Continued from Part 2
An unedited first draft text from forthcoming book, The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid
Being is the underlying eternal ground of existence that lives beneath the flux and turbulence of reality. It may be imaged by the silent depths of the ocean floor as contrasted with the storming wave of the surface. Neuroscience has documented the effectiveness of meditation which is a way of accessing this eternal and spacious ground. It is characterized by a sense of absolute freedom, expanse and often is described as silence. Sitting in silence is one of the ways to access the ground of being. There is an urge to merge with the ground of being which lives strongly in every human being. This is often expressed as the need for deep rest, peace and tranquility.
The quality of becoming is very different. Becoming is dynamic flux and turbulence, creative tension and constant transformation. It is characterized not by the urge to merge but by the urge to emerge. Its auditory quality is not silence but raucous tumult and transformative noise. Its interior feeling is not spacious peace, but rather, some combination of ecstasy and urgency -- what one might call ecstatic urgency.
When Tagore points to what we are calling Outrageous Love as the core quality of the interior face of the cosmos, he is referring to love as the ground of existence itself. The inner nature of eternity and being is Outrageous Love. When Dante and Whitehead refer to what we have termed Outrageous Love, they are pointing towards the dynamic evolutionary quality of becoming. The nature of emergence and becoming is Outrageous Love. These are the two tastes of essence: being and becoming. Both partake of Outrageous Love.
Outrageous Love is not the pallid strategy for ego security that so often masquerades as love. We have referred to that form of ego love as ordinary love. Outrageous Love is source itself. The same love that moves you to make contact and connect with others is the same love that moves the sun and the stars. It is the love that moves quarks to become atoms, and atoms to become molecules. It is the evolutionary love that initiated the big bang, and that both drives and animates all of existence.
When you awaken to a lived experience of this knowing, you begin to be able to access Outrageous love as the core aliveness and motive power of your life. It is outrageous love that poet Dylan Thomas points to when he evokes "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, Drives my green age, the force that drives the water through the rocks, Drives my red blood."
Another name for Outrageous Love is what the mystics called Source. When we access Source, we are capable of love in any and all situations. We are able to live, fully alive and radically empowered, in every dimension of our lives. In other words, we become capable of Outrageous Love.
To be continued...