“…we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
Ram Dass
Happy Blursday! Today is December 31, final day of 2020. Oh, right, today is New Years Eve!
Social distancing. Lockdown. Isolation. Loneliness. Loss. Fear. Confusion.
You, too?
A friend expressed surprise recently when I said that I have exceeded my comfort level for solitude. She knows I love my alone time. As an artist, writer, and all-around introvert, solitude has always been my friend. But this is too much!
This isolation feels like a sort of death. I have been struggling to keep moving.
On the other hand, I know I am in the best place I could be to ride out this pandemic. I am fortunate to be in good health as I approach my 65th birthday. I am grateful for my health!
Recently I picked up Osho’s Book of Secrets. It’s been on my shelf for years and years but I have never before spent much time with it. When I found chapter 70, Suffer The Pain Of Aloneness, I found the words I needed to hear, the guidance I desperately needed to help me commit to mastering aloneness. I found the motivation needed to stop avoiding this pain. Not fun but necessary.
Let me be clear about my purpose in posting this: In a nutshell, my purpose is to encourage you to view your isolation as a once in a lifetime opportunity to find out who and what you are when you are alone, isolated. Without the trappings of society, without all the superficial ego reinforcements we are habituated to, what is left? While the process is undeniably unpleasant, the reward is immeasurable!
It is my hope that by sharing my struggles you or someone you know will be helped.
So I followed Osho’s advice. I stopped pushing myself to plough through my self-imposed task list each day, a habit that–while it yielded real progress–served to distract me from a growing sense of inner exhaustion.
I have arrived at a clearer understanding of the difference between loneliness and aloneness. While there is no physical difference, there is a fundamental difference in internal state between loneliness and aloneness.
When I feel lonely, I am missing something or someone. This absence spoils my ability to experience the right here, right now moment as it is. My attention is preoccupied with what is not right. This situation is painful because it lacks something. This story, this inner narrative, causes my emotional and mental state to plummet.
When, on the other hand, the negative commentary stops and I am okay with what is, the pain of loneliness simply does not exist anymore. Then I feel relaxed, calm, content–even happy.
Actually, in true aloneness, in authentic presence, there is no “I.” Unless what is being described by “I” is all and everything. For in true aloneness, all separation drops. In true aloneness, “I” am Existence itself.
Excerpts from “Suffer the Pain of Aloneness,” (Chapter 70, Book of Secrets, by Osho)
Q: Confrontation of oneself in aloneness is very fearful, very painful. What to do?
It is fearful and it is painful, and one has to suffer it. Nothing should be done to avoid it, nothing should be done to divert the mind, nothing should be done to escape from it. One has to suffer it and go through it. This suffering, this pain, is just a good sign that you are near a new birth, because every birth is preceded by pain. It cannot be avoided, and it should not be avoided because it is part of your growth. This pain and this suffering is known traditionally as tapascharya, austerity. This is the meaning of tapas–arduous austerity, effort.
But why is this pain there? This should be understood because understanding will help you to go through it, and if you go through it knowingly, you will come out of it more easily, and sooner.
Why is there pain when you are alone? The first thing is that your ego gets ill. Your ego can exist only with others. It has grown in relationship, it cannot exist alone. So if the situation is one win which it can exist no more, it feels suffocated, it feels just on the verge of death. This is the deepest suffering. You feel just as if if you are dying, but it is not you who is dying but only the ego which you have taken to be yourself, with which you have become identified. It cannot exist because it has been given to you by others. It is a contribution.
[…]
Without society you are uprooted; the soil is not there from where to get food. This is the basic pain. You are no longer sure who you are: you are just a dispersing personality, a dissolving personality. But this is good, because unless this false you disappears, the real cannot emerge.Unless you are completely washed and become again clean, the real cannot emerge.
His false you is occupying the throne. It must be dethroned. By living in solitariness all that is false can go. And all that is given by society is false–really, all that is given is false, all that is born with you is real. All that is you by yourself, not contributed by someone else, is real, authentic. But the false must go. And the false is. great investment; you have invested so much in it, you have been looking after it so much. All your hopes hang on it, so when it starts dissolving you will feel fearful, afraid, trembling. What are you doing to yourself? You are destroying your whole life, the whole structure.
There will be fear. But yo have to go through this fear, only then will you become fearless.
[…]
The cyclone has gone and you will now be centered, centered as you have never been before.
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…within three months the old will be gone and the new will be there. But the secret is allowing it to be, whatsoever fearful, painful, howsoever apparently dangerous, deathlike. Many moments will come when you feel as if you will ego mad if you don’t do something and involuntarily you will start to do something.
[…]
Remain a witness, and allow whatsoever happens to happen. Fear has to be faced to go beyond it. Anguish has to be faced to transcend it. And the authentic the encounter, the more face to face, the more looking at things as they are, the sooner the happening will be there.
…you will have to pass through a tremendous hell, with such an intensity that you may not be able to bear it, to tolerate it. If one can face whatsoever is hidden in oneself, it passes, and when it has gone, you are different. Because all that has left you was part of you before, and now it is no longer a part.
So don’t ask what to do. There is no need to do anything. Nondoing, witnessing, effortlessly facing whatsoever is, not even making the slightest effort, just allowing it to be…remain passive and let it pass. It always passes. When you do something, that is the undoing because then you interfere.
And who will interfere? Who is afraid? The same will which is the disease will interfere. The same ego which has to be left behind will interfere.
No alternate society
So you can create an alternative society, that is one of the greatest tricks of the mind. It has always been so. You can create a different society, you can create an ashram.
So they move from society but they create another society, so basically nothing changes.
…they may become more egoistic because now they are the chosen few, the elect. They have left the world behind but they have created another world, and the same pattern of relationships moves again.
To be solitary means not to create an alternative society. Just move out of society, and then whatsoever society has given you will leave you.
All types of inconveniences will be there. Those inconveniences have to be suffered with the understanding that they are part of solitude, part of regaining yourself.
This is tapas, this austerity, and you will come out of it new, a new purity and innocence.
In true aloneness, you are not an individual
Aloneness is wholeness. But aloneness doesn’t mean individuality. You are an individual because of society. When you are totally alone you will not be an individual.
You become a silent inner space. You are not an individual because you are not a mind. TO drop the mind solitude is suggested. And with the mind everything drops. A moment comes when you don’t know who you are–and that is the moment from where real knowledge will start.
Christian mystics have called it the dark night of the soul–before the sunrise. All artificial lights have been put out. The night has become very dark. And the moment nearest to the sunrise will be the darkest.
You feel dead. Everything has stopped. All movement has gone. This has to be passed–because then there will be spring, new leaves will come, new flowers. A totally new dimension will appear within you.
You become one with the whole and the boundary disappears. You become one with the cosmos, you are Brahma.
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…you have to travel long before you come to realize that your home is the goal, that you have been always in the place that you wanted to reach.