user13694: I'm in a strange situation right now (weird for me, at least).
These past few days have been intense days of reflection on the Dhamma, which generated two effects at the same time in my overall life:
1) I feel like I'm seeing things clearer than ever before. Anicca, Anatta and Dukkha are no more just simple intellectual statements, but they are the filter of most of my experiences. 
This is not a declaration of attainments nor anything alike, but rather an oportunity to share how true is the Dhamma and how much freedom can it bring to our lives.
I feel more at peace than ever before, and people around seem to be benefiting from these changes (or so it seems from the outside).
But...
2) I feel more isolated than ever before, which is not a bad thing in itself. It is rather a kind of peaceful loneliness, but loneliness nonetheless.
I feel like quite a few people could understand these feelings, and that I have few people around me to get advice from.
And so it seems be noticed by some close friends and acquantances. Some of them seem to think that I'm becoming something like a robot. I don't think that's the case. Maybe "equanimous" is the word I'd use to describe such state. 
One of my friends asked me if I talk to her just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship.
That question really freaked me out, especially because it seems to be pointing to some truth, but I cannot put my finger on it; I don't know if there's a real difference between those two motivations.
One part of me wants to keep going along this Path, because all of the peace it has brought to me.
The other part is not so sure if it's ready to lose its bonds, relationships and wordly goals and ties, feelings which can be ascribed to still being in love with Samsara, and still having ignorant tendencies.
I feel in a kind of crossroad right now.
Have you experienced something like this?
Is it possible to balance these two goals?
I'd really appreaciate any piece of advice, whether from personal experience or from suttas.
Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding!

user254: I guess "desire" (whether "worldly" or "for liberation") has two components: it's an ambition or a goal for the future ("I do X because I aspire towards Y"), a motive; and it's a preference ("I prefer Y", possibly "I'm attached to Y").
In summary, I guess you try to balance "Wholesome desires" for or about the future; combined with "liberation" in the present.
I have been motivated to behave "appropriately", where "appropriate behaviour" can be understood as "behaviour taught to children" -- for example, having a temper tantrum in a parking lot is "inappropriate behaviour"; whereas washing the food containers after eating a meal is "appropriate behaviour".
There are further definitions of "appropriate behaviour" for adults -- keeping laws -- but a lot of freedom too (e.g. to be or not to be a recluse, to practice this or to practice that).
But maybe "avoiding inappropriate behaviour" is a way to satisfy both desires: a way towards liberation, and, towards worldly situations. For all that the N8P is prescriptive (e.g. "right view, right effort"), the suttas are proscriptive too (e.g. "don't break the precepts, uproot the poisons, avoid the hindrances, abandon the fetters") -- I guess a lot of my desires have been proscriptive.
My recent questions on this site (e.g. here and here) have been wondering what to put in place of that negativity.

I'm not sure how anatta informs your view, is "the filter for most of your experiences".
If someone asked me now whether it was "just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship", I guess I'd answer something based on Dhamma (since the Dhamma has so much to say about compassion) -- maybe something like, "Relationships! They can be complicated, can't they. Perhaps you're right that compassion isn't real friendship, but I think it's a real part of friendship -- I think "compassion" is wanting someone to be happy, and wanting to avoid ever hurting someone -- and ideally that might go both ways in a relationship, both people feel that. There are other aspects to friendship too -- admiring someone for their virtues, generosity, self-sufficiency, their skills in interacting with people, bravery, kindness."
In terms of relationships, it's not all about "me" or "my loneliness" -- a more, kind of, objective question might be something like, "am I hurting this person? is this relationship beneficial or is it harmful?"
To get back to talking about compassion then, you might say, "There's more to a relationship than compassion, but harmlessness is a minimum. I don't want to say, 'I'm doing more good than harm': I need a relationship where I'm not hurting you at all."

