Opening up about grief is not easy. Deep inside, we perceive grief to be too personal for it to be shared or dissolve, writes Vipin Gupta, as he suggests ways to cope
We are living in difficult times. Each of us has experienced some loss due to Covid-19. We are all grieving the premature loss of our near and dear ones to this pandemic. In times such as these, we seek to cope in different ways.
The first way
The first way to cope is at the psychological level. We try to fill the void in our lives with religion, spirituality, or divine entities. But, we also question the meaning of religion, spirituality, or divine entities when their faith or devotion could not save their loved ones. We kindle our faith in the ancient wisdom that offers healing techniques such as yoga and Ayurveda. But we also double up our faith in modern science and the need to advance science further to help protect everyone from future pandemics. At the same time, we blame modern scientific experiments for the present pandemic.
The second way
A second way is at a more subtle psychic level. Psychically, we notice subtle changes in our moods, emotions, thoughts, feelings, interests, preferences, expressions, interactions, values, and behaviours. We question the meaning of material wealth that can’t save even the wealthy from the pandemic. We become disillusioned about our busy lives and seek time for our physical and human well-being. We become depressed, helpless at the plight of those with limited resources, starving and sad, barely surviving. We get angry with anybody we believe is not concerned with our social, ecological, economic, national, and psychological well-being. Why do we not have a social discipline of taking care to avoid infections? Why nobody took care of pollution and ecological degradation that has made breathing shallow even in regular times? Why have we not economically developed like China and other East Asian nations after so many years of our independence to have the resources to deal with the problems proactively? Why do we not have a cohesive national action plan even during the pandemic? Why do we have to suffer psychologically and physically for the failings of others and no fault of ours?
The third way
A third way is to let time bring us in terms with our new consciousness. This process is a deeply emotional one. We all have experiences where just openly crying and shouting is the best healing method, not science or spirituality. The silence and calm after our emotional outburst is our healed state.
Let me share the experience of my cousin, Captain Prachi Jain, a helicopter pilot, in her own words:
“Covid got hold of all three of us at the same time, my beloved 37-year old younger brother, his wife, and I. While we all struggled to recover in the separate hospital rooms, he left behind his wife and a five-year-old son. After our recovery, my younger sister broke the news, ‘Hum bhai ko bacha nahi paye, He is no more’ in one breath. To date, my shrieks and non-stop chanting of his name from that day echo back in my ears. I feel a part of me has been sliced off that I did not realise exists. Alongside all the emotions of sufferings, the ‘Gita Saar’ now keeps me going. All that shouts in the silence within me is his name. I call his name to thank him for being my brother and loving me as long as he was in his physical body. I know he resides peacefully in his new home.”
The fourth way
A fourth way is to give ourselves space by doing something that calms our minds. We pick new hobbies, make new friends, get engaged in supporting those in need, reach out to those who could support us emotionally, if not financially. Opening up about grief is not easy. We fear others judging us, fueling our emotions, or not empathising with our state of mind. Deep inside, we perceive grief to be too personal for it to be shared or dissolve.
Indeed, managing grief is a theme few Bollywood films have dared to handle. And, makers have added their personal experiences when telling a storyline involving grief. Consider the 2004 Tamil movie, 7G Rainbow Colony, and its 2019 Hindi-remake, Malaal.
In both versions, the protagonist fights against all odds seeking a life of togetherness with his beloved. However, the universe plays the antagonist and negates the due fruits of his efforts. His beloved dies in a road accident. He survives. In the original version, the protagonist gravitates toward the option of running away from reality, choosing a life of mental hallucination. He lives in a dream world, dreaming that he is always with the beloved’s spirit. The remake’s protagonist chooses the path of self-development his beloved laid for togetherness and finds her consciousness always with him, prodding him on. He leads a fulfilling, successful life in the finance industry.
Note that the beloved is not the spirit (Ruh) nor the consciousness that forms the soul (Atma).
The soul is one’s consciousness, following another like a shadow. The shadow feels like pushing us gently forward on a linear path and guiding us not to distract from the goal within that consciousness. The consciousness is immortal because it is not something that anybody creates or destroys. Consciousness is a part of our essential nature that self-perpetuates as a unique local point personifying a person who projects that unique part of the essential nature as a personal force. Our essential nature is everyone’s essential nature (Svabhav).
