The Final Unlearning: Grief, Possession, and the Illusion of Permanence

In my earlier essays, I’ve explored what I call the Unlearnings: the intentional dismantling of assumptions that obscure direct experience. Unlearning is a subtractive process that removes inherited beliefs, identities, and mental models so that reality can be perceived more clearly, without the conceptual scaffolding we typically mistake for truth.

But some Unlearnings are not chosen. They are forced upon us by loss.

In this essay, I turn that lens toward loss, grief, and impermanence, and toward what remains when the scaffolding falls away.

Loss enters like a silent shadow crossing the threshold. Unbidden. Unwelcome.

Sometimes it arrives suddenly: a phone call, a diagnosis, a final breath that alters the course of a life. Other times it arrives slowly, almost imperceptibly, as people drift apart, chapters close, leaves fall, and seasons turn.

Yet whenever it comes, loss performs a devastating function. It removes something we believed we possessed.

Devastating, yes, but perhaps necessary.

The Call Not Taken

My friend David Pate wrote an essay about a call he did not answer. On a Tuesday morning, a friend who struggled with addiction reached out. David thought, as we all often do, “I will catch him later.” By Wednesday, the friend was gone. Dead.

The problem was not the missed call. The problem was the underlying assumption: that 'later' would exist, that tomorrow was guaranteed, that time was something he possessed.

I carried similar assumptions for sixty-plus years, across an entire career, through the building and dissolution of a company, right up until a December day in 2023 when my heart faltered, stripping those assumptions away.

The assumption that “later” exists.
The assumption that tomorrow is guaranteed.
The assumption that time is something we possess rather than something that we pass through.

This is the grammar of assumed possession.
Not “I enjoyed time with them,” but “they were mine.”
Not “our paths overlapped,” but “I had them.”
And then, when loss arrives, we inevitably cry, “They were taken from me.”

But what if nothing was ever ours to begin with?

What if loss is not the tragedy of having something taken, but the revelation of an illusion we did not know we were holding?

What if grief is the pain of a mental model shattering when it meets with the reality that nothing endures, that tomorrow is never guaranteed, that we possess nothing at all?

The Brain That Builds Worlds

From a neuroscientific perspective, grief is a model-update problem¹.

The brain does not passively receive reality. It is constantly predicting it². This predictive machinery is one of the core capabilities that allowed our species to survive and thrive.

Every moment, the brain is running internal models:
Mom exists. She is usually home in the evening. I can call her.
These are not conscious thoughts. They are background assumptions, neural patterns that fire automatically.

When someone dies, the model keeps running. The brain continues predicting their presence. It keeps expecting the phone to ring with their voice. It keeps us turning to tell them something before we remember they are gone.

This is not delusion.
It is not a refusal to accept reality.
It is simply the brain’s lag in updating its model of the world.
The prediction engine continues running on outdated data. Yes, we may understand intellectually that the person has died, but the neural circuits have not yet integrated that change. That takes time.

That surreal feeling of their continued presence is the prediction model still firing. The shock each time we remember they are gone is the collision between model and reality, repeated again and again until the model finally updates. When that happens, we say we have “accepted” the loss.

Grief, in this sense, is the work of model reconciliation. It is the slow, painful process of rewriting neural patterns that assumed the continued existence of what was lost.

The brain’s Default Mode Network³ (DMN) is heavily involved in this process. This network handles much of the brain’s background integration work. It stores memories of the person. It simulates future scenarios through mental models that must now be rewritten. It maintains a sense of self shaped by relationships. And it generates associative thinking. This is why everything suddenly reminds us of them: a song, a corner cafe, the tilt of a person's head.

When someone dies, the DMN does not simply lose a person. It loses part of its own architecture. The “self-who-had-a-mother,” or the “self-who-called-him-every-Tuesday,” was encoded into the neural network. When that relationship ends, the network must reorganize.

This is perhaps why grief is exhausting. It is not only emotional. It involves neurological reconstruction. The brain is literally rewiring itself around an absence.

