Audio 8: You Are Desired by Reality

The Greatest Story Ever Told: Audio series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Welcome everyone to Podcast Eight in our great series, The Universe Story, the greatest story ever told. I’m here with the inestimable and wonderful, Barb Marx Hubbard. This is Marc Gafni, and we’re here to tell you this story, the story of our time, The Universe Story, integrated from all the strands of wisdom that we have, traditional, modern, and post-modern into a larger unified whole, giving us the best take and understanding of the true nature of reality. We stand before the mystery, we stand before the uncertainty, but we don’t stand before it utterly naked. We’re actually able to gather the certainties of our heart, the eye of our heart, the certainties of our mind, the eye of the mind, and the certainty of our senses, the eye of the senses. Actually we know something and we delight in our knowledge, and our knowledge, our gnosis, guides us. As we actually express and then incarnate our unique purpose, our unique delight, on this planet.

So we’re talking this week, Lady B, if you remember from last week, we’re trying to remember back, yeah, remember? Yes, exactly, we’re talking about the second two pointing out instructions of uniqueness. Uniqueness is a fact of reality. Uniqueness exists all the way up and all the way down. One of the trajectories of evolution that we talked about in one of the first podcasts is evolution moves to more and more uniqueness, ultimately in the human world, right? We move to higher and higher levels of consciousness, which is more and more conscious uniqueness. We move from unconscious to conscious uniqueness. We begin to realize that our uniqueness is not separateness. My uniqueness doesn’t separate me from all this. Uniqueness is the currency of connection. Uniqueness is the puzzle piece that connects me to all that is.

The first implication of uniqueness is reality intended you. The second implication, the second point of instruction which is emergent from uniqueness is reality needs you, and now, Lady B, I want to introduce the third and fourth, and I really want to emphasize this week the third. Let me lay it out, and then, you know, turn it over to you. And for everyone listening, the last couple of weeks I’ve taken the lead, and the next couple of weeks, Barbara is taking the lead, right, as we unpack this vision of self which is the core evolutionary structure that lays at the base of The Universe Story.

There’s a new science, there’s a new evolutionary story, and there’s a new vision of self, which is emergent from this new evolutionary story. In order to get the new story, we need to know who are we in this new story? We are unique selves. What are the implications of uniqueness? That’s what we’re talking about. What are the pointing out instructions that emerge from uniqueness that transform the way we experience ourselves and our purpose, our being, and our delight in this world.

The third pointing out instruction of uniqueness, the third implication of uniqueness is not only does reality intend you, not only does reality need your service, but ready for this? This one’s unbelievable. Reality desires you. Wow, right? Like reality desires you, right? Now we know, right, that desire, need, and intention are not the same. They’re not extra words in language in that sentence. Each one connotes, evokes, a different quality of being, a different quality of reality. So desire, reality desires me. Not just intends me, not just needs me, reality desires me. There’s been luscious about it.

Now we all know that the word “desire” is often associated with the sexual, right? We associate that word with the sexual, which is why desires were thought to be problematic. Buddha was thought to have spoken against desire. Of course, parenthesis is not really what he said. Buddha, in the original Pali Canon says, “Have few desires, but have great ones.” And my good friend the Zen-teacher Diana Musho Hamilton, loves to cite this particular passage from Buddha; Have few desires, but have great ones.” It is in fact discerning and clarifying, right, the truth of your desire. What’s the difference between your pseudo desire and your authentic desire? So desire is a word we’ve exiled to the sexual.

Now, just stay with me for a second. Let’s kind of make this alive. Lady B, you don’t have to answer this directly, but let’s view it as an inquiry question. All right, what’s the difference for people between two sexual activities? One is a self-involved, an auto sexual activity, self- pleasuring, and the other is making love. The one’s inter-subjective, there’s another person involved, and the other is, right, just me. So pretty universally in culture, there’s a pretty clear general consensus that making love is better, okay? That’s pretty clear across the board. Ask a thousand people, 999 will tell you, despite Woody Allen’s endorsement of masturbation, despite that, right, there’s a general consensus that making love is better.

