“Aloneness is tremendously beautiful, loneliness is ugly. They don’t mean the same, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. Aloneness is such a beautiful experience. You are – pure, uncontaminated by anybody else’s presence; no shadow falling on you – a clarity, unclouded, your being pure, virgin, nobody has ever traveled in that territory. It is virgin territory. It is of tremendous beauty, silence, bliss.

     “Loneliness is an ugly idea. Loneliness is the idea which comes when you try to escape from yourself and cannot escape. Then you fall into loneliness, you miss the other. You don’t see your presence, you miss the other’s presence, your whole focus is wrong. You don’t look into yourself, you look outside. You say, ‘Some friend should be here, or should I go to the restaurant? Or should I go to some club or to the movies or watch TV? What should I do?’ You don’t look in, you look out. You wait for the other, your eyes are searching for the other, and the other is not.

     “When the other is not, you feel lonely. When you are, you feel alone. This has to be understood deeply: you cannot belong anywhere, belonging is not possible. You can love, but you cannot belong. You cannot get attached. You can love, but you cannot possess and you cannot be possessed. Your freedom is ultimate. Nobody can possess you, nobody can make you a slave. You cannot become anybody’s shadow. That is the meaning when I say ‘your aloneness is ultimate.’ Once you understand it, you start cleaning the ground – you start forgetting the idea of loneliness; you don’t get confused with the idea of loneliness.

     “What is meditation after all? It is going into your aloneness. It is moving into the deepest core of your being, where nobody else has ever entered, will ever enter – where you and only you, can enter. That is your privacy, your subjectivity.

- Osho