[Skybird]

For yourself you can decide whatever you want, Markus. But even ethics and religion and other ideology turn into tyranny and oppression where they are turned into an excuse to impose one's own will onto somebody else who wants it not.



Deciding for oneself how one wants one's own life to end is the penultimate expression of freedom and self-determination. Denying that, is denying human dignity.



One just has no right to harm others in practicing suicide. Shooting a bullet through one's head is - well, "okay". Throwing oneself before a train and bringing the train driver into a state of shock, psychic stress and suffering and feelings of guilt, is not.



All life is suffering. Because all life and all things are temporary only, and ever changing: panta rhei. All things are impermanent, and impermanence is suffering. But we do not suffer because things are perishable, but because we cling to the ephemeral while expecting it to remain. Thus we get disappointed every time, and frustrated. In other words, we don't suffer because things are wrong, but because we are wrong.


I tend to a thinking of that living means to learn how to leave, because we must say goodbye to things and situations and loved ones all the time, all life long. What came together, must go apart, what was build, will fall. I think we cannot live well if we allow to be scared all the time by the fact that one day we must die. In other words: learning to accept death and how to die well teaches us to live well.



When I taught meditation for quite soem years, and I mean spiritual meditation, not just psychological relaxation games as they are common in my former profession, I focussed a lot on these things. I kept telling people what my master once, in my youth, kept telling me: meditation is a matter of life and death. Those who fear, go lost. Those who take emptiness as the goal, go lost as well. And those who stay in a state of mental void and take it as an enlightenment and Nirvana, get drowsy and fall asleep. Its the big, wide open bear trap.



The importance of not being phobic about death and dying, was understood in the past by many cultures, and many of them had so-called Books of the Dead. The Egyptians had that, famous is the Tibetan one (Bardo Thödol), and even Europe once had something like that, but it got lost in the darkness of history, unfortunately, the church also may have had a hand in helping that. These books say a lot about the nature of different stages of the dying process, and about death. But by that, in reality they are books on life.



Good for those who understood that.