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Becoming One, Remaining Two- How does true intimacy happen in Tantra?



Man and woman staring lovingly at each other while sitting on a log

So many worldviews can be divided into two categories— the worldview that everything is separate, discrete, disconnected objects, and the worldview that everything is fundamentally one single thing. 


So with the first we have the idea that everything is disconnected— you and I are two different things, mind and body are two different things, God and humans are two different things, spirit and matter are two different things, and all of these different things are separate from each other, they are disconnected, there’s a clear boundary between which is which.


There is no connection.  


In the second world view, everything is one thing— you and I are the same thing mind and body are the same thing. God and humans are the same thing, spirit and matter at the same thing, everything is connected. One great indivisible, singularity of consciousness. 


There is no separation. 


Strangely, both of these worldviews lead to an experience of life that lacks the opportunity for deep embodied connection, which is the intersection of intimacy and interaction. 


In the first version there’s no intimacy. 


There’s no connection, like everything has its own little force field we may engage. 


We may bounce off each other we may interact, but there’s no overlap. There’s no ability to come together into a singular experience. 


In the second version, there’s no interaction.


The world as it appears is treated as not real, which is to say you and I aren’t really here, that there isn’t really are you or a me. This is just an illusion, and for someone fully melted into the singularity, there’s nothing to experience, and there’s no one to experience it because it’s all just one thing. 


In order to have deep connection, 

there has to be intimacy and interaction. 


Intimacy requires the merging of experience. 

Interaction requires there to be two things. 


But how does one do both of those at once?


Tantra takes a unique position, in that it validates and pursues a deep connection and experience of both of these things— the experience of feeling that everything is all actually just one thing, and also, you and I really are here and we get to engage, we get to overlap, we get to intersect, we get to share the deepest form of intimacy where two fields overlap into oneness and yet there are still two.

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