Paraphrasing pretty tightly his comments in Seattle on 6
August 1950:
What is important is not to conquer, overcome or distract
oneself from loneliness, but to understand loneliness by facing it and looking
at it directly. In relationship we use others to cover up loneliness; most of
what we do is a distraction and attempt to escape. But if we are to understand
something, we must give our full attention to it.
How can we give our full attention to something if we are
running away from it? How can we give our full attention to loneliness if we
are afraid of it, if we are running away from it through some distraction such
as work, what we call relationship that actually is not, through religious
practice, through entertainment, through politics and power-seeking, through
drink?
Many people laugh at loneliness and say, "That is only
for the bourgeois; be occupied with something and forget it." But
emptiness cannot be forgotten, it cannot be put aside. One must see that
without understanding, loneliness in every form of action is a distraction, an
escape, a process of self-isolation which only creates more conflict and
misery.
If we go more deeply into it, the problem arises of whether
what we call loneliness is an actuality or merely a word... a word that covers
something that may or may not be what we think it is; what we have been taught
to believe it is by our parents, our families, our teachers, our culture, the
so-called authorities. Is not loneliness really just a combination of thought
and emotion, a result of thinking? And moreover, a kind of thinking so common
throughout our environment that we do not see it?
So the very giving of a name to that state may be the cause
of the fear which prevents us from looking at it more closely.
Surely there is a difference between loneliness -- an idea
and a corresponding set of emotions -- and merely being alone, as "by
oneself without others nearby." Aloneness is neither loneliness nor
isolation. Loneliness is the experience of ideas and emotions about being
alone.
Aloneness is a state in which all influence has completely
ceased, both the influence from outside and the inner influence of thinking and
memory. Only when the mind is in that state of aloneness can it know the
incorruptible. But to come to that, we must understand loneliness, the process
of isolation, which is the activity of one's unobserved and unconsidered
beliefs.
