Osho on aloneness

[raindogParticipant 313]

We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.

Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes. Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal.

Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place. As you grow older, the gap also grows bigger. People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the other party is not there. They have invented games in which the same person plays cards from both sides.

Those who have known aloneness say something absolutely different. They say there is nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, more joyful than being alone.

The ordinary man goes on trying to forget his loneliness, and the meditator starts getting more and more aquainted with his aloneness. He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances. And those who have known their aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human beings — because your very being is blissful.

After being in tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear. Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as many things as you want, because this involvement will not anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your potential.

But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely.

So I remind you, don’t misunderstand aloneness as loneliness. Loneliness is certainly sick; aloneness is perfect health. Your first and most primary step toward finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else.

–Osho

"Free your mind and your ass will follow. The kingdom of heaven is within." -Funkadelic

[TuneoutParticipant]

Like Robin Williams once said,”I’m only lonely when I’m
around other people”

Lifes a bitch,but you don't have to marry one!

[raindogParticipant 313]

Every effort that has been directed toward avoiding loneliness has failed, and will fail, because it is against the fundamentals of life. What is needed is not something in which you can forget your loneliness. What is needed is that you become aware of your aloneness, which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of being lonely.

The whole life experience is of being together with people. Aloneness seems almost like a death. In a way it is a death; it is the death of the personality that you have created in the crowd. That is a gift of others to you. The moment you move out of the crowd you also move out of your personality.

In the crowd you know exactly who you are. You know your name, you know your degrees, you know your profession; you know everything that is needed for your passport, your identity card. But the moment you move out of the crowd, what is your identity, who are you? Suddenly you become aware that you are not your name — your name was given to you. You are not your race — what relationship has race with your consciousness? Your heart is not Hindu or Mohammedan; your being is not confined to any political boundaries of a nation; your consciousness is not part of any organization or church. Who are you?

Suddenly your personality starts dispersing. This is the fear: the death of the personality. Now you will have to discover freshly, you will have to ask for the first time who you are. You will have to start meditating on the question, Who am I? — and there is a fear that you may not be at all! Perhaps you were nothing but a combination of all the opinions of the crowd, that you were nothing but your personality.

Nobody wants to be nothing. Nobody wants to be nobody, and in fact everybody is a nobody.

So the first problem for a seeker is to understand exactly the nature of aloneness. It means nobodiness; it means dropping your personality, which is a gift to you from the crowd. As you move away, out of the crowd, you cannot take that gift with you in your aloneness. In your aloneness you will have to discover again, afresh, and nobody can guarantee whether you will find anybody inside or not.

Those who have reached to aloneness have found nobody there. I really mean nobody — no name, no form, but a pure presence, a pure life, nameless, formless. This is exactly the true resurrection, and it certainly needs courage. Only very courageous people have been able to accept with joy their nobodiness, their nothingness. Their nothingness is their pure being; it is a death and a resurrection both.

In aloneness you will disappear as an ego and personality and you will find yourself as life itself, deathless and eternal. Unless you are capable of being alone your search for truth will remain a failure.

Your aloneness is your truth. Your aloneness is your divineness.

The function of a master is to help you to stand alone. Meditation is just a strategy to take away your personality, your thoughts, your mind, your identity with the body, and leave you absolutely alone inside, just a living fire. And once you have found your living fire, you will know all the joys and all the ecstasies that human consciousness is capable of.

The old woman watched her grandson eat his soup with the wrong spoon, grasp his knife by the wrong end, eat the main course with his hands, and pour tea into the saucer and blow on it.
“Hasn’t watching your mother and father at the dinner table taught you anything?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the boy, chewing with his mouth open, “never to get married.”

He has learned a great lesson! Remain alone.

It is really very difficult to be with others, but we are accustomed from our very birth to be with others. It may be miserable, it may be a suffering, it may be a torture but we are accustomed; at least it is well known. One is afraid to step into the darkness beyond the territory, but unless you go beyond the territory of the collective mask, you cannot find yourself.

