We Should Invest in Loneliness

Selected from: Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche's Not for Happiness

Why do people always feel lonely? Is it because they lack a sense of security? And another question: why can't we simply live alone? If we could manage on our own, that would be wonderful — it's something yogis excel at, and it's why they can let go of so much baggage. For me, loneliness is really a philosophical question. According to Buddhism, loneliness is rooted in that lack of security I mentioned earlier.

Now, when I say lack of security — even though we say "I," "I'm David," "I'm this, I'm that," even though we have a name, a title, a job, a husband, a wife, a degree, an apartment, a car, a penthouse — there's still a persistent sense of insecurity, because we can never quite prove that we exist.

Getting a tattoo, slashing our wrists, earning a degree, getting married — we do all of it just to give ourselves a fleeting sense of existence. And that insecurity often shows up as loneliness. I said before that the flower I see, you'll never see. So we can't truly share the real flower. We can only pretend we're sharing, and that's profoundly lonely.

I can never share what I'm going through with you, and that really is very lonely. What I go through, only I can go through. But if you're a Buddhist, loneliness is the dawning of wisdom, and you should invest in it. If you feel lonely, it means something feels off about this samsaric life. You can sense that it isn't working. You'll get a feeling that everything has been slightly overpromised, and you can let yourself feel it. That sense of wrongness, of not belonging to the cycle of samsara, is actually a very important psychological factor that a practitioner should invest in.

When we were little, all our values revolved around building sandcastles at the beach. We were thrilled. We absolutely loved those sandcastles. After a while, in our teens, that trick stopped working. It became fast cars and video games. By middle age, those stopped working too, and became jobs, titles, colleagues, marriages, and the like. By the time you're around ninety, those games won't work either. At ninety, I think you'll begin to value things you'd overlooked before — a salt shaker, a tablecloth — your toys have changed.

And some of us manage to fast-forward through all of this in just a few months. You half-realize it's all meaningless, and that eerie feeling is genuinely lonely. For a practitioner, that loneliness is very important. In the Prajnaparamita Sutra, there's a Bodhisattva who, in the presence of the Buddha, complained: "I feel such deep sorrow. I am grief-stricken by this meaningless life and by everything in it. It's almost unbearable."

Then the Buddha said: "This is a sacred treasure. You must have accumulated such vast merit to feel sorrow over these things." Without that kind of merit, you'd simply be scattered and distracted by all the little gadgets and trinkets of life, and by the time you finally started thinking, "Wait — what's happening? These ninety-five years!" — it would be far too late. So for practitioners, this really matters.

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