The Hard Problem of Loneliness
The root of all suffering in the ego is loneliness.
If you trace back all of your defense mechanisms, all your addictions, all your craziness, it comes down an avoidance of loneliness, doesn’t it? Or an acceptance of loneliness, but a bitter acceptance, a Vulcan acceptance; stoic resignation to the lonely life.
So, people can’t handle it, and because they can’t handle it, they refuse to grow up. Because growing up means facing your loneliness, doesn’t it? And so, people do all kinds of things to avoid it. They drink alcohol—that’s a big one—or they stuff their loneliness with pizza or other comfort foods, or other harder drugs, or promiscuity, or various other ways of dealing with it, porn and all of the ways that people try to have imaginary kind of flings, or assumptions of a coupling that usually falls flat. Often the best choice for a neurotic ego is to fall in love with their pet. And then you have somebody who won’t leave you (probably) and doesn’t talk back, and won’t tell you that they hate you, actually. So, there are all these different ways, but they all lead to a kind of a codependency and to a refusal to grow up, because growing up means facing solitude.
So the only cure, the one and only cure for loneliness, is only-ness. And that only-ness means the only one Self that is Real must be attained, because the real loneliness that we have is loneliness for our own Self, because the ego is not the Self—that’s why it’s lonely.
Now, Jacques Lacan said that the ego is produced by what he called the “mirror stage”: when the infant first looks in the mirror, recognizes its body, and the mother is usually standing there and says, “That’s you!” and the baby says, “Oh! That’s me!” and from then onwards the consciousness is trapped in the mirror, because your consciousness enters a reality tunnel in which you are simply an image of yourself that can be represented in a mirror, but you want it to be a mirror that your mother is looking at, because she is the one who gave you your identity, and your identity came out of a state of fusion with the mother—“I and the mother are one”—and when that fusion broke, you felt abandoned.
So, most egos think that they have a terrible fear of abandonment; it’s not, actually—it’s a fear of abandonment because that already happened in your early childhood, usually at the weaning stage, and the realization that you’re born into a relatively loveless world—but because it gets suppressed you’re always throwing that trauma into the future, and then trying to recreate a dosed version of it that you can handle: “I can take this loss, maybe I can take a bigger one.” But there’s always a level of loss that you feel you can’t take and then you regress back into an infantile state of consciousness, and regress to old habit patterns in avoidance of your only-ness, that you interpret as loneliness.
And this, of course, creates a whole jungle of projections—the ones you’re angry at because they are abandoning you or don’t recognize you in that mirror stage, and adore you; or the ones that you project on that deserve to be abandoned, etc., and you try to keep yourself as much as possible, safe, from the taint of the unlovable and the outcast. And, of course, there are versions of it where you have to wear a scarlet letter, and there are versions of it where you have to get castrated, you know? And there are versions in which you have to die for your crimes—etc., etc.—but all of these narratives get built upon the issue of loneliness.
If you go back to the twelfth century, that great archetypal story Tristan and Isolde, look at their names: Trist: sadness. Isolde: isolation. Right? The sadness of the isolated ego that would rather take a love potion and get an artificial form of love than to suffer the loneliness of being left out.
And so, the loneliness of the ego is the issue that the yogi must come to heal, and to face, and not run away from. But if you think about the tamasic and rajasic gunas, they are two different ways of trying to avoid your loneliness; one is you space out and get sleepy, or you black out on alcohol or some other way—actually the way that the POMO [postmodern] deals with the loneliness is to cure it, not with only-ness, but with online-ness, and “If I stay connected often enough and I’ve got someone trying to call me then I’m OK. You know? But I’ve got to have that phone right there in my pocket. I can cure my loneliness in a minute—look I’ve got 25 friends right there!”
So, you know, these are ways that don’t really work very well. And unfortunately when we’ve had traumatic childhood situations where the loneliness was augmented by neglect and child abuse, then we tend to even want to repeat those—they repeat in fantasies and nightmares, but they can also repeat in the Real of the phenomenal plane, because we prefer to be abused than to be alone.
And so, the situation of the ego is always a running away from, rajasicly, into workaholism or hopefully some other productive form of running away, or running away by sleeping one’s life away, or spending it on diversions or distractions, or one faces it and goes through it. But that’s the black hole that the ego isn’t strong enough to confront, and therefore would rather continue its vain fantasies of connections that aren’t real, and stay in a Peter Pan type of state, rather than to grow beyond the loneliness into the truth of what reality is.
But from that needy infant who is trapped in the mirror, and whose defense is only narcissism—you see once it becomes an image the only choice is either to let go of that image as it was originally loved and unified with by the mother—who is now the “lost object”—or it worships that image, it builds shrines to that image, it turns itself into a statue. This is narcissism. But a statue isn’t very much alive. It’s very passive and very unable to grow. And so, you have people who are very intelligent but live in a zombie box, because growth means facing that black hole and going through it.
Audio File: The Hard Problem of Loneliness – Audio File.MP3