Is grief selfish?

A friend asked me if grief is selfish.  It's such a good question I wanted to explore it for myself. 

In essence, I believe that grief is of the self (the personality), but not of the Self (the Soul).

Grief is our pain at loss and separation from a loved one.  It comes from that limited part of us that is bound by the personality and the ego.  It comes from the part of us that believes the story of death, of separation and loss.

The Self, on the otherhand, is infinite.  It knows All.  For the Self, separation is simply an illusion.  It knows that the drama of life is simply that: a drama, a stage we have created on which we can experiment with emotions and physicality, all under the veil of amnesia, the complete forgetfulness of our expansive, infinite, divine essence.

We live, love and even lose whilst we play on the stage of life.  When the drama is over, when we have experienced all that we came to experience, we leave the stage.  We return to the Self we had forgotten while acting upon the stage.  As the Self, we are one with all.


I suspect that the reason that, in mourning, we pass from moments of acceptance to moments of grief is because we are both the ego self and the Divine Self.  Consequently, we flow between those two states of being, touching into the knowing of each part in turn.  As the light subsumes the darkness, so too the knowing of the Self eventually dissolves the grief felt by the ego self.

So my answer is this: grief is of the self.  It is not selfish, because selfish carries the weight of criticism and error.  It is, rather, a dance in the experience of life.  It is a state through which we pass, until we have made our peace with the passing, with the ever evolving drama of life.