We need a new story. A new cosmos story. A new waking up story. We need to know once again and beyond anything we ever knew that the universe is a love story. Not an ordinary love story, an Outrageous Love story. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.
What do we mean by Outrageous Love? Outrageous love is not ordinary love. Ordinary love is a strategy of the ego. It is a way of getting egocentric security and comfort. Those are wonderful and legitimate human aspirations that we all, myself included, really need. I want to honor them fully. But they are not enough. They will not actually take us home. They will not give us the experience of being fully alive, engaged, passionate, and on purpose. They will not give us access to the lived truth that our lives are wildly meaningful and significant. They will not remind us that we matter infinitely to all that is. Those deeper experiences of reality, which arouse in us a spacious sense of true peace as well as the joy of ecstatic urgency, can only be accessed by waking up to Outrageous Love.
So many of us think that the "real" world is totally impersonal. We think the real world is filled with mindless competition, and driven by the survival of the fittest. That is probably true for you whether you consider yourself spiritual or secular. When you wake up you realize that this is just not the way it is. The cosmos is driven by love. Love is not hard to find. Love is impossible to avoid. In every single moment you are literally drenched in love. No corner of your being is left untouched. To wake up is to know that truth at the very core of your being. It is not a truth accessed through faith in a dogma. It is not a truth owned by the religions or some new age declarations. It is the deepest truth about the nature of reality that we have access to from the most profound sources of wisdom available on the planet. From Evolutionary and Emergence theory, we recognize this essential truth. That is a pretty big deal.
What if you actually knew that all of reality was animated love? What if you knew in your deepest place that the initiating and driving energy of the entire evolutionary process was love? Not ordinary love, but Outrageous Love. Ordinary love is mere human sentiment. Outrageous Love has two qualities. It is both the essence of being and becoming. Being is the very ground of reality that inheres in, suffuses and animates all that is. Outrageous love is not mere human sentiment. It is the very heart of existence itself. Outrageous Love is the very essence of being. Love is not something. Love IS. Outrageous Love is also becoming. It is the love that moves the sun and the stars and causes quarks to come to together as atoms. It is the evolutionary love that inheres in the very fabric of the cosmos and drives reality to ever-higher levels of mutuality, recognition union and embrace.
That same evolutionary love is what awakens in you when you seek to come closer to another human being. The drive in you to love, to make contact, to recognize and be recognized, to open and not to close, to radically give is not merely a personality mechanism of your ego. It is the same love that moves the sun and the stars. It is the evolutionary Eros awakening as you! There is only One Love driving and animating everything. One Love, Evolutionary Love, Outrageous Love.
In each column I will share a new part of the great story of Outrageous Love. This Outrageous Love manifesto is the best approximation we have today of the Cosmos Story. One of the greatest developments in science in the last hundred years is the realization that the Universe is not just a time and a place. The universe is not static. The Universe is a story. A story evolves and transforms. It has a plot line. It is going somewhere. The great realization of the evolutionary worldview -- already foreshadowed in some of the evolutionary mystics in the great traditions -- is that the universe is going somewhere. And when we wake up from unconscious to conscious evolution we are the unique agents who chart its direction. We are irreducibly unique expressions of the love intelligence and love beauty that drives and moves the entire story. A Love Story.
The need for a new love story, an Outrageous Love story that will inspire and animate our personal lives and the lives of the polis, is urgent. We need a politics of love, a politics of Outrageous Love. A politics of Outrageous Love must be based on a new narrative, an evolutionary narrative, a new story, an evolutionary story. We need a new story. A love story. An Outrageous Love Story.