However, our loneliness of spirit can be cured
— independent of our personal relationships.
If our interior hollowness is filled, we no longer use other persons
to plug-up our inner emptiness and fill-in our deficiencies of being.
Instead of trying to fit other people into our interior gap,
we find ourselves loving
from a deep richness, fullness, & completeness.
We are empowered to give to others
without expecting anything in return.

Altho each person’s journey toward this liberation is individual,
we can, nevertheless, distinguish three movements within our spirits:
1. We separate interpersonal loneliness from existential loneliness.
2. We abandon our former attempts to solve our Malaise by love.
3. We leap across the Abyss
…….and find ourselves freed from loneliness of spirit.

If our problem is really existential rather than interpersonal,
we need an existential solution,
rather than a psychological method of healing.
The same inner sensitivity and subjectivity
that enabled us to grapple with our existential loneliness
can now help us to grope our individual ways to Existential Freedom.

Just how we enter the new condition of wholeness
will probably always remain a mystery.
Each of us can only try to become sensitive to those interior moments
when we spontaneously find ourselves whole and filled.
If we learn how to attune ourselves better to such moments of peace,
we might discover how to be so that such moments will return.

The surprising way in which Existential Freedom happens to us
tells us that this new way of being it is not
a latent personality characteristic now blooming.
So when we find ourselves living beyond existential loneliness,
we are not tempted to be proud, as if it were a personal achievement.
Our new completeness is not the result of strenuous internal efforts.
The transformation comes precisely when we give up striving.
And that might be all we will ever know about the process:
how we orient ourselves internally to enable completeness to come.

When we discover how to open ourselves to this gift,
our hollow yearning is filled, our loneliness of spirit is cured.
In that very place in our depths where we used to feel
empty, lacking, deficient, incomplete, lonely, & needy,
we now find ourselves satisfied and full.

This new fulfillment empowers us to love in a new way.
Instead of trying to use others to fill our aching existential Void,
we can now appreciate them for the persons they really are.
We no longer need to cling to others
because their absence does not throw us back into loneliness of spirit.

If we discover how to live beyond existential loneliness,
we are empowered to love from fullness rather than emptiness.
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-James Park