But here is the deeper issue.
The brain that needs to update was not seeing reality directly in the first place. It was running on models, predictions, and assumptions. The person who died was never perceived “as they were.” The brain developed a model of the person, a construct often shaped over years. We magnified the qualities we loved, softened the qualities we did not, overlooked their quirks, and filled the gaps with our own hopes and interpretations. What resulted was something familiar and beloved, but still a model, not the thing itself.

And if the brain mistakes its models for reality with those we love and see daily, we can be certain it does the same with those we dislike. We magnify the traits that irritate us, downplay their strengths, freeze them in memory at their worst moments, and reduce their complexity to a single story that fits our emotional needs.

In both cases, the person disappears behind the model. We never see them at all. What we perceive is only the model. Our construction of them.

Once we see how the brain builds its models, and how limited those models truly are, another illusion comes into view. Something larger, more fundamental, more pervasive, and perhaps more quietly disruptive. Let us examine this next.

The Illusion of Possession

We live as though life is a ledger.
Columns of credits and debits.
Gained and lost.
Possessed and surrendered.

My relationships.
My achievements.
My beliefs.
My spiritual insights.
My identity.

My father gone.
My business gone.
My opportunities gone.

All entered, line by line, in the quiet accounting of the mind. Some entries celebrated, others perhaps lamented. All tallied.

But possession is the mind's greatest illusion, its most persistent hallucination. Nothing we call “mine” survives contact with time. Absolutely nothing.

Fruit flies live for days, humans for decades, stars for billions of years, and even galaxies fade over cosmic epochs. The universe itself is moving toward its own dissolution. Forms change. Impermanence does not.

Bodies age. Cells that were “you” seven years ago have been entirely replaced. The atoms that form this body were borrowed from stars and oceans and will eventually return to them.

Careers collapse. The company I founded and spent thirteen years building dissolved when my health failed. Two founders had grown to fifty consultants. Revenue was rising. Clients were returning.
And then, poof, gone.
Not because I failed at something I could control, but because circumstances shifted in ways I never commanded to begin with.

The person you were close to five years ago may now feel like a stranger, not through betrayal but simply because both of you became different people. Your paths diverged.

Our children grow up. And away.
They are never truly “ours.”
They are sovereign beings passing through our life for a time, then forging their own paths. Paths that inevitably diverge, because they are not our paths, no matter how much we might wish it were otherwise.

Even beliefs dissolve. The certainties held at twenty feel naive at forty. The spiritual insights that once seemed revelatory soften into background understanding or are replaced by deeper recognition.

We begin to see how nothing remains fixed.
Not bodies, not relationships, not roles.
Not even our stories about ourselves.
A recognition begins to take shape. Loss is not an interruption of life’s flow.
It is part of the flow itself, revealing the impermanence that was always there.

These thoughts brought back memories from Ueno Park in Japan.

Under the Cherry Trees

I have been fortunate to be in Tokyo's Ueno Park, half a world away, multiple times during hanami, watching thousands gather under the cherry trees. On the surface, to a non-Japanese mind like mine, it looked like a holiday celebration. People picnicking under the branches. Drinking sake, eating, laughing, taking photographs.

Tourists with selfie sticks moving in a kind of frenzied urgency, intent on capturing... something. I remember wondering whether they were even aware of the experience itself, or whether they were too caught up in a frantic attempt to somehow possess it.

But beneath all this movement was something deeper: the Japanese have built a cultural ritual around an entirely different relationship with impermanence. The word hanami means “flower viewing,” but what is really being viewed is not the flowers. It is impermanence itself. The blossoms are the visual aid.

Everyone knows the window: perhaps three days of peak bloom. A strong wind could end it tonight. The petals are already falling even as people arrive. They come because of this, not despite it.

This is mono no aware, a Japanese philosophical concept often described as the “pathos of things.” It is the recognition that beauty and impermanence are intertwined, and that the awareness of passing is part of what makes a moment meaningful.

