Suicide rates increase as inner peace wanes

The West is experiencing a massive suicide epidemic. Famous individuals who "have it all," pertaining to wealth and fame, are part of it. The numbers are alarming among Americans; suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death. The rate has increased 30% the past 15 years. Somehow, these individuals fundamentally lack inner peace, a sense of contentment and find life to be meaningless.

White people particularly are killing themselves at higher rates, according to studies. Between 2006 and 2016, the suicide rate for white children jumped 70 percent. The group at highest risk are white males aged 14-21, chief editor of Daily Wire Ben Shapiro points out.

The famous American Hollywood actor Ben Affleck recently spoke about his alcoholism and regrets of infidelity and divorce from his wife, Jennifer Garner. He said there was this constant feeling of inner discomfort and self-loathing that caused him to choose the bottle of alcohol and sex outside of marriage in the attempt to drown this excruciating feeling. He candidly addressed the regrets of his own mistakes in life, saying they haunted him badly.

The inner feeling of discomfort may probably best be described as a fundamental lack of peace. It is a sense of chronic suffering that is epidemic in the West.

The very aim of religion is to ease suffering and give man peace. Man is to learn how to live in order to avoid suffering, or lessen it. Buddhism speaks of the poisons of the mind – envy, greed, lust, ignorance – and defines these human ills in the heart as the reason for man's sufferance.

In essence, the person plagued wants more than he gets, desires more than he has, wishes for more than has been given to him. He steadily wants more. This is not a healthy competitive attitude, but the excessive greed that breaks down the virtues and churns the soul.

These toxins are the product of man's own craving and lead to a state of pain, suffering and dissatisfaction. The ever-present wish for more, be it in fame and glory, wealth, sex, economic dominion or power over others, all boils down to man's desire.

"The wages of sin is death," proclaims the Holy Scriptures. The aim, therefore, is to avoid inner death both while alive as well as death in the afterlife. When the soul is disconnected from God, it is equally disconnected from the profound inner peace that is so precious, claims the religious.

The metaphysical God is outside of the human universe and at the same time the very essence of it. He is inexplicable to the fallible human mind, yet explicable and near him in his heart. "The most important thing that happens between God and the human soul is to love and to be loved," writes the Orthodox Kallistos Kataphygiotis.

The religious will claim that this insatiable love for God contains the equally fuming inner peace. It is this peace, that surpasses human understanding, that Jesus said is his gift to his friends. The quest becomes to be his friend. Even in afflictions and persecution, the believer consumed by God's peace will overcome. Peace is the very ticket that enables one to go through tribulations and come out of the tunnel victoriously.

Yet, envy, lust and greed destroy both the peace and the spiritual friendship with God, also for the Christian. Hypocrisy is the state in which a believer says he is a follower, but does not live in such a way that the peace of God consumes him. He may be religious regarding tradition, but not of the heart. One of the benefits of believing in God and seeking him in deep prayer, one may say, is to receive a peace so strong that it surpasses any other feeling.

It is a guiding peace that calms the soul, redirects the individual on a better path and does as king David said in Psalm 23, "leads me to green pastures and sooths my soul." "You are the lover of my soul," claims the awakened believer, who therefore is not that dependent on praise from others. It is God who is great and is to receive the praise, not us.

This is what the atheist misses out on. To him the world is without existential meaning, without hope, without the afterlife. The Nietzsche, Freud and Marx world of God as dead prohibits their atheist followers from entering this peaceful world of mental bliss.