From the Dialogue

Barbara Marx Hubbard: I think we’re at just the moment in our history as humanity when there are enough innovations and innovative people, loving people that we are connecting more and more rapidly every day. We have a communication system, we have the internet, we have a thinking layer of Earth to connect us and one of the things that we’re doing here with this whole series is to help connect the people who would like to tip the system to the higher order. And since it’s at a tipping point, you don’t know one more person in the right direction of the tipping point it goes.

Marc Gafni: Right and that’s so awesome and it’s so outrageous. Outrageous is the new awesome. When you have an evolutionary relationship to life, your experience is that your next act of awakening as outrageous love and creatively living that outrageous love and enacting it in the world can actually tip the entire system.

Watch and listen to the dialogue and read the transcript below:

Transcript

Marc: Here we are at week seven The Universe: A Love Story, Evolutionary Love Podcasts. So, here we go.

We talked last week about outrageous love. And outrageous love is evolutionary love. It’s the love that moves the whole process that awakens in a human being. And we said we live in a world of outrageous pain because you can’t talk about the Universe as a love story and ignore outrageous pain. And we’re going to spend somewhere between two and four or five podcasts talking about how pain and suffering how do we understand them in the context of The Universe: A Love Story.

Just like in a relationship when there’s pain and suffering. How do I deal with the pain and suffering in the context of a love relationship? What does that mean? And we’re not going to give any easy answers or any kind of blind faith assumptions and no new-age kind of panaceas. We’re going to look very deeply about how we hold pain and suffering, creation and destruction, in the context of a love story. So we’re going to get to all of that. But this week we’re going to touch it for the first time, which is we live in a world of outrageous pain we said last week. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.

So what does that mean? That means when we confront outrageous pain, it’s overwhelming. How do you respond to outrageous pain? How do you respond to eight hundred thousand people in Rwanda being killed in a hundred days in a horrific massacre? And everyone listening knows that I could go on and on. In the twentieth century alone there were seven genocides. Samantha Power wrote an incredibly important book called A Problem from Hell: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. So how do we respond to outrageous pain?

The way we respond generally is we close our hearts. We close our hearts not because we’re bad people, not because we’re lost in our Ego, not because we’re narcissistic or materialistic or sinful or self-involved which are the usual reasons given, but for precisely the opposite reason. We close our hearts because we care so much because it hurts so much. And the gap between our ability to feel the pain and our ability to heal the pain is too great. So when we try and take small love, ordinary love and apply ordinary love, the Egoic strategy of longing and comfort and apply that to outrageous pain, it doesn’t work.

You’ve got to be able to access outrageous love which is the movement towards healing and transformation and the movement towards more and more care that moves through the Cosmos. You’ve got to align with that force in order to get the creativity, the energy, the potency, the power to begin to address it in any way whatsoever, outrageous pain. Only big heart, only the outrageous love of reality itself can actually empower me to in some sense engage outrageous pain. So let’s start there.

Barbara: You know one of the things I’ve noticed is that the process of creation has put freedom in the system. It is not a robotic Universe. It isn’t as though a God said we’re going to go through all of this and was consciously creating all these situations. It looks like it’s a groping effort toward higher consciousness, greater freedom, and more complex order. There’s a grope in there. There’s a [Inaudible, 0:04:06] tapping like a blind person for ways to do it and in that process of groping for higher order and greater consciousness and freedom, there’s been a lot of breakdowns and failures. Just like failures in our personal lives.

It’s not a one way street here. So when you get up to human suffering and you think of it not as a robotic Universe, but as a Universe that put freedom in the system, it seems to me what’s happening is that we are becoming aware that we have the freedom to destroy or create and there is no God whose going to make us be good so that this outrageous love becomes a necessity to give us the courage to handle the freedom of destroying or creating which our species has given to itself by its brilliance.

So I’m this may sound unclear to you, but I think that the fact that there’s freedom in the system as we go higher and higher order means that their so called evil has been this groping for higher order and all the destructiveness that has come from that. And what’s happening among people like ourselves now is that it’s no longer tolerable to feel all this suffering so we are about to be changing the political system outer which the suffering is coming a lot of the hunger, the disease, the poverty is coming from the way we’re running the system.

Marc: So let’s just… there’s so much important in there so let’s start from the beginning.

Freedom in the system. Ok? So you’re in a love relationship, right? And you think your partner has no choice but to love you. So do you feel love? No. Because you only feel loved if your partner chooses you. And so often in a relationship when choice falls away and it becomes coercive or compulsory or automatic, then love withers and dies.

So in some sense when we open up the eye of the spirit, the eye of the heart, which is a perceptive faculty that tells us about the interior of ourselves and of reality, we begin to realize that the intelligence of reality needs us as it were to be free. Because the Universe is a love story, right? And it is because the Universe is a love story and it seeks love, it seeks higher and higher levels of care, higher and higher levels of loving. Love is only possible when there’s freedom. Love and control are opposites. And so if I love you I’ve got to be willing to step back and allow you freedom to choose even if you choose against me. Because without that, there’s no love.

And in some sense, the intelligence of reality allows reality to find its way. It allows reality to grow. It allows reality to make mistakes, it allows reality to be free, and in some sense if you even want to say it this way, just to kind of grasp it poetically because there’s things that we have to grasp. We grasp interiors often to the eye of the spirit, the literate eye, the eye of the heart trying to feel our way in. Not that it’s because it’s not true knowledge because it is true knowledge. It’s true knowledge that we get through feeling our way in.

We realize that if reality is betrothing us as it were, it’s saying with this ring I set [0:08:00] you free. And allowing for freedom, we invite love. So paradoxically, the very fact of reality moving towards higher levels of freedom where we’re invited to choose love is actually an expression of The Universe: A Love Story.

