Ordinary Love and Outrageous Love — Part 3
An unedited first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid
Outrageous Pain and Outrageous Love
When we look around us we are bombarded by constant images and facts of horrific pain. We are fully aware that as we go about our daily routine thousands of children are starving to death every day. When we truly feel into the reality around us we are overwhelmed by the enormity of the raw anguish. Put together our internal wounds and tragedies, our routine lives, and the vast objective pain that surrounds us, it becomes almost unbearable. Our only reprieve from the pain comes from somehow closing our hearts and deadening our emotional nerve endings. Or at least we try and select carefully what to let in to our heart.
We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.
Outrageous love is not ordinary love. Ordinary love cannot hold outrageous pain. Ordinary love is reaction. It is a transitory feeling that arises in response to something outside of us. A fleeting feeling of love in response to external stimuli is what passes for love today. That is ordinary love. But the feeling and the power that derive form it never last. Outrageous love is an action which emerges spontaneously from inside of us. It is only that can of love which has the sustaining power to transform both our personal lives and our planet
Love which arises in response to something external to us is not at all bad. It can remind us of the outrageous love inside that we have forgotten. But it never lasts. And when we only experience it on rare occasion it simply makes the rest of life seem dull and drab. It only by awakening directly to the outrageous love that lies dormant in us that we can access the full aliveness that gives our lives power and meaning.
To live on purpose and in joy, liberated from aching anxiety, it is not enough to be in love. More than being in love you have to be love. Being lived as love is a much more awake and evolved state than being in love. It is a key difference between ordinary love and outrageous love. Ordinary love is being in love induced by an external source. Outrageous love is being lived as love. Being lived as love emerges from the inside of the inside of our core identity. When we become love then we do not need to search for stimuli. We are love incarnate. Being lived as love is the essential experience of outrageous love.
We need to evolve beyond ordinary love to outrageous love. That is the way to love more; to love more widely, more intensely and more deeply.
The practical solution to almost every challenge we face is to love more. Bill Clinton said in a public speech at the Davos economic summit that the only tenable response to the threats that loom over us is the evolution of consciousness. This goes for all threats internal and external. The inside of consciousness is love. The evolution of consciousness is no less than the evolution of love. It is from our ability to love more that we will make new choices, unleash higher imagination and transform our identity from consumers to creators. Said simply the solution to all that confounds us is to love more. And to love wider. And to love deeper. And to love more powerfully.
One Love: Outrageous Love
But this only becomes possible when we understand that all forms of love come from one source. There is only one heart and one love. This is the love that is source itself. Bengali mystic Tagore said, “Love is not mere sentiment, it is the ultimate truth at the heart of creation.” The ancient Shamans would say to a person before a journey of awakening, “may you find your heart in this journey and may you discover that your heart is the one heart.”
Tagore and the Shamans were referring to the same truth understood by certain dimensions of quantum mechanics, evolutionary emergence and complexity theory. Reality itself moved to make greater and greater levels of contact between ostensibly separate parts. All of the parts are part of a larger field. They are drawn to each other by the allurement of Eros. This interior force of attraction in the cosmos is what makes the entire universe hang together. This is the interior Eros which is the ground of reality, love by any other name. It is this same Eros which is the ceaselessly creative impulse of becoming. Through this erotic evolutionary impulse, love by any other name, reality moves to higher and higher levels of interconnectivity, mutuality, union and embrace. Christian mystic Dante talked about “the love that moves the sun and the stars”. Process philosopher Whitehead speaks of evolution as the “gentle movement towards god by the gentle persuasion of love”. By gentle he meant gradual and not self-evident to the one who is asleep. Tagore, the shamans and Whitehead were all pointing to the truth of what we are calling Outrageous Love.
Outrageous Love is not the pallid strategy for ego security that so often masquerades as love. It is precisely that form of ego love that we have called ordinary love. Outrageous love is source itself. The same love that moves you to make contact and connect with other is the love that moves the sun and the stars. When you awaken to a lived experience of this knowing you begin to be able to access Outrageous love as the core aliveness and motive power of your life.
Outrageous love is what the leading edge of post quantum physics calls the quantum field. It is the field of love intelligence. Another name for Outrageous Love is what the mystics called Source.
When we access the source, we are capable of love in any and all situations. We are able to keep our heart open in all circumstances. We are able to live fully alive and radically empowered in every dimension of our lives. In other words, we become capable of Outrageous Love. Outrageous love is the source for all other forms of love. It is source itself. Outrageous love is the opposite of dissolution, deconstruction and destruction. Outrageous love is not ordinary. It is epic and extraordinary. It is not reactive it is active. Outrageous love is what Meta-thinker Charles Pierce referred to as evolutionary love. Outrageous love is the very impulse of evolution. Outrageous Love is the only force that is more powerful then entropy.
Outrageous Love is both the currency of connection between human beings and the essential eros that drives the evolutionary process as a whole. Outrageous Love is the eros of all relationship even as it is the very Eros of evolution itself. Personal and impersonal love are one. One love. Evolutionary love. Outrageous love.
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Evolutionary Mystic de Chardin wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for and as God, the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
This is not the dulling comfort of ordinary love designed by the ego to soothe over the challenging nature of this life. This is the fierce and tender fire of outrageous love. Fire is not tepid or weak. Fire is outrageous. To master the capacity of outrageous love is to be on fire. It is to awaken a capacity in you for joy and aliveness, for intimacy, for manifestation that is beyond your current imagination.
We do not want to share this with you merely as information.
Rather we intend share with you a transmission of the inner nature of reality that animates your essence in every moment. A transmission of outrageous love.
The Universe feels. And the universe feels love.
In every single moment, aware of it or not, you are drenched in the cosmic love that animates the Kosmos, which is alive in and as all that is.
In this sense Love is not hard to find. Love is not difficult to achieve. Rather love is impossible to avoid.
Sometimes we go our whole lives waiting for somebody to say “I love you”. But the fact is that moment to moment to moment, spirit is saying, “I love you.”
Every single corner of you is loved and accepted. Every single inch of you is loved and accepted. Every single part of you is absolutely loved and absolutely accepted, and it’s that extraordinary love that is so utterly nourishing and utterly enlivening and utterly profoundly awakening.
You are responsible to know this. You are responsible to know that you are loved in every moment. You are responsible for your own arousal. You are responsible for your own awakening to the truth of outrageous love. That is the essence of spiritual practice
We usually think of spiritual practice as developing our capacity to love. And this is of course true and important. But the other thing that’s just as important is our capacity to recognize and receive the love that’s already raining down on us like a thundershower. Spiritual practice is about being open not closed. It is about being able to open ourselves to that love.
To just feel into the heart and just open the heart in gratitude and blessedness and feel that love entering us and nourishing us and breathing us and actually being us is an extraordinary phenomenon.
Andrew Harvey, Sally Kempton & Marc Gafni: Approaching the Evolutionary Goddess through Kabbalah
Andrew Harvey and Sally Kempton are co-teaching a 6-months online course on The Evolutionary Goddess: Incarnating the Divine Feminine in Your Spiritual Life & Our World through The Shift Network.
In a bonus session for the online course Andrew Harvey and Sally Kempton are co-teaching through The Shift Network on The Evolutionary Goddess: Incarnating the Divine Feminine in Your Spiritual Life & Our World, they have been interviewing Marc Gafni on the presence of the divine feminine in Jewish mysticism, and how the Kabbalistic teachings on the Shekinah hold a secret mystical understanding of the evolutionary Goddess.
Listen to that interview here>>>
