Exploring Loneliness from Curiosity

Loneliness is the fundamental ground of ego life. All ego-life activity can be seen as an attempt to deal with – eliminate – being lonely (isolated).

As the ego is rooted in identifying as a separate, independent entity, the pursuit of eliminating loneliness is a losing proposition. This conflict of interests is at the core of loneliness. Given this predicament, is there another way to approach the painful predicament of loneliness? And just how prevalent is loneliness in today’s world?

Google is great for providing us with a barometer of interest. A search on lonely returns 1.05 billion search results. Loneliness yields 813 million search results. By comparison, results for news comes in at a measly 35.5 million results.

Here are a few lonely headlines:

If You’re Feeling Lonely, Here’s What People Are Doing To Feel A Bit Better
Young adults are the most lonely, data shows
With loneliness on the rise, there may soon be a pill to treat it
Loneliness is as bad for health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but don’t speak to me
How Social Media Can Help You Escape The Feeling Of Loneliness
From drawing nudes to knitting socks, yet more ways to beat loneliness and receive a creative boost prompting a variety of health benefits
Ask an Expert — Combating Loneliness During the Holiday

Many articles on loneliness use words like epidemic and combat. Loneliness is a global epidemic, and, as is apparent, we’re fighting a war on loneliness.

Covid has helped elevate loneliness issues and the numbers of the lonely. The staggering numbers of the lonely point to several systemic cultural and human issues. The most prominent is: most children are raised without any significant education and guidance on emotions and emotional development. Most people enter and exit adulthood without real understanding of emotions, all the while believing they know their emotions. One interesting read is How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

In our modern world, many people receive the message that unpleasant emotions and feelings like loneliness are to be controlled, suppressed, rejected, hidden, and changed to happy faces. And of course, as one headline points out, we should always rely on pharmaceutical companies to provide us with a solution—even though many of us may be able to find greater connection by investing the time and energy to understand ourselves as human beings and communities. One way to start investigating emotions by zeroing in on the subtleties of emotions is through this interesting read: Dictionary of Emotions: Words For Feelings, Moods, and Emotions by Patrick Michael Ryan.

From a spiritual perspective, the situation is easily understood – being disconnected from our true nature is the source of all suffering, and loneliness is the bummock (the portion submerged in water) of that iceberg, not the tip.

If we weren’t so averse to uncomfortable feelings and had more capacity to tolerate our emotions, we might get more interested in them and their contribution to the human experience.

The Ego Solution to Loneliness: Busyness & Friends

“Yes, the issue of loneliness. Right. You spend time with a friend so that you won’t feel lonely, and you won’t feel alone. That’s a very important thing about a friend. In fact, most people spend a lot of time with friends, so that they won’t feel lonely. So a friend is there to help you get over your loneliness—to deal with your loneliness by not feeling it any more. Again, the function of the friend is to fill a certain hole.” – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Two, Ch. 11

Many times people report being sad because there are tears in their eyes. But closer examination might reveal that this is simply an automatic association and that the tears might be in response to joy, beauty, or humanness. This is one of the reasons why in the Diamond Approach, we explore the phenomenology of what is actually happening – to go deeper than ingrained, habitual, automatic associations and responses.

Research suggests that “social identity and emotion regulation explain over one-third of the variance in loneliness. Loneliness is associated with a variety of tendencies, behaviors, and outcomes, such as materialism, digital media use, and fear of missing out (FOMO). Furthermore, research shows that lonely people are more likely to experience acute or chronic pain and to come down with cold, flu, and many other illnesses.”

Where Curiosity & Exploration Might Lead Us

It is possible to recognize that the source of feelings of loneliness is associating the painful loneliness of the past with a state of aloneness in the present. This recognition
liberates the sadness, allowing it to evaporate, leaving a sense of transparent depth to the dark abyss, a spacious depth.

The feeling of this recognition is centered in the chest. It is as if the chest region has become void of everything except for a subtle lightness which curiously feels deep.

Feeling within the chest, inquiring with no goal in mind, I find no sense of solidity. The chest feels empty, but curiously quiet, peaceful and still. I recognize the state as a luminous black spaciousness, which is the unity of stillness and space. There is immaculate, glistening emptiness, but the emptiness has a sense of depth. The depth seems to be the felt aspect of the blackness of space. It is like looking into, and feeling into, starless deep space.

“No loneliness and no sense of aloneness.
Simplicity of Being has ushered me, through the door of aloneness,
into its inherent intimacy.”
– A. H. Almaas, Luminous Night’s Journey, Ch. 1