The Fear of Intimacy

Who is preventing you? Join the dance!

TrackThe Hidden Splendor

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"Everybody is afraid of intimacy. It is another thing whether you are aware of it or not. Intimacy means exposing yourself before a stranger. We are all strangers – nobody knows anybody. We are even..."
"Everybody is afraid of intimacy. It is another thing whether you are aware of it or not. Intimacy means exposing yourself before a stranger. We are all strangers – nobody knows anybody. We are even..."

Osho continues:
"Everybody is afraid of intimacy.

"The problem becomes more complicated because everybody wants intimacy. Everybody wants intimacy because otherwise you are alone in this universe – without a friend, without a lover, without anybody you can trust, without anybody to whom you can open all your wounds. And the wounds cannot heal unless they are open. The more you hide them, the more dangerous they become. They can become cancerous.

"Intimacy is an essential need on the one hand, so everybody longs for it. But he wants the other person to be intimate, so that the other person drops his defenses, becomes vulnerable, opens all his wounds, drops all his masks and false personality, stands naked as he is. And on the other hand, everybody is afraid of intimacy – with the other person you want to be intimate with, you are not dropping your defenses.

"This is one of the conflicts between friends, between lovers: nobody wants to drop his defenses and nobody wants to come in utter nudity and sincerity, open – and both need intimacy.

"Unless you drop all your repressions, inhibitions – which are the gifts of your religions, your cultures, your societies, your parents, your education – you will never be able to be intimate with someone.

"And you will have to take the initiative.

"But if you don't have any repressions, any inhibitions, you don't have any wounds either. If you have lived a simple, natural life, there will be no fear of intimacy, but tremendous joy – of two flames coming so close that they become almost one flame. And the meeting is tremendously gratifying, satisfying, fulfilling. But before you can attempt intimacy, you have to clean your house completely.

"Only a man of meditation can allow intimacy to happen.

"He has nothing to hide.

"All that was making him afraid that somebody may know, he himself has dropped. He has only a silence and a loving heart.

"You have to accept yourself in your totality – if you cannot accept yourself in your totality, how can you expect somebody else to accept you? And you have been condemned by everybody, and you have learned only one thing: self-condemnation."
More Information
Publisher Osho International
Duration of Talk 119 mins
File Size 26.29 MB
Type Conversa Individual