012 — Five Principles of a Personal Politics of Evolutionary Love
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 14, 2017] 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.
Our crisis is a birth
Dr. Marc Gafni
What is this week? This week is Inauguration. [Editor’s note: January 20, 2017] We are inaugurating a President Elect in the United States of America, and the processes of democracy are working amidst the chaos.
We know that:
— The chaos is cha-ordic. It is chaos and order.
— The greatest evolutionary driver is the breaking itself.
— Something new wants to emerge.
— That our crisis is a birth.
We are, for the very first time, laying the groundwork of a new movement in Reality, of a new movement in humanity. Let’s trump everything that needs trumping
That is what we are here to do — we are here to offer this to President Elect Trump — let it trump everything that needs trumping. Let us give our full heart and prayer to our President Elect as we do in a democracy.
Let us all wish him, as we resonate with President Obama, the best Presidency that can possibly be, to create a great period of time not just for America in an ethnocentric way, but for the world in a worldcentric way. And not just for the world, but for the world to influence all of Reality in a kosmocentric way.
A Politics of Evolutionary Love
Who are you? That is the First Principle of a Politics of Evolutionary Love
You are an irreducibly Unique Self. As an irreducibly Unique Self you are an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty that is the initiating, animating energy of all that is.
That is the answer to the question, Who are you?
You are God’s Unique Intimacy. As such, you have a unique perspective and a unique gift to give that is needed by All-That-Is.
That is the First Principle of being a citizen — to be a citizen is the greatest privilege in the world — to be a citizen is to be a Unique Self.
First Principle: You are a unique expression of Outrageous Love.
Barbara, take us into the message — into the next Principle of a Personal Politics of Outrageous, Evolutionary Love as a gift to Mr. Trump, and to all America, and to all citizens. Take us in, Barbara. Amen.
Open our hearts to all who have been left out
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Marc, you are imbued with the passion of Evolutionary Love such that it fills absolutely every fiber of your being as a masculine co-creator. I feel the impulse of Evolutionary Love coming from Source — coming from the original consciousness creation, carrying us through the billions of years — expressing itself through you directly:
— in the passion of complete and total fulfillment of your creativity,
— as your gift to the world,
— and to the inauguration of the next stage of our democracy.
Let us just for the moment experience you as an impulse, in person, alive.
Which then gives me, as a feminine co-creator, an experience of the feminine version of the impulse of Evolutionary Love.
Why do we say the entire impulse of billions of years is Evolutionary Love?
Here is my deepest sense of it:
One could say, How could it be love with all the pain that has been felt way before we got here? Billions of species went extinct, the five mass extinctions. If I were a creator God attempting to create an expression of Evolutionary Love, it appears to me in all humility that: It is a Universe of intrinsic freedom with an intrinsic purpose to evolve that allowed for it to be a discovery process, that allowed for all the creatures that came before us, each of which totally yearned to give forth their own potential.
It is the nature of life to do that. And God put this yearning to realize unique potential in every creature that came before us. And, if you see the struggle that must have been — electrons, protons, neutrons, early multicellular organisms all the way up.
Now, I am feeling as a feminine co-creator in partnership with a masculine co-creator and with all the men and women. I am feeling that very same impulse that created the Universe, driving through me as my unique impulse, to give my full potential self into a world that is at the threshold of crisis and devolution or birth and evolution.
I experience the billions of years of evolution coming through me as my Unique Self, my Evolutionary Unique Self, meaning that my Unique Self is a direct experience of the billions of years of evolution in person.
I would like everyone to get in touch with the impulse of creation inside you knowing that it came and has coded in it, all the journey that it has been on, but it also has coded in it a memory of the future. That memory of the future is the passionate desire of your Evolutionary Unique Self to fully express itself in love.
This is what we mean by taking the top off the lid of and praying without limitation because the God in us, as us, has chosen this generation of all the generations that ever came before us, to express that love without reservations.
On behalf of Donald Trump and the inauguration:
- Let us take a moment to love every single person who has been left out.
- Let us take this passionate love of creativity and touch into the hearts of all our brothers and sisters and children worldwide, not just in the United States, who have been left out of the process of creation.
- Let us dedicate the purpose of all of humanity to have the opportunity to express to the fullest possible extent within themselves, the beauty of their desire to create, the beauty of their desire to love.
I am calling on the Unique Self Symphony to realize that every voice, everywhere in the world has a unique note of beauty, of excellence, of creativity to give into a symphony which can result in the planetary awakening in love.
