One has to understand what it is to be alone, for beauty is aloneness.

To be alone means you can get to know yourself and that you are not under the influence of anybody. Or rather, you are trying to understand the influence of propaganda, newspapers, magazines, television, teachers, your mother and father, or the group around you. You begin to learn. You are independent, and you are free. From this comes the peculiar quality of inner discipline.

Silence

“It is a sign of the love of God that a mystery is always separated from man by a layer of silence. And that is a reminder that man should also keep a silence in which to approach the mystery. Today, when there is only noise in and around man, it is difficult to approach the mystery.” The Quaker Reader, 527

Loneliness is the ill being of our time

Loneliness is the ill-being of our time. We feel very lonely, even if we are surrounded by many people. We are lonely together. There is a vacuum inside of us, and we don’t feel comfortable with that kind of vacuum, so we try to fill it up by connecting with other people. We believe that we can connect with other people, and then the feeling of loneliness will disappear.
Technology supplies us with a lot of devices in order to stay connected. We always stay connected, but we feel lonely. We continue to feel lonely. We check our emails several times a day, we send emails several times a day. We post messages every time in the day. We want to share, we want to receive. We are busy through the whole day in order to connect, but that does not help with reducing the amount of loneliness within us. … We have used technologies in order to try to dissipate that feeling of loneliness, but we have not succeeded.
We walk, but we do not know that we are walking. We are there, but we do not know that we are there. We are alive, but we do not know that we are alive. We are losing ourselves, we are not ourselves. And that is happening almost all day long.

Possession is loneliness

“Possession is loneliness. The very word excludes others from the use of the possessed object without the consent of the possessor, and those who insist on possession ultimately perish in self-excommunication and loneliness. On the other hand, in receiving a gift the recipient obtains, besides the present, also the love of the giver. A gift is thus the vessel that contains the affection, which is destroyed as soon as the recipient begins to look on it as a possession.” Abraham Heschel