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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Aloneness

Editor's Essay: There's an aloneness which is not loneliness. This latter is part of the dysfunctional ego’s sense of being cut-off, isolated, a prelude to annihilation. But the reality is quite different.

 

 

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Kairissi. I’d been bothered by this topic for some time, couldn’t quite articulate, but I think I know what I want to say now.

Elenchus. The malady of loneliness is part of the human condition, afflicts almost everyone, especially as old age approaches.

K. Let me preface our comments by suggesting that our readers first peruse the “Editor’s 1-minute essay” and also Krishnamurti’s discourse. But, there’s much to clarify here.

E. Why don’t you begin from “left field” and reference the “Noah” movie?

K. As usual, Anthony Hopkins, one of the great performers, offers a first-rate portrayal of his character, Methuselah. According to the Bible, Methuselah was the oldest man of recorded history, living to age 969. His father Enoch gave him a name, meaning, “his death shall bring.” This was a kind of prophecy indicating that, upon Methuselah’s death, the world and its evil would be destroyed; according to the story, by worldwide flood.

'origin of all coming evil'

E. Let’s interrupt ourselves to provide a side-bar comment. While the Bible is near-and-dear to many people, and while we ourselves, in earlier life, spent much time studying it, we can no longer vouch for its authenticity.

K. There is a section on the WG site featuring nearly 100 short articles which reveal that the Bible is a man-made document and, by no means, an “infallible writing, dropped from heaven, delivered by angels.” That’s just not true and any objective review of the evidence will support our misgiving.

E. As an aside, a small supporting item, here’s a quote from the movie:

E. These words are not found in the Bible, but, one could say, the sentiment is strongly implied. But, “the Creator” would never do this. Kriss, would you like to explain why.

K. Well, there’s so much wrong with Methuselah’s assertion here, one hardly knows where to begin. First of all, even if widespread destruction were to be called for, there’s no need for “the Creator” to get involved. Mankind is doing such a fine job destroying itself that no outside help is required – at all. And it’s always been this way, down through the thousands of years of recorded history. See the discussion of Revelation’s solution to evil in the world.

E. Dr. Carl Jung, in his old age, famously set us right on this:

 

Carl Jung, BBC interview, 1959: "We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself ... We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil."

K. We could also point out that “the Creator” was never surprised by anything that humankind has done – requiring some sort of emergency ad hoc make-over. What would this say about God and divine intelligence if this were needed?

E. And what good would it do to wipe out humans? Would this solve evil in the world? Did it solve the problem of evil after the time of Noah? - or did all the evil immediately start right back up? Have a look at any page in a history book or today's news.

K. The problem is man himself, his dark side, the dysfunctional ego, and it's ludicrous to suggest that a flood would solve the problem of evil in the world. No intelligent Creator would implement an ill-conceived plan like this.

 

K. The “Noah” movie does not claim to closely follow the text of the Bible but, instead, is a creative-interpretive rendition. Methuselah was Noah’s grandfather, and he’s presented living hermit-style in a cave on a mountain-top.

K. And I thought about this grandfather living his reclusive life, high above the “madding crowd” of ungodly greedy-and-violent society, milling about, far below. Most would consider him to be just an eccentric old man who likes being alone, maybe a misanthrope or mentally unbalanced. But then it occurred to me, what if Methuselah represents the sound mind and the rest of society as dysfunctional?

E. It is true that “the wise” have sometimes lived apart from the main. We recall the ascetics, those who’d put away materialism; those who were put off by the crass and vulgar petition of the world's carnival-barking.

K. And also the “desert fathers,” philosophers and saints who stepped out of the mainstream, with its neon glare-and-glitz, to focus on spirituality.

E. Some seem to have found a mental peace and were unafraid of being alone.

K. I would encourage our readers to consider the words of the mystic Deng Ming-Dao: 

"Spiritual practice must be uninterrupted. We may be anxious because we see very little happening on a daily basis, but we must be patient until we can see what the accumulation of our effort yields. Self-cultivation means steady gradual progress…

"After long self-cultivation, one’s accumulated energy reaches a threshold and then bursts out, full, breathing, and vibrant… When one’s spiritual energy emerges, it feels like a swan rising from the water...

"If you spend a long period of time in study and self-cultivation, you will enter ... a world of extraordinary perceptions. You experience unimaginable things, receive thoughts and learning as if from nowhere, perceive things that could be classified as prescient. Yet if you try to communicate what you experience, there is no one to understand you, no one who will believe you. The more you walk this road, the farther you are from the ordinary ways of society... To speak to them of the wonders you have seen is often to engage in a futile bout of miscommunication. That is why it is said that those who know do not speak." Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao

E. As we see from Deng's testimony, a desire to separate from the world is not uncommon for those who seek for enlightenment.

K. And so, the question can be asked, what if Methuselah represents the sound mind and the rest of society as dysfunctional? Let’s come back to this idea, but first to consider something Krishnamurti said:

is there anything holy in itself

from the September 30, 1967 London lecture:

Man has always sought in various forms this feeling of something that must be beyond the transitory...