You mentioned loneliness and isolation. I don't understand those words, possibly (if I project onto them from my own experience), they disappear when you stop thinking, "there is an 'I' who is isolated" (i.e. a self-view), and "I wish had a relationship" (i.e. a craving). I suppose I have a Theory of mind and therefore don't believe that I'm alone (instead, the Dalai Lama said once, "I'm not special, I'm like everyone else; seeing yourself as 'special' is a prison.").

As for, "Some of them seem to think that I'm becoming something like a robot. I don't think that's the case.", maybe there's less conflict if you don't contradict people.
So "Yes I space out a bit sometimes" might be an appropriate reply, might it?
My teachers' report card called me dans la lune when I first started grade school, so that's easy for me to accept, that people might see that.
And if they (friends) really want to talk about mental health and so on, then maybe that's no bad thing, an important topic, worth listening, conversing.
I guess my view of having an enlightened friend is that, "That's good -- mudita and metta. And yet, enlightened isn't meant to be (shouldn't be, ideally isn't) a handicap or an incapacity." Still there's a reason, I guess, why some people leave home, calling it a "dusty path" and so on, and (I don't know) perhaps that reason is to escape the social obligations which other people try to impose.

user471: Perhaps the essay "The Balanced Way" by Bhikkhu Bodhi could help you balance your renunciation with the ordinary world around you (but I guess your lady friend could see that you are probably already using this method):

Like a bird in flight borne by its two wings, the practice of Dhamma
  is sustained by two contrasting qualities whose balanced development
  is essential to straight and steady progress. These two qualities are
  renunciation and compassion. As a doctrine of renunciation the Dhamma
  points out that the path to liberation is a personal course of
  training that centers on the gradual control and mastery of desire,
  the root cause of suffering. As a teaching of compassion the Dhamma
  bids us to avoid harming others, to act for their welfare, and to help
  realize the Buddha's own great resolve to offer the world the way to
  the Deathless.
Considered in isolation, renunciation and compassion have inverse
  logics that at times seem to point us in opposite directions. The one
  steers us to greater solitude aimed at personal purification, the
  other to increased involvement with others issuing in beneficent
  action. Yet, despite their differences, renunciation and compassion
  nurture each other in dynamic interplay throughout the practice of the
  path, from its elementary steps of moral discipline to its culmination
  in liberating wisdom. The synthesis of the two, their balanced fusion,
  is expressed most perfectly in the figure of the Fully Enlightened
  One, who is at once the embodiment of complete renunciation and of
  all-embracing compassion.
Both renunciation and compassion share a common root in the encounter
  with suffering. The one represents our response to suffering
  confronted in our own individual experience, the other our response to
  suffering witnessed in the lives of others. Our spontaneous reactions,
  however, are only the seeds of these higher qualities, not their
  substance. To acquire the capacity to sustain our practice of Dhamma,
  renunciation and compassion must be methodically cultivated, and this
  requires an ongoing process of reflection which transmutes our initial
  stirrings into full-fledged spiritual virtues.
The framework within which this reflection is to be exercised is the
  teaching of the Four Noble Truths, which thus provides the common
  doctrinal matrix for both renunciation and compassion. Renunciation
  develops out of our innate urge to avoid suffering and pain. But
  whereas this urge, prior to reflection, leads to an anxious withdrawal
  from particular situations perceived as personally threatening,
  reflection reveals the basic danger to lie in our existential
  situation itself — in being bound by ignorance and craving to a world
  which is inherently fearsome, deceptive and unreliable. Thence the
  governing motive behind the act of renunciation is the longing for
  spiritual freedom, coupled with the recognition that self-purification
  is an inward task most easily accomplished when we distance ourselves
  from the outer circumstances that nourish our unwholesome tendencies.
Compassion develops out of our spontaneous feelings of sympathy with
  others. However, as a spiritual virtue compassion cannot be equated
  with a sentimental effusion of emotion, nor does it necessarily imply
  a dictum to lose oneself in altruistic activity. Though compassion
  surely includes emotional empathy and often does express itself in
  action, it comes to full maturity only when guided by wisdom and
  tempered by detachment. Wisdom enables us to see beyond the
  adventitious misfortunes with which living beings may be temporarily
  afflicted to the deep and hidden dimensions of suffering inseparable
  from conditioned existence. As a profound and comprehensive
  understanding of the Four Noble Truths, wisdom discloses to us the
  wide range, diverse gradations, and subtle roots of the suffering to
  which our fellow beings are enmeshed, as well as the means to lead
  them to irreversible release from suffering. Thence the directives of
  spontaneous sympathy and mature compassion are often contradictory,
  and only the latter are fully trustworthy as guides to beneficent
  action effective in the highest degree. Though often the judicious
  exercise of compassion will require us to act or speak up, sometimes
  it may well enjoin us to retreat into silence and solitude as the
  course most conducive to the long-range good of others as well as of
  ourselves.
In our attempt to follow the Dhamma, one or the other of these twin
  cardinal virtues will have to be given prominence, depending on our
  temperament and circumstances. However, for monk and householder
  alike, success in developing the path requires that both receive due
  attention and that deficiencies in either gradually be remedied. Over
  time we will find that the two, though tending in different
  directions, eventually are mutually reinforcing. Compassion impels us
  toward greater renunciation, as we see how our own greed and
  attachment make us a danger to others. And renunciation impels us
  toward greater compassion, since the relinquishing of craving enables
  us to exchange the narrow perspectives of the ego for the wider
  perspectives of a mind of boundless sympathy. Held together in this
  mutually strengthening tension, renunciation and compassion contribute
  to the wholesome balance of the Buddhist path and to the completeness
  of its final fruit.


