Comedian Louis C.K. was on the Conan show on September of 2013 and joked about how we avoid the truth by keeping busy with our smart phones. Smart phones users rush to text so they don’t want to face the fact that they are alone, because when they are in that moment of aloneness they feel something. It’s that thing, the loneliness thing: that when being alone brings up the feelings that we are really empty, and it scares the daylights out of us. We don’t want to go there, so we rush and text to whomever with the hope of escaping that feeling, and hoping we get a cool texting response. What are we actually avoiding? Louis C.K speaks about is that thing, the big empty, the awful feeling of being alone and powerless; however, if we stop what we are doing and face it and accept it, then, maybe happiness follows and fills the empty.
This is a Youtube video of Louis C.K on Conon’s show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c
Have you ever felt uncomfortable with the silence while being with friends or strangers and not knowing what to do or what to say? You can be in an elevator, at a party, having dinner or just standing waiting somewhere and it’s so painfully quite. At that moment that feeling comes up, we feel a need to escape the thing the big empty. We are constantly and always running from it and why is it so difficult for most of us to face the emptiness and the alone thing? Because we know that the big empty is telling us that we are really not happy and we try to fill the empty hoping that someone or some grand thing will fill the big empty: it never does.
In reality there are no models to help us; our parents by their example taught us the tricks on how to avoid it, so everyone is running away and hope they bump into a solution…. a good and solid escape path. Such as an over indulgence in sex, money, drugs, booze, or we have an obsession about our job, education, career, getting married, and caring for our children. However, no one can escape the great deep empty by just being and staying busy.
The work that we do is to help us develop courage to face our emptiness and find a way to fill it with true happiness. It is so necessary for the growth oriented individual that he or she must want to face this reality. In time we learn how to build mental and emotional strength: we build our courage to see what is actually there. As we learn how to study our nature without judgments, but with interest, this will develop a new sense of self that represents the ‘I’ of intelligence. Very few people know how to study their nature because what they normally experience is a desire to complain and a feeling of shame and loneliness comes up. We have no models of how to look and examine one-self. This is why it’s so important that we find someone who knows what it’s like and has been there. That someone who understands the way and the process of developing the new ‘Self” so we can with courage be able to be with the empty and not be destroyed. Then, we want to learn how to apply our mind to fill the empty and it’s in this process that we find our identity of the ‘Self’ which enables us to experience the ultimate feelings of joy, happiness and living.
Lewis
