This is the text of a talk I gave on July 21, 2022 at the Blooming Heart Sangha. The talk was a little shorter and focused on constraints.
Cultural Constraints on Intimacy 7/21/2022
Back in September, I shared with you my aspiration of becoming intimate with the world.
- I made a number of observations at that time, one of which was that this aspiration for deep intimacy is often counter cultural. Our culture doesn’t support this aspiration of intimacy.
- What’s this all about?: I think that intimacy with the world is an aspiration we all share, and we describe it in many, personal ways.
- You may recall that the Buddha used 33 different expressions to refer to nibbana.
- Thay expanded the notion of experiencing the other shore in one expression: interbeing.
- To experience interbeing, is to experience the other shore, experience deep intimacy.
- For me, it is most meaningful to think of interbeing as becoming intimate with what is, with the world.
- That is my basket for holding all those 33 expressions, along with interbeing.
But it isn’t easy in our culture.
- I think that we are part of a world that innately craves beauty and intimacy.
- Human culture sometimes supports that craving and sometimes makes it more difficult.
- In this Sangha, we have support for intimacy. We are following a cultural tradition that relies on mindfulness to take us to a deeper level of intimacy.
- It is a tradition that goes back 2500 years, and probably beyond.
- However, those same 2500 years are littered both with powerful attempts at deep intimacy, and with resistance to intimacy.
- There have long been attempts at intimacy. In the past half dozen years, archeology has found new ways of uncovering what some of our ancestors were drinking in the vessels they left behind.
- We are becoming aware that, for a long time, the wine and beer they drank had many other plant-based ingredients, many of which were capable psychedelic effects.
- Ancestors were reaching for an alternative experience of reality, of connecting with the underworld, connecting with the unseen.
- They were seeking ways of stepping into transformative time.
Our current culture does not support deep intimacy with the world, nor the mindfulness that makes it possible.
- We see all around us the unbalance that results in our culture.
- How can we live in balance with the world when we lack a deep connection with it?
- Why is this important? I find it useful to notice those cultural impediments to intimacy. I think that by being aware, by paying attention to those impediments, I might more easily find my way into intimacy.
Some cultural impediments:
- Top of my list: Possessing: Our culture encourages possessing things and one another; it encourages and supports the very thing that the second Noble Truth identifies: grasping. Grasping things, grasping people blocks intimacy.
- Aversion: Alternatively, as one of you recently pointed out to me, our culture encourages fear; it encourages aversion, fear of one another, of the world. I might be able to embrace my fear, but I don’t think I can be intimate with what or who I fear.
- The ever-present Ego: Our culture strokes and supports the ego, and the ego is an impediment to intimacy.
- Doctrine: Our culture promotes doctrines; usually in the form of religion. While religion can invite intimacy, a step into transformative time, most religion quickly encases that experience in a golden doctrinal cage.
- Expections: We see what we want or expect to see, and the culture tells us how to see. There are so many examples. I have a friend who is 81 like me, and I could simply see her as my culture sees an 81 person. I tell her that I choose to turn those numbers around and see her also as 18, and we enjoy the anti-cultural experience, and a fair degree of intimacy.
- Relationships: The culture teaches us what to see in sexual relationshipsbetween men and women, men and men, women and women, the number of relationships. That limits many opportunities for intimacy with one another, with the world. Our own Five Mindfulness Trainings are still playing catch-up to shed the cultural way of seeing sexual relations.
- Body: Our culture has a very ambiguous relationship with the body and with sensory, sensual experience. Our culture has many ways to celebrate and pursue the sensory, but it stops there and does not penetrate into the experience of intimacy.
- Desire: Even Buddhist writers have a hard time writing desire without attaching a descriptive sensual desire. Desire, the deep energy of the universe, eros: the erotic is hard for the culture to handle.
The list can go on, but I am stopping. I invite you to add to it, or expand on what I have said.
- I don’t think that it is an accident that “culture” and “cult” sound so much alike. I approach both very cautiously.
- Culture tells us how to see the world, and when I only see the world as I think it should be, I miss out seeing it as it really is.
I think our practice allows us to step outside of culture and become intimate with the world, to move to the other shore.
- Our practice allows an unconditioned connection with the world.
- Our practice encourages stepping into a transformative time and space, and that time and space is largely independent of the human artifact of culture.
- Many humans follow the culture and are impeded from intimacy, they are held back by roadblocks. We form a sangha where we help one another, through mindful practice, evolve into deep intimacy with the world
- When we try to be mindful of the impediments, we can better avoid their influence.
What are your thoughts about the cultural impediments to intimacy with the world?
- How do you experience those cultural impediments.
- How do they affect you?
- How do you work around them?