Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 11.

Specialization

There is a rapid, continuous evolutionary up leveling that humans and human society experience in a way that no animal does. What is it about human society that is distinct that causes this constant, dramatic, incessant evolutionary transformations? What causes rapid human growth?

The reason this is such a key question is because objective human nature itself does not change. In the last 200,000 years, the essential nature of the human being from the perspective of the size of the human brain, the organs of the body, and the major systems of the body has not changed. Usually, in evolutionary unfolding, when you get a different level of functioning it’s because there’s an evolution in the physical structure of that particular species. Evolution then jumps to a higher level of reality.

This process of evolution in the human being is completely different. The human body, both from an exterior and interior perspective of the basic organs, is actually pretty much the same as it’s been in the last 200,000 years. And yet, everything has changed. To say that life is the same today as it was 40,000, years ago, for example, is utterly absurd. In that time, we’ve multiplied more than one hundred thousand percent, from about three million to seven billion people. We’ve given ourselves a level of self-knowledge, science, religion, attainment, comfort and luxury that no other species can imagine. We’ve colonized every imaginable corner of the planet and explored almost every inhabitable one. We’ve altered the appearance, the genetics, and the chemistry of the world. We surrounded ourselves with peculiar, nonrandom arrangements of atoms that we call technology that we invent and reinvent continuously. These allow us the spectacular achievements of culture, law, poetry, philosophy, space travel, modern medicine, nanotechnology, robotics, computers and so much more that we all take for granted.[1]

Chimpanzees don’t do that. Dolphins don’t do that. Parrots don’t do that. Octopi don’t do that. Some of these occasionally use tools; they occasionally shift their ecological niche. But they don’t raise their standard of living, they don’t experience economic growth, they don’t encounter poverty. They don’t evolve from one level of consciousness to another, nor do they miss doing so. They don’t experience agricultural, urban, commercial, industrial or information revolutions. They certainly don’t experience renaissances, or reformations, depressions, demographic transitions, civil wars, cold wars, cultural wars or credit crunches.

[Read more…]

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 10.

Self-Organizing Universe

I understand that it may be challenging for you to imagine your outrageous acts of love can create a ripple effect powerful enough to heal the planet. But let me assure you, the principles of this evolutionary process are firmly rooted in the study of complex systems. The core mechanism of Evolutionary We Space is the scientific principle of self-organization, which implicitly contains within it the principle of specialization (which is why Unique Self is so important.)

The idea of self-organization is, according to many, the single most important scientific idea to emerge in the last fifty years. It exists at every level of reality. Take for example an anthill. The anthill is magnificently organized. The level of complexity and precision is dazzling. To sight but one example, the location of the cemetery in an anthill is geometrically the farthest possible distance from the garbage dump. Which ant made that calculation? Each ant knows what to do and how to interact with other ant. The ants each act in response to what the scientific literature calls signals from “street level.” There is an interior knowing in the ant of what needs to be done in its immediate environs. The individual ant receives signals from the ants that it passes. Those ants secrete pheromone, a particular chemical that communicates information. Each ant then acts locally in response to the unique needs that the ant perceive at street level, in its immediate surrounding. However, each ant acting locally creates a global effect. That is the vast elegance and complexity of the perfectly organized and interdependent anthill. When this principle is applied to the universe what emerges is what has been described by leading edge evolutionary theorists as the self-organizing universe.

Science tells us that self-organization is a basic principle of reality at all levels. Self-organization, and Evolutionary We Space and Evolutionary Unique Self are directly related in the emergence of collective consciousness. There is what some physicists have called the “inherent ceaseless creativity” of the cosmos, which moves reality to higher and deeper levels of complexity, consciousness and love. An external god making decrees does not enforce this development. Rather this evolutionary emergence is a function of the internal property of self-organization, which is the creative cosmos always evolving and organizing at higher and higher levels. The question is, what guides self organization at the level of human culture? Clearly it is not pheromone, which tells ants what other ants need in their immediate surroundings. The answer is dramatic, yet elegantly simple. Once it is almost self evident in its truth. The guiding principle, or said better the organizing principle of the self-organizing universe is Evolutionary Unique Self.

Evolutionary Unique Self is a psychoactive construct that lies at the very core of nature. You awaken to your Evolutionary Unique Self as the most accurate interior expression of I am. Who am I? I am an Evolutionary Unique Self. Evolutionary Unique Self is the currency of connection with the larger current of outrageous love that powers the universe.

