007 — Loneliness as an Evolutionary Driver
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [December 3, 2016] given by Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Kristina Tahel Amelong. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
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Do we feel loneliness?
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Good morning, Beloveds. We are not alone. We are coming home.
Those of us in whom the flame of expectation burns are an emerging Evolutionary Family upon this earth.
We have been scattered everywhere, in order to seed the global culture with the awareness, and love, of life ever-evolving. We are each an expression of the Divine process of creation.
We are here to birth a species —
- capable of loving one another as ourselves,
- capable of overcoming the illusion of separate self,
- able to be one with the whole, a puzzle piece within the whole puzzle,
- awakening to the impulse of evolution as an expression of our own Unique Selves evolving.
We are a resonant field — an evolving church, for the evolving humans — as a home base for the appearance and nurturing of co-creators of the emerging world.
Do we feel loneliness? Yes, we do.
What is the response to our aloneness? Interiority, genuine holy conversation and purpose.
As we join together as members of the Evolutionary Family of humanity, in Evolutionary Church, we begin to foster the Politics of Evolutionary Love. Consciously.
We’re finding our way home. Reality flows through our blood and bones, as the impulse of the Creator, animating us as unique evolutionary co-creators in Evolutionary Church.
Thank you. I turn my word to Marc.
Emergent world vision: the Universe is a Love Story
Dr Marc Gafni
Welcome, everyone. Barbara, it’s so good to see you, Beloved. It’s so good to see everyone.
Oh, my God!
Are we excited? We are excited. Now, why are we excited? Are you allowed to get excited? If you’re excited, you must be an evangelist.
We are evangelists, yes!
We are not evangelists of fundamentalism.
We are evangelists who are bringing the good news together.
We are all bringing the good news. And the good news is, there’s a vision.
The good news is that we stand at the abyss of uncertainty — and, there is an emergent world vision.
We know a lot.
We know that the universe is a love story —
- and that love story is one that we are personally implicated in,
- and that we can actually awaken as Outrageous Love in that love story. And Evolutionary Church is about awakening to the evolutionary impulse that lives in us, as us, and through us.
We know that, as the evolutionary impulse, each of us has an irreducibly unique expression of that LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty — and as such, has unique Outrageous Acts of Love to commit that can be done by you and by you alone.
For instance, Reality is having a Barbara Marx Hubbard experience, and look at what a good time Reality is having! Oh, my God!
So we are excited. We are evangelists. We are bringing the good news.
And there’s a certain order to church, and there’s a ritual to church.
And we are in, as Barbara said, week seven.
Seven is completion.
Seven is wholeness.
Seven is Sabbath.
Seven, in Hebrew, is sheva: utter satisfaction, as something begins to be grounded in Reality.
What fundamentalists got right
Every week we go into prayer.
We deepen the field of evolutionary prayer.
We reclaim prayer in a deep way. Each time there’ll be new wine in old flasks.
We’ll do our Evolutionary Church hymn, Hallelujah, and we’ll offer prayer. Then, we will enter into the beginning of the message for this week with Lady Barbara, the fair princess in all worlds. Then, I’ll continue the message. To close, we will do confession of greatness, and have a place for people to speak their personal confession of greatness.
Our theme this week is loneliness. What does loneliness have to do with our meta-vision, which is to articulate a personal politics of Evolutionary Love?
We’ve said that we are going to actually send President Elect Donald Trump a manifesto with the basic principles of the Politics of Evolutionary Love, as a gift for his inauguration.
Friends, we are on the inside of the inside.
So, let me say a word about prayer before we step into our hymn. Barbara and I both get lots of emails saying, what do you guys do in church, what are you doing? Is this a regressive move? Those are the fundamentalists — the fundamentalist world, the world of the church, the world of the fundamentalist church.
So let me tell you a little secret, this is between us. The fundamentalists got something right that the liberal left-wing world completely missed. You know what they got right? The Lord Jesus knows your name and speaks to you directly, and you can speak to Jesus, and Jesus is holding you. Okay, you got that, that’s a little fundamentalism.
