#THE UNCOUPLED MEDITATION
The Destruction of the Union of No Union
A Morning Talk on the One Intimacy
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A Word Before Reading
This is written for the mature. It is not prohibited — you can discover all of it on your own — but if you are not mature you will take sides as you read, and taking sides is a collapse of what can be understood here. The talk speaks plainly about desire, about bodies, about the bedroom, and it jokes the whole way through. None of that is the subject. The subject is equality, and the single intimacy that cannot be partitioned. Read it as that, or set it down.
I. Unloading
So — what did you learn? Unloading. Unloading myself of the excess one keeps holding onto: the thought, the promise of. It is just baggage, and it keeps reiterating the failures. You can’t be healthy. That is the metaphor. The reality is that you have been indoctrinated to always consider yourself unworthy.
The only time a person is totally blank is when they are held as a newborn. Totally blank. Nobody even remembers their own adventure through the tunnel — some supposedly do, but for ninety percent of us it is only the rare one who remembers that tunnel vision. Funny, anyway. Since our arrival we have been told: you have to earn it — which means you are unworthy. You have to get to some level to own it. We have been told we are unconditionally loved — which quietly implies a conditioned love, a love most of the time, conditioned on what I can give you, what I can help you with, what I complete in you. All that kind of stuff.
II. The Five Degradations
So: uncoupled meditation. It is a play on words — how coupling, a union, has been separated by the meditation cushion into uncoupling.
In matters of degree, uncoupled meditation turns the other into a soulmate. The similitude of deity yoga. There is no physical relationship at all — you are my soulmate. Well then, we can just sit in the same room and watch the Korean drama, right? You are my soulmate, you complete me. Let’s get some ramyun (라면).
Here one is fully narcissistic. “You complete me.” Why would anybody complete you if you did not believe you were somehow absent, something missing? An extravagant praise of the other, a denigration of the self. The flaw that won’t heal.
Desire is indulgence here. It is still mutuality, but it is indulgence, from both of you — you have gone from the soulmate to the carnal. That small carney rollercoaster ride: getting onboard, strapped in the seat now thought to be a bond — a mutual expectation of shocks and jolts and screams.
Then the contractual relationship: self-deception. Paying to be lied to. And that is any kind of wedding, I don’t care — it is contractual. You are paying to be lied to: that the energy is going to stay the same, that the chattel is going to be improved, that the dowry will not run out. Whatever you want. So there is no difference between finding the woman on the corner, or the man on the corner, and saying, what are you doing right now? Sneaking to the hotel. Oh wait — that is the reception after the wedding. Well, it may have the bridal suite. The romp is a pleasure until exposed as transactional. It was always: what unknown price do I pay for being with you? The lie: I am unworthy to be in this relationship without transaction.
Then you have on-demand, which is sociopathy: one manipulates things so one can have it when and how one wants to enjoin with the other, but you are pleasant about it.
Then required, which is psychopathy: one pretends to fit in. They feign concern, trustworthiness, sincerity, but whenever they want it, the other is attacked and demeaned. They grab it.
The denied, which is catatonia — one is, by appearance, catatonic. A very special case of purity gone wrong. Having been held within the mud and nurtured by the mud’s resources, and then expelled at the loin of one’s mud-mother: all women are the filth that cannot be denied but must be accommodated — the return to the loin for birth as a buddha. KA! Play the ultimate game and deny the purity of women. The meditator on the cushion of similitude, thinking the erection is the plaything of a yogini. There could be no better view from the cushion than purity merged with the similitude of purity.
Say it plainly, so no one mistakes whose voice that was: this is the lie, not the teaching. No woman is mud; no woman is filth. Her purity is not ore to be mined for another’s buddhahood, and it was never the yogi’s to grant or to deny — purity is not conferred and cannot be removed. To hold the other as filth to be “accommodated” is not a high practice; it is the catatonia naming itself, the inequality that forecloses the union of no union before it can begin. Where one must be made dirty so the other may rise, nothing is shared and nothing is realized — only the cushion’s theft, dressed as attainment. The teaching refuses it.
Uncoupled meditation is catatonia; one is catatonic. Nobody views it that way. They infuse it with a spirituality that is not present, and they believe they can operate at yabium when they have no spirituality, no religiosity, nothing associated with it. So let us get out of religiosity altogether — it doesn’t make sense. You pay the church to make your union, and then the “church” (or whatever you may name it) takes over control of the union and enforces rules of hierarchy and order. Let us get out of spirituality and all of that.
III. What Yabium Is Not
Well then, what is yabium? Equality. It is neither physical nor not physical; it is not vibrational nor not vibrational. But if you are attending to the chakras, to the totality, to the voluntary — this is only one more way to express yourself. If you see it as stages, as positions, as an iconographic graphicness, you are mistaken. For you both to be in yabium — there is no yabium. The energy is a collective energy. It has no boundaries, no shape, no location, no ability to release or not release. It is not the liberty leave of the seamen at any port of call.