Man out of his loneliness and despair has given sacredness to an idea, to an image made by the hand or by the mind. The image has become extraordinarily important to the Christian, to the Hindu, to the Buddhist and so on, and they have invested the sense of sacredness in that image… That is what we are asking ... whether there is, beyond the [religious] symbol, the word, anything real, true, something completely holy in itself?

To understand that, or to come upon it, one must first investigate this whole question of experience… our daily life is so shallow, empty and dull… we want deeper, wider experiences… Most of us want deep fundamental lasting experience: an experience that will be completely satisfying, an experience that will never be destroyed by thought...

Behind this demand for experience there is the desire for satisfaction. We want to be satisfied but nothing satisfies us - sex, so-called love, so-called daily existence which is very shallow - we want something very deep and very satisfying and so there is our demand for great, wide, deep experience. So the demand for satisfaction dictates [and leads us to crave] the experience…To have great satisfaction is a great pleasure; the more lasting, deep and wide that experience the more the pleasure. So pleasure dictates the form of experience that we demand… pleasure is the measure by which we measure the experience. So in seeking something fundamental - as what is true - and is there anything which is really holy in life?

... It is really a very interesting question this… If one is merely seeking satisfaction through an experience, then satisfaction is the measure and anything that is measurable is within the limits of thought and is apt to create illusion. One can have marvellous experiences and yet be completely in delusion. You can see Christ, Buddha or whatever it is and you will inevitably see these people in visions according to your conditioning. The Catholic believer who practises, he strengthens his background and his conditioning and the experiences become stronger - and to him that is the real - but it is obviously a projection of his demands, of his own urges, of his own background and therefore it has no validity at all.

Editor's note: K is correct. See how this craving, this demand for projection of one's own conditioning, played out in a famous NDE.

... It is a well-known phenomenon which has been practised for generations, for thousands of years in India, the Mantra Yoga it's called, and it is so obvious, it is so infantile. One can induce the mind, by repetition of a word, to be quiet, to be gentle, to be soft, but it is still a petty little mind, it is still a shoddy little thing. It's like the experiments of those people who take a piece of stick, which they pick up in the garden, and put it on the mantelpiece; every day they put a flower there, give a flower to it! Within a month they are worshipping it and not to give a flower to that stick is a calamity, a sin!

One can make the mind, induce the mind to do anything it wants, or produce any vision. But meditation is not following a system, it is not repetition, a constant imitation; meditation is something that demands an astonishingly alert mind, great sensitivity in which there is no sense of bringing something about through demand, no illusion. So one has to be free of all demands, therefore of all experience, because the moment you demand, you will experience; and that experience obviously will be according to your conditioning.

To be free of demand and satisfaction necessitates investigation into oneself; it necessitates understanding the whole nature of demand. Demand is born out of duality. 'I am unhappy and I must be happy.' The demand that I must be happy, in that very thing is unhappiness. The opposite always contains its own opposite.

K. This is a long quotation, but it speaks directly to the problem of aloneness versus loneliness.

E. Can you summarize Krishnamurti’s comments as they relate to our topic?

K. There’s a lot here, with much of it deserving careful thought. Krishnamurti asks the question, is there anything holy in itself? He asks this because most of the world, almost everyone, is sick-in-the-head pursuing things which, it is believed, will fill up the “emptiness” on the deep inside.

E. These are the various religious or philosophical or sexual or political ideas that people believe will bring utopia, bring satisfaction, bring pleasure to their empty lives.

K. But none of it works, at least for very long, none of it is “holy in itself,” none of it fills up the "emptiness" on the deep inside.

E. And, we could say, because none of it brings satisfaction or pleasure, or filling the “emptiness,” then, for this reason, people are terrified of being alone – especially, with their own thoughts.

K. This is absolutely the problem. Many people would rather be in a bad relationship than to be alone by themselves, because at least, in the fighting at home, there’s a distraction from the “emptiness” in one’s own spirit.

E. Kriss, explain what you see in “the Methuselah principle”.

K. Most people will never be able to do this in this life, they’re too dysfunctional. They could never be so alone, “live on a mountain-top,” so to speak, without contact with others.

E. Would this even be desirable?

K. In an ideal world, no, it wouldn’t be. But Methuselah wasn’t losing much sleep over not being able to interact with the greedy-and-violent crowd.

E. (silence)

K. But it’s more than avoidance of poisonous spirits. I’m seeing that, for some, those who are somewhat well along in the process of finding the “true self,” a time will come when one prefers one’s solitude, prefers the sacred quietude of the sanctified self and the “sparks” of insight one daily receives from divinity – begins to prefer the “holiness” of one’s own mind. And this is what Krishnamurti was talking about with his leading question, is anything holy of itself?

E. We recall the comment by Emerson, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." The mind, especially in its purified state, is holy because it represents the soul, which is linked to God and all Holiness.

