Loneliness is Just Selfishness

When I experience loneliness I have agreed to the idea that my identity is based on the self-perceived limitations of space and time. If I have agreed to these limits of self-concept I have forgotten the truth that I am not an organic carbon based organism located in time and geographical space, but the universal spirit animating inert form located in time and space.

When I realize that the personal ego is an entirely provisional social construct, I simultaneously appreciate that my sense of deeper Selfness comes from beyond the strictures of the personal narrative. The surface self is ever changeful and subject to the rise and fall of circumstance, victim to the ebb and flow of “good” or “bad” conditions, both internal and external. In this conviction of conditioned self-hood I become a helpless cork bobbing up and down on the surface of the ocean of life, according to the inevitable peaks and troughs of my human journey.

Each day I am asked by life to choose how to see life in it’s unfolding – either from the perspective of the limited persona, or to choose the perspective of transcendent/immanent cosmic wholeness from which to view this “Lila”; of the Absolute convincingly pretending ignorance of Itself so that it can endlessly experience the joy of moving from the isolated separate ego to the bliss of the Self in all things.

For something more dependable we all seek the changeless (in whatever shape we conceive of it) to give us a sense of safety which is beyond dispute. Yet, looking out upon the mystery and magic of the human landscape we initially depend on the external markers of security, money, job, relationship etc.. to give us this sense of belonging. However, in the words of Louis Komjathy, “Every worldview has its “seams” the places where enough pressure splits it apart and renders it fragmentary and discardable.” It does appear that nothing external to our personal identity structures can give us the enduring safety we seek.

So, experiencing loneliness (in this window of understanding) simply confirms the inadequacy of a self-referencing worldview, which cannot in the long term work as a place of inviolate safety from the storms of life.

We might be lonely but we are never alone. Spiritual life has been characterized as “the flight of the alone to the Alone”, a flight from the perceived aloneness of the separate individualized viewpoint to the radical Aloneness (and supreme singleness) of the Divine, however we conceive of it; the subtext being that there is nothing but God, Allah, Brahman, the Einsoff, the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Light Supreme or whatever name we give to the supreme reality, and all that appears separate from That is simply the illusion of separateness. Not the actuality of separateness. Separateness in this context them becomes the grand adventure of romancing the Divine, courting with the divine “Beloved” to use Rumi’s language.

All manifest appearance in form then, the world of the senses, proceeds from the primordial originating Divine which gave it birth into form, sustains it and dissolves it back into Itself, the event horizon we misname death. Spirit is that which lends its animating principle and presence to all forms of life, of which we humans are simply one expression of. No matter how we choose to characterize ourselves, our very lives depend on all that lives and breathes to be -the whole Eco-environment which is the shining web-of-life which supports all that is life.

We cannot isolate ourselves in a special box of individualized identity, because each of us, though “wearing” a persona, are both nobody and everyone, both nothing and everything. No one, more or less than any “other”.

So, why this insistence on this one life as more significant or relevant than any other life expression? All of life is equally sacred.

My favorite word for G-O-D is Life.

No other word suffices to include the All That Is, the All that each of us is.