Grief, Catastrophe, and the "Big Heart"

    I've written numerous blogs about both the damaging (eg PTSD), as well as the beneficial effects (eg Post-traumatic Growth) of trauma on individuals: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=PTSD and http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Post-traumatic+Growth .
    Yesterday I came across a fascinating book about the beneficial effects of trauma on large groups of people: Rebecca Solnit. “A Paradise Built in Hell. The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.” Penguin, 2009.
    And call it synchronicity, just today I received this wonderful essay (below) in my email from Zen teacher Henry Shukman:

Grief, Catastrophe, and the "Big Heart"
Henry Shukman
henryshukman.com

    "I occasionally hear from someone who has suffered a catastrophic loss or challenge. Or a series of them. Sometimes I quickly feel unqualified to respond, because they can be about severe losses I have been spared so far. But then I realize — wait, I've lost people as close as close can be. As a parent I've lived on the harrowing edge. And all of us are subject to the ills that flesh is heir to.
    As the Buddha put it in a sutra: four great mountains are rolling toward each one of us, that will inevitably crush us: old age, sickness and death. (The fourth mountain, 'rebirth,' is kind of irrelevant to us unless we happen to have a reincarnationist worldview.)
    We all live on the perilous edge. We may think we don't — and there are ways of heaping up apparent bulwarks against the uncertainties that surround us, but none of them can work for long. Death and loss is a truth we all have to face. The point of practice, some say, is to face it and make our peace with it before it comes.
    If we do that, then we are free to live. That's the claim the practices sometimes make — that once death is no longer a menace to us, we are able to live fully and freely. Death, where then is thy sting?, as old scripture puts it.
    A realist might say: accept it. Accept your own temporariness. You are a bundle of systems and conditions that inevitably must change and come apart.
    Zen, the deep realist, says: Wait, what actually is this experience we call life anyway? And who exactly, truly, am I? Examine this experience, examine your sense of self, and you will find that there really may be no one to die, and nothing to lose.
    This discovery, if thought about, if pondered intellectually, may or may not be much help. But how different it is to make this discovery personally, in the deepest depths of your own being.
    Then the discovery is profoundly liberating. It's liberating in an almost inconceivable way. It frees us from our most basic assumptions and preconceptions about life and identity.
    But that's not all it does. It also blasts open our hearts. It's as if it opens us up to one single, whole, all-inclusive heart, that is somehow right here in the midst of every moment of our life.
    What is this 'big heart'? Some teachings say that all things are made of fundamental consciousness and this consciousness is intrinsically loving.
    Some experiences suggest that all things are made of a single fabric, and that fabric is one, just one, and therefore all things are secretly unified already, and to get the merest taste of that oneness is to get blasted by a great love, the love of utter belonging.
    And some say all things are made of nothing, you included, and that all things are empty, so that all things are erupting from nothing and appear just as they do, and act and interact just as they do, while never ceasing to be, in reality, nothing. And to discover this personally is a kind of triple blessing.
    Namely — first, you find you are inseparable from all else. Second, you find that you are utterly open and free. And third, you emerge along with all of your experience right now, as a kind of surge of infinite energy.
    Whether that big heart is a single consciousness, or a single fabric, or an emptiness, a nothing, an unnameable source of everything, these are just three views of what it might be. I assume they're all correct and real. And I know some argue about that (I've done so myself at times). And I also assume that they are by no means an exhaustive list of its attributes. I assume in some way they are all also wrong, that they are just attempts at suggesting the unnameable.
    I also assume one day we'll actually understand all the above much better than we do now, and perhaps have language for it, and that it itself will teach us how to speak of it, as more of us discover it, and as this kind of human experience is subjected more and more effectively to scientific investigation.
    On top of that, we will find better and better ways of discovering it for ourselves, and living in contact with it.
    Right now, we are already privileged to be living in a time when many different methods and approaches to it are becoming accessible globally, and we will likely get better at matching person and method, as time goes by.
    But what does all this have to do with harrowing losses? Well, this big heart — it's the ultimate healing, the ultimate solace. First, it can definitely be a comfort just to hear of it. To hear that this world may be one big heart experiencing itself. Second, I've heard from people who in times of catastrophe found an unfamiliar peace, a radical acceptance, a sense that there was some way in which all was okay, or perhaps a spring of warm love opened in their heart — as if something that was a face of this 'big heart' showed itself, just when it was most needed.
    That doesn't mean there isn't grief or rage or fear. It just means that an access to a wider, larger, deeper love is sometimes touched, tapped, opened up, when it’s most needed. And that can make all the difference.
    But also, if we are touched and struck by this reality — of an all-encompassing 'singularity' — then the grace of that reality can wipe away all our worry and fear, by showing us that truly we have nothing to lose, truly we are right now being given the boundless gift of experience and consciousness, and yet, at the same time, somehow, they can never be taken away.
    Zen says: We are all traveling in a single boat. And we are all living under the shelter of the 'shadowless tree.' Somehow, against all appearances, we can't fall out of that boat, and no matter how we may sometimes feel, we can't lose the shelter of that strange shadowless tree."
    Henry Shukman henryshukman.com

    “Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole.” Iain McGilchrist