INTIMATE LOVE

INTIMATE LOVE

Aphoristic glimpses  

JÖRG FITZ

1995 – 2018

INTIMATE LOVE is the love that can begin to dawn when the outer, unconsciously projective love fades. It is typically a significance-conscious, serene love-play that contributes to developing greater understanding of what in one's life needs to be retained, left behind, and transformed.

The jewel in the flower crown. Intimate love is relational love that - if we express it somewhat poetically and metaphorically - can be qualified through a precious gem-like energy sphere in the heart that naturally radiates subtle energy in a softly vibrating environment permeated by nectar of happiness pulsating through being in the Wholeness's heartfelt sphere.

The heart's well-balanced chord. Intimate love is essentially the language of the heart. Not primarily the language of thought, speech, body, emotion, or sexual organs. Intimate love is also not primarily the language of religions. Intimate love is about significance-conscious calibration of attitude in the heart's living rhythm.

The heart's natural purity. The heart's intimate gestures are not the highest forms of expression, nor remarkably profound or extensive. They are not mighty and need not be expressed verbosely... nor exciting, passionate, or intensely magnetic blood-red. They can be symbolized by, for example, some blue anemones near clear water by a not-so-frequented nature-protected bay. The heart's intimate language is often ignored by both worldly and religious people, i.e., by more or less reductionist and pride-minded persons who have no knowledge of the differences between the four types of attitude: ordinary, spiritual, wisdom-spiritual, and enlightenment-oriented. The heart's language is the naturally pure and spontaneously present happiness actualizations of intimacy that gladly qualify with mirror-like recognitions.

Gentle nobility. Intimate love is also qualified with carefulness... not to harm and hurt, but instead to care for, nurture, and heal. Intimate love typically expresses itself calmly. It needs no dramatic manifestations and can simply be manifested with naturally jewel-gleaming eyes and significance-conscious smiles.

Awareness of impermanence and love. The characteristic gestures of intimate love can be awakened - if the related conditions have matured sufficiently - from the consciousness that arises when death's or life's wind whispers in one's ear 'your present life's last breath may pass soon'! Intimate love can mature - not always painlessly - through this knowledge... unlike ordinary love which often cannot bear the presence of this reflection, but keeps it at bay through various means. Intimate love contains at least an intuitive glimpse or reflective notion of non-cyclic reality consciousness, where death's servants have lost their ability to permanently darken. This reality consciousness can be approached through the presence of intimate love, which includes the gradual disarmament of the oppressive and manipulative power exercises of death's agents. These cannot stand clear-awake mirror consciousness, but sustain themselves with short-sighted defensive, fear-inducing, revved-up or limiting approaches.

Ignorant and insightful love. Ordinary love can harbor intimate love as potentiality. However, ordinary love rarely consciously offers conditions that welcome the actualization of intimacy. Ordinary love often involves relating where desire, dualization, pride, envy, and ignorance can unconsciously intermingle. Intimate love, on the other hand, consists of relating in the more receptive gardens of human insightfulness. In the gardens of desire and dualization, relating gestures are often shaped through indraws to their sphere, or through graspings and autonomizing cognitions of substantiality and independent existence. The heartfully insightful intimacy garden's fundamental soil consists mainly of enigmatic wholeness perceptions (where the conventional division between outer object and inner subject is not independently separated), of togetherness consciousness, of mutually dependent creativity, and of holodynamic mirror reflections.

Level-conscious coordination and harmonization. Intimate love is simple love. It is beyond manipulation and compulsive desires for more complex stimulation... not due to restrictive restraint, but due to satiation and insight. The simplicity consists of naturally seeing essence and relevance in present conditions with clarity consciousness. The simplicity aspect of intimate love means to unhinderedly see and shape the valuable qualities that promote the actualization of satisfying, happiness-bringing, and developing conditions in given contexts. Even if these dynamic gestures may appear incomprehensibly complicated and content-rich under detailed analytical examination, their functional practice is as natural as certain flower crowns opening and closing in harmony with the sun's rise and set. Expressed with some metaphorical images... in the intimately loving person's psyche, beyond the conventional scenery, there can be many cooperating teams consisting of nectar-giving waitresses, wonderous researchers, active dharma servants, assisting bodhisattvas, dancingly generous goddesses, insightful love co-wanderers, transformation-inspiring dakinis, grace-full nymphs, sharp-eyed jewelers, healing doctors, artists, therapists, teachers, guiding captains and lighthouse keepers, protective shepherds, cultivating gardeners, earth-dwelling conscious humans, among others, who significance-consciously coordinate all involved modalities into fruitful gestures in various contexts.

Mature happiness. Love's seed consists of the intention to bring happiness and satisfaction. Intimate love is no longer just a seed or a plant. It is a rarer garden with trees, many plants, and a hidden cottage for intimacy communion beyond ordinary life's unreflected conditions. The intention to bring happiness and satisfaction is here qualified with thoughts, sensations, formations, and feelings that touch the intimately ungraspable movement contents... like, say, a pair of co-dancing and cultivating rainbows that harmoniously decorate conscious happiness space above softly mirror-glittering water.

