Continued from Part 3
An unedited first draft text from forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid
Law Two: The Law of One Love: Outrageous Love is the One Love
Insight Two (Part 2 of 2)
Part 1 of Insight Two is here
Open any book on love and you will find the same answer to the question of "What is Love?" "Love is an emotion." Moreover love is considered to be a human emotion. Love is understood to be a human emotional experience in reaction to some form of outside stimuli, person, place, idea or thing. However this is precisely wrong on all three levels. Love at its core is not merely an emotion, it is not merely human and it is not merely a reaction.
Ordinary love is a human emotion and a reaction, whereas Outrageous Love is source itself. Ordinary Love is merely a reactive emotion. Outrageous love is not a reaction at all. It is the action of perceiving. A ball hits the wall. In reaction to the impact the ball bounces off the wall. Very quickly however the energy of the reaction peters out. The ball ceases its motion. An emotion is energy in motion, in reaction to outside stimuli. Because it is in reaction, the emotion, energy in motion, comes to a rest. Ordinary Love inevitably withers and dies. That is simply its nature. The feeling and the power that derive from Ordinary love never last.
Outrageous Love is at core a perception and not an emotion. Perception is a capacity of consciousness that only deepens over time if we keep cleansing our doors of perception. Instead of love growing stale and eventually disappearing which is the inevitable trajectory of ordinary love, Outrageous love invites us to a path where love grows ever more powerful, passionate, vital and erotic in the fullness of time. It is only Outrageous Love which has the sustaining power to transform our personal lives.
Outrageous Love is not the dogma of a particular religion. It is not the belief of a specific spiritual form. It is a fully accessible lived truth. Like all great truths it is revealed through scientific experiment. In the introductory chapters we talked about the distinction between dogma and dharma and how science works. You do an experiment. You produce a result. You repeat the experiment and produce the result again. You then have people, who do not know each other, what science calls double blind conditions, consistently repeat the same experiment. You check to see if they all get the same results. You then check your experimental process and its results with the greatest experts in that field of knowledge. If it is all confirmed you have produced genuine knowledge. This is true in the fields of physics, chemistry, calculus and pretty much all of the great fields of study that make up modern scientific knowledge.
This is true however both in what we might call the physics of outer space and in the physics of the inner space. Both inner and outer space have their own nature and natural laws and both are revealed through experimentation. We know that outrageous love is the inner nature of the reality because great experiments in spirituality have been conducted by the most subtle and speculative heart-minds that ever lived for thousands of years. They used empirical experimental methods to reveal their truth. These methods included rigorous sustained Zen meditation, Kabbalistic practice, Christian mystical prayer, sacred ceremony, Shamanic ritual, the practice of the prophets and masters in all the generations and much more. They did not know each other.
In the last one hundred years or so we have gathered the results from all these experiments. They all came to the same scientific conclusion. The interior face of the cosmos is love. The universe feels and the Universe feels love. Not ordinary love which is an interpersonal emotion between human beings. But Outrageous Love which is the love that moves all of reality to higher and higher levels of contact. The same love that moves you to reach beyond your loneliness to make contact with another being is the love that moves the sun and the stars. These key distinctions between ordinary and Outrageous Love, critically empower your awakening as an outrageous lover.
The good news is this. Human beings can access Outrageous Love. You can move beyond weak, sentimental ordinary love, which is limited by your social, cultural and psychological conditioning. You can access Outrageous Love as the motive force in your life. You can awaken to your true nature as an Outrageous Lover. This is what it means to align with your true nature and to awaken to your essence. There is a direct transformative practice, which will take you there. This is the writing of Outrageous Love Letters. The Outrageous Love Process, the path and practice of writing Outrageous Love letters. We will unfold this practice in law five.
To be continued...