By saying, yes to this inauguration of Donald Trump, let us empower this inauguration to reach everyone who have been left out by some of the more liberal elites of our country — and certainly left out of the world — and put our hearts with them now; put our intelligence and let them teach us.
Let us open our arms. Let us, all of us who have been privileged to be knowing that we are evolving humans, reach out to all the humans, who are also evolving.
In our Principles of Evolutionary Politics, there is the Unique Self expressed in Evolutionary Love, such that Evolutionary Unique Self joins with every other self who is yearning to give their potential, to create an Evolutionary Unique Self Symphony heard for the very first time in human history.
For the very first time, this level of evolutionary potential, goal, and realization of the intention of creation has been affirmed as the purpose of an Evolutionary Church. I invite evolutionary mosques and evolutionary temples to take up the one story of creation that we all have been given. It is the Universe Story.
We don’t have ten narratives here. For the first time, we have one narrative.
It is the Universe Story. As we enter the evolutionary aspect of that story, we imbue it as our own potential to love. That is where the Evolutionary Love comes in.
- There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this is the purpose of evolution.
- There is no doubt whatsoever that this is the creative potential of every human being on Earth.
I have gratitude to my friends, Marc, and everybody, to set for us the new context of the purpose, goal, and privilege, and blessing — not only the inauguration of Donald Trump and his efforts — to bring to those who have been left out the blessings of our age. But let us go much further than that and join with Donald Trump to bring it to the world, in all our diplomatic relationships and in all our relationships and associations with Russia, with Iran, with Egypt, with Pakistan. The people everywhere joining us in the first Evolutionary Church of humanity!
Five Core Principles of a Politics of Evolutionary Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
In a place that is so good to be with you, what an honor, what a privilege as we give our blessing to the inauguration of the next President of the United States. We offer him this vision. My job is to articulate the actual Principles that were implicit so beautifully, in what Barbara laid out. What are our Principles?
First Principle: You are a Unique Self.
The first principle of a Personal Politics of Evolutionary Love is you are a Unique Self. The answer to the question of who are you? is: you are a Unique Self. That is the first principle. You are a Unique Self.
Second Principle: Uniqueness implies need. You are needed by all that is. Reality needs your service.
The second principle is uniqueness implies need.
Reality only manifests what it needs.
If I sit in my garage and I tinker around and I create something and I spend thousands of years creating it, and billions of years creating it and zillions of synchronicities come together to manifest it, that means I need it.
- I need it aesthetically.
- I need it for its beauty.
- I need it because of the way it can serve.
- I need it for what it can express in the world.
I am irreducibly unique, I am actually about 50 trillion cells.
I am the most complex, millions of miles of nerve cables.
I am processes of dazzling complexity, which are utterly unique, unlike any others in my immune system, my DNA, my cellular signature, my atomic signature.
If all that is true, it means I am needed. I am not extra.
As a Unique Self, you are irreducible, you are irreplaceable, you are needed by All-That-Is.
The second principle of a Personal Politics of Evolutionary Love is:
You are needed by all-that-is. Reality needs your service.
Third Principle: You have a Unique Gift.
The third principle is, you have a unique gift, which is an expression of your irreducibly unique perspective, and your unique quality of intimacy, your unique taste.
Unique perspective comes together with my unique quality of intimacy.
You have an irreducibly unique perspective, because even from a physical perspective, you are always located at a particular place in the spacetime continuum. That is in the exterior.
On the interior you are a unique perspective of Reality. It is your slant, as it were, on Reality, but your irreducibly unique perspective comes together with your unique taste.
What do we mean by your unique taste?
If I pull up the image of Barbara in my mind, that is Barbara’s taste.
If I pull up our friend, David from Sunrise Ranch, that is David.
We don’t confuse the tastes of people.
That is the unique quality of intimacy that a person is. So, if I sit with Barbara in silence — that silence will be different than if Barbara sits with someone else in silence.
Because I am not just a unique perspective, I am a unique quality of intimacy.
My unique perspective comes together with my unique quality of intimacy.
Those are the two Principles of Uniqueness —
— I am a unique perspective.
— I am a unique quality of intimacy.
Those two come together to form my unique gift. I have a unique gift to be given that comes from me living into my unique intimacy, my seeing with my unique perspective, and my unique gift can be given only by me. That is the Third Principle.
So three principles of a Politics of Evolutionary Love are:
- First Principle: You are a Unique Self.
