United

I am amazed that I have missed something for all these years.   I never realized that I have a natural intimacy with everyone who has ever been a part of my life.   All the struggles to achieve intimacy were based on a persistent illusion.    I have lived my life under the illusion that we were all separate.   All the time we were actually united in a most intimate way, and I was unaware.

I think I am starting to wake up, and I realize how different my life would have been if I had been immersed in the closeness I actually had with all my many companions but didn’t really experience it.   There were those few, of course, with whom I even had a close physical intimacy, and I now realize it could have been much more.    There were many with whom I simply experienced an intimacy that was part of the vague  awareness of one another and the energy we shared.   How different that could have been.

Now I know.    I am now aware that there is a unity present before even getting next to someone.    Sometimes, I feel the joy of that unity before we even meet.   Then there is the energy of contact, if we actually experience one another in any way.    It can be a look, it might be sounds, sometimes it is pressure on skin, a hug.   There are many ways of affirming the presence I already know and feel.   There is joy in the contact, whatever form it takes.

Any form of physical closeness that affirms the deep feeling of presence is intimacy.   It is an intimacy built on the awareness of unity.    A physical look, touch or sound is more than simple contact.    It is a conduit of the flow of energy from the core of myself.

First I have to take my hands off my eyes and come face to face with someone’s presence and with my own.   Awareness is the first step and it gives meaning to anything that follows.    The second step is unity, an expression and awareness of the oneness that arises from my being wholly present.   Subject and object become one, the boundary dissolves.    Only when we become one do I understand the reality of the moment.

Touching someone’s shoulder is now an act of intimacy for me.    Their skin becomes as my skin.  There is no separation, no isolation.   There is only unity.

I smile when I remember my past.  I now know that so much of my life would have been a different experience if I had known and could have experienced the unity, the absence of barriers.   The good and joyful news is that the option of experienced unity is now available to me and anyone I meet.