Now, the truth is, we might not like the way they do it, and especially when there’s a big move for a big donation to sell your house and mortgage your car. There’s a lot of things we don’t like about fundamentalism; it’s xenophobic, and it’s a little homophobic, and it’s politically way far to the right, and it’s against free choice and abortion. We have all the problems.
But what did they get right?
They got something really right. What they got right is, Jesus knows your name.
When I say Jesus, I don’t mean Jesus. I don’t mean a particular Christian expression. I mean the personal face of Reality, we call it the second face of God.
The three faces of God
The first face of God is I Am, in Buddhism. You go to an ashram, I Am. Tat tvam asi: Thou art That. The divine impulse that lives in me, as me, and through me; the evolutionary impulse awakening in me. In Eastern world, tat tvam asi, it’s the divine principle in me. It’s what they call in Buddhism, sunyata, or emptiness. It is Shiva Shakti that lives as me. In evolutionary spirituality, it’s the evolutionary impulse awakening as me. That’s the first face of God.
The third face of God is the forces of physics, the incessant creativity of Kosmos, the Evolutionary Love that drives all of Reality. That’s third person, third face of God.
But we’ve missed the second face of God, which is the personal face of the evolutionary impulse that knows your name, that holds you, that holds you no less than when you’re held in a conversation with another. The realization that I live in an Intimate Universe, and that every place I fall, I fall into God’s hands. That I can stand and pray, and for as long as I stand and pray, God is going to stand and listen.
- And God is not less than the personal; God is the infinity of the personal.
- God is not less than human intimacy; God is the Infinity of Intimacy, and God is the Infinity of Intimacy that knows my name.
- And the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist.
The Divinity is always a Trinity, the Catholics got that right.
- The Eastern Buddhist world just gets the first face of God, but leaves out the second face.
- The church often only gets the second face, and leaves out the first face, leaves out that I Am God, leaves out tat tvam asi: Thou art That, leaves out the evolutionary impulse awaking in me.
- Science — our colleague, Stuart Kauffman, for example, at the Santa Fe Institute — gets the third face of God: the incessant ceaseless creativity, or the evolutionary impulse.
In evolutionary spirituality, we forget the second face of God.
God knows my name. God is holding me intimately.
The fundamentalist world is actually holding this sense of the second face of God, but they’ve hijacked that into a fundamentalist world which says: that second face of God is owned by me. It’s owned by Islam. It’s owned by Christianity. It’s owned by Judaism. We own it, and we know exactly what God says. And God happens to have fundamentalist politics. And God happens to be an extreme right winger.
Well, that’s not true.
That’s a hijacking of the second face of God.
But if we just reject the second face of God, we are living in denial. We are living in denial of the Intimate Universe.
In Evolutionary Church, we have a historic mission. We are reclaiming the second face of God that knows our name and hears us, before whom we say Hallelujah.
Let’s hear another evolutionary personality, Leonard Cohen, who passes away just as Donald Trump moves on to the scene, and who was both a Buddhist and a Jew, and he’s doing Sabbath and he’s doing Christianity, and he’s singing the Psalms of David. He’s singing Hallelujah, the hymn of Evolutionary Church.
The field of evolutionary prayer
We hold the silence of presence, which is the aftertaste of a chant or a prayer.
It’s in the aftertaste, it’s in the silence of presence that we live. And in that silence of presence, we affirm, as Cohen does in Hallelujah, the dignity of our loneliness, the dignity of the holy and the broken Hallelujah.
She tied you to a kitchen chair.
She broke your throne.
She cut your hair.And from your lips, she drew the Hallelujah.
And “she” here is not a woman or man. “She” is life. She is the broken and the holy Hallelujah.
Prayer affirms the dignity of our yearning.
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need.
Prayer affirms the dignity of our loneliness.
And when we offer prayer, we pray from the dignity of that loneliness, from the dignity of that personal need. We break out, and we pray for ourselves and we pray for another. We pray and we ask for everything. Not just for world peace, though. We ask for our Uncle Sam, who needs help. Or my brother Jack, who’s having an operation next week, and for my own ability to support my family.
