Osho - Next Time You Feel Lonely...

Osho,
It seems that one of the greatest hurdles that faces a human being is to bealone: to stand alone in the face of the opinions of the world, to stand alonein the face of the lies of the world, to be able to be physically alone and,ultimately, to be alone without even our minds the companion of last resort.
We know we are really alone, we know we will die alone, we know that everycontact outside ourselves is transitory. Only you reflect the silence of thestars, the silence of infinity, the silence of eternity. Yet just below theheart there is a pain, a knot, a fear: the fear of being a little boy withoutfriends, the fear of failure and rejection, and the pain of pretending I dontcare.
Every tear I have ever shed comes from this pain: loss and the fear ofisolation or separation. How do we break this blackness that surrounds the fearof aloneness and allow the bliss of aloneness that you radiate with everysingle breath?

The darkness of loneliness cannot be fought directly. It issomething essential for everyone to understand, that there are a fewfundamental things which cannot be changed. This is one of the fundamentals.You cannot fight with darkness directly, with loneliness directly, with thefear of isolation directly. The reason is that all these things do not exist;they are simply absences of something, just as darkness is the absence oflight.

Now what do you do when you want the room not to be dark? Youdont do anything directly with darkness or do you? You cannot push it out.There is no possible way to make some arrangement so that the darknessdisappears. You have to do something with light. Now that changes the wholesituation, and thats what I call one of the essentials, fundamentals. Youdont even touch the darkness, you dont think about it. There is no point; itdoes not exist, it is simply an absence.

So just bring in light and you will not find darkness at all,because it was the absence of light, simply the absence of light. It wasnot something material with its own being, not something that exists simplybecause light was not there, you got a false feeling of the existence ofdarkness.

You can go on fighting with this darkness your whole life and youwill not succeed. And just a small candle is enough to dispel it. You have towork for the light because it is positive, existential; it exists on it own.And once light comes, anything that was its absence automatically disappears.

Loneliness is similar to darkness. You dont know your aloneness.You have not experienced your aloneness and its beauty, its tremendous power,its strength. In the dictionaries, loneliness and aloneness are synonymous, butexistence does not follow your dictionaries and yet nobody has ever tried tomake an existential dictionary which will not be contradictory to existence.

Loneliness is absence. Because you dont know your aloneness,there is fear and you feel lonely, so you want to cling to something tosomebody, to some relationship just to keep the illusion that you are notlonely. But you know you are, hence the pain.

On the one hand you are clinging to something which is not real,which is just a temporary arrangement a relationship, a friendship. And whileyou are in the relationship you can create a little illusion to forget yourloneliness. But this is the problem: although you can forget your lonelinessfor a moment, just the next moment you suddenly become aware that therelationship or the friendship is nothing permanent. Yesterday you did not knowthis man or this woman, you were strangers. Today you are friends. Who knowsabout tomorrow? Tomorrow you may be strangers again, hence the pain.

The illusion gives a certain solace, but it cannot create thereality so that all fear disappears. It represses the fear, so on the surfaceyou feel good at least you try to feel good. You pretend to feel goodto yourself: how wonderful the relationship is, how wonderful the man or thewoman is. But behind the illusion and the illusion is so thin that you cansee behind it there is pain in the heart because the heart knows perfectlywell that tomorrow things may not be the same. And they are not thesame.

Your whole lifes experience supports this that things go onchanging. Nothing remains stable; you cannot cling to anything in a changingworld. You wanted to make your friendship something permanent but your wantingis against the law of change, and that law is not going to make exceptions. Itsimply goes on doing its own thing. It will change everything.

And perhaps in the long run you will understand one day that itwas good that it did not listen to you, that existence did not bother about youand just went on doing whatever it wanted to do, not according to your desire.

It may take a little time for you to understand. You want thisfriend to be your friend forever, but tomorrow he turns into an enemy, orsimply says, Get lost! and he is no longer with you. And then somebody else, whois a far superior being, fills the gap, and suddenly you realize it was goodthat the other one got lost; otherwise you would have been stuck with him.

But still the lesson never goes so deep that you stop asking forpermanence. You will start asking for permanence with this man, this woman:Now this should not change! You have not really learned the lessonthat change is simply the very fabric of life. You have to understand it and gowith it. Dont create illusions; they are not going to help. And everybody iscreating illusions of different kinds.

I used to know a man who said, I trust only money. I trustnothing else.