Intimate love is an opening toward our real nature. The quintessence of intimate love's dwelling place can, for example, be likened to a protected cottage deep in the forest. Not just any cottage in the forest somewhere; but a pastorally hidden dwelling in a long-time cultivated glade that is camouflaged with ordinary trees and to which no paths visible to the ordinary eye lead, except for barely discernible trails left by shy deer. It is a heartfully brought forth golden-like cottage whose one - perhaps blue-framed - window faces the direction of sunrise. This to awakenly welcome water-reflecting and clear dawn light.

Responsibility and meaning in civilized evolution. Intimate love is preciousness-cultivating love. It aims not only to bring happiness and satisfaction, which healthy ordinary love usually also desires. Intimate love has more of people's happiness, satisfaction, and spiritual experiences as instrumental elements in the gradual journey toward realizing an awakened being. Here it's about intimate love being supported by a principal basic attitude that aims to increasingly realize meaningful and civilized evolution. Civilization here refers to human life that is qualified with a sufficient portion of existential consciousness, principal knowledge of cause and effect laws and the significance of mutual dependence, insight into dying and rebirth processes, and embracing clear consciousness regarding the nature of being. Intimate love can thus be characterized as a finely tuned instrument that with it´s play intends to promote living beings' developing journey toward perfection of awakened significance consciousness.

The enlightenment thought and meaningful intention's tree. Intimate love can also be likened to an important root of a tree, whose other main roots include compassion, empathic sympathy, loving kindness, responsible care, respecting tolerance, and relevant knowledge and insights. The tree's trunk can be likened to the enlightenment thought, that is, the intention to realize fully awakened consciousness for the benefit of all living beings. The tree's branches can be seen as all integrated experiences along the way and not least applications of intimate love. The leaves and fruits represent the actual abilities to help others in a significant way and the consequences that follow from cultivating such a tree. The whole tree symbolizes here a mirroring formation of enlightenment in becoming. A tree can certainly grow without intimate love. But it bears different fruits when the heartfulness of intimate love also qualifies its maturation. The fruits and the tree's sap hereby gain a uniquely characteristic fragrance, which can disperse many obstacles to experiencing happiness and peace as well as insight into the essentially uncomposed nature of psyche, formations, and being. Children who get to grow up with parents who have integrated intimate love get different developmental conditions than similar children would get with parents who lack these chords. Yes, already the conditions of fetal life become differently tuned when the pregnant mother also harbors intimate love chords... and hereby the basic chords of the child are also affected after it has been born.

Intimate love has distinctive chords and is permeated by life-essence's fluid energy. Loving intimacy gives life a special taste - like the sap in a tree - that cannot be equally replaced by other qualities. Loving intimacy can, for example, cause rain to be experienced as nectarous blessings that have a unique fragrance. Loving intimacy can open experiential doors that other approaches cannot as easily. Long-term blockage of, or absence of, this distinctive energy and mental attitude can be indicated by symptoms such as coarseness, numbness, and dryness... common elements in, for example, materially oriented strong-willed people and achievement-focused and emotion-suppressing individuals. Related manifestations can temporarily also manifest as shadow sides in psyches where too intensely lived application of intimacy has taken place over a long time, whereby imbalance arises when the love dynamics have not yet been integrated into an appropriately composed human wholeness. Absence of intimate love can also in some be indicated by such chords as resignation, depression, dejection, indifference, and similar.

The epicenter of wholeness. Intimate lovingness is a dynamic attitude whose qualitative epicenter is found in the heartful interior of wholenesses... not e.g., in wholenesses' marketing periphery, or at power-oriented high level, or in psychoanalytically reducing depth, or in touristic dispersion or squeezed into I-want-to-be-heroically-coolest-at-the-front. Intimate lovingness is rather contemplatively and stillness-intensively heartfully present, attentively gentle, naturally radiating benevolent, mirror-empathetically co-experiencing, openly origin-minded and harmonizing. Intimate lovingness is loving intimacy. It is essentially about stripped-down, naturally clear and heartfully well-tuned presence.

Enigmatically creative stillness. Intimate love can naturally be in becoming or become in being..enigmatic..we-conscious..resting..creative. It can duo-coexisting be shaped with romantic chords like two wild ducks in the blank-silent and almost invisible reed water, or as two albatrosses carried by subtle air layers above the ocean in love-space, or as a pair of mountain cranes in magical monastery environment, or as a pair of snow leopards in deep blue full moon night, or as a pair of snails that quietly and very closely share their mutual delight, or as a pair of roe deer in golden-green peacefulness forest among intangibly present spruce nymphs who radiate fragrant beauty that opens the pores and transforms them into sapping flower crowns that transform into forest streams that transform into nectar goddesses that transform into smiling clouds that transform into playing autumn leaves that transform into a light-hearted acro-duo dance pair that unites in enigmatically creative stillness presence that never allows itself to be experienced repetitively and that dissolves in nirvana that dissolves in parinirvana that dissolves in mahaparinirvana that dissolves in... that remains heartfully loving clarity consciousness until all living beings are awakened..clunk.