We actually know that, in this moment, the gates are open.
We actually offer our prayers.
We offer Hallelujah. And Hallelujah is drunken intoxication, in Hebrew, and Hallelujah is praise, and that praise brings us to prayer.
I am offering the first prayer. I’m praying for my friend, Sam and Barbara, that Sam gets the most incredible fabulous job in the world so that he’s able to do all the great writing he needs to do in the world. Hallelujah.
And I pray that Barbara, who’s in her new home Colorado, just is madly in love with that home. Hallelujah.
We pray for everything.
We pray because in prayer we affirm the dignity of personal need.
We are not afraid to pray. Because every place we’re on our knees, we’re on our knees to God. And so the gates are open now. And we invite everyone, as we do every week, and we invite ourselves, to be an unguarded heart and learn prayer, so we can actually pray together. And we say Amen to every prayer.
When we open our hearts to pray and to put my prayer into the chat box — whether it’s the chat box where we type it in, or it’s the chat box of our heart — when we actually speak the prayer out loud, then something happens.
We reclaim the Infinity of Intimacy.
We get connected to that Infinity of Intimacy.
We step out of our loneliness.
The first step beyond loneliness is to know that although sometimes we may live lives of quiet desperation, friends, there is never lonely desperation, because we are never alone.
We are never alone: we are always held in the arms of the Infinity of Intimacy, that intended us, that desires us, that knows our name.
And I turn to sister Barbara, my beloved wholemate, Lady Barbara, to take us into the message on loneliness this week.
Loneliness and the impulse of evolution within us
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Marc, I’m so inspired now about loneliness, and what you were saying about the Infinity within us is always there, and how easy it is to lose it.
I want to tell you a little bit of my own discovery of loneliness, why it occurred and what to do about it, using all the great Dharma that we’re getting together here.
Loneliness is possibly the most prevalent emotional problem we face in this culture. More people feel lonely than any other psychological problem.
It’s obvious what happened. The extended family disappeared. Most of us do not live in a community. There are minimal services to help us.
I’m the perfect example of someone who broke the pattern. I have five children. I love my husband. I love my children, my home, my dog, my cat, my garden and everything. And yet, this depression sank in.
But, I had the awareness to realize something more wanted to be expressed. What was it?
It was vocation, life purpose, which is one of the great keys of overcoming loneliness.
But also, it can truly create loneliness. Because what did I have to do? To make a long story short, I got a divorce; I took five children to Washington, DC, and I created the Committee for the Future.
Why?
Because of the impulse of evolution.
But, it created loneliness. And then I had to create a new family there, and it kept growing and kept growing. And I realized that what’s happening here, to the evolutionary family of humanity, who now has a new church — it’s really an epic moment — is that every one of us, somewhere inside, said Yes to a deeper purpose. Said Yes to something that separated us — -
- from the daily life,
- and maybe the family that we grew up with,
- or even the husbands or wives we may have had, even the children.
In my case, with my children, when I told my son who was nine that we had to move to Washington, and I knew it might not be helpful for him, but he was going to come with me. He said: Mom, I know what you’re doing is right. This is what mothers are for, they’re supposed to be creating the future, he said. And he put his little nine-year-old arms around me, and I didn’t feel lonely. But I was breaking up a very, very comfortable pattern.
And so as I went on with this, I realized that no matter where I went, I didn’t have a permanent home. Because the impulse of doing more, being more, loving more — which is life purpose, in each one of us who’s a member of the evolutionary family — keeps challenging us to move further onward, so we often need to step beyond what we might feel is very secure.
Is it true that we’ve left a lot of places that are secure in our lives?
Yes. Yes, I’m seeing a few nods of heads here, we’re going to hear about this. Well, I have to say, I’ve done it again. But Marc said, this was his genius, he said: Barbara, let’s form an Evolutionary Church. And this woke a forgotten hope in me.
What was the forgotten hope?
It was something that could not be taken away by my own impulse to create more love and be more. A church of other people who were all doing exactly this: creating more, loving more, being more, for the sake of life.