Evolutionary Unique Self is actually what drives the emergence of civilization itself. It rests in part on the principle of what a whole school of economists and anthropologists refer to as specialization[1].

To be continued…

[1] A key exponent of these ideas is from Matt Ridley in his book the Rational Optimist. Ridley is operating in a materialist flatland paradigm with little awareness of either waking up or growing up. However his presentation of human evolution, particularly the evolution of ideas rests in part on an implicit Evolutionary Unique Self principle. We are following his argument in the paragraphs below.

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 9.

Solve One Crisis, Solve Them All

There are three different forms of crises. One is an objective physical crisis of suffering. Starvation is the most potent expression of this crisis. The second is the crisis fomented by the second shock of existence. Our very survival as a species is threatened by this crisis. The third is a crisis of meaning. The crisis of meaning emerges from an insufficient availability of meaning-making models. The old religious systems of meaning gave us much, but were ultimately limited. Their truth claims excluded the other and fostered extreme conflict and war. The second source of meaning, the modern notion of the separate self, also lacks sufficient depth to enact a meaningful life. Merely succeeding at the survival and even prosperity, does not give a person the experience of a life well lived.

The first crisis of objective suffering plagues the economically underdeveloped countries. The second crisis of resources, which catalyzes the second shock of existence, plagues the entire world. The third crisis of meaning, unsatisfied by available scripts which spell out the rights of the ego self, plagues the economically developed world. Paradoxically, the resolution of the first two crises solve the third, and the resolution of the third solves the first two. Each is a key in the lock of the other. (Reality is always strangely elegant.)

Salvation for the economically developed world, at this moment in time, can only be authentically found in the awakening to the outrageous love that realizes the truth of One Love and One World. This is the awakening to Unique Self and outrageous love, committing outrageous acts of love and forming Evolutionary We Space which orchestrates the Unique Self Symphony. From that place of awakened consciousness, the developed world can stand as one and reach out its hand, fully and powerfully, to the underdeveloped world. We can also invest the full power of innovation and attention to address the looming structural crisis that has induced the second shock of existence. That solves the crisis of meaning.

[Read more…]

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 8.

Evolutionary We Space

This awakening characterizes the sixth big bang which we discussed in chapter X and marks the formation of Evolutionary We Space, which is the emergence of a higher global wisdom in which each individual has irreducible rights and dignity and at the same time contributes to a larger collective intelligence.

Not only is it possible to awaken, but awakening is the natural and necessary evolutionary expression of this moment. The human being awakening as an irreducibly unique and singular expression of the love intelligence and love beauty that is the initiating and animating Eros of reality is the next evolutionary step. We need to reclaim potency by liberating love from its anthropocentric predicament. But to do so we must close the gap between our ability to feel and our ability to heal.

To close the gap between our ability to feel and heal we clearly must be able to engage in collective action. It certainly appears to be self evident that no individual or even individual government or corporation will be able to close the gap. How do we foster a We Space capable of collective action? How do we form an Evolutionary We Space capable of unfreezing the global action paralysis? Evolutionary Unique Self allows you to reclaim your own personal potency and power. More than that, Evolutionary Unique Self is the technology which facilitates the formation of the Evolutionary We Space. It is precisely such We Space that is required for powerful and effective collective action. The centrality of this idea, which we already outlined in its broad parameters in law X, demands that we engage it in greater depth.

To really understand Evolutionary Unique Self let’s first return to the four selves we briefly unpacked in law X: Separate Self, True Self, Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self. To get a clearer sense of this core trajectory in the evolution of self which is ultimately the evolution of love let’s understand each of the selves in terms of a simple but powerful symbol: a puzzle and its puzzle pieces.

[Read more…]

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 7.

Unique Self-Symphony

“A symphony orchestra conductor who consults with business did the following at a consulting engagement with one of the largest management consulting firms in the world: As the 1,000 senior level managers filed in to the large room, they noticed that, interspersed among their seats were seats set aside for the various sections of a symphony orchestra. The conductor, stereotypical conductor-hair and all, strides into it all and proceeds to make a variety of points about running a team, using orchestral principles to make the point. Using a Wagner overture, at one point, the conductor said, ‘let’s hear only the second violins and the triangle from measure X to measure Y.’ This allowed the managers to hear how the triangle relates to the overall piece without being drowned out by the whole orchestra. Next, he has the whole orchestra, without the triangle, play the same passage. It is unbelievably rich — you cannot imagine a richer piece of music. Then, finally, he has the entire orchestra, with the triangle, play the same passage one more time. With the addition of the triangle, this already magnificent piece was sprinkled with musical fairy dust, transforming the piece from gorgeous to transcendent.”

