Welcome to the Commune Podcast. My name is Jeff Krasno. As we mark six years of the Commune podcast, we are now republishing some of our most popular interviews with teachers who now have full-length courses

over on the commune course platform.

So this interview from the fall of 2019 is with David Kessler.

At the time, he had just released his book, Finding Meaning, the Sixth Stage of Grief,

in which David beautifully outlines not only how to

accept and acknowledge loss, but actually how to find meaning in it, how to channel grief

into purpose. So if you've listened to the show in the past, you've probably heard me

volley around this quote from the French philosopher Pierre Telliard. We are not human beings

having a temporary spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a temporary human experience.

And the more I read and listen, the more that I am convinced that in fact we are living between

two realities, a subjective one that

conforms to time and space, location, and form, the reality that Lao Tzu calls the world

of the 10,000 things, and the infinite reality of the soul, the spirit that does not take

physical form, one that is not easily perceived through the

limited ability of our five senses, but exists in the mystery that we call consciousness.

Now, these realities are not distinct. In fact, you, as infinite consciousness, are experiencing

the human condition through a wide array of phenomena,

including objects, thoughts, and emotions. We exist within this paradoxical duality of infinite

time and timeless presence. Now, one of the inevitable facets of our human reality is loss,

more bluntly, death.

The physical death of a loved one, the death of a marriage or of a friendship, a job,

the sale of a family home, unless you are incapable of love, and that sounds awfully bleak,

...