So this Evolutionary Church got formed out of the insight that Marc had — and that I at first rebelled against. I said it’s an old form, people don’t need an old form, they can just meet in any way they want to. But as I got into it, I began to see that the structure would create the strength and the home for the politics of Evolutionary Love to be nurtured in a family that would not go away. And that it could, in fact, be the most important step in this vast movement of political evolutionary change that we could possibly take.
So I want to just read a quote to you from Ilia Delio, who is a great Catholic nun, and a student of Teilhard de Chardin. She speaks everywhere, mainly to Catholic Sisters, telling them they cannot remain Catholic, unless they understand the new cosmology. That the less they understand that the universe is filled with the impulse of the Divine, and that Divine is in them, and there is no three-tiered universe: God above, hell below. And she says to them, as a Catholic nun, this is wrong. You cannot expect to remain a Catholic and believe the three-tier universe, it’s wrong.
What we are teaching in Evolutionary Church is that the universe is a love story.
It started at the origin of creation with an impulse to connect, connect, connect: quarks with electrons, with protons, with neutrons, with people — and now us, in Evolutionary Church, given this enormous inspiration to reach out with life purpose, to connect and to love others in a politics of love.
I want to tell you one of the things that happened to me when I moved here to Sunrise Ranch.
Sunrise Ranch is in Colorado, Loveland, Colorado. It’s founded by the Emissaries of Divine Light, and the founder of it, and several others, with Marc and myself, formed something called a Planetary Mission. Basically, the Planetary Mission is the overall goal of Evolutionary Church. It is a planetary awakening in love through a Unique Self Symphony. Our overall goal is to reach out and to invite people everywhere in the world who are moving towards being co-creators, to join together their creativity and their love until we can infuse the noosphere, the internet, the thinking layer of Earth, with our love.
And that this is what used to be called The Second Coming.
This is what the Catholics said was the second coming of Christ.
What Evolutionary Church and the Planetary Mission are working toward is the evolutionary awakening of love on a mass scale.
And I would like to say — I mean, I’m realizing this, Marc, as we go deeper and deeper into it — Evolutionary Church is the home of the planetary awakening.
It’s the home of the politics of Evolutionary Love.
The reason I came to Sunrise Ranch is –
- I was invited here because they want to host the Planetary Mission.
- They want to create a communication hub for this mission.
- They want to invite us to assemble there and create together.
So I bravely left Berkeley — where I was near my sister, near Marc, near many people I know and love, near Lisa — and headed out to Sunrise Ranch, Colorado, with that inner impulse of creativity. And when I got here, we were in the midst of a huge blizzard. I was writing, I wrote a letter to Marc saying, I’m wintering in Colorado. We were hit with a blast of the coldest possible air. The people were very cordial, they put me in a nice little room. I sat there, and what happened?
I felt lonely. I didn’t think it was possible for me to still feel lonely, after all the things that I had done. But I felt lonely.
And the loneliness was so deep, it was like that depression when I was married with the five children. There was something missing. I knew enough to say, okay, I’ve got to act.
I used loneliness as an evolutionary driver. The evolutionary driver for me was, I have to do something,
I met with my hosts the next day, and I said, very simply and humbly, I’m lonely.
And what was I lonely for in that instance?
It’s part of the Dharma that Marc speaks up. For holy conversation. I couldn’t live in that community saying hi to people, nodding and going about my work, being with most people on the internet. I was lonely.
I was lonely because I didn’t have holy conversation.
So, I said to my host, let’s have a meeting every day from 5–6pm, and we thought of a name for it: Creative Insights at the Heart of the Hub of The Wheel of Co-Creation. And I would be exploring insights of conscious evolution, of Evolutionary Church, with members of the community at Sunrise Ranch of the Emissaries of Divine Light.
As we started to think of that, then my host said, well, let’s decorate this room, let’s make it more festive. And then the question was, well, how about getting this on the media? Then how about having the proper lights, in order to communicate from the sacred space of the holy communion there at Sunrise? Let’s communicate to the world. Let’s invite everybody to have holy conversations. That happened in one afternoon, after me confessing loneliness.
