LONELINESS is not liking yourself and inability to get on with yourself when you are alone. You are more comfortable in the company of those who write your life’s script, the role you have to play, the words you have to utter, the dress you have to wear and the environment in which you have to live. The reality is that you are going to spend most of your time with yourself alone. All others, no matter how dear and near or how interesting and important, cannot be with you every minute, every hour or every day. Since it is inevitable that you have to spend your future in your own company, why not understand the self better and be a friend? The popular saying is : “The tyranny of loneliness and the joy of aloneness”.
The hypersensitive, irritable, annoying, criticising, nagging people who use those unpleasant qualities to hurt others are the ones who turn the very same qualities inwards when they are alone. Perhaps, they feel a sense of guilt in not being what they think they should be.
Bhartruhari the king-poet classified humanity into four types. The first one he called Satpurushaha, the selfless ones who always lived for other people like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Swami Vivekananda and others (Sattvic). The second category he called as Saamanya, the common man who looked after himself but has some time for others too (Rajasic). The third category he called Maanava Rakshasa, the demonic type who destroy others to gain an inch of ground (Tamasic). The fourth, he could not name, because they are purely ‘sadistic’ only destroying others for no tangible reasons. The loner either belongs to the third or fourth category, never trusting himself or others and always trying to put them down.
