Continued from Part 5
Insight Three:
This law is also sometimes called the Law of Desire. The first dimension of this law is that reality is moving in a direction. Reality desires. Desire moves towards a desired result or object. Reality evolves = Reality desires.
The second dimension of this law is that the motive force of evolution is Eros, or what we have called Outrageous Love.
Said simply, reality has both Telos (direction and desire) as well as Eros (an awakened quality of radical creativity and aliveness). The third law of love states therefore that we live in what we might accurately call a telerotic universe. Outrageous Love is the initiating and animating Eros of all that is. It is evolutionary Eros itself. Said differently, desire is the initiating force of evolution itself. Eros is identified not merely as an interpersonal human attraction but as the ultimate truth at the heart of reality. It is the evolutionary impulse itself.
Love is sometimes too tepid a word. Love includes Eros and desire. That is what we mean by Outrageous Love. Outrageous Love is not pallid, polite, conceptual or intellectual. Outrageous Love is dripping, pulsing and demanding. It is characterized both by spaciousness and freedom as well as by ecstatic urgency. In this sense, the movement of Evolution is the movement of desire itself.
The Action:
Awaken to the recognition that your root desire is evolutionary desire. At your core, you are Love in Action.
Just a very short time ago, we did not know this new fact about reality - that reality evolves. This is the change that changes everything. We are living in a particular time in history - at the beginning of the 21st Century. We're living at a time where the whole idea of evolution, which is largely synonymous with creativity and transformation, is changing the way we think about our role in the cosmos in the most fundamental of ways.
Science is revealing to all of us unequivocally that we all have been created by an evolutionary process. It had a beginning in time. It's a process that's definitely going somewhere.
This is the good news that liberates us when we embrace an evolutionary worldview: we are part and parcel of a process that had a beginning, and is definitely going somewhere.
The whole notion that we're actually going somewhere is a new idea for most people. The realization that the universe is not a static place, that the cultural context that we emerged with is not static, is a dawning awareness whose full revolutionary implications need to be consciously assimilated.
Even though many educated people are aware of the fact that we're part of an evolutionary, developmental creative process that's going somewhere, that information, for most of us, hasn't truly been internalized.
Most of us are seeing our own experience and seeing the world around us within a lens that doesn't really appreciate that each moment is revealing, or giving rise to, an opportunity for creative advance. This is what Alfred North Whitehead famously called the creative advance of novelty. This was for Whitehead, as well as for the mainstream of evolution science, a defining characteristic of reality. In my own understanding of this truth, I find myself in a state of ever-deepening appreciation about the significance of that fact.
The ego or the Separate Self tends to see its own inner experience in the world from the perspective of being trapped in a static place, a static inner psychological space, and a static world-space.
Even if we may technically know that the Kosmos is in motion, our psychological orientation in relationship to our personal experience, and also in the way we see the world, is that we tend to project the outdated perspective of unchanging or static on the world around us.
When we know that we are part of a process that's going somewhere, the most exciting thing we can possibly do is to get with the program -- or the process -- that has created us.
We need to begin to interpret our own personal human experience in the context of cultural evolution. The first step in doing that is to really embrace, at a very deep level, the profound fact that we're part of a process that's going somewhere.
And I suggest that the step that needs to be taken, the most exciting and the most spiritually and culturally relevant step, is to move beyond the classic spiritual position in which we are the witness (the mere passive observer of experience and of what's happening within our own inner psychological world-space and in the world around us). I suggest that we need to really to step into the process that's going somewhere.
If we are going to step into a process that's going somewhere, we, in a sense, have to get going.
An unedited first draft text from forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid