There are moments, hours, and days when you cannot help but feel lonely. That sinking feeling in the chest, longing for what you had and what you never could, a pain that clouds all judgement, thought, and emotion, making it impossible to feel alive. It’s like falling into a bottomless pit and dreading the experience of it.
Is there a cure? A person, a medication, or a meditation through which I can escape it? Or will loneliness continue to be the salt in the wounds of existence? Why do I feel the way I feel? Why is there no feeling of belonging? Why am I not used to it already? Why does loneliness only seem to magnify with time?
What is loneliness?
Loneliness is the experience of a perceived sense of self which is essentially separate from everything that there is, an absence of all connection to anyone or anything. I feel like an island, isolated from everything in this world; never to be seen, loved, or cared for.
It is a slow death that kills you from the inside; making you question whether you have any worth to anyone, or will you ever be of worth to anyone. Research on loneliness shows how this pain of loneliness is as deadly to the system as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day and twice as deadly as obesity. (Now smoking seems so attractive, doesn’t it?)
This video by Kurzgesagt on YouTube is an excellent explainer of how loneliness manifests in the present day and what all effects it can have on those who experience it.
Where does it all start?
How the Mind Works
According to yogic scriptures, the mind has 16 aspects to it, which can roughly be clustered into four categories: Buddhi (the intellect), Ahankar (the identity which we adopt, consciously or unconsciously), Manas (the silo of memory), and Chitta (the part of the mind which is pure intelligence, an aspect which is unsullied by memory).
To understand this feeling of loneliness, we are only concerned with two areas: Buddhi and Ahankar, aka, the intellect and the identity.
The Intellect
To understand how these aspects relate to loneliness, we need to draw an analogy. See the intellect like a knife (when we think of our intellect, we want something that is sharp, right?). Something that pierces through everything that we are trying to understand.
The analysis that is done using the intellect is primarily a process of dissection. You want to know a flower, therefore you split it up into petals, stems, seeds, leaves, etc. This is the very approach that scientific enquiry takes, isn’t it? Science is an attempt to understand the puzzle of the cosmos by dissecting and analysing each piece carefully, and then trying to join the pieces together to arrive at a grander theory, and go on proving it to be true using the other pieces of their board (does the puzzle contain cover the entire landscape? Contain each piece? Or are we entangled in our games forever?).
The Identity
Now coming to the identity, see it as the hand that holds the knife of intellect; the way that we identify ourselves is the way our intellect works. Identity is a concept that refers to a person’s traits, characteristics, and experiences that make them who they think they are. The formation of identity begins in childhood and continues to evolve throughout a person’s lifetime. As children grow and experience new things, they start to develop a sense of self. This sense of self is influenced by many factors, such as family, friends, cultural background, and life experiences.
It is mainly of three types; the person you think you are, your likes and your dislikes, etc. Second is your social identity, or how others perceive you, and finally, there is your collective identity things like nationality, football club, religion, and language. Our collective identity is a way for us to connect with others who share our background, our heritage, or our shared beliefs. You will cheer for your own country in a sports tournament, you will rise for your nation’s national anthem. Even if your country doesn’t mean much to you, when you travel abroad you will find yourself being much more comfortable around people from your own country than you would be with someone else, isn’t it?
So identity primarily constitutes your core beliefs, beliefs about yourself and the world around you, and it plays a major role in how you think, feel and understand the world around you, allowing room for errors in your thinking and intellectual processing.
Now Coming Back to the Notion of Loneliness
Firstly, we identify an emptiness inside of us. Something is missing — something we had, or something we could never have. We think it was love, warmth, or a connection to something or someone. What else could it be? Why is there a hole inside of me? Why do I feel so empty?
An absence of love, an absence of warmth — as I keep searching for these things, I feel more and more empty, more and more lonely. Pain spreads through my body, a sinking feeling in my chest and stomach. Uncertainty and anxiety take over, and a feeling of melancholy pervades my being, clouding all thought and judgement. I feel wounded by this experience.
No one can understand it. Words on this screen fail to fully express the experience. This process of identifying that you are lonely is the first domino, this is where it all goes wrong. You identify this emptiness, this hole inside of you, and your intellect immediately starts to dissect and analyse it, analyse as to why you are lonely, what is it that you have done so wrong, or who did you so wrong that you are in this position in the first place? Is it my behaviour, my attitude, am I too ugly, too stupid, too reckless, too naive? I must be, otherwise why am I lonely? I am the devil’s favourite child as he dooms me to such a terrible experience of life forever, do I even deserve love?