We could talk about this for a long time. The basic distinctions between self-pleasuring and making love and then the experience of making love, you experience yourself as being desired by someone else, right? That’s an experience you don’t have in self-pleasuring. In self-pleasuring you have a desire that lives in yourself, that you express within yourself. But what’s happened is, we’ve exiled the experience of desire and being desired to the sexual. So what happens is, right, we then need to fulfill our entire requirement, our entire fundamental human need to be desired, we try and fulfill it in the sexual.

Let’s really get this straight. Every human being needs to be desired, right? Being desired is an ontological need, it’s an essential human need, but we don’t need to fulfill it in the sexual. Actually, the deeper truth is reality desires you. You’re actually desired by reality itself. We can actually realize that the sexual models the erotic, the erotic as in the nature of Eros, the holy, the essence of existence itself, actually you’re not just desired in the sexual. The sexual, on a good day, models what it means to be desired, but actually all of reality desires you. Well, how do we know? We know that because what’s the nature of reality? Reality is allurement or attraction all the way up and all the way down. From electromagnet attraction at the subatomic level, to celestial attraction right at the kind of gravitational, if you will, level, all the way up and down the evolutionary chain, and all the laws of chemistry and all the laws of physics, all the laws of biology. Everything is driven, and all the laws, by the way, of the cultural, social world, everything’s driven by attraction. Everything’s driven by allurement. Reality is the allurement, attraction, all the way up, all the way down, which means reality only manifests what it desires.

So if reality manifested irreducible Barbaraness, in a cacophony of gorgeously expressed subatomic cellular, right, cultural, organismic, right, dancing, expressions of uniqueness, reality having a Barbara experience, it means that not only did reality intend Barbara, not only does reality need Barbaraness, it desires Barbaraness. It was precisely the desire, the unique set of desires and attractions of reality that produced Barbaraness. Barbara is an expression, is a unique desire of reality’s desire. Did you follow that?

Barbara is a unique expression of reality’s desire, which manifests Barbaraness. Reality only manifests what it desires. It’s irreducibly unique cacophony of sound and motion, right, and intuition and emotion and intellect and embodiment, which is Barbaraness, because reality desires it. So, wow, what does it mean, Lady B, to get that you’re desired by reality. Wow, talk about experiential. Right? Yeah, take it away love, what do you think?

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

It turns me on-

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Yes.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

… to passion, to express that which I desire to give as my gift.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Beautiful.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

In other words, the reality that’s desiring me is internal to me desiring to express, and that’s really why the thing works, because I am reality. So, whatever I am desiring, when I’m desiring it at a very deep level of my whole passionate self, and certainly my unique self, then I’m desiring what reality’s desiring, and when I know that I get empowered in my desire. I take my desires personally, seriously, and with a certain reverence, which I say to myself, “Oh, you desire this, Barbara? That’s not so convenient. That’s not so easy.” Like, you know, “Why don’t you take a simpler thing to desire?” But every time I said yes to a desire at a deep level of being because it felt real to me, it proved to provide more joy, more realization of potential, and more giving of gift to the light. So I trust desire, Marc.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Yes, yes, that’s, I mean, so gorgeously said, and just to unpack two small things in what you said, right, which are implicit and you said much more than that, but just to pick these two. The first thing you said was, “When I know that I’m desired by reality itself, it ignites my own desire.” Right? Now this is another way that this deep teaching, this deep dharma, and by the word “dharma” we mean you’re not a particular Sanskrit Buddhist expression, by “dharma” we mean the deepest expression of all wisdom integrated in the world, right?

