Yogi Bhajan Quotes on Isolation and Connection

Loneliness is the saddest thing on the Earth. Group consciousness takes away the loneliness—I am not alone; I have many brothers and sisters. And this is a unique power—when these brothers and sisters and goodness inspire me to the goodness of myself, and I know I am good, and around me there is a goodness of all my brothers and sisters.
3/11/74

Isolation is not the law of life. Some people totally isolate themselves. Some people limit themselves in little bigger ways and smaller ways. As long as you isolate yourself in any identity, you have lost sight of Infinity. Identity is given to you for reaching out to Infinity.
7/3/95

However much you don’t understand, that much you contract. And if you are contracted, then what is the use of life?
-Success and the Spirit; The Breath of Life is a Gift to Share

When you think the Universe is different from you and you are different from the Universe, or you want to be different than the Universe and you want to make the Universe different—“I want my own world”—ha, ha, you are asking for direct trouble. How can you compete with God?
5/5/78

When you do a sadhana in the sangat, you enrich yourself in multiple ways. First, the isolation which can hit anybody and make them go totally crazy is defeated. Secondly, when all of you meditate on God, the total effect of your sadhana becomes multiplied by the number of people participating.
-KRI International Aquarian Teacher Training Manual 

You cannot live isolated. You may pretend or you may practice isolation, but it is not a fact that you are an isolated human being. You may confine yourself in a very little closet, still you will vibrate. Your magnetic field will vibrate. Your astral projection will vibrate. Your physical elements vibrate. Your mind vibrates. And these vibrations will affect everybody else in your surroundings, in your frequency and in your range. So you are not individual. We affect each other.
3/1/72

You have to reach out and touch people. You have to mend your relationships. You have to build in yourself the unison-ness of the human mind—psychologically and sociologically. Give beautiful smiles and songs to each other.
1/5/00

In group sadhana individual auras merge and form a group aura. If the group is well-tuned into the Infinite, a rainbow aura forms that reflects all colors. A bluish color of sincerity and devotion predominates. This auric transformation aids the practitioner in making the step beyond ego-centeredness.
-Aquarian Teacher Teacher Training Manual

How can you have satisfaction when you do not accept loneliness as the highest state of consciousness? When you reach the top of all, you become One. Lonely. Exclusive. In that exclusive oneness, the loneliness, the One within you is awakened. 
3/29/87

If we squeeze down, close down ourselves, and start judging and punishing and laying rules on each other, all we are creating is fear. Let us become as vast as God is and hug each other, love each other. Let us be warm and shining and beautiful and bright.
5/20/95

Take care of the spiritual factor of your life by joining with others to experience and elevate yourself, the group, and the Universe. 
-Aquarian Teacher Training Manual

It will not be the fact to build more earthly facilities and just become isolated and corner yourself as much as you can. We are now marching forward to that era when this Information Age will broil down everybody to a reality, and every person will act for higher self.
1/5/00

We are group, we are energy; I am not alone. I am not by myself. I can muster the strength of so many people. That is group consciousness: I am not alone.. 
3/11/74

Group consciousness in morning sadhana is to help each other. If I am trying to sleep, another is not sleeping. If, in this whole group, one person opens up to God just once, we will all be blessed in his openness.
-KRI International Aquarian Teacher Training Manual

What is wrong with being social? What’s wrong with meeting others? Why do you act like baboons jumping all the time? Why do you talk about miseries all the time? All this karma adds up. It is your dharma to show the light and the path to all. Let your memory ever be that you will uplift everything.
-Success and the Spirit

The state of compassion is when you do not recognize any other identity other than you. You’ll have no fear, and you’ll have no vengeance, because you’ll be alone. Loneliness, the oneness, is the ultimate reality of all times and all ingredients. All tattwas merge to be one. I urge you to create a surge to merge with one lonely being called God.
3/29/87

