Why do I feel less lonely when I and camping in the mountains all by myself then when I am in Times Square in the middle of a million people? Loneliness is a chronic part of western culture. We have become so far removed from our place in the natural order of the universe, from one another, from our fellow creatures, that chronic feelings of separation isolation and loneliness are the result.
Our way of thinking in the west began with the Greeks. The Greek philosophers, namely Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle sought to discover truth through the dialectic approach and through reason, to come to fundamental truths of the nature of the universe and reality. To discover these truths through reason, a requirement for a separation between the observer (subject) and that being observed (object) became necessary. This built-in separation, this isolation of the subject from the object was completely synthetic. It was picked up later by Thomas Aquinas and Saint Anselm and continued to foster and reinforce the church’s notion that God (object) was completely separate from his child (subject). This separation, this chasm between the creation and the creator has been preached and reinforced for thousands of years. It has been inculcated into our collective cultural psyche.
With the advent of the scientific methodology, a preconceived fundamental separateness has produced a neurosis in our culture that is responsible for all sorts of maladaptive manifestations; Columbine, Sandy Hook, Donald Trump, Nazism, Stalin’s Soviet Union. Although the communist collective developed by Marx and put into action by Mao and Lenin were attempts to remove the separation between fellows by reducing everyone to a cog in a giant state-sponsored machine as reflected in Nietzsche’s writings fared no better due to the Greeks original intent to seek truth rather than to seek the quality, the good, the virtue. It is in the eastern mode of thought that the antithesis of western Grecian thought predominates.
That, like the words of Carl Sagan, “I and the oak tree are cousins,” I and the oak tree are simply different manifestations of the same substance, the all-pervasive intelligent primal substance that permeates the inter-spaces of the universe and it is responsible for all creation. My creative juices, when the spark of a new idea is first perceived in my mind, is simply a result of my being a manifestation of this Zero Point Field of original creation. I have been rowing upstream all of my life, fighting my part in the natural order. When all I need do is let go of the oars and allow the river of life, the infinite knowledge and wisdom of the universe, to direct me as it always will. We are the only species capable of fighting this nearly inevitable force.
This underlying goal to see the truth rather than the good is the source of our cultural neurosis, the loneliness we see and experience in our travels every morning on the train to work. Hundreds, thousands of our fellows are each consumed by their electronic devices, no interaction, no conversation, no smiles, simply the daily grind of loneliness and isolation. I asked a young man who was traveling with me on the city bus “how are you doing?” He was engrossed in a video game on his smartphone and when he looked up in response to my question I saw fear in his eyes. A fear of human interaction, the fear of human contact. He stammered and his fear and embarrassment embarrassed me and I felt his loneliness. It was palpable. It saddened me. The separation I feel, even amongst the teeming masses of the city, can be traced all the way back to the first advent of the dialectic approach to truth-seeking. I’d often rather seek the quality of things, the good in my fellows and find virtue in my existence. It’s a choice actually. I must ask myself, do I seek to be right, or seek to be happy.
