Ashtavakra Gita

A truly wise man does not grieve for what has passed, nor rejoice in what is present, since both come and go

This isn't a call to feel nothing, but a description of what no longer happens to one's sense of self when circumstances change.

The claim here is easy to misread as a demand for emotional flatness, but the Gita is more precise: it is not forbidding feeling, it is describing what no longer happens to identity when events arrive or depart. Grief over the past and delight in the present both share a hidden assumption, that the self's wellbeing is bound up with whatever state of affairs currently holds, so that a change in circumstance becomes a change in the self. Because everything that comes and goes is, by the Gita's account, a wave on an unmoving sea, tying one's sense of being to any particular wave guarantees a wellbeing that rises and falls with the tide. This complements the earlier admission that even a wise mind may still waver: what steadies is not necessarily the surface of experience but what the wise person no longer stakes on that surface remaining calm.

Ashtavakra Gita

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• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about grief

  The text's first word on loss is not about feeling but about identity: what stops happening is that a change in circumstance stops registering as a change in you. It does not forbid grief; it describes a self that no longer rises and falls with whatever arrives and departs.