Hi Sundari,
I hope that you and James are both well.
I just wanted to share the news of Franco’s passing 4 weeks ago today. He was committed to the teachings of Vedanta till the very end, and for this, I am eternally grateful. I know it gave him so much peace and strength through his most challenging times, and I would just like to say thank you again for your support and generosity.
Sundari: I am so sorry to hear of Franco’s passing, my sincere condolences. I am so happy that we could help and that he had the consolation of the teachings on the Self in his last days here as a jiva. I hope that he gained what he needed to end this incarnation fulfilling the only true purpose of life, to realize the Self.
Sarah: I am trying to navigate the whole concept of death. I have lost parents in the past, but nothing has compared to the grief that I am currently experiencing. I always knew that my biggest obstacle to my spiritual growth was my attachment and dependence on Franco. We had been together for 20 years, so navigating my new world without him has been terrifying and extremely difficult to accept.
Sundari: Loss is part of life and guaranteed sooner or later. Nothing lasts in mithya. Attachment to others is the cause of most of our suffering as people, which is why freedom is defined as freedom from dependence on objects for our happiness. Of course, this is easier said than done when it comes to those closest to us. Love relationships create the biggest obstacle because dependence is built-in, that is why people enter them. What is not known is that as the Self, you already are pure love. Your nature is whole and complete, ever-present, unchanging Awareness. Nobody gives that to you or takes it away—you cannot lose it or get more of it from anywhere. There is no need for any special condition or person to be present to experience this love ALL the time. But if the knowledge that you are the Self and not the jiva is not firm, then the mind is still under the spell of Maya and attachment persists.
Self-knowledge, truth with a capital T is a rock that withstands everything mithya throws at it. It is our only armor in the ever-changing dream of Maya. May it carry you through the abyss of grief and protect you. Remember in your darkest moments that Franco was never not the Self, and blessed is the soul whose painful karma ends in this life. May that Subtle body find rest.
Yet allowing the jiva to grieve is natural and important. As the witnessing Self, see how poignant, deep, and beautiful is the jiva’s pain as it stares into the unfathomable depths of life, loss, and death. Feel the strength and intimacy with the Self as you do so. What a traitorous felon human love can be, granting us gifts beyond measure and then brutally taking them away. I understand the pain of loss as I too have experienced it. Keep in mind that from Awareness he came, by Awareness he was sustained, and to Awareness, the Subtle body returned to be held in the bosom of the one Eternal Existence. You will miss his body, his presence, his voice, and the energy of love produced by your union, that is normal. Yet you will never be apart from the essence of who he is because he is you. He has not left you. It is not possible.
Sarah: I know that Vedanta is the one and only solution. And I know that it is what Franco would want me to do.
Sundari: Vedanta, Self-knowledge, is the only solution to everything because it is not in mithya, that which is always changing and not always present. In mithya, the apparent reality, there are no solutions to anything, it’s all zero-sum. Vedanta has the solution and the tools to step out of mithya because it removes ignorance of your true nature and reveals the truth that you are Satya, that which is always present and never changes.
Sarah: I do have a few questions regarding death and Vedanta. Is the death of a loved one considered to be part of one’s own karma, because you are directly affected by the loss?
Sundari: Everything in the jivas life is karma. Whatever you are experiencing and is unfolding in your life moment to moment is part of your karma, whether it is sancita karma (unfructified karma from past lives), prarabdha karma (the momentum from past actions in ‘this’ life), or agami karma, the results of karma to fructify in the future. There is a purpose to everything we experience, particularly suffering, because it turns the mind inwards towards the Self, instead of outwards, towards the world. Isvara always gives us what we need to grow, there are no mistakes. Franco’s passing and your life without him are all part of the blueprint or bigger picture of this incarnation. Its sole purpose is to realize the Self, as stated.
Sarah: In other cultures, and religions, when one passes, their spirit continues to guide and watch over their loved ones, sending messages and signs of their presence. What is Vedanta’s view of this? I know there is no death in Vedanta, it is only the body that dies. But the subtle body remains and is then eventually reincarnated. I suppose I just want to understand Vedanta’s teachings on death so that it can help me to understand and accept it.
Sundari: Most other cultures and religions are dualistic, so there is a belief that the person lives on in some way as ‘spirit’, however one interprets that word. In Vedanta spirit or soul means the Self, and as such, nobody is ever born or dies because the Self is non-dual and eternal. Only objects that are ‘born’ and that ‘live’ ever ‘die’. Your husband’s incarnation as the person you knew and loved has come to an end, but the essence of who he is, Awareness, which is the same as your essence, is untouched by his coming or going. He finished his prarabdha karma, so it was time for that Subtle body to be withdrawn into the Causal body, from when it came. But as the Self, he never came or left.
