Spiritual Consequences of Suicide

Dear D.P.,

Both Yogananda and Swami Kriyananda have said that suicide is the greatest sin. When we hurt another person, we are rejecting God in the form of that other person. When a person kills himself, he is rejecting Life itself.

Yogananda said that a person who commits suicide disturbs his energy on a profound level. When that soul decides it wants to reincarnate, the fetus is unable to complete the act of bringing that body into life, because of the disturbance of energy. So the soul who commited suicide will, in seven lives, be unable to be born: they may be aborted, stillborn, miscarried, or in some way not be born as a living baby.

You might be interested in reading more about this in the book Karma and Reincarnation by Yogananda.

Swami Kriyananda also said that at death, the astral and causal bodies are untouched by the death of the physical body. Since our ego and personality are part of the astral body, this means that the physical body drops away, but the mental and emotional pain and suffering remain just as they were before suicide. In fact, without the weight of a physical body to tone them down, so to speak, the suffering is even more intense.

It’s supremely ironic. The person seeking relief from his emotional pain finds that it doesn’t diminish – rather it increases!

Sometimes the person who commits suicide is actually mentally imbalanced. In such a case, the karmic suffering would not be as great, Swami Kriyananda once said.

This is a very sad subject. But the process of reincarnation is very long – Yogananda says five to eight million lives. During those many lives, you can be sure that everyone has tried this solution, which is not a solution at all.

God awaits each soul at the end of its long journey of searching for bliss.

In divine friendship,
Anandi