Reference: DEATH: An Inside Story
“I want you to understand that your grief is not because someone has died. One life going away does not mean anything to you. Thousands of people in the world die in a day. But it does not leave a vacuum in you. You are still partying. The problem is, this particular life going away leaves a hole in your life.” ~ Sadhguru
9.1 The Essential Nature of Grief
You grieve because you have suffered a loss; but this also brings to your attention the incompleteness of you. You realize how incomplete you are with this person now gone. Of course, there is immense love for the departed one; but you must also examine why it is that you feel incomplete. It could mean that you have not experienced the whole life the way it is.
9.2 Going beyond Grief
Your connection with people is very physical. You may have emotions attached to it, but your deepest connection is physical. Once someone leaves their body, whether you like it or not, they have nothing to do with you any more. Only when you are embodied, you have a mother, you have a father, you have a brother, you have a sister. After that, there is no such thing.
When someone is dead it is over. You are unwilling to come to terms with it, so grief sets in. It is time to accept it the way it is. When death happens, it is time to look back and cherish what has been, and it is time to accept it and look at what you can do with the life that is here.
As long as you are alive, it is important that you see how to contribute to the living because other than doing a few rituals within the stipulated time, there is nothing that you can do about the dead. Moreover, if you believe that the person you are grieving for has enriched your life, show that enrichment in how you live.
One of the tools you could use to overcome grief is to perform Kalabhairava Karma. It is not a ritual to handle your grief, but because of what it does, it can handle grief also.
9.3 Articles of the Dead
It is possible that there is a certain residual element of your grandmother that is left behind in her clothes after she dies. And they may cause some things. But there is no need to play into it. All these things were taken care of in India by various customs that were built incorporated into the culture. People accepted these things as a normal happening. When a person died, all the clothes that were closely in touch with that person’s body were burned. They were never kept. The clothes that the person occasionally wore were given only to a blood relative, no one else. And even in such an instance, the clothes were not worn for the first year.
The only thing that you do when someone dies is you cherish the beautiful moments that you had with them—that is all, otherwise, forget about them. Don’t try to work your guilt and your problems through the dead. It can become very complicated.
9.4 Empathetic Death
This happens with some birds, it also happens with animals and human beings: if they were a couple or were very close, when one of them dies, within three to six months, the other will also die. One life following another in death is not necessarily because of loss of companionship or emotional debacle. Two lives that lived in tandem, that were tied together energetically, tend to dismantle in response. This does not happen at the level of thought; it is deeper than that.
9.5 Large-scale Death and Its Consequences
If a violent or unnatural death happens, then the being hangs around and this in turn impacts the place. Now, in case of wars, where a lot of people are killed violently, there are negative consequences only when they were in extreme fear or terrorized. When people die of fear on a large scale, very morbid manifestations may happen. The next few generations after that would have this gore of death in their samskara. So they could never have really known the joy of bonding with people, nor the simple joy of living. They would have slogged, they would have built and they would have done things. Here and there, they would have laughed, they would have lived, they would know everything, but there would have been no real sense of joy. This can be undone by creating many consecrated spaces that are strategically located. It requires creating awareness about the truth.
9.6 Mourning Period
In India, there is a peculiar tradition of mourning that depends on being genealogically related to the dead person in a particular way. Such people are supposed to avoid going to temples or participating in social events or celebrations for forty days. This is because, in ancient India, they followed the system of kula, which is like a clan, but with a much more genetic basis to it.
9.7 Memorials, Samadhis and Pyramids
Building memorials for people who are dear to us or those who were of certain significance or prominence, after their death, is common in all cultures of the world. These memorials also have social and political significance where they help in building our identities. In India people created another kind of memorials called samadhis. There is some spiritual significance to such samadhis and people go to a samadhi not just to remember the dead or pay their respects but also to be in its presence and meditate.
The pyramids of Egypt are perhaps physically the largest and most spectacular attempt ever at connecting the here with the hereafter. The basic quality of the pyramid is preservation. It does not help the dead in any way, except assisting in the preservation of the physical. This is how mummies were preserved for thousands of years. In India, preserving the dead body is the last thing we want to do. Destroying the body immediately is very good for both the dead and the living. Preserving the body is only a torture for the person who has departed.
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