Aloneness

Last night you said that total aloneness is the essential nature, is the ultimate reality of man. Another day you explained that individuality is false and man is a wave in the organic whole of existence. How is a reconciliation possible between aloneness and wholeness?

There is no need of reconciliation. Aloneness is wholeness. But aloneness doesn't mean individuality. You are an individual because of society. When you are totally alone you will not be an individual. An individual means a part of a society, a unit of a society. When you are in the crowd you are an individual; when you move out of the crowd not only is the crowd dropping behind, the individual also is dropping behind. That individuality was given to you. Individuality and society are two poles of one phenomenon. Alone you are not an individual; the individual has to exist in a pattern of society. It is just as when I said that alone you are neither good nor bad, alone you are neither sage nor sinner, alone you are neither beautiful nor ugly, alone you are neither wise nor foolish. Both the dualities drop. The dichotomy drops. The…

Beloved Osho, I am loving my aloneness. I am feeling fulfilled, nourished, fresh with new energy and ecstatic. However, there are days when I feel lonely. Then I get sad, unmeditative and even grumpy. Osho, can you talk about how to go through the transition period from loneliness to aloneness?

You just have to make your aloneness more and more strong. So you don't have to do anything with your sadness or your grumpiness, or your fear that the old habit may come back again. You have not to think about that at all. You have to pour your whole energy into the joy of being alone. You have only a certain amount of energy -- either you can dance or you can be sad. If you dance half-heartedly, then you are saving energy for sadness. That's why I insist: live every moment totally and so intensely that no energy is left to be invested in sadness, in misery, in anger; there is simply no energy left. So the whole effort has to be very positive. Feed and nourish your aloneness with all that you have, pour your love, and you will be surprised that those gaps of sadness and…

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…

Beloved Osho, you often tell stories of persons who went into aloneness in some forest and who became silent and peaceful there. But aloneness seems to make most modern persons anxious and depressed, and it creates a yearning for human companionship. Instead of the patterned mind dropping, we become more acutely aware of it and preoccupied with it. How to overcome this? How can we learn to enjoy long periods of aloneness, and drop the old mind in it?

In the East time is a circular concept, just like seasons moving in a circle. The summer comes and then the summer will come again, and it has been so always and it will be so always. And the Eastern concept is nearer to truth than the Western, because every movement is in a circle. The earth moves in a circle, the sun moves in a circle, the stars move in a circle, the life moves in a circle -- every movement is circular. So time cannot be an exception; if time moves at all, it moves in a circle. The linear concept of time is absolutely wrong. That's why in the East we were never interested in history. We have been interested in myth, but never in history. The West introduced history into the world. That's why Jesus became the center of history, the beginning of the calendar. We…