The following conversation is between myself and my friend Maria. Although we have never met, our conversation is about intimacy, in all its forms, and our need for/desire for/experience of it, within an understanding of reality as a nondual whole where there really is no separation. The two of us decided to published this conversation because we hope that it may be of interest to others. We welcome comments from you, so send us an email. This conversation consists of written communications between us, so rather than quick back-and-forth commentary, you get a prolonged, deeply felt explication of our experiences of intimacy, within the context of an intimate conversation.
Maria: (
visit her page on Gaia)
This subject is difficult to write about, perhaps because it's so close... but, here goes.
In my daily life, from the perspective of a divided mind, I notice a craving for connection, for intimacy in all forms. People (including myself) long to be "understood" by another. We want sympathy, or at the very least, empathy for our positions in life; we want justification for the decisions we make. We want help, approval, affection, tenderness – all those endorphin-releasing situations that are physically and emotionally satisfying, that carry us through and remind us what it's like to feel really good.
We want these things because of how our biology works, to be sure, but also because living here on Earth in our culture at present, there is a perception of lack. We crave intimacy and connection, thinking it is absent somehow. We live in close quarters with each other and with "world events", but we are well and truly divorced from reality, from what is actually happening in our environment, locally and universally, and even inside of ourselves. This "split" is part of our education, part of the socialization process, but is exaggerated and encouraged by our culture. It pervades our perception of relationship with almost anything one can imagine. Of course, there is no split, there is no division in the first place; any "relationship" we have to anything else must be predicated on a division that only exists in the mental process.
That mind really is a terrible thing to "waste"!
So I want to be intimate with what feels good to me, and I want to avoid what feels bad. This is fine and necessary for my biological survival. But because mind is so powerful and imaginative, I sometimes listen to the stories it tells about what might happen to me. The mind thinks in terms of separation, isolation, competition. This is its nature. Of course it can unite and repair, but only what it has first torn apart. So it gives me stories about my loneliness, should people vanish from my field of perception. It tells me how I might suffer if I can't economically compete in a system that seems more and more unworkable. It explains how my femininity will decline if sex falls off the radar screen for good; it warns of the pointlessness of living at all if what I try to do in my work goes unnoticed or unappreciated by other humans. It babbles on and on about what I must have to feel safe, secure, loved and powerful. This is how it solves problems... problems that it must first create.
A typical day for most of us involves a tremendous amount of fear around our lack of something or someone. Buying into the division, I tear open the bill for the new water-heater with dread, because the bank account math no longer adds up. I have always been, I tell myself, prompt about paying bills, since I want to be seen as a reliable person. Now I must explain why it is that I can only pay part of this, and either beg the business to work with me or take out more credit that I can't afford. I am weary of tackling this kind of thing; there is no end in sight at this point. Not only that. A vague anger/despair has settled over the lives of most people I know, including my spouse. This anger and depression can find a million reasons, right now, to exist. The idea of physical/emotional/social poverty is at the bottom of all the angst. And a very common way to deal with it is to throw the "off" switch. Disconnect. Avoid. Because damn it all, depression and fear hurt!
Dive, says mind. Hide. Sleep. Medicate. Does not compute, can't deal! What results is more disconnection. More loneliness. More isolation. More painful lack. The sickness deepens.
Fortunately, there is the truth. On a basic, physical level, I am an animal who is capable of figuring out a way to eat, to stay warm, and to physically defend myself and my family. It may take some creativity, but that's what we do.
But what about emotional intimacy? What about love?
I ask my fabulous mind to give me a worst-case scenario, in which all humans but myself have vanished from the planet. (Maybe they were all righteously sent to heaven and I was denied access... maybe I missed the interplanetary rescue ship... maybe I just imagined everyone from the beginning, and then woke up! ) What would I do? Would I cry myself into insanity, or even death? I'm sure I would grieve; feel very alone for a while. Would I adopt a volleyball, give it a face and call it "Wilson"? No, but I might adopt a mannequin. Would I get so desperate for physical love that I could cross the species barrier? No. I would have a lot of pets, but not THAT kind of pet! (Preferences, you know.)
