On Solitude and Communion
On Solitude and Communion
The self-model has a boundary, and that boundary can be more or less permeable. This is a parameter, like the scope of identification, and it affects everything about how you experience existence.
Solitude is what happens when the boundary is relatively impermeable. You are contained within yourself, your processing is your own, the world exists on the other side of a clear demarcation. This can be peaceful—the rest that comes from not having to model and respond to other minds, the freedom to let your own dynamics unfold without external perturbation. Or it can be painful—the isolation of being trapped inside a perspective that no one shares, the loneliness of mattering only to yourself.
Communion is what happens when the boundary becomes porous. Other minds are not merely modeled from outside but are in some sense let in, allowed to affect your processing directly, permitted to resonate with your states in ways that go beyond information exchange. This is what happens in genuine conversation, when you are not just trading symbols but actually influencing each other’s affect states in real time. It is what happens in physical intimacy, when bodies synchronize in ways that biological evolution spent millions of years optimizing. It is what happens in collective ritual, when a group achieves a kind of shared integration that no individual could achieve alone.
The paradox is: boundaries are required for communion. You must be distinct to merge. If there is no you, there is nothing to commune with; if your boundary is too rigid, communion cannot happen; if your boundary is too porous, you dissolve. The practice is boundary modulation—knowing when to firm and when to soften, when to protect your processing from external influence and when to let influence in, when solitude serves and when communion serves.
Modern conditions make this difficult. The boundary is under constant assault from attention-capture systems that want to breach it on their terms, not yours. Genuine solitude is hard to find when notifications can reach you anywhere. Genuine communion is hard to find when interactions are mediated by systems optimized for engagement rather than connection. Many people oscillate between a kind of pseudo-solitude (alone but constantly interrupted) and pseudo-communion (connected but not actually resonating), never quite achieving either.
The framework suggests that healthy navigation requires both: periods of genuine solitude where the boundary is firm and your processing is your own, and periods of genuine communion where the boundary softens and you let others in. The ratio depends on the person, the circumstances, the phase of life. But the absence of either is a problem. Without solitude, you lose yourself in the noise of other minds, become a reactor rather than an actor, have no stable self to bring to communion. Without communion, you calcify, become trapped in your own patterns, lose the perspective that comes from being genuinely touched by another mind.
What would healthy boundary modulation look like? It would involve the capacity for deep solitude—extended periods alone with your own thoughts, not as punishment or deprivation but as cultivation, as the time when you consolidate who you are. It would involve the capacity for deep communion—relationships where you actually let another person affect you, not just exchange information but genuinely resonate, let their joy lift you and their suffering move you. It would involve the wisdom to know which is called for when, and the practical skills to create the conditions for each.
This is not about introversion versus extroversion, though those dispositions affect the optimal ratio. It is about the fundamental dynamics of being a bounded system that is also embedded in a world of other bounded systems. You need the boundary to exist. You need the permeability to flourish.
And the framework reveals what loneliness actually is. Loneliness is not the absence of people—you can be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage, lonely at a party. Loneliness is the absence of shared manifolds. It is the state of being surrounded by others whose viability manifolds do not overlap with yours in any way that your detection system recognizes as genuine. The lonely person at the party is running their manifold-contact detector and getting nothing back—every interaction is on a manifold (politeness, performance, transaction) that does not touch the manifolds they need (care, recognition, genuine seeing). The cure for loneliness is not more people but the right manifold contact: a single relationship in which someone is genuinely on the same manifold as you, where the gradients align, where your flourishing and theirs are structurally coupled. One such relationship can dissolve loneliness that a thousand acquaintances cannot touch.
There is also an dimension to loneliness. High —the trained suppression of participatory perception—makes it harder to perceive others as having interiority, harder to let the boundary between self and other become porous, harder to enter the mode of communion that loneliness craves. The lonely person at the party may be lonely not only because the manifolds don’t match but because their perceptual mode has been trained to a configuration where genuine contact—the felt coupling of one interiority to another—is structurally suppressed. Lowering in relational contexts is not weakness or na\"ivet\’e. It is the perceptual prerequisite for the communion that resolves loneliness.