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If you are struggling right now, please know that this article was written with you in mind, and with care. You can find free, confidential support in over 130 countries at Find A Helpline. Reaching out is not weakness. As you will see below, it may be the most spiritually significant thing you can do.
There is a question that arrives, sooner or later, in the inbox of anyone who writes about consciousness and the afterlife. It usually comes quietly, from someone in real pain, and it asks some version of this: if consciousness continues after death, what happens to someone who ends their own life?
It is a question that deserves a serious answer, not a platitude and not a threat. And remarkably, across near death experience accounts, between lives regression research, and decades of clinical study, a consistent answer does emerge. It is not the answer of fire and brimstone that religion has sometimes offered. But it is also not the answer the despairing mind hopes for. What the accounts describe, again and again, is something stranger and ultimately more hopeful: the door marked exit does not lead out.
A View From Between Lives
One of the most detailed modern accounts of the space between incarnations comes from Aaron Thomas Green, whose childhood near death experience included what he describes as a full tour of the pre life planning process. In his extended interview about what happens between lives, Green recounts being shown clips of his previous incarnations by his guides, the way a coach might review game footage before the next season.
One clip stood out. In what appeared to be a life many centuries ago, he had been a young father in a harsh, subsistence level society. Standing at the top of a cliff, exhausted by the sheer difficulty of survival, he reasoned that jumping would end the pain and end his existence altogether. He jumped. And the second half of his reasoning turned out to be wrong.
What his guides explained next is the heart of the matter. The suffering he sought to escape was not extinguished. It was deferred. The life challenge he had walked away from was, in effect, still on the table, waiting to be faced again in a future incarnation, and now at a somewhat higher level of difficulty. Only by eventually meeting and moving through that same category of challenge would the earlier retreat be resolved. Added to this was the weight of the pain his death had caused the family who depended on him, a karmic thread that would follow him forward and ask, in some future life, to be balanced.
Escape, in other words, was the one thing the act did not accomplish.
The Same Report From the Hypnosis Chair
If this were one man’s vision, it would be worth noting and holding loosely. What makes it worth an entire article is that the identical structure appears in research conducted through a completely different doorway.
Dolores Cannon spent decades regressing hundreds of subjects into the state between lives, and her findings on what happens after death form one of the largest bodies of between lives testimony ever collected. On the specific question of self termination, her subjects were strikingly unanimous. As recorded in Between Death and Life, the consistent message from the deep trance state was that ending one’s life to escape a problem only amplifies the very problem one hoped to leave behind, because it must be lived through again. In the blunt phrasing of one session, suicide is no solution.
Michael Newton, working independently and unaware of Cannon’s parallel sessions, mapped the same territory through thousands of clients in deep hypnotic regression. His landmark study Journey of Souls describes souls reviewing lives cut short by their own hand, and the pattern his clients reported matches the others: no punishment imposed from outside, no wrathful judge, but a loving and unflinching review in which the soul itself recognizes that the lesson was left unfinished, and chooses, sometimes reluctantly, to set the table again.
Two independent researchers, hundreds of subjects, one NDE experiencer, and the same architecture. In the framework this site has explored many times through the Law of One and related material, this is exactly what we would expect: incarnation as a curriculum, difficulty as catalyst, and the self as its own most honest examiner.
Not Punishment, But Curriculum
Here it is worth being careful, because this is where accounts can be told in a way that harms the very people who most need to hear them. Some experiencers describe the aftermath of repeated self destruction in dark and heavy terms, and a few accounts do speak of profoundly difficult states for souls locked in that pattern. Green touches on this in his own telling. But dwelling there misses what nearly every account emphasizes far more strongly.
The near death literature on this subject is surprisingly gentle. The comprehensive survey of suicide related NDE research at Near-Death.com finds that experiencers who arrive on the other side after an attempt are overwhelmingly met not with condemnation but with love, understanding, and a kind of cosmic clarity about why the act cannot deliver what it promises. The message is almost never you are damned. It is almost always this did not work, the pain came with you, and your life is still waiting for you.
Angie Fenimore’s account is the best known example. After her 1991 attempt, she found herself in a bleak, isolating darkness that mirrored her inner state, and yet her full account turns on the moment she was met by an overwhelming presence of love that sent her back with new understanding. Her own summary is telling: the hell she visited was a manifestation of the suffering she was already living in, not a sentence passed upon her. The state of consciousness was the point. It always is.
What the Clinical Research Adds
Here is where this subject offers something almost no other afterlife topic can: hard clinical data pointing in the same direction as the mystical accounts.
Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia, the most cited researcher in near death studies, spent years studying attempt survivors specifically. His research found something counterintuitive. Although NDEs might seem to romanticize death, his 1981 study on near death experiences and attempted suicide found that transcendental experiences following serious attempts appear to decrease rather than increase subsequent suicide risk. His follow up study of consecutive hospital admissions found that roughly a quarter of attempt survivors reported an NDE, and that these experiences were associated with reduced suicidal ideation afterward.
Think about what that means. The single most protective shift observed in this population came from directly encountering the core teaching of every account above: consciousness continues, you remain yourself, and the pain is not escaped but carried. Once the false promise of oblivion dissolves, the logic of the act dissolves with it. The IANDS overview of NDE aftereffects notes the same broad pattern, with experiencers reporting a deepened sense of purpose and a transformed relationship with both life and death.
The Real Teaching Is About This Life
Strip away the imagery and the metaphysical scaffolding, and the teaching that survives every version of this account is simple. The difficulty you are facing is not an error in your life. In the between lives framework, it is your life, chosen and calibrated, and it can only be completed from inside a body, inside time, inside the struggle. The curriculum does not grade harshly, but it also does not accept a blank page. It simply presents the lesson again.
And crucially, in every one of these frameworks, asking for help is not a failure of the curriculum. It is part of it. Green’s own conclusion after seeing his past life was not endure alone. It was get help, change your approach, do something different. The soul that reaches out, that lets another person carry part of the weight, is meeting its challenge, not dodging it. Connection is catalyst too.
If you have been carrying the question that opened this article, carry this away instead: the testimony of those who have seen behind the veil is that you are loved beyond measure, that your existence cannot be cancelled, and that the version of you who works through this chapter, with whatever support it takes, is the one the universe is patiently waiting to meet.
Support is available right now, wherever you are in the world, through Find A Helpline. Talking to someone is free, confidential, and, if the accounts above are right, part of the work your soul came here to do.
