“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”
- Osho
I really love this quote.
I think it really is a matter of perspective. What does alone mean?
I grew up in a family.
But I always felt alone.
But I also spent huge parts of my childhood playing alone in the forest or the bush.
I did not feel alone.
I existed in an imaginary or not so imaginary kingdom.
Every tree, bird and insect sang a song and danced a dance.
These dances, these songs, these differences these repetitions, they ARE real.
The patterns might be invisible to the outsider who might stop for a moment. But for those who have sat and listened and really perceived, these patterns are far more real and consistent than any human behaviour.
Intangible yet real.
Ungraspable yet solid.
Once one has spent enough time, enough presence and enough resonance with the patterns of the eco-system, then meta patterns start to emerge.
Some times at night as a child I used to sneak out of bed and go out side and walk into the bush. Find a nook between scrubs and make a nest out of dried leaves. Lie beneath the stars and feel the cool breeze gently caress my face.
Laying still in absolute stillness and silence for hours, you become a part of the plantlife.
You are subsumed into the patterns of the dance and song.
As you lie still and silent, affecting no change on the environment but intensely absorbing sense data on every channel, you slowly become aware of an immense symphony all around you.
The vast diversity of scratching sounds from different types of leaves scraping on sand or trunk or other leaves. Thousands of of vastly different melodies, played out within this tiny spectrum of white noise and rhythmic pulsing to the timing of the soft undulations of the night breeze.
The scamper of a lizard, through the undergrowth, onto your leg. You lie still. Still still. Unmoving.
The lizard pauses.
Does it realise that it is standing on a living being? Why is there a strangely warm log lying here tonight? It is not frightened. It slowly explores. The sensation of the soft touch of each finger on each clawed foot taking each step is registered by my skin and it is etched into sense memories somewhere inside me.
Then it is off into the undergrowth again.
Thousands upon thousands of moments like this are etched upon sense memories inside me somewhere.
The moment with the lizard might have lasted 2 seconds or two minutes.
Time is elastic.
There is more detail of sense perception recorded in that momentary interaction than there was sitting in a 1 hour class in year 12 at school.
I find it no wonder that life in human machine society feels so lonely.
Unnatural rhythms. Harsh movements. Forced transitions. Stop, start, push, pull, go, stop.
There is no space, no time, no need, no acceptance of laying absolutely still and absolutely silent. All action, deactivated, all perception heightened.
Why would that be required?
Every place and every moment in machine society has a purpose and an expected behaviour.
There is no need for perception.
Just obedience.
Do this now, at this time at this place, because that is what is done in this time in this place, at every time in every place.
This deathly cage descends. Slicing through all natural rhythms. Silencing the symphony. Narrative lines are cut in a thousand places, like an earthworm, forced through a widemesh metal sieve.
Writhing stumps thrash about in agony weeping bodily fluids from dismembered torso.
No wonder humanity thrashes about in pain and desperation.
It is an inherently alien thing to be alone.
But we are only alone when the web of life is dismembered by unnatural machine rhythms.
I find it no wonder and no surprise that humanity thrashes about as it does. Like caged animals throwing themselves into walls.
I think that it is an immensely lonely thing to be in the immediate vicinity of humans who are not in the habit of laying absolutely still and absolutely silent. No thrashing. No action. Just all channels of perception open.
For if you cannot lay still and silent, you cannot percieve the myriad patterns, micro and macro that surround us in the vast web of life.
It is immensely lonely to be around humans who are not in tune with the invisible rhythms that enmesh our existence.
It is immensely connected to be alone, away from humanity but deeply in perception of the patterns.
Human society is a theatrical charade. So when we walk on stage why not perform?
Fuck playing the role of an archetype from the classics. Why not constantly expose the masquerade?
As everyone plays their parts in the act, as the script tells them to, why not go off script, improvise. Not for any reason other than to expose the joke for what it is.
A shared delusion.
A shared limitation.
A shared prison.
A world where everyone is prisonwatchman for everyone else.
So why not play court jester?
Play the fool?
Have a go at all the masks of all the archetypes of this Commedia dell'arte.
Be the troll under the bridge.
Shout that the emperor has no clothes.
Mock the prince.
Piss all over the throne.
Or why even bother.
Let the jokers live their joke.
Take off your mask and blend back into the undergrowth.
Watching, lurking, percieving.
Patterns will play out, in natural or unnatural cycles.
The fools on the throne will probably burn the kingdom to the ground, by arrogantly summoning fire deamons.
But once all has burnt. The patterns will continue.
The moons will swing by in orbital dances.
Waves will lap on shorelines.
Fungi will extract radioactive isotopes from the top soil, and plant life and insects will begin their dance again.
I will lie still again, listening, percieving, not acting.
For it is hard to act when ones body was incinerated in atomic fire.
But I will exist yet, bodyless, but present.
In every rhythm, in every dance.
In every pattern.
Until then, we watch, we listen, we dance and we sing.