Light Incense And Meditate

Man Is Lonely

We are alone. The whole earth may be crowded but still every individual is alone. Even when you are in a crowd you are alone. This loneliness is unbearable and you want to get rid of this loneliness, so you create these relationships to forget yourself and your loneliness. For some time you feel that you are not alone.

Man is lonely, very lonely. With this loneliness you can do only two things: either you make a world of your own or you enter sannyas. Making a world means making relationships so that loneliness can be forgotten. And the meaning of entering into sannyas is accepting this loneliness because this is your nature. Do not run away from it, do not avoid it; accept it, embrace it. This is your nature. You will not get anywhere by running away from it. You have done this in innumerable lives and you have failed. You have gained nothing except failure.

Sannyas means: one who has accepted his loneliness – now he does not whistle, he does not sing, nor does he make any relationship – he is absolutely satisfied with himself.

It is very interesting to note that the more you run from yourself the more you will have to run – the more you will get scared of loneliness. The more you accept to be with yourself the more you will be able to find that loneliness is not loneliness but aloneness. There is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness means that you miss the presence of the other. To be alone means that being by oneself is enough. Loneliness is painful but there is bliss in being alone. When Shankara is alone he is by himself, but when you say that you are alone you are lonely.

Being lonely means that you feel the absence of the other. Aloneness means that you are happy to be with yourself. Aloneness means you have fallen in love with yourself. Meditation means to be in love with yourself. Meditation means to make such a relationship with yourself that there is no need to make a relationship with anyone else.

Meditation means to be fulfilled in oneself. Your world, your whole world is in you. There is nothing lacking. You are complete, you are whole, you are the divine, there is no need for you to go anywhere. This inner state means sannyas.

We make the world because loneliness hurts. We try to fill this loneliness with money, with friends, with family, with religion, caste, nation. We make so many efforts to fill this inner void because this wound is painful. But it is wrong to think of it as a wound; it is not a wound.

Loneliness is similar to darkness. You don’t know your aloneness. You have not experienced your aloneness and its beauty, its tremendous power, its strength. In the dictionaries, loneliness and aloneness are synonymous, but existence does not follow your dictionaries – and yet nobody has ever tried to make an existential dictionary which will not be contradictory to existence.

Loneliness is absence. Because you don’t know your aloneness, there is fear and you feel lonely, so you want to cling to something – to somebody, to some relationship – just to keep the illusion that you are not lonely. But you know you are, hence the pain.