- Second Principle: You are needed by All-That-Is. Uniqueness implies need. You are needed by all that is.
- Third Principle: What is needed is your Unique Gift, which is the emanation, the expression, the coming together of your unique quality of intimacy and your irreducibly unique perspective.
We need to explicate so you can see the Principles. That is why there are four noble truths and why there are Ten Commandments.
Fourth Principle: Evolution is love in action.
This is the principle of the evolutionary impulse. You are not just a Unique Self, you are a Unique Expression of the LoveIntelligence, not ordinary love, Outrageous Love or Evolutionary Love. Evolutionary Love is the love which sources All-That-Is and that drives all of Reality.
Let us feel the Principle. The Fourth Principle is Reality is not a fact, it is a story.
It means, it is going somewhere.
It is not an ordinary story. It is a love story.
It is not an ordinary love story. It is an evolutionary love story.
Evolutionary Love drives the whole process. Evolution is the Fourth Principle: love in action.
The Fourth Principle comes together with the First Principle — Unique Self — which means you are personally implicated in the story.
Barbara: I ask everybody, and beyond, to go out this week knowing that you are carrying the impulse of evolutionary love, uniquely needed, during this period of inauguration of the next stage of democracy.
We know that democracy does not just reside in politics, that democracy resides in our presence and behavior of creating together a world equal to our potential. We are not even limited to what has been called democracy with this degree of love. It is not about voting; it is about creating.
Marc: Yes, and everyone is needed! That brings us so beautifully to that planetary sense, Barbara.
And someone just raised their hand and said that we need Donald Trump. Let’s speak this aloud, friends, we need Melania Trump. That is critical to understand. We need Donald Trump to be the most successful president ever in the history of the United States because that is bigger than politics.
Barack Obama in his deepest center when the ego falls away and he is in Barack Obama-ness. He is Reality having a Barack Obama experience. Barack Obama, he was so graceful in his farewell. He wished deeply that President Trump be the best president that America could possibly have because that is good for America, which is good for the world — There is no split.
But we need not only Donald Trump, but Melania Trump, is a Unique Self, an irreducibly Unique Self, needed by All-That-Is. Whether she is living in New York or living in Washington, or letting her son finish out the year and then coming to Washington. We send our blessings to Melania Trump. And Melania, thank you.
Fifth Principle: We are a Unique Self Symphony.
Our Fifth Principle, this is the critical principle, friends, out of which everything and in which everything comes together. We are at a moment where we need to move from mastermind, which is Unique Self, to MetaMind.
MetaMind is Unique Self Symphony. Unique Self Symphony means — with all due love and respect for our president-elect which we always have our ultimate reverence, our ultimate commitment is to We the People.
Because the President serves We the People, We the People are not just an aggregate of separate selves as Bentham, and Mill, and Hobbes thought.
In this new principle, this new politics of principle five, of a politics of evolutionary love, we realize that we are a Unique Self Symphony and that the Universe is self-organizing.
The Universe self-actualizes and self-organizes, just like an ant hill self-organizes, every ant knows what to do based on pheromone secretions, and like slime molds, which kind of look like diarrhea on the floor of the forest.
Slime molds are a multicellular blob that splits up into single cells, looks like it is completely dissipated, then comes together perfectly as a multicellular unit again. It is able to do all sorts of elegant and complex processes even though it has the most simple structure.
Science didn’t understand how that works: Who is the general that’s running the slime mold?
I’ve read study after study — and along came Turing, remember the movie about Turing who cracked the Nazi codes in World War 2? The early computers were called Turing machines.
Turing wrote an essay at Bell Labs in 1947 called Morphogenesis, my friends. It was about the self-organizing universe, which means the universe self-actualizes.
We are going to add to Turing, these interiors:
- more consciousness
- more goodness
- more love
- more creativity
Stay with me friends because this is critical — that means self-organizing happens, not just at the level of slime molds; not just at the level of ant hills, it happens at the human level.
The Strange Attractor Is Unique Self
What is the strange attractor, beloved Barbara, feminine co-creator?
What is the strange attractor for Unique Self Symphony?
What is the strange attractor for a self-organizing universe?
How does the universe self-organize to higher levels of love?
We are attracted to give our Unique Gift.
We are allured to give our Unique Gift.
When we all begin giving our Unique Gift — addressing the unique need in our unique circle of intimacy and influence — then we begin to have a bottom up politics, not a top down politics.
