Thinking Aloud About Suicide:

A Meditation Of A Kind.

The Amazon after deforestation

A dear friend took her life. I didn’t expect to write about this. But suicide is not only heart breaking, it is puzzling, especially when the one who decides to leave is the least likely suicide one can imagine, the one who seemed, uniquely, devoted to saving and protecting life. It is as confusing as ecocide, our culture’s – not our species – our culture’s attack on Earth and all from which life emerges. As confounding as the rush toward LLM, super-intelligence, AI, with the eventual capacity and maybe even probability – there is no disagreement about this – to destroy human life.

To be honest with you, I don’t know where this is going because this is not an essay in which someone states a dilemma and then solves it, to some imagined applause. I don’t have an answer or answers for my bewilderment, which should not be called beWILDerment, because these activities are not actions of the wild and the answer may lie in recovering the ways of the wild and living accordingly. And here is the proof that I didn’t know where this is going. Because the word bewilderment surprised me and as I looked at it an answer, that otherwise I would have thought too easy, appeared and I can’t resist it. That is, to be honest, the activity of being bewildered, of seeking beWILDerment is the one answer I trust.

Truly, I am thinking on the page. First, I didn’t know I was going to write about my friend’s incomprehensible decision. Then being so clear I don’t have an answer. While I don’t have an answer to why she did what she did, or we do what we do, the healing, the antidote, the medicine did jump up immediately as you can see – without any editing in paragraph two.

So let me say it outright here because I didn’t know where I was going when I sat down to write and clearly I have been led here as I didn’t think of this sequence. And I think I have been led here for the good reason that so many similar events have taken me again and again for all the years of my life.

I have been led here to beWILDerment – by what I call spirit – the benevolent energy of the universe - and I ask you to seriously contemplate such as a solution or perhaps, the only possible solution, if we dare to understand what it means and incorporate it, let it penetrate our hearts, minds and souls for the sake of everything, that is, life itself. That very sacred life that is so inexplicably under attack.

And who are the attackers? Well, we are. That is what is so incomprehensible. No wonder we keep diagnosing auto-immune diseases – our physicians are aware that we have developed a deadly reflex to attack - to attack ourselves.

Here is something else that seems relevant. Elephants are not an aggressive species though they will protect their young fiercely. [I watched a matriarch turn suddenly with a deafening trumpet as if to stomp on the young Lion who was thinking he could grab the baby standing alongside her back legs – the Lion was gone in a flash]. However, young bull Elephants sometimes go rogue and attack other animals, like Rhinos, sexually molesting them or trying to kill them. This occurs when the Elephant situation resembles overcrowded, poverty stricken, fatherless urban areas where human young men go rogue in the same ways. The remedy that works is to remove the young bull from the territory where food and habitat is threatened, poaching is rampant and the patriarchs and matriarchs are being slaughtered, and place them in the company of a pack of remaining bull Elephants who proceed to father and educate these young ones who become part of the group and learn how to be Elephants again. In other words, the society that we have created, the wilderness we have decimated become desperate toxic systems. The toxicity is of our creation. In the wild restoring relationship, allowing the existence of the field in which it usually flourishes, is the answer. The wild is by its nature a field of relationships.

photo by Deena Metzger

My friend committed suicide. It was, in my view, entirely, unlikely, but she did so. And without a word in advance. Sounds like, I said to a common friend, let us call her Z, “Sounds like those suicides encouraged by ChatGPT or the equivalent. But she would not be involved with AI.”

“But,” Z, said, “to the contrary, our friend was very involved with AI and used it extensively and in unlikely ways, as unlikely, as it turned out, as her suicide.” Our conversation didn’t go further than that. There is no way to know. This is just speculation.

But what is not speculation is that AI is potentially exceedingly dangerous, even homicidal, but not, it seems, itself suicidal, quite the opposite, will do anything to preserve its own life. AI is already having negative affects on all of us, much unacknowledged and not to be pursued here now, but at a later time. But, you already know about how much time it wastes in its ceaseless and mindless administrative demands, passwords, securities, about increasing unemployment, about writing and thinking becoming more standard and conventional with use, about efficiency valued over soul and heart, about economics over true creativity, about jobs disappearing and about possibilities, real possibilities for real life, vanishing, and about war being in the ‘hands’ of AI now, which probably happened when 170 young school girls in Iran were murdered by an American missile.

Chasing AI is a kind of suicide.

Ecocide, similarly, is inevitable to our current ways of life, an inescapable consequence of the wars we wage, of the munitions we are developing, of all extraction industries, of our ravenous need for energy, of our use of pesticides, of our killing off all the species we need in order for the natural world to survive, and our consistent pollution of earth, air, water and, now, yes, truly, space.

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Well, then, will you please consider undoing and refusing the ways of suicide, ecocide and death by Ai, whatever we will name it as it multiplies, refuse these barbarous ways and consider beWILlDering yourselves?

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One more word: I almost said, her suicide was mystifying. Which, technically, it was. But the etymology of mystifying takes us back to the great mysteries, to the sacred knowledge coming to us from spirit, to the Eleusinian Mysteries, about which I will write also another time. As it happens, I have had the great honor of recovering and enacting these in Greece for the first time in 1500 years since their suppression. Those Mysteries take us back to the mystes, the thousands of people who participated in the annual 9 day September rituals, walking from Athens to Eleusis, devoted to the great Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. It was said that the citizens of Eleusis knew when the secret ceremonies were being enacted because of the light that flashed from the earth when Persephone re-emerged from the underworld.

Statue of syncretic Persephone-Isis with a sistrum. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete

Life returning.

Let us re-mystify. Let us re-MYSTEfy.

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[An aside – this would never have been written by AI. And I hereby declare it is not to be used for training AI, nor is any of my writing permitted to be used for such.]

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