On my first visit, I was like the tourists, celebrating arrival:
Look, the blossoms are here.
On subsequent visits, Japanese friends taught me to see what lay beneath: celebration and mourning held simultaneously. A way of honoring what is already passing.

The teaching is this: be here. Attend. Recognize that this moment, under these trees, in this light, with these people, will never come again. Not “might not.” Cannot.

This is how you hold something precious.
Not by grasping.
Not by pretending it will last.
Not by taking a thousand photos to possess what cannot be possessed.

Impermanence is not what makes things meaningless. It is what makes them sacred. The blossoms matter precisely because they will fall. The moment under the trees is precious precisely because it will not come again. A plastic cherry blossom lasts forever and means nothing. A real cherry blossom perhaps lasts three days, and its beauty and its very transience invite us to be fully present.

This inverts everything we thought we knew about value. We believe permanence creates worth, that lasting matters. But the cherry blossoms teach otherwise: what endures forever demands no attention. What passes makes us care. Impermanence doesn't diminish the moment's value; it creates it.

It occurred to me that there was another possibility, another way to look at loss: that loss is a subtraction we seldom choose.

Loss as the Subtraction We Did Not Choose

In a previous essay, I wrote about the Second Unlearning⁴: growth through subtraction rather than accumulation; deliberately removing illusions, stripping away what is not essential, uncovering what was always there beneath the noise.

But that is voluntary subtraction.
Deliberate. Controlled. Intentional.
Subtraction in which the “I” still maintains the fiction of agency.

Loss is different.

Loss is reality performing the subtraction on us. We do not choose when or how. We do not choose what. We do not even choose whether.

It simply happens.

David did not choose Wednesday morning.
I did not choose that day in December 2023.

The same is true for all forms of loss.
We did not choose for a relationship to end, or for a role to disappear, or for health to falter, or for a future we depended on to evaporate. Loss arrives without our consent, and in that forced subtraction something is revealed that voluntary subtraction might miss: perhaps there was never anything to subtract.

What feels like loss, the sense that something was here and now it is gone, is the exposure to what was always true. It was never “here” in the sense of being possessed, secured, or held in place. It was present for a time, and then the form of that presence changed.

Neuroscience confirms this. The brain built a model that included what was lost, and loss forces that model to update. But the model was always a construct, never the reality itself.

We did not lose the person or the role or the future. We lost our model of a world that included them. And discovering this difference is the unlearning.

David’s haunting is not simply about the friend who died. It is about the shattering of his model of a world in which “later” existed.
My cardiac event was not only about my body failing. It was about every assumption of permanence collapsing at once.

We cling to people and things because we fear losing them.
But why? What makes loss so devastating that we organize entire lives around avoiding it?

So we turn our attention to the nature of fear itself.
What is this fear that makes loss feel unbearable?

The Fear Beneath All Fears

Our fears are many.

Fear of failure may be the fear of losing identity.
Fear of rejection may be the fear of losing belonging.
Fear of change may be the fear of losing the familiar self.

All our fears, even the smallest anxieties, may whisper the same underlying question: What will remain if this is taken from me?

If we look deeply enough, we may begin to see that they all trace their lineage to a more fundamental fear, one that is silent and unarticulated:

the fear of ceasing to exist.

Indian philosophical traditions⁵ have long suggested the possibility that beneath the variety of surface fears lies a single root fear, ancient and primal. The fear of death.

Loss exposes this root fear with surgical clarity. When someone dies, when something we depended on ends, the mind is forced to confront a truth it often avoids: I, too, am temporary.

This may be why loss shatters us. Not simply because we loved, but because we believed, perhaps without consciously acknowledging it, that somehow love exempted us from impermanence.
That deeply meaningful things would last.
That we would last.

Loss removes that veil. It is the first teacher to speak the truth plainly:

You cannot hold anything in this world.
Not even yourself.

And this recognition, that even the self is fleeting, opens us to something unexpected.