But when a tension builds up in the body, when the channels and chakras build it up and it is blocked — now, all of a sudden, you say, oh, maybe this is why they talked about blocks. You get to the point where you feel you are on the edge, and then it goes away, and so you were blocked: how do you get it to leave?
And then you confuse the chemical rushes with some kind of epiphany, with a status of god. You have to be really careful. You have to understand that the uncoupled meditation is in fact the destruction of the union of no union, and that there are these different ladders. The yogi in similitude, at a real and explosive chemical crossroads.
So religion and spirituality will not protect you from the uncoupled meditation. The only thing that protects you is that it is equal, respectful, sincere, safe. It never leaves the purity. You cannot start with one impure and have them made pure — or, worse, hold them dirty and never suffer the harm of contamination. One cannot start by taking the other’s purity on as more purity for oneself.
The transfer complete: arising as the buddha. The only way you can be in that space is to be okay — with another who is okay. Purity with purity. Union of no union.
The activity itself cannot make you better. The absence of the activity cannot make you worse. The relationship is not in that activity, and that activity is not a celebration of the relationship — it is the establishment of the equality. Nothing was taken. Nothing was received. Nothing was denied to the receiver only; nothing is denied to the giver only. The whole idea of the union of no union, inseparable, is that you cannot distinguish the other from oneself, and the self cannot be distinguished by the other from themselves. There are no chakras. There are no channels. There is no body. All you feel is the movement.
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So you can see the uncoupled meditation is not for the weak of heart. It is one of those things you have to say is written for the mature. If you are not mature you will take sides when you read this, and taking sides will be a collapse of what you can understand. Don’t read this if you are not mature. It is not prohibited — you can discover all of this on your own.
IV. Soulmate, Platonic, and the Baby
Then you can look at all the relationships. You say, oh, he is misunderstanding soulmate — we call it something else, we call it platonic. Maybe you get a little closer. Two physical bodies only, honoring each other in some ethereal range. Soulmate versus platonic — they sound pretty close. There are people who misunderstand this completely.
When you hold a baby, you hold it with complete love and no sense of physicality. You hold it only with the idea of protection, only with the idea of taking care of its needs, and you do not expect anything back. What more can you say about a soulmate? So I am not off when I say a soulmate is strictly not physical — it is right there; we have all the models. And when I say you complete me, you understand there is this sense of satisfaction, this sense of, I didn’t know I needed that. One fills those gaps, hiding within the newborn — gaps one could never have filled without the other holding what one does not yet understand one owns.
So when you hear these things you say, oh, I wish I had that soulmate, that one who completed me. But you are running through the stages of narcissism. It is looking at the picture in the water and saying, I love that picture of me in the water. And when you ask yourself about desire — desire is not bad. It should not be mean, should not be injurious. It should just be: would you like it? Yeah, I’d like it. We know each other. Okay. We haven’t even done first kiss yet — why are you thinking about these feelings? Saranghae (사랑해) — I love you. That is desire. It is not evil. It is that whole first kiss. (The Korean drama arc’s punctuation.)
V. The Walk, and Walking Around Naked
What is a walk, other than pretend churning? Another joke. But you feel safe on the walk. You feel safe in the conversations. You feel you have been listened to — you get me. You have to be careful with that one; it falls into soulmate, into you complete me, pretty quickly. You get me. So you are always worried about floating into those.
And then one day you realize: we were walking around naked and you never even touched me. You gave me a kiss and then you walked away. You looked in my eyes — you did not look at my breasts. You did not look away when you saw what was hanging there, but you did not indulge either; you looked back at my eyes.
We move together as though clothing did not matter. One is privately undressing; you walk into the room — oops. You enter and remain, gathering what you need. This is not one shedding their skin. It is not a temptation; no apple is offered.
No — this was ease. Not a permission to lust. Everyone feels safe and respected. Nakedness does not incapacitate the other; no advantage is given. The eyes always meet eyes — they do not meet what one has safely exposed. There is a respect. The clothes do not make the woman or the man, and neither, unclothed, is different from when clothed.
And then, finally, you have the trust to lie on the bed together. Or stand at the counter. Or shove everything off the kitchen table — whichever K-drama you like to follow. But it is now something you have never allowed anyone else to do. You have that much trust, that much safety, that much respect — not only for them but for yourself. One can watch what is enacted in a lighted room; one can say this feels good, and is enjoyed. No hidden dialogue running wild in the head. One is not indulging oneself — one knows both feel good in the merged, shared pleasure.
