Alone? Depend On It!

An incarnation of the Godhead and, to a lesser degree, any theocentric saint, sage or prophet is a human being who knows Who he is and can therefore effectively remind other human beings of what they have allowed themselves to forget: namely, that if they choose to become what potentially they already are, they too can be eternally united with the Divine Ground.
— Aldous Huxley, Introduction to Bhagavad-Gita (Prabhavananda and Isherwood), p. 13.

     You who travel with the wind, what weather-vane shall direct your course?
     What man's law shall find you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door?
     What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's iron chain.
     And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man's path?
— Kahlil Gibran, "On Laws," in The Prophet, p. 53.

     You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
     But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
— Kalil Gibran, "On Freedom," in Ibid., pp. 54-55.

     Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows — then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason."
     And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, — then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion."
     And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.
— Kalil Gibran, "On Reason and Passion," in Ibid., pp.58-59.

     But if love, for Proust, is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and, if neither can be realised because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not cosa mentale, at least the failure to possess may have the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible is merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture. Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication. Even on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expressions of personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them. Either we speak and act for ourselves — in which case speech and action are distorted and emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is not ours, or else we speak and act for others — in which case we speak and act a lie.
— Samuel Beckett, Proust, pp. 46-47.

"Man," writes Proust, "is not a building that can receive additions to its superficies, but a tree whose stem and leafage are an expression of inward sap." We are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known. "Man is the creature that cannot come forth from himself, who knows others only in himself, and who, if he asserts the contrary, lies."
— Samuel Beckett, Ibid., pp. 48-49.