Last year I made an interesting observation. Before the New Year holidays, I created a survey on the topic “New Year is …” Until the first day, while everyone was in the New Year mood, the option “magic and fairy tale” was confidently leading. In second place was the reassuringly calm: “new life at a new stage”. And somewhere far behind, lost among the other twelve options, “meaningless convention” was crowded. When the mass psychosis of the New Year mood ended, starting on January 2, the ratings began to change rapidly. As a result, “new life at a new stage” won. "Magic" went into second place. But the “senseless convention” with a slight lag suddenly found itself in the third place of honor - and I think if the poll lasted another week, it would have moved to the second. Output? People believe, or really want to believe in magic and fairy tales. And when faced with realities, they are often disappointed. We all strive for a happy unity, kinship and understanding - this is our New Year's magic and fairy tale. And having been disappointed, we feel our own existential loneliness and the “senseless convention” of all measures for universal rapprochement.
What is loneliness?
Imagine that you are the last living being in the universe. There is nobody to talk to, nobody quarrels with you, nobody entertains you. Others no longer influence you, do not share their knowledge, do not frighten or delight you. You are in an empty world. Have you presented?
In loneliness, most people have such a tricky feeling, as if nothing new in this life will ever happen again, as if everything light and loaded with meaning at this moment disappears from reality forever. At the same time, we seem to feel that knowledge and the light of meaning can only come from outside, as if we ourselves are such an empty and dark box, and all the best we have received from others. And as soon as we are left alone with ourselves, all our "superficial" light will immediately begin to scatter.
Impressions are the food and air of the personality. However, impressions do not occur somewhere outside, they happen inside us - in our psyche. We feed our personality with impressions that we ourselves develop. The outside world is the key, it reveals the information that is already embedded in us.
The bottom line is that the experiences we have with other people are really just our experiences. In this sense, those around us are simply guides to our inner resources. The light of unity that we experience in the company of kindred spirits comes from our gut. The outside world is the canvas on which our mind draws.
However, in terms of “consuming” our own karma, we are so dependent on external “conductors” that in solitude, where there are no suitable objects for our most colorful projections, we stop the flow of impressions and experience mental suffocation.
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Loneliness is a lack of experience that really resembles holding your breath. And loneliness, like holding your breath, can be "trained" by maintaining comfort alone with yourself for ever longer periods of time.
Man, as they say, is a social animal. It is hard for us to be alone simply because we associate all the brightest in ourselves with other people. Alone, even the most beautiful and useful things lose their meaning and merge with lifeless walls. Why are others so important to us?
Extremes
Simplified, the mental content of our gut could be measured on a scale where at one pole is life, and at the other is death. At the pole of life - the most vivid and vivid impressions. At the opposite pole are experiences that block life inside us. There is coldness, darkness, doom and fear - information that we project onto the most unsightly forms of external reality.
You may have already guessed what this is about. The bright and living layers of our karma are rightly projected onto the outlines of the world, which, as it seems to us, are filled with the light of life - onto people. The highest quality impressions are attributed to our loved ones, a little less goes to our children and our friends. In animals, the light of life, as we feel, is manifested to a lesser extent - for us they are usually somewhere in the middle between lifeless things and living people.
In characters that we do not like for some reason, both poles are paradoxically mixed - death merges with life, turning into hatred, disgust, pity and other forms of rejection of our own "heavy karma". In how and on what our projections are projected, everything is ambiguous. This can be judged by each of the personal experiences of life in the body.
Why is it so important for us to feel that the people we love are our property? Why does attachment awaken? The manifestation of quality projections depends on the presence of “quality” people to whom these experiences are attributed. The key word is addiction. And even when a loved one is near you, but does not "belong" to you, you can languish and suffer, because an internal blockage is projected onto this scenario, it seems like there is light, but it is not ours, but someone else's.
Loneliness and death are often associated. They seem to be at one pole, and merge at their ultimate point. In loneliness, the negative layers of suppressed experiences first creep out of the subconscious. That is why the villains are so afraid of solitary confinement - there they face their own reflection in all its glory. And the saints voluntarily leave for the caves - they have nothing to suppress there, and in solitude they feel peace without negative impurities. Here I deliberately use the word "solitude" to emphasize that loneliness is not so much physical isolation as a subjective mental state.
