Dealing With Loneliness | Eckhart Tolle

now here we have another question another person who is dissatisfied for another reason i'm on a path of awakening but my deep loneliness and loneliness at not having a life partner is an obstacle to my spiritual development i get deeply depressed though i do my best to stay present in the now instead of dwelling on my longing what advice could you offer okay well i won't say internet dating [Laughter] there's a part in every person the form you the the form identity of who you are and the level of form it tends either towards the

male or the female it might not necessarily be the physical the physical male may tend more to the other so it doesn't necessarily depend on your the physical form but you tend to be pretend either to towards the male or the female and therefore you're not complete because you're only one half on the level of form which is the physical form or that just underneath that the psychological or emotional form and so there is a natural longing for the other polarity or completeness in a human being and you can feel that as a sex is

only part of that but it goes beyond sexual longing it's there's more to it than that there's also an emotional longing for the other and you can so they come they go together and there's a place that pull that you can feel as on the level of form and when that is not satisfied then that can lead to unhappiness particularly if you have not transcended at all your identification with form if you are still totally totally identified with you as this physical form and psychological form the transcendent dimension has not come into your life at

all then you would become very dissatisfied and depending also to some extent what culture you live in there are traditional cultures still on our planet where it's almost where they you have to find a partner and if you're not everybody would look down on you as being a total and miserable failure in in some traditional cultures if you if you're not married at a certain by a certain age or you cannot give birth to children people look down on you and despise you and uh you're miserable for the rest of your life you have not

fulfilled your form identity and and so and also in some traditional cultures the the sense of self is very strongly bound up with whether you're a man or a woman so more so than in the west it still persists to some extent in the west but much less so than in some traditional cultures where if you're a man in certain cultures you are this becomes percent of who you feel you are your self-identity is the male you are the male and you look at every woman as a as um that's the female you can't relate

to a human to a woman as a human being you are the male and she is a female in chief of course not your equal and the woman is totally identified with being the female form and behaves according to that kind of collective conditioning so depending on where it is i won't act it out but here in the west it's a little easier to step out of those collective expectations it is more acceptable in the west to say my choice is not to get married and you can even say my choice is not to have

children and people say okay so there's a bit more freedom there and yet the longing for the other on the farm level is still there emotional sexual the essence is to be able to transcend who you are on the level of form whether or not you find a partner that meets that longing or whether you go from one partner to another and another or you find one life partner with whom you are for the rest of your life that is secondary really because even if you have a partner if you have not gone deeper and

and encounter the transcendent dimension to who you are beyond the form identity of you as the male or the female or whatever the nationality or the particular status in society whatever makes up your form identity in addition to gender if you haven't gone beyond that then even the relationships yes you might have found your partner but you won't be satisfied in the relationship with in the absence of the transcendent dimension the spiritual dimension you may come to some kind of compromise and living together somehow managing to stay together but it you'll be actually you have

a longing to get out so the people who are who are outside the relationships have a longing to get in on marriage and those who are in have a longing to get out so the young the young the young girl or man late teens early 20s they want to get into the cage and those who are in the cage want to get out of the cage it is quite possible to to notice the sense of if in the absence of a partner it is quite possible to notice a certain sense of lack on the level

of form and yet have a lot of spaciousness around that sense of lack yes i can feel that there's a longing but the longing does not consume you the longing has not taken possession of you and making you into an unhappy person a totally unfulfilled and bitter person perhaps no the longing is there but the longing that arises from your particular form of you exists within a spaciousness because that is the transcendent dimension and who you are is not the unfulfilled longing who you are is the presence or the stillness around it that is the

shift so the longing may persist but you can live with it however if you are no longer trapped in the longing it's also quite possible that a change will come into your life particularly if the intense neediness goes i need somebody and then everybody you and everybody you meet can feel the the neediness you are when you when you've given somebody your phone number you've just met and then you're waiting for them to call and they they're less likely to call when the neediness is there they're more likely to call when the certain spaciousness is

there i'd like i'd love you to call i'd love this person to call me but he may or she may or may not and there's again a spaciousness around it so you of course you can take action towards meeting somebody i don't know the questions the whether the questioner has taken any action and actually gone to places perhaps where one meets people are not necessarily nightclubs we might not meet the most conscious people in bars but there are other places one can go to where you meet people and even the internet why not this is

the way many people read that way but even there if you haven't gone beyond the the absolute neediness of needing somebody then it's less likely to work out for you but if you have that sense of inner some inner spaciousness around the longing then now the way in which you approach others changes without that absolute that pull so that's my suggestion then is see if you can on the outer level see how and where you could meet people and explore perhaps you will find somebody here that why to realize that the transcendence is the most

vital thing does not exclude the possibility of taking action on an outer level of course that is always secondary but why not and maybe you find a good website where you meet conscious is there such a thing conscious dating if there isn't maybe it's a business idea conscious dating of course the the difficulty is a person who thinks of themselves as conscious may be deluded so find that place where the polarities actually don't are not there anymore in the being the i am-ness that's deeper than the form and go there as much as you can

it may not totally free of the longing but that's okay the longing will just become a thing that's no longer overwhelming and then if take action and see what happens this mind-made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive to be free you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life [Music] situation you