So the deep dharma is, right, is the sexual models all of life. The sexual models Eros in all of life. So in the same way that in sexuality, right, when I’m desired, it ignites my desire. That’s actually the economy of desire and sexuality. Desire ignites desire. So when I actually step beyond the sexual, see we’ve exiled it all to the sexual, so therefore it’s distorted, and our need for the sexual is distorted, and we can’t step out of the sexual when we need to. But when we actually liberate, right liberate, you know Barbara it’s funny. People think I’ve got this kind of radical teaching that’s all about the sexual, no, it’s about life. It’s actually a conservative monastic teaching, paradoxically, which says that the sexual teaches us how to live erotically in all the non-sexual dimensions of life, right? Meaning I’m desired by reality, right, and therefore my desire is ignited. That’s one.

Then the second thing that you said, which is just implicit in this whole dharma if desire is actually realizing that reality desires, right, affirms the dignity of desire. The ontology of the desire. Have few desires, but have great ones. Reality is a desire. The interior sense of evolution, the interior experience of evolution is desire, right? Evolution yearns for it. I can find that desire by [inaudible 00:11:29] into myself. Desire is, now I’ve got to discern between sacred desire and pseudo desire, for sure. Between addictive desire, between desire which expresses my irreducible uniqueness. But once I actually get that desire itself is the very life stream of reality, I can begin to give and affirm the dignity of my own truest desires, and to give them the passion, the efforts, the commitment they take, to be manifest in the world, because reality needs my service. So, yes, yes, yes-

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

Marc …

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Lady B, please.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

I’m sensing when you say the word “reality desires,” I’m going deep into the word “reality” and what that reality is desiring is not some kind of disembodied frequency, but I like to think of it as the divine source of creation desires. I like to think that reality is springing from source, from God, from I would say the consciousness field of life itself. So when any one of us feels that the very deep desire and reality is desiring, I go to the source of the reality that’s desiring me to fulfill a desire, and I could even manage to say, “Well, you know, this is the will of the divine.” Now that’s-

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Totally.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

… a big jump. But, if you’re humble enough to know that your impulse didn’t just come from you, that you didn’t just create yourself. Whatever created you and your impulse is truly divine. Then there’s a way of approaching your own reality and your own desire that truly makes it sacred.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Yeah, that’s so, I mean, so beautiful and so gorgeous, right? I mean the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist, and so we play with, you know as we have, both in Evolutionary Church and everyone listening is welcome to join us. Look up on the web Evolutionary Church that happens every week on Saturday at 9:00. You know when we talk about words like church or God or prayer, we try and evolve the meaning of those words beyond the fundamentalists, ethnocentric, you know, words that lived 400 years ago to actually their deepest and deeper meanings that have evolved and emerged, right, in these new emergent periods of revelation.

When we use the word, “God” we always mean the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. We mean the God who is the incessant creativity in cosmos and that holds cosmos, but not the ethnocentric homophobic God that says that if you masturbate you’ll die. We’ve got to distinguish between those two Gods. There’s two uses of the word “divine,” and you’re using the word “divine” in it’s highest way, which is exactly the way I mean the word “reality,” right, and the reality is everything. It’s all that is ultimately is real.

Reality is as you say, so beautifully not neutral. Reality’s not a neutral field. Reality is a yearning field. Reality is a field that has intention. Reality is intelligent, right, reality has infinite intelligence that manifests photosynthesis before there was a human brain or a super computer. It manifested mytosis and myosis, right, before we even had a neuro cortex, so reality’s wildly intelligent, and reality moves towards greater and greater love, right, which is what we talked about in the beginning, the trajectory of evolution being the evolution of love. So yes, thank you, that you so much for that emendation, that dance between languages that we’re doing today. That between reality, right, God, right, the divine impulse.

So friend, this is the yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. This is the third pointing out instruction of uniqueness. We said we’re going to do four, and the fourth one we’ll do next week in response to and as part of Barbara’s taking us into the next stages of self. Thank you for being with us in Week Eight. Barbara, give us a closing blessing of Podcast Eight, the Greatest Story Ever Told.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

The Greatest Story Ever Told is truly inherent in all of our yearning, to be all that we can be. Thank you, Marc.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Amen, thank you everyone. Have a great week. See you next week B.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

Yes.

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