The Capacity To Be Alone

“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.”
– Osho

5 Comments leave a comment below

  1. Osho is another name for Rajneesh — he was a cult leader who, among other shady and/or pretty objectively lousy things he did/got his followers to do, also ultimately planned to poison the water supplies of the town he had pretty much taken over in order to set up his cult (though he blamed it on his assistant and various others, but he still ended up having to leave the States) in order to control the local government (this sounds insane, but it really did happen — salmonella poisoning was his jam). It’s actually very interesting and you should look up the whole story, but basically…he’s not the greatest person to be learning life lessons from, just thought you might want to know.

  2. I liked this quote and then read Alice’s comment. Whoa.

  3. @alice I’ve been reading about Rajneesh for the past 30 years now, and what you write is new to me indeed. What is your source?

  4. There are literally dozens of articles about this easily findable online — The Atlantic Monthly has a nice concise and comprehensive one, if you want to start somewhere. (But, I mean, even the general Rajneesh Wikipedia page mentions this stuff, so it isn’t like it’s secret unknown information.) If you do some searches for ‘Rajneesh voter fraud’ or ‘Rajneesh poisoning’ you’ll find all sorts of internet holes full of information to fall down.

  5. Poisoning with salmonella looks like was Sheela’s plan, who then grabbed the money and fled from the scene. Osho accused these people and asked the authorities to investigate. Btw he was keeping silent for 3 years then (his personal way of contemplation), so the terrorist had little hindrance on stabbing the commune in the back.
    How can someone who speaks such words plan to poison and kill people? What about the aftermath? Poisoning 700+ people and nobody would have guessed anything? Even the dumbest would have understood it was suicidal. So. Might be also a false flag, who knows.