Mortality as Mirror

My own brush with death revealed this directly. My heart did me the favor of stripping away many illusions I had been lost in.

In that ER hallway, where identity and achievement and ambition and fear all dissolved, something unexpected remained.
A stillness. Not mine. Not of me. Simply present.
Unaffected by the illusions, the masks, of personality.

Since then, I have noticed something strange and perhaps remarkable: that loss points back to that same stillness. Not immediately, because grief is raw and consuming at first, but eventually, like a tide receding, it leaves behind a kind of quiet clarity.

It shows us the boundary of the self, and what lies beyond it.

When someone dies, part of our story ends, the part that required their presence. But beyond the story, beyond the identity, beyond the roles that vanish with loss, the same stillness remains.

The same awareness that was present for me in the ER.
The same awareness you touch in meditation.
The same awareness that receives insights, claiming no ownership.

The person we lose is gone. But the awareness that held the love is not. It was never subject to loss.

This raises an unexpected possibility: What if grief is not only devastation, but also revelation? What if loss, when attended to with care, can open a kind of seeing that is unavailable in ordinary life?

Grief as Mystical Experience

Grief may, at times, open a doorway into a kind of mystical experience, although not in the sense of magical thinking or comforting visions of the afterlife. Mystical in a more technical sense: the temporary collapse of the ordinary categories of mind, allowing direct contact with reality before it is shaped by concepts.

When someone dies, the mind’s meaning-making apparatus often falters. The stories stop working. The models fail. The future you were living toward dissolves. Even the self that held all this together can destabilize.

And in this gap, the difficult and sacred gap between the collapse of the familiar world and the construction of a new one, there may be a brief encounter with what remains when constructs fall away.

Not always. Perhaps not even often. But sometimes.

There are moments when grief becomes so complete that even the thought I am grieving dissolves. There is pain, yet no longer a clear sense of anyone who owns the pain. There is awareness, but no longer a separate self being aware.

This is what contemplatives may spend lifetimes seeking through meditation. Yet grief can unveil it in an instant, not through cultivation or discipline, but through an involuntary and overwhelming surrender.

Mystics sometimes call this ego-death. Neuroscience might describe it as large-scale network reorganization. The person grieving simply knows that nothing is as they thought it was, including themselves.

Researchers studying grief have documented something curious⁶. In the acute phase, especially in the first hours or days after profound loss, people sometimes report experiences that resemble those described in mystical literature. These include a sense of time collapsing or disappearing, the softening or dissolving of the boundary between self and world, simultaneous pain and peace, and the recognition of something fundamental or more real than ordinary experience.

Clinicians often interpret these states as dissociation, protective shutdown, or trauma response. And perhaps they are. But perhaps something else is happening as well: the familiar constructs collapsing quickly enough that what lies beneath becomes briefly visible. This is what I have elsewhere called Rational Mysticism⁷: applying critical inquiry to extraordinary states without dismissing them as mere pathology or elevating them as supernatural revelation.

The brain’s model-building machinery, when overwhelmed, can temporarily stop building. The meaning-making systems, when overloaded, can fall silent. And in that quiet space, there may be a moment of contact with what exists prior to all models and meaning.

This is not comfort. It does not reduce the acuteness of loss. But it may reveal something important.

What we thought we lost was already a construct. The person we grieve existed in our mind as neural patterns, memories, predictions, and interpretations. The relationship existed as habits of interaction, assumptions about the future, and a sense of identity in connection.

All constructs. All dependent on conditions. All subject to change.

And when these constructs are forcibly removed, when loss performs the surgery we would never choose, what remains is not nothing. It is the awareness that was never constructed and therefore cannot be lost.

Not my awareness of them.
Not even awareness of anything in particular.
Simply awareness. Here. Present.
The silent is-ness that continues even when everything we believed we possessed dissolves.

The Final Unlearning

So here it is, stated simply:

Nothing is mine.
Nothing was ever mine.

And when this is seen, loss does not disappear, but it changes. It does not numb grief. It dignifies it.

Grief becomes the cost of custodianship, the quiet heartbreak of having been allowed to hold something precious for a time. Loss does not diminish love. It reveals its nature. Love was never ownership. It was participation in the sacred fact of another being’s existence.

And when we see that we are allowed to hold, never entitled to keep, something shifts. The temporary nature of all things is not what makes them meaningless. It is what makes them matter. Every conversation becomes unrepeatable, therefore precious. Every moment with someone we love is sacred precisely because it will not come again. The fleeting nature of existence is not a flaw to overcome. It is the condition that makes attention possible, that makes love real, that makes any of this mean anything at all.

If nothing ever ended, nothing would ever begin. If no one ever left, presence would lose its weight. If love lasted forever without effort or attention, it would cease to be love, it would be mere persistence.

Seen in this light, we no longer need to cling. We no longer have to grasp for permanence in a world that offers none. And what emerges is not nihilism, but perhaps a quiet transcendence.

The self that possessed begins to dissolve. The awareness that is cannot be lost.

This is the final unlearning.
Not because inquiry ends, but because the one who sought begins to dissolve into the seeing.

What remains is the simple truth that nothing was ever ours.
Not the person. Not the relationship. Not the future.
Not even the self that claims to have lost something.

The brain built its models, and when loss came, those models took time to update. Neural networks rewired themselves. Predictions failed and recalibrated.
And in the midst of this quiet reorganization, reality kept pointing to what has always been true:

impermanence is not a flaw in the system. It is the very nature of the system.

The cherry blossoms in Ueno Park teach this gently: beauty in transience, presence without possession, attention without grasping.
Loss teaches it without asking for our permission: grief in absence, reorganization without choice, awareness without construct.

David encountered it on a Wednesday morning.
I encountered it in an ER hallway.
You may encounter it in a quiet moment when some part of your life shifts from present to past tense.

And when that moment comes, you may remember this:
Neuroscience calls it model updating.
Philosophy calls it subtraction.
Mysticism calls it the falling away of constructs.

Different language for the same recognition.

Nothing is yours.
Nothing ever was.

And what remains when possession fails is the only thing that was never subject to loss.
Not your awareness.
Not my awareness.
Simply awareness itself.
Groundless. Indestructible. Here.

Nothing left to grasp.
Nothing left to lose.
Only this: a vast, spacious presence through which life, loss, and love continue to move.

Your Turn

The cherry blossoms teach by falling. Loss teaches without asking permission.

What has loss taught you?

What assumptions did it strip away? And in that stripping, what—if anything—remained?

If you feel moved to share, I’d love to hear from you — publicly in the comments or privately at undoing_raaj (at) proton (dot) me.

Thank you.

Footnotes:

¹ On grief specifically as model-updating: O'Connor, M.F., et al. (2008), "Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center," NeuroImage, 42(2), 969-972.

² The brain as predictive engine is central to modern neuroscience. For accessible overviews, see:
Barrett, L.F. (2017), How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and Clark, A. (2013),
Also, "Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181-204.

³ The Default Mode Network is a collection of interconnected brain regions that becomes active when we are not focused on an external task. It governs mind-wandering, autobiographical memory, self-referential thinking, imagining the future, and constructing meaning. In essence, it is the brain’s “storytelling” network—the system that builds and maintains our sense of self and our internal model of the world.

⁴ See my essay, Before the Learning, the Undoing: Three Unlearnings on Identity, Growth, and Control

⁵ In Vedantic philosophy and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, this is called abhinivesha - the instinctive clinging to life and fear of death, identified as one of the root afflictions (kleshas) underlying all suffering.

⁶ Mary-Frances O’Connor, a leading neuroscientist of grief and professor at the University of Arizona, has extensively documented altered states of consciousness during acute bereavement. Her book The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss offers an accessible overview of this research. More at: https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/research

⁷ See my essay, Rational Mysticism, The Enlightenment Rebooted

With quiet gratitude to Sora Sagano on Unsplash for the image