to be alone

You are never alone, because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone, you must die to the past.

I really love this insight by Krishnamurti, about what it means to be truly alone. And aloneness is a critical element on the spiritual journey. Really to live any spiritual life, there must be an element within us which is deeply alone, profoundly alone.

But less start at the more superficial meaning of alone. Usually when we use this word, we mean we are physically away from other people. But that's only the first step in becoming really alone. For example, I might be sitting alone in a room, but talking on the telephone, chatting on social media, listening to the radio, reading a book. All of this is still connecting with other people, communicating, speaking, hearing, reading, writing. I'm basically still interacting with other human beings, even if they are not physically present in the same space as me. And that's not real aloneness. Just as I might claim to be in silence and then write a note for someone: that's not silence, I'm still communicating.

And it's vitally important on the spiritual journey that we spend some time alone and in silence. What we're really trying to do is get a deeper and deeper understanding of life and of ourself. And we have to understand that to do that, we need to have ever greater sensitivity to what is around us and to what is inside oneself. And that sensitivity needs a great emptiness. It's as if we need a tremendous silence in order to be able to hear that tiny voice. We need a tremendous stillness in order to feel those delicate subtleties within oneself.

And so it is with aloneness. We need to be tremendously alone in order to feel ourself. Otherwise, we're really feeling the other people around us, as well as ourself perhaps. If two people are in a room together, there is a resonance going on between them. And really, in that space, one can't feel oneself as such. One is feeling the interaction between oneself and the other. There's something common going on between the two, shared. It may be of value in itself, but to really see who we are – without that interference from another person – to really see ourself, we need to spend some time alone. And I'm not saying that we should go and sit in a cave in the Himalaya for the rest of our life. But to take some time deeply alone is really an essential part of the path.

So to be alone, we need to not only cut ourself off physically from other people, we need to break off all communication. And then, at least, we are left with ourself. But at this point, at this point, we're ready to read Krishnamurti's words. Because although we may not be communicating with another person, when we are alone, we soon discover that we are full of voices, and these voices are really our memories and all the conditioning that we have been subjected to in our life so far.

This great accumulation, an accumulation of rubbish, as Krishnamurti calls it, effectively means that we can't really see ourself as we are today, right now in this moment. Because we are being coloured, coloured by all these historic events, all the conditioning that we received as a child, what you should be and what you shouldn't be. All of this distorts our image of ourself. We cannot see anything really clearly, whilst we're having to see it through all these coloured glasses, all our memories piling up, creating an identity, and all the attachment that comes with that.

So if we do take time physically alone and cut off communication with other people, this is what we are faced with. It's like a crowded room. Only every person in that room is really a different version of oneself. Perhaps one version from when we were a small child being told what to do by our parents, perhaps another version from when we are at school being told what to do by our teachers. In fact, many, many versions of ourself from every stage of our life, every significant memory creating a new version of oneself. And every version of oneself is there in the room with one, crying out to be listened to, to be remembered, trying to assert itself as the right version of oneself. I should be this, or I am this, shouting ever louder than their neighbours.

And what Krishnamurti is saying is, we cannot be truly alone. We cannot be truly silent. We cannot reach that level of sensitivity that is needed, unless we can clear all this rubbish from our mind. We need to die to the past, is what Krishnamurti says. When we die, all our memories are erased. It's very simple, it's finished. It's all just dropped. Everything that I think I should be, that I think I am, it's all just gone. And then there is a great emptiness and a great silence.

And what Krishnamurti is saying is, we need to reach that state whilst we yet live. We need to die to the past. And only then can we reach this level of aloneness, this great depth of aloneness, of which Krishnamurti speaks, then we can be truly alone. And in this aloneness, there comes the tremendous sensitivity to what is: to what is around one on the outside, all the colours seem brighter, all the sounds seem clearer. But more importantly, there's a tremendous sensitivity to what's on the inside, to what actually is. When we are not cluttered up, when we are not busy with the mutterings of yesterday, in this space where there's a tremendous stillness and silence, we are at last intimately in tune, in touch, with ourself, with who we really are.