Though deep down it is that which we fear most, that which is contrary to everything we truly are, it never ceases to amaze me just how much effort and energy people expend to be alone. Though we go through our lives blindly reaching out for connection, for solace, safety, understanding, in the end we do not know how to not be alone.
I have thought often on what the opposite of alone is, and what I came up with is something that most people would probably find strange: love. The reason, I think, that we do not know how to not be alone is because we do not know how to love, we do not really know what love is. We not only do not know how to love, we do not know how to be loved, for with true love, such distinction is an artificial illusion.
Our very conceptual frameworks condition us to believe in duality, and thus we know “alone.” We do not know, we do not understand, love. And so we go through life like blind wanderers, bumping into each other, huddling briefly, fleetingly, for warmth before we set off again. Or maybe out of fear, or delusion, or laziness, we cling to something that keeps the cold out a bit. It is our tremendous fear of the unknown, our delusion, arrogance, and cowardice, that keeps our eyes closed, which ironically, keeps that which we fear the most—truth—unknown. We fear this unknown, the truth, the light, and so we keep ourselves in the dark. And so, by way of our cowardice and desires, we live in the dark, the unknown, the aloneness that we so fear. And so we see that, in reality, what we fear is not the darkness, but the light.
It is not that we fear being alone (for we do so much to ensure just that), but not being alone. We fear letting go of the identities and “individuality” we cling to so voraciously, for as lonely as it may be, we feel it is safer than letting go. We fear love, for we fear most that which we do not trust or understand. We fear opening up, being ourselves, of loving, or letting ourselves be loved, for fear of what will happen if we are rejected: we are scared of being alone, so we live that which we fear for fear of it.
We are stuck in the middle of being scared of being alone and scared of not being alone. It is a self-fulfilling cycle of fear. We do not see that we are living exactly that which we tell ourselves we fear.
But what we truly fear is the light, being who we really are.
Most of the people who are in relationships, whether it be with friends or a spouse/lover, are simply alone together. They open themselves up in some ways, but since they don’t even know who they really are (they’re too scared to really go there) they never truly open themselves up—there is always stuff tucked away, deep down, in the boxes marked “avoid”—out of fear of losing what they (think they) have.
We must open our eyes to see and admit that as ego-controlled beings we are alone—anyone who really looks can feel it deep down—before we can ever be in a position to truly not be alone.
And so we live lives of illusion and delusion, all the while telling ourselves that we are not, and yet feeling the emptiness deep within that comes from being in the dark. Like Plato’s cave, we live in the dark that we profess to fear for our true fear of the light (our eyes have adjusted to the small amount of light in the cave, and so we think that the amount of light we have is all there is). We are conditioned to want the dark, and learn to defend and protect it. We are the jailers of our own prisons. Until we see this, we can never be free, for we look outside of ourselves, to other people, our pasts, we look everywhere else for the key that can only be found in our tightly clenched hands.
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From my personal notes, 6/29/00
