The forces of nature are more powerful than we are. On a certain level human beings are fragile and vulnerable, at least in terms of our physical existence here. They represent a moving away from the actuality of experience. Schwartz: The justification and the condemnation are exactly the same. One minute I’m justifying my feelings, and the next minute condemning them. I’m full of self-righteousness, and at the same time I know I’m being possessive and unfair. I become jealous because of something that’s said. A heroic act is a naked encounter with what we’ve judged to be dangerous and then, perhaps, discovering that it is something else entirely. Heroism is not overcoming what we perceive to be negative about ourselves or anything else, but rather facing right into those things - finding the core. Schwartz: The idea that you have to be something else, to prove something, is disheartening. Yet, here I am, with my shameful dependency on my wife. I want to be someone who isn’t hung up on his own fears, but who extends himself compassionately toward others. The only piece of the past that one would try to release from is the hypnotic conditioning that prevents us from having a rich experience in the present. It’s something that we let work on us, not something we try to release ourselves from. Deeper than the content of life dwells a mysterious force - a presence, if you will - which is guiding us toward an unknown end.Īs far as explaining loneliness in terms of the past, it’s important to see the past not as the cause of a problem but rather as a formative, evolutionary force. Something is happening to us as human beings that can’t be explained by surface events or by the psychological dogmas that parade as truth. When a person turns toward whatever is being felt in the body, it is always different from what they initially thought. The interruption of this flow comes from conditioning, from habitually imposed responses. All those labels are made up.įeelings come and feelings go. It is a movement in the body, a flow of something, maybe a hurt or a woundedness which we assume to be weak, neurotic, or wrong. There is nothing in the feeling to dislike. The reason we dislike them in the first place is because we’ve been taught to. At both levels, the call is for gentle respect, not moral evaluations.ĭisliking feelings or making them wrong never solves problems. One layer of truth does not contradict another. We can say that on level A, you miss your wife, and on level B, you are longing for a deeper relationship with her and with life itself. It’s important not to create a moral attitude about this. Schwartz: You do miss your wife and that is real. Safransky: I deal with loneliness by either wanting to blame someone - say, my wife for being away - or explaining the loneliness to myself in terms of the past. We need to turn to ourselves as a mother to a child and wait, without judgment. There are times when the signal is there, but our response is self-hatred or dislike, and the body’s call gets ignored. There are times when the body is calling for attentive care. This so changes our relationship to it that we never need fear it or run from it again. Whatever way it comes, we can be with it respectfully, openly, allowing it to exist. Sometimes it manifests as loneliness, sometimes as grief, anger, or something else. What we called loneliness turns out to be something else entirely.Įach of us is longing for something. If we allow ourselves the chance to attend to the loneliness, to be with it at a feeling level - physically - then the harsh overtones dissolve. There’s no reason to run from it or to tighten down when it comes. There is nothing to fear about loneliness. Loneliness is a kind of wisdom, a recognition of something, an urge toward genuine transformation. But such an assumption is based on a misunderstanding of what loneliness is and how it relates to our life here. We’ve all been taught that there is something wrong or even dangerous about being lonely. Schwartz: Inside our loneliness is a longing to be released from the pain of separation and the confusion it entails. Safransky: I’ve heard you talk about loneliness in a very moving way - as a prayer to God.
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