Description
The course teaches you about why loneliness arises and how it is experienced: loneliness is the experience of isolation that is inevitably created by a mind that is self-concerned. When one is alone, one comes face-to-face with they mind they have built.
INTRODUCTION
Loneliness is a common form of suffering for most people. When we are by ourselves, with no distractions, we are left alone with our thoughts. We feel isolated, a lack of connection to others and the world, and we spiral into a deep depression. The experience of loneliness is intense and inevitably results in a fear of being alone and a fear of silence. Loneliness, in its more extreme form, causes a deep sense of feeling lost in life and an awareness that one’s life, and the way ones lives it, has very little meaning.
Being unable to free ourselves from loneliness, we seek to escape from it, organising our lives in ways that avoid loneliness.
The isolation experienced in loneliness makes us demand connection. To secure ourselves against loneliness arising in the future, we develop relationships that promise continuity. I remember hearing one man say to his wife: ‘The way you show me you love me is by being there every day.’
Continuity in relationships is established through mutual agreements or codependent circumstances.
Escaping from loneliness leaves loneliness intact, sustains a fear of being alone and establishes a multitude of escapes that are interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives. Those escapes are nothing more than distractions from the central fact of loneliness, and are responsible for sustaining loneliness.
For those willing to remain with loneliness instead of escaping from it, the observation of loneliness offers a profound insight into the way we have constructed our mind. A structure that, for the purpose of security, has built a wall around itself. When we are alone, we are left to stare at that wall: that is isolation.
In this talk I would like to discuss loneliness, understand what it is, why it exists and explore whether it can end.
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