Emptiness

Emptiness

Emptiness of spiritual loneliness Love Can Only Fill Up the Inner Void To Some Extent, But Hollowness Remains Whatever the state of our relationships – whether close and warm, boring and cool, or non-existent – we should distinguish our experience of interpersonal loneliness from the much deeper, more central, spiritual loneliness. Spiritual loneliness is really a void within ourselves, a hollowness that cannot be filled with other people – no matter how close, warm, and fulfilling our relationships might be. The yearning we feel is real; it comes from the depths of ourselves. But love is not the answer to this spiritual yearning. Fusing with another person will not solve all our problems. But if our real problem is our Spiritual Malaise – felt as loneliness – even the most ideal loving relationship will not fill the aching void. For a time, probably, love will cover our inner emptiness, but after the initial period of emotional excitement is over, our fundamental hollowness will make itself felt again. Then we may blame each other for our spiritual alienation. We may respond to the reappearance of loneliness by changing partners. With a new person to love, we can become lost in romance again, forgetting momentarily our inner incompleteness of being. The belief that ‘true love’ will solve our spiritual dilemma is one of the strongest illusions of the world. Perhaps only a series of disappointments will convince us that love cannot solve our spiritual loneliness. Both interpersonal loneliness and existential loneliness are two different things. Both the longing for a specific person and the general urge to make connections with others are clearly interpersonal feelings. But spiritual loneliness only seems to be yearning for love. Even the best love will not abolish our spiritual loneliness. After a while, inner lack or hollowness gnaws thru again. Interpersonal loneliness results from being isolated and alone. When we reunite with the people we love, our loneliness disappears. But when being together with the people we love does not overcome our ‘loneliness’, it may be spiritual loneliness. We may feel lonely, incomplete, and unfulfilled when we are receiving all the loving we could ask for. Nothing others can do will abolish this ‘loneliness’ because the problem is spiritual rather than interpersonal. Interpersonal loneliness is usually temporary; when our relationship improve, this loneliness disappears. But spiritual loneliness is a permanent condition of our beings. Independent of the ups and downs of our love-lives, our spiritual loneliness remains – a persistent lack of wholeness. Interpersonal loneliness affects only one part of our lives. But spiritual loneliness affects every dimension of existence. We feel incomplete, inadequate, miserable in everything. We know how to cure interpersonal loneliness: Find people. It is seldom easy to create good personal relationships, but at least we know some appropriate ways to open ourselves to others. But rearranging our relationships will not cure our spiritual loneliness. In fact, we may be disappointed to feel essentially ‘lonely’ even when our relationships are doing very well. Our central hollowness remains unfulfilled no matter what the state of our personal relationships. How does it feel to be existentially lonely? Spiritual loneliness is discovered in our depths. Sometimes, when we least expect it, loneliness freezes us. Or perhaps it feels like the bottom dropping out of our being. We feel incomplete, as if something important is missing. We feel shaky and insecure inside, weak and ‘clingy’. Sometimes this gnawing deficiency makes us want to ‘devour’ others – to get as much of them as possible, to complete our egos by possessing them. Or we may seek to be supported and protected by others. However, our spiritual loneliness can be cured – independent of our personal relationships. If our interior hollowness if filled, we no longer use other persons to plug up our inner holes and fill in our deficiencies of being. Instead of trying to fit other people into our interior gap, we find ourselves loving from a deep richness, fullness, and completeness. We are empowered to give to others without expecting anything in return. Although each person’s journey towards this liberation is individual, we may, nevertheless, distinguish three movements within our spirits : We separate interpersonal loneliness from spiritual loneliness, we abandon our former attempts to solve our Malaise by love and we leap across the Abyss and find ourselves freed from spiritual loneliness. If our problems is really spiritual rather than interpersonal, we need a spiritual solution – rather than a psychological method of healing. The same inner sensitivity and subjectivity that enabled us to grapple with our existential loneliness can now help us to grope our individual ways to existential freedom. Just how we enter the new condition of spiritual wholeness may always remain a mystery. Each of us can only try to become sensitive to those interior moments when we spontaneously find ourselves whole and filled. If we learn how to attune ourselves better to such moments of peace, we may discover how to be so that such moments will return. Existential freedom comes over us in a surprising way, which tells us that this new way of being is not a latent personality characteristic now blooming. So when we find ourselves living beyond existential loneliness, we are not tempted to be proud, as if it were a personal achievement. Our new completeness is not the result of strenuous internal efforts. The transformation comes precisely when we give up striving. And that may be all we will ever know about the process; how we orient ourselves internally to enable completeness to come. TOI Kol 26-2-06