I’ll add that sometimes we think of ‘intimacy’ as referring to certain actions we do with some people but not others, the most obvious being physically intimate eg sex, kissing, hugging, touching or being physically nearby. There are other aspects though such as talking about certain subjects, hanging out with no others around, or late at night for example. However, actual intimacy does not require any of these. It’s a way-of-being - or rather, that there’s a lack of way-of-being in the way of experiencing the other.
Where normally we are always projecting things onto others (as @Kub933 mentions), in actual intimacy there is the direct sensorial experiencing of the other with nothing - no ‘me’ - in the way.
An intimacy experience would be when there is /very little/ ‘me’ in the way.
@hunterad was talking about something similar the other day:
The area where this currently concerns me most is when my sincere naive self seems to want to talk with women in a naive/intimate way even if they are in a relationship. Really I want to talk to everyone that way but I am finding it easier with women (that’s new!).
I’m fearing that I am being harmful and then retreat into moral/social identity decisions about right and wrong. Best guess for now is to have confidence in my experience that my naive and sincere self will stop short of causing harm without the need for the social identity to take back over and make me withdraw.
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It may be and seems likely to me that “talking with women in a naive/intimate way even if they are in a relationship” is thinking about intimacy in that first sense which could indeed cause problems. But there is no reason not to ‘directly sensorially experience [someone of the opposite sex who is a relationship] with nothing in the way.’
Critically, in actual intimacy one may find that the ‘normal intimacy’ moves are appropriate for the moment, but one may find the opposite as well: that it is not the time for physical intimacy, or even the time to push toward intimate subjects. I have frequently discovered that most people are not in a place where they are ready to talk those topics, which are most often considered ‘intimate’ because people commonly hold fears around them.
An excellent description of this actual intimacy comes from Peter’s description of becoming free:
The following evening, I found myself back on my couch, leaning across the little table that separated us, explaining to Richard that I experienced him as being on the other side of a veil – with only his face bulging through as it were. As I was explaining this to him, I was waving my hand in front of my face so as to illustrate the veil and I happened to look down at the table in front of me.
On the woven table mat my attention was drawn to a dark blue plastic cigarette lighter, an empty glass, a tobacco pouch and other sundry items. All of a sudden, Richard’s phrase “the actual world of people, things and events” came to mind and I found myself acknowledging that the things on the table existed in actuality, i.e. did in fact actually exist, and this being the case, here I was waving my hand in front of “people”, in this case Richard, saying that I experienced him as if behind a veil, i.e. not actually existing.
For my part I have had an extremely clear experience of the difference when I had a friend visiting, I entered a PCE and was dumbstruck by the realization that my friend was actually there with me, a physically-existing animal alive on this planet, and I was there with him! In that moment the significance of that event really hit me, a complete contradiction to the normal-way-of being ho-hum ‘boring’ way that I most often experience others.
