“When I was in third grade--the age of many of the boys here--my parents had debated whether or not to buy me a pair of [special soccer shoes]...Here in Bolivia most of the kids played in bare feet, and they had as much fun as we ever had. Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something that we do only in comparison to others. I took off my shoes.”

“Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others.”

“Meditation is the way to be with ourselves and to learn to accept our own aloneness. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego can not function. In aloneness, you are not. I have always been comfortable with my own aloneness as an inner source of love, joy, truth, silence and wholeness. When we depend on other people, it becomes a bondage - instead of a freedom. I took this sunday as a meditation to be consciously alone, and to accept all feelings of pain, of not being loved and the fear of being nobody that would come up during the meditation. This meditation goes up and down during the day: at certain moments, I can totally accept my aloneness. It feels fine to accept that I am alone and that I am nobody. At other moments, I feel the pain of not being loved, when the meditation brings up how dependence on other people is a barrier to totally accept my aloneness. I take a coffee at a restaurant. I am the only person that sits alone in the restaurant, while the other guests are couples and families eating sunday dinner. It brings up painful feelings of not being loved and wanting to be needed by other people, when I see how much people cling to each other in the couples and the families. Escaping your aloneness through relationships and needing other people's attention through being a teacher, a politician or by being rich or famous, are ways of escaping the pain of aloneness. But then the relationships are not really love. Only when you are capable of being alone, you can really love. When we can be alone, we discover the inner source of love, which is our true nature. When we can be alone, it open the door to be one with the Whole.”

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”

“We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.”

“Acceptance leads to the direct experience of true love. It confronts us with the awareness that love has nothing to do with what is advertised in consensus reality, that there is a deeper love shunned by the outer world. This love becomes our task to explore, even if this means doing so alone. A most significant experience on the way to acceptance is to acknowledge aloneness. Aloneness (all-oneness) is our authentic nature. We are always alone. We came into this planet alone and we will leave alone. And also during our whole staying in this world, no matter how we engage in relationships, we continue to be alone, although we may forget about it or pretend it is not the case.True love have nothing to do with the idea that someone is the other half of my soul and that I need him or her in order to be whole and feel complete. Love is not being half of an entirety with another, love is being both a whole, is accepting to be alone, and only when you can be alone with someone there is true love regardless of whether this aloneness is accepted by the other or not.”