Reply To: How to cope with loneliness

#25263
lodonyo
Participant

ALOHA WTA,
I hope you come back to the forum and aee these messages.

Pema chodron has a great rest on loneliness. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lionsroar.com/six-kinds-of-loneliness/amp/. It relates to a recent article written by all ACTUALLY…https://puredhamma.net/dhamma-and-science/origin-of-life/worldview-of-the-buddha/is-there-a-self/chachakka-sutta-no-self-involved-in-vipaka/

Tge thick & skinny of it is illustrated early in Pema’s article: “The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.”

I’m currently on my way to having Gnosis on this topic. The keyword for the issue is “feeling”. Basically, the situation is this: due to a series of karmic fruits, we feel some kind pain due to REAL INVISIBLE ENERGY (Kamma) in our mental bodies. This is like the feeling of a loose tooth, or the feeling of a headache – we either bear witness to it with some kind of strong positive emotion like love and compassion or we let our mind become agitated and continue to think about how we can rid ourselves of THE FEELING. <- thia actually creates even more suffering and thus a cycle repeats.

You listed the karmic fruit/cause of your feeling in your post. NOT having intimate connections with your family or anyone for that matter.
From Buddha: “Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble’s comprehension of suffering: Birth of a [hated] is suffering, Decay of a [Loved] is suffering, disease/disorder of a [loved] is suffering, death/transition of a [loved] is suffering; union with a [Hated] is suffering; separation from a [Loved] is suffering; not getting an object of satisfaction is suffering; in brief, the…”. So you are having to go through a seemingly continual amount of suffering because the kama guna (as mentioned above) which is a real phenomena called “intimate connection” – likely a source of energy from other people – you are missing in your life. This is like being in a karmic situation where you are poor and cannot afford food – maybe you would be hungry ? all the time and have to bear the suffering feeling of being without food a lot until you were able to eat again.

I write all this to give context to thw above answers and other answers I’m sure you’re getting. The dukkha vedana(feeling) have the same root. Also those feelings are RESULTS and made worse, or better, by thoughts about them.

In my own research/XP, the Buddha – and anyone giving teachings for that matter — has always responded with a kind of meditation to people who were experiencing the feeling of suffering from the reasons Buddha gave(listed above). It seems to me then, an effective recourse for experiencing a “suffering karmic result” is to either focus on that feeling with various levels of wisdom anout the true nature of reality OR re-direct the attention of the mind with one-pointed attitude towards a positive direction like Buddha dhma or some other topic.

The important thing here seems to be 1. The feelings of loneliness ARE NOT JUST “ONE FEELING” but basically a string of bad feeling resulting from a craving that is not met everytime it “bubbles up”. Every bubble-craving not met gives a kind of pain feeling and we experience a string of them which results kn a kind of subtle agonizing emotion.
2. Though a variety of advice can be given, the main faculties of aid in such a situation always seem to be directing the attention and intention towards the feeling, the cause od the feeling, or some other object that will result in a dukkha feeling instead. <- perhaps if you think about it, there can only be so many “movies” running at once?

So I hope this helps. Release the craving of kamaguna/intimate connection can come through a variety of ways, as #2 above. Past life regression, early childhood regression, vipassana meditation, deel Dharma research and consequential realizations, deep meditation on the nature of your suffering…etc etc etc. But all such pathways to happiness rely on us not generating hatred (or greed) due to the experience. I think this is the initial hard part…going from suffering to focusing on something else other than the suffering and temporary relief from it. We all seem to have our own “version of this and this ia because the root is the same!