The subject of reincarnation is not such a big topic in Vedanta because self-inquiry is about negating the notion that you are the body/mind, the doer. We say that you die and reincarnate with each thought. The whole idea of reincarnation depends on who you think you are. If you are religiously inclined and identified with being a person, then the ego will be attached to the idea of a future life ‘beyond this life’ wherever ‘heaven’ may be. If you are spiritually inclined the ego will be invested in the idea of a past life and reincarnation, a continuation of sorts.
Once you understand that you are not the person and why, it is not terribly important to know whether the person re-incarnates or not because you know that you, Awareness, are unborn. The person is just an idea that appears in you, Awareness. This does not mean that the person does not exist; it just means that he/she is not real: as I am sure you know, real being defined by that which is not always present and always changing. Only Awareness is always present and never changes.
The person is just a name for the Self under the spell of ignorance. The person (personality) will never reincarnate because though the Eternal Jiva (Jivatman), is Awareness because reality is non-dual, the personal or conceptual jiva is not real, though the Subtle body is relatively real with reference to the person, but not real with reference to Awareness. The Subtle Body (vasana bundle) is called the “traveler” because it is that which may or may not reincarnate.
If the karma we came in with and created in this life is not exhausted, then it is likely that the Subtle body will be consigned a different set of life karma by Isvara. But that person will not be the same and will have no memory of ever having been who they were in their last life. The spiritual world has built up a very elaborate fantasy around the belief in reincarnation because the ego is afraid of death. Some people do have ‘past’ life memories, it’s true—but what difference do they make in the here and now?
Each apparent incarnation is just a playing out of the gunas, which creates a story with a name and an address. It is no more real than a movie playing out on a screen. Although the story of the jiva may seem personal and to originate from ‘past’ lives, as there is really only one Self there is really only one Subtle Body seemingly appearing as the many. There is only one story with no past. It is the eternal story of ignorance and knowledge.
The fact is, everyone and everything reincarnates all the time because all objects exist only as thoughts in our mind, even when they are present and with us. Where was your husband when he was alive, and you were not thinking of him? Objects seem real when we are thinking about them but when we do not, they do not exist for us. We think we possess and experience objects, but we never do. We only ever experience the qualities of objects (taste, texture, size, smell etc). You cannot possess the essence of objects because the essence is you, the Self. You cannot gain what you already have.
All objects (including Franco) dissolve into you, Awareness, because they are only ever experienced in the mind—and nowhere else. Duality makes an object appear to be separate from and other than you, but nonetheless, every object is a thought appearing in the mind. You can verify this by investigating any object. You see that every object is made out of thought and thought is made out of energy and energy is made out of Awareness and is non-separate from you, Awareness. Think this through when you miss Franco.
Reality is non-dual Awareness and there are no differences in it. The differences we see belong to the uphadi’s (limiting adjuncts that make something look other than what it is) of different objects, not to Awareness. The uphadi in this case was the Subtle body called Franco. I know this is cold comfort when we are grieving the loss of someone we loved so dearly. But it is a matter of experience that Existence is independent of objects because there is only one Existence or Awareness; neither Existence of Awareness is specific to the object.
Your sadhana is to contemplate the loss of your husband in light of Self-knowledge, which says there is no loss, ever. Loss only applies to mithya, the person. That said, as stated, grieving a loved one is a natural and human thing to do; it cannot be avoided, even when you know you are the Self. Grief is a kind of praise because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.
Grieving is not about the dead one, it’s about you. There is a statement in Lawrence Durrells’ book, The Alexandria Quartet, that goes something like: ‘Do not grieve for the dead because perhaps it is they who grieve for the living’. Who is it that lives and dies? From the human perspective, beyond the five stages of grieving, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, there is a sixth. It is the possibility of discovering something meaningful in grief, though not in death itself. There is nothing meaningful to be found in death; it’s just the end of the body though not the end of Consciousness, or, of love. The death of a loved one gives us a great opportunity to understand what love is and why it is what always remains when the loved object is taken from us.
My advice is to create an altar for devotional practice (if you don’t have one) where you offer all your feelings of loss and heartache in the karma yoga spirit to the Field, to Isvara, the Self, you. Place a picture of Franco on it as a symbol of the eternal and undying Love you are, and he was and still is.
