Understanding Loneliness
The intense heat of the day was slowly dissipating. The magpies were all chattering to each other in the tall gum trees. A large cat sitting on a bush fence would often look to that gum tree when they were too loud. It was almost as if she was telling them to be quiet as the day was ending.
I sat in the hard chair for some time as the sun was setting in the ocean. The noise of the birds changed, as the sun died lower in the sky. It was as if the birds were debriefing each other about their day. There were moments of absolute quiet and then one of the birds would give out a loud chirp. A few others would answer and then they would be quiet again. The rhythm of the setting sun and the noise of the birds seemed so timeless and endearing.
She was a very attractive women with a kind smile and a curvaceous body. She shook my hand tightly as if to give me a message of her eagerness to come and talk. A mother of two teenage boys, she loved them and did everything she could for them. She had a great relationship with them and her husband as well. But she couldn’t understand why she was so troubled and couldn’t sleep. She had tried pills and meditation but they all seem to fall short of what she needed and wanted them to do.
She began to speak:
I want to thank you for seeing me. After that talk you gave at that dinner last night and what you said, I had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a long time. Your words seem to speak to me and I too feel this great loneliness and isolation. Most of the time my friends and family are distractions from it, and I keep myself busy doing so many things. I feel compelled to be in my boys’ lives and I slowly feel my grip on them loosening as they are having lives of their own which don’t include me. I think this is okay and the way of things but in my heart I ache with the loss I feel as the world will take them away from me. What you said last night affected me in a powerful way. I was angry at you first for making us all so uncomfortable, but then I realized what you said about how we escape from any pressure that leads us to evaluate ourselves. Can you please tell me why I am so lonely and afraid ?
We are so lonely because we have built a wall around ourselves and that wall has isolated each from the other. We have no direct relationship to things or people.
But why have we done this?
Does it matter why we have done it miss or should we not understand the fact of what is going on first and through what is going on discover something else?
Yes, I can see that but only because of the way you talked the other night. I could not come to that on my own.
Please, the truth is the truth and it is there for everyone if we are truly interested in such matters
Then tell me why it doesn’t matter. It took you coming to Australia for me to look at my, well, even admit this problem. I thought no one thought as I did. Yet it was so painful to see it. I felt like I was naked.
Miss, our whole life is set up this way. Each person’s prime concern is to fulfill their every desire. The demand for pleasure runs most of us and we can do that by the avoidance of pain. These two things we seem to be concerned about from morning to night. There is the pleasure of seeing your children succeed, getting the big job, buying the big house, the demand to be a somebody and be envied. This is what is going on all around us, which creates all the identifications and fuels the loneliness.
Well that is all I know how to do. Join this group, be a part of this movement, take this course to better myself to become a better person…
Is not the bettering of yourself a self-centered movement?
I guess it is, based on how you spoke the other night. That is one reason why I had to see you. That is my whole life. It is all about me, me becoming better. I have done Landmark and Tony Robins and many courses to better myself. I have spent thousands of dollars. But that only lasts a short time and I am back again, afraid and lonely. I have a good friend who I do this with and we joke sometimes and say to each other, “What is next in the course department?”, because the rate we are going we are going to be perfect by the time we are 65, and then have no energy to do anything.
Yes, this is the way of the world .Thinking you need something from the outside to master your life, take this course and you will be happy, believe in this god and you will be happy – it is all one in the same. Even now if you have done all this, the newest path is the path of the shrink and medication. These shrinks are just “confidence people” saying that the reason people are not happy is because of a chemical imbalance and it is not their fault, just a defective brain and most people love that because they are not responsible then for their life.
Brian, three years ago I was unhappy and I didn’t know why. I talked to my husband about it and he was to afraid to talk to me so he told me to go see someone, so I did. I wasn’t there fifteen minutes when he told me I suffer from anxiety . He gave me some pills and I took them and felt a lot better. Then my husband noticed a change in me and said I was not myself as everything didn’t matter to me anymore. I lost all of my sex drive and didn’t read or garden, both things I love to do and I stopped taking care of the boys, like making their lunch, things that I loved to do! So I went back and he changed the dosage and that didn’t work so we tried about four other medications until I sent my friend to see him and we compared notes and we both discovered they don’t know what the hell they’re doing!
Yes I know. I have seen this happening for years, people giving up their freedom and power and creativity to the church, the government or the shrinks. They’re all one and the same – corrupt from top to bottom.
That is a strong word, corrupt, they do help a few people!
Any help that divides you and takes away your creativity and sensitivity is corrupt. Do you know what the word means, to corrupt?
No, I don’t
It means to break up, to fragment. Are we all not fragmented? And each person is concerned with his own little petty attachments. His family, money, home, job, his personal beliefs, opinions, ideas and ideals. Are we not, in our daily life, battling with each other for our personal fulfillment and self-interest? Then we wonder why we are lonely! Relationship means the end of all this, to have a mind that is not driven by its self-centered desire, to have a mind that has understood all the factors of loneliness. The investigation of loneliness is to have a mind that is alone and comfortable with itself. To spend time with oneself, doing one’s own pursuits is not the understanding of loneliness, that is an escape the the presence of anxiety . Loneliness comes into being when the self is unaware of its own movement and allowed to run like a starving dog after whatever meal it thinks appropriate at that time. To see this and feel it in your heart and bones is to have an education that leads out of the darkness of one’s own loneliness. No course or book can lead you out the the prison you have built in which loneliness is just a room. There are many rooms that must be gone into and investigated, simply because they are there. That means freedom from all outcomes and arrivals, that is the flowering of understanding and compassion, which is love in action.
You have changed my life and I thank you for it. I have never felt this vastness with anyone before.
Perhaps it is because you have always looked outside for answers and have forgotten it is all about the questions we ask that empty our self-centered movement.
Why don’t you let me thank you? You sure push a lot, you are very challenging! I really like what you say, it’s hard to take but it affects me .
So then you make it about me and is that not the same pattern?
I have done it again, right? I see that and I have done it again! Okay, got it, sorry!
Now we can begin! See it, see it!
YES!! YES!!
Coachbri