True intimacy is to welcome every sensation just as it arises.
To be at home in the present instant without labels of better or worse, without preferring what should be to what is: such immediate contact with the energy of Presence, unfiltered through thinking, is not passivity but an ever-increasing Life surge, pressed out and overflowing.
To experience such intimate un-mediated contact with the Now may be likened to birth: far too overwhelming and traumatic for the average adult. We instantly retreat from this Presence into a fortress of mind, hiding behind a ghostly wall of thought, where we can filter Life through names and descriptions before living it. To shield ourselves from the energy of Presence, we reduce it to a second-hand reality. We do not live our Life directly, we live a description of it.
How can we awaken this intimacy with Life? How can we live on the cutting edge of a now-ness unedited by thought?
Some engage in dangerous acts or extreme sports to get back to that edge. Animals live on that instinctive edge all the time, but without the precious elixir of self-awareness. We do not want to return to the animal nature, but we want to experience the intimacy with Life that animals experience. In fact, that innocence is why we love them, and what we learn from them.
The distinctive quality of the next stage of human evolution will be returning to this edge of intimate living, but with self-awareness. An enlightened being is like an angel in the body of a cougar.
How can we awaken such direct living without danger, or without a return to the animal nature? By opening the Heart Center.
You don’t have to be extreme, or macho, or edgy. You can live intimately yet gently with every sensation in every moment of Life. Just open your heart. Open your heart all the way, welcoming everything with love.
It is easier done than said.
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