ALONENESS IS NOT LONELY
“There is a hole in aloneness that leads into everythingness.” – ZR
Normally, we don’t know how to be alone. We look for things to occupy our time and space, and immerse ourselves in projects, people and intensities, anything so as not to feel ourselves. Many people who claim to enjoy being alone use isolation as an excuse to do and be as they please, without distractions, diving into some activity or another to cover up the fear of insufficiency, meaninglessness, and their own selfishness. This is not aloneness.
Aloneness is pure experiencing, free from boundaries or targets. We are at the centre as sentient observers, but do not concern ourselves with any self-description or reflection. Instead, the experience suggests a positioning whereby we are whole, good, perfect, and in a sense irrelevant. There is no time and space in the experience of Self. There is nothing to criticize, complain about, compete with, or achieve. It is an utterly sensitive participation in the totality of life in any given moment, as deep as it can be subtle. Aloneness is the portal to genuine lasting fullness and joy.
Loneliness reveals a need for outer parameters. Without them, we don’t know who we are or what to do with ourselves. The mere thought of being disconnected from the company, support, and general context of others, triggers the despair of non-existence, unimportance, and uselessness that sets the stage for the confusion we equate with the experience of emotional love. In truth, love doesn’t need anyone or anything, and it doesn’t fill the void of one who does not know himself. Love IS. It is an end in itself because it is who and what we are when we experience life without descriptions.
Unfortunately, our conception of life is centred on active, physical participation; a “doing” which invariably requires the presence of others, a context, and constant validation. Our whole world is defined by it. Far from bringing us together, such activity, like the body that performs it, separates us from one another and from Creation. The doings, and the significance we elaborate around them, prevent us from experiencing life directly.
Personality is the invisible counterpart of body, loaded with subjective meaning. It is limited and limiting. To be anything other than the collection of quirks, likes and dislikes that define our reactions, and us, is inconceivable. To preserve itself, the personality needs to “do” and “show”. Exercise power and build meaning.
In an unconscious world, we are taught to “do”, not to sense or feel. We learn to identify with the things we do, substituting impartial awareness with linear thinking. This is how our actions and the persons and conditions associated with them, become more important than the state of being. Then, when inner connection is impossible, we experience loss, imagining ourselves deprived of what we believe is reality. By this time, fear, as the absence of real Self, has taken hold, closely followed by its shadow, loneliness.
We become who and what we identify with, and then believe this is the nexus of our being, without recognizing the faculty within us that makes this possible. The personality is the result of a mechanism that we use automatically. However, at the centre of it is Self, a state rather than a condition of Being.
In a state of aloneness, movement perceived inwardly is one of abundance, non-specific and non-directional. We experience the whole within us through simple affinity and resonance. This gives us genuine confidence, as subject connected to the whole. Once this focus is gained, we are able to take our personality in hand, adjust our resources and reshape our world.
To “be” requires a positioning in aloneness in order to experience fullness and power; it requires that solid sustainable base that is gained only through experience of Self.
A human being is not meant to depend on anyone or anything, but to express wholeness and authenticity. We can’t do this if we are subject to descriptions. Everyone and everything appears quite differently when we gain the depth of intimacy and fullness of thriving in aloneness, as the most natural of experiences. To reach it, we need to stop looking for things to do, and this includes planning and calculation. Everything needs to be in its place and in its true perspective. When it concerns us and the direct experience of Creation, doing has to be replaced by sensitivity, and thinking transformed into a state of wide awareness.
In aloneness we do not cease to be who we are, but we cease to participate in the endless dependence we create, when we identify with what we do, and with what others hold us to be. On the portal of Aloneness (All One-ness) we envision the ocean in a drop of water, and totality in the One. This One is who you really are.
The Intelligence used in constructing our world is a force that requires a conscious driver. It is invisible, the most powerful dynamic in existence, formless, unlimited, and empty of self importance.
The challenge to an evolved human being is to own it in full knowledge and responsibility for the extraordinary power it represents. Learning to direct it requires we construct a bridge in Consciousness between our Presence as aloneness, and a conscious temporary personality. The choice is between allying ourselves with limitation or with creativity, with the things we construct or with the power that constructs universes.
