Judith Blackstone Ph.D. - The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others

the

Intimate
Life

AWAKENING TO
THE SPIRITUAL ESSENCE IN
YOURSELF AND OTHERS

Judith Blackstone, PhD

Also by Judith Blackstone

Belonging Here (forthcoming)

The Empathic Ground

The Enlightenment Process

The Subtle Self

The Realization Process (audio)

For Zoran,
with love for your pilgrim soul

TO LOVE LIFE , and in particular, to love other human beings, is one of the central ideals of every spiritual tradition. It is also one of lifes greatest challenges. It requires the ability for true contact. And contact requires us to be authentic and deeply in touch with ourselves.

Every aspect of ourselves is capable of contact. We can contact another human being with our touch, gaze, and voiceand even with the subtle vibrations of our emotions, physical sensations, and awareness. We all crave this contact instinctively, for everything that it reaches becomes awake, alive.

The question addressed in this book is how we can deepen this capacity for contact, how we can become more adept at love. By love, I do not just mean love between intimate partners, but the warm, dynamic response of our heart to the world around us. The spiritual traditions teach that love is a basic component of the spiritual dimension. In the dualistic religions of the West, God is love. In the nondual traditions of the East, love is inherent in the spiritual essence that we can realize as our own being. Love is part of our own essential nature, somehow hidden or enfolded within us. Our desire and our efforts to love uncover our mysterious wound of separation from this authentic core of life. For this reason, our relationships can become spiritual pathways; they can help us realize the spiritual essence of ourselves.

For many people, the word spiritual suggests an intangible, inaccessible, and perhaps improbable realm of existence. As spirituality is understood in this book, however, the spiritual refers to our true and basic nature, beneath the fantasies, artifices, and constraints that distort our usual experience. It is our most subtle and most clear attunement to ourselves and the world around us. When we enter the spiritual path, we are becoming real.

Although it cannot be detected by the ordinary range of our senses, the subtle essence of our being does become tangible as we attune to it. It becomes an actual experience, a quality of being that is felt in our whole body and that can then be discerned in all of life. As we realize this essence of ourselves, our senses themselves become more subtle and begin to reveal the radiance, fluidity and a spacious stillness that suffuses the material world. The most radical transformation that occurs with this subtle attunement is that instead of experiencing ourselves as separate from our environment, we find that our own being is continuous with everything around us. This book describes how the realization of this unified, spiritual dimension of life transforms all of our relationships.

The understanding that I present in this book is most closely aligned with the Hindu system of Advaita (nondual) Vedanta and the Tibetan Buddhist schools of Mahamudra and Dzog-chen. These Asian traditions have in common the recognition of a fundamental dimension of consciousness that encompasses and pervades all of our experience. Some of these traditions consider this dimension to be the nature of the mind, and some the nature of the universe. Some consider it to be the foundation of our individual minds, and others regard it as a unified dimension, as one mind at the root of all life. But they all agree that this dimension of pure consciousness is uncreated. It spontaneously appears. It reveals itself to us as a transparency of our own being and everything around us.

My views are also informed by the accumulated knowledge of Western psychology and by old and new methods of body/mind healing. But the primary sources of the ideas and practices offered here are my own experience of spiritual practice, the necessities of my own healing the challenges and gifts of my relationships, and the spontaneous emergence of guidance in response to the needs of my students and clients in my practice as a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher over the past three decades. I am not concerned with arguing for a particular philosophy, for I do not believe we can know for certain which explanation of ultimate reality is true. I do know that the experience of spiritual oneness is the innate potential of our human organism, and that it involves a transformation of every aspect of ourselves, including our physical body and our psychological maturity.

Spiritual realization is not a matter of constructing something new; it is always a clearing away, a letting go of the holding patterns and beliefs that obscure our true nature. If oneness is our true nature, it is also the natural potential, the underlying reality, of our relationships with other people. This book looks at how relationships can help both partners in a relationship release their barriers to spiritual oneness. This is presented as a dual process of resolving our resistances to contact with our partner and attuning directly to the subtle dimension of spiritual unity.

The spiritual essence of life is our most subtle, fundamental dimension of consciousness. The Asian literature describes fundamental consciousness as all-pervasive. It is experienced (or experiences itself) as vast space, pervading our own form and everything else that we experience, even physical space itself. It is therefore the basis of unity within our own being our internal wholeness. And it is the basis of the unity of our own being with everything around us. It is an unbroken dimension, a dimension of wholeness and stillness that, when we attune to it, is coexistent with the movement of life. Spiritual realization is not just a matter of uplifting our mood or changing our behaviors and beliefs. It means that we enter into and experience ourselves as the spiritual foundation of existence.

Although the traditional teachings do not speak of it in this way, fundamental consciousness is the basis of contact: our deepest contact with ourselves, with other people, and with all of nature. It touches and knows everything that it pervades. Although our fundamental dimension of consciousness is referred to in spiritual teachings, it is just beginning to gain recognition in the psychological field. Up until recently, it was thought, in the more adventurous schools of psychology, physics, and medicine, that energy was the basic stratum of life. Energy, which is movement, such as flow, pulsation, or vibration, is easier to perceive and to feel than consciousness. The energy dimension is a spectrum in itself, from denser to subtler vibrations. When we realize ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we also reach the most subtle aspect of the energy spectrum. But we can experience the movement of energy without accessing the pervasive stillness of fundamental consciousness. Therefore, the application of fundamental consciousness to psychological and physical healing represents the cutting edge of the human growth movement.

There is also a growing recognition in contemporary psychology of the mutuality or interconnectedness, of existence. The psychoanalytic theorist Robert D. Stolorow describes human interaction as an intersubjective field of mutual influence. Interestingly in his book Nonduality, the Buddhist philosopher David Loy refers to the unified, spiritual dimension as a pre-subjective ground, because it exists beyond, or deeper than, our subjective distortion of reality. In this book, I describe how the intersubjective field can gradually transform into the pre-subjective field of spiritual oneness. I also show how this shift brings compassion and insight to relationships, and helps both partners disentangle themselves from the defenses and projections that obstruct the flow of exchange between them.