People who have experienced bereavement often find that they’re in a better place psychologically after some time, if they have taken meaning from it, or when they’re upfront about how it’s changed them. One of the things we risk losing in our grief-adverse society is the personal growth bereavement can bring. We talk so much about post-traumatic stress yet what we do not talk enough about is that post-traumatic growth is just as possible and very beneficial. It is Ok to acknowledge that loss can have this spin-off and understand what it can do for you. Personally, I know what it is like to have taken care of a terminally ill person for a long time, how much it takes out of you. It is a relief when they no longer have to suffer.
This brings us to another point: guilt. Because if as bereaved people we are gaining from loss, we will at some point feel guilty about it. Yet we should not because we’d never have chosen to lose the individual we cherished. Their death is something we can’t change, but what we can change is how we live in the now, how we relate to life without them. We would give up in the blink of an eye the growth we’ve experienced if it would bring our loved one back; but the point is, that’s the one thing we absolutely can’t do. And we must remember, too, that the person who has gone would have wanted us to find meaning in our lives without them in it. It honours your love to grow from it, not shrivel in grief and pain. I am sure your husband would want this, as I think you know.
The bottom line about grief is that there’s no wrong way to do it. Grieving is as individual as each of us; our grieving needs are different, in every case. It’s also incredibly lonely: the finite silence of the world you once shared can be deafening and threatening. Most people do not know how to relate to us or how to help. All you can do on the bad days is survive. You are fortunate in that you have the scripture, and you have karma yoga. Use it as your shield to get through this time. It will pass. Live one day at a time, thought by thought, consecrating all thoughts and feelings on the altar of karma yoga. You will get through this.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus famously said, “Death is nothing to us; when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and Awareness end with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness”. End quote.
Epicurus did not have Self-knowledge; he was identified with the body and so believed that Awareness ends when the body ends. But if he had, he would have ended that statement with:
“The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, Awareness ends”.
It is in resisting the truth of how things really are which makes life so difficult and painful. It’s not that karma yoga means embracing unpleasant experiences and stops them from being unpleasant. Indeed, accepting their intractable unpleasantness is arguably the whole challenge. But by doing so we relinquish results that stop all experiences from being a problem because we are no longer the problem. It becomes possible to be at peace with exactly how things are, including the ‘not-being-at-peace’ that arises when we experience extreme emotions like grief.
As the Zen saying goes… “Our suffering is believing there’s a way out.” There is no way out of duality other than with Self-knowledge and karma yoga. We hand over the experience and the result of action to the Field. We do not have to carry it. The Awareness you are has always been free of the experiencing entity, the person. And for the person, there’s freedom from the existential burden of doership, even if there’s no possibility of freedom from the actual experiences you are going through at the moment. Freedom is only in the knowledge that your true essence is immortal, and no experience (object) has the slightest effect on you as the Self. The ability to discriminate Awareness from the objects that appear in you at all times is freedom. The death thought being just another object known to you. Use this knowledge as a grappling hook to get you out of the pit of despair and sadness when it sucks you in.
Samsaris, people under the spell of duality, don’t understand karma yoga and assume that a life of meaning and dignity entails being in control, so of course, death is a fearful thing. But there’s more meaning and dignity in accepting our lack of control and not running from what can’t be outrun. There is no security in mithya. Karma yoga is the only life insurance that matters. As the jiva, we will all die one day. In surrender to that, life is an adventure, even when the adventure brings us the loss of a loved one.
Feel free to write to us any time, we are here to help you in any way we can.
Sarah: I am once again blown away and overwhelmed by your generosity in sharing this knowledge with me. Thank you so much. You have given me a lot to work through and I know it will take time to reflect on and fully understand and assimilate. Thank you so much for all your guidance and support, I really do appreciate it.
Sundari: You are most welcome Sarah. My heart goes out to you as there is no easy way to navigate the pain of your loss. Life really can be brutal, and it can feel like we are no match for it at times like this. Self-knowledge does not give us immunity against feeling what we feel as a jiva, and we must honor that. But it does give us the knowledge and the tools to deal with those feelings so that they do not take over the mind if we apply the teachings to our life. Karma yoga is perfectly designed to do this.
It may be hard at this time to remind yourself that your feelings are the reflection of love, they are not actually Love, just like your reflection in the mirror is you but is not you. Feelings are objects known to you, the Self. They arise from Consciousness (Self), are made up of Consciousness, and dissolve into Consciousness, you. This does not diminish our human love; it just puts it into perspective. As the Self, Love as your nature means you are whole and complete and need nothing. It does not involve another at all because there is no ‘other’. In this light, the scripture says that we should grieve neither for the living or the dead because we are beyond both as the Self.
May Isvara grant you the grace to get through this time and to use it to grow and deepen in Self-knowledge, which stands alone unaffected by what the jiva experiences.
Much love
Sundari
