It is critical to remember that this crisis we are facing is a crisis in which the sacred powers of love in the human soul are being diverted by distraction, by greed, by ignorance, by the pursuit of power, so that they never irrigate the world and transform it. What is needed is a vision of evolutionary relationship as a relationship that helps us come into the real, take responsibility for it, and enact our sacred purpose with a partner, and for the world: when two lovers come together in this dynamic love consciousness, they create a transformative field of sacred energy, from which both can feed to inspire their work in reality.
There are seven requirements necessary, I believe, for this tremendously potent vision of evolutionary love to emerge in the world.
The first requirement is that both beings need to be plunged individually into a deep and passionate devotion of the Beloved, by whatever name they know the Beloved, because without both beings centering their life in God, the relationship will never be able to escape the private circle. From the very beginning it must be centered in the Divine. It must be a relationship that is undertaken in the conscious presence of the Divine for the Divine’s great work in the Universe. Only a relationship that is centered in God, and that has God as the prime actor in the relationship, will be able to bear the vicissitudes of authentic love, of dealing with the challenges of life and service in the world.
The second requirement for an evolutionary love is that both beings must develop a mastery of solitude. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote:
“Authentic love is where two solitudes border, protect, and salute each other.”
They “border” each other, they don’t infiltrate each other’s domain. They “protect” because they realize that the solitude that each one has is the source of inner wealth and inner revelation; they “salute” because they understand that the work of solitude, the work that goes into solitude, the heart work, the yearning, the longing, the deep contemplation of one’s gifts and one’s faults, is a sacred work that is the secret foundation of healthy relationship. In too many relationships in our current narcissistic model, what threatens the person most is the solitude of the other. In a true evolutionary relationship, what can exhilarate one person the most is the other’s solitude, because they know that solitude has the potential to make them a billionaire of generosity, of insight, and of creativity.
The third requirement is that in a true evolutionary relationship there is an equality of power, and that equality is born out of a profound experience of the sacredness and dignity of the other person’s soul. This new relationship that is trying to be given to us by the Mother is what I call the beloved-beloved relationship. One person isn’t the beloved and the other only the lover. Both partners recognize in each other the unique face that God is turning to them in order to bring them the essence of divine truth, which is embodied love. From that recognition of each other as the Beloved flows a natural movement of passionate honoring and service of the other’s life. This gives each person the freedom and the energy and the joy that they need to go out into the world and fulfill their destiny. This is crucial because in the past there has been a vision of inequality of power.
The male has often had the power and the female hasn’t. Dominant and submissive roles between two people have been seen as inevitable.
Now what’s emerging is the mutual recognition of holiness and sacredness expressed in tantric rapture, in an adoration and worship of the other in the core of life.
The fourth requirement follows on from the third: if you are going to have a beloved-beloved relationship, you have to center your whole being and work and evolution in God. You have to be a master of your own solitude so that you can work on what is necessary to deepen that sacred relationship of the Divine. You must also bring the sacred practice of prayer and meditation into the very core of your life, so that the whole relationship can be enfolded in a mutually shared sacred enterprise.
The fifth requirement is that both lovers completely abandon any Hollywood sentimentality about what relationships actually are. As love becomes more evolutionary and conscious, so does each lover’s understanding of each other’s shadow. One of the essential roles of this new love is to make each person in the relationship the safe-guarder of the other’s shadow—not the judge of the other’s shadow, not the denier of the other’s shadow, but someone who recognizes where the other has been wounded, and safeