Tuesday, November 3, 2015

On dealing with death

These are some comments I wrote recently to a sponsee relating to dealing with death.


For me, it's part of the disease to always focus on the negative and never the positive.

I like the Hindu trinity: Brahma; Vishnu; Shiva -- it's a cycle: create, sustain, destroy/transform, respectively.  When I first heard about it, I thought that Shiva, the destroyer/transformer, must be a bad guy -- like our Satan.  I was quite surprised to discover that Hindus regard him as a loving God -- the cosmic declutterer. 

Once I attended a seminar at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the earth sciences, graduate campus of Columbia University.  I heard a presentation about disaster hotspots: places where natural disasters are closely located to population centers.  These disasters include floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and storms. The worst disaster hotspot in the world was in the Ganges valley of India. 

It made sense to me then how they had to include Shiva in their trinity.

In the western tradition, we always refer to HP as "creator."  That's incomplete.

We're still in a time in our world when more people are being born than are dying, though.

Another interesting thing that I heard was when I attended a seminar on fear at a local yoga ashram.  The speaker said that fear is often associated with fear of loss.  Then she said, "if we truly believe that we are part of a universal whole, than we must believe that nothing is ever truly lost," or something to that effect.  I may be distressed because things are redistributed somewhere where I personally cannot access them, but that is a selfish distress.

For instance, in physics we learn that time is a dimension, just like the physical dimensions of our visible world.  We humans have not learned to travel in time.  Presumably, tho, an omniscient HP can do so.  Therefore, people who seem lost to us do not seem lost to HP.  It's just that we personally cannot access them according to our current perspective.

I find these thoughts helpful in dealing with loss.



No comments:

Post a Comment