“The opposite of loneliness is intimacy. Unity has no opposite.” ~ Georgi
Spinning on its orbit, suspended as a particle within the infinite ball of the universe, is our lonely planet. Here, humanity is moving in an energetic stratosphere over the surface of the earth, sometimes connected, often hardly physically present. Here, this one consciousness, curious within its space and evolutionary time, looks inwards and outwards to find that which from the core of itself seems to be missing.
Spinning the wheel of my car around the roundabout, here it is again, this morning, these clouds of suffering. Let me taste them. Yes. We are moving through mental turbulence caused by some dense, disgruntled clouds of loneliness. Bad weather ahead.
The collective state of humanity includes a state of loneliness; an ache of separation from the whole; a longing for reunion or at least communion with something beyond itself. This is not the absolute state of humanity. But it is a filter of perception (staining consciousness and awareness) which could be called the state we’re in right now.
Loneliness is at the heart of every spiritual seeker, every lover, every artist and of humanity when it stands as one form. It is between man and woman, mother and child, a scientist and his research, the seeing eye and its own reflection.
The shame around loneliness is intense, burning in wordless form at the upper half of the chest. Imagine the intimacy when one day a co-worker you have known at the office for 30 years turns to you and says:
“I have to admit it. I am lonely.”
“Guess what. Me too.”
What happens to the shame when the dark isolation of loneliness is balanced with the risk of intimacy? What happens with the isolation and the belief in eternal separation? What happens when we agree to be lonely together?
The suffering of loneliness is in the blue ice of the glaciers, in the rivers, streams and waterfalls. This suffering is at once moving and silently still through every ocean of the planet. It is in the steam that rises from the Korean kettle in our kitchen. It is in the clouds, in the rain and in the puddles where children jump. The suffering of loneliness is in a single tear-drop, that in it’s salty truth reverberates an awesome hurting in the wisdom that it never was really separate from the sea.
And I drive on, as I know, that we must spiral again through the territory ‘inside’ this unstable form of Georgi to the sanctuary of the heart and beyond.
This questioning, needy, searching vibration of loneliness in the collective consciousness will turn, is turning, to the dimension of awareness. It will turn through love in order to melt in love.
Here, at the end point of every feeling, and through and beyond all form, there is an infinity of love which is always, already given, a love that cannot be damaged, cannot be taken away and that is never compromised by the forms that arise out of its own fine substance.
So the human field gradually turns its head in surrender to its heart – where there is almost a satiation – but not quite.
Not quite, because I have a sharp, passing pain in my physical foot as I ram on the breaks.
The pure love of the heart can fill whole moments of form and an infinity of space.
Yet it cannot easily step out of itself, into that emptiness which allows humanity itself to take form: the emptiness that allows separation, the emptiness that allows transformation, the emptiness that allows the subtle differentiation between the dimension of love and peace. It cannot step out of itself to penetrate the atoms of which this body is composed, each atom 99.8 % empty. Emptiness, which is even empty of love, until love is allowed there.
They say you are not your body. Oh, you are SO your body. You are your body in every limb, every cell, every particle and every atom. You are your body, and it is a living miracle composed of emptiness, infinite love and eternal peace. You are your body. But you are not only your body. The body is not absolute – it is a miraculous moment that must not, cannot be missed.
And so to this emptiness – beyond love and peace – or where love and peace are one – through which we are composed in every molecule, layer and explosion and implosion of form. Let’s move to the prolific awesome potentiality of creation that brings the fertility birthing each second of consciousness and awareness. What is this emptiness which we are in every cell?
This emptiness is not empty, it is, must be and only can be, empty of separation.
Through emptiness, human perception can begin to allow the miracle of the physical, and the wondrous composition of planet earth in silent rotation beneath the feet. Through emptiness, all agenda is gone – agendas that invest in the illusion of rejection, the myth of non-equality and the fantasy of an absolute, separate self.
This separate self will always be suffused with the suffering of loneliness. The suffering of loneliness is born from a fear of intimacy – its partner in the waltz of duality. This fear arises when there is a resistance to allow what is anyway already here in the human field: cruelty, horror, abandonment, isolation, terror, sexuality. Can we be intimate with that?
Like children who cover their eyes in the hope that they will disappear through not seeing, we block our perception to that which is anyway here, in our collective being. The pain of birth, the moment-by-moment torture of transience and death, the agony of inevitable loss. And then we send in the conscious troopers to “heal it” with love, without letting “it” be here in the first place.
Yet anyway, it is here, this suffering. It is only a small part of what is here. But it too, is here. Suffering itself is love and love is suffering by another name.
And so we become internally lonely, directed by a seemingly bottomless pit of need into the unknown to get the “things” that will fill the existential gap. Our refusal to allow intimacy with all the cracks in creation, our rejection of the imperceivable, throws up more loneliness, which in its solitary pride whips up more shame and disgust at intimacy. In this way, we spiral into a greater illusion of suffering. And we lose our ground on this sacred earth, separated in our consciousness, even from that.
Separation is an illusion because the unity that both loneliness and intimacy serve, is always, already here. The love that arises out of that is already here. The peace is always, already here. We cannot control or dictate it. We can only blend and melt back into it.
This unity of emptiness is here in every particle and every space between particles. It is here in every membrane and within every cell. It is here in the appearance of endings and beginnings. It is here in every micro second and in each capsule of space. It is here in the explosions of war and in the ecstasies of human achievement. It is here in the breakage of the body and in the bliss of air on the face. It is here where our perception wanes and our minds decay.
It is here when we surrender – to that conscious, aware, unconscious, unaware, existential entity from which all forms are arising and where no thing can be absolute and no thing can ever be lost.
