Nowhere does the conflict between desire and desire-less-ness or form and formlessness seem more palpable than in the realm of intimate relationships between couples.
In fact most of the images we have of enlightened or awakened beings are of individuals who have renounced community and relationship to live isolated lives as hermits or in a monastic existence where the complications of intimate relationship do not intrude. Many, if not most, of the religious or spiritual traditions of the East and the West suggest that a choice needs to be made between GOD and an intimate companion in this incarnation. People who speak about nonduality often seem curiously asexual, as if transcending the separate self means denying the face of the beloved.
This bias might reflect the fact that those who have traditionally had the most to say about nonduality are those who have come from celibate or monastic traditions. They may actually have little experience and not much to say about nonduality in relationship, but I don’t believe that means that a relationship based in the truth of nondual awareness is impossible. It is difficult, but not impossible.
When we recognize the lack of separation between ourselves and another, we call that love. This is neither romantic love, nor erotic love, nor platonic love, though it may encompass them all. Love as a recognition of the unity of all form is deeper than that. It holds the possibility of transcendence and even awakening, but it may be the trickiest and most confusing of all the paths to pure awareness.
Ultimately, nonduality is a simple concept. It is in fact so simple that it is radically difficult for us to even conceive of. In order to conceive of it, we tend to use stories that make it seem like we can separate from the process or that there was something from which we could separate.
One of the deepest stories we carry in our genetic memory is that it appears to us as though two separate beings must come together and mix their essences (masculine and feminine) in an affirmation or recognition of the underlying state of oneness in order to create new life (another separate form). In many religions there is a story about whether the masculine or the feminine manifestation comes first. From a nondual awareness, however, this is not really a question.
In order for a masculine or a feminine something to arise, each needs to arise out of nothingness. Each needs to arise simultaneously with its polar opposite. Otherwise, there would be no knowing it—no recognizing it as something unique.
In the Bible the phrase “he knew her” or “she knew him or “they knew each other” is commonly interpreted to mean sexual intimacy, but there is a deeper meaning. To know someone is to have a knowing (a gnosis) of that person. But this “knowing” is not a surface knowing of “I know about you,” or “I know how you appear,” or “I know the details that make you seem to be similar to or distinct from me,” or “I know the degree to which you align with my sexual preferences.” This knowing is ultimately about a recognition that we are one. We can, of course, engage in sexual intercourse or intimacy without experiencing this recognition, but we cannot know the other as the self without it.
The deeper the recognition is, the more profound the nature of the sexual experience will be and the more profound the nature of the sexual experience, the deeper the sense of dissolution of separateness is likely to be.
One or both partners sometimes experience this sense of dissolution during sex and it can be very powerful. Unfortunately we are only capable of understanding an altered state of consciousness like this from the stage of consciousness we are currently at. Sometimes that means that we come to believe that the feeling, the awareness of no separation, was a result of the sex rather than a feeling we have access to at any moment and then transcendent sex becomes just another thing that we add to our list of things or experiences we are seeking.