The Rains Method

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Rains Intimacy

What is Rains Intimacy

When I talk about intimacy, I notice that at first people usually think about sex.  Generally, when I hear people talk about sex it has nothing to do with intimacy.  Some people think intimacy is closeness with family, friends, or others. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about in order to share an intimate understanding.

Rains Intimacy is communication that provides the greatest possible material satisfaction, dissolves the self illusion as part of an overall practice of mental clarity, understanding, and virtue.

This kind of intimacy is the heart of what makes familiarity worthwhile.  Rains intimacy is what makes life worthwhile.  

These are carefully chosen words, and their meaning could escape anyone.  Let this definition be broken down in an act of intimacy between us: writer and reader.  First, we will briefly review what the practices of the Rains Method are, because practicing intimacy depends on them.  Next we will discuss how to practice Intimacy specifically.  We will then discuss how this fits concretely and usable into your daily life in order to end distress.

THE RAINS METHOD: STAGE OF INTIMACY

One Problem

The problem that is cured by the Rains Method is called “Crushing Chronic Distress.”  This is a state of subjective stress that incorporates anxiety, depression, confusion, and all manner of mental distress.  Distress is deeply uncomfortable, constant, and debilitating, and constant.  It is the only real problem humanity faces, because the other “problems,” such as old age, disease, and death can not be eliminated.  Distress can.

One Cause

The cause of crushing chronic distress is a natural and health perceptual-mental-action feedback loop of Wanting that has run wildly haywire, causing a lot of extra mental and emotional baggage and mistakes (known as Crushing CHronic Distress).  Wanting means “me see, me like, me must get.”  Wanting can also mean, “me see, me no like, me must avoid.”  Although they have great survival and social usefulness, due to the confusing nature of our modern environment, they no longer apply in a way that leads to happiness.  Internally, wanting often applies to wanting, not wanting to not wanting, wanting to not wanting, and not wanting to wanting.  In short, we have become lost due to inner overpopulation and dysregulation of wanting within our minds.

One Cure

The Rains Method is a set of practices that work together for the specific purpose of ending crushing chronic distress.  The Rains Method does not aim to do anything else such as make us rich, handsome, pretty, popular, well spoken… or even happy.  Any ulterior motive will be just another hindrance to let go of on the path.  You will see that crushing chronic distress is caused by wanting a reality that you can not have – which is any reality other than this one right here!  The Sixth Understanding of the Rains Method is “life is perfect” – reality is perfect – and that your best self will emerge from intimacy with reality, and it is greater than anything you want or imagine.  

One of Eight Core Practices of the Rains Method, Including Intimacy

These Eight Practices can be divided into three groups: Mental Clarity, Understanding, and Virtue.

  1. Mental Clarity Practices empty the mind of confused thoughts, emotions, and anxieties
  • Meditative Absorption
  • Awareness
  1. Understanding Practice creates a bridge of insight between deep meditative absorption and our familiar mental busyness
  • Life is Crushing Chronic Distress
  • Wanting causes Crushing Chronic Distress
  • Life is change
  • There is no self in life
  • Life is empty
  • Life is perfect
  1. Virtue practices deliver the base of Mental Clarity and the atmosphere of Understanding to daily life – right here and now in order to cure Crushing Chronic Distress:
  • Acting to end Crushing Chronic Distress
  • Intending to end Crushing Chronic Distress
  • Engaging the material world to end Crushing Chronic Distress
  • Managing our bodies to end Crushing Chronic Distress
  • Practicing Intimacy to end Crushing Chronic Distress

Principles of the Method

Eight Interdependent Core Practices

These Eight Core Practices are interdependent and inter-developmental.  Meaning Awakening requires a concert of all of them, tuning each other and reaching chechendo in order to finally cure Crushing Chronic Distress and become appreciate intimately the flawless perfection of the world as-it-is.  

Rains Method Not For Pleasure or Pain

Unlike many modern meditations, therapies, and -isms, products, services, relationships, the Rains Method is not about feeling good, having fun, or even being at peace.  Recall that the Second Understanding “Wanting causes crushing chronic distress.”  Quite simply, the desire to feel good, more often than not, causes us to feel bad.  The Rains Method is more about curiosity about the nature of the world, the courage to face, and the depth of intimacy that makes it all worthwhile – not “feeling good.”  As the quest goes on, you will find that reality itself as-it-is is the greatest pleasure of all.  Whatever’s happening within it is just the flavor of the month.

Likewise the Method is not for causing pain, dragging yourself through the much, exploring guilt, fascinating over our demons, reliving our trauma, conditioning ourselves for future difficulty, self-denial, or any other form of self neglect.  This Method is more about deconditioning ourselves.  

