My sis sent me a mail stating the differences of loneliness and solitude. And I asked if she is interested in two books which I happened to buy which never had the chance to read:

1. St. Nadine in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness by Terrance Keenan
2. Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter by Philip Koch

I would think that the first book would not be a hard read. The second however promises to be a worthwhile struggle. The author explored both sides of the arguments, that we are our most natural when alone and that we find ourselves in encounters. When I bought the first book, a friend looked at me with a puzzled look on his face. Maybe he thought that I would never be lonely. Or maybe he thought that loneliness is a shameful affliction of sorts. And years ago, I would have agreed readily, now perhaps I have my reservations. God, I would have agreed to so many other things in the past. It may be an affliction, but no longer shameful.

On a philosophical level, I would agree. Without a doubt, each of us are alone. Having no access to the minds of others, the failure of language to represent reality, the emptiness of socially constructed meanings and languages all adds up to a very lonely world. In the huge sea of the Social, we are all trapped by the bubble of our own construction, one that we can call the inner reality of the mind, unable to breathe outside it, unable to live with it, unable to transcend it, unable to escape it. Human beings are wretched creatures indeed.

Try not to ask me ways we can access each other's worlds, if I can answer that for you, it would be in my Phd thesis.

I would think that when I am alone, I am in my most natural state. In quantum physics, when a particle is not characterized or concretized by the intervention of the observer, it can exist in any state. Perhaps can be said of a human being as well, without the definition and crystallization by society, it is at its most free. Even if it is a lonely world, even if no one can enter my world, even if I am alone, solitude is still of vital importance to me. It allows me distance, not from myself or the external world, but my own interference and interaction with the external world. I cannot distance myself from myself for reflection and I refuse to use abstract and constructed definitions on myself and the external world will always at a distance.

But what happens when I am alone then? In Buddhism, the self and the ego has no permanence and in a sense does not truly exist. And will there exist a vacuum in the bubble? Or will the bubble disappear? Neither, for a vacuum does not truly exist. In quantum mechanics, a space totally devoid of of particles is impossible. In fact, a vacuum is a sea full of virtual particles, appearing and disappearing, taking energy and returning them back to the surrounding, all taking place in Planck time, the shortest possible unit of time.

Note: Virtual creation of particles has severe implication on the lifespans of blackholes, it was postulated by Stephen Hawkings. My favorite Casimir effect actually corroborate his hypothesis.

If I cannot exist, yet I cannot not exist, then what am I? Allow me then to be Buddha's silence.