Daishin Morgan, Rev. Master

In recent years I have spent much of my time in solitude and would like to offer some thoughts on loneliness, especially now when many of us are having to live in isolation. Most of the advice going around at the moment addresses loneliness through keeping up contact with family, friends and neighbours on various media and so on. This is good advice but what can be forgotten is the value there can be in allowing ourselves some space to explore the actual feeling of being lonely. Loneliness, the ache of the heart, impels us towards other people. The more I explore that feeling the more I can see how interwoven it is with the whole of my being like a rope of many threads. The wish to connect with others involves love, compassion, fears, doubts, desires, and more. Loneliness exposes us and that is part of its discomfort. On the other hand it is an opening.

 Once we begin to turn towards this complex experience, we may try to analyse all those threads. That can be productive in its way and to a degree it is probably necessary but it is also where we get bogged down. To just be lonely is a whole experience. There will be strands that are obvious and in our face and others that we become aware of more gradually but loneliness is the teacher. Recognition and acknowledgement of what we are actually feeling is essential for being at peace with ourselves. If we look carefully we see that experience is a whole that is experienced altogether and at once. Analysing our experience, the teasing apart of the threads, has its uses but its role is limited by the sheer impossibility of coming to a resolution. One thread on its own is never quite true because of all that has had to be pared away to examine it as a single thread; we are not really made of parts, we are ‘just this’. We can tease the threads apart but putting them back together results in a reconstruction that we have to keep trying to hold together. It will always lack the authenticity of immediate experience. If we trust the immediate experience we will see that it is not blind to complexity. It is multi-layered even as we experience it all at once. Direct experience is not serial. It is not a oneness in which all the detail is submerged and lost. All the threads are the endless subtlety or quality of a whole. When the threads are separated they become abstractions. Reality is the whole in its infinite quality just now.

Loneliness rests on a sense of separation. Are we the rope or the thread? The answer is to delve into the quality of the present. We are profoundly involved, as separate beings and as a whole. Zazen is the whole aware of itself; zazen doing zazen in which I am involved. We don’t have to make anything or hold anything together, we need to trust enough to let conditions reveal their reality which they do without intervention. Our actual experience is not made up of parts, even while we recognise this being here and that being over there. Loneliness paradoxically can reveal undividedness, it then takes on a different cast; it is no longer about lacking anything. There is something profound going on that it is not meaningless to call loneliness, but it is not at all what it seemed to be before.

At first loneliness is chaotic and it is tempting to grasp at solutions. I think that is often what makes us adopt someone else’s understanding. We may be able to tame loneliness with a strategy and keep it captive but it keeps escaping. Loneliness is valuable for its obduracy. We have to spend time with the chaos. I can offer some reassurance that being lonely, far from being some failure of practice, is a thread leading out of the maze.

Loneliness as a guide starts with what it really feels like. The purpose is not to make the loneliness go away but to know it so that when we are lonely we can let ourselves be lonely. If we deny that part of ourselves it is no wonder we get lonely; it hurts until we accept its heart. We have no way to know if our loneliness is more or less than anyone else’s. Assessing its quantity is a hopeless business. We must let our experience stand as it is.

As we sit, thoughts about loneliness will occur but they are about loneliness, when the real matter is loneliness itself. For something so challenging it can be surprisingly elusive and we have to learn to be with the way it can be absent one moment and acutely present the next. Take a holiday from judgement. It helps if we don’t set this up as an ascetic challenge; it is like listening to complex music.

Our actual experience takes us beyond ourselves to where we and the loneliness are not two things. In the same manner we and our feelings are inseparable from all the rest of existence. To be this is to be undivided, the whole world. Where is loneliness then? Please take this as encouragement to engage. When you are lonely, to know your loneliness is to be in touch with reality and that is the longed-for gift offered to the part that aches. Even precious memories of being with someone we love are not well used if we make them a shield to hold between ourselves and loneliness. It is not you and your loneliness; it is the whole of being, endlessly unfolding.

I can still be lonely; this is not about becoming impervious. One of the expectations many people have of practice and training is that it is like weeding a garden; that if you persist you will eventually have a garden without weeds. In the end we have to come to know the weeds, because weeds reveal the truth as much as the lilies. Reality is sufficient and liberation resides in reality, not in becoming some more acceptable thing.

Space is a poor analogy for emptiness,

It is the lightness of things being free.

Being in a room is the same

If the door opens easily or I am locked in

But so completely different.

Remorseless positivity is only pretending;

The cries must be heard, you must enter the room.

The lightness is not the condition of the door.

Finally, a word about distraction. I have come to appreciate the role of distraction in keeping some equilibrium. When on your own it is usually not a good idea to spend many hours in zazen as you might do on an intense retreat or sesshin. We can rely on conditions for the intensity. Enjoyment is important. I once had a dog who would chase his tail, distracting him with a biscuit would usually help.

This article is available only as part of the Summer 2020 Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives.  

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