When every person is guided by their irreducibly unique perspective and irreducibly unique taste to give their unique gifts, a Unique Self Symphony is formed in which everyone is needed and no one is extra. The power and potency of this symphony releases a creative and entrepreneurial innovation that literally has the power to heal virtually everything. Innovation and evolutionary creativity in every sphere of life, emergent from the Meta mind of Unique Selves, collectively released into reality is what will take us to the next evolutionary step.

Evolutionary Intimacy is, thus, realized with the recognition that you are playing your instrument in the Unique Self symphony. Remember, you are not called to fix it all yourself. You are called by your uniqueness. You are charged to action by your uniqueness. You are needed only to play your unique self-instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.

As we know from the Law of Feeling and Healing, we reclaim our potency and power by reclaiming our access to outrageous love. This requires two steps. First, we must open our hearts to feel again. Then, we must close the gap between our ability to feel and heal. The gap is closed by realizing that you have outrageous acts of love that are your, and yours alone, to commit. In this step Unique Self is aroused and you awaken to the full potency of your participation in the Unique Self Symphony. From the chorus of Unique Selves, a new sound is heard, the sound of the Unique Self Symphony. The Unique Self Symphony, in turn, arouses a global evolutionary intimacy, which is an emergent property of love, heretofore unseen in human history. When billions of Unique Selves awaken to their evolutionary context and give their unique gifts which emerges from their unique insight then the outrageous love and infinite creativity of the Unique Self Symphony is born.

To be continued…

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 6.

Evolutionary Intimacy

As we have said before, the cosmos produced only one you as a result of an unimaginable string of synchronicities. It took 13.7 billion years to manifest your irreducible uniqueness at every level of your physical, spiritual, and emotional being. All that’s needed is your Unique Self. You are a unique expression of the love intelligence. Reality needs your unique service. That means very simply that a love that can only come from you is needed in the world. Truly transformative and effective outrageous acts of love must emerge from a genuinely felt sense of outrageous love. Only that which wells up from the essence of our desires has the power to change not only our internal and external realities, but a new quality of intimacy. An evolutionary intimacy. [Read more…]

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 5.

The Second Shock

We now come to our postmodern age. Since the early farmer we have evolved through at least six major structure stages of cultural consciousness. We have entered deeply into the postindustrial, informational age, and death confronts us once again. Just as we are intuiting the first, faint glimmerings of being able to defeat personal death, a far more devastating world death looms on the horizon: the second shock of existence. The second shock of existence is the realization that our contemporary vision of success has failed and we are about to destroy ourselves.

First, our runaway technological success threatens a global crisis of dangerously dwindling supplies. We are running out of resources. We have cut down too many trees and dramatically affected the core structure of our climate. We have used the oceans as our dumping ground for our waste, including nuclear waste. The nuclear storage sites are housed in shocking conditions such that nuclear waste seeps into the ground. The meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant during the tsunami in Japan in 2011 continues to cause structure damage to our environment with implications we cannot yet begin to imagine. [Read more…]

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 4.

Global Paralysis

Instead, for the most part we close our hearts. We feel the pain. It hurts too much. We do not know how to heal the pain. The gap between the ability to feel and the ability to heal is too great. In closing our hearts we wind up doing nothing. We cannot find our way. The result is what might be accurately named a global action paralysis. The result of this paralysis is a narrative in which it is somehow okay that there are tens of millions of starving children. Feel into the most extreme cold, pain and hunger that you have ever experienced. Imagine your hunger exponentially multiplied. Can you feel the infinite pain? Is there any part of you that feels it is okay to have the world go on in the fleshpots of dulled senses–business as usual–while you starve?

Paradoxically, the global paralysis goes beyond dulled senses. Rather, the paralysis is created by the realization of the end. We recognize the whole story is not sustainable; the world as we know it is on the brink of almost certain death. We have given our best answers to the great challenges of our age. And, we have not succeeded. Starvation is still rampant. Premature demise lurks at the door for hundreds of millions of people. And the death of civilization haunts us.

