Overcoming Existential Loneliness and the Delusions It Creates
How depression, anxiety, and spiritual delusions are protective mechanisms blinding Deeper self-knowledge.
During the process of awakening it is guaranteed that you’ll feel existential loneliness. In fact, it’s this feeling that moved me and most seekers to self-realization.
It’s the feeling that nothing in the cosmos could ever make you whole. Nobody is there to truly share what it’s like to be you. Nobody there to understand the depth of your being. And even if someone could, even this wouldn’t be satisfying. As time will eat each brief moment of connection alive.
From this feeling of loneliness most psychological afflictions come. There is a resistance to that loneliness. A being inside wishing to not be alone at all costs. And from there it fights against reality, wanting it to be something that it is not. Inventing all sorts of mechanisms, belief systems, and emotional blackmail strategies to avoid facing the truth underneath. The truth that this loneliness is not what it seems.
Three afflictions
There are three main afflictions that this sense of loneliness creates:
- Dullness and depression
- Anxiety and fear
- Delusions and belief systems
All of them must be overcome before the loneliness can disappear. Before the true nature behind it can be seen. A silver lining. A sense of deeper connection. A sense of wholeness. But first we must understand what these afflictions are and how they function.
Dullness and depression
Dullness and depression is very common. When reality is seen to be empty there is a sense of disillusionment with life. If it all dies and withers anyway, what’s the point? And the more you look for a point, the more you won’t find one. So then you say “fine universe, so be it” and repress all aliveness inside of you that wishes to be expressed.
Behind all dullness there is repression. The natural human mind is not dulled out. There is something preventing you from the aliveness that wants to desperately come out. And the stronger the defense mechanism against it is, the more dull you feel. To the point where depression seems like the natural state of things. If there is no way out and there seems to be objectively no point, then it’s hopeless.
This hopelessness feeds on itself. It becomes obsessed with itself, justifying its own hopelessness again and again until it is believed as fact. With thoughts of shame, guilt, and unworthiness. Belief systems that further this dull state. All so that the repression can keep on going, to not reveal whatever is underneath.
All this is quite delusional for the mind to do. But delusional does not mean not real in experience. To bring that out alone can be tricky if one does not know where to start or what the mechanism is. But the repression is not effective. Life feels unsatisfying and is in search of something better. Energy spills out. This happens in a ton of self-destructive ways. But the most evident ones are...
Anxiety and fear
Anxiety and fear is the flip side of this process. Energy that wishes to be acknowledged having no real way to be expressed. Depression can be said to be the focus on repression. And anxiety can be viewed as fear of expression. What if I find something I truly desire and act it out? What is going to happen when I am seen for who I truly am?
But for most, these thoughts are also repressed, but they are felt in the swings between restlessness and dullness. Anxiety and depression often work together, like a pendulum swing. Anxiety leads to a deeper need for depression and vice versa. But each person processes this differently. Each individual has different mechanisms that keep these processes functioning. Belief systems, habits, and ways of thinking that keep the mental process going.
It’s very important to note that this is what it really is: a mental process. As much as the mind is trying to convince you that it’s some objective assessment of how things are and will be forever, it’s not. Apart from negative thoughts of entrapment, it is actually healthy to notice these feelings. Both anxiety and numbness is like a fever of the mind. It’s a symptom wanting to be acknowledged, telling you something is wrong and can be healed. All emotions are a signal to the nervous system that something can or should be done.
But negative thoughts of entrapment are really nefarious. Because it’s the mind actively reasserting the symptoms not as an illness to heal, but as externalized nature. As if there is something inherently wrong with yourself or reality that can’t be mended. As if the loneliness itself is an unsolvable existential problem. As if you are ultimately separated from whatever it is you’re seeking. Think the same thoughts often enough, and the self becomes entrapped through belief systems.
Delusions and beliefs
Most belief systems are used to strengthen this entire mechanism of avoidance and repression. It’s avoidance of loneliness by grasping onto concepts and ideas. They also strengthen the perception that you are accessing something truly external that solidifies your entrapment.
When beliefs get really desperate to avoid the loneliness, they tend to enter the realm of delusions. Simply put, a delusion is a false idea or belief. There is something to be said here about how all life is an illusion that the universe makes up to escape eternal loneliness. We will touch on this in this essay and in other work of mine. But to be clear here I am referring to the delusions that come from our three afflictions.
