Questioner: I have a question on an excerpt from you.
“Aloneness is not about being free of others and living without others. Aloneness is to live without oneself. Aloneness does not have much to do with the so-called others; aloneness has everything to do with the one called oneself.”
I’d like to understand this on a deeper level. How can I put this into practice in my life?
Acharya Prashant: Nice little quote.
Aloneness is not to be free of others. Aloneness is to be free of oneself.
The others are just too numerous. When you say you want to be free of one particular person or thing or place or idea or whatever, there is almost certainly a recoil and you find yourself gravitating towards something else, falling in somebody else’s lap. That happens because the fundamental tendency to stick to the world in some form or the other remains. That’s what I am calling as ‘oneself’.
‘Oneself’ is characterized by the tendency to be with a multitude. There is the one, and how do you know that one? That one is known by its tendency to be with many. There is the one; that one is within; that one is called the little self, the fake self, the false self, or the ego. That one is characterized by the tendency to keep looking towards many with hope—hope of fulfillment, hope of love, hope of completion. And these many that are there, they are all hagglers, they are promisemongers; like eager vendors, they want to keep selling you something.
