Our dissatisfaction with the world around us brings to bear upon us our own dissatisfactions which are ever present within us. From this standpoint, escape is an illusion in which we find ourselves in the same predicament we thought to escape from.
Sensing, more or less, the inescapability of life accounts for much of our fall into degeneration including the degeneration of our culture from which we cannot escape except to transcend it which is not really an escape since it involves seeing ultimate reality.
What stands between us and ultimate reality is a foreboding including a weakness so insidious that we can only attempt to anesthetize our self rather than face it. Facing it thus becomes an act of personal courage because we also have to transcend our culture which is the single most difficult thing we must do.
This is Zen's intrapersonal path. It is not one given to interpersonal relationships. In transcending our false self we also transcend the almost desperate need for the interpersonal life which consumes much of our cultural human life. (Even our search for the perfect teacher is still interpersonal.)
The interpersonal life is all but consumed by projection. We constantly ascribe to other people our own own ideas, hopes, feelings, and attitudes which may not, in reality, be there. Here our imagination must work overtime. We have to fill-in what we do not know with what we imagine we know thereby deluding ourselves even more.
In the intrapersonal life which is what solitude is all about we are in various degrees of knowing our self by having to face our self or what we imagined wrongly to be our self. This false self is what we do not want to face, especially, when living is solitude (pañisallàna, pavivakà or viveka) which is the state of being isolated or separate from others. Thus alone, we have no one except ourselves to examine.
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