If you went out to dinner you would say, please, no spicy chicken. Yet here one somehow conjures an experience without a menu — afraid to name a favorite, afraid it might embarrass, or—. There are things one has only imagined and never knew were possible. Hamburgers aside, suddenly there is sushi. Joke.
And then you realize how much you have denied yourself by not letting the other person tell you what makes them more comfortable — what spices they like, what they want to pair it with. Pair it. So you ask yourself: what have I done that would interrupt this union of no union? And you go down the list. Oh — I was thinking I was getting some benefit. She was so nice to me; maybe I’d get her another necklace. I wish I could have this on demand all the time. It is only because I mowed the lawn that she is interested at all. It was that dripping sweat. You can put all of those mismatched things into the equation, and then you lose the one intimacy that matters: the intimacy of equality.
The intimacy of equality cannot be measured. It has to be voluntary. It can never be other than respectful, never other than safe, never other than sincere; peaceful at the beginning and peaceful at the end. And it has to have the moment where you can say, too much spice — or, maybe a little more spice, please. If one hears that as a criticism — you don’t like my technique, how many women have liked my technique, and you’re telling me you don’t — it is a joke, but watch it. Or from the other side: I like the way you are, but thicker would have been nicer. You can have it on both sides. This is not a sphere one side controls.
You are no longer equal the moment you introduce another’s anatomy, another’s pleasure-technique. Then you fall back into one of the other forms. And the moment you bring the idea that the woman has to be a particular beauty, the man a particular Adonis — the moment you bring in the Venus and the Adonis — you are no longer playing with equality. The person in the bed with you can never reach that same level of being with the deity. If I can never find the physical that matches my ideal of the deity, why not be catatonic? Why not sit on the cushion and have a similitude — if I can control my blood pressure, control my breathing?
And what do you think about ejaculation? Wait — you are supposed to control it when you are in. No: you have to learn to control it before you are in. You control it when you are out. You bring yourself right to the edge in your meditation and then you stop — see, I am all by myself, closed away, and now I can be inside somebody and turn away and say, see, it is just like my catatonic meditation, I am still in that spiritual world of make-believe perfect deity, but I get this little warm, moist embrace that I think is pretty cool. Joke. And then you are back into psychopathy, because you are using the person for your own result, at a time you decide you need them. When you use it as a religious completion, it is psychopathy. You have left catatonia for psychopathy. It is better that you had remained in the similitude than to discard the partner the moment your purpose is met. This is not the lotus arising from the mud. This is for one purpose — spiritual bliss; I got it met; goodbye. Next empowerment, please. That is psychopathy.
VI. The One Intimacy
But the union of no union has nothing to do with anything except a complete intimacy that need not have any physical connection at all. That is where everyone seems to get confused. It is not a catatonia of individual isolation; it is on the whole. You can never have a physical relationship with something you think is separate from you. Understand that physical means it is yours — this is your physical body. So a physical relationship is not physical.
Two chakras together, coiled around a churning armature. Maybe a current, a tumult spinning: first tummo. The pair, a dynamo, with induction of the heat throughout the channels. Is it two, or just one, who is fully realized?
Or might we say the field energies were never separated to begin with. We were always interconnecting. We were always inseparable. We were always part of the luminous, essenceless, stainless, unsupported. And the expression is the same whether we are sitting in chairs, sitting next to each other, or naked at a public bath. The energy is always the same.
The intimacy is not challenged and does not change. If you are intimate at one, you cannot be coming in and out of intimacy. You learn that there is only one intimacy, and its presentation is not to be taken lightly. If that intimacy is not safe when a favored, irreplaceable something is lost, where is the safety?
VII. The Same Pattern at Work
Even in the presentations of ordinary life one can run through all of these stages and forms — what I described as the physical. This is not the intimate. This is not the union of no union.
You are my soulmate. You are the boss of all bosses. You are the mentor of all mentors. And he always does that to me — he sets it up, and I always fall for it, because he is the boss — and then he takes full credit. Do we want to talk about psychopathy? Everyone is migrating through this mess. And the one who arrives and says, okay, five o’clock, goodbye — you cannot get more contractual than that. Did you punch in on time? Did you punch out on time? And then comes the moment of, we could be more than this — I’ll work overtime, I’ll sacrifice my life for this, call me anytime, I’m on demand, don’t worry.
These forms have one by the nuts — the kind that make the beer taste better. Easing the intoxication: go for it. I was waiting for your response. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead is reported to have stepped into an elevator, pointedly sniffed the air, and — as the couple already aboard glanced sheepishly — declared, “Ah, you two had sex!”
I thought you did that today. Embarrassed enough. All right. Thank you.
❧
Colophon
The work is personal. The material here is original arising directly from my sitting contemplation. It is protected under Any Note Press. It’s publication here permits no commercial use. All rights are reserved. It is offered for the benefit of one’s practice and nothing else.
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