Entertainment and original authenticity. Intimate love is not in conflict with, but generally is not stimulated at circus, in sports halls, on the football field, at the theater, at the opera bar, in politicians' corridors, at the market, in the competition arena, on the achievement path, in scout camps or in front of entertainment TV. Intimate love thrives where unaffected presence and significance consciousness naturally support togetherness. Intimate love thrives together with originally heartful purity, effort-freed goodwill, and quietly living carefulness.

Intimate love is destroyed by coarse desire. Intimate love thrives when conscious softness and clarity presence is at hand and when these conditions have not been absorbed into ordinary experiential conditions. Our unreflecting ignorant attitude obscures the precious energy levels without benefiting anyone. It is fruitless to try to convey intimate love to someone who only desires experiencing the stimulation that numbing desires seek and where welcoming openness for soul qualities in holodynamic mirroring space is lacking.

Existential loneliness consciousness and intimate love. Loving intimacy can also be awakened when two loneliness-experiencing and sensitive hearts touch each other in soul togetherness space and begin to co-dance in cosmos with perplexed caution and recognizing gratitude. One tenderly kisses each other's existentially feeling-consciousness-glittering and precious happiness tears that can spontaneously emerge then. The heart's intimate communication world can be inspired forth through shared human loneliness feelings when these unite with togetherness consciousness, gratitude, and mutual respect.

Whispering touch. The intimate love's communication field is not found essentially in the world of thoughts, nor primarily in either the conversation dimension or in the bodily sexual interaction - although of course these forms of togetherness can constitute important expressions and ways of cultivation - but in the heart's whispering touch dance in origin-vibrating and soft gratitude valleys and fields. Intimate love is conveyed naturally clearly and conventionally with discrete tone and low-key chords.

The clearing for secret communication. Intimate lovingness tends to develop toward integration of secret communication. The development of relating spheres can from inclusive general level be described as progression from outer, through inner, then intimate, thereafter secret, then very secret, thereafter enigmatic and finally ultimate communication. Secret communication has shed quite a few dualizing cognitions. Intimate love, as characterized here, has - even if overlap exists - not far-reachingly realized this non-dualizing consciousness yet, but has an inherent tendency to mature to the secret level, which here can be understood as a potential dynamic aspect of increasingly awakened creativity. Two chord groups define secret above all. One refers to invisibility for the ordinary perception that is conditioned by among others subject-object-dualization, by conceptualizations, by all kinds of defense tendencies, by ego-graspings and that one is usually unconsciously surrounded by a system with conventional preferences. The other refers to that one in secret love communication also consciously keeps it beyond the ordinary life's areas. This happens naturally in an analogous way as when, say, parents keep their adult intimate interaction away from the children's experience field... or as when yogis shape their intimate union in meditative or hidden spheres, which cannot be experienced by conventionally framed humans. This applies both intra- and inter-psychically. The intimate love's conditions do not necessarily mean that it in many other expressions needs to be hidden. There are aspects of it that fit very well into conventional contexts. Yes, in some of these the intimate love can naturally also bring needed and enriching chords. To e.g., produce such exemplary films, would be very important to realize. The secret love, however, is maintained partly thanks to it being hidden from the conventional and more child-oriented world.

Conditions of precious rarities. Particularly intimate love cannot manifest without many favorable conditions being present. It can concern astrological or moon cycle circumstances, seasonal conditions, cultural conditions, karmic prerequisites, meditative preparations, geographical factors, and more. Intimate love is not ordinary, confirmation-seeking and virtuous love. An ordinary stone we can find everywhere. But, a well-polished gemstone we can only find in a few places. To ventilate polite statements about weather and wind we can do in most contexts. But, to mutually exchange intimate love can usually only be done at suitable occasions. Intimate love is not something common that just pops up. Preparations often need to take place - if not already all related conditions have been integrated - between appropriately attuned humans who consciously enough find themselves in harmony with living beings.

To perfect intimate love. The dynamic perfecting of intimate love usually happens in humans' relational experience worlds and energy fields. The actualization of intimate love is facilitated by several conditions, such as good and free human living circumstances, significant impermanence consciousness, insight into the karma principles and understanding of different existence levels and liberated forms of being. To successively promote the maturation of intimate love liberates us gradually from attachments to and aversions against:

·       security and insecurity

·       hope and fear

·       success and failures

·       wealth and poverty

·       praise and blame

·       static and objectifying cognitions

·       representational and reductionist thinking and

·       both nihilistic and eternalistic ontologies.

We will hereby instead successively open ourselves more for enigmatically creative experiences, living wonder and significant reflections concerning relevance and meaning in different contexts. We will probably also more often experience undisturbed happiness peace, freedom joy and empathically recognizing togetherness. Perhaps hereby opens in us a notion or a glimpse of conditions that reveal wide flower fields, penetrated by clarity light, where humans' ignorance, dualizations, prides, desires and envy - and the sufferings that follow from these attitudes - disperse... or what do you say about together dwelling naturally wonder-fully perceiving in original being and seeking to promote our development here...