Smiling in profile

Devotees bring him loneliness more often than almost any other private difficulty, and it arrives in several shapes: the widow whose house has gone silent, the young man working in a city where nobody knows him, the elderly parent whose children call on Sundays. He does not respond by telling them to find company, which is usually the advice they have already failed to act on.

What he offers instead is narrower and more honest. With the name running, the room is not empty in the way it was, because attention has somewhere to rest that is not the silence. He does not claim this replaces a person, and he does not tell a grieving widow that she has lost nothing. He is describing a change in the hours rather than a solution to the loss.

The distinction matters because loneliness has two parts and only one of them is about other people. There is the absence of company, which is real and which practice does not repair. And there is what the mind does with the empty hours, which is where nearly all of the suffering accumulates: the reviewing, the imagining, the conversations held with people who are not there.

That second part is available to be worked on immediately, and it is the part he addresses. A mind with nothing to hold will hold whatever is nearest, and in an empty house what is nearest is the emptiness itself. Giving it the name is not a distraction from the pain; it is declining to spend the entire evening rehearsing it, which is a different thing and a considerably kinder one.

He is also alert to a mistake devotees make in the other direction. Practice should not be used to withdraw from people who are still available. Someone who stops answering the phone because they would rather chant has not solved loneliness, they have arranged it, and he does not encourage that. Take the name and keep the relationships you have; the two are not competing for the same hours.

What it asks of you is to change what the quiet hours are made of. Do not wait until the evening is unbearable before starting. Let the name run through the ordinary parts of the day, the cooking, the walk, the commute, so that by the time the house is silent the mind already has somewhere familiar to go. The silence does not disappear. It stops being the only thing in the room.

The rest of his most repeated sayings are on the quotes page, the teaching they belong to is set out on the teachings page, and the questions devotees bring him about anger, money, family and grief are answered on the questions answered page.