This is not the first time death has come knocking on the door. Death came before in what might appropriately be called the first shock of existence. Cultural anthropologists have written extensively about the first shock and their conclusions are best summarized by Ernest Becker’s classic work, The Denial of Death. Becker reminds us that in some real sense the entire cultural project of human history is an attempt to come to grips with the first shock of existence. Dawn man, the early hunter-gatherer was indistinct from his larger environment. Death happened for dawn man as it does in the animal world. Death was not an existential issue causing dread. For dawn man, like the animal, death was not a force which drives a vast complex evolutionary cultural project, a project which has gone through many distinct levels of cultural consciousness. Death became the driving cultural force for man only in response to the first shock of existence when early farmer emerged as a separate self. The new sense of self engenders the first shock of existence. Dawn man emerged from his enmeshment with his environment, became aware of time and his own mortality. He was terrified at the realization of his own demise and death grins at the banquet.

Every great, ancient literature memorializes this first shock of existence in its mythical prose. In the West, the foundation story is the exile from Eden. Man eats from the tree of life and knows death for the first time. The consciousness of death enters his heart and now becomes the core driver of his survival. The desire to erect edifices of thought, heart and body that stand as a bulwark against death is a major motive force of cultural evolution. One of the key emergent responses to this first shock is a series of evolutionary refinements of man’s conception of self and his relationship to the larger community. The first shock of existence ultimately produced the separate, self-consciousness of human beings, which eventually fostered all of the human dignities and rights that define modernity. Death could not be defeated, but life was invested with infinite adequacy and dignity. This is the response to the first shock: the notice of impending death of the separate self, ego, individual.

To be continued…

Read the mystical testimonies from the Mystery School of Love 2015: Part 1 and Part 2.

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.

Continued from part 3.

The Law of Evolutionary Intimacy

Reclaiming Intimacy

Our era can most aptly be described with the opening lines of Charles Dickens 1859 masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” We live in a world of outrageous love. We live in a world of outrageous pain.

More people live in conditions of unprecedented dignity, choice and possibility than at any other time in history. The leading edge of thought recognizes, as we point to in this book, the essential nature of reality itself is outrageous love. For this first time however this knowing of the eye of the spirit and the eye of the heart is supported by the growing evidence from what Pier Luigi Lusi and Fritjof Capra have called in their 2014 book by that name, The Systems View of Life. Life is built on profound cooperation between billions of diverse elements that allure and attract each other as they dance in near-perfect harmony.

At the same time we face unprecedented challenges to our continued stability, to our survival and to the health of the planet. We live in a world where the outrageous pain is both personal and collective. There is no longer a split between the global and the local. No more is there a place to hide. Google Earth symbolizes the disappearing lines between the global and local; in seconds you can view any location on the globe from the comfort of your home. Such access was not available two decades ago to even the most advanced spy agency. Today, what happens in China affects the daily life of someone in the United States. World financial markets are intertwined. Climate change knows no boundaries. Billions of individuals connected on the planet experience various levels of outrageous pain.

Three thousand people went to work on an ordinary day and died terribly when al-Qaeda obliterated the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and terrorist organizations continue to threaten civilization. Disease travels via jet plane. Seventeen million people are enslaved for sex and labor. Twenty million children will die of starvation and related diseases this year if the current conditions remain untransformed. Included in the suffering are the victims of mass rape, children forced to be soldier murderers and tens of millions of aids victims in Africa. Hordes of people in western countries are driven to addiction because they experience their lives as devoid of purpose and empty of meaning. Teens commit suicides at shocking rates. Masses of people live under fundamentalist regimes of politics or religion and their life force is deadened by being denied the twin human joys of authentic self-expression and free creativity. All of these are crises on the level of the individual. These individual sufferings, however add up to a global upheaval of outrageous pain. Virtually all of it is unnecessary. Its root is in a pervasive failure of intimacy.

In a real sense, we are living the tale of two futures, and each unfolding is quite different. One view is of continued outrageous pain. Yet, for the first time we are awakening to the possibility that outrageous pain is not inevitable. All of the justifications offered by the various philosophies of human life are being rejected. We recognize that outrageous pain is outrageous. Outrageous pain is a violation of intimacy. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.

Yet, even those on the leading edge, committed to changing the game through outrageous acts of love, are afflicted by a powerful loneliness. The feeling of being disconnected, the feeling “I cannot do it myself” remains. The great evolutionary, mystic, Jesuit priest, Teilhard De Chardin, spoke to this existential angst when we said, “There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.”

We live in an intimate universe. Intimacy must be restored. We become powerful by aligning with intimacy, the core of existence. The global anguish and the consequential loneliness cannot be healed merely by personal intimacy. They require a communion. They require an awakening into an evolutionary, global intimacy.

To be continued…