Recently, I had a compelling exploration with two amazing young women on the topic of intimacy. I am blessed with a ‘retirement’ that continues to be filled with women of courageous heart and expansive mind with insatiable appetites for discovery and their own evolution. As they evolve, so do I… in a never-ending shared dance of possibility and potential. I love being retired… this way. 🙂
This exploration may well make more sense to those who have a working knowledge of how we engage the seven Logical Levels of Thinking. (If you want a deeper dive into that, use the keyword search box and a number of options will show up for you to consider.)
Also, this one will require time and attention. Time, to allow whatever awakens in you to be welcomed, honoured and relaxed into; and a depth of your attention that requires a surrender of any and all distractions that may make it easy for you to abandon yourself, along the way. I encourage you to shape a reality within which you are both willing and able. It will be worth it.
Below, you’ll find an email that I recently sent, expressing my perspective on intimacy using the simplicity of the structure of those seven Logical Levels of Thinking. I share with you in the event that you might find something of value as you navigate your ‘reality’ in the search for your own Divinity. Enjoy!
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Logical Levels of Thinking transformed my ability to create my life rather than seek to live the one that had been handed to me. Such was the emerging and increasingly devastating tension that I easily saw myself choosing death, at my own hand, rather than continuing to live with my own, ever-increasing and deepening rage. Clearly, I’m still here! I found another way.
Levels of Thinking allowed me to see and make sense of what my body already knew and had been trying to communicate to me for more than a decade. There it was: a fully-formed and convenient roadmap to a more functional way for me to take ownership of and response-ability for my own thoughts; and declare them to be mine for the taking! An overview of how my inner world became my outer world… and how, then, might I change both.
As far as I know, how we use Logical Levels is unique to how they are used anywhere else in the world. Why? Because my experience of them was as a living expression of my Being… and not as a diagnostic or chart to be memorized in order to ‘understand’ a fixed, immutable reality.
All that I share with you in this email emerges from Logical Levels of Thinking and how I have come to know them to be alive; and both a reflection of and a gateway to the connection between what I hold as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Think of your body as the membrane between the past and the future; the thin veil between ‘reality’ and ‘potential’. Your body is constantly weaving those together… constantly allowing information to pass through, in one direction or the other… culminating in your experience of what it is to BE alive! Your body exists in the ‘now’ moment of time and IS the pivot.. the turning point… and the final arbiter of the quality of your life.
Identity – as you hold it to be real – defines the structures you put in place for your ‘reality’. Identity invents… delineates and describes… all that you put in place in order for that identity to be both that which creates and defines your reality and that which is left with the task of living out that reality how you have defined it to be, for yourself.
You have been taught to believe (Culturally Conditioned Identity – 4th Level of Beliefs/Values/Attitudes) that reality already exists and the best you can do is seek to manoeuvre through it with the least damage done to yourself. Reality is static… fixed… and your best bet is to find strategies (3rd, down) to ensure that your culturally conditioned identity remains intact with the least wounding possible.
What I am trusting you are coming to appreciate is that Perpetually Emerging Identity (6th – Identity level of Logical Levels) – which lives ABOVE the Choice Point – DEFINES reality as YOU choose to have it be! Yup.. .all illusion – you choose the illusion that best serves the quality of Life that you are CHOOSING to experience, for and through your Self.
Perpetually Emerging Identity/Self emerges from a newly expressing trust that: the living godForce that you ARE creates it all! Science says that… and why would we not want it to be so?
Identity (4th or 6th level) sources process. Who we have been told we are… or who we are choosing to allow ourselves to become… SOURCE the processes from which we live. Identity (at 4th or 6th – it’s a choice) is the context from which we live. Identity then defines process (what we can allow ourselves to engage), from which then emerges HOW we make that happen (3rd level, down.. each level defining the one below it).
Is my Identity 4th down (eg I am my parents’ daughter.. a product of decades of conditioned responses through a relentless system of punishment/reward) or is it 6th down (eg I AM a LIVING godForce, emerging through tissue into a world of matter)? I get to choose.
What defines me as a 4th down or a 6th down Self?
Depending on the level I allow myself to embrace, where does fear live and what might fear impose upon my quality of Life?
At 4th, the process of ‘intimacy’ that I allow for myself arrives with rules.. and obligations… and risks… and potential punishments, etc. As an adult, my job is to learn to navigate those with the least amount of damage in exchange for the greatest outcome.
At 6th, the process of ‘intimacy’ is one that is designed for ME to come to better know my own potential, expressed AND MANIFEST in a world of matter.
Identity defines process; process sets the rules; and I get to live out the rules and call them ‘my life’.
Perhaps what we call ‘intimacy’ is that which allows us to call ourselves forward, in living fully and authentically the truth of who we know ourselves to be… and who we are choosing to become. The process of ‘intimacy’ becomes the conduit for us to invite and allow more and more of the living godForce that each of us ‘is’… that we might become the invitation to an awakening Presence in and through and from us all… devoid of the debilitating fear that so frequently becomes the very context within which so many seek to live a full and enriching quality of Life. How silly is that…
At the 4th level, intimacy is believed to be about another. At the 6th level , it is always about emergence of Self freed from the constraints of fear.
Without fear, intimacy BECOMES the natural byproduct of authentic emergence. Available to us all, at all times. Devoid of the rules and obligations and constraints that a 4th level identity uses to provide evidence that intimacy is present.
For me, this is the critical turn – the one that allows us to see: each of us IS the ‘god’ we have been taught is not us. We are Creators of our own realities… and not simply the Muggles that occupy the ‘reality’ of some ‘other’… terrified to get it wrong and be punished by ’The One’ who made it happen and spends eternity watching us.. .waiting for us to fuck it up. There is no ‘higher authority’… unless we lose ourselves to those first 7 years of cultural conditioning that pounds into us (mercilessly) that there is some great unseen Force with which we must contend as we draw every single breath, in gratitude to the great generosity of that Force allowing us to inhale and exhale.
Something immensely powerful happens when we ‘get’ that we are NOT the device (body); that we are the Signal that animates the device… and that, THAT Signal IS the force of creation, itSelf. Godforces, all. Immensely powerful… capable… and response-able for it all – if we allow it to be so. Most of us recoil in the deeply ingrained, abject terror of DARING to even consider that WE, each of us, IS that which we seek. And when we allow ourselves to ’test’ it AND we manifest what we desire, we recoil… hoping no one saw that… and we will not be reported for our arrogance… and for the great travesty of daring to consider.
The exploration of ‘intimacy’ at every Logical Level produces new and provocative insights. What is intimacy above the Choice Point? There is no one there for us to have sex with. There are no bodies to be involved. What is intimacy without the trappings of our physicality? What are the internal cues of/for intimacy when we are the only one engaging? What are the effects below the Choice Point when intimacy is fully owned above the Choice Point? How does intimacy matter when it is only the ‘intimacy’ of the Signal, recognizing its place in one’s Universe? Ah yes… so many things to consider…
Perhaps our greatest intimacy lives between the Signal of our Being and the quantum biological device of its expression in a world of matter. Without that, the device/body has no guidance on how to move through its reality. Cultural conditioning reigns… ensuring a cycle of ‘rinse and repeat’ to the bitter end. And from there, all else falters.
Perhaps, without that primal and deepest of intimacies that reconstitutes the Wholeness of our Being, we spend lifetimes looking for intimacy in all the wrong places.. destined to never find the soothing balm for the deepest of our wounds: that of separation from Self.
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(Photo by mododeolhar: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-reaching-hands-to-each-other-5795688/)