Intimacy. Women often talk about intimacy in their relationships to emphasize closeness and togetherness. I’ve heard of soldiers experiencing deep feelings of trust among themselves during combat, feelings they refer to as intimate. Men and women opt to live alone, totally fulfilled with the intimacy they experience from the unconditional love their pets exude and corporate companies are now using the word intimacy to define a more meaningful approach to teamwork in the workplace. Generally, intimacy was seen to involve two or more parties until psychotherapy and the new age movement introduced the concept of self-discovery and self-realization in the west, the goal being self-acceptance and self-love which, when misconceived by mind, often led to self-absorption, self-righteousness and other narcissistic traits.
Intimacy involves a variety of preferences; compatibility being a strong precursor to most intimate relationships. Even with oneself preferences run high and this dualistic approach requires that we accept one quality or trait and reject another. These internal vacillations of mind are transient and never ending.
I would like to talk about a different kind of intimacy. I call it Intimacy with a big I. It’s less talked about because it requires that one put one’s preferences aside and reside within the open field of one’s awareness. It’s neutral there. There’s no refusing nor grasping. If I were to use a metaphor I would repeat the words of Alan Watts and compare neutrality to ‘a mind that’s like a mirror. A mirror receives but does not keep. The mirror also reflects the image instantly, it does not wait, so it is neither refusing nor grasping anything.’
Becoming aware of one’s never ending stream of vacillations and allowing them to be there without indulging in them permits the mind to do less and rest more. This has a profound effect on the way we engage with ourselves and others.
This kind of Intimacy is less talked about because it requires non-doing which is contrary to everything we’ve been taught since the day we received our first instruction. This non-doing requires that we simply sit in silent surrender, allowing the vagrant traffic of the mind to do what it does while we remain with something less fleeting and more steadfast. Initially this is practiced by introducing the mind to focus on just one thing repeatedly until all those preferences, the cause of all of one’s hopes & dreams, demands & disappointments, begin to have less influence over us. Fickle emotions are replaced by a deep feeling of trust. With this steadfast pillar deeply embedded in our core, courage is born. Man always associates courage with doing, often inflated doing, but in this case, courage requires that one simply be, receive life humbly, even vulnerably, and only then can one begin to enjoy the spacious world view of acceptance, not before. Acceptance is not a mind made concept. It is a deeply touching, heart felt encounter with all of life. Only then can Intimacy with a big ‘I’ begin. Only then can Oneness be felt.
Being open in this way introduces us to a life that is filled with variety, is spacious, vibrant, colorful and constantly impregnated with sincere feelings of wonder and awe for oneself and other. There’s no vanity nor obsession attached to it, only acceptance, regardless of what life presents. With preferences out the way, we transcend the duality of mind and every encounter feels intimate, be it with a prince, a hobo, a hero or inmate, a whale or cockroach. Even the food on one’s plate acquires a colorful, radiant quality to it.
Life then no longer happens to us. It is us. Mind made stories, the dramas, tend to take a back seat as we engage fully in the mystery and magnitude of what is.
People seldom talk about this kind of Intimacy, the one with the big ‘I’. Perhaps because the world loves drama.
