I'm sitting at the desk in our hotel room, sipping mediocre coffee from a styrofoam cup, waiting for my husband to wake up. The obtrusive whir from the air conditioning unit camouflages his rhythmic sleep-breathing, drowning out any auditory evidence of the two human beings currently occupying this room. He's lying on his back, almost completely motionless except for the automatic rise and fall of his chest. Is he dreaming right now? He stirs, rolling over onto his side, burrowing further beneath the covers, and lets out a deep sigh. How can it be that we've only known each other for five years? I sometimes wonder if it's possible to intimately know another person, or whether that's just what we tell ourselves because we like the reassurance of feeling as if we're "in the know" about the people with whom we share our lives. Most of us refuse to know ourselves; how can we really know another?
This warm, sensual skin which envelops each of us gives the physical illusion of "him" and "me", but the only real boundary circumscribing us is that of our own thoughts, thoughts which readily evaporate in the spontaneous bliss of carnal knowledge. Our thoughts no more define us than our clothes do. Just as clothes conceal our true forms, thoughts are obstacles to our innate intuition, superfluous barriers to the primal sense of connection and interdependence we enjoyed before we developed conscious reasoning. To accept our thoughts as reality is to be imprisoned by them. Why are we so apprehensive about letting them go? In releasing ourselves from the bondage of our egos, the opacity of "me" and "you" is supplanted with the transparence of "I" and "we", and suddenly, we remember we've always been one, that we're only as separate as the thoughts which distance us.
This warm, sensual skin which envelops each of us gives the physical illusion of "him" and "me", but the only real boundary circumscribing us is that of our own thoughts, thoughts which readily evaporate in the spontaneous bliss of carnal knowledge. Our thoughts no more define us than our clothes do. Just as clothes conceal our true forms, thoughts are obstacles to our innate intuition, superfluous barriers to the primal sense of connection and interdependence we enjoyed before we developed conscious reasoning. To accept our thoughts as reality is to be imprisoned by them. Why are we so apprehensive about letting them go? In releasing ourselves from the bondage of our egos, the opacity of "me" and "you" is supplanted with the transparence of "I" and "we", and suddenly, we remember we've always been one, that we're only as separate as the thoughts which distance us.