What I got out of this is that I want to go over the Dharma, as I understand it, of dealing with loneliness. And this is something from Marc and myself.
The first thing to know is that we are one with the impulse of evolution, or what Marc calls interiority. Getting in touch with that interior Reality.
For me, it’s a process of morning meditation; quieting my mind, then writing out in my journal the situation I’m facing, like I’m lonely: really the worst of the situations I can possibly think of. And then say, dearly Beloved, what does this mean? And I turn off my thinking mind, and I believe I tune in to the deeper knowing of Reality. I used to project it outside myself. I thought it was Christ or some avatar. But actually, I discovered it’s totally inside. So, by doing that, I realized, now I tapped the interiority. And then I was able to read it and be guided by it, and learn from it. And then the next day, say, here’s what happened, dearly beloved. It didn’t work, or this is great. So I have a very profound conversation with the dearly Beloved interiority.
The second part of overcoming loneliness is purpose.
We have to identify the actions we are taking toward a politics of love that only you and I can do uniquely.
- And purpose is not just I have a nice project.
- Purpose is not even just so I can go get a good job doing X, Y, or Z.
- Purpose is tuning in through the interiority, with the impulse of that divine creativity within you, and saying Yes to it.
Does that feel right? To say Yes to the inner impulse, it is Unique Self expressing. What it does is, it activates the divine presence of creative force within you.
Marc: Right, the holy Yes that set the Big Bang. Holy Yes.
Barbara: Let’s just take a moment here and tune into what you are saying Yes to in your life — the biggest, deepest, most great thing you are saying Yes to.
And let’s say Yes together.
What does this Yes do? It brings us closer to union with the Divine. We become non-dual.
Because if the Yes is deep enough, as it is in so many of us — it is in me, my Yes is very, very deep — it means that I and the impulse have become one. You and the impulse, when your Yes is profound, you and the inner impulse become one. As Jesus said: If you’ve seen me, if you’ve seen you, you’ve seen the Divine Creator.
And the deeper meaning then of the word co-creator is one with the Creator within. If I have any understanding of God’s intention, the creator, it’s to create co-creators.
And how do we get to be one with God?
By saying Yes to our unique creativity.
The holy Yes, in the holy interiority, with the holy conversations that we are going to have, so we can remind ourselves and realize we are not alone in our Yes. Because if you’re saying Yes all by yourself, it’s extremely lonely, even if you’re very, very great, so we consciously create what Marc calls a We-Space: a resonant field of two or more who are truly excited by what you want to give.
It’s very important that they are excited by you, and you can be equally excited by them. But it’s not okay, you are not in a We-Space if they are not thrilled with the impulse that you want to give. Like, I am thrilled with the impulse that Marc wants to give, and he actually appreciates the impulse that I want to give, so we have this holy conversation.
But now, here’s the great thing, we begin to confess our greatness. But what we’re confessing together, so each of us can share it with each other, is the impulse of the Creator within us saying Yes.
That’s a confession of greatness.
And finally, to help us, let us co-create our Evolutionary Church. Let us make it the home base for the evolutionary souls on planet Earth, creating together from the heart of the hub of The Wheel of Co-Creation.
This is the social environment we can co-create —
- to share genius,
- to join our creativity, our love, our oneness,
- and actually be the impulse of the politics of Evolutionary Love at a planetary scale, never existing before.
I’m not lonely right now. I know I might be again later today. But I’m inviting you, and we want to get to know each other.
Marc, I turn this to you.
Evolution is the story of reality: moving from loneliness to loving
Dr. Marc Gafni
To be lonely is to be unable to share your soul print with another person
I receive the word, beloved Barbara. And we step in Yes, and we are merging with Barbara’s word. When you are really loving each other, the words merge together. They are a space. Ego disappears. Because Unique Selves are voices that merge together. Egoic voices clash. Unique Selves, there is so much room, it’s so spacious.
Let’s really come home now. Because home is when —
- we are awake,
- we are alive,
- we are in Eros.
