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

“Aloneness is not withdrawal from life; on the contrary it is the total freedom from conflict and sorrow, from fear and death.”

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

“Loneliness is the consciousness of the self without activity.”

“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.”

“If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty, and anxious - a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.”

“One has to be indifferent to health, to loneliness, to what people say or do not say, indifferent to whether one succeeds or does not succeed, indifferent to authority. Indifference comes into being when you listen to that noise, ride on that noise infinitely. Then that noise does not affect you, does not pervert you. You listen to it completely with indifference and therefore with understanding.”

“Loneliness comes when all our days are spent in self-centeredness. The very acting of self-centeredness is producing loneliness.”

“The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone, no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything.”

Only in Aloneness is there innocence
Most of us are never alone. You may withdraw into the mountains and live as a recluse, but when you are physically by yourself, you will have with you all your ideas, your experiences, your traditions, your knowledge of what has been. The Christian monk in a monastery cell is not alone; he is with his conceptual Jesus, with his theology, with the beliefs and dogmas of his particular conditioning. Similarly, the sannyasi in India who withdraws from the world and lives in isolation is not alone, for he too lives with his memories.
I AM TALKING OF AN ALONENESS IN WHICH THE MIND IS TOTALLY FREE FROM THE PAST, AND ONLY SUCH A MIND IS VIRTUOUS, FOR ONLY IN THIS ALONENESS IS THERE INNOCENCE. Perhaps you will say, "That is too much to ask. One cannot live like that in this chaotic world, where one has to go to the office every day, earn a livelihood, bear children, endure the nagging of one's wife or husband, and all the rest of it." But I think what is being said is directly related to everyday life and action; otherwise, it has no value at all. You see, out of this aloneness comes a virtue which is virile and which brings an extraordinary sense of purity and gentleness. It doesn't matter if one makes mistakes; that is of very little importance. What matters is to have this feeling of being completely alone, uncontaminated, for it is only such a mind that can know or be aware of that which is beyond the word, beyond the name, beyond all the projections of imagination.


Alone has beauty
The agony of loneliness
“It is a fear that comes when one feels oneself to be completely alone, entirely by oneself, utterly cut off from everything. Though my husband and children were there, this wave would come upon me, and I would feel myself to be like a dead tree in a wasted land: lonely, unloved and unloving. The agony of it was much more intense than that of bearing a child. It was fearful and breath-taking; I didn’t belong to anyone; there was a sense of complete isolation.”
Commentaries on Living, Third Series, 199

Loneliness is the awareness of complete isolation
“Loneliness is the awareness of complete isolation; and are not our activities self-enclosing? Though our thoughts and emotions are expansive, are they not exclusive and dividing? Are we not seeking dominance in our relationships, in our rights and possessions, thereby creating resistance?”

We are afraid of solitude, but it is solitude that heals the deepening wound of loneliness.
We are never alone; we are surrounded by people and by our own thoughts. Even when the people are distant, we see things through the screen of our thoughts. There is no moment, or it is very rare, when thought is not. We do not know what it is to be alone, to be free of all association, of all continuity, of all word and image. We are lonely, but we do not know what it is to be alone. The ache of loneliness fills our hearts, and the mind covers it with fear. Loneliness, that deep isolation, is the dark shadow of our life. We do everything we can to run away from it, we plunge down every avenue of escape we know, but it pursues us and we are never without it. Isolation is the way of our life; we rarely fuse with another, for in ourselves we are broken, torn and unhealed. In ourselves we are not whole complete, and the fusion with another is possible only when there is integration within. We are afraid of solitude, for it opens the door to our insufficiency, the poverty of our own being; but it is solitude that heals the deepening wound of loneliness. To walk alone, unimpeded by thought, by the trail of our desires, is to go beyond the reaches of the mind. It is the mind that isolates, separates and cuts off communion. The mind cannot be made whole; it cannot make itself complete, for that very effort is a process of isolation, it is part of the loneliness that nothing can cover. The mind is the product of the many, and what is put together can never be alone. Aloneness is not the result of thought. Only when thought is utterly still is there the flight of the alone to the alone.

Loneliness is the action of the self. To the alone, life is eternal
“Loneliness isn't aloneness. Loneliness is self-centered, whereas aloneness involves absence of self. One has to be complete in oneself to turn utterly alone and thus pristine.”
"Loneliness, with its fear and ache, is isolation, the inevitable action of the self. This process of isolation, whether expansive or narrow, is productive of confusion, conflict and sorrow. Isolation can never give birth to aloneness; the one has to cease for the other to be. Aloneness is indivisible and loneliness is separation. That which is alone is pliable and so enduring. Only the alone can commune with that which is causeless, the immeasurable. To the alone, life is eternal; to the alone there is no death. The alone can never cease to be."


Aloneness

We are seldom alone
In the life we generally lead there is very little solitude. Even when we are alone our lives are crowded by so many influences, so much knowledge, so many memories of so many experiences, so much anxiety, misery and conflict that our mind become duller and duller, more and more insensitive, functioning in a monotonous routine. Are we ever alone? Or are we carrying with us all the burdens of yesterday?"
Freedom from the Known,105

Alone has beauty
“I do not know if you have ever been lonely; when you suddenly realize that you have no relationship with anybody – not an intellectual realization but a factual realization – and you are completely isolated. Every form of thought and emotion is blocked; you cannot turn anywhere; there is nobody to turn to; the gods, the angels, have all gone beyond the clouds and, as the clouds vanish they have also vanished; you are completely lonely – I will not use the word alone. Alone has quite a different meaning; alone has beauty. To be alone means something entirely different. And you must be alone. When man frees himself from the social structure of greed, envy, ambition, arrogance, achievement, status, when he frees himself from those, then he is completely alone. That is quite a different thing. Then there is great beauty, the feeling of great energy.”
The Book of Life

Being alone is innocence
“When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to a family, a nation, a culture, there is that sense of being an outsider. One who is completely alone in this way is innocent, and it is this innocence that frees the mind from sorrow.”
Freedom from the Known⠀