Transcendental Intimacy

I use the term transcendental intimacy to mean two or more beings transcending their habitual, embodied identifications – the experience of radical relational intimacy via the practice of nonduality.

We can transform resentment into understanding; fear into compassion; distance into affection.

Instead of drifting through our lives, we can emancipate ourselves from entropy, we can engage the interrelational forms of syntropy, and promote collaborative anthropy.

I offer you two introductory vignettes, which demonstrate that the experience can be had whether you're walking around in heaven or hell, or somewhere in between.

Hell

A little while ago in Extra Foods, I encountered a lady who appeared to be around ninety. She is guiding her husband, who plainly has Alzheimer's.

I feel her intense loneliness as
an empty cocoon around her;
an emotional vacuum chamber, sucking the marrow from her bones.

She has no one left to see her, and people instinctively avert their eyes from dis-integration. When is starved of human contact, so she immediately senses my attention.

We make direct and sustained eye contact, silently sharing her pain. A tear runs down my cheek as I offer her an empathic smile from my heart.

She takes a full breath – perhaps her first in days – grasps my hands and says two simple words with deep feeling: "thank you".

As she turns away to guide the husk of her mate, I realize that this is among the most emotionally poignant experiences of my life.

Nirvana

One Sunday morning at Gratia bakery-café, I’m talking with a couple of my favorite polymaths. They discuss arcane geometry, quadratic equations, and rocket science. I can barely keep up because I am ten years post-TBI at the time.

In walks a fellow I know, by the name of Rai Yun, who would fit in perfectly at a Shaolin monastery. His meditation and Tai Chi practices are much more developed than mine.

Rai's entire being is centered and grounded, steeped in spirituality and martial arts. He doesn't claim the title guru, although the word suits him perfectly as it means spiritual heavyweight.

If you are sensitive to such things, Rai feels like a deep gravity well, gliding through space-time. Gravitational lensing cloaks him with an aura of shifting light, bending around him as he moves! I'm not even kidding.

Imagine the dual-slit effect, run in reverse. The traditional experiment shows that light waves collapse into photons under the influence of observation or measurement.

In other words, “Matter” is a cognitive construct of inter-relational informationality. Each nexus within the matrix of space-time, inter-”views” each other, and this perspectivity perturbates the vibrations of the field into patterns of standing waves, which have enough localized momentum of space-compressed, time-dilated self-similarity, that we model these events as particles.

But E=mc2 runs both ways.

Rai's observation of matter from a spiritual perspective seems to be the reagent that dissolves allegedly discrete packets of “matter” into what they always already are – “E”.

Sorry, we aren't in Kansas anymore.

As we discuss our writings over tea, I want to deepen and ground our conversation, so I quietly let go of duality and locality.

Allowing my joints and tissues to align with the benediction of Anahata, I open to verb-ness, anointed by its flow.

When two people are in such receptive-creative balance, interpersonal boundaries simply dissolve.

Immediately, he glances at me with a surprised look that asks: “You can do that?”. Rai is a serious practitioner, and I come off as a light-hearted joker, so I guess the ability to invoke nonduality seems incongruent with my persona.

Often when I meet an empath, we waltz to a familiar, graceful choreography. A ballad remembered hauntingly from another time and place. It acts both as a crucible of tension, and a doorway to reciprocal affection.

Generally, I find that women open up to me quite quickly because I carry the presumption that we already know each other, that we will enjoy each other's energy, and that we both want to see each of us thrive.

I approach her castle, dismount and lay down my sword. Speaking with the man in the boat, the drawbridge lowers across her moat. As I ring her bell several times, the crocodiles blink uncharacteristically - perplexed at this voluntary surrender.

With one deep scan, she validates my retinal heart-credentials, finally understanding why my approach didn’t trigger her minefield of shit-tests. The water beasts gaze glassy-eyed, needing time to recover.

Inside her keep, our eyes connect with the light of amore and her armour falls like last year's autumn leaves. Her ramparts phase-shift toward transparency, and we walk through into a sunny spring day where songbirds serenade us from blossoming cherry trees. The smithy is forging swords into plowshares.

She blinks at the shifting light, unaccustomed to seeing and being seen so deeply.

I sense the subtle energy of our attraction bypassing her habitual defensive stance. It is a silent internal shift - her pupils increase their aperture, her breath hesitates; curiosity and desire overcome fear.

Speech is irrelevant, as our communion operates at depths that words can't reach. With quiet confidence, I gently hold a space for her emergence.

The game requires us both to be present and attentive to subtleties, because in this realm, everything is presented in micro-expressions and flickers of emotional energy.

We explore our exposure - how much inner light can we reveal before the gravity in the room shifts? If our star-paths cross closely enough there may be orbital capture and we become binary-bound.

As gemini, it is inevitable that we will cross the event horizon and fuse into singularity.

