being lonely

So being lonely, I want to find someone or some idea through which I can be happy.  But loneliness always remains; it is ever there, under cover.  But as it frightens me, and as I do not know what the inward nature of this loneliness is, therefore I want to find something to which to cling.  So I think that through something, through a person, I will be happy.  So our mind is always concerned with finding something.  Through furniture, through a house, through books, through people, through ideas, through rituals, though symbols, we hope to get something, to find happiness.  And so the things, the people, the ideas, become extraordinarily important, because through them we hope we shall find it.  So we begin to be dependent on them.

But with it all there is still this thing not understood, not resolved; the anxiety, the fear, is still there....Is it not very important that I should understand this loneliness, this ache, this pain of extraordinary emptiness?  Because if I understand that, perhaps I shall not use anything to find happiness, I shall not use God as a means to acquire peace, or a ritual in order to have more sensations, exaltations, inspirations. 

If I knew the content of loneliness, then I would not be afraid of it. But because I have an idea of what it might be, I run away from it.  The very running away creates the fear, not the looking at it. To look at it, to be with it, facing it, then I am capable of loving it, of looking into it.  Because all other processes away from that loneliness are deviation, escapes, distractions.  If the mind can live with it, then perhaps through that the mind will find that state which is alone, a mind that is not lonely but completely alone, not dependent, not seeking to find through something.

It is necessary to be alone, to know that aloneness which is not induced by circumstances, that aloneness which is not isolation, that aloneness which is creativeness, when the mind is no longer seeking either happiness, virtue, or creating resistance, It is the mind which is alone that can find - not the mind which has been contaminated, made corrupt, by its own experiences.  So perhaps loneliness, of which we are all aware, if we know how to look at it, may open the door to reality.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in London, 7 April 1953
art by Picasso

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