The Real Beauty Of Intimacy

The allure of naked flesh - hinted at by an overly short skirt or a masculine chest - the suggestion of sexual union or just the workings of a fertile imagination, sends fire to the loins and hastens the pulse. The psyche knows no difference between imagined or real, it reacts in equal measure to a thought or a truth. Fantasy becomes reality and is played out internally with all the gusto of an actual event.

We remember the excitement and joy of physicality and the memory adds measure to the anticipation. Story mounts story as man mounts woman and the entire scene becomes the stuff of dreams. Yet, when all is said and done, in the afterglow of the meeting, it is the feeling of the meeting itself that lingers most. Not the extent of one’s libido or endurance or expertise, but the simple act of being naked and physically connected with another being.

The nakedness is not just a state of undress but a disrobing of all that is false, all that is not who we really are. In nakedness there is no pretence, just being. It is where we are most vulnerable and yet where we are most simple. In being, there is nothing more than simplicity. Children are absorbed in it, adults long for the memory of it, and intimacy offers us a path back to it – to our natural state, where we can just be and enjoy it. Shed of everything, we experience love, our true nature. Fears may rear their head as a result, but only because they have been exposed to something far greater, and fears fear for their survival. In love there is no place for them .. and they know it.

Too much is made of the mind’s perception, and sexual imagery is glorified instead of the thing we love the best – feeling who we really are, feeling an absence of fear, feeling love. We have made of love a beast. We have replaced tenderness with hardness, meeting with controlling, stillness with egoic postulations. We are so absorbed in the fantasy that we fail to see the real beauty. We revere the story and the infinite pornographic possibilities and forget that the reason why we are drawn together is to experience ourselves physically as love, embodied here on earth.

Yet for all the crassness that has grown in the pursuit of love, there is no escape from feeling. Consciousness can not be lied to, deceived or denied. Consciousness is present, always, in every experience and every encounter. In being naked and totally present with another, not lost in a lurid dream but awake in reality, it senses itself and remembers itself as it experiences itself in the sexual union. It only takes the faintest hint, the lightest whiff, the slightest pure touch to activate the knowing of who we are. In the sexual dance we meet ourselves, we recognize ourselves and we come home to that place of inner peace.

Ego generated fears will do their best to paint a different picture, perhaps more sordid or base, perhaps designed to pull you away from your natural home, but you have tasted it, you have touched it and smelled it and nothing can ever get rid of that knowing. No matter how fleeting the moment, something inside you has been awoken and you sense that the route to love is simply to love ... to disrobe from all that you are not, and just be, in that intimate moment, the innocent beauty of who you are.

We give sex such significance, yet in reality it is not for the act itself but for what it offers - a glimpse of our own beautiful truth. We are none of us desperate for sex but actually for the sacred place it introduces us to. The physical act has taken on all the plaudits but only because we have not recognized the destination it leads us to. Yet we know, we all know, no matter how deep we have to go inside to find it, that intimacy is just a wonderful stepping stone on the path to home. Enjoy the journey, but recognize and embrace the sacred place that it unearths.

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