The power of solitude (revised)

Question: Should I spend some time in solitude?

Answer: It is the old methods of yoga which demand silence and solitude.
The yoga of tomorrow is to find the Divine in work and in relation with the world.
Look within yourself, reflect upon it and tell me what your choice is.
(Mirra Alfassa, The Mother)

Why do we want to distract ourselves all the time? Why do we want to escape from what we fear we are all about deep inside? Well, it is painful to face ourselves and everything that is hidden there. My Awakening started when I was working in a stressful and competitive workplace. I learned that other people were my mirror and they taught me a lot about myself. I loved studying them. I loved all the interactions with everyone.  I was riding other people’s energies and became quite good at it. I had countless spiritual break-throughs in these years and shared them proudly in my two first books. Yet, there was still something missing. As I was facing myself in the outer world, my monkey mind also had plenty of opportunities to keep itself busy with gathering of information, contemplating spiritual insights and writing about them. I realized one day that my monkey mind will never go away until I am finally willing to sit down and resist the temptation to do anything and go anywhere. That’s what solitude is all about. I realized that the final stage in our Awakening journey is really breaking free from the bondage of our mind. This can only happen in solitude. I found that the truth of Mirra Alfassa’s choice was right in the middle. We can be effective light-workers in today’s stressful work if we also find the time to go inside to realize that it is not us that is doing it.

I remember meeting a former colleague who had withdrawn from the business I was in earlier than me. We met for lunch and when I was telling her about my plans to become an author and spiritual coach her response was, “I hope you are prepared for solitude.” It seemed such an innocent remark but the moment she said it I knew it would be meaningful. Sure enough, solitude has been tougher than expected. All my life it had been more fun to fight dragons in the outside world. When I looked inside I discovered so many confusing and frustrating energies, anger, lack of confidence, ambition, lust, depression, and the desire to be loved and admired. You can fill in the blanks here for whatever it is that is slumbering inside of you. We all have different dragons to slay in the outer world. When we deal with the outer world we can become aware of the drives and fears that rule us. We can express them, transmute them, possibly conquer them. On the outside we can find a way to live with these energies, but it is only on the inside that we can realize that these drives and fears are not us. They are impostors pretending to be us. The last step in the Awakening process is to be one with the energies in solitude and watch them dissolving like the clouds in the wind.

I retired from my job in the financial industry a couple of years ahead of time due to an organizational shake-up at that time. I knew that it was premature then but I just had to follow the Signs that were pointing that day. It turned out that I was quite bored at that time. I can only write that much in a day, and my clients find me, that’s how the process works. A colleague was building a spiritual center in my home-town but it took time, and I had to patiently wait for the relocation of my spiritual friend from Canada back to the US. This was hard to accept for a former goal-getter like me but there was nothing I could do about it. One day it hit me and I understood that these two years were in fact the missing chapter in the 12 year Awakening story. All that light-working of the earlier years still had a lot of ‘me, myself and I’ in it. There comes the time when you just have to be still and enter the journey within. We set our self free from the mind bondage, otherwise the external world will always take us for a ride. Your mind will send you on a quest instead, will ask you to read yet another book on enlightenment and attend yet another lecture. Enough! Put the book away for a couple of days. Go inside, feel the restlessness, observe how the mind minds solitude. It is written ‘be still and know that I Am God’ for a reason. When I started my journey inwards I experienced:

Loneliness
Emptiness
Boredom
Ennui

As I finally broke through the veneer of my self I discovered:

Love
Epiphany
Bliss
Enthusiasm

All these states and characteristics—loneliness, emptiness, boredom, ennui—are nothing but a façade. They are like a bubble in fact, ready to burst in the intensity of stillness and self-reflection. They burst into nothingness when you face them and love, epiphany, bliss and enthusiasm burst to the surface. When I lined up the letters of both states I discovered the following acronym, ‘LEBE’—the German word for ‘live’! In the first stage of our spiritual journey we face life to avoid loneliness, emptiness, boredom and ennui, whereas in the final stage of life we are willing to dig deeper and find life itself within us, love, epiphany, bliss and enthusiasm. Under a veneer of the ego there is everything we ever dreamed off.  The ego mind vanishes into nothingness once we are finally ready to meet God everywhere, on the inside as well as in real life. I thank my two year sabbatical for this revelation!

Who is afraid of loneliness if we have solitude to look forward to. May Sarton put this insight beautifully when she writes:

Loneliness is the poverty of self.
Solitude is the richness of self.

The self is illusionary, and loneliness makes that fact blatantly obvious, but when we scratch the surface, when we break free from the illusionary self, there is a bounty waiting for us. Welcome solitude into your life. It’s bound to set your Self free!