As you can see, the moment we identify with our thoughts of loneliness, our intellect turns against us, analysing and scrutinising every aspect of our being; coming back to our analogy, it is like we are cutting ourselves up with this knife of intellect, we become masochists of the worst kind, there is no higher form of self-harm.
The smaller and smaller identities will inevitably cause disturbance within the human being and consequently in the world. ~ Sadhguru
So can loneliness end?
“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Irony process theory, or ironic rebound, refers to the psychological phenomenon where attempts to suppress certain thoughts or emotions make them more likely to surface. Our minds right now work in such a way that when we try to put it in first gear it ends up going in the reverse. Therefore to manage this experience of loneliness, any attempt to end or escape from will just end up magnifying the pain and suffering of it. We just have to learn to turn the knife around, and ideally stop this intellectual process of self-analysis itself, so that we don’t end up cutting ourselves up.
Loneliness is aloneness misunderstood
We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone; aloneness is a fact of life. Now that we know that by the virtue of our identification with this feeling of longing for something, and an attempt to escape from that hollowness, we embark upon this intellectual masochism we call loneliness; we can turn the tables around it. Half of the battle here is being aware of this cycle; a cycle which can erupt in so many different shapes and forms.
So many day-to-day events can trigger the feeling of loneliness and we invariably and unconsciously attempt to escape from it. Through mindless binges on socials, through food, through gossip; I understand how terrible you think embracing the experience of loneliness can be, but sit with this experience for a while without any escapes and see what happens.
Sit with your loneliness, still, unmoving; observe it, attend to it, understand the flow of it; know that you are not your thoughts, nor you are your emotions, just sit. It is going to be painful at first but just sit with it for a while, look at it with a non-judgmental spirit, a spirit of acceptance and compassion; a spirit of love and kindness, and see that you were just believing in a false notion, that you are alone, and not lonely; see the beauty of this emptiness that lies within you, see the cold melancholy transform into love, into warmth, into bliss. It all is after all, okay.
Just witnessing this cycle will bring major improvements in itself, second half involves observing loneliness for what it is and not making an attempt to escape it; the dissociation of the experience and the word loneliness has to be made, cause identifying this experience as that of being lonely begs the intellect to desire for something intensely, and question the self as to why one is not able to meet that desire. I am alone is a better statement than identifying by saying I am lonely.
The Myth of Sisyphus
The story of Sisyphus is a tale from ancient Greek mythology. Sisyphus was a king of Corinth who was known for his cunning and deceit. He was so cunning that he was able to trick even the gods themselves. According to the myth, Sisyphus once captured Death and kept him locked up, preventing anyone from dying. This caused great distress to the gods, as the natural order of the world was disrupted.
Eventually, the gods managed to retrieve Death and punish Sisyphus for his misdeeds. They condemned him to an eternity of rolling a heavy boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again. This task was to be repeated for all eternity, making Sisyphus one of the most famous symbols of futile and endless labour. but is it futile though? or did Sisyphus deceive the gods again and got himself a life of endless fulfilment? As Albert Camus says
One must imagine Sisyphus happy ~ Albert Camus
It does not make sense at first, but when one deeply thinks about it, one cannot help but appreciate the counter-intuitive beauty of the meaning that is deeply embedded in this story. The philosopher Albert Camus saw the myth of Sisyphus as a celebration of the human spirit. He believed that Sisyphus’ task was not meaningless, but that it was a symbol of our defiance against the gods. Despite the endless labour, Sisyphus continues to push the boulder up the hill, showing us that we too have the strength to carry on, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Camus believed that this was the key to finding meaning in life — not in the attainment of our goals, but in the struggle to achieve them; that our greatness lies not in the achievement, but the amount of pain we are willing to endure.
Despite the never-ending nature of his task, Sisyphus did not give up. He continued to push the boulder up the hill, day after day, showing remarkable persistence and determination. This is what makes the story of Sisyphus so powerful — it shows us that even in the face of overwhelming odds, we have the strength to carry on.
One thing needs to be made clear, loneliness is the yin to the yang of fulfilment, nothing in this world is ever going to fulfil you, that happily ever after kind of utopia is merely an illusion, it simply is too naive to sustain itself in real life. Life will always be filled with situations and circumstances that might or might not be unfavourable and unjust to you at first, and it is okay to feel lonely in them; the point is; to accept our pain for what it is and carry on despite it, that fulfilment is not in the end goal but it lies in the journey towards that goal, and once we reach that place (or if we fail) we set another one and begin the whole process all over again. We cannot end the pain, we can only stop its suffering of it.