There is only one power which nobody can defeat. It’s longing to belong. Your strength is your longing to belong to that identity which is the reality, which is the Infinity.
7/10/91

A leader has to do three things. The first is sacrifice. The second is stand alone. The third is lead. A leader is one who can stand on the top of the ladder and stay balanced and alone.
6/30/94

The development of group consciousness into the experience of Infinity is the bridge to Universal Consciousness. Barriers will always exist. Lack of knowledge, lack of a teacher, ego, fear, and karma are all barriers. These barriers keep a person limited. Group consciousness releases the unlimited self and fulfills the spiritual longing.
-KRI Aquarian Teacher Training Manual

The Age of Aquarius is bringing unexpected changes. Not only you, but everybody is going to be lonely and you are a part of that cycle of loneliness. Therefore, create a relationship. It’s a time to agree, a time to listen, a time to cooperate. It’s a time to trust. 
4/5/94

When you become lonely and you’ll not love yourself, then you’ll have tears, you’ll have pain. It does not reach the uniqueness of the loneliness of the oneness of the One, the highest of all. Unconsciously you all reach for oneness. Consciously you all deny it.
3/29/87

If you are not intermingled with that vastness, if you have not absolutely surrendered yourself into the Totality of this existence, life, then you will feel very independent, lonely, confused, and live a cursed life. You will be just one person—born and died; that’s it. You never came out. Your ego, fears, and commotions are a cocoon, you will never hatch, blossom, and be beautiful.
-The Mind: It’s Projections and Multiple Facets

People do not know how to take care of their loneliness. The majority of people who suffer today feel that they are lonely. And loneliness comes from a very inner being of you and that is your soul. Your soul is lonely because it wants to be with God, it wants to feel the inflow of the divine spirit.
4/27/82

When you say, “I am not this. I am not that. I am not here. I am not there,” who are you talking to? This life of yours is meant to be a life of all within you and all existing in you. God is omnipresent and omnipotent. So are you.
-Success and the Spirit

The whole pain of life starts when the hunger of the soul is not taken care of. The soul is hungry and needs to be fulfilled by the spirit of the higher self, through the word of higher being, by the company of the holy.
4/27/82

If one has walked into sadhana with heart and soul in a prayerful mind, we will all benefit. That is the power of group sadhana.
-KRI International Aquarian Teacher Training Manual

Isn’t it amazing that we call ourselves civilized human beings, with churches, religious teachers, yogis, swamis, preachers, and counselors—all with tons of status—yet you are all mentally alone? There are books, libraries, and magazines, but you are still unfortunate and still alone. You have never been taught that this loneliness is a power. You don’t have a practice, so every day you become harsher and harsher and harder and harder. You have never been taught to become you. You have been taught to become “somebody.”
9/10/95

If you must do sadhana by yourself, then while you are chanting, imagine a million others all around you. Hear them all chanting, with you in the middle, not moving at all. Feel that you do not chant physically, and yet are leading the chant and letting the chant lead you. As you imagine this, continue chanting.
-KRI International Aquarian Teacher Training Manual 

How long can one escape from the oneness of the One, where one ultimately belongs?
1/31/75

Do you know each other? No. You work hard your whole life, and never know each other. Not to understand compassion is not to understand God. God is an impulse of expansion and man is a compassionately understanding expansion.
-Success and the Spirit

Apply one to everything. Apply oneness to your enemies; apply oneness to your friends; apply oneness to your calamities; apply oneness to your destruction; apply oneness to your construction; apply oneness to everything. You will feel great. Your fear will be gone, your tragedy will melt away, your sorrow will be gone. 
6/28/92

What rules you is fear. Fear of each other. Phobia. Phenomenal phobia of your spirit, your soul. That’s why you can’t surrender. 
4/5/94

We cannot live with our cold depression. We cannot live with our open denial. We cannot live with our isolation. Be open. Be straight and be yourself.
8/28/96

