Last December I got an email from a dear friend informing me that his father had passed away peacefully at 92. I went to the shrine and offered a special prayer for his father and his family. Not surprisingly, I remembered my own father––and specifically the moment when I had received a call late at night informing me of my father’s peaceful passing almost exactly a year after I came to Boston. I remember that moment vividly, as if it happened this morning. As soon as I had heard the news, I had experienced a sudden void, a deafening silence within me, and it had lasted for several hours.
As I recall, no sooner I heard the news than all sounds ceased. There was total silence. And there was a huge void––a large empty space filled with nothing. Where had all the sound disappeared? From where did this large space suddenly appear and fill my entire mind? It’s only now, years later, that I am able to objectify that experience and think about it as if it happened to someone else.
The way I responded to the news was itself something of a surprise, although of course I did not think about it that way then. After all, I had left my home as a teenager more than 23 years earlier and, while the family ties never really go away, I had imagined that they had at least become sufficiently loose. And yet, while I took the news with admirable external calmness, inside was this sudden silence and a huge, empty space.
I have no explanation for the silence and the space. What I do know is that at critical moments in life–-and death of a dear one is certainly a critical moment–-life stops. All the noise around becomes irrelevant (even if temporarily) and all the forms of the living and the nonliving become uninteresting (even if temporarily). In the absence of sound, silence is all that remains. In the absence of forms, space is all that remains. There is something sacred about this silence and this space.
It is in this inner silence and space that the mind is able to focus entirely on whatever has triggered the critical moment. In my case, all that remained in my mind was my father. Not his physical form, not his voice–-just him, whatever that means. I don’t even know whether I’m making sense. But it was in that state that I was able to grieve, knowing that I would never again see him and that a very real part of my life had been chopped off. But it was not grief alone. I was also able to rejoice, even smile to myself, remembering some of the joyful times that we shared together. The heart overflowed with gratitude for everything that I had learned from him, most of which was through witnessing his life through the eyes of a son, for it was not his nature to offer a lot of advice. The silence and the space healed me. When I returned to the noisy, crowded world around me, I was at peace.
I still miss my father but now I am mature enough to take his absence in my stride. I am also old enough to recognize that everything passes away. All forms change. As Vivekananda pointed out, “Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction” (CW 1.7). The body is mutable, it is composed of many particles, and therefore must decompose eventually. The Ātman is not composed and suffers no decomposition. The Ātman simply is. It is being itself. Death is conquered through the abiding experience of being the Ātman.
We don’t need to wait passively for some critical moment in order to experience inner silence and space. We can actively create a critical moment. Those who take their meditation practice seriously know that entering into a state of meditation is a critical moment ––it is the crossover moment from humanity to divinity, from the world of names and forms to the world beyond names and forms. Meditation is more than simply sitting quietly and trying to think of God. That is not meditation. That is called thinking about God. Which is good, but it still is not meditation. At some point, our prayer, our thinking, our efforts to visualize the Divine presence--all of these suddenly melt away. The critical moment arrives. There is silence and there is space. In Vedanta texts, it is often known as the “space in the heart” (hṛdākāśa). All that remains in that holy silence is the sound of the mantra or the prayer. All that remains in that holy space is the presence of the Divine, one’s own favored way of seeing God (iṣṭa).
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