Intimacy with Change is the End of Distress

The final, lasting solidification of this experience of perfection we call “awakening.”  This method is in fact the long way to pleasure far deeper than sensory pleasure.  Once you awaken you will always feel good… enough!  That is as good as it can possibly get, and you’ll be doing better than almost every living person at that point, believe it or not.

Satisfaction, which is pleasure that does not cause an appetite for more pleasure, is derived from knowing the great dance of birth and death in this life for what it is.  Birth and death of a movie, relationship, hot dog, party, good mood, bad mood, etc.  Everything is born and everything dies.  

You need look no further than your own mind to know that birth and death are so pervasive, so interdependent, that “Life is Change,” as the understanding goes.  This does not mean change exists in life.  This means that there is nothing, anywhere, ever, that is not change.  In other words there is no such thing as stability.  That is not real.  Permanence.  Not real.  There is no such thing as constancy.  These are made up concepts in our heads (which as concepts are also changing in meaning moment to moment!)  The search for stability, permanence, or even a single subatomic particle in the universe lacking constant change will be a great disappointment to you.  

True intimacy means giving up everything you know and love in every moment so that you can be closer to the world and the world can be closer to you.  You have to even give up what I just said!  We must keep this in mind when we practice Rains Intimacy, because it is only upon ceaseless change that we can trust our heart’s awakening to perfect satisfaction with perfect faithfulness.  This is stable.  It will never change.

Intimacy with Emptiness is the End of Distress

If you consider what I am saying, that everything is change, you will be led to the fifth Understanding: “the world is empty.”  In a world of pervasive, relentless change, ultimately there can’t be any “things,” objects, people, moods, ideas, because they are constantly changing in every single way.  There is no “me” and “it.”  This is in fact the true nature of the world – empty.  Philosophers call this non-duality, but our understanding is more… dimensional.  You do not need to write or think philosophically to see this, you need only practice Rains Meditation in absorption.

Change and emptiness are important, because an understanding of this change and emptiness leads to the dissolution of grasping.  It’s like if you see a well is dry, you stop attempting to draw water from it.  You simply will not grasp to that cheesecake, that man or woman, that drug, that money if you understand that they are more or less illusions.  Understanding the world will end many of your worldly problems, as it turns out.

Rains Method of this Material World

Now.  The Rains Method promotes one of the Core Practices of the Rains Method is “Materialism.”  This will usually include making money, saving some money, establishing protection from legal and financial threats, consuming goods and services, arranging for comforts, and providing for others.  

Simply because the things we want may be illusions does not mean that we stop working and striving.  Simply because curing crushing chronic distress is a subtle art of Intimacy with danger, and that often means encountering illusion, if only to dispel illusion.  

The Rains Method causes work harder and wiser, precisely because we know that what we want is an illusion and our wanting is unwise – because it is only with that knowledge that we can truly know and understand what we are working on and who we are as the worker.  It is also true that the fiercest passion in the world is the one without wanting.  That’s how I wrote this.  This is a method that celebrates hard, gainful work, close relationships, and worldly participation.

It isn’t hard, meaningful work and deep engagement in relationships that causes crushing chronic distress, it is hiding from the reality that we can ever own them – or ever could.  You are going to cut down your possessiveness once and for all when you finally realize for yourself that there is no “you” to own anything anyway.  This knowledge is the ultimate existential wealth, and there’s nothing wrong with adorning it with material wealth as it arises.  

This Method is the Stage for Intimacy

The Rains Method forms the stage for mastery of Intimacy, and Intimacy is part of the stage for the other Core Practices.  Rains Intimacy brings the greatest material satisfaction in the world.  All of the material in the universe: cities on Mars and all over the galaxy, macaroni with cheese, travel faster than the speed of light, cities of gold, limitless eons of sexual perpetually escalating ecstasy is not only useless, but toxic for our humanity in the universal throngs of Crushing Chronic Distress – because we will continue to want it to be otherwise.  

Wealth is good.  Sex is good.  Praise is fine.  Gear and toys are cool.  I want all that, too – and I pursue them all daily.  The Rains Method, in some sense, is about owning your things for what they are rather than them owning you into believing you’re something you’re not.

Confusion, hatred, and craving weigh heavily in on our every breath, all of us, and yet it can be seen if you intimately look that perfect satisfaction is everywhere, inexhaustible, and utterly quenching.  The practice of Rains Intimacy is to communicate with the world beautifully, thus the world will awaken us what real beauty truly is.