Robert Strock explores why people chase fulfillment in the wrong places and end up empty. He argues the heart—compassion, peace, trust, love—is where real fulfillment lives, and that grief and emptiness are invitations to look inward and open closed parts of yourself.
You've often pointed out that there is an existential level for all these things that are happening to us. That there is things as part of our human. There's things essential to our humanness. Longings, yearnings. We've talked about the heart and so on. What do you mean by that?
The heart itself represents, as I'm using the word heart, at least the very most fulfilling qualities and states of being that exist in humanity. And so compassion or peace or being in a state of trust or loving, the truth is the pinnacle of human existence. It's what we're all longing to find. And my experience is that most of us have to go through, and maybe all of us have to go through believing we're going to find that satisfaction or fulfillment somewhere else. And then what happens if we really are sensitive to ourselves is we feel empty. And that emptiness lets us know, oh, this isn't the real heart, this isn't the real soul, this isn't the real God, this isn't the real goodness, this isn't the core. And so the emptiness persists. And then we say, oh, I'm empty, so what is real? And we start to ask those questions, maybe nothing's real.
Maybe at that point we become cynical and despairing and say, nothing is real, nothing matters. Isn't that the invitation of emptiness as well?
I think that's the invitation of rejecting emptiness. Okay. I think the cynicism comes because we can't tolerate what's underneath the cynicism because we're actually empty. We actually feel despairing, we actually feel grief. And so we want to make a conclusion and we want to go into a black and white thinking. Cynicism is a religion, it's an anti religion religion, and it's a form of knowing, an absolute knowing. Whereas when we're really empty and we go underneath the cynicism and we're really grieving again, of which you are an expert, then what happens is we have a chance to discover that our suffering is because our own hearts are closed. We're suffering because we've closed off somewhere. And of course I'm not asking anyone to believe that. That's my life experience. And so if, for example, we're not tender, we're going to feel a certain kind of emptiness that relates to not being able to be tender. If we're not able to be strong and clear where boundaries need to be set in life, some of the distinctions between things that are destructive and are actually beneficial to others and to ourselves, then we're going to feel empty. And we're going to feel incomplete. The heart has all this rainbow, from strength to tenderness and all the beautiful qualities in between. And it's the ultimate payoff. And it is the gift of life. And one of the subtlest mysteries that blows my mind is that when you really are in an open heart, it becomes obvious. You come home, and when you feel empty and you track it, you can see why you're homeless. And so the emptiness becomes so important to experience. And all the forms of grief that let you know that it's a reflection of a part of you that's missing. And it's a place where we always want to ask ourselves, how is it possible to open my heart more and more? And I don't want to paint a picture of I've arrived with an open heart. Because we're going to have places like you've experienced where a part of our heart lives with our child. And if our child dies, part of opening our heart is paying the price of a permanent place of grief. And we can still open our heart and the grief is still going to be there. And that's as good as it gets.
