How Do I Stop Feeling Lonely? | Rupert Spira

My question is back to this resistance and your instruction to look at who's resisting. I have a similar routine. I want to go home and do my violence when I get home and I do anything to avoid this violence. My question is, it sounds like your instruction was to look at who's resisting. That feels like the direct question that blows away all of the whatever is underlying. My tendency, I think, is to look not at who's resisting but at what is being resisted. To kind of look in and to feel into what is it that's in there. Maybe it's a loneliness or a despair. Something like that. Yes. It is on account of this loneliness and despair. These are feelings that are very uncomfortable that we would rather not feel. Hence, we go towards the object, the substance, the state. Whatever it is, anything, any object will suffice to distract ourselves from feeling the discomfort of these things. These feelings such as loneliness or despair, they always have a story attached to them. But they're also located in the body as a sensation. It's important that the story part of the feeling always has a main character. The main character is always the non-existent self. When you start telling yourself a story about loneliness or shyness, there's always a self, the main character. That character, as we said earlier, if you look closely, it's not there. That will leave, in some ways, the deeper aspect of the feeling in the body. The feeling has a bodily component to it. It's a sensation. It's a subtle contraction in the body. It's very important that, as I was saying earlier, as we become acquainted with the resistant self, that both the thought aspect and the feeling aspect are allowed to come up, to appear in the presence of the one. Be sure that you include the sensations in the body. Don't get busy. Don't touch them. Don't do anything to them. Know yourself as the open space in which this sensation is appearing. Then, in time, you can begin to explore the sensation like we did this minute. You are the emptiness that opens, and this sensation is just appearing in it. It is because this sensation has not yet been clearly seen that it still holds a vestige of me-ness. The separate self is still hiding in the sensation here. You mean the story of the separate self is still hiding? Yes, but it's felt here as a feeling. But with thought, right? I mean, it's like, yes, there's the feeling, but the feeling is sort of held by a thought, isn't it? That's true. A feeling is a mixture of a thought and a sensation. But if you go to the sensation where the feeling... If you go to the place in the body where the feeling seems to be located, the feeling of loneliness, say, in the chest, it's really just a sensation, a neutral sensation, no more uncomfortable than the sensation of your hand on the microphone. It's no more intense than that. Why is the feeling of loneliness here more uncomfortable than the feeling of the hand on the mic? It's no more intense as a sensation. Why is your hand on the microphone completely innocuous? You wouldn't think of it if I hadn't mentioned it. And yet the feeling of loneliness, which is no more intense, it's just a sensation. Why is it so unbearable? It's because the me story is still attached to it. It still has a residue of me-ness to it. And the reason the me-ness is still attached to it is that it hasn't been clearly seen yet. It's still in the twilight. It hasn't been clearly seen. So that's this morning, the kind of meditation we've been doing these last few days, without our realizing it, almost, that the sensations are being felt for what they truly are. There's no separate me-ness there. Yeah, that's really obvious to me when we do the meditation. But when there's a story that's happening, or there's a charged feeling. This is not a charged feeling, but when there's a charged feeling with the storyline that goes along with it, it feels like it all comes together as a clump. Yes, and the charged storyline is always I, this open, empty, luminous space. I'm not an open, empty, luminous space. I am a separate self that lives in here. So that's why this contemplation is this disinterested contemplation of the body, that we liberate the body's sensations from this me-charge, which thought adds to it. This me-charge that thought adds to the sensation, turning it into a feeling, is the deeper root of the separate self. It's where the separate self seems to be lodged in the body. I'm going to take your word for that. No, no, please don't take my word for it. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm going to look tomorrow morning. I mean, I do have that experience. Don't wait for tomorrow morning. If you find yourself, for instance, awake in the middle of the night, with nowhere for your thoughts to go, these are the kind of times when these feelings come up. Because there's nowhere for thought to go in the middle of the night, and that's precisely when we feel this loneliness or this solitude. We cannot successfully distract ourselves, or rather, we can less successfully distract ourselves, because it's the middle of the night. We can't turn our computer on because our partner's fast asleep, or whatever it is. And that's when these feelings really reveal themselves, and these are perfect opportunities not to go towards the usual distractions, including thinking, wandering off in your thoughts into the past or the future, which is just a subtle distraction. That's the time to really explore yourself and your experience, and to allow these feelings, to almost invite these feelings to come up to the surface of your experience so that you can really be explored, If you start doing something to them, you'll just frighten them away again, and they'll go down inside the box. This has to be truly a disinterested contemplation. Disinterested doesn't mean uninterested, it means with no vested interest. Don't do this subtly in order to get rid of these uncomfortable feelings. It's really to understand truly what is at their origin. If you understand that in your experience, that understanding will dissolve these feelings in time. So the dissolution of these feelings will be a byproduct of your understanding, not a goal. I have one more question, which is not completely unrelated, but it's when we're doing these meditations in the morning, and you're having us expand the awareness of our hands and arms to the wall, or any of these, all of that language, I guess it's confusing to me, and my experience is that it's like a subtle attunement to what's already there. I'm attuning to the extension of energy that goes to the wall, as opposed to making it happen. And that's what you're inviting us to do, really, attune to. Yes, and I think at some stage this morning, I described how to begin with, it may seem that we have to make the effort to do this. In fact, it's not a new effort that we are making. It is rather the relaxation of a previous effort of which we were unaware. But because we're unaware of the effort, we've been so used to living like this, contracted into a body. We just think that's the normal state. That's what it means to be a human being. Therefore, when somebody says, no, imagine that you're not contracted within the body. Allow this sensation to expand. You think, oh no, I can't do that, because it's normal to be like this. So then you think, okay, I have to make a great effort to expand. Actually, it's not. It's the relaxation. It's the relaxation of an effort that you were previously making, the effort of being contracted into a body. But because you had become so accustomed to it, you didn't even realize you were making the effort. So that's fine. If you feel that you have to make an effort to do this, I think I said something like this morning, that if you feel you have to make the effort, that's fine. Just make the effort. Just do it. Make the effort. At some stage, so when we make the effort, and then through habit and the force of inertia, we'll find ourselves continually being pulled back into the body. But each time we make this effort, the force of this pull back into the body is slightly weakened. The next time we make the effort, it's a little bit easier. It's as if we've carved a pathway out. And it requires a little bit less effort. Not only does it require less effort, but there's less pull backwards. But we do inevitably find ourselves pulled back, and we make the effort again. And the next time, it's a little bit easier, and there is a correspondingly less force of contraction back into the body. Until at a certain stage, it's easier to feel the body expanding. You feel you have to make an effort to contract back inside the body. It becomes more and more natural just to live with this expanded feeling. I think the effort that I make is the effort to... It's like a coming back into a central... It's almost like a central location that then opens out into the whole of everything. And doing that leads to the attunement to what is present, the energy going out to the walls or whatever. You're right when you call it an attunement. You're actually attuning yourself at the level of your feelings to what is already the case. It only seems not to be the case, and therefore you seem to have to make an effort. In fact, as you say, it's another way of putting it, and it's a nice way of putting it, that you're really just attuning yourself to the way things already are. Yes, yes. You're trying to... This would be another way of saying it. You're trying to re-educate your body to feel and move and act in a way that is consistent with what is already the case, but has simply not previously been the case. In other words, you're not trying to create a new state of the body. Thank you. You're talking about attunement or...