Of course, love and human connection are very important. But you can have very good friends and people you love, and still experience loneliness, especially if there are deep parts of who you are and how you are in the world that your loved ones do not understand. This is why the spiritual path can be lonely, because it shifts how one engages with life, what one looks to for inspiration, and so on--and this shift in perspective can alienate one from other people who have a different perspective on life. You realize at some point that you are not going to win approval or acclaim by walking this path you are on, that there are no external rewards for your commitment to the truth--fame, money, approval. The only reward is freedom, which is also lonely, because freedom is the realization that we can't hold on to anything. Love can never die inside of us, but the ones we love will die, and even in their love of us, they cannot touch or understand the fundamental core of our experience.
A big part of what Chogyam Trungpa talks about regarding loneliness is the loneliness of realizing that each of us walks our path alone. That does not mean we do not find guides, friends, and even guardians along the way, but rather that no one else can explain it to us or do it for us. We have to suffer through the breaking of our delusions against the rocky shore of reality, and no one else can carry that pain for us.
Chogyam Trungpa also relates the sense of loneliness to a total lack of security, no way to reinforce or reassure the ego.
Quote:
"I think we should realize that the practice of meditation takes us on a journey that is very personal and very lonely. Only the individual meditator knows what he or she is doing, and it is a very lonely journey. However, if one were doing it alone without any reference to the lineage, without any reference to the teacher and the teachings, it would not be lonely, because you would have a sense of being involved in the process of developing the self-made man. So you would feel less lonely. You would feel like you were on the way to becoming a hero. It is particularly because of the commitment that one makes to the teachings and the lineage and the teacher that the meditative journey becomes such a lonely one.
That commitment does not particularly bring protection or companionship or feedback to clear away your doubts or remove your loneliness. In some way your sense of loneliness is exaggerated by your commitment to the path. The path has been established and you start to take a journey on it. That journey is then up to you. You can read the map, which tells you how far along you are. You can stop at various places for rest and refreshment. But still it's your journey.
Even if you are sharing the journey with other people, those other individuals' experience is different, totally different, in terms of how the journey really affects them. So it's a lonely journey. There is no support, no specific guideline. You may have been told to do this and do that, but that is just at the beginning--so that you know how to be lonely.
So loneliness is one of the basic points. It means not having any security on this path of meditation. One can't even say that you get moral support. For one thing, as we discussed earlier on, you don't exist; and because of that, security doesn't exist. The only thing that is visible, that apparently exists, is the journey, the loneliness itself. That is a very important point for us to see and realize.
On this path, we are not looking for the grace of God or any other kind of saving grace. There is no sense that we are going to be saved, that someone is going to keep an eye on us so that if we are just about to make a mistake, someone will fish us out. If we had that sense, the journey would become a very sloppy one, because we could afford to play around. We would think that in case we did the wrong thing, we could be fished out or saved. But instead of relying on outside help, in this case, the impetus has to be a very personal impetus. Nobody is going to save us and nobody is going to protect us, so this journey has to be a very personal, individual journey. That's a very important point."
(Chogyam Trungpa, The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 126-128)
Quote:
"Now, the next question is the role of the teacher, the guru. How is he or she going to affect this process? There is no contradiction whatsoever between being on a lonely, personal journey and relating to a teacher. The role of the teacher is to teach the students what direction to take, to teach you a certain attitude and how that attitude might develop further. And the role of the teacher is to show you that the path is lonely...
Then there is another notion, which is the sangha, the community of practitioners working together. The sangha is also the creation of the teacher and the teaching in a sense. You get information, messages, from being among friends who are also doing the same practice as you at the same time. You might feel that you can take off by yourself whenever you want, that you can maintain yourself without having to be hassled by the sangha, without going through the painful problems of dealing with the rest of the community, these friends around you. But this is partially not accepting the world of the teachings. You want just to have a summit meeting with your teacher and to try to avoid the rest of the flock. You go off in order to be saved from the hassle of relating with anybody else. This is also in part looking for something other than loneliness--looking for security. Although your style of dealing with the whole thing is the style of loneliness, actually dealing with the sangha would make you feel more lonely. And that is very painful."
(Chogyam Trungpa, The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 128, 130)
Quote:
"There are all kinds of different levels and different approaches to trying to ignore the loneliness.
If you are like the ordinary person in the street, working a nine-to-five job, you feel very lonely. And also you felt very lonely before you got to the ordinary level. You felt you had to struggle, that you were wretched, outside of society. And then, when you try to step above the ordinariness into extraordinariness, you also feel lonely. All those attempts are made out of loneliness. The whole time the goal is not to be lonely, to achieve enormous security. So there are constantly inspirations arising out of the sense of loneliness, always looking for companionship. That seems to be the problem.
