COPING with DEATH – Vedantic Wisdom for Overcoming Sadness, Grief, and Painful Memories.

 COPING with DEATH – Vedantic Wisdom for Overcoming Sadness, Grief, and Painful Memories.

         Over the years, many people have sought my advice after losing a loved one due to illness, accident, or old age. They ask how to overcome their sadness, grief and painful memories. Of course, I'm not a trained psychologist and can't offer psychotherapy, but the spiritual wisdom I've shared with them seems to provide a lot of strength and comfort. I'd like to share some of those teachings with you today. Before getting into this topic, it's important to properly understand the nature of both physical and emotional pain. When you're pricked by a pin, you feel physical pain.

       According to Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist, pain helps you survive. It calls your attention to a problem in your body that needs attention. If you didn't feel pain, you could die from something like a burst appendix. No doubt, pain is extremely unpleasant, but it's not your enemy; it's a natural and useful part of being human. Along with physical pain, we also experience mental or emotional pain. Just as physical pain arises from physical injury, so too, emotional pain, like the grief of losing a loved one, arises from emotional injury. That's why we speak of having a broken heart. And just as physical pain calls our attention to a bodily problem that shouldn't be ignored, emotional pain likewise calls our attention to a mental issue that needs care and healing. Some people downplay the significance of emotional pain. They say, "It's all in your head. Snap out of it." But emotional pain is every bit as real and agonizing as physical pain, maybe even more so. A child was once asked, "Which is worse, when you fall and hurt your knee, or when someone says mean things and hurts your feelings?" The child replied, "Hurt feelings are worse because when I hurt my knee, mommy can kiss it and make it better, but when my heart hurts, what can she do?" Also, a cut on your finger will usually heal in just a few days, but the heartache of losing a loved one can linger for months or years. 

      And even later, memories of someone's death can rekindle painful feelings of loss and grief, whereas remembering the cut on your finger won't trouble you at all. Based on all this, it seems foolish to downplay emotional pain. Fortunately, we're all created in such a way that our bodies and minds generally repair or heal themselves over a period of time. And, as our physical and emotional wounds heal, the pain they produce gradually fades away. But sometimes, children pick at a scab on their skin and hinder the process of healing. Similarly, some people pick at their emotional wounds, so to speak, by recalling again and again certain traumatic events they experienced. That, too, hinders the process of healing. 

      Therapy can help address this particular problem and enable the natural process of healing to continue unimpeded. But no form of therapy can remove emotional pain itself. It's a cliche to say, time heals all wounds, but there's a lot of truth to it. Just as therapy can't remove your emotional pain, so too, spiritual wisdom, including the teachings of Vedanta, is similarly incapable of removing emotional pain. Spiritual wisdom that culminates in enlightenment can indeed remove suffering, but suffering is completely different from pain, as we'll discuss shortly. Physical and emotional pain are natural and are experienced by every human being, including those who are enlightened. Enlightenment can't free you from headaches and stomachaches, nor can it free you from heartaches.

       I learned this many years ago when I lived with my guru at his ashram. One day, I noticed that he looked extremely sad, an expression I'd never seen on his face before. He told me that he just received a phone call, informing him that a dear friend of his died the previous night in a terrible road accident. Over the years, I saw my guru deal with all kinds of challenging problems and some pretty horrible situations without ever losing his serene disposition. And yet, due to his friend's death, he apparently felt tremendous grief.

We'll come back to this story in a moment.

Someone who can't feel sadness, loss, or grief is emotionally numb, psychologically anaesthetized in some way. Do you remember the old Star Trek shows that portrayed the character, Spock, as having no emotions whatsoever? Fortunately, enlightenment doesn't make you emotionless like that. Now then, what's the difference between pain and suffering? 

    Simply put, pain can be either a physical sensation or an emotional feeling. Suffering, on the other hand, is your negative response or adverse reaction to that pain. Let me explain. When you have a throbbing headache that won't go away, you might get irritated, frustrated, or even infuriated by the nonstop pounding in your head. Getting upset because your headache won't go away is a kind of suffering. And that suffering adds to the misery caused by the headache itself. In this example, pain is the unpleasant physical sensation in your head, and suffering is feeling unhappy, resentful, or sorry for yourself because of that pain.    

      We can make the same distinction between emotional pain and suffering. When a loved one dies, emotional pain is the terrible anguish, heartache, and deep sense of loss you feel. Suffering, on the other hand, is the result of thoughts like, "Why did God let him die? How can I go on living without him? I can't bear this horrible sadness!" The bereaved often suffer like this, a lot. They might experience depressing thoughts, fear, anxiety, resentment, and regret. All this is suffering, and it adds tremendously to the terrible emotional pain they already feel. Returning to the story about my guru, after telling me his friend had died, he immediately walked into the lecture hall and taught a brilliant class, lively and full of humour.

     After class, he seemed completely free from any lingering sadness, even when he talked about the tragic incident. So, he apparently experienced emotional pain, but without all the suffering that usually accompanies it. It's indeed possible to experience both physical and emotional pain without suffering, without feeling unhappy or resenting the presence of pain. How? By discovering that physical and emotional pain doesn't truly threaten your wellbeing. The teachings of Vedanta can show you how physical sensations and emotional feelings arise in your mind as mental objects, and those mental objects become known to you.

       You are the observer of all such mental objects, including physical and emotional pain. You are the conscious being who's aware of their presence in your mind. They're revealed or illumined by your awareness, by the light of consciousness, so to speak. A traditional metaphor describes how the sun is utterly unaffected by all it illumines, whether it shines on a sacred temple or a pool of stinking filth. So too, your consciousness is utterly unaffected by all the mental objects it illumines. That means, when physical or emotional pain arises in your mind, becoming known to you as mental objects, your consciousness remains totally untouched, not troubled or disturbed in any way whatsoever. The problem here is, when physical or emotional pain arises in your mind, they probably seem to affect your consciousness a lot. 

       Unlike the sun, your consciousness seems to change drastically in response to whatever it illumines. But according to the sages of ancient India, neither the sun nor your consciousness is subject to any kind of change. They discovered how the experience of pain is misleading, and often misunderstood, and they showed this through another metaphor. This clear crystal appears orange due to its proximity to my robes. It seems like the crystal is affected by orangeness, but it actually remains perfectly clear, despite its appearance. Similarly, your consciousness seems to get affected when it reveals physical or emotional pain in your mind. But in fact, your consciousness actually remains unchanged, unaffected.

       This orangeness belongs to my robes, not to the clear crystal. So too, physical and emotional pain belongs to your mind, not to consciousness, the consciousness that's the essence of who you are as an aware being. Of course, profound teachings like these have to be thoroughly understood and personally realized. But with the help of proper guidance and spiritual practice, these teachings can transform your world view to such an extent that you no longer feel threatened by physical or emotional pain. Then, when you notice a throbbing pain in your head, you'll be able to say without a trace of sarcasm, "Wow! That's the most intense headache I've had in a long time." And, you'll be able to experience emotional pain without the dreadful feeling that you're not ok and you won't be ok until the emotional pain goes away. Pain and sadness are not your enemies. After all, you can leave a movie theatre with tears streaming down your cheeks and say, "That's the best movie I've seen in a long time!" If you can enjoy the sad scenes filmed on a stage in Hollywood or Bollywood, there's no reason to regret the sad scenes that play out on the stage of your mind.

Namashivayam....