Are You a "Second-Hand Human Being"?

The one who is alone is innocent

One of the factors of sorrow is the extraordinary loneliness of man. You may have companions, you may have gods, you may have a great deal of knowledge, you may be extraordinarily active socially, talking endless gossip about politics—and most politicians gossip anyhow—and still this loneliness remains. Therefore, man seeks to find significance in life and invents a significance, a meaning. But the loneliness still remains. So can you look at it without any comparison, just see it as it is, without trying to run away from it, without trying to cover it up, or to escape from it? Then you will see that loneliness becomes something entirely different.

We are not alone. We are the result of a thousand influences, a thousand conditionings, psychological inheritances, propaganda, culture. We are not alone, and therefore

we are secondhand human beings. 

When one is alone, totally alone, neither belonging to any family though one may have a family, nor belonging to any nation, to any culture, to any particular commitment, there is the sense of being an outsider—outsider to every form of thought, action, family, nation. And it is only the one who is completely alone who is innocent. It is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.

The Book of Life, December 5, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995

"...as I post this, I become aware of the irony of it! Although I resonate with the truth of this realization, I realize that even this truth is possibly adding to my conditioning... my "second-handedness"! The truth is a tricky business when it is conveyed or gossipped about. And yet, I am better for the awareness of it"