Krishnamurti: Can you overcome loneliness? Whatever you conquer has to be conquered again and again, does it not? What you understand comes to an end, but that which you conquer can never come to an end...

Now, what is this loneliness of which most of us are aware? We know it, and we run away from it, do we not? We take flight from it in every form of activity. We are empty, lonely, and we are afraid of it, so we try to cover it up by some means or other - meditation, the search for God, social activity, the radio, drink, or what you will - we would do anything rather than face it, be with it, understand it.

Running away is the same, whether we do it through the idea of God, or through drink. As long as one is escaping from loneliness, there is no essential difference between the worship of God and addiction to alcohol. Socially, there may be a difference; but psychologically, the man who runs away from himself, from his own emptiness, whose escape is his search for God, is on the same level as the drunkard.

What is important, then, is not to overcome loneliness, but to understand it, and we cannot understand it if we do not face it, if we do not look at it directly, if we are continually running away from it...

On Love and Loneliness, Seattle, 6 August 1950

Aloneness is different from loneliness, but you cannot understand it if you do not understand loneliness. Do you know loneliness? You have surreptitiously watched it, looked at it, not liking it. To know it, you must commune with it with no barrier between it and you, no conclusion, prejudice, or speculation; you must come to it with freedom and not with fear. To understand loneliness, you must approach it without any sense of fear. If you come to loneliness saying that you already know the cause of it, the roots of it, than you cannot understand it. Do you know its roots? You know them by speculating from outside. Do you know the inward content of loneliness? You merely give it a description, and the word is not the thing, the real. To understand it, you must come to it without any sense of getting away from it. The very thought of getting away from loneliness is in itself a form of inward insufficiency. Are not most of our activities an avoidance? When you are alone, you switch on the radio, you do pujas, run after gurus, gossip with others, go to the cinema, attend races, take drugs, have sex and so on. Your daily life is to get away from yourselves, so the escape become all-important and you wrangle about the escapes, whether drink, or god. The avoidance is the issue, though you may have different means of escape. You may do enormous harm psychologically by your respectable escapes, and I, sociologically, by my worldly escapes. But to understand loneliness all escapes must come to an end, not through enforcement, compulsion, but by seeing the falseness of escape. Then you are directly confronting 'what is,' and the real problem begins.

What is loneliness? To understand it, you must not give it a name. The very naming, the very association of thought with other memories of it, emphasizes loneliness. Experiment with it and see. When you have ceased to escape, you will see that until you realize what loneliness is, anything you do about it is another form of escape. Only by understanding loneliness can you go beyond it.

The problem of aloneness is entirely different. We are never alone; we are always with people except, perhaps, when we go for solitary walks. We are the result of a total process made up of economics, social, climatic, and other environmental influences, and as long as we are influenced, we are not alone. As long as there is the process of accumulation and experience, there can never be aloneness. You can imagine that you are alone by isolating yourself through narrow individual, personal activities, but that is not aloneness. Aloneness can be, only when influence is not. Aloneness is action which is not the result of a reaction, which is not the response to a challenge or a stimulus. Loneliness is a problem of isolation, and we are seeking isolation in all our relationships, which is the very essence of the self, the "me" - my work, my nature, my duty, my property, my relationship. The very process of thought, which is the result of all the thoughts and influences of man, leads to isolation. To understand loneliness is not a bourgeois act; you cannot understand it as long there is in you the ache of that undisclosed insufficiency which comes with emptiness, frustrations. Aloneness is not isolation, it is not the opposite of loneliness; it is a state of being when all experience and knowledge are not."

On Love and Loneliness

The First and Last Freedom, p.187