My friends, the answer is — it doesn’t depend on President Trump. We give him our blessing as we do our democratically elected leader with all its complexity.
We wish him gorgeousness.
But ultimately, it is our turn —
We are the citizens. We are the people. We are the Unique Self Symphony.
It is our city.
It is our streets.
It is our neighborhoods.
It is our institutions.
It is our country.
It is our city.
It is our town.
It is our village.
It is our laws.
The tragedy of this last 2016 election was that so few people voted.
We have got to vote. We have got to — get up and do it. It is our turn!
When we rise up as a self-organizing universe, we rise up as a Unique Self Symphony — each of us giving our Unique Gifts then we will have articulated the Fifth Principle.
The politics — The Personal Politics of Evolutionary Love.
Let us do this together. Let us articulate together a Personal Politics of Evolutionary Love.
Meditation: Breathe from the deep impulse of evolution within us
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Take a moment to breathe from the deep impulse of evolutionary creativity within each of us.
Breathe all the way from the mind of God up through that evolutionary impulse’s extraordinary powers of creation — for billions and billions of years bringing more life, more consciousness, more freedom, more complexity, more love.
Let’s feel that same impulse — the impulse of creation that has come from the mind of God, that is rising up through all of creation and is now coming through you and me as our own impulse to create.
When we resonate with that inner impulse of creation, it feels like love. It feels like yearning to give every ounce of your gift, of your beauty, of your radiance, into the world. It feels like the impulse of God itself, internalized, as your own desire to uniquely express your greater love.
Putting our attention on the feeling of the impulse, let it radiate internally — the frequency of creation as your unique expression of the irreducibly beautiful LoveIntelligence of the Universe through you.
We dedicate now…
— the love in every one of us,
— the brilliance in each one of us,
— the greatness in each one of us,
…to our own unique experience of the process of creation that has created the entire Universe.
Knowing God as the greatest love of your life
We are about to enter into prayer.
We are about to enter into the place of prayer.
We are going to do our prayer meditation because…
We are here in Evolutionary Church to evolve church, to evolve prayer, to evolve love. We come to speak dangerous words. We ask that you listen dangerously.
Am I willing, beloved Barbara, to work with the word church?
Am I willing to be dangerous and work with God?
Am I willing to actually participate in the Evolution of God?
We talk about the Three Faces of God. We are laying down new tracks, and a new universal grammar of Spirit, and a new evolutionary God language, because language creates and reveals Reality.
We have to lay down a new language, to pour new wine into old flasks, to receive old words and give them new meaning — which is the great way of Spirit and its evolution.
We talk about prayer specifically. We don’t avoid prayer. We don’t call it affirmative prayer.
Prayer means, I am bowing in devotion before the God who manifested me.
And who is that God?
Is that the Santa Claus God in the sky?
Is it the God that is wholly without?
Is it the God who demands obedience from me, a kind of imperious Divine two-year-old willfulness?
I don’t think so!
The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist.
God is the God who is —
- the Infinity of Intimacy.
- the Infinity of Delight.
- the God who knows my name.
- the God who is the power of personhood that lives between Barbara and Marc — in our personal intimacy that participates in the larger divine intimacy of Kosmos.
We realize that the Divine is not only the Infinity of Power, as the great traditions said, but rather the Divine is the Infinity of Intimacy, and that we are God’s unique intimacies.
So, we bow before the Infinity of Intimacy
— that knows us,
— that needs us,
— that loves us,
— that adores us,
— that desires us,
— that holds us.
That is God in the second person; the second face of God.
It is a second person relationship.
God in the First Person: We have the God that lives in the first person — Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art that. Tat Tvam Asi — God which is the Divine LoveIntelligence, the Outrageous LoveIntelligence that initiated all of Reality. That evolutionary impulse which is shimmering Love that lives awake and alive in me, as me, and through me. That’s God in the first person.
God in the Third Person: The evolutionary impulse animated by Outrageous Love, the love that is not mere human sentiment (that’s ordinary love), but Outrageous Love — the heart of existence itself.
God in third person is the Outrageous Love, the love that drives the Kosmos, the inherent ceaseless creativity of Kosmos — as the great physicist Stuart Kauffman likes to refer to the impulse of Reality.
When we pray, we pray as God, we pray to God, we bow before God, as Rumi does in every poem.
- Rumi says, let me fall into the arms of the Beloved — God in the second person.
- And we know that God is also the force that drives the Kosmos — God in the third person.
