Aloneness
Aloneness - The Ability to Live With Yourself
You are not just living inside your body as you imagine. You are living with people. Imagine if suddenly all the people living around you are dead. You are just there alone. Are you going to live happily?
Aloneness is not living without anybody. No. It is ability to live with yourself.
I am constantly transforming the people living around me, that is why I am constantly exploding in enlightenment. Right now, your aloneness is more like fear of relating with people. Real aloneness is being able to relate and inspire everybody, and being able to relate with yourself and inspire yourself whenever you want.
Ability to inspire without any outside source is aloneness. I can remain in bliss without anyone – you cannot. You will be depressed!
Sharing with others is nothing but creating an enlightenment-based community around you. It is not even serving others, it is serving yourself.
First, any human being creates the sex-based community, the biology-based community - like your wife, your child. Then when you evolve, you create psychology-based community – your friends, who are ideologically connected to you. Only few create consciousness-based community.
Fools are those who create only biological community around them. Great are those who create ideological community around them. Blessed are those who create a consciousness-based community around them! If you have a sangha around you, you are blessed. Sharing the truths, the great experiences, great joy, is what is creating consciousness-based sangha.
Get Comfortable with Aloneness
The Joy of Discovering Individuality
OUR mind dies when we are alone. Mind needs relationships to survive. Mind, ego and personality are norms of a society. They thrive only in relationship with society. Our true nature is aloneness. However, our mind starves when we are alone and makes us feel uncomfortable as it is not conditioned to it.
Our personality has a social basis of comparison with others. However, when we think of ourselves in terms of our personality, we are isolating ourselves from others. We are setting ourselves up for loneliness. Again, we feel uncomfortable as a result of this comparison.
Personality is a status given to us by society. What others think about us, what we have earned, what comforts we have accumulated are all part of our personality. Personality is like an external covering. Personality thrives on attention. Personality makes no distinction between good or bad kinds of attention. For a personality to thrive, any kind of attention is sufficient. In all our social roles, whether positive or negative, we are constantly seeking attention. We act to seek attention. We beg for attention. However, sooner or later, we seek our true nature or it seeks us. There will be no one to praise us or blame us. Our ego and our personality are shaken with this lack of attention. We then start realizing that we are not merely the personality or the status we project to the outside world. We then realize that we are more than a spouse, much more than our professional label, and even more than a citizen of a nation. These are parts of us and we are more than the sum of all these.
Individuality is our natural state. On most occasions, we nurture our personality ignoring our individuality. Individuality is internal. The cry of individuality can be heard above the clamor of our personality if we dare to be alone. Our life is filled with parties, shopping, or watching TV. Why? It is because we are afraid of being alone. We don’t know how to be with ourselves. Old people who have married grandchildren read matrimonial columns in newspapers for vicarious pleasure! Entertainment is to run away from individuality.
For how long can we run? We always believe we will be joyful at some point or other. By the time we are about forty years old, we may get everything we want. But, we still don’t understand why we wanted all this. We are still unhappy. We have reached the depression of success. Take time to be with yourself. Get comfortable with aloneness. This is the state of meditation. It leads to bliss, Nithyananda.
Love Yourself First
The big problem today is that most people don’t love themselves. Society never teaches that it is possible to love ourselves. Real love keeps you in the moment. Understand that unless you love yourself, you cannot possibly love another person. Only when you lose yourself to yourself can you lose yourself to others. We are taught that we can only love even ourselves if we have a reason. If we perform well, we love ourselves. If we fail, we hate ourselves. We apply the same logic to others. We love them only because of something, never without a cause or a reason.
When you don’t love yourself, you become cynical and negative towards life. When you were alone in your mother’s womb, you were completely loving and blissful. In your aloneness in the womb you experienced your loving self. That is why you will see that you assume the fetal posture whenever you lie down with insecurity.
Blissful aloneness is your original nature.
Once you came into the world, society conditioned you to believe that you needed people and television to be loving and happy. It never nurtured your original quality. Your original quality is blissful aloneness. If you get back in touch with that, you will settle down and feel peaceful and relaxed within yourself.
Feel yourself as part of Existence and love yourself for it.
For a few minutes every day, just sit by yourself and feel overflowing love towards yourself. Feel what a wonderful being you are. Feel how much you have taken yourself for granted. Feel yourself as part of Existence and love yourself for it. Melt with the feeling of love for yourself. If you practice this everyday you will see that where you were once hard and self-centered, now you have become soft and loving.
When you deeply settle down within yourself with peace and love, bliss will explode in you. When your nerves are clean, when your nervous system is cleaned by peace, bliss will explode. You will start expressing the same bliss that is expressed in the master’s body language.
Then when people love you, you don’t feel guilty or unworthy because just as they love you, you love yourself too. You become ready to receive love from others. Usually when others show love to you, you feel guilty or unworthy because you don’t feel you are worth being loved. Once you settle within yourself with deep love, you will receive others’ love with joy.
==Aloneness Leads to Enlightenment
How often do we succeed in that? Never.
None of our questions can be answered fully from outside of us. All our questions have answers from within.
Listen to the voice within.
