We are conceived in connection.
We are bathed in the warmth and security of connection,
from the moment that our mothers hold us against their breasts.
We don’t even thing about who we are,
because we are not differentiated.
It s in that moment that we are closer To who and what we really are.
But like I said we don’t think about who and what we really are.
Because the idea is not one that Comes up in our psychology.
But from this place of connection We experience a fall from grace.
The fall from grace is that deep sense of connection.
We begin to be differentiated.
We begin to see the world through the lenses of me and everything else.
And it is at this moment that we lose our sense of connection.
Loneliness is something that all people on this planet
experience to some degree or another.
But there are two types of loneliness.
The first is a kind of loneliness that can be resolved
by being with other people.
It’s when we feel isolated. and being around other people
just makes us feel a little better.
There’s another type of loneliness.
This type of loneliness is not solved by being around other people.
In fact, it’s the type of loneliness that persists
regardless of whether or not we are in a crowded room.
And it’s this second type of loneliness,
That creates the most intense type of suffering in the human race.
It’s where we perceive ourselves to be completely isolated
from the world around us.
Because this form of loneliness is so pervasive,
we could call it an epidemic on the planet today.
I have written a book. A book to solve this problem.
I’ve called this book The Anatomy of Loneliness.
In this book I reveal quite literally the anatomy of loneliness.
What specifically creates loneliness.
And how to resolve those things, so as
to create lasting connection with other people.
This book is available through my website
www.tealswan.com
and every other online book retailer such as
Barns & Noble, Booktopia and Amazon.
If you want to learn about loneliness in depth and great detail,
As well as how to find your way back to connection,
I highly suggest that you pickup a copy of this book
The anatomy of loneliness is composed of three distinct parts or pillars.
The first is separation,
the second is shame, and the third is fear.
The story of separation happened far before your birth.
It happened in fact before physical form.
It I the idea of self versus others.
Obviously self concept, “ I “ is the ego.
Separation is a state of fragmentation,
Where one perceives themselves to be
separate from everything else around them.
this fragmentation does not just take place externally
relative to yourself and other things in the world.
It also takes place internally.
The fragmentation that takes place within each person and creates internal disunity.
Causes us to separate from certain parts of ourselves.
It causes those parts to feel ostracized, rejected, disowned and isolated.
But here’s the thing, we can’t actually eradicate
parts of our being from us.
Its not actually possible to separate from pars of ourselves.
We can try to disown, reject and deny them,
but they’re still connected to us.
That means we feel what they feel.
That means as we go through this process of internal fragmentation,
we cut ourselves off from parts internal to us and external to us.
We make those parts feel alone.
We feel that aloneness.
For more information about this watch my video titled:
“Fragmentation the World Wide Disease”
The second part of loneliness is shame.
Most people think that shame is just
the emotional reaction
to experiences that are debasing in nature.
They make us feel bad about ourselves,
on a mental level, on a physical level,
on an emotional level.
But this is not a thorough understanding of shame.
Shame is much more complex
and much more fundamental to our nature.
Shame is the mechanism of fragmentation.
To understand shame I want you to think about a sea anemone.
If you imagined poking a sea anemone with your finger or a stick,
what you would notice is that it would immediately pinch itself closed.
This is a reaction, it’s a primal reaction.
The sea anemone doesn’t have to think hard to do this.
What most people don’t understand about shame,
is that it’s an organic biological affective reaction.
Shame is actually a primitive reaction encoded in your organism
just like your fight or flight mechanism
and interestingly enough, so is love.
When we experience shame,
we push ourselves away from ourselves.
In response to something that has happened in our external environment.
Or in response to a thought
that we have adopted from our external environment.
But we can’t actually do this.
Obviously how do you push yourself away?
The only way to accomplish this is to split your own consciousness.
We become internally isolated from ourselves.
Because consciousness can split.
We then feel, as a result of this, The secondary layer of shame.
That’s the emotion of shame.
What that emotion causes us to do,
is it causes us to withdraw from people.
We do to them the same thing we are doing on an internal level.
We separate ourselves.
We either do this through direct avoidance,
meaning, we become kind of a wallflower.
Or else we do the opposite, we become completely inauthentic.
We allow them to only be in a relationship
with the facade we put forward.
Either way we are isolated.
The third part of loneliness is fear.
To fear something, is the exact opposite of to love something.
To love something is to take something as part of yourself.
To fear something is to push something away.
To make it not part of yourself.
You can’t push something away,
without simultaneously becoming separated from it.