Barbara: This is true and since we have more and more power to destroy today than ever before like thermo-nuclear weapons. Even four or five of them could destroy our whole environment and we have thousands of them. That freedom to build those thermo-nuclear weapons has given us the absolute directive to have greater outrageous love or self-destruct. And we’ve been able to self-destruct on small scales all throughout history. But never has our species been able to self-destruct the whole system as well as all life on Earth. So we have been given the ultimate freedom to destroy or create in this generation.

Marc: Which is an expression itself of the Universe as a love story.

Barbara: So if I were God, I would say that this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for to see if on this little planet a species has enough people within it to say yes to outrageous love, yes to the impulse of creation for innovation, creativity, and solutions to all these problems; yes to changing the political system to a system of co-creation. This is I’m sitting here waiting to see can we do this? And I think the whole message of what we’re saying is yes we can because it is the direction of evolution and I believe there are enough of us who already know this.

So we need to understand the structure in which we could connect. You call it a universal self-symphony. I’ve called it a planetary Pentecost where enough of us connect with spirit from within with our unique gift to give to shift the whole system. How many people does that take? We don’t know.

Marc: Yea. This is so beautiful and so necessary and so radical. So I just wanted to kind of again take it slow. Let’s kind of see where we are. So if enough of us choose outrageous love, if we awaken as outrageous love, we can begin to enact a politics of outrageous love. We can only choose outrageous love freely. It’s a free choice. We have greater capacity for destruction that we’ve ever had because we’ve created new technologies.

New technologies are actually forms of love. This is really critical to understand. New technologies are forms of connectivity. There’s new connections. There’s new creations. There’s new mutuality’s that are happening. There’s new embraces. That’s what technology is. So technology is actually love. It’s new attractions creating new births because whenever you have a new attraction you birth something new, that’s what technology is. Technology is love. But if we actually if it actually loses its connection to source it can be used for un-love, for destruction in the most horrific sense.

And so there’s an urgent need to choose outrageous love in a way that there never was before. And when we choose outrageous love, we can create… if enough of use choose outrageous love we create a unique self-symphony which you call planetary Pentecost in religious terms meaning we create a tipping point in reality in which a new consciousness begins to emerge that actually deconstructs what’s not working and creatively constructs new visions of polis, of politics. New visions of economics, new visions of the very basic structures of life itself because outrageous love is creative, it’s imaginative, it reimagines reality. Ok?

So we’ve got to talk about how this works really carefully so it doesn’t sound kind of Pollyannaish, pie in the sky. This is actually part structured, clear politics here. Politics of outrageous love. I think that’s what we’re going to talk about next time, but do you have any closing before we…

Barbara: Well I do. If you think of this the whole tendency in nature toward disorder which things break up and they don’t suddenly put themselves together at a higher order. How does this happen? For billions of years we’ve been going from entropy which….

Marc: Is the tendency towards disorder.

Barbara: Disorder to higher order.

Marc: How does that happen?

Barbara: So here’s how it happens according to Ilia Prigogine who won the Nobel Prize for this and I’ll just say it in the most simple terms to unpack it later. When a system gets dysfunctional in disordered, it uses more of its energy in handling its own disorders. Meanwhile, innovations pop up everywhere in health, in education, in economics, in energy, in science and technology. And there’s a tendency of innovations to interact with each other. While the system is dysfunctional down here, we are little innovative specks of dust, but we’re coming together out of allurement and the nature of nature is there’s enough interaction by attraction of innovations and the system cooperates in its own self-transcendence.

I think we’re at just the moment in our history as humanity when there are enough innovations and innovative people, loving people that we are connecting more and more rapidly every day. We have a communication system, we have the internet, we have a thinking layer of Earth to connect us and one of the things that we’re doing here with this whole series is to help connect the people who would like to tip the system to the higher order. And since it’s at a tipping point, you don’t know one more person in the right direction of the tipping point it goes.

Marc: Right and that’s so awesome and it’s so outrageous. Outrageous is the new awesome. When you have an evolutionary relationship to life, your experience is that your next act of awakening as outrageous love and creatively living that outrageous love and enacting it in the world can actually tip the entire system.

Now, just before we finish, let’s just talk for one more second so people really can break it down. So this idea of autopoiesis which is the name, one of the names given to what Barbara’s describing. Let’s just talk about it a little bit so people can get it before you bring in politics in the world, just kind of how does it work simply? So you have a system that disequilibrium meaning a system that’s not in balance with itself, it’s out of balance and then at a point of disorder, there are dimensions in the system which create new integrations…

Barbara: Innovations yes and mutations.

Marc: Mutations create in biological terms you’ve got particular expressions that are called mutations which create new innovation and the system jumps to a higher level of order.

Barbara: Yes because it tends by allurement to attract. Now why are you and I together?

Marc: Before we make the jump, so this thing, this process that Barbara’s describing it happens at the physical level is also happening at the societal level. That’s the key idea.

Barbara: That’s the key idea and I think in the next podcast we should [0:16:00] really talk about the evolution of politics as the attraction of innovative people, creative people everywhere on Earth; anyone anywhere on Earth. We could become a planetary culture.

Marc: So part of the evolution of love is actually to develop a politics of outrageous love that begins to enact a planetary culture. What does that mean? Is that pie in the sky? Is that where does that strange? Or is that the natural trajectory of evolution itself, of love itself evolving? We’re going to get to that soon. Have an awesome week. Thank you Barbara. Love you.

Barbara: That’s great.

Marc: Total. Do you love me?

Barbara: I do.

Marc: Ok. Just checking.

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