Groucho Marx has made a beautiful statement for you to remember: “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”

In your aloneness you will discover what it is to be. And out of that awareness of your being love flows, and much more. Aloneness should be your only search.

And it does not mean that you have to go to the mountains. You can be alone in the marketplace. It is simply a question of being aware, alert, watchful, remembering that you are only your watchfulness. Then you are alone wherever you are. You may be in the crowd, you may be in the mountains; it makes no difference, you are just the same watchfulness. In the crowd you watch the crowd; in the mountains you watch the mountains. With open eyes you watch existence; with closed eyes you watch yourself. You are only one thing: the watcher.

And this watcher is the greatest realization. This is your buddha nature; this is your enlightenment, your awakening. This should be your only discipline. Only this makes you a disciple, this discipline of knowing your aloneness. Otherwise, what makes you a disciple? You have been deceived on every point in life. You have been told that to believe in a master makes you a disciple — this is absolutely wrong; otherwise, everybody in the world is a disciple. Somebody believes in Jesus, somebody believes in Buddha, somebody believes in Krishna, somebody believes in Mahavira; everybody believes in somebody but nobody is a disciple, because to be a disciple does not mean to believe in a master. To be a disciple means to learn the discipline of being yourself, of being your true self.

In that experience is hidden the very treasure of life. In that experience you become for the first time an emperor; otherwise you will remain a beggar in the crowd. There are two kinds of beggars: poor beggars and rich beggars, but they are all beggars. Even your kings and your queens are beggars.

Only those people, very few people who have stood alone in their being, in their clarity, in their light, who have found their own light, who have found their own flowering, who have found their own space they can call their home, their eternal home — those few people are the emperors. This whole universe is their empire. They don’t need to conquer it; it is already conquered.

By knowing yourself you have conquered it.

–Osho

"Free your mind and your ass will follow. The kingdom of heaven is within." -Funkadelic

[FunInTheSunParticipant 8283]

I’ve spent most of my life living with other people. I grew up in a large family. I’ve had roommates in the Army and when I paid rent to live in a houses with other guys. I used to live with relatives when I was totally broke or unemployed. Right now I’m living in a cheap apartment all by myself. No pets. It’s been an interesting year since I moved into this place. I think of my bedroom as a sanctuary. I have a mattress, a coffee table, a laptop computer, a TV tray, a fan, a lamp, and a lamp stand. It’s a real simple set up. I come to this place after work, put on some comfortable clothes, play some music, have a drink, and just zone out.

"I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win-and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’" (Atlas Shrugged)

[FrostByteParticipant 19005]

What OSHO book are you quoting from?
I would like to read it.

If you rescue a damsel in distress, all you will get is a distressed damsel.

[raindogParticipant 313]

FrostByte wrote:

What OSHO book are you quoting from?
I would like to read it.

It’s called Love, Freedom, and Aloneness: A New Vision of Relating. Good book.

"Free your mind and your ass will follow. The kingdom of heaven is within." -Funkadelic

[raindogParticipant 313]

Jesus said: Blessed are the solitary and elect, for you shall find the kingdom; and because you come from it you shall go there again.
–from the Gospel of St. Thomas

The deepest urge in man is to be totally free. Freedom, moksha, is the goal. Jesus calls it the “kingdom of God” — to be like kings, just symbolically, so that there is no fetter to your existence, no bondage, no boundary; you exist as infinity, nowhere do you clash with anybody else… as if you are alone.

Freedom and aloneness are two aspects of the same thing. That’s why the Jaina mystic Mahavira called his concept of freedom “kaivalya.” Kaivalya means to be absolutely alone, as if nobody else exists. When you are absolutely alone, who will become a bondage to you? When nothing else is there, who will be the other?

That’s why those who are in search of freedom will have to find their solitariness; they will have to find a way, means, a method to reach their aloneness.

Man is born as part of the world, as a member of a society, of a family, as part of others. He is brought up not as a solitary being, he is brought up as a social being. All training, education, culture, consists of how to make a child a fitting part of the society, how to make him fit with others. This is what psychologists call “adjustment.” And whenever somebody is solitary he looks maladjusted.

