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Chapter 26: In Aloneness You Are Infinite

I’m isolating myself - and I feel I should be doing something else. At first I felt good alone, but now it’s changed.

Then move out of it! One should always be watchful, because if one is not feeling happy in any situation, in any mood, then one should come out of it. Otherwise that becomes your habit, and by and by you lose sensitivity. You will go on being miserable and living in it, which simply shows a very deep insensitivity.

There is no need! If you are not feeling good in isolation, then come out of it. Meet with people, enjoy company, talk and laugh - but when you feel you are fed up with it, move into isolation again.

Always remember to judge everything by your inner feeling of bliss. If you are feeling blissful, everything is all right. If you are not feeling blissful, then whatsoever you are doing, something somewhere is wrong. The longer you remain in it, the more it becomes just an unaware thing, and you completely forget that it is through your cooperation that the miserable feeling continues. It needs your cooperation; it cannot exist itself.

Human growth requires that one moves from one polarity to another. Sometimes being alone is perfectly good: one needs one’s own space, one needs to forget the whole world and to be oneself. The other is absent so you have no boundary to yourself - the other creates your boundary, otherwise you are infinite.

Living with people, moving in the world, in society, by and by one begins to feel confined, limited, as if there are walls all around. It becomes a subtle imprisonment, and one needs to move. One needs sometimes to be perfectly alone so that all boundaries disappear - as if the other does not exist at all, and the whole universe and the whole sky exists only for you. In that moment of aloneness one realizes for the first time what infinity is.

But then if you live in it too much, by and by the infinity bores you, it becomes tasteless. There is purity and silence - but there is no ecstasy in it. Ecstasy always comes through the other. One then starts feeling hungry for love, and wants to escape from this aloneness, this vast expanse of space. One wants a cozy place surrounded by others, so that one can forget oneself.

This is the basic polarity of life: love and meditation. People who try to live by love alone, by and by become very limited. They lose infinity and purity, and they become superficial. Always living in relationships means always living on the boundary where you can meet the other. So you are always standing at the gate, and you can never move into your palace, because only at the gate is the meeting point where the other passes by. So people who only live in love, by and by become superficial. Their life loses depth. And people who live only in meditation will become very deep, but their life loses color, loses the ecstatic dance, the orgasmic quality of being.

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