This Voyage

Your Aloneness

Meditation means: bliss in being alone.

Loneliness is pain, alone-ness is peace; hmm?

When we are alone we feel – separate, lonely and miserable.

It is one of the basic problems. Every human being has to face it.

The way children are brought up is the cause of this whole misery. No child is accepted as he is. He is rewarded if he follows the directions of the parents, the teachers, and the elders. Those directions may go against his nature, because those directives were not made by him or for him. Somebody five thousand years before made those principles, and they are still being used in raising the children.

Naturally, every child is displaced. He is not in his own-self. He is not himself; he is somebody else. That somebody else is given to you by society, by others.

So when you are lonely, and there is nobody to dictate to you, you simply relax in your nature. There is no need to perform anything, because there is nobody who is seeing. That relaxing into your own nature makes you feel guilty. You are going against your parents, against the priest, against the society; and they have told you that you, in yourself, are not right. You have accepted it. It has become a conditioned thing in you.

Whatever you do on your own is always condemned, and whatever you do following others is always praised.

In your aloneness there is nobody else there. Naturally, you need not act; you need not be a hypocrite. You simply relax into what you are; but your mind is full of the garbage given by others.

So when you are with others, the others are dictating to you; and when you are alone, the mind that has been created by the others is making you feel ugly, guilty, unworthy.

That’s why people don’t want to be alone. They want to always be with someone else, because with someone else they cannot relax into their nature. The presence of the other keeps them tense. The other is there, judging every moment, every action and gesture that you are going to make.

So you simply perform a certain act that you have been told is right. Then your mind feels good: it is according to the conditioning. Your mind feels happy that you did well; you are great.

People need crowds. This is the psychological reason why they always want to belong to Hinduism, to Christianity, to Mohammedanism, to this country, to that country, to this race, to that race. Even if that does not suffice, they create rotary clubs, lion clubs.

They cannot be alone. They have to be surrounded by people continuously. Only then, they can keep the tension alive, the act alive. In the crowd, they cannot be themselves.