People often ask me this question: What is man’s eternal quest?
I reply: Man’s eternal quest is to find himself.
The person said: If I say that they will send me to an asylum!
A small story: Jawaharlal Nehru, then the Prime Minister of India, went on a visit to a mental asylum. There he met an inmate who thought he was Nehru. When Nehru introduced himself as Nehru to this inmate, this guy came up close to him and whispered, “Don’t worry. That’s what I too said when I came here. If you stay here for six months they will cure you too!”
Such is the nature of the world. Even if God himself comes and stands before them, in human form, or any other form, they will resist the idea. Even if God appears in front of you now, you will demand some kind of identification. “Show me your ration card or ID card” you will say.
If I say that Self is superior, it is real, and our search should turn inwards, you will wonder, what is this man saying. Each one of us is unique. We are perfect as we express our true nature. In that state no one is brighter, much perfect, and more beautiful than any other.
Try this simple exercise. When we are alone we try to relate mentally with others. Drop that. Do not blame others for our loneliness. Allow the loneliness happen to us without resistance. We will then feel alone even when people surround us. To start with, we need to experience physical loneliness. Once the joy of aloneness happens, it stays with us even when we are not physically alone. To have aloneness we need to do nothing; it’s our reality. For material comforts we need to work and struggle. To be alone you just need to let go. Aloneness leads to Enlightenment.
A disciple asked a Zen Master: How long does it take to be enlightened?
Master said: Just the time it takes to blink your eye. You are already enlightened. You only need to declare.
isciple asked again: What happened when you became enlightened?
Master: Nothing! I decided to live in my enlightened state from that day. Blink and be in Bliss!
Upanishad Samyama - Discover Yourself!
“Yogi yunjeeta satatam aatmaanam rahasi sthitaha Ekaki yata cittaatmaa niraasheera-parigrahaha”
– Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 6 : Dhyana Yoga, Verse 10
“The jeevan mukta having subdued his thoughts and identity, being free from desires with an attitude of renunciation seated within oneself in aloneness should continuously connect with the higher consciousness by unclutching.”
In the same way that a baby grows in the womb of its mother when she is sleeping, the soul of an initiated disciple grows when he is seated alone, within the self. Upanishad means nothing but sitting with the Master. No prayer, meditation or mantra is needed, all one has to do is sit. Although the fear of falling into depression may arise, there is no need to worry – after all, how long can worries haunt the individual when they are directly confronted?
The mind is a powerful thing, it will bring up unnecessary excuses like work and not having time to sit with oneself. However, it helps to look closer and see that every person has as much time as they make for themselves. To find time is to sacrifice an hour of watching television or surfing the net, neither of which adds any value to one’s time.
When excuses have lost power over the individual, fears will take over. Fear of failure and fear of depression will attack one’s resolve and attempt to break it, but the key is to face these fears. The person will be scared that they will sleep, or that they will never be able to complete the samyama. If not, they will be afraid of falling into a depression. The key to overcoming the constant stream of worry in the mind is to confront those worries. When human beings accept that they are truly alone, orphans in this world, they can face their worries. A strong resolve to just sit will fight away all deviances of the mind.
DAY 1 Be seated alone and allow all worried thoughts to express themselves. Remain seated for two hours with these worried thoughts. This technique will remove the fear and possibility of depression.
DAY 2 Eat until the body is full of food. After that, remain seated and allow yourself to sleep. Continue this for two days. After these two days, your body will get tired of sleeping and you will be able to stay awake throughout.
DAY 3 Visualize yourself as a stone statue and remain seated still.
DAY 4 Visualize all the knee joints to be locked and sit. Within eleven days you will discover the power of Upanishad.
While practicing the entire technique, the best place to experience Upanishad is the Arunachala Mountain, the river Ganga or Kailash. It can be by visiting these places or simply gazing at pictures of these places. All three hold a prominent place in the Vedic culture and are few of the most powerful spiritual energy centres. With the help of these, one will discover the beauty and sweetness of Upanishad.
Unclutching Technique
Yogee yunjeeta satatam aatmaanam rahasisthitah l Ekaakee yatachittaatmaa niraasheeraparigrahah ll
The translation:
The contemplative sage, saint having subdued his thoughts and character, his identity being free from desires with an attitude of renunciation, seated within oneself in aloneness, should continuously connect with the higher consciousness by unclutching.
The Jeevan Mukta having subdued his thoughts and character, identity, being free from desires with an attitude of renunciation, seated within oneself in aloneness, should continuously connect with the higher consciousness by unclutching.
References
http://www.nithyananda.org/article/what-aloneness#gsc.tab=0 http://nithyanandatimes.org/upanishad-samyama-discover-yourself/ https://www.nithyananda.org/article/aloneness-leads-enlightenment#gsc.tab=0 http://articles.nithyananda.org/2012/06/love-yourself-first/ https://www.nithyananda.org/article/stop-struggling-ego-0#gsc.tab=0 http://www.nithyananda.org/article/joy-discovering-individuality#gsc.tab=0 http://www.nithyananda.org/video/bhagavad-gita-chap-6-verse-10identity-confused-reality#gsc.tab=0