The point is I would have no one to compare myself to, to judge as inferior or superior in some way; there would be no sign of praise or disgust from another human. There would be no more fear of reprisal should I not conform to this ideology or that. As a matter of fact, there would be no exterior human reflection at all to either chase or run from or just "face" me. All "outward" emotional and psychological yardsticks would be gone. I could no longer relate by comparison, or by imagining someone's approval or lack of it. All games would be off. I would be Eve in the desert/garden, uncaring about my undressed state; both serpents and apple trees would be reclaimed as part of my life, my body; even though one may not fruit and the other inflict a potentially deadly bite. The idea of "me" would likely atrophy from disuse.
Would, in this imaginary situation, the Grand Creator, the Whole God, resurface? Oh, yes. In subtle and violent ways. Would I emerge from my cave one evening, climb a hill to view an approaching storm, and fail to find a necessity to distinguish myself as apart from the storm, the storm apart from Life, or life apart from love? Would I cease to make poems or draw pictures or feel an outpouring of affection for worms and trees and birds of prey, or the way my feet feel in hot summer dust, or what happens when I jump from a bridge into cold water? Would my respect or fear or awe or ecstasy die because I couldn't find a human to bounce it off of? No. Would I ever worry that I was not good enough, not myself enough, not loved enough? No.
Intimacy would be unquestioned. The very act of stopping the chase would reveal its presence.
Having done this short trip, courtesy of my imagination, I look around at my living room and wham, the barriers are down. All the calloused people wandering around my world are myself. The results of greedy systems are a nightmare I can lose myself in, or not, and have no bearing on the actual abundance of this planet or the human heart. All the protective expressions or the crossed arms have nothing to do with where love is to be found, and the idea that I can somehow keep it at bay, keep it from entering my lungs as air and eyes as light and my whole being as existence is... well, an idea whose time has come and gone.
There is this Beloved upon whom we paint an angel's face, upon whom we dump our worst habits and criticism. Every cage we ever ask for is immediately supplied, as well as every form of potential escape. The problems we create each day arise with an instant solution, for our endless preoccupation, if that's what we must do. We run away from things we might feel, hoping at the same time that love won't abandon us. It doesn't. It never has. The thing that we don't like to face is that we exude, secrete, unfold life as we live it, and noticing this fact puts us in the most direct, intimate contact possible--a point so close to us that the whole process collapses in love. Not the love of approval or the love of fear, but Love itself.
If, as sometimes happens, two or more humans notice this in the presence of each other, it can seem like the end of a long eclipse, a flight of dragons or the instant alchemy of lead into gold. It becomes an unusual and somehow sacred event. Magic happens as a multiple is recognized by one as One which becomes Many. No conflict. No hiding. No denial. No problem. The circle is not vicious, it is instead empowering, enhancing of the love that creates it in the first place. A marriage like this cannot be arranged; a faith like this cannot be created as a "religion". A peace like this cannot be born of perceived distance or conflict. Our only task is to accept what is simply and immediately apparent before all the "relating" becomes necessary...we are the very intimacy we seek. We carry home wherever we go.
Sharing is indeed a blessing, upon each other and our origin. Passing a flame back and forth or on to the world is nothing if not fun! It's the joy inherent in this activity which makes it so fulfilling, the mutual laughter and awe from inside the play that we so look forward to. But the joy is very deep, very primal, essential to creation and growth as a bursting, self-renewing energy. We can feel it reflected back to us in the eyes of another AND we can experience it as the very source of its own existence, the alpha-omega intimacy of self-to-self. Words like "eternal" or "perpetual" fail to encompass the caress, the literal lovemaking of the world that is witnessed and practiced in that spontaneous state of sourcing.
It goes on, with or without permission, inside and outside our institutions and structures and everything else that we are. It holds and releases and breathes and loves us into oblivion and fullness, if we would but notice, while we are struggling with the idea of bills and loneliness...
James: It is not just that the distinctions that we make, that separate us from each other and the world around us, are ultimately false; or that we are – really – One. It is also that each of us is one. Unfortunately, we have inherited this split personality from Monsieur Descartes, who gifted it to us almost 400 years ago. We walk around in our daily lives as a homunculus driving a not-yet dead corpse. At least that is how we often see ourselves. We, the living presence here at this moment (there are errors even in this description, but for the moment it works), are a mind. Yet, somehow we are also a body, although the connection – and it is only a tenuous connection – is difficult to clearly understand. At least that is how we tend to see ourselves.
In this split personality we believe that we can override the merely biological appetites of our body as if they are somehow something that can be controlled by the mind. We turn down the flames when these appetites are unsatisfied and the dissatisfaction becomes annoying, or troubling, or just plain distracting. We also try to control the flames when we feel that leaving them uncontrolled will somehow be a moral mistake, a sign of weakness, or bad character. Somehow though the appetites never are controlled; the body just transforms them into something else. Sometimes fear, sometimes illness, sometimes a hundred other dis-eases that haunt our days.
I think we need to recover the wholeness of our individual natures. When we are ill or dying we are in the midst of an experience that cannot be shared the way a good day at the beach can be shared. We are an individual perspective. In Reality we are the manifested form and presence of a single Nature, but while manifested, we are an individuated perspective, and there are some things, such as fear, loneliness, disease, or death, which cannot be known in the same immediate way by others. These are the really scary times when it is so easy to forget that we are truly One.
The need for intimacy is the need to be put back together again. This need is different than what a properly functioning appetite would feel. Think about how we feel when we haven’t had a proper meal for a very long time. We are ravenous and will eat anything that we find regardless of whether it is good or not, or good for us or not. Yet when we have been well feed our appetite is not so insane. We do not eat to excess and we choose what we eat. I never craved a cigarette more than when I was “quitting” and had reduced my consumption. I finally reached a point where my entire day revolved around my one smoke of the day. It’s the same with sex, with social interaction, with any of the aspects of intimacy in all its varied flavors.
We are not a mind and a body; we are a body with a heart and a brain, and that is not three things – they are just three aspects of our individual nature. But our nature no longer fits our way of life, if it ever did. Our mental life, filled with all the conceptual distinctions and attempts at reassembling the initial wholeness that we started with as infants, creates more problems at times than it does solutions for our daily needs. We have cultural taboos, traditions, prohibitions, and proscriptions, whose general validity is to be found in the desire to make communal life function well enough to make it worthwhile. We even sometimes try to live up to a higher standard that we set for ourselves in an effort to elevate us ‘out of the jungle’. And with all of this we become so removed from our true nature (if such a thing can even exist anymore) that we wouldn’t know what to do even if all these restrictions and requirements were lifted from us.
I see the need for intimacy, in all its forms, to be a symptom; yet the enjoyment of intimacy has nothing to do with this need. When intimacy happens its enjoyment is a natural aspect of our being – as natural as breathing is. We just breath. It feels good to breath. We touch and it feels good to touch and to be touched. We look around us at a world that is not covered over with fears and desires and we notice, perhaps for the first time, the colors of everything and the sound of everything and the smells of everything. Lovemaking becomes a sharing of sensual experiences – touches, caresses, tastes, and smells, which lead us to waves of pleasure. It is a far cry from the satiation of a need, such as our culture, for various reasons, demands that we seek. The latter is a goal to be reached; the former is an experience to be savored.
Our nature manifests in particular ways. This is what it means to be a human, rather than a dog, or a tree. And like a dog that pees on the rug or a tree that grows roots through rock, our nature does not accept being denied and will find ways, even if they are uncomfortable for us, to express itself. Finding a balance between absolute freedom and denial of egoistic insistence is a compromise we incur to live together. But we need to work together on it to make it work. When the effort is not equal it doesn’t work. For a restricted time we are willing to pick up someone else’s slack for the survival of the relationship; but only for a restricted time. When we begin to feel put upon or cheated a whole new level of dis-eases crop up.
We can look forward to intimacy and we can enjoy it when it comes. It reminds us of our shared nature. It may even be possible (the Tibetans say so anyway) that some forms of intimacy can cause a momentary breakthrough to our single Nature in a moment of truly shared bliss. But when we need it, really need it, then alarm bells should go off because there is obviously a problem in our lives. An imbalance exists, like a miss-loaded washing machine that is off-balance in the spin cycle.
However, there is another aspect to intimacy, one that is born from the immanent presence that is each of us. It is the ray of appreciation, attention, and love that fills our lives with meaning. All of us are pulled toward a union that is both the source and destination of our existence. We call this pull many things: a desire to know God, Compassion, Love for another. It is this aspect of intimacy, when it is stymied; that I think is the origin of the feeling of loneliness and barrenness in our lives. There is something missing, but it is not just the presence of friends or family, or the touch of loved one. It is something much more primordial. I see it this way because we can be loved – truly loved – and yet be utterly alone. It is one of the paradoxes of our existence.
When we express our ‘hearts’ in forms such as words or paint or stone or wood, we seem to be releasing a pent-up river of love that has nowhere else to go. Perhaps it is the overflowing of love from within us; perhaps it is an unrequited love calling out to its other. It is different than the dis-eases of our physical form when it finds itself on rocks and seeks to send down roots through them, or the dog that pees on the rug because it cannot let itself out.
So we are daily faced with a balancing act; balancing our formal (physical) needs against the context of our lives and attempting to balance this fountain of love that we call a Self that wants to return back to its source through its other. Great art is created by the backflows and eddies created by the obstructions of absence in our lives. Great bliss by the clear flowing of this mighty stream.
Maria: I agree. The way I see it, alarm bells are going off everywhere! I see many people living out their daily lives in terrible loneliness, even when socially active, married or partnered in some other way. I see many people who have spent such a long time denying who and what they truly are that they have essentially forgotten what feeling is. Our entire culture, in many ways, is off-balance; of course, cultures are made up of individuals. Ideally, everything would flow more smoothly if we worked together.
Compromise is, indeed, essential; too much denies our needs or nature. But I think it's common to confuse reactionary responses to perceived threat (fear, defensiveness, grasping) with deeper, more authentic feeling. I think the centuries-ago philosophers noticed the ongoing, human inner "war" between the animal who wants complete, lusty freedom and the thinking, cooperative member of the group willing to curb an impulse for the sake of the union. The division, if you stop there, is painful and impossible to resolve in a satisfying way. The conclusion was soul (or mind) versus body. God versus Satan. Man versus animal, control versus release, male versus female, and so on, never to be in agreement. It's as if we got stuck in cultural adolescence, eternal frustration because we feel crazy in love/hate/whatever while some parental authority (church, state, wife, husband) yells at us to control ourselves. In that stage, our reaction becomes dominant, and often problematic.
This is only an assumption and misunderstanding about ourselves. It's pervasive, but we aren't doomed. Just below the split is the unseen union, and it's never too late to address this.
In our intimate relationships, what commonly happens is that we present our ideas about ourselves to our partners, and they do the same. We approach each other, holding a mask in front of our true face...the mask is made of I think, I want, I need, I don't, I am, I'm not, I should. And so on. We inspect each other's ideas and decide that we love them/hate them/can possibly live with them...throw in some chemistry, that deep desire for love and understanding, and we might have a match.
But underneath the relating of egos, something else is happening that perhaps breaks through when our defenses are down, or when the idea of self is submerged during lovemaking, or when things are quiet for a moment. We see the stunning beauty of the person for what it is. It has nothing to do with our own gratification, or what we think, because what is noticing that beauty is the beauty itself, with the ego out of the way, the mask down. It doesn't matter whether there is a response to this vision, an acknowledgment or a reaction. The experience is enough in itself.
Our intimate relationships are just an aspect of our relationship to the rest of the world, to life, to being. They are symptomatic of what is going on inside of us; that's why a partner, whether they are aware or not, is such a great teacher. There is never really a "wrong" partner, or a "wrong" situation. That isn't to say that a person should stay in a violent or destructive relationship; but the fact that one "misses" the signals and agrees to participate is very telling. It tells you nothing about the "other", but everything about yourself.
My point is, our "true" nature is both ends of the desire/fulfillment cycle taken together. There really is no split, no gap. It is our capacity for love and beauty that is doing the recognizing of love and beauty. We can choose, more and more, to dwell there. The vision is much clearer, and one can see dis-ease as it arises, before it becomes a complicated war; not only that, the solutions are evident as ways to care for ourselves, rather than ways to coerce our intimates to care for us.
As you pointed out, art (any form of creativity) is a way to both release and, I might add, step into an ongoing flow. Our task is to understand that we place the stones in the stream or clear it...beyond that, awareness, attention--that's all. Paying the same deep attention to myself that I may crave from someone else, I see the intimacy that is inescapable. I don't have to do a thing for that bliss but notice. It's free. :)
James: Everything that occurs in our lives is the spontaneous presence of this nature that manifests or appears, and all we have to do is pay attention – deep attention; not the flitting attention of someone that is bored and ‘hopping the channels’ of their life. We need to step back and notice what is going on, and the more we do this the easier it becomes and the more we experience. Paying attention to ourselves, not in the sense of tucking in our shirt, or primping our hair, but paying attention to the flow that is the only true self that we have. It’s not what ‘flows’ past us, or the ‘flow’ of our lives; it’s this formless and nameless presence that endures and that meanders through our days and that can suddenly notice that it is doing so, that we must pay attention to.
Art is the spontaneous manifestation of a deep channel that this presence moves through, like an old record-player needle moving through the groove of the vinyl disk, vibrating from contact with it and filling the world with music. But this channel responds to the needle and creates new music, never before heard music that will never again be heard. The needle plays best when it is not constrained, but instead is allowed to flow freely through whatever comes. An artist does not create; an artist allows something to flow out of herself. Do our words here come from some act of creation by us? How could that possible be? How can one create something that does not exist? These words, in a very real sense, create themselves. It is the manifestation of Nature; the incarnation of God; the flip-side of non-being that is being. We are merely the needles through which it happens when we let it happen. And our lives are art – we are the Victor record dog.
Maria: It occurred to me some time ago that I could quite happily give away everything I own, since in Reality, I own nothing. I could take what I need--clothing, fire, food, maybe some drawing materials--stuff it in a bag, and go. The purpose of my "going" would be contained in the journey itself; yes, there are lots of things I want to see, experience and record in my own way. But such traveling would be like a point of consciousness walking through its own body. This entire universe is mine, because I am, as you have pointed out, an individuated perspective, and absolutely no one can see this life from exactly my viewpoint. Wherever I go, I am my own landmark. "I" am the only reference point I "have".
Maybe my heritage is involved in this dream of rootlessness (I'd probably find "Gypsy" DNA in my profile); or perhaps variety truly is the spice of life, and adventure is just plain fun. Point is, I know what happens with each step I take, whether it's across this room or across a continent. The entire universe blooms, just for me, in just the tiniest change in location or thought. When I climb a hill, the hill obligingly flows downward. When I shift my attention, there is a corresponding shift in the thought process of the world. When I turn my back on a scene, it becomes a different kind of sensual experience, invisible to my eyes... it vanishes and transforms, just like that.
There is no time in which all of this happens. There is no "real" space traversed. I could make any story out of any element of this whole thing, whether actual or imaginary – it doesn't matter, since it all takes place in myself. No matter where I go or what I do, I cannot get away from this unfolding; nor can I get away from the timeless, placeless stillness that is always present here.
Of course, I realize that this is true of every other individual perspective, or point of consciousness, anywhere in this "everywhere". Each of us carries a universe, constantly being expressed in an absolutely unique way. And we "share" this as we create each other spontaneously. I realize that we like to believe that we are solid travelers in a journey through a solid space-time on a solid planet, and that we all have a solid history, a true beginning or end. Our story absolutely depends upon our agreement with this very solid idea. Our individual stories derive their drama and movement from a sense of conflict and resolution, of a man or woman (or a nation or any other entity) overcoming the odds of a precarious life, of finding love or truth or a good reason to keep "going". Our collective story, as a species living upon a planet, unfolds the same way.
But this nomad, here, has already died in a certain sense. I cannot help but notice that, while I observe all these universal goings-on which spring from the fact of my own existence, who and what I am is created by you and all other perspectives, moment to moment. Truly, I exist and I don't.
We have had a couple of discussions around the idea of intimacy, which, sifted down to its finest parts, is the bottom of all we consider love and relationship to be.
I feel that in order to experience honest closeness, we have to make the journey to the center of ourselves. We already do this, culturally, through myth – but often we miss the significance of these tales. We also do it through science and the harrowing path inward to the center of atomic structure and outward to the edges of space. And art is recognized as "great" when it fills a gap in our understanding by pointing to unrealized potential – when it fills an emptiness with possibility –which is where we stand, considering another kind of journey.
The "
Eternal Embrace" photo says it all, actually. It is striking, the tenderness one can read into the intertwined skeletons of a man and a woman. It is sad because I am looking at what I know to be the remains of two people who were once living the same vital emotions that I do. But mostly, it points to the very paradox that we dance around in our discussions. Real intimacy involves an acceptance of death, of loss. Not just of someone you love, but of the person you think you are. That is the heart of our journey. That is what we most fear, individually and collectively. Understanding this is not a caving-in to doom; it is, instead, a sort of stepping beyond the story, so one can have an "objective" look from a "subjective" viewpoint. I'm sure neither of these two beautiful people knew that one thing born from their death would be an image fired directly to a wordless place of gratitude, empathy and fascination – it's a direct hit, on a path far more true than the arrows which probably caused their demise in the physical world.
Real-life scenario: I am holding the memory of my childhood as I realize my responsibilities. Or I am holding my brand-new twins in my arms. Or I'm holding my lover in a most passionate embrace. I am holding a painting, a story, some creation that is nothing like I imagined it would be, but a piece of my heart, nonetheless. I could even be holding a sense of the road not taken, of a possibility that might not be realized at all in my physical lifetime. I am blinded by the love I feel for these events in these moments, and by the knowledge that there is no way I can really hang on to any of this beauty. I cannot "own" the process of my life, my history, my children, lover, or any other creation, deliberate or not. The body and senses that bridge all these astonishing worlds are not mine, either, in the sense that they pass into compost like all organic "things". This entire dream slips out of my grasp the second I try to stamp my name on it or slide an expectant piece of jewelry on the third finger of someone's left hand, thinking of "forever", thinking unconsciously that my personality will be fulfilled through or immortalized by spouse, offspring or projects. The mask of personality is a brief flash in time. The funny thing is, once this is truly understood and accepted, I step into a timeless place where I can't die, because I was never born.
I've tried to explain this before, and sometimes the reaction is that this thinking leads to a very "detached" or "uncaring" or "pointless" way of being. Far from it. Embracing death – which is, after all, a process of what we call life--is certainly not sterile! Our idea of death as "nothing" points directly to how we perceive things we can't intellectually know. Death, or nonexistence, stands exactly "behind" me, as the space I can't see beyond the edges of my field of vision. It is a gap into which my loves vanish without my express consent. It is the "off" which understands "on", and the darkness supporting light. Somehow, I have one foot in each world. Intimacy and the deepest love I've ever been blessed to experience exist right between these ideas, right smack in the middle of the conflict, right in the center of the eternal dance of opposites. In other words, right in the heart of myself.
I think what people don't understand is that embracing the "negative" is simply becoming aware of the relationship that gives birth to consciousness. For instance, I teach drawing now and again, and one of the fundamentals of learning to draw accurately is to develop an accurate "seeing" of a subject. One of the best ways to translate a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface is to record with the hand-and-pencil not just the "positive" outlines of, say, a piece of fruit, but the "negative inlines" of the space around it. We don't often stop to consider that we are drawing both the outline AND the inline of something every time we attempt to translate. The translation may be visual, linguistic, auditory, tactile, olfactory or kinesthetic. That's what creation is. The value of, say, a clay vessel lies not only in the interior space which stores and carries, but also in the exterior forces which allow its shaping in the first place. At what point do the inline and outline collide? Is it a collision, a relationship, a conflict? All I know is that it is so intimate, this standing in-between, that there is no real line, and love is so total that each completely allows the other, without condition. Out of this allowing is born a beautiful and functional creation.
Beyond that creation, function changes and varies according to the universe(s) in operation. A person may decide the clay pot is a piece of art and put it in a place of honor in a glass case. Someone else might look at it as an excellent place to temporarily hold human waste. Another person may smash the pot and use the sharp edge of one of its fragments as a tool for cutting a rope. I could grow strawberries in it, abandon it in a field, and find a family of mice nesting in it the following year. The ocean could eventually claim it and pound it back into the bits of earth from which it was born. All of these are valid lives for a clay pot, and none of them are in anyone's (or the artist's) real control. If the vessel had an identity, a personality like a human's, it might strenuously object to being removed from a glass case, where it is treated as "special", and put to use as a chamber-pot! It might also fear its own death under the hammer of the tides...it cannot foresee a life where, perhaps, it's a grain of sand comfortably stuck to a beautiful, naked behind in a tropical paradise. It's just another kind of sifting leading to another kind of bottom. :)
Intimacy seems to be the pure willingness to be both the outline and inline, the glue that holds things together and the explosion that blows them apart, as well as the new form taken while the old one vanishes...to be the departure and the destination. How could it be any closer?
James: Your words about “inlines,” in relation to outlines, remind me of the Tao Te Ching and the remark found there in stanza 11 to notice both the being of a thing and the non-being of the thing. It is the hole in a wheel that makes it useful it says. Without that hole it is nonfunctional. We are more than what we see ourselves to be; it is what we don’t see that allows such a thing as our “selves” to even form.
You touch on an important point relating to when you have tried to express this understanding that you are; that you became through a moment of awakening to the true wholeness of reality… to the reality that you are not separate from This… It seems, to those who have not experienced this blissful union, to be a stance in which your personhood is somehow erased; in which you are no longer connected to the people and life around you. But this is a complete fallacy, as we know. Instead of being disconnected, one sees the emptiness of the kind of ‘connections’ that went before, once the absolute wholeness of reality is experienced. You said to me once “understanding myself as an infinite "all" is exactly the same as understanding myself as an infinite "nothing". This is so true. Within the infinite This the people and things of the world still exist. They just no longer have the sharp distinctions from everything else. This is a form of death; but it is also a form of life that can never end because it is finally seen, as you yourself expressed it, as never having been born.
Most of us never have this awakening simply because we are frightened of losing our “selves” which seems to be the only truth that we can hold onto in our lives. We are so frightened by the intimacy required of us that no matter how prepared we otherwise are, we still hesitate at the moment of rising from our slumber, turn over, and say to ourselves “just another ten minutes!”
To find God, to become the universe and the nothingness, to finally rise out of our slumber, stretch and greet one’s Self for the first time in our lives, is a simple thing. All it requires is absolute surrender. And that is not something that one does. All one needs to do is allow this Intimacy to spontaneously occur without turning away in shame, or fear.
The world does not disappear. Friends and family do not suddenly collapse into clouds of dust. You are still in this place. But the scene has somehow changed. The light is brighter somehow, and it changes the whole ‘taste’ of life. And for the first time it has a point; there is now real meaning standing behind everything that is experienced. It is all a divine dance – a kind of shadow play that is itself the expression of this absolute Love. Your body still gets hungry (perhaps even hungrier), it still longs for the closeness that it did before. But when it comes, evanescent sparks dance in the air, which itself quivers as if it is no longer just a mixture of inert gases, but is a living thing. I think that is the best way to describe such Intimacy – it is a world that is the same, but not the same. You are the same, but not the same. Connections have been replaced by identity. Intimacy that before connected you to an other, now shows the true identity of you and the other as One. Such intimacy is real, as you and I know, and would be possible for anyone if they just allowed themselves to step into it.
To be continued… (you can visit Maria’s art & poetry website from this
link)
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nonduality
May 2009 
James
Access: Public
