Sitting alone, resting alone, walking alone,
Untiring and alone,
Whoever has tamed oneself
Will find delight in the forest.
– Dhammapada, verse 305. Translated Gil Fronsdal
In the forest, at a rock concert, on a beach, in a prison, in a hospital bed, or in a royal court. This is a serious problem. Why aren’t we making it national policy to teach citizens to be alone in their own minds?
I woke up today a little muddy, and it took me a little while to get warmed to the day. The first thing that I did was invoke R.A.I.N. After the recognition, I accepted that I was muddy. And then I committed to being present anyhow. This freshened my attention at least. I naturally investigated what was happening in myself, and what I found was a feeling of being alone. This investigation quickly dropped below the surface and I noticed that I was with ‘a second.’ That is, that I was muttering to myself as though I was my own company. Sadutiyavihāri, means ‘dwelling with a second.’ That’s a way of avoiding feeling lonely which exacerbates loneliness.
I remember how moved I was when young, by a phrase Krishnamurti used: to be utterly psychologically alone. ‘Alone,’ etymologically, means ‘all one.’ A sense of unity, with no companion. I can’t remember where K. said that, but here’s a passage by him on the topic:
We are never alone; we are surrounded by people and by our own thoughts. Even when the people are distant, we see things through the screen of our thoughts. There is no moment, or it is very rare, when thought is not. We do not know what it is to be alone, to be free of all association, of all continuity, of all word and image. We are lonely, but we do not know what it is to be alone. The ache of loneliness fills our hearts, and the mind covers it with fear. Loneliness, that deep isolation, is the dark shadow of our life. We do everything we can to run away from it, we plunge down every avenue of escape we know, but it pursues us and we are never without it. Isolation is the way of our life; we rarely fuse with another, for in ourselves we are broken, torn and unhealed. In ourselves we are not whole complete, and the fusion with another is possible only when there is integration within. We are afraid of solitude, for it opens the door to our insufficiency, the poverty of our own being; but it is solitude that heals the deepening wound of loneliness. To walk alone, unimpeded by thought, by the trail of our desires, is to go beyond the reaches of the mind. It is the mind that isolates, separates and cuts off communion. The mind cannot be made whole; it cannot make itself complete, for that very effort is a process of isolation, it is part of the loneliness that nothing can cover. The mind is the product of the many, and what is put together can never be alone. Aloneness is not the result of thought. Only when thought is utterly still is there the flight of the alone to the alone.
– Jiddu Krishnamurit, Commentaries On Living, Series II Chapter 20
We don’t dwell alone. We not only habitually seek outer company, but when ‘alone’ we fill our minds with ‘a second self’ and people our inner world with others, constantly.
In the Nikāyas, there’s a phrase: “saddhā dutiyā purisassa hoti”; which means that there is faith in ‘a second self.’ An inner companion made from desire. There’s a shorter expression, too: Sadutiyo, which is (literally) “with a second.” Elsewhere the reference is to taṇhā-dutiyā, which is both “connected with thirst (craving),” and “having thirst (craving) as one’s companion.” This is the root of all the sub-personality suffering. This is the work of saṅkhāra – fashioning tendencies.
In Shakespeare’s Richard II, in the fallen king’s soliloquy in Pembroke Prison, we have a good example of this, and a great expression, too, of the conflict-dukkha involved. I take the beginning and the ending of the passage:
Like Richard II:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours* like the people of this world, [* dispositions]
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix’d
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word….
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king’d again: and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.
We so rarely let our minds be still, silent, un-locatable and alone, because we are afraid to become nothing. However, the nothing we become is no more than the nothing we have always been, so it’s not so bad. And, it doesn’t take sitting on a cushion, in meditation to appreciate the still mind. With training, we can do it frequently while in activities throughout the day.
Remembering the conversation between the Nikāya Buddha and Sakka, here’s how that Buddha describes a person who unhooks from the mental habit of peopling his or her inner world, in the Migajāla Sutta (Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation.) It starts “Now, there are forms cognizable via the eye…”
“There are sounds cognizable via the ear… aromas cognizable via the nose… flavors cognizable via the tongue… tactile sensations cognizable via the body… ideas cognizable via the intellect — agreeable, pleasing, charming, endearing, fostering desire, enticing — and a monk does not relish them, welcome them, or remain fastened to them. As he doesn’t relish them, welcome them, or remain fastened to them, delight ceases. There being no delight, he is not impassioned. Being not impassioned, he is not fettered. A monk disjoined from the fetter of delight is said to be a person living alone.
“A person living in this way — even if he lives near a village, associating with monks & nuns, with male & female lay followers, with kings & royal ministers, with sectarians & their disciples — is still said to be living alone. A person living alone is said to be a monk. Why is that? Because the craving that was his companion has been abandoned by him. Thus he is said to be a person living alone.”
Thoughts don’t only people this world, they make it a little world. Mindfulness expands our world to infinity. This is what the Nikāya Buddha means in another passage, from the Bhaddekaratta Sutta. (MN131). This version is translated from the Pali by Thich Nhat Hanh:
We must be diligent today.
To wait till tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who
dwells in mindfulness
night and day
‘the one who knows
the better way to live alone.’
– From Our Appointment with Life: Sutra on Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone.
Post-script: After writing this, I read a poem by Gary Snyder, pertinent to the theme of being truly present at all times, and of the expected scariness of such a naked state of mind:
The Earth’s Wild Places
Your eyes, your mouth and hands,
the public highways.
Hands, like truck stops,
semis rumbling in the corners.
Eyes like the bank clerk’s window
foreign exchange.
I love all the parts of your body
friends hug your suburbs
farmlands are given a nod
but I know the path to your wilderness.
It’s not that I like it best,
but we’re almost always
alone there, and it’s scary
but also calm.
– Snyder, Gary This Present Moment: New Poems