Eros is the experience of Radical Aliveness, moving towards contact and creativity.
Let us feel the Eros of the Kosmos, awake and alive in us.
Let me share with you a brief story. And, when I share a story about myself, or Barbara does about herself, it’s not about us. It’s about all of us. We all have sacred autobiography, and our sacred autobiography is a sacred text of our lives. Not a narcissistic text, but a text that connects us to the larger Field.
It must have been 25 years ago. I am leaving my house, the State of Israel has asked me to do a little lecture tour in Scandinavia. I’m 24 or 25. I’m doing my lecture tour, and I’m so excited to be doing this lecture tour, and I’m convinced that the entire future fate of the world hinges on me getting every word right and every lecture going perfectly.
As I leave the house, my son, he says, Abba. He says, Dad, take this with you.
I say, Sure, Eytan, I’ll take it with me.
And he says, Take a look.
I say, Sure.
I put it in a box, I have this box of books that I carry with me everywhere. In three weeks, I arrive home. It’s midnight. I walk into our little apartment in Jerusalem, and Eytan is wide awake. He usually waits till the next morning to see me. As I walk in, he looks at me, and I look at him.
And — oh my God! At the bottom of my bag of books, I had this box he had given me. It had been this incredibly intense couple of weeks, seventeen hours a day, and I hadn’t looked at the box. And he looks at me, he’s got a little tear running down his cheek. And I felt like it wasn’t even worth being born.
I say, Eytan! And in Hebrew, efshar o’chance: can I have another chance? He imperceptibly nods, as another tear rolls down his cheek.
I go, grab the box, and open it. In the box, there’s a door handle from our first apartment in Jerusalem, a silver Cross pen there that I used to write with, a picture of his mother from the Palm Beach newspaper, a rock, and a seashell.
I say, Eytan, mah zeh? In Hebrew, mah zeh tavim eh’lu: Eytan, what is this?
Eytan says, Abba! That’s my stuff. I gave it to you, you didn’t receive it.
Like, wow! So he was totally my teacher.
We all have a box, and in that box is our stuff.
- It’s not our status,
- and it’s not our egoic structure,
- and it’s certainly not our bank account,
- and it’s not any of our degrees.
It’s our stuff.
It’s our holy and our broken Hallelujah.
It’s the dreams that we lived and the dreams that are unlived.
It’s the person we married and the person we didn’t marry.
It’s the poem only we could write.
It’s the song only we could sing.
It’s that unique story.
It’s not your fingerprint. If you will, it’s your soul print.
You know what it means to be lonely, my friends? To be lonely is to be unable to share your soul print with another person.
And you know why?
Well, sometimes because there’s no one to receive it, that’s true. Other times, we don’t quite know how to express it. But those two are not usually the reason, my friends.
The reason we’re lonely is because we don’t know what it is. We don’t know what our soul print is. If you don’t have it, you can’t share it. Or, even deeper, our sense of our soul print is not equal to the full depth of our power, to the full depth of our love.
We don’t have a story of our lives which is equal to our love and equal to our yearning.
Loving is the fundamental driver of reality
Reality is a movement from loneliness to loving, all the way up and all the way down. The first quarks which come together to form hadrons are joined together, they are lonely.
We have scripture on this. We’re in church, so we have scripture on this.
The entire first chapter, the Book of Genesis: And God saw that it was good. And it was good, and it was good, and it was good, and it was good — praise! All of the first chapter. And then in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, that great mystical mythic text, all of the It was good of chapter one, is nullified by a divine literary flick of the wrist, which says in the only form in the entire biblical canon, lo tov: it’s not good. So God who was good is not good.
What’s not good?
Lo tov heyot ha-adam le’vado: It’s not good for the human being to be lonely. Wow!
You won the lottery. What’s the first thing you do when you win the lottery? You just won the lottery! Somebody, you just won! Wow, it’s awesome. You run to the phone to tell someone. So imagine, Barbara, imagine, beloved, there is no one to tell; there’s no one to call. You remember that saying: “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If something happens to me, and there’s no interiority, there is no one who receives my soul print to receive it, did it happen?
