THE FIRST AND LAST FREEDOM QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS QUESTION 6 'ON LONELINESS'
Question: I am beginning to realize that I am very lonely. What am I to do?
Krishnamurti: The questioner wants to know why he feels loneliness? Do you know what loneliness means and are you aware of it? I doubt it very much, because we have smothered ourselves in activities, in books, in relationships, in ideas which really prevent us from being aware of loneliness. What do we mean by loneliness? it is a sense of being empty, of having nothing, of being extraordinarily uncertain, with no anchorage anywhere. It is not despair, nor hopelessness. but a sense of void, a sense of emptiness and a sense of frustration. I am sure we have all felt it, the happy and the unhappy, the very, very active and those who are addicted to knowledge. They all know this. It is the sense of real inexhaustible pain, a pain that cannot be covered up, though we do try to cover it up.
Let us approach this problem again to see what is actually taking place, to see what you do when you feel lonely. You try to escape from your feeling of loneliness, you try to get on with a book, you follow some leader, or you go to a cinema, or you become socially very, very active, or you go and worship and pray, or you paint, or you write a poem about loneliness. That is what is actually taking place. Becoming aware of loneliness, the pain of it, the extraordinary and fathomless fear of it, you seek an escape and that escape becomes more important and therefore your activities, your knowledge, your gods, your radios all become important, don't they? When you give importance to secondary values, they lead you to misery and chaos; the secondary values are inevitably the sensate values; and modern civilization based on these gives you this escape - escape through your job, your family, your name, your studies, through painting etc; all our culture is based on that escape. Our civilization is founded on it and that is a fact.
Have you ever tried to be alone? When you do try, you will feel how extraordinarily difficult it is and how extraordinarily intelligent we must be to be alone, because the mind will not let us be alone. The mind becomes restless, it busies itself with escapes, so what are we doing? We are trying to fill this extraordinary void with the known. We discover how to be active, how to be social; we know how to study, how to turn on the radio. We are filling that thing which we do not know with the things we know. We try to fill that emptiness with various kinds of knowledge, relationship or things. Is that not so? That is our process, that is our existence. Now when you realize what you are doing, do you still think you can fill that void? You have tried every means of filling this void of loneliness. Have you succeeded in filling it? You have tried cinemas and you did not succeed and therefore you go after your gurus and your books or you become very active socially. Have you succeeded in filling it or have you merely covered it up? If you have merely covered it up, it is still there; therefore it will come back. If you are able to escape altogether then you are locked up in an asylum or you become very, very dull. That is what is happening in the world.
Can this emptiness, this void, be filled? If not, can we run away from it, escape from it? If we have experienced and found one escape to be of no value, are not all other escapes therefore of no value? It does not matter whether you fill the emptiness with this or with that. So-called meditation is also an escape. It does not matter much that you change your way of escape.
How then will you find what to do about this loneliness? You can only find what to do when you have stopped escaping. Is that not so? When you are willing to face what is - which means you must not turn on the radio, which means you must turn your back to civilization - then that loneliness comes to an end, because it is completely transformed. It is no longer loneliness. If you understand what is then what is is the real. Because the mind is continuously avoiding, escaping, refusing to see what is it creates its own hindrances. Because we have so many hindrances that are preventing us from seeing, we do not understand what is and therefore we are getting away from reality; all these hindrances have been created by the mind in order not to see what is. To see what is not only requires a great deal of capacity and awareness of action but it also means turning your back on everything that you have built up, your bank account, your name and everything that we call civilization. When you see what is, you will find how loneliness is transformed.
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http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/the_first_and_last_freedom/1953-00-00_the_first_and_last_freedom_questions_and_answers_question_6_'on_loneliness'.html
Candace: To escape loneliness, is to NOT create. Being "lonely" is the place of creation. I KNOW, for I journey there regularly. If you persist in running after escapes which now includes television, as the above piece was from a book written in 1953, The First and Last Freedom, (thus the radio comment), you will not find the creative process. Deep Loneliness is a great place, if you don't escape it, at least on a regular basis. For there you find God, which is yourself. For it is there you determine what plagues you and find the solution. It is there, in my own intense lifelong loneliness that AbundantHope was born.
This piece came from this website, http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/index.html
which houses J Krishnamurti's works. I highly recommend this material, it is thought provoking and way better than the new age crap on this planet right now. Journey here, rather than all these lollypop channels putting out fake and shallow information. This material by this man is the real deal. Learn to spend time with your own self, in that lonely place, and you will grow. A lot of you are escaping into new age. Some of it is good, but most is just plain shit.
And as part of my preparations I needed to be exposed to the material out there, and I found most of it that I read, merely created escapism. And that is the point also of religion, escapism.
Journey with this man if you must journey in your lonliness, and you should journey in it. I hope all of you are LONELY. For you will not fix this world, if you are NOT Lonely. Abundance is found in Loneliness. This man's material will produce perhaps in some of you some profound real thinking. I have not be overall pleased by "new age." This material is much better. Much of the new age movement is the creation of the Satanists, and that is covered in the PJ's I might add here.
I have recommended Zeitgeist, because you see, when we find technology to replace mundane work and the like, we will be LONELY, and have little escapism, and we will find our creative abilities. The dark side places all sorts of escapism activities in front of you, so that you do not become Lonely, so that you can't truly find the God within. Ponder it.
Bless Loneliness. And find your inner self. Find the pain that proposes you create. My little story in The Miracle That is Me, "Finding my Unfinished Business" was born of my great loneliness. And that day, I made the decision to stay in this world, rather than escaping it. You can escape it two ways. You can check out, or you "follow" the bullshit and play the escape games, which include by the way, many computer games.
This whole election process that apparently has drawn in many people this year, many finding it exciting, is at the height, an escapist game. People must stop looking for a messiah in the President, and find the messiah within themselves. It would seem the people are merely looking for another person to solve their woes. What change is it they want? Do they even know? Do they have any idea what is truly "broken" that needs change? For the most part, I don't think so, they have simply bought into a set of false entertaining problems proposed on TV. Escapism.
The Connection to Creator, the finding of ones creative abilities is never found outside one's self. NEVER. It is found in the lonely moments with God, in the dissatisfaction with the entertainments of this world. In this dissatisfaction with the games of this world. In this co dependence with the distractions of this world, is found insanity. In chasing money is found insanity. In chasing anything of this world, is found insanity. In the quiet moments with God, is found the SANE.
There are people who find me insane, but I will stand and claim, that I am completely sane, especially in my times of loneliness. For that is where I find true reality, not manufactured reality.