It's very erotic to watch her eyes as her openness progresses. Sometimes I catch the moment when she is surprised by her own arousal. She suddenly realizes that she's turned on, and may even startle a little at how quickly it happened.

It's as if her amygdala whispers "go for it," and the body reacts with arousal before she is able to consciously process it.

When this happens, her eyes glow, and we both come alive in a shared space between us.

Now comes the really fun part.
A puzzled look washes briefly across her face, as she tries to understand why this stranger is able to affect her so deeply and so instinctively.

She realizes: “Oh my God, he knows that I'm attracted to him, but I can't look away because it feels so good.” But the normal rules of social pacing evaporate as we fall outside of time.

We are so close to the frequency of love that it's glorious and terrifying, all at once. It can go three directions from here – open, close, or edge.

With most, this intimate level of inter-knowing is just too much for her to abide, and she retreats to her Default Mode Network.

Especially if she's shy, introverted, or conservative, she might shrink back into the shell of her habitual identity, and I won't push the issue.

If she's more open (and this is so delicious), I watch her think: “Oh my God, I'm turned on, and he knows it. In fact, he knows that I know that he knows. My heart, mind and body are naked and transparent to him, and to everyone. I feel people's thoughts.”

Next comes the icing on the cake, the reason to play the game. I feel her blossoming concurrent with mine as our fields open and overlap. We're inside each other's head and heart, like we've created a shared identity – covalent instead of ionic; a collaborative system, instead of an interactive state.

I am her, over here, and she is me, over there.

It takes a strong empath to thrive at this level of openness. One who hasn't allowed life to dim her inner radiance - unafraid of her expansive energy. She doesn't fold, she sees my bet on openness and raises it, increasing our shared stakes.

In the third case, she is both open and assertive - just enough to explore this new territory.

When it gets too intense, she feels around behind her like a raccoon. But she can't find her castle – her egoic construct has temporarily gone fully transparent.

In our current condition of radical presence we have crossed into the land of verbs, and she starts to feel a little fearful because there's nowhere solid to stand.

She tries to close her drawbridge, but she's on the outside. Her eyes go wide.

Her Default Mode Network overloads and glitches now that she is seeing it from the outside. Caught in the unfamiliar territory of extreme openness, she suffers a sense of loss, and a feeling of disorientation.

So I withdraw some of my own openness; close down my aperture a bit. This softens our shared space, and helps her withdraw from oneness. The castle of nouns begins to phase back into our plane.

But she hasn't yet learned to intentionally modulate her vibe. She can't quite fit within her previous identity.

Now that she has ventured outside of her shell, outside of her cell, there is a beautiful, growing inability to believe her own narrative identity. She gradually acclimates to the freedom from the ego's tyranny, and this is almost guaranteed to make her blush.

Now, by titrating my own openness, I help her explore the movement between openness and limitation, between expansion and contraction.

This is where blush edging comes in.

There are shades of red associated with guilt, embarrassment or anger; and a lovely magenta-biased red that flushes during extreme orgasm. But I'm aiming for a particularly subtle wild-rose dusty pink that comes when a combination of novel curiosity and erotic arousal try to hide in plain sight outside of the ego-cage.

I pull back on my openness, settling back into locality. It feels safer to her, less risk of self-dissolution in the “other”. Her blush fades, because I'm no longer looking right through her. But it's not far under the surface, and with one deep look I can draw the pink back up into her cheeks.

I open up more, or close down a bit, in response to her blush level. The most interesting moments are when she pushes her own boundaries, voluntarily staying open longer than she otherwise would, because it feels amazing, expansive and erotic.

She can gradually become acclimated to openness, and raise the level at which her blush kicks in.

No matter your psychological type, or hers, everyone is at a certain level of openness in each moment. Just like with poly-orgasm, we need to acclimate to these states over time, so it's best not to push it too hard at first. I believe there's a profound truth down that rabbit hole.

I've just started to play with the blush moment, and it's quite ephemeral. Finding the correct dosing level of openness is not always immediately obvious, so I use the goalposts of keeping her right on the edge of admitting her desire for more unity.

I show that I feel her heart, then invite her to remain open, just to the degree she can bear. Very similar to orgasmic edging.

Underneath the play, I'm training her nervous system to associate openness with safety, to learn that being fully seen doesn't lead to being consumed or abandoned. Over time, the threshold rises. She becomes capable of sustained transparency that would have been impossible before.

This is one of the most intimate things I know how to do with another person. Maybe not as deep as polygasm, but as intimate, sometimes more so because it happens in ordinary clothes – sometimes in a coffee shop, sometimes walking through a parking lot.

The orgasmic work develops the same capacity. It's all the same practice. So projecting heart-energy like a lighthouse doesn't have to be sexual, but it's nice when it is.