The process of awakening is to shed all false beliefs and illusions. This process causes many to notice how many delusions there actually are, and how deep they go. Suddenly the most fundamental things get questioned. Like the nature of reality, the idea of self, and other. Foundations of who we think we are get realized as false or illusionary. From there the sense of aloneness can strengthen. As even the suppression mechanisms of beliefs that also provided us with some sense of identity dissolve. Without a clear ground, new ideas that would seem insane for an ordinary person suddenly seem experientially verifiable:
God complexes, solipsism, persecution paranoia, the prison planet, and other existentially troubling modes of being. An entire new class of beliefs that can severely inhibit normal daily function.
All have the same root cause, and they are the core culprits blocking deeper awakening. And it’s difficult because the problem isn’t even that they are all 100% false. It’s more about what the mind does and processes about these ideas that make them false. And to be able to tell truth from delusion becomes difficult when all you see is your own visceral experience.
Since all these belief systems are self-imposed and externalized as true, seeing them as untrue or at least incomplete is the only way out. And it requires a willingness to look into areas of yourself you previously did not want to look at. Areas that might feel even more solid than previous beliefs. Each person is very unique in that regard, but there are universal principles I’ve observed in myself and others that repeat.
God complex
Believing oneself to be god or identical to god is a very tricky belief. Because there is a huge semantical game to be played here depending on how you define ‘god’. But from an experiential perspective I know personally how true this feels. It doesn’t feel like a matter of belief at all but a matter of fact. Which is something all delusions have in common. It doesn’t matter what you think when reality smacks you in your face with it.
When I had my first “god realization” it was very shocking. It was an experience that can’t really be put into words. But the logical thought was something like this:
All I can truly know is my own conscious experience. This field of perception, thought, and sensation. I know for certain that **I Am** because I perceive. If I am only knowing myself through perceptions, then “I” and “my perceptions” are the same. I am the field of perception.
I am told God is an all-knowing, omnipresent being. Even if I don’t really believe in god, what could that mean?
At this point, my sense of self was already shaky, dissolved in some sort of sea of awareness with no clear center. As I had questioned the nature of the self a lot at this point. In this moment, witnessing my line of thinking, I remember fear and hesitation. A feeling unsure of if it really wanted to go there. As if I knew where this was headed, but I did so anyway. So I continued:
Okay. If God is all-present, then God must be the very fabric of existence, the totality of what is. All of perception and all of being. Then it would also be all-knowing. And it would also be a ‘being’ as reality is being. All of existence.
If it all boils down to awareness, consciousness, perception, then I am not in the universe. The universe is inside of me. I am the space in which all of reality happens. If God is the totality of reality, and I am the conscious space that is experiencing this totality right here right now, then this is not a metaphor.
What the fuck@! There is no separation at all!
I am all of reality as consciousness experiencing itself!
Oh my god. Holy shit!
I AM GOD.
Truth or delusion
Well, the truth of this realization is a permanent shift in perception of self, reality, and consciousness. It’s true in a way that it changed something. The thought process wasn’t as straight forward as I laid out here, and the moment of realization is not the first time I thought about this. But it was the conscious state that I was in plus this reflection that made the realization feel real. But I had to grapple with that for a while as I felt like I must be delusional. If this is truth, the existential implications are so utterly profound it collapses the human psyche in a way it feels like it can’t handle it. It did not feel like philosophy anymore. It felt like I was downloading some forbidden conscious knowledge into my mind. And people for sure will declare me as crazy.
Now philosophers like Spinoza’s version of god already had discussed these ideas way back. And panpsychist ideas or analytical idealism à la Bernardo Kastrup make it very cohesive and logical. But I didn’t have the framework back then, neither did it really matter because the lived experience was mind-shattering.
But here is where it gets tricky. Because the integration process of such a realization is really where the needle lies between delusional and Truthful. They flirt with each other and come very close together at times.
Some don’t go that far and stay in the realm of “I am consciousness” or “I am awareness.” More manageable but still destabilizing for sure. I could write an entire essay about the differences to your mental structure depending on what words you use to define your conscious self. But that’s for another time.
The delusional part is that for a while the identity starts to identify with “I am god” in a way that is isolating. In most cases something arrogant seems to emerge. Something pretentious. Once fully convinced, it’s suddenly not just “I believe I am god” but “I’ve realized the nature of reality and others have not.”
