Continued from Part 4
An unedited first draft text from forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid
Step Three:
Outrageous Love is Evolutionary Eros, the Universal force of desire; it is allurement and transformation. To awaken as Outrageous Love is to awaken as the evolutionary impulse.
Law Three: Outrageous Love is Evolutionary Eros: Eros is Desire.
Your deepest desire is evolution's desire. At the root of all your desire is the will to grow, transform, and make contact. Attraction is the inner mechanism of evolution. Evolution is the emergence of higher and deeper levels of connection, growth and transformation. Outrageous Love is the initiating and animating Eros of all that is.
To understand what it means to awaken as Outrageous Love, we must understand what I will call the law of One Love and evolution. This law might also be called the law of desire. This is the third law of Outrageous Love.
The essence of the third law has three distinct dimensions.
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. This law picks up not on the eternal taste of being but on the evolutionary taste of becoming.
The meta-theorist Charles Pierce identified this quality and referred to it as evolutionary love. This is the love that is the motive force of evolution. This is the Eros -- or what the cosmologists sometimes referred to as the fifth force -- that drives the entire process. Besides the four classical forces of reality (i.e., the gravitational, electromagnetic, nuclear, and the strong and the weak) there is a fifth force, a universal initiating and driving Eros. This is what we have called Outrageous Love.
The second dimension of the third law is the evolution of love itself. Not only does outrageous or evolutionary love drive the process, but the process itself is the evolution of love.
Love itself is not merely an eternal quality of being but a dynamic and therefore evolving property of becoming. The movement from absolute dictatorship by the king invested with divine authority to democratic government is, for example, a clear example of the evolution of love. More people are cared for, recognized and honored in a democracy than is even imaginable under an absolute dictatorship. That higher level of love is not capricious. It is not based on the whim of the ruler. Rather this more evolved version of love is written into the system itself.
Outrageous Love is identified not merely as an interpersonal human sentiment but as the ultimate truth at the heart of reality. Outrageous Love is the initiating and animating Eros of all that is. It is the evolutionary Eros itself. Said differently, desire is the initiating force of evolution itself.
Love is sometimes too tepid a word. Love which marries Eros and desire is what we mean by Outrageous Love. The basic realization emergent from the integration of mysticism and emergence theory, supported by the leading edge of object relations theory and social anthropology, is that evolution is love in action. The Eros of evolution is the love-intelligence and love-beauty at the heart of reality itself.
Some evolutionary mystics referred to the quality that we are calling Outrageous Love as teshuka, which might be loosely translated from the Hebrew as desire. This refers not to superficial desire, but to the desire which lay at the heart of reality. Paradoxically, however, all superficial desires, when traced back to their source, are revealed to be an expression of the One Love, Eros or Desire itself. When you ask yourself not only what you want, but also what do you want by wanting what you want, the answer is almost always: You want to experience the fullness of being alive, which happens alongside want and desire.
In this sense, the movement of Evolution is the movement of desire itself. From this perspective, that is why we refer to the law of One Love and evolution as the law of desire.
Outrageous Love as the core expression of spirit is very different than what Spinoza referred to as a "mythological external god demanding obedience." Rather, Outrageous Love both initiates and animates our evolving, intelligent elegant universe.