But this not good for the human being to be alone is not limited to human beings, my friends.
Quarks don’t want to be alone.
Molecules don’t want to be alone.
Cells don’t want to be alone.
Actually, all the way up the evolutionary chain, all the way up and all the way down, is the movement beyond loneliness to loving, beyond alienation to connection, beyond separation to integration, to synergistic larger and larger wholes.
Evolution is the story of Reality moving from loneliness to loving.
Wow!
And you know what the essence of loneliness is, my friends? I am stuck in myself.
See, it’s not enough to share my story. I’ve got to have a story equal to my love, equal to my yearning.
- And my yearning, my love is, I want to know Reality.
- I want to give to Reality.
- I want to imprint Reality with my unique gift.
- I want to move out of my perspective, and hear and feel you, and be delighted.
- I want to move from a politics of rage to a politics of love, from a politics of fear to a politics of empathy.
And every week in Evolutionary Church we say it is not politically correct, it is spiritually incorrect.
I want to be an Outrageous Lover.
I can’t move from loneliness to loving if I’m going to ordinary love.
Ordinary love is a strategy of the ego, security, comfort. They’re beautiful, they’re good. Maslow level one, level two, it’s great. But it’s not going to take me home.
It’s only when I awaken as an Outrageous Lover, as Barbara said, and I know that I’ve got Outrageous Acts of Love to give, I am filled with what Barbara calls telos and Eros together.
I become a telerotic being.
I become an Evolutionary Lover.
I’m giving my gift.
I’m intimately sharing with a partner or partners who are with me, giving our gifts, and I know I am needed by All-That-Is. Then I am not alone.
When I know my need is Reality’s need, and that all of Reality intended me, because that’s the implication of a politics of Evolutionary Love.
My Unique Self, my irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty of All-That-Is, is intended by All-That-Is.
Reality intended Barbara. Oh my God, wow!
Reality intended Muzi.
Reality intended Lynn.
Reality intended Eugenio.
And Reality needs Eugene.
Reality desires Eugenio.
How do I know Reality desires Eugenio? How do I know Reality desires Barbara? Because Reality only manifests what it desires.
Wow!
And all of a sudden, we have liberated desire.
Desire is not limited to the sexual; the sexual models the holy.
We are desired by Reality itself. That’s when we are liberated from loneliness — only in an evolutionary context.
Evolutionary Church is about transmitting the good news; we are evangelicals.
We confess our greatness, because our greatness is the gift that we have to give.
Being wholemates
Dr Marc Gafni
Barbara and I want to model for everyone — and we know you do this in your lives — what does it mean to actually come together to create a whole that’s larger than the sum of its parts?
Every word that Barbara says, I delight in it. So delightful, such honor, such devotion.
We get to be excited about each other.
We get to be devoted to each other.
We get to move beyond the kind of commodification of spirit, which becomes another product. We want to live spirit.
We want to be spirit.
We want to be outrageous.
We want to be spiritually incorrect.
Imagine you’re living near Bethlehem, and it’s the beginning of the new era, the new millennium. Are you going to Jerusalem to parties? Or are you coming because there’s a new word that’s being spread? But then it was one person.
It’s no longer one person. The next Buddha is a sangha. It’s all of us.
We are the sangha.
We are the Christ Field.
We are the Evolutionary Love Field.
And there’s no one extra who’s here.
In deep prayer, we bow.
In deep prayer, we conclude.
We’ll conclude with a chant, like we always do, borrowing from our Hindu brothers and sisters. We’ll do the shortest chant in the world just to finish, and the chant is Om Namah Shivayah.
In our last minute, I just want to ask forgiveness.
If there’s anything I said or Barbara said that didn’t sit right with you, that was hard for you, forgive us if it was our imperfection. We are imperfect vessels for the light. The light flows through us, we are It together.
We are the sangha together.
And so let’s hold our discomfort.
Let’s comfort the afflicted.
Let’s afflict the uncomfortable.
Let’s be spiritually incorrect.
Let’s be holy Outrageous Lovers.
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