K. Elenchus, you and I know many people who live in senior apartment complexes. Now, on the surface of things, they seem to have a good arrangement: meals provided, nicely designed rooms, housekeeping is offered, recreational events available every day. And yet, especially among the more thoughtful there, they are quite miserable with their existence.

E. Explain the problem.

K. As I’ve looked at how these communities are arranged, it seems similar, in some respects, to the activities of a summer camp for ten year-olds. It’s non-stop fun-and-games and "ain't it great": bingo, then to tv shows, to dominoes, and to shuffleboard, to chair yoga, to afternoon old movies, to football viewing, to sing-a-longs, to coffee hour, to chair volleyball, to card games, to chess, to billiards, to ping-pong, etc., etc.

E. Most people would say, sounds decent to me.

K. On one level, it’s ok, but – as we’ve found, people are not happy there. Many speak of the vicious gossiping, the in-fighting, the “I can’t trust anyone.” But the real problem here is that these seniors are being treated like vacuous little children. And the question could be asked, why do we need this wall-to-wall distraction of events? Can't we, oftentimes, just read a book, or meditate, or write something, or listen to good music, or talk to a friend? But we know the answer. We’ve heard people say, “I don’t know how I could survive if I didn’t have my tv”, or the dominoes, or the bingo. Because what’s really happening here with this kaleidoscope of activities is to keep people distracted from the terrifying loneliness of their own spirits and inner life.

E. They’ve not yet discovered the “holy of holies” of their own mind, and so they’re trying to make do with mindless chanting and shouting at the next tv football game.

K. This is a real problem of mental health, and almost no one understands why Methuselah lives alone on that mountain-top, and feels good about it. The ego is terrified of being alone, which, it believes, portends its ultimate annihilation. The "false self" taps into this skewed view of reality.

postscript

E. I’d like to mention that if one is engaged in full-time repression of one’s essential self, one might not be able to enter Summerland immediately. Any time we shut down our critical reasoning faculties we create darkness in our spirits, and this mental darkness is carried over to the next life. And we’ll have to address this before we can enter the real world. See the many reports:

K. It occurs to me that there’s a kind of natural sequestration in Summerland and more advanced worlds. And so Methuselah naturally gravitates toward his “mountain-top” seclusion, in this violent world and over there.

E. Tell everyone what this means, Kriss.

K. It’s not that any evolving person is anti-social – far from it, and quite the opposite. But no advanced person is interested, a farthing’s worth, in the football game, the dominoes, or the shuffleboard. And so, you won’t want to be constantly around those who are still so immature as to live-and-die by this fluff.

E. In the next worlds, for better or worse, everyone goes to a place matching one’s essential vibrational essence.

K. But as we’ve recounted on the “Summerland” and “500 tape-recorded messages” pages, we'll live in "neighborhoods" where people are like us.

E. And that’s the key, we're with those who are like us - which may or may not be good news. For the more sane, however, we will naturally find ourselves removed from the “madding crowd” of immaturity – but not as an expression of “I’m better than you” but only as self-protection against the constant low-level energies which would burden anyone, if one had to live with that all the time.

K. There’s a myth about the “7 levels of heaven” and the “insane 500” have created a fake version of this, but, for the sane, one’s elevation is mental, meaning that, wherever one goes in the universe, one takes along one’s advanced level, one's “mountain-top seclusion”, that is, with an ability to retreat into the “holy of holies” of one’s sacred mind at one’s discretion.

E. We completed the above discussion nearly a year ago, and how do we feel about it now?

K. In the interim, the world continues to careen toward more loss of civil liberties, more totalitarianism entrenching itself. Many today feel that we live at the end of an age or cycle or human history, but with little hope a new golden age bursting on the scene.

E. For that to happen, history teaches, if totalitarianism is on the rise, usually a time of “blood in the streets” will serve as prelude.

K. I think bad times are coming, but this doesn’t mean that the world might not float downstream for some time yet. We don’t know. But, the question remains for us, how should the spiritually minded live life during such precarious and dangerous times?

E. We could say, try to help others as we can, do good as opportunity arises.

K. And we can try to do that, neighbor to neighbor, or maybe a charitable volunteer project. These are always good, but, what we’ve found is that it’s often quite problematic to “serve” others. As society becomes more violent, more self-centered, people trust others less and less, and it’s very hard even to make a new friend.

E. So, how then shall we live our lives, given the “present distress”? as the apostle Paul used the term.

K. Sometimes, all that life will allow us to do is to maintain our own sanity – which is not a small thing, and not so easy.

E. We need to remain positive, knowing that our stay on planet Earth is but a short time.

K. Sometimes, not short enough. But I like what Nina Fawcett said: To seek for the beautiful is its own reward. We should seek for the beautiful in nature, in literature, in the arts, and in our own spirits.

E. This helps to maintain sanity.

K. In our natural state, we want to live in the sunshine, and rejoice simply being alive; someday we'll have this. But, for now, to do this, given the vicious and deranged state of the world, we might have to live on that mountain-top with Methuselah.

 

 

Editor's last word: