Intimacy is a vital force in life. The willingness to embrace your newborn child. The willingness to open your home to an elder in need. There is something beyond “moral code”, and to my belief a moral code alone is insufficient to allow right action to endure.

We have the capacity for powerful and lasting emotional connections with everyone. Not attachments, attachments aren’t intimacy, but connections. Attachments are self arising and arise from a concept of self that your life only has meaning when you are playing some role in a persons life, or from the idea that you are only validated by being seen to occupy one role. If anything, intimacy is rather much the opposite. In intimacy, you acknowledge a connection with the other, with the world itself, that goes well beyond your ego.

Attachment and intimacy are mutually exclusive, really. In attachment, if your boyfriend or girlfriend is not paying attention to your role, you can become very upset and feel invalidated. This stings the ego pretty bad. In intimacy, you have a connection with your partner no matter their mood, or their current activity, or mode of behaviour. Can we ever bridge a gap with our partner if we “claim our attachment”?

I am once previously divorced. I recall one of our fights when my wife actually asked “How dare you …” That it wasn’t fair that I was acting with the attitude I had. I responded with my observation that we had moved beyond fair, but she felt that declaring her relationship would make me know my place and shut my mouth. Is this a sound relationship strategy? Fair is fair as long as people are keeping to it, but we don’t, and are roles enough to motivate us to keep to it?

Roles define the barriers. Barriers make people feel safe. Yes, and never do they bridge them, and divorce is the rule in relationships these days. What if you had been intimate with your partner? Mentally and empathically aware perhaps for good portions of your relationship. Could you invoke your “place” then? Would it even occur to you when you know your partner that well? Would you truly oppose their state of mind/heart? If you did is that love?

What if it conflicts with your state of mind/heart? Very good question. In the normal way of handling things that would go very badly. There would be emotional harm done, and would you ever really recover from it? But an understanding of intimacy allows another way.

You can recover, but it takes an act of love and will. Yes, indeed it does. The way of intimacy is that. In the elder cultures, they saw the world and life itself as very intimate. Can you breath without the sky? Eat or find shelter without the earth? It’s a bond as deep as our human connection. In this day and age deeper. When you accept that your partner has the right to be at odds with you, that they are how they are and still worthy of your love, you accept a similar relationship. As I said, intimacy is not the same as attachment. You don’t take what isn’t yours when intimate, nor do you give what would hurt you. It is a total acceptance.

But how often do you find people are capable of that? Honestly, you raise a good point. Raised and taught as we are, we are ill equipped if able at all to do this, to be this. But this is the truth behind the confusion, we don’t have to be taught. It is our nature. What we would have to do is unlearn. The newborn doesn’t reject their mother from any disapproval, do they?

Like Weird Al sang, ‘Everything you know is wrong.’ Weird Al was right, and wrong. Everything you know is wrong. It’s true, because everything you are is right. What you are, and what you know, can be the same. The ending of this has been called many things: gnosis, transcendence, nirvana. It’s not as complicated as people think. The complication is in the thinking.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~