A Politics of Outrageous Love
We began the book* with the core of our post-post-modern, post-dogmatic, sacred creed. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. We then developed the distinction between ordinary love and outrageous love. Outrageous love is Source itself. We outlined the path to awaken as an outrageous lover–to commit the outrageous acts of love that are yours and yours alone to commit. We unpacked the practice–beyond meditation and prayer–of writing outrageous love letters. We then outlined the other key laws of love necessary to overcome the obstacles to awakening as an outrageous lover. We articulated the verbs of love, the stages of love, and the distortions of love that create shadow. We then turned to the great question: Why we close our hearts in the face of outrageous pain? We realized that our hearts close in the gap between our ability to feel and heal. To love is unbearably painful. Not to love is even more unbearably painful. When we close our hearts to outrageous pain our hearts close to their true feeling in every part of our life. To open our hearts we must close the gap between our ability to heal and our ability to feel.
This begins with the realization that it is not yours to heal it all. It is yours to respond as an outrageous lover–committing outrageous acts of love–that address a unique need that arises in your unique circle of intimacy and influence. You awaken as outrageous love by giving the unique gift that addresses this unique need in your unique circle of influence. Your unique gift is a natural function of your unique self–which is comprised of your unique perspective and your unique taste–the unique quality of intimacy that incarnates as you. In giving your unique gift your reclaim your potency. You reclaim your power to heal. By reclaiming your power to heal you reclaim your ability to feel the pain. You are able again to live with an open heart. You remain awake as outrageous love. You know that you cannot heal all of the pain. But you can hold that for you are able to powerfully address the pain that is yours to heal. That is the pain that can be addressed by the potency of your unique self.
We then took our final step. We articulated an outrageous social vision, in which each person committing their unique outrageous acts of love participates in enacting a Unique Self Symphony that has the capacity to heal the entire story. An emergent politics of outrageous love began to take form before our eyes. A politics of outrageous love that is as practical as it is lyrical.
We see now how the evolution of specialization is a key structural mechanism in fostering infinite creativity and innovation. Linking specialization with the mating of ideas through exchange, what Matt Ridley called Idea Sex, accelerated by technology, we began to discern the possible path for the evolution for culture. Idea sex is the engine for cultural evolution just like sexual selection–as Darwin pointed out in this later work–is a critical engine of biological evolution. But how does this all come together in a coherent and organized fashion? Who is calling the shots in deep time that generate the genuine evolution of the good the true and the beautiful? Is it a mythic creator God who lives outside of reality pulling the strings? Or does the mythic god live as the evolutionary impulse, the inherent ceaseless creativity of reality itself? We began to understand that we live in an intelligent self-organizing universe. The universe organizes to higher and higher levels of complexity, consciousness and ultimately, love. Evolution itself is love in action.
Well before sexual selection kicks in as one of the possible mechanisms for biological evolution, the Eros of evolution is doing its work. Eros is driven by a ceaseless creativity, an Eros that moves, transcends and includes randomness and entropy. The core principle of evolution is, as Eric Jantsch famously phrased it, self-organization through self-transcendence. That simply means that reality moves to higher and higher levels of complexity with each level transcending and including the level that came before it. The inside of complexity is consciousness. And the inside of consciousness is love. Love is the inside of the inside.
The inside of the inside was the mystical name for the inner sanctum in the ancient temple in Jerusalem, which was said to be the seat of Eros and love. For love is, by its very nature, the inside of the inside of reality itself. The more complex the evolutionary emergent the more conscious and in potential the more capable of love. Each level of evolution includes more and more of reality. Nothing is left out. Quarks are transcended and included in atoms. Atoms are transcended and included in molecules. Molecules are transcended and included into complex molecules. Complex molecules are then transcended and included into cells. Cells are transcended and included into organisms and so the process continues all the way up the evolutionary chain. Each level is a new emergent which includes and adds to the previous level. Each level is thus including, caring for, and nurturing more levels of reality than the previous level. Each level loves more than the previous level. This is the path of evolutionary Eros. Eros is the movement, as we have seen, to higher and higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union and embrace. This is precisely the path of evolution. This evolutionary path continues up from Eden all the way until the advent of the first human beings. As we have seen, this is the beginning of cultural evolution. Here again we can trace the path of evolution as a process of transcending and including the previous level.
*Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.
This post is but one part of a longer series elaborating on Evolutionary Unique Self & the Unique Self Symphony taken from the same forthcoming book.
