do you want intimacy?

Do Do you want to experience intimacy

Or merely your own ego?

Most people are living from their ego. They are living an egoic life. And there is something I've observed, which is of significance: when the ego is present, true intimacy cannot arise.

Intimacy can only occur when the ego is set aside, at least in the moment. When I talk of intimacy, I am referring to the intimacy that can arise between two people, but the same feeling of intimacy can also arise in nature. But the same requirement holds true. One's ego must subside for there to be a chance of intimacy.

The ego is always trying to reinforce itself. Because the sense of self is ultimately an illusion, an error, to maintain this error requires considerable energy. And this is what the ego is all about, continuously trying to reinforce itself because it is ultimately hollow. And the ways the ego tries to strengthen itself are many, but they usually boil down to an attempt to possess things. I don't mean necessarily property in the normal sense of the word possess, although that is a part of it. There is a sort of psychological possession, though, which the ego delights in.

It's as if we see a beautiful bird in the rainforest and we take out a net and capture it and put it in a cage. This is an analogy for the way the ego interacts with the rest of the world. Now it possesses that bird. But look what has happened. What was a magnificent free bird, living in harmony in its natural environment, is now in a cage. It can no longer fly. It is no longer free. And that is why no intimacy can arise. How can one be intimate with something that has been encaged by oneself? And this is how we tend to treat each other as well: forming an attachment, and then subtly trying to put each other in cages, clipping each other's wings, dragging each other down.

Another little analogy comes to mind. I don't know whether you've ever watched a small child upon seeing a flower. He might gaze at it intently for a few moments, but then he might grab it with his fist, crushing it. Of course he is young and rather innocent, and he doesn't really know what he's doing. But look at the outcome. The flower is crushed. Again the intimacy, that may have been there when he was gazing at the flower, that intimacy is lost in that act of domination.

And so a deep question we should ask ourselves is, which do we want to live our life by? The way of the ego with its domination control, possession? Or the way of intimacy?

For real intimacy to arise, there can be no trace of the ego. If I really want to see a leaf the way it is, I can only do that if I have no ulterior motive, if I'm not trying to gain something from it. As soon as I collect it and put it in a museum, I have destroyed it. This is really the way the Victorians went about looking at the world: classifying everything, but always through this process of taking it out of its natural environment, killing it, stuffing it, putting it in a display case where it has been gathering dust ever since.

So can we live life in a different way, a way where we can set aside this urge to dominate, to gain, and really interact with the world just through an immense appreciation, wanting to see the beauty and the things around us as they are without having to mess with them. This is the way to feel intimate.