Ed Gabrielsen

Essentially, we are each alone. Even if you are with a group of friends, laughing and talking, even if you are sitting at the dinner table with your entire family, even if you are lying in bed with your lover, you are, at the same time, alone.

You are alone because no one else has your thoughts, perceptions, or feelings. This is self-evident. We know this is true because our experience shows this to be true.

You are alone, and yet, the paradox is, you are not alone. This is because the you that you think you are, the person you take yourself to be, is an illusion. The real you, the you that is not an illusion, is the you that is not alone. That you is never alone because it is the complete wholeness and oneness of everything. In other words, it is emptiness, or, to use a different terminology, it is loving awareness.

Experience of the person.

As a person, you experience yourself in various ways. Your experience of yourself appears moment to moment as a combination of physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings. It can be very useful to examine these different experiences.

But what we eventually notice is that every experience follows the same pattern. It begins, it exists, and then it ends. Every experience is like this. All experience is impermanent. This is another self-evident fact sometimes called the “law of impermanence.”

Suffering of the person.

It is the person, the impermanent and illusory person, that experiences the suffering of being alone. This is the fundamental suffering, the basic suffering. It is the pain and dissatisfaction of experiencing oneself as separate.

Human beings have so much suffering, and there are so many forms of suffering. But perhaps this suffering begins with the existential angst of perceiving oneself as alone and separate. This is because the person, by definition, is alone and separate. The person is a temporary ediface, a constructed illusion. From this basic suffering and all the misguided attempts to relieve it, suffering multiplies, following the chain of karmic consequences.

The path to freedom.

However, in spite of great suffering, and, in fact, because of it, the possibility of being free from suffering is present. Through systematic investigation and observation, the constructed edifice can be dismantled. Most of the time, our perception of reality is not reality at all, but the smoke screen of our habitual projections and delusions. Through the practice of sitting meditation, the entire process can be observed, that is, we begin to see the tangled web that is the conceptual mind. Slowly, little by little, we can unravel the web, piece by piece, until it falls away completely. What remains is the simple truth of being, the empty blue sky of consciousness, the limitless space of emptiness, the vast ocean of mind, our true home, in which we are never alone.