Loneliness. I once asked the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa about loneliness. I was a new meditator and was fortunate to be on the staff taking care of his household. (He was visiting and teaching in New York back in, I think, 1980). It was when I had first started meditating and had become acutely aware of how alone I felt. He asked me if I felt more lonely when I was alone or when I was with people. I said when I was with people. He then said, “You are allowing your mind to wander in samsara.” Creating my own sense of separation. That was it. That was what I had to think about for many years later. Compassion is the key. Compassion towards oneself as much as for others.
There is a big difference between being alone and lonely and being with someone and lonely. It depends on the walls we put up around ourselves, our various needs for protection. Most coupled women I know often say how lonely it can be to be with someone. Obviously there is a separation between people. We do not know everything about someone else nor do we really feel what they feel. But the physical presence of someone is real. A source of heat in the room, in the mind, in the room. A reminder. I think it might be self-absorption that makes us lonely when with people. Wanting confirmation from others. Wanting a witnesss.
Carrie, in The Dive from Claussen’s Pier, when thinking about not being with her fiancé after his accident, mused:
There were things I’d seen in him that perhaps no one else had ever seen or noticed—wouldn’t those things disappear along with my apprehension of them? Because we were caretakers of each other’s habits and expressions, weren’t we, witnesses who didn’t just see but who gave existence? Our coming apart would erase all those tiny moments and gestures and looks from everywhere but our separate memories, until even there our history would begin to fade.
Memories, history, all dependent on the point of view. And the importance of their being a point from which to view, a point that comes from (or to) another body. Human beings are a species that need other people, just like other animals need each other, run in packs.
The Karmapa gave me a lot think about. But sometimes profound meals of thought take years to digest.
Posted by leya at December 29, 2004 06:09 AM