Solitariness and Solitude

 

 

Man can live either on the circumference or at the centre. To live at the circumference is easy, cheap, because everybody is living there. But to live at the centre is a great challenge, because you will be living there all alone. You will not find a crowd there. And to be alone needs the greatest courage in the world, that’s why very few people have been able to know their innermost core, because the journey is absolutely solitary.

 

So meditation prepares you for this journey. It transforms your loneliness into aloneness, your solitariness into solitude — that’s the miracle of meditation. There is vast difference between the feeling of loneliness and the experience of aloneness, between solitariness and solitude.

 

Solitariness is negative, solitude is positive.

Solitariness is ugly, solitude is beautiful.

 

Solitariness is like a wound, a black hole inside you, which hurts. One wants to cover it, one wants to escape away from it, one wants somebody to be with so one can forget one’s solitariness. Solitude is like Everest: it is a virgin peak. Just a single moment of it is more valuable than the whole life of living with the crowds. the whole life of so-called relationships is just sheer madness compared to a single moment of solitude. It is so healthy and so whole.

 

And the same is true about loneliness and aloneness: loneliness is negative, aloneness is positive; loneliness means you are missing the other, aloneness means you are enjoying yourself. And meditation’s whole function is to transform the negative into the positive, to transform the miserable into the blissful. Once you have tasted the joy of being alone, the beauty of solitude, you can rush in — then there is no problem, then the journey is a joy. That each moment the joy becomes bigger and bigger, each moment it is more and more incredible, each moment you are surprised because you were thinking that you had reached the last — now what more there can be? But again there is more: once you reach one peak suddenly you see another peak waiting ahead of you, higher. And it goes on, it is an endless journey.

 

As you start coming closer and closer to your centre, your behaviour on the circumference changes. It becomes more and more loving, compassionate, calm, friendly. It becomes less greedy, less angry, less jealous, less possessive. It becomes more and more a song, a dance, as if suddenly a spring has come to you and thousands of flowers has burst forth.

 

And when you have reached to the very centre of your being you have known all that is worth knowing — knowing oneself one knows all. The name of that innermost core is the supreme self. It is not YOURself. You are left far behind, you are lift on the circumference. The ego is no more there so you are no more there, but in a way you are for the first time but egolessly. That is the meaning of the supreme self: egoless experience of one’s being.

 

-Osho, “Nirvana Now or Never, #14”