And in more severe cases it’s a personification of godhood. It’s taken to be literal and individualized. Like an anthropomorphizing except that the object is you. The mind makes you personally god and the only god. All other humans might also be god in some sense, but they are not here now. Not in this current timeline experiencing yourself. God as being in only one body at a time. And this is how solipsism develops.
Solipsism
As amazing as being god sounds, it does deepen the sense of loneliness a thousand-fold. Because let’s be real. As long as you are in the human body form you know you can’t be all-powerful. You know there is something separating you from the whole. So even while seeing yourself as god there is this odd duality between you and other people and you and an imaginary “higher self.” There is also fear of having absolutely gone insane. You might think “god, now you’ve done it. Who will ever get to truly understand you now, relate to you now. Of course you are eternally alone.” The nature of god seems to be aloneness itself.
Now instead of deepening your relationship to reality, you separate yourself more from its whole. The depth of this realization now becomes a deep disconnect with other people and other forms of being. And it starts to feel very clear that from whatever point of view you are perceiving, you are in the present moment of time and space. The only thing that perceives and will ever perceive. And when adding to this the idea that time is relative and you can’t ever witness another person’s consciousness, it seems reasonable to suspect that there might as well be no other consciousness at all. It’s all just you, in this body.
The mechanism behind solipsism is like stretching both repression and expression simultaneously. It feeds self-aggrandizement by hijacking the need for expression (fear). And it dulls everything out by disconnecting you from every other person, conscious being, or even external objects. It’s like infinite disconnection obsessed only with itself (depression). All pushing against the still present feeling of eternal aloneness.
What is happening here is that the ego has simultaneously decreased in size and increased in density. Instead of letting go into true emptiness, it has solidified emptiness itself by imagining that other people aren’t even real. It clings to the notion of self and other more so than ever.
To be alone there must be a separate you to be alone. Meaning there is a separation that is being believed in. But outside god realizations and solipsism, there might be a way more grounded way this suppression can get expressed.
Paranoia and persecution
Another way this affliction manifests is when people become convinced they are being followed. Feeling oneself to be the center of the universe can create the perception that everything revolves around you. As if other people are thinking, talking, stalking, or wanting something from you. And whatever this is, is trying to be hidden from you.
It’s fear of the unknown that has been found inward turned outward. And the unknown is now other people following you. People who think there are government conspiracies against them or that they’re persecuted by the Illuminati are more common than you might think. It speaks to a fear of being observed by a judging authority figure. But it’s just the self that is always watching. And always the ego which judges. Like other belief systems, it externalizes an internal problem of identity into the world.
But paranoia doesn’t even need to be this extreme state. When people smoke too much weed they also get paranoid. Weed erodes certain systems in your brain, making underlying systems more obvious. It reveals the ego scared of being seen, everything it’s trying to hide..
Like you want to find yourself from the inside but can’t find it. But others can see you from the outside. How you look, your body and behaviors, in a way you can’t. Especially not from their point of view. You know this odd feeling of being filmed and watching yourself back? Hearing your voice from an audio recording? This is how you truly appear to the world. Others can see you better than yourself. Solipsism is false because the reflections of you are real. And paranoia is fear that you remain real for the outside world even without the ego. As pure outer expression and visibility. So there is an uncertainty. Are you how others see you or how you see yourself? Both? Neither?
The question to cosmic loneliness
Paranoid delusions, even of government persecution or Illuminati conspiracies, show how deeply the ego digs itself into a hole just so it doesn’t admit its own lack of existence. But there is something underneath that is always there. And it is realer than real. Always seeing it all. The ego just makes it so uncertain of itself.
Even without solipsism or grand delusions, the loneliness is connected to the same underlying affliction. A separate identity wanting to be seen.
Being at peace with the fact that you can’t be found or located releases that uncertainty. This need to manage others’ judgments, the fear of being seen. True authentic expression starts with a fear of the unknown. The fear of genuine self-discovery. Once this fear is overcome it solidifies others’ perceptions of you as real. As matters of fact not to be controlled or manipulated. A product of your own expression, your way of being. Even if their perceptions are fundamentally unknown to you.
But then there is something else that becomes certain. Something that you’ve always seen and always known. A realization that seems so obvious yet you fought and denied all the time.
If you want to be known and understood with the depth only you can know yourself, then what could possibly be missing?
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