If, staying in a dark punishment cell after the release of superficial "dark" experiences, the recluse managed to maintain his sanity, his psychic pendulum can swing towards bliss. And then a person is surprised to notice that being alone he is not at all lonely, and his dependence on the society of other people is noticeably weakened.
I’m not completely sure, but it seems that the experience of all-encompassing loneliness is a necessary stage of purification before spiritual enlightenment. Therefore, ascetics hide in caves in order to go through the inner darkness and open their inner light.
As a result, in long-term loneliness, either a saint or a madman is comfortable, whose reason no longer depends on the scenarios of the outside world. For the layman, oddly enough, a state similar to drug addiction is the norm.
And if you already consider yourself an enlightened entity, sit for a week in an empty room. If this does not cause discomfort, then you are really psychologically clean, and you can proudly wear the honorary order of a detached ascetic, and shamelessly brag about your great achievements in front of mere mortals.
The reasons for loneliness
There is an opinion that extroverts get charged on the move - therefore they are drawn to the hype and fuss. And introverts are charged alone, so they need peace and solitude to a greater extent. As a result, everyone balances between movement and rest. Everyone needs their own dose of solitude to calm down and put their thoughts in order. But once you drag it on, positive solitude begins to turn into gloomy loneliness.
All the most serious and gloomy states, as a rule, seem to be the most realistic and justified, therefore, alone, a person is so easily led to the negative illusions of this state. The recluse may seriously think that life is meaningless in the most tragic sense of the word. And it’s not a matter of loneliness, just, as he thinks, this is the truth of life. It's easy to get depressed by winding yourself up with this dark trend. But as soon as the indulging recluse finds himself in the company of interlocutors of his level, then, as if by magic, all the darkness dissipates. One illusion is replaced by another.
One gets the impression that in a state of loneliness, consciousness narrows to a small dark closet - one of the many rooms of the unconscious. And in a society of their own kind, consciousness expands, and we get access to other rooms of our insides.
Everyone knows - we can experience loneliness even in the circle of relatives and friends. This happens when the access to the positive pole of our karma is blocked by something - for example, during falling in love, when the inner light is completely projected onto a single person. From extreme to extreme: with loved ones - bliss, without them - languor. Sometimes we feel lonely in society when we outgrow our environment and strive for something truly new. The stage of darkness at the end can unexpectedly lead to a different path in life, on which meaning shines with renewed vigor.
Many people tend to feel lonely in large cities in the middle of a crowd. In conditions when there are a host of people around, there is a feeling that no one personally cares about you, and everyone is indifferent to each other. The crowd moves like a soulless mechanism - without meaning or purpose. There are so many people and they are all so strangers to each other that the individuality of an individual is completely devalued. That is why many do not like Moscow so much, especially its subway, where the flow of people is like some half-living empty mess, the fragment of which the “unique” personality does not want to feel at all.
More often than not, we find ourselves alone because of our long-suffering self-esteem. We avoid contact when we fear criticism. And this could be the cause of another vicious circle. Being alone, the hermit becomes stronger in his uselessness to anyone, more and more loses self-confidence, runs wild and it is more and more difficult for him to establish contact with the world around him. Such isolation is treated only by practice - communication skills develop as the communication itself, step by step.
Sometimes, we are ashamed of our striving for the company of other people, because this sign, as it were, demonstrates our worthlessness, our low "value", since others do not reach out to us themselves, and we have to humiliatingly chase after their "majesty", and catch random views.
Sometimes loneliness, on the contrary, can become the lot of the proud. A person is afraid to show his craving for the company of other people, hinting with his detachment that he is better alone, as if he has some secret, some secret value that attracts much more than the society of mere mortals. And later, the same proud man, suddenly suddenly expresses resentment. He believes that the people whom he once pushed away are to blame for him, because they did not humiliate themselves and beg the proud man to condescend to communicate with his “highly esteemed” person.
Deep inside, everyone has a space of unsupported void. But we are so afraid of our own inner freedom, and so attached to worldly supports, that we barricaded ourselves from this inner space, throwing it with a train of mental garbage. And now, being alone with ourselves, it seems to us that there is not freedom, but an empty, gloomy and hopeless basement in which you can easily disappear. And we grab onto external events, like lifelines, only so as not to be alone, to forget ourselves in the bustle and not see ourselves … We ourselves create this painful dependence on conditions. And in order to be cured of it, it may be worthwhile at least sometimes alone with yourself to boldly peer into yourself.