The infinite power of cosmos
So let’s do this as our meditation and then go into our hymn as we set the stage for our personal prayer, after the hymn.
Here is our meditation, friends: This is the first time we have ever done Evolutionary Church — there is no second time. The second there is a second time, we are dead.
It is like the first time — every single time. Madonna got it right — for the very first time.
To be a mystic is to know this moment is new — it has never been before.
This moment is not extra.
This moment is pregnant with Divinity.
It is pregnant with possibility, because God is the possibility of possibility.
We are showing up.
We are becoming.
We are waking up.
We are growing up.
Here is our meditation. We shut our eyes for a second — when we shut our eyes we imagine God in the third person and God in the third person is the infinite power, impulse of cosmos —
- The laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, the laws which govern and allow for supernovas to take place. The laws of attraction, repulsion, through the original cosmic, great flaring forth that have driven the evolutionary process.
- The dazzling complexity of mitosis and meiosis that existed before there was a neocortex.
- The dazzling gorgeousness of photosynthesis that all of the labs in the world couldn’t create with all the super scientists and supercomputers.
- The gorgeous Infinite, dazzling, unique, complexity, stunningness of Reality as it is. The intelligent inherent alive third person — billions of light years, supernovas of power, dazzling, brilliance beyond imagination.
Our imagination cannot even grasp or touch the brilliance of mathematical equations. Mathematical equations, imagine them dazzling in front of you in infinite, incandescent math.
All of it — all of that power — nuclear power is but a pale reflection of that ultimate power — that ultimate complexity, that ultimate brilliance, that ultimate beauty. All of that, in all universes — in the multiverses — is God in the third person.
All that God in the third person in this moment — imagine now sitting in a chair right next to you, looking at you, knowing your name, desiring you, loving you, holding you, tenderly stroking your hair.
All of God in the third person sitting in a chair — in the second person looking at you, knowing you, loving you, needing you. That is God in the second-person.
So, now we’ve invoked and now we realize — oh, my God! — that is God in the second person. And it is before that God — who knows everything that happens in our lives at every moment, every holy and broken Hallelujah — that we cry out, Hallelujah!
Hallelujah means praise.
Holelut means drunken intoxication.
Hallel is the pristine praise of the most gorgeous moments in our lives and,
Hallel is the most broken moment in our lives and all of it is held by God in the second person. The personhood, the infinite personhood, of Kosmos knowing us.
Friends, to live without that, is to live blind. It is not to know the greatest love of your life.
So, we reclaim God at a higher level of consciousness — not the fundamentalist God who’s xenophobic and homophobic but God in the second-person — the ultimate Buddha, the ultimate Christ.
Imagine the greatest love moment you have ever had in personhood, in your life. Now, exponentialize it a billion-fold and you’ve got God in the second-person — for whom we sing the praise and offer up our hallelujah.
Everyone has their hallelujah.
Remember, prayer affirms the Dignity of personal need.
When I pray, no matter what else is going on in reality, there is nothing else to do, if I am preparing anything else, if I am thinking about anything else now, then I’ve got no idea what it means to be awake and alive and in the arms of the God in second person and I’ve never read a Rumi poem and I don’t even know what he is talking about.
God shows up, the mystics say, regularly when we show up regularly.
As we show up together every week and we come to this time of prayer, something opens in the gates of heaven. We are invited now to step up and to write our prayers. In this moment, the gates are open. The gates are open!
I pray for the most personal things, the most intimate things. I pray for the personal need in my life and those around me because prayer affirms the dignity of personal need. Then I expand my prayer and I pray for world peace, and I pray for our President Elect as President Obama did.
I pray for this whole complexity around Obamacare. What would it mean if 30 million American lost access to healthcare? How tragic that would be? So we pray that the Republican majority has the wisdom to create a safety net for those 30 million Americans who are watching today to see if they will be able to get surgery in 6 months from now.
So let’s offer our prayers, friends.
Remember everyone pray for your personal prayer. Never skip what you need personally — what you most personally yearn for — and from that personal yearning then you can find the yearning for all the Cosmos.
If you skip the personal for yourself, you skip the deep prayer for the world.
Rhoda: I yearn for a partner.
Marc: You hear that everybody? Thank you Rhoda, that’s real! I can hear that. That’s real. When you say I yearn for a partner, then I can yearn for peace in the world.
Orianna: I pray for guidance for my next step.
Alura: I need love in the form of a deep intimate relationship and vibrant health and for abundance.
When we pray we ask for everything.
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need.
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