Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
One of your most basic needs is to be needed. But nobody wants to accept that “it is my basic need to be needed, to be loved, to be accepted.
The first step is to accept yourself in your totality. Once you have accepted yourself as you are, the fear of intimacy will disappear.
Self knowledge is only possible in deep aloneness. Ordinarily whatever we know about ourselves is the opinion of others. But others know only aspects, and very superficial aspects at that.
Each moment has its own way, and no moment needs to be consistent with any other moment. Life is a flux, it is a river, it goes on changing its moods. Anyone who is worried about consistency will become untrue because only lies can be consistent.
Truth means authenticity, truth means sincerity. Truth is not a logical thing, it is a psychological state of being true – not true according to some ideal.
The true man has no ideals. He lives moment to moment; he always lives as he feels in the moment. He is utterly respectful toward his feelings, his emotions, his moods.
To tell a child to believe in God is utter nonsense, because the child has not yet felt the thirst, the desire, the longing. Giving him the answer before he has even asked the question will make him live in a phony way. You don’t create a religious person, you create a diplomat, a politician.
If you don’t love yourself, who else is going to love you? But if you ONLY love yourself, you love will be very poor.
-Advertisement-
If you are moving in the right direction, the longest journey is not such a problem. But if you are moving in a wrong direction, or not at all, life starts collapsing. That is neurosis, a collapse in energy.
No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back. If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone. Then your mask is related, not you. Risk is there, but it is better to be separate and real than unreal and together, because it will never be satisfying.
If the relationship survives truth, it will be beautiful. If it dies, then, too, it is good because one false relationship has ended.
Unless you are capable of saying no, your yes is meaningless.
Love is possible only when there is a deep acceptance of oneself, the other, the world. Acceptance creates the milieu in which love grows, the soil in which love blooms.
A person who hates himself cannot love anybody, he can only pretend.
Beauty is a shadow of harmony. It is not that you fall in love with a beautiful person, the process is just the opposite. When you fall in love with some person, the person looks beautiful.
The only way to dissolve fear is to go into it. Experience liberates. It is better to learn. It is better to drop fear. It is better to relate to people.
The more knowledgeable you are, the more egoistic you are.