Inner Truth

“Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone” wrote Paul Tillich. For millennia, great writers and thinkers have extolled the benefits of solitude, for reflection, inner peace and even to bring us closer to each other.  Yet with the most recent social research suggesting that more and more people are suffering from loneliness and that loneliness itself is worse for your physical and mental health than even alcohol and lack of sleep, there are some interesting questions that arise about the ontological nature of these two states and how we can be with both of them constructively.  To explore this I spoke with Robert Kull Ph.D., who in 2001 traveled to a remote uninhabited island on the rainy, wind-swept coast of southern Chile, more than one hundred miles from the nearest person. There he built a shelter and lived alone for a year to explore the physic