Direct Knowing, True Intimacy

The direct unmediated felt experience of:

• hugging someone we love,

• your grandchild snuggling up to you while reading them a story,

• holding a Golden Retriever puppy's face & getting lost in it's eyes,

• being fully-engaged with ANY person or activity,

all differ on one level, yet share the fact that they're unmediated by thought (words, concepts, self-talk, thought proliferation).

Love - our true nature - keeps awareness grounded in present-moment reality.

When love is embodied, fear cannot hijack our attention into thoughts of past or future.

Our noisy thinking mind doesn't get in the way, doesn't spoil the moment. Direct experience, direct knowing is vitally-real - too precious to dumb-down to worn-out sound bites.

“We may believe that it’s the quality of the sunset that gives us such pleasure, but in fact

it is the quality of our own immersion in the sunset that brings the delight.” Ayya Khema

“The idea of practice is not the same as the practice of practice.

The idea of my life is not the same as my life.

We are directed to meet the moment as it arises, not our thoughts about it.

Our mind interferes with meeting the moment as it is.

… when we bring our ideas, feelings, and language to things, this produces delusion. Concepts always go against the whole (Any concept is necessarily a "partial view" ie one of an infinite number of perspectives). ‘No matter how cleverly conceived they are, they almost always work against the Whole.’

True intimacy occurs when we directly experience reality for ourselves. Transmission, or true understanding, does not come from someone else; nor can we transmit to someone. We transmit to ourselves. Each one must find intimacy directly, not through our thinking mind, but from immediate direct experience prior to the mind’s mediation.”

Katherine Thanas. “The Truth of This Life. Zen Teachings on Loving the World as It Is.” Shambhala, 2018.