Society exists as a network, a pattern of many persons, a crowd. There you can have a little freedom — at the cost of much. If you follow the society, if you become an obedient counterpart to others, they will lease you a little world of freedom. If you become a slave, freedom is given to you. But it is a given freedom, it can be taken back any moment. And it is at a very great cost; it is an adjustment with others, so boundaries are bound to be there.

In society, in a social existence, nobody can be absolutely free. The very existence of the other will create trouble. Sartre says, “The other is hell,” and he is right to a very great extent because the other creates tensions in you; you are worried because of the other. There is going to be a clash because the other is in search of absolute freedom, you are also in search of absolute freedom — everybody needs absolute freedom — and absolute freedom can exist only for one.

Politics, psychology, culture, education, they all serve society. Religion alone is basically rebellious. But the society has fooled you, it has created its own religions: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism — these are social tricks. Jesus is antisocial. Look at Jesus — he was not a very respectable man, could not be. He moved with wrong elements, antisocial elements. He was a vagabond, he was a freak — had to be, because he would not listen to the society and he would not become adjusted to it. He created an alternate society, a small group of followers.

Now try to understand the words of Jesus: Blessed are the solitary and elect, for you shall find the kingdom; and because you come from it you shall go there again.

Penetrate each single word. Blessed are the solitary… Who is solitary? One whose need to be needed has dropped; one who is completely content with himself as he is. One who does not need anybody to say to him, “You are meaningful.” His meaning is within him; now his meaning does not come from others. He does not beg for it, he does not ask for it — his meaning comes from his own being. He is not a beggar and he can live with himself.

Who is a solitary? One whose need to be needed has disappeared, who does not ask any meaning from you, from your eyes, from your responses. No! If you give your love he will be grateful, but if you don’t give it there is no complaint. If you don’t give, he is as good as ever. If you come to visit him he will be happy, but if you don’t come he is as happy as ever. If he moves in a crowd he will enjoy it, but if he lives in a hermitage he will enjoy that, also. You cannot make a solitary man unhappy, because he has learned to live with himself and be happy with himself. Alone, he is sufficient.

A solitary, a sannyasin — that’s what sannyasin means, a solitary being, a wanderer, absolutely happy in his aloneness. If somebody walks by his side it is okay, it is good. If somebody leaves it is also okay, it is good. He never waits for anybody and he never looks back. Alone, he is whole. This beingness, this wholeness, makes you a circle. And the beginning and the end meet, the alpha and the omega meet.

–Osho

"Free your mind and your ass will follow. The kingdom of heaven is within." -Funkadelic

[FrostByteParticipant 19005]

raindog wrote:

It’s called Love, Freedom, and Aloneness: A New Vision of Relating. Good book.

Thank you. I have known of him via random quotes but never dived deep into his teachings. Since I have adjusted my sails to making a better life for myself via MGTOW ideals, this comes at a good time to restart my studies.

Namaste’

If you rescue a damsel in distress, all you will get is a distressed damsel.

[Anonymous 18]

raindog wrote:

Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.

raindog wrote:

Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes.

Beautiful post @raindog.

To acquaint one to oneself, one must spend time alone with oneself.

Being alone is a powerful tool. But I think it also involves facing at one’s reality. One’s past, one’s present.

In this day and age of anti-depressants and media channels – mainstream, alternate, social, etc – the lonely people are those that spend time actively avoiding spending time with their thoughts.

One can’t wake up and be happy and thankful for one’s aloneness. It takes an active lifestyle – of right choices; and a healthy temperament.

[Wolfgang RyderSpectator 70]

We were doctrined to think that individualism is selfish and bad. We are given materialistic and empty reasons to live. We are trained to live for others. We are taught to serve the system since our birth. We never have time to focus on ourselves.

A society is a group of individuals living together in the same territory but society became our master.

Without individualism how could they expect to form a society? The only thing you have is a horde of zombified, alienated, empty, mediocre and futile humans living for a meaningless ideology.

[DorkShitParticipant 4353]

You make me want to be a better rationally, objective, selfish being…

Thanks, raindog man

Peace brothers

[Author]

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