The beauty and the blessing of being alone

Osho

In the crowd, you can find yourself lonely, but never alone. Loneliness is a kind of hunger for the other. You are missing the other. You are not enough unto yourself – you are empty. Hence everybody wants to be in the crowd and weaves around himself many kinds of relationships just to deceive himself, to forget that he is lonely. But that loneliness erupts again and again. No relationship can hide it.

All relationships are so thin and so fragile. Deep inside you know perfectly well that even though you are in the crowd, you are amongst strangers. You are a stranger to yourself too. Zarathustra and all the mystics have gone to the mountains in search of aloneness. Aloneness is a positive feeling, the feeling of your own being and the feeling that you are enough unto yourself – that you don’t need anyone.

Loneliness is a sickness of the heart. Aloneness is a healing. Those who know aloneness have gone beyond loneliness forever. Whether they are alone or with people, they are centered within themselves. In the mountains they are alone, in the crowd they are alone, because this is their realization: that aloneness is our nature.

We have come into the world alone and we will be leaving the world again alone. Between these two alonenesses, between birth and death, you are still alone; but you have not understood the beauty of aloneness, and hence you have fallen into a kind of fallacy – the fallacy of loneliness.

To discover one’s aloneness one has to go out of the crowd. Slowly, slowly as he forgets the world, all his awareness becomes concentrated on himself, and there is an explosion of light. For the first time he comes to know the beauty and the blessing of being alone, the tremendous freedom and the wisdom of being alone.

Living for ten years in the mountains, Zarathustra attained the ecstasy of being alone, the purity of being alone, the independence of being alone – and this is where he is unique amongst other awakened people. When they discovered, they remained in their heights. Zarathustra starts ”downgoing,” going back to the crowd. He has to deliver the message to humanity that you are suffering unnecessarily; you are being dependent unnecessarily; you are creating all kinds of imprisonments for yourself – just to feel safe and secure. But the only security and the only safety is in knowing yourself, because then even death is impotent. 

Zarathustra is going downwards from the mountains to tell the people that wisdom is not synonymous with knowledge; in fact, knowledge is just the opposite of wisdom. Wisdom is basically innocence. Knowledge is ego, and wisdom is the disappearance of the ego. Knowledge makes you full of information. Wisdom makes you absolutely empty, but that emptiness is a new kind of fullness. 

Excerpted from ‘Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance’ being commentaries by Osho on Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’