Without vastness and an enriched mind, you entangle in earth and try to have everything and end up with nothing. Husbands fight with wives. Father fights with the children. Children fight with the mother. There’s no familiarity, no capacity of connection. You do not develop anything and there is no depth.
-The Mind: It’s Projections and Multiple Facets

Blessed are those who get it together to get it together. Together they join, meet, communicate and walk together.
8/28/96

The breath of life is the ultimate cause of your living and has the purpose that you must grow from your smallness. You are creating a universe within the Universe. That is what is called the psychological, sociological and personal effect of isolation. Don’t think in just boxes. Think as the huge Universe and be part of it.
7/19/94

By isolating you block all the opportunities, all the wealth, all the happiness and everything which should come to you and belong to you. You put your shields up; nothing can enter. If you are an open, wide, honest, giving, receiving, smiling, kind person, even God can walk into you. 
7/19/94

Let your isolation go, let your anger go, and you’ll become part of the Universe. The Universe has a language of love and it’s a continued existence. So please let your shortcomings go and love Infinity. 
5/16/98

The only thing you will know when you are compassionate and as vast as the ocean, is that everybody else is like a little boat on it. Everybody is a part of you. If you do not understand that everybody is a part of you, then you do not understand who you are.
-Success and the Spirit

You have all isolated yourself from the world individually like islands. That is very unfair. This isolation has always brings unhappiness. Life is to share, not to destroy your identity, but to share your identity and elevate another person.
10/21/93

Every soul needs to see the light and get rid of personal darkness. There is a maturity in it. There is a fulfillment in it. There is a joy in it. 
8/28/96

All these yogis who ran to the caves and hid themselves and didn’t socialize and didn’t come out to work—Guru Nanak told them, “What are you? You are a bunch of individuals who have run away. You have hidden yourselves in the hills. You are no human; you are no use to anybody. You are unable to share your spirit.” 
12/29/82

It’s a proven scientific fact that none of you is individual. You are all interdependent. You are woven into each other. You are knitted. This knitting of you, you do not recognize.
3/1/72

You’re all afraid to become lonely. You do not know what to do with your loneliness, because you do not know how to give. Give your loneliness—that oneness, that ecstasy, that state of higher consciousness.
3/29/87

Expand, elevate. Your horizon will become big; you will know more, you will be happy. Contract, isolate, cry and die—the choice is yours.
5/14/98

Don’t hide out. Be holy, don’t put yourself in the hole. Expand the horizon. 
6/7/92

There is an emptiness in our life and that emptiness we cannot fulfill because that emptiness is a calling of the soul, like a candle needs to be lit, and though the candle will be consumed, the soul will be redeemed and free.
8/28/96

You make fences. You’re controlling yourself, “I am me. I am for myself.” But when prosperity comes, it will find all the hurdles you have created. You are not for all. You are not for goodwill for humanity. You are not unique and open to all winds.
-Success and the Spirit

When you are asked to deliver, you can get scared, you can get inferior, you can hide out, you can say no. That’s your choice, but that choice will destroy you, not God.
6/14/92

When you have your negative mind and it controls you, you live in a dungeon. Mind controls you with rational ideas. It gives you logic and reason. It gives you right and wrong, but it will never let you sing your song of life. It will never let you grow. It will let you go, it will scare you, you will be isolated, you will be just good for nothing. It will put you in your own dungeon. You will never see the brightness of yourself, and when you will not see the brightness of self, people are not going to see, and when people are not going to see, you will not have opportunities. When you will not have opportunities, you will be frustrated, you will be angry; you start losing your self-control. When you lose self-control, you will have no self-esteem later on because everyone will say, “He’s an idiot, he’s an angry person. Leave him alone.” You will not be appreciated.
3/9/94

You let your soul live lonely, die lonely and squeeze it to suffocate into its own extremities. The soul needs a little food all the time—a little word here, a little word there, a little kindness, a little love of God.
4/27/82