Osho – Asango means absolute aloneness. It does not mean loneliness. Loneliness is a negative state, it is miserable. You are hankering for the other and the other is not available; you would like to be with the other but you are forced to be lonely. Loneliness is enforced, it is empty. Aloneness is positive; it is not forced. You don’t miss the other; on the contrary, you find yourself. The other is completely forgotten, you rejoice in your being; that is aloneness.
Aloneness makes one an individual, otherwise a person remains just a part of the crowd, dependent, in subtle ways a slave. Freedom is the fragrance of aloneness. And the paradox is that only one who knows what aloneness is, is capable of love too; that is one of the mysteries of life. Only an individual can love: you can love only when you are, otherwise who is going to love? People go on playing the game of love but they ARE not, so those gestures are empty. There is no substance in it; it is just fantasy… sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, but it is fantasy all the time. Only a real person can love, only an individual can love. Love can only come out of your being, never otherwise. And in aloneness the being is found.
So this is the paradox: the person who hankers for the other never finds it possible to commune with the other because he is not; there is nobody to commune. So he goes on rushing from one relationship to another, from one thing to another, from one sensation to another sensation; he goes on hoping and goes on being frustrated at every step. His whole life is just a hope and a frustration, and no hope is ever fulfilled. He chases the other but he never finds the other, because he has not done the homework: he has not yet found himself.
Asango means one who is alone, and out of that aloneness, all that is beautiful is born: love, freedom, silence, communion. So aloneness is not anti-love or anti-relationship: aloneness is the very foundation of love and relationship. And it is a very very ecstatic state of being; it is not empty. So those two words, aloneness and loneliness, appear to be synonymous; they are not. Linguisticaly they may be, but existentially not; they are poles apart. Loneliness is darkness, impotence; aloneness is light, potence. Aloneness has a power to it.
Source – Osho Book “Don’t Bite My Finger, Look Where I’m Pointing”