So, the more fear we have
the more separate we feel from everything around us.
Fear is the number one most isolating experience on the planet.
Fear about relationships or about other people
simply serve to separate us from people
and make us lonely when it comes to human contact.
We have four primary fears when it comes to relationships.
They are abandonment, rejection or disapproval,
being trapped in pain in the relationship
and loss of self, also called enmeshment.
What most people don’t know is that it’s impossible to fear the unknown.
We fear what we have experienced before and have been traumatized by.
Something that causes us to feel distress that we could not resolve.
So, what does this say about fear?
If its impossible to fear something unknown,
and we experience fear that separates us in relationships,
it means that getting beyond fear and into a state of connection,
is a lot about resolving past experiences.
Things we have experienced that we have no resolve with.
Fears about something that we are projecting into the unknown.
It is critical to know that you cannot push through fear
so as to get to connection.
If you try to push something or bulldoze it, or act in spite of it,
You aren’t taking it as part of yourself.
So, you are actually separated from it in that moment.
So, the ironic thing is,
the way that most of us deal with fear,
actually, enhances loneliness because it creates an increase
separation between ourselves and our own fear.
Now let’s talk about connection for a minute.
Connection can be thought of as a link with something else
where you perceive a link or association between yourself, and that other thing.
But in a state of oneness you can’t be connected
any more than you can be disconnected.
Because you are everything else and everything else is you.
In other words, in a state of oneness,
there is no need for connection.
But obviously most of us are not living in a state of oneness.
Most of us can’t perceive ourselves
to be the same as the coffee table Were drinking our coffee from
So basically, we are living in the land where we must develop connection
as a very critical step, to re actualizing
our state of oneness.
When it comes to making a genuine connection with someone else
that link must be chosen consciously and deliberately
by both people involved in that connection.
Our connection can exist at any level of our being.
We can be mentally linked, emotionally linked,
energetically linked or physically linked.
When we disconnect we break that link
at one or all different levels of our being.
Because genuine connection is a link to someone
That has been consciously chosen not forced upon us.
We have to focus on choosing to create it as well as on keeping it.
Our happiness in our individual lives depends on our capacity to be connected.
Our survival as a human race depends on our capacity to be connected.
Right now, loneliness is an epidemic.
Its an epidemic with devastating implications.
The pain of the human condition is that we walk this planet
With several billion other people, and yet each of us
experiences a sense of isolation and feels alone.
That’s a serious problem.
I couldn’t think of anything worse.
Its like starving to death in a grocery store.
Now its bad enough if this issue which is reaching epidemic proportions
only affects us. But it doesn’t.
It affects far more than that.
The pain of disconnection bleeds across the planet.
The danger in disconnections is when we disconnect from something
we no longer perceive it to be connected to,
linked to a part of ourselves.
Therefore, when we cause it pain,
we don’t perceive directly our self being caused pain as a result.
Think about the implications of this.
If I perceive myself to be other than or disconnected from something,
I can cause it pain. without feeling like that causes me pain at all.
When we perceive ourselves to be disconnected,
we no longer feel the ripple of oneness that is our fundamental truth.
We no longer feel the impact that everything has on us
and we have on everything else.
And as a result we can cause something or someone else pain without perceiving
that pain in us.
The concept that there is something innately painful
or even dangerous about disconnection,
is something that fails to reach us until we realize our history
and what disconnection has shown us in the past.
In other words, the concept of disconnection being dangerous
seems theoretical and abstract until you realize this is the reason
why for years many countries were completely segregated.
People with dark skin were taken from their families and
kept as slaves, burnt, beaten and hung.
This is why in the 1940s Osh Wits and other death camps were created
to contain and exterminate Jews.
And other demographics opposed to the Nazi regime.
Disconnection is what caused the U.S. to drop a nuclear bomb
on Hiroshima in 1945.
Its why as of 1979 Pol Pot’s regime had eliminated 21 percent
of Cambodia’s entire population.
And today disconnection is the reason
a man can train for years with the single task
of strapping a bomb to his own body and exploding himself along with it
in an attack aimed to create terror and destruction
to whomever he has decided is an enemy.
Every crime that has ever been committed
has come about because the person committing that crime
has believed themselves to be separate from, disconnected from
and isolated in some way from the person that they committed those crimes against.
The only way to save your species, on the planet,
the only way to save the planet itself at this point in time,
and the only way to end human suffering,
is to create a sense of connection.
To end a sense of isolation and loneliness within the world.
And it begins with you ending it inside yourself.
Have a good week.