During the past few decades science has been discovering something which has always been known to saints and seers, and that is the essential unity of all things. Even though the myriad forms in the cosmos appear to be separate there is only the one underlying energy out of which everything is created.

We can understand this principle of unity in diversity when we look at the millions of waves on the one ocean. The waves seem to be separate but it is really just the one ocean changing shape here and there. There is an illuminating proverb which says:
 

When the bubble bursts it knows itself to be the entire ocean

The bursting of the bubble, like Gibran’s breaking of the shell, is painful, disturbing, grief-filled, but only if we resist the discovering that we are the ‘entire ocean.’ Let me give you a personal example of how grief can serve as an impulse towards realising this underlying unity:

I was very close to my sister, Mary, and when she died I was immediately happy for her. It was not until a few weeks later that grief appeared. My wife Suwanti and I were driving past the street corner where in the past we had turned off to visit Mary. All at once a wave of grief passed through me. Automatically I said to myself:

      ‘Ah, grief has come. In what way am I distorting the truth? Yes, I know, it is because
      I think I am separate from you (Mary). But we have never been separate. We have
     always been one, and always will be.’

At that moment, grief changed into exultation and I could feel her speaking inside me. Not words that I understood, but the same vibratory impact inside my chest that her voice had always had. I knew it was her. Involuntarily I cried out inside, ‘Oh Mary, Mary. Yes you are here. Thank you. Thank you.’

This was my first defining experience that emotions – all emotions including grief – can be impulses towards union with the oneness that we all are. When we go with that impulse, and not resist letting go of our fixed view of the world, the emotion is transformed into its higher expression. In my own case, grief was changed into the exquisite joy of reunion with a beloved.

I later went on to experiment with other emotions, discovering how to ride the wave to the shore. Just to help elucidate this principle in action, even though it is not specifically about grief, I’ll share with you one other story from my own laboratory.

Sometime in my mid-fifties I realised with a disturbing clarity that I had always been afflicted by envy – envious of what others had or did, and even wishing that such good fortune had not come to them. I determined to find an antidote to this emotional poison, and it was not long before I came across the words of Sathya Sai Baba who said:

        ‘To rid yourself of envy, think of all those who are less fortunate than you.’

I began practising this in earnest. As soon as envy appeared I would think of all those who were poverty-stricken, confined to wheelchairs, or dying of thirst. To my surprise and delight the envy immediately changed into compassion, waves and waves of it which brought loving tears to my eyes.

My understanding of this is that, once again, a disturbing emotion can act as an impulse towards a feeling of loving brotherhood with all mankind, towards oneness.

So, to take liberties with Kahil Gibran’s poetic words we can say: ‘Your grief is the breaking of the shell which encloses your innate understanding that there is no separation, no loss, only the ever-lasting unity of all creation’