According to Osho, you cling to escaping aloneness because your conditioned mind misreads aloneness as loneliness and immediately seeks “the other” — sex, people, books, distractions — to drown self-remembering. Profound experiences return you to your center, which feels sad only due to this interpretation. Aloneness itself is ultimate freedom and richness. Drop the mind’s labels, taste aloneness directly, and the urge to escape dissolves.
You run away because you confuse being with yourself (aloneness) with missing someone (loneliness); see it as your free, full space and the fear fades.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Master, after the tidal wave of events and with the memory of a profound experience, I face new aloneness. Efforts to share or escape into distractions have bad results. Why do I cling to this habit of escaping aloneness? A few comments may help me for the task ahead.
And, Amrito, what has happened to you has been aloneness, but your interpretation is wrong. Your interpretation is coming from your past experiences, from your past mind. It is from your memory. Your mind is giving you a wrong idea. You drop the mind. You go into your aloneness: watch it, taste it. All the aspects of it have to be looked into. Enter into it from all the possible doors; it is the greatest temple there is. And it is in this aloneness that you will find yourself -- and to find oneself is to find God. God is alone, and once you have looked into it without the mind interfering you will not want to be distracted at all. Then there is nothing to distract, then there is no need to be distracted. Then you would not like to escape from it because it is life, it is…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, IT SEEMS THAT ONE OF THE GREATEST HURDLES THAT FACES A HUMAN BEING IS TO BE ALONE, TO STAND ALONE IN THE FACE OF THE OPINIONS OF THE WORLD, TO STAND ALONE IN THE FACE OF THE LIES OF THE WORLD, TO BE ABLE TO BE PHYSICALLY ALONE, AND, ULTIMATELY, TO BE ALONE WITHOUT EVEN OUR MINDS -- THE COMPANION OF LAST RESORT. WE REALLY KNOW WE ARE ALONE, WE KNOW WE WILL DIE INTO ALONENESS, WE KNOW THAT EVERY CONTACT OUTSIDE OURSELVES IS TRANSITORY -- ONLY YOU REFLECT THE SILENCE OF THE STARS, THE SILENCE OF INFINITY, THE SILENCE OF ETERNITY -- YET JUST BELOW THE HEART THERE IS A PAIN, A KNOT, A FEAR... THE FEAR OF BEING A LITTLE BOY WITHOUT FRIENDS, THE FEAR OF FAILURE AND REJECTION, AND THE PAIN OF PRETENDING I DON'T CARE.
Beloved Osho, every time I am on my own, I feel separate, lonely, and miserable. I love myself only when I am with others. If I am alone, I feel ashamed and dislike myself. It seems as if I judge myself through the eyes of others. Can you say something?
The old method is a long process. Delgado's method is simple, can be done within seconds, but it is more dangerous too. You can disidentify yourself with the mind that the society has given, but the electrode is a different matter. Even if you disidentify, the electrode will control your body. You may not like to do something, but the electrode will force you to do it. You are absolutely incapable. In a way, the discovery can be a blessing, because we can stop all that is ugly in man, all that is inhuman in man with such a simple methodology -- just a small operation in your skull, and placing a small electrode. If you are too much of a man of anger, you can just go to the scientist and tell him that this is your basic trouble: small things make you angry. He can put an electrode…
Why is it difficult? It is difficult because to feel your aloneness and yet be loving seems to be contradictory to the mind. The mind feels perfectly right: if you are loving, then forget about your aloneness, then be lost in togetherness. According to the mind that's what love is, it is the meeting with the other. But if you don't know what aloneness is, who is going to meet whom? Two empty shells will be meeting, two bodies will be meeting. But unless two souls meet and merge love never reaches to its ultimate crescendo. And one becomes a soul only when one knows the beauty of being alone. The mind is ready to say that if you want to be alone then be alone, forget all about love. The mind seems to be absolutely logical.
I am experiencing something that I am calling "the pain of myself". Can you say what this is?
Vandan, the ordinary life of humanity is a continuous effort to avoid oneself. Everybody is doing it, in different ways of course. Nobody can sit silently and be alone. Watch yourself, how fidgety you become if there is nothing to do. If the radio is not there and television is not there and the newspaper is not there and you don't have a book to read and nobody to talk to, just think how fidgety, restless you become. You are almost in a panic, as if you are dying. You need something to remain occupied with, you cannot be with yourself. And whenever you are with yourself you start feeling bored. Now, this is strange. And if somebody else feels bored with you, you feel very hurt, but you yourself feel bored with yourself! And everybody is the same: nobody feels good being alone. Man is constantly escaping from himself;…