So we have two kinds of processes here. Rejecting loneliness by using the medium of loneliness; and trying to use the medium of friendship and companionship to arrive at the goal of loneliness. The second one is the dharma way. At the beginning you have your spiritual friend and your sangha that you work together with. It feels good, fantastic. But once you have been initiated into the path and style and practice of meditation, then your goal is loneliness. You begin to realize that.
Loneliness here is not meant in the sense of feeling alone in an empty room with nothing but a mattress. When we talk about loneliness here, we are talking about the fundamental starvation of ego. There are no tricks you can play; there is no one you can talk to to make yourself feel better. There's nothing more you can do about the loneliness at all. So for that reason, there's a need for a teacher, for the sangha, and a need for practice.
This is not based on a theistic approach--needing protection, needing a savior. As far as that is concerned, everybody is their own savior. The basic point is that the practice of meditation brings all kinds of experiences of uncertainty, discontentment of all kinds. But those experiences seem to be absolutely necessary. In fact, they seem to be the sign that you are on the path at last."
(Chogyam Trungpa, The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 133-135)
Quote:
STUDENT: My connection with the word loneliness has to do with different emotional states like sadness and all that sort of thing. It seems that you're talking about something different, but if so, I don't understand it.
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: Maybe it is an emotional state of some kind, but not in the sense of the highlight when your emotion reaches its peak. Rather, it's a self-existing situation. Whenever there is uncertainty and threat, there is loneliness, which is the fear of no companionship and the fear that nobody understands you--which is very simple. At the same time, it's a fear that you might possibly not exist, that there's nothing to work on, nothing to work with. We might even go so far as to say that it's a sense of total nonexistence and total deprivation. A feeling that whatever direction you face, you're facing the world rather than the path. Things are being pushed back on you. It's some subtle state of wretched ness. I mean, it's a heavy one. It's a very total wretchedness, all-pervasive. It's not just one-directional, such as, 'Because he treated me badly, therefore I feel lonelier, and I'm sobbing.' It's not just him alone, but it's the whole orchestra that's not playing your music.
(Chogyam Trungpa, The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 137-138)
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STUDENT: I'd like to ask a question about loneliness and love. In my experience, the kind of love where two people try to be together in order to protect themselves from loneliness hasn't worked out too well. When you come in contact with the loneliness, it seems to destroy a lot of things that you try to pull off in trying to build up security. But can there be love between two people while they continue to work with the loneliness?
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: That's an interesting question. I don't think anybody can fall in love unless they feel lonely. People can't fall in love unless they know they are lonely and are separate individuals. If by some strange misunderstanding, you think you are the other person already, then there's no one for you to fall in love with. It doesn't work that way. The whole idea of union is that of two being together. One and one together make union. Zero is not union, one is not union, but two is union. So I think in love it is the desolateness that inspires the warmth. The more you feel a sense of desolation, the more warmth you feel at the same time. You can't feel the warmth of a house unless it's cold outside. The colder it is outside, the cozier it is at home.
S: What would be the difference between the relationship between lovers and the general relationship you have with the sangha as a whole, which is a whole bunch of people feeling desolateness to different degrees?
TR: The two people have a similarity in their type of loneliness. One particular person reminds another more of his or her own loneliness. You feel that your partner, in seeing you, feels more lonely. Whereas with the sangha, it's more a matter of equal shares. There's all-pervasive loneliness, ubiquitous loneliness, happening all over the place.
STUDENT: Would you say that loneliness is love?
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: I think we could say that.
STUDENT: You've indicated that as we got into this loneliness, there would be a lot of wretchedness as well. Now I'm wondering how compassion fits into this picture. How does one practice compassion with that loneliness?
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: I think loneliness brings a sense of compassion automatically. According to the Buddhist scriptures, compassion consists of shunyata, nothingness, and knowledge, prajna. So that means the ingredients of compassion are the experience of nonego and a sense of precision, which is often also called skillful means. You can't have compassion unless you have egolessness and the sense of precision at the same time. The sense of egolessness, obviously, comes with loneliness and at the same time seeing through oneself, so that everything's been examined and looked at. That becomes compassion. That's unconditional love, unconditional loneliness. Then even after you've reached that point, the loneliness principle goes on. But then you are not lonely anymore; it becomes aloneness as opposed to loneliness, which brings a sense of space.
(Chogyam Trungpa, The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 139-141)
Quote:
STUDENT: But doesn't the sense of aloneness or loneliness contradict the idea of totality?
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: Absolutely not. If you realize that you are a lonely person, then you feel the totality of the whole space in which you are lonely or alone. It amounts to the same thing, absolutely the same thing. You can't feel alone unless you feel the totality of the whole thing. There is no help coming from anywhere at all. You have to make your own individual journey, which is purely based on you. That goes without saying.
S: That's not the same thing as ordinary loneliness then.
TR: There is no such thing as ordinary loneliness. Loneliness is one thing--there is always space.
(Chogyam Trungpa, Orderly Chaos, Shambhala, 1991, p. 12)