The spirit is one’s belief system about a person. It is the spirit with which we make sense of someone, with or without a body. The spirit comprises the essence fusing another’s forward-facing and our backward-facing essential nature and the consciousness of that essence.
To help make this easy to understand, let’s use some numbers. Let’s say the consciousness of the one departed is four. In that case, essential nature is eight. Eight is the horizontal face of essential nature, in identity with Mother Nature (Kudrat). Four is the ascending face; it makes the person a unique local point above the universal global horizon. One who has departed is the forward face, gently pushing us with his forward-facing essential nature like a confident masculine. One who is alive is the backward face, turning the face around trying to look for the one who has departed and can’t be found ahead like in the past. She is radiating her backward-facing essential nature with love for the one who has departed.
Therefore, the essence (Rab) that includes both the forward-and the backward-facing essential nature is sixteen. The spirit (Ruh) includes the essence and the descending-face of consciousness of the one alive. Like the ascending-face of consciousness of the one departed, the descending-face also is four. When the one alive seeks peace and togetherness within the consciousness of the one departed, she exchanges her warm “maternal consciousness “(Chaithanya) with the cold “paternal consciousness” (Pitra) of the one departed. Spirit’s numerical value is twenty.
The fifth way
The fifth way is to behave like a child and decide to isolate oneself from the world until someone brings back the loved one, like a toy or a baby that the child may love forever. Childish is how the protagonist behaves in the 2013 Hollywood blockbuster, Gravity. After her young daughter died from a fall while playing, the protagonist decides she will never touch the ground that took in her daughter. She knew life in space is impossible. So, that’s what she chooses in her quest to run away from the ground reality. To defy the gravity, grave, grief, and ground, she decides to float above everything. However, she finds herself facing another tragedy while in space when the spacecraft malfunctions and her co-astronaut floats into the deep space without oxygen. At that moment, she decides to fight it for the sake of everything she taught her daughter and returns safely to the ground beating all odds.
The sixth way
The sixth way is how one behaves when faced with challenges. One uses wisdom when neither science nor spirituality is there to offer a solution. When there is no guru to lend us a helping hand, we make our wisdom the guru. We take the spirit of each of the five preceding ways to make “wisdom” (Chitta) a 100 unit solution. Therefore, without the spirit, we extend our age (Brahmani) by eighty units.
Wisdom spontaneously becomes our guiding force when we have a goal in sight. When we have a goal, we become a goalkeeper. In the moment of crisis, our goal is to let us as the unit person be the enjoyer of the consciousness of the challenge we overcame and of the solution we applied. Therefore, the goal is of the nine units. We know it as Maha Shiva. The enjoyer is also of nine units. We know her as Maha Saraswati. The goalkeeper is the goal without the unit person conceiving the challenge and the one perceiving the solution. The goalkeeper is of seven units. We know him as Shiva.
The challenge’s consciousness is the descending face, fading from memory like a distant nightmare for the enjoyer, enjoying the goal after realizing it. The descending face is the “child consciousness” (Putatma) that childishly conceived something solvable with wisdom into a challenge.
The solution’s consciousness is the ascending face, playing like an intense climax scene in our mind as if we just woke up like a “hero” (the protagonist) after fighting hard and destroying all the “discordant energy” (Asura shakti). The ascending face is the “wisened grandmother consciousness” (Jyotistava) that embodies wisdom.
When we multiply the descending and the ascending faces of the challenge and the solution, we get the sixteen units of “essence” (Rab). Similarly, when the seven-unit goalkeeper realizes the goal of his incarnation as a param deity, he reverts to the “essence” (Rab) living like an inanimate entity, Maha Durga, also of sixteen units.
The seventh way
The seventh way is to develop self-awareness of the purpose for our birth as a unique entity. In Bhagwad Gita, Shri Krishna illuminates all of us that he is the essence of everything. He is the sixteen-dimensional “Child Primordial Greeter” (Madhusudan), gifting the wisdom to everybody for living a joyful life, filled with a unique purpose to be ever-alert about the well-being of our physical body. Only then we have the limitless energy and vitality to use wisdom to resolve all the challenges we face today.
The writer is a professor of management and a co-director of the Center for Global Management at the Jack H. Brown College of Business and Public Administration, California State University, San Bernardino. He explains many ways to live the seventh way in the 2021 12-book namesake project, Vastly Integrated Processes Inside Nature (VIPIN)