The first question:

Osho,
After the tidal wave of events and with the memory of a profound experience, I face new aloneness. Efforts to share or escape into distractions have bad results. Why do I cling to this habit of escaping aloneness? A few comments may help me for the task ahead.

Aloneness is ultimate. There is no way to be anything other than alone. One can forget it, one can drown oneself in so many things, but again and again the truth asserts. Hence, after each profound experience you will feel alone. After a great love experience you will feel alone, after a deep meditation you will feel alone.

That’s why all great experiences make people sad. In the wake of a profound experience, sadness always settles. It is because of this phenomenon that millions of people don’t hanker after profound experiences, they avoid them. They don’t want to go deep in love, sex is enough, because sex is superficial: it will not leave them alone. It will be fun, an entertainment, for a moment they will enjoy it and then they will forget all about it. It will not bring them to their own center. But love brings you to your center: love is so profound that it leaves you alone.

This will look very paradoxical, because ordinarily people think love will make you aware of togetherness. That is utter nonsense. If love is deep it will make you aware of aloneness, not togetherness, because whenever anything goes deep, what happens? – you leave the periphery of your being and you fall into your center, and the center is all alone. There only you are, or not even you, but only a consciousness – with no ego in it, with no identity in it, with no definition in it – an abyss of consciousness.

After listening to great music, or after penetrating into the meaning of great poetry, or seeing the beauty of a sunset, it always happens: in the wake of it you will feel sad. Seeing this, millions have decided not to see beauty, not to love, not to meditate, not to pray – to avoid all that is profound. But even if you avoid truth, truth bumps upon you sometimes. Unawares, it possesses you.

You can distract yourself for the moment, but no distraction is going to help. Aloneness has to be accepted because it is ultimate. It is not an accident, it is the very way things are. It is Tao. Once you accept it, the quality changes. Aloneness is not creating sadness. Your idea that you should not be alone, that is creating sadness; your idea that to be alone is to be sad is creating the problem. Aloneness is utterly beautiful because it is profoundly free. It is absolute freedom – how can it create sadness?