I know you feel that staying alive is important, but that’s only because you think you are a human being and forgot you are an immortal spirit having a human experience. When you compromise your integrity and do something shameful and despicable, you may never get over it and eternity is a very long time. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar “ A coward dies a thousand deaths while a hero dies but once.”
When threatened with death, you can be tempted to find an expedient solution like running and hiding or pushing someone else in front of the danger so you can escape. When enough time has passed, you might hope to be able to find ways to forgive yourself for abandoning those you were supposed to protect. It really doesn’t work that way. Since we are immortal beings, our memories of shameful actions stay with us and affect us every lifetime thereafter when we are presented with similar problems.
Even worse is the situation where death is not imminent, but we do something so against everything we believe to stay alive a little longer. This happens when a group becomes cut off from civilization with no way to avert eventual death. Killing each other to extend life-giving supplies and air is despicable, but there is something else that is so against everything we know that doing it absolutely damns the survivors for eternity and that is eating the bodies of our dead.
An Uruguayan Rugby team was stranded in the Andes for 72 days and survived by eating frozen teammates and friends. The survivors never forgot the horror of that experience and neither has the rest of the world. Others who made similar decisions in earlier lifetimes are still haunted by their actions even though they no longer remember what they did.
Most of us decide to forget all of our past life experiences at birth for reasons similar to what I just described. We do things out of desperation and then regret them for eternity. However, it is really not possible to erase past memories, only to suppress them until something comes up which has all of the sensations and visual impressions of the earlier incident. At which point, Lo and Behold, it comes back in living color with all of sensations and shame of the original incident!
This causes an amazing upset as I have personally discovered when I bought a new kind of Lox, which is a kind of smoked salmon. Normally, Lox I buy is dark pink and somewhat dry and salty. This Lox was wet and slippery and somehow revolting but I couldn’t identify what made it feel wrong. It smelled right so I tried a little piece on a bagel. Within an hour I was violently ill and stayed ill for many hours.
I finally took myself in session and recalled an incident where I was eating human flesh under terrible circumstances. The incident finally blew when I realized that there was a cluster of us with similar experiences and we all had to face our decisions to compromise our integrity and survive on the bodies of others. Dying of starvation or by suicide would have been much less destructive in the long run. Most of us seem to have agreements to protect each other against harm and when we violate that agreement, it rebounds on us as a major curse.
A friend shared a story of his past as a starving Confederate soldier eating a dead Yankee soldier after a battle. He was not only haunted by his experience but also by the spirit of the Yankees soldier who followed him and tortured him physically for several lifetimes thereafter with illnesses and body defects. He finally received spiritual counseling which freed the angry spirit and restored his health and sanity.
This is how we learn that there are worse things than dying. One of them is living with shame, regret, and incurable sickness forever.
There will always be situations where it may seem expedient to abandon your principles, but if you remember that you are immortal and these decisions will stick to you forever, then you may remember to take the actions that you can live with forever.