be alone

Be alone

We have lost the art of being alone. Most of us live in cities, surrounded by millions of strangers. Most of us carry a smartphone around and we are connected to the world twenty-four hours a day – the world being other people with their tweets, their Facebook posts, a never ending stream of trivial comments.

If we really want to find out who we are, who am I?, we need to spend some time alone. Not all the time, it's also important that we spend time interacting with other human beings, preferably face to face. But we do a lot of this interacting, albeit most of it at a rather superficial, trivial level. So I'm not going to emphasise the interaction side. The part of life that most people lack is time alone.

This is critical. There are things that we can only see about ourself when we are alone. Ideally, we should probably be spending fifty percent of the time alone, at least as a starting point. Maybe there are periods when it needs to be more, perhaps there are times when it can be less, but half the time. Considering for most people, they are spending zero time alone, that constitutes a big change and it's going to take some discipline and organising. It's worth it, though. Spending time alone will yield great benefits on the spiritual journey. It's an essential element of the path.

What do I mean by being alone? First of all, and most importantly, be physically alone, preferably far from other people, away in the countryside, where there's a low density of population, and even then away from where other people are physically. This gets away from the whole field of mental chatter, human noise. And of course, leave your mobile phone behind. You don't need it. It'll get in the way of your aloneness. Also leave behind anything else that connects you to other people: radios, newspapers, books everything like that, no communication of any sort. Go away as much as possible from human artefacts, man made things. They are also carrying the energy of people, drop it as much as possible. Get out into the wilderness, alone. And there, there, you are at least in a space where potentially you can see who you are without reference to other people. 

When you are alone, there's no need to put on a mask. There's no point in pretending to be something that you're not. There's no point in behaving in a certain way just because that's what's required socially. Most of our identifications come about through our social interactions with other human beings. What is our nationality? It's just joining a little tribe, a little club, one group of people, excluding some others; same with race, religion. Every way we identify ourselves is usually in relation to other people. I'm a husband. I'm a wife. I'm a parent. I'm a child. These are relationships. I have this job. I have this place in society. It's all about other people how we relate to them.

So being alone gives us this space. Thoughts will probably still arise. And most of those thoughts will still relate to other people in some way. But if we can step back and detach a little from those thoughts, we are physically in a space where we can begin to see what is left when we take other people out of the equation. Who am I underneath all that? And this is really why being alone is so important as a part of our spiritual journey.

So being alone, getting away from other people, allows us to be in a space where we are no longer drowning in the mass consciousness of humanity, with its gross neuroticism, with its ceaseless noise, with its ubiquitous trivia. We can get into a space where silence is possible. And it is only in silence that we have a chance of discovering who we really are. It's only when there's some space and some stillness. None of this is possible when we are surrounded by other people. This is why I urge you, I say it's an absolute necessity on the spiritual journey to spend time alone.