user15027: Kalyāṇamittādivaggo: Good companionship and others
Zen teachers would say: Don't live a half-hearten life, and the wise praise 3 things: rendering help for ones parents, generosity, renouncing. Once the things done in right order, it would be a lot of self-cheating and the defilement kitchen, not to seek simply the way out. Actually there are less real obligations and the most compassionate gift for this world, for one self and all others, is to become being at least on the straight way to an Arahat. The world is already full of "Bodhisatvas" and soon there will be no more place for all of them...
So it's all about the question if one likes to get ride of ones "body-debts" or cheat one further on one of the many desired Ahara-hat-path laid out by Mara.
The younger the better, since an old tree is even harder to bend and handicaps for a full holly life can arise tomorrow.
(like always not given for trade, exchange, stacks for the world but for release and so most possible not for everyone)

user8157: 
One of my friends asked me if I talk to her just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship. That question really freaked me out, especially because it seems to be pointing to some truth

Indeed. Insightful or intuitive question by the lady 

One part of me wants to keep going along this Path, because all of the peace it has brought to me. The other part is not so sure if is
  ready to lose its bonds, relationships and wordly goals and ties,
  feelings which can be ascribed to still being in love with Samsara,
  and still having ignorant tendencies.

Worldly friends generally will not abandon you when you live a more isolated life. They like to reassure themselves you are not crazy when you occasionally turn up to one of their social events & act reasonably normally. This said, yes, a genuine Dhamma life in ordinary society is very isolated. It can be more isolated than living in a monastery (because in the monastery there may be some like-minded persons). 

13694: <p>I'm in a strange situation right now (weird for me, at least).
These past few days have been intense days of reflection on the Dhamma, which generated two effects at the same time in my overall life:</p>

<p>1) I feel like I'm seeing things clearer than ever before. Anicca, Anatta and Dukkha are no more just simple intellectual statements, but they are the filter of most of my experiences. 
This is not a declaration of attainments nor anything alike, but rather an oportunity to share how true is the Dhamma and how much freedom can it bring to our lives.
I feel more at peace than ever before, and people around seem to be benefiting from these changes (or so it seems from the outside).
But...</p>

<p>2) I feel more isolated than ever before, which is not a bad thing in itself. It is rather a kind of peaceful loneliness, but loneliness nonetheless.
I feel like quite a few people could understand these feelings, and that I have few people around me to get advice from.
And so it seems be noticed by some close friends and acquantances. Some of them seem to think that I'm becoming something like a robot. I don't think that's the case. Maybe "equanimous" is the word I'd use to describe such state. 
One of my friends asked me if I talk to her just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship.
That question really freaked me out, especially because it seems to be pointing to some truth, but I cannot put my finger on it; I don't know if there's a real difference between those two motivations.</p>

<p>One part of me wants to keep going along this Path, because all of the peace it has brought to me.
The other part is not so sure if it's ready to lose its bonds, relationships and wordly goals and ties, feelings which can be ascribed to still being in love with Samsara, and still having ignorant tendencies.</p>

<p>I feel in a kind of crossroad right now.</p>

<p>Have you experienced something like this?
Is it possible to balance these two goals?</p>

<p>I'd really appreaciate any piece of advice, whether from personal experience or from suttas.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding!</p>
 254: <p>I guess "desire" (whether "worldly" or "for liberation") has two components: it's an ambition or a goal for the future ("I do X because I aspire towards Y"), a motive; and it's a preference ("I prefer Y", possibly "I'm attached to Y").</p>

<p>In summary, I guess you try to balance "Wholesome desires" for or about the future; combined with "liberation" in the present.</p>

<p>I have been motivated to behave "appropriately", where "appropriate behaviour" can be understood as "behaviour taught to children" -- for example, having a temper tantrum in a parking lot is "inappropriate behaviour"; whereas washing the food containers after eating a meal is "appropriate behaviour".</p>

<p>There are further definitions of "appropriate behaviour" for adults -- keeping laws -- but a lot of freedom too (e.g. to be or not to be a recluse, to practice this or to practice that).</p>

<p>But maybe "avoiding inappropriate behaviour" is a way to satisfy both desires: a way towards liberation, and, towards worldly situations. For all that the N8P is prescriptive (e.g. "right view, right effort"), the suttas are <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aproscriptive" rel="nofollow noreferrer">proscriptive</a> too (e.g. "don't break the precepts, uproot the poisons, avoid the hindrances, abandon the fetters") -- I guess a lot of my desires have been proscriptive.</p>

<p>My recent questions on this site (e.g. <a href="https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/q/31442/254">here</a> and <a href="https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/q/31549/254">here</a>) have been wondering what to put in place of that negativity.</p>

<hr>

<p>I'm not sure how anatta informs your view, is "the filter for most of your experiences".</p>

<p>If someone asked me now whether it was "just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship", I guess I'd answer something based on Dhamma (since the Dhamma has so much to say about compassion) -- maybe something like, "Relationships! They can be complicated, can't they. Perhaps you're right that compassion isn't real friendship, but I think it's a real part of friendship -- I think "compassion" is wanting someone to be happy, and wanting to avoid ever hurting someone -- and ideally that might go both ways in a relationship, both people feel that. There are other aspects to friendship too -- admiring someone for their virtues, generosity, self-sufficiency, their skills in interacting with people, bravery, kindness."</p>

<p>In terms of relationships, it's not all about "me" or "my loneliness" -- a more, kind of, objective question might be something like, "am I hurting this person? is this relationship beneficial or is it harmful?"</p>

<p>To get back to talking about compassion then, you might say, "There's more to a relationship than compassion, but harmlessness is a minimum. I don't want to say, 'I'm doing more good than harm': I need a relationship where I'm not hurting you at all."</p>

<hr>

<p>You mentioned loneliness and isolation. I don't understand those words, possibly (if I project onto them from my own experience), they disappear when you stop thinking, "there is an 'I' who is isolated" (i.e. a self-view), and "I wish had a relationship" (i.e. a craving). I suppose I have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Theory of mind</a> and therefore don't believe that I'm alone (instead, the Dalai Lama said once, "I'm not special, I'm like everyone else; seeing yourself as 'special' is a prison.").</p>

<hr>

<p>As for, "Some of them seem to think that I'm becoming something like a robot. I don't think that's the case.", maybe there's less conflict if you don't contradict people.</p>

<p>So "Yes I space out a bit sometimes" might be an appropriate reply, might it?
My teachers' report card called me <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%AAtre_dans_la_lune" rel="nofollow noreferrer">dans la lune</a> when I first started grade school, so that's easy for me to accept, that people might see that.
And if they (friends) really want to talk about mental health and so on, then maybe that's no bad thing, an important topic, worth listening, conversing.</p>

<p>I guess my view of having an enlightened friend is that, "That's good -- mudita and metta. And yet, enlightened isn't meant to be (shouldn't be, ideally isn't) a handicap or an incapacity." Still there's a reason, I guess, why some people leave home, calling it a "dusty path" and so on, and (I don't know) perhaps that reason is to escape the social obligations which other people try to impose.</p>
 471: <p>Perhaps the essay "<a href="https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_08.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Balanced Way</a>" by Bhikkhu Bodhi could help you balance your renunciation with the ordinary world around you (but I guess your lady friend could see that you are probably already using this method):</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Like a bird in flight borne by its two wings, the practice of Dhamma
  is sustained by two contrasting qualities whose balanced development
  is essential to straight and steady progress. These two qualities are
  <strong>renunciation and compassion</strong>. As a doctrine of renunciation the Dhamma
  points out that the path to liberation is a personal course of
  training that centers on the gradual control and mastery of desire,
  the root cause of suffering. As a teaching of compassion the Dhamma
  bids us to avoid harming others, to act for their welfare, and to help
  realize the Buddha's own great resolve to offer the world the way to
  the Deathless.</p>
  
  <p>Considered in isolation, renunciation and compassion have inverse
  logics that at times seem to point us in opposite directions. The one
  steers us to greater solitude aimed at personal purification, the
  other to increased involvement with others issuing in beneficent
  action. Yet, despite their differences, renunciation and compassion
  nurture each other in dynamic interplay throughout the practice of the
  path, from its elementary steps of moral discipline to its culmination
  in liberating wisdom. The synthesis of the two, their balanced fusion,
  is expressed most perfectly in the figure of the Fully Enlightened
  One, who is at once the embodiment of complete renunciation and of
  all-embracing compassion.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Both renunciation and compassion share a common root in the encounter
  with suffering. The one represents our response to suffering
  confronted in our own individual experience, the other our response to
  suffering witnessed in the lives of others.</strong> Our spontaneous reactions,
  however, are only the seeds of these higher qualities, not their
  substance. To acquire the capacity to sustain our practice of Dhamma,
  renunciation and compassion must be methodically cultivated, and this
  requires an ongoing process of reflection which transmutes our initial
  stirrings into full-fledged spiritual virtues.</p>
  
  <p>The framework within which this reflection is to be exercised is the
  teaching of the Four Noble Truths, which thus provides the common
  doctrinal matrix for both renunciation and compassion. Renunciation
  develops out of our innate urge to avoid suffering and pain. But
  whereas this urge, prior to reflection, leads to an anxious withdrawal
  from particular situations perceived as personally threatening,
  reflection reveals the basic danger to lie in our existential
  situation itself — in being bound by ignorance and craving to a world
  which is inherently fearsome, deceptive and unreliable. Thence the
  governing motive behind the act of renunciation is the longing for
  spiritual freedom, coupled with the recognition that self-purification
  is an inward task most easily accomplished when we distance ourselves
  from the outer circumstances that nourish our unwholesome tendencies.</p>
  
  <p>Compassion develops out of our spontaneous feelings of sympathy with
  others. However, as a spiritual virtue compassion cannot be equated
  with a sentimental effusion of emotion, nor does it necessarily imply
  a dictum to lose oneself in altruistic activity. Though compassion
  surely includes emotional empathy and often does express itself in
  action, it comes to full maturity only when guided by wisdom and
  tempered by detachment. Wisdom enables us to see beyond the
  adventitious misfortunes with which living beings may be temporarily
  afflicted to the deep and hidden dimensions of suffering inseparable
  from conditioned existence. As a profound and comprehensive
  understanding of the Four Noble Truths, wisdom discloses to us the
  wide range, diverse gradations, and subtle roots of the suffering to
  which our fellow beings are enmeshed, as well as the means to lead
  them to irreversible release from suffering. Thence the directives of
  spontaneous sympathy and mature compassion are often contradictory,
  and only the latter are fully trustworthy as guides to beneficent
  action effective in the highest degree. Though often the judicious
  exercise of compassion will require us to act or speak up, sometimes
  it may well enjoin us to retreat into silence and solitude as the
  course most conducive to the long-range good of others as well as of
  ourselves.</p>
  
  <p>In our attempt to follow the Dhamma, one or the other of these twin
  cardinal virtues will have to be given prominence, depending on our
  temperament and circumstances. <strong>However, for monk and householder
  alike, success in developing the path requires that both receive due
  attention and that deficiencies in either gradually be remedied. Over
  time we will find that the two, though tending in different
  directions, eventually are mutually reinforcing.</strong> Compassion impels us
  toward greater renunciation, as we see how our own greed and
  attachment make us a danger to others. And renunciation impels us
  toward greater compassion, since the relinquishing of craving enables
  us to exchange the narrow perspectives of the ego for the wider
  perspectives of a mind of boundless sympathy. Held together in this
  mutually strengthening tension, <strong>renunciation and compassion contribute
  to the wholesome balance of the Buddhist path and to the completeness
  of its final fruit.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
 15027: <p><a href="http://zugangzureinsicht.org/html/tipitaka/an/an01/an01.071-080.uppa_en.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Kalyāṇamittādivaggo: Good companionship and others</a></p>

<p>Zen teachers would say: Don't live a half-hearten life, and the wise praise 3 things: rendering help for ones parents, generosity, renouncing. Once the things done in right order, it would be a lot of self-cheating and the defilement kitchen, not to seek simply the way out. Actually there are less real obligations and the most compassionate gift for this world, for one self and all others, is to become being at least on the straight way to an Arahat. The world is already full of "Bodhisatvas" and soon there will be no more place for all of them...</p>

<p>So it's all about the question if one likes to get ride of ones "body-debts" or cheat one further on one of the many desired <a href="http://accesstoinsight.eu/en/dictionary/ahara" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Ahara</a>-hat-path laid out by Mara.</p>

<p>The younger the better, since an old tree is even harder to bend and handicaps for a full holly life can arise tomorrow.</p>

<p><em>(like always not given for trade, exchange, stacks for the world but for release and so most possible not for everyone)</em></p>
 8157: <blockquote>
  <p><strong>One of my friends asked me if I talk to her just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship. That question really freaked me out, especially because it seems to be pointing to some truth</strong></p>
</blockquote>

<p>Indeed. Insightful or intuitive question by the lady </p>

<blockquote>
  <p><strong>One part of me wants to keep going along this Path, because all of the peace it has brought to me. The other part is not so sure if is
  ready to lose its bonds, relationships and wordly goals and ties,
  feelings which can be ascribed to still being in love with Samsara,
  and still having ignorant tendencies.</strong></p>
</blockquote>

<p>Worldly friends generally will not abandon you when you live a more isolated life. They like to reassure themselves you are not crazy when you occasionally turn up to one of their social events &amp; act reasonably normally. This said, yes, a genuine Dhamma life in ordinary society is very isolated. It can be more isolated than living in a monastery (because in the monastery there may be some like-minded persons). </p>
