Understanding loneliness and the beauty of aloneness

Osho,
You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others; in addition, we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular. Would you please comment?

The question that you have asked is the question of every human being.

“We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.

Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes. Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal.

“Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness.

“But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore – but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and again. And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely.

“The dictionary meaning is the same; that shows the mind of the people who create dictionaries. They don’t understand at all the vast difference between loneliness and aloneness.

Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place.