The Art of Intimacy
Module One: Perfection
The Path to Unconditional Freedom
“Life is a song – sing it.
Life is a game – play it.
Life is a challenge – meet it.
Life is a dream – realize it.
Life is a sacrifice – offer it.
Life is love – enjoy it.”
Sai Baba
Introduction
Eros is a path to unconditional freedom. This is not a light undertaking; by nature this path means becoming intimate with all things, even and perhaps most especially with the things we find difficult, ugly, or disdainful. Unconditional freedom, or an outlook that aims for it, is what becomes available to us through working with perfection and approval. You get to give the judging mind a rest, and open up a whole new dimension to your life where you meet each thing just as it is, finding approval for it, placing no expectations on it to be different than what it is, and allowing yourself to be worked and changed by this activity. You no longer have to be positioned against the flow of life. You can meet it in all its many expressions and mediums and forms, rejecting nothing and learning about everything. You can engage with each thing honestly and fully, finding the perfection in it.
This is an advanced practice; it is much easier to live in an either/or mindset, discarding this and that, exalting that and this. Labeling things as good, bad, acceptable, or unworthy. Picking a side and sticking to it. Unconditional freedom requires an aim toward unconditional reception of all of it. All sides are valid; all behaviors make sense when you look at the bigger picture; all angles to a story mean something. This outlook doesn’t strip you of your ability to change something or disagree or heal a destructive behavior–it puts you into relationship with it, which is the only way to create something new.
Reading – The Path to Unconditional Freedom
When we recognize the unified nature of all phenomena, we realize there is nothing we are not. Nothing is foreign or other in a state of intimacy. We can afford to see the essential beauty and truth in phenomena we would have otherwise rejected or dismissed through a lens of separation. What may be considered taboo holds within it a nutritive concentration that most need but few access. The rejection of its benefit is based not upon truth but superstition.
There is a path to unconditional freedom. It is a path where the procedure is to become intimate with all conditions: lust, desire, reverence, the profane and the profound. To attend to all of it with undivided attention. Life becomes our intimate partner that we come to know by meeting it in all its various displays. This process is a delicate balance between honoring nature’s limits but holding no personal limits as to what we are willing to explore.
This path trains us first in how to convert poison to medicine, to transform that which brings pain to that which gives strength, then how to skillfully administer the medicine, and finally, how to make it available for use. Heat, light, vibration, the swell of yearning, the tension of desire–-these become our dowsing rods, leading us back into the center of our lives where life itself issues from.
The rules for entry to this path are 180 degrees different from what most of us have known. Rather than restrict or renounce, Eros suggests we nourish. Rather than discriminate or extinguish, it suggests we include. Rather than ascend or escape, it suggests that we enter or engage.
We aim not for perfect wisdom, for pristine awareness or absolute enlightenment, although those “states” are welcome. We aim instead to develop the deep hearing and the acute vision that can hear and see into the heart of all things. Not in spite of, but through our difficulties. And not outside of connection to our flawed humanity, but as the result of the accurate development of it.
Each of us desires to know not that we are welcome because we are good, or work hard, or produce, or have transformed, but that we are welcome, all of us, just as we are right now. On the path of Eros, we come to discover the secret. Life delivers unkindly, through heartbreak, discomfort and disaster, and we welcome all of it. The request from Eros is always the same–to the most beautiful, the most ugly, the most disdainful, the most unfamiliar–know and be known, see and be seen, love and be loved.
From this welcoming we understand the principle, as much a description as an instruction: stay connected no matter what.
Example
I always thought my tendency to procrastinate was a huge flaw that was keeping me from success at so many things. I hated it and tried to force myself to do things even when every fiber of my being told me not to, to wait and hold off. I began meditating regularly and discovered that my procrastination came from a deeper desire to tune into my inner guidance before I acted on something because I used to just act on things and often regretted it. I now understand my procrastination was a way to keep me from making huge mistakes, and have been able to go within to get the direction I need, then act accordingly, and the results have been wonderful.
Video – The Perfection of All Things
Meditation – Seeing into the Heart
Get into a comfortable position, either in a chair or seated in a meditation cushion. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Close your eyes and become aware of your breath and the sensations in your body. Allow yourself to drop into your body. Bring your attention inside. Slowly scan your body from head to toes noticing any sensations.
Think of something about yourself that you don’t like. Maybe its your jealousy, or anger, or lust or temper. Something simple about you that you often wish were different. Place this part in front of you as though they were a person. See how they look and feel in front of you. Once you have this part in front of you, send it some love and approval. Accept this part of yourself as though it is an old friend.
Next, ask this part what it wants you to know about it. Listen to what it has to say and teach you about you. What wisdom does it carry with it? How does it want you to be with it and treat it? Be with this part of you for the duration of the meditation getting to know it.
At the end of the meditation, slowly bring yourself back into the room. Feel the seat beneath you and the sounds around you. Slowly open your eyes when you are ready. Jot down your insights, and what you felt and heard from this part of you.
Exercise – Reflect on and write about what it would mean to you to be more intimate with all aspects of life. What aspects do you hold yourself away from and why? What aspects of life are easy for you to be with? What parts do you feel superior or inferior to? What would it be like if you were on equal footing with all of it? Write about how you can begin to open yourself to life on its terms and what that will feel like when you surrender to it. Notice any resistance and dig deeper to ask why it is there and what it is trying to tell you.
There can be no freedom without first removing the internal and external walls, blocks, and lines that hold you confined to a conditional way of living.
Lesson Summary
You are a child of the universe, and life does not exist outside of you, but in you and through you, expressing as you. Tuning into this knowing can now allow you to live and act and create the reality you desire from within, instead of from outside desires for you. You realize it is all good, even the flaws, because it is all a part of you, and a part of life itself. Now you can better experience whatever life brings you from a more empowered place.