The Emptiness and the Fullness at a Funeral
El Vacío y la Plenitud en un Funeral
A student reflects on attending a beloved cousin's funeral and the powerful experience of grief, love, and loss existing simultaneously, asking whether this points toward the deeper reality of emptiness and fullness.
The Emptiness and the Fullness at a Funeral
A student reflects on attending a beloved cousin's funeral and the powerful experience of grief, love, and loss existing simultaneously, asking whether this points toward the deeper reality of emptiness and fullness.
I wanted to follow up on something you said about relationships and locality. Were you saying that it doesn't matter where the locality is, that the relationship is the relationship regardless? Was that your point?
I'm talking about a mystery, but the experiential tasting of it. It's something in the space of the unknowable, yet there is an experiential tasting of it: the dimension and reality where there is relationship. There is an energetic aspect, a flow of energy, a life force that moves between us. And the absolute locality of Germany, England, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, how we understand distance, none of that applies. I mentioned physics because this is becoming well known: locality and distance are not absolutely real things. In fact, quite the opposite. There is no such thing as location, and there is no such thing as distance. There are ways in which those function, but they are not absolute. We could have a similarly intense energetic connection being five thousand miles apart.
And even without speaking to each other. Sometimes there's the energetic. That's what I've experienced as well: communication without speaking.
I wanted to share something. On Monday I was at a funeral of someone so beloved by so many people, my first cousin. It happened to work out that I'm here in the area, about four hours from where I usually am, so I was able to be at the funeral. It was such an event; I don't have words for it.
I felt so much sadness. I just wanted to cry my eyes out, but I wouldn't let myself do that because most other people were more subdued, and I didn't want to steal the show. So I had a stomach ache the whole day just holding it in. It was killing me. I finally let loose once I was back at the hotel.
But I was watching the grief. I was following his wife. My radar was just fixed on her, and it was so powerful to watch her. She's a person who is very natural, very authentic, not trying to be something she isn't. I couldn't get enough of watching her.
The loss and the love together
After feeling the grief and being with people feeling the heaviness of the loss, it hit me that maybe this is what you've been referring to with the emptiness and the fullness. The emptiness of the loss, that he's not here with us, and the fullness of the love for him that's never lost. And then the love between all of us; there was so much love in that group of people.
Maybe it's just a metaphor for what you've been talking about, but it feels like when we grasp, when we want to hold on to it, when we say, "I don't want him to die, he shouldn't have died," we suffer. But if we just let it be as it is, then I feel the loss, and only then can I feel the fullness of the love. I can be here, and I can move on to the next moment and the next. Is this just a story I'm making up?
No, I don't think so. It is in a sense metaphorical, but at the same time, it is close to that. It's not entirely that, but it is a tasting in that direction.
I felt like it's a metaphor because this is about feelings, about relationships, about phenomena. And I understand that emptiness and fullness is not phenomena. It just is what it is. That's what it all is, underlying what we can see and perceive. But it felt like it's based on that principle: that they go together, that our human experience is both.
People kept saying, "It's great to see you, but not in these circumstances." And it occurred to me: no, in these circumstances it's great. Any circumstance, it's great. And there's so much love, thanks also to this wonderful person who died. He brought us together. It's all together.
A deeper tasting
I think you're speaking of a deeper tasting of that. The language "emptiness is fullness and emptiness" is pointing to something even deeper, but it isn't that you aren't tasting it.
So maybe it's a manifestation of it, but not a direct experience of it. Can you say anything more about the direct experience of emptiness and fullness, or would it just be words?
I don't want to detract from the beautiful experience you're sharing. I think you should just sink into that. In a sense, that's more beautiful than me saying some words.
Thank you. When this realization came, it was like, "Yes, yes, in these circumstances." It's the yes. It's the all of it.
That's a pointer, let's put it that way. And these days I don't get as excited about any single experience. I can feel an inner calling: "Keep going, keep going." The buck doesn't stop here. That's not why I attend these groups, so I can have a happy life or so I can understand. That's not why I'm here.
It's about a life that is well lived. It's deep. There's a deep well-being which includes joy and pain and everything. But that's really the end: life.
The end is life, but it's like, of course it is, and yet there's so much more than the experience.
That still is life.
So the point is I don't want to reject anything, but I get that it's a pointer. It's not it. I don't want to confuse the experience for the underlying reality. That's what I'm saying.
What counts as experience
It depends on what you call experience. I'm calling something very broad: this, everything, life. So it is the experience, it is the emptiness, it is spirituality, it is the world, it is consciousness, life, death, humanness.
What I'm talking about is the tendency to want to grasp it, to say, "I got it." And no, that's not it.
That's just the mind, right?
Right. So what I'm saying is: when I see these things in context, as another gift, I love the gifts. And I find they come sometimes more and more intensely. It's like a little pointer, an inner guide, maybe.
I agree. There are signs, reflections of the synchronicity of moving toward deeper and deeper openness or more wakefulness, however you want to call it. But what I'm trying to reflect is that that's the end in itself. Life, the moment. Otherwise, what I'm trying to say is: don't worry so much about getting somewhere.
I understand that. But that's exactly the thing. I was so there, so present. It felt like another retreat. I don't have words for how beautiful it was. And I didn't need any more. That's really what I'm saying. But the final line for me is: it's good to see these things in context.
Why did you keep searching and going further and further? Because you understood something. Or actually, it's not even understanding. It's just this inner calling. That's all, I think, for me. Does that make sense?
It makes sense, yes.
Openness to this moment
I guess there's this openness. Maybe the openness of being here right now is the openness to the next moment, but without thinking about the next moment. I can't be open unless I'm open right now. I guess that's really what it is.
Exactly. You can be open now and think about the next moment openly.
It's all about openness, really.
We were talking about this earlier, using different words and different language, but we were talking about the balance of the world, time, the projects of life, spiritual work, and inquiry in the present moment. When I talk about waking up, growing up, all of that, the core of it is what you said. We can be in rejection of what is of the mind, which is going to be time and evolution and the body-mind and the future. Or we can be in rejection of what is here now, at the level of what I'm feeling: if I'm anxious, if I'm in pain, if I'm sad.
What you said is that if you're open to this moment, you can also be open to thinking of tomorrow and thinking of yesterday. But it's the openness in this moment. If you're open to what it feels like to feel, what it is like to imagine, to think, to remember, to plan, to conceive, that openness to all of it is so good.
That's the gift. And that's it. It's not the experience I got. The openness is ultimately what I feel.
It's your openness. And your openness is calling you to open, and you are opening, listening to yourself.
Listening to you, too. Thank you so much.
You're welcome.