Intimate Love. What feelings do these words stir up in you? Longing? Excitement? Pleasure? Fear?
Whatever
feeling, if thinking about intimate love makes your heart beat faster, I’m not surprised. This feeling is more powerful than almost any we can experience. That’s because it’s nothing less than touching of two souls.
Three years ago I suffered terrible loss of a younger brother. In an attempt to actually experience something beyond painfully limiting framework of physical world, I made a couple of visits to a hypnotherapist who practiced past-life regression therapy.
Under hypnosis, I had an experience that I will never forget. I don’t know whether it was a dream, a memory from another life, or my soul expressing itself through images, but this is what happened:
During session, therapist directed me to get in touch with “a memory from an earlier time”. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I saw myself as a young woman, Polynesian perhaps, with long dark hair. I was standing in front of a small white hut, tall green bamboo plants swaying gently on each side. I walked forward and entered hut. Inside I saw a simple room, a dirt floor and a long low wooden table. Cross-legged by table sat a young man. As I entered, he looked up into my eyes and smiled at me.
What happened next is something that made an indelible impression on me.
As I saw his smile I felt a blinding, overwhelming love pass from him into me. The sensation was as strong as a physical blow. Without conscious thought, instantaneously, my entire being responded. I was flooded with a sensation of light, joy and oneness. I felt my heart – my whole essence - leap out of my body toward him.
The experience was dazzling.
I don’t think intimacy gets more intense than this, tangible, intense, overwhelming merging of two souls drawn to each other out of pure essential love.
Here’s my question: From where did this experience come? I was lying on a couch in a hypnotist’s office. Outside of silent therapist, nobody was there but me. In actual fact, at that moment of overwhelming love, unity and connection, I was, on physical plane at least, entirely alone.
Whether or not this incident actually took place in some earlier life, at that moment this tangible joy, love and connection was coming solely from inside of me.
From where precisely did it come? Where was it hiding before this experience? And where did it go back to when session was over? How can a feeling so pure, bright and overwhelmingly real be here one moment, gone next?
Many years ago, when a cousin of mine was four years old, she suddenly looked down at herself and exclaimed: “I’m all alone!” Her mother quickly reassured her: “Don’t worry, Sweetheart, I’m right here.”
My cousin’s response? “No, I mean in here! I’m all alone in here!”
That feeling of ‘all alone’ is something every one of us can relate to. Our bodies separate us from each other and from our Source in unifying Oneness from which we come. But just beneath surface there is a part of each of us that is never disconnected, never alone. This part is always present, but is concealed – often completely - behind stories, struggles and concerns of our ego-based identities.
This ‘all alone’ is profoundest of illusions. And it’s all more profound because it feels so very real.
But this illusion is no accident. In order to allow for existence of limitations, boundaries, separateness, polarity, conflict, and free choice (i.e. human existence) G-d performs a feat more challenging than any we can imagine. Like hand within puppet, He hides Himself within fragmented details of Creation while at same time remaining their activating force. Like concealed hand does for lifeless puppet, spark of G-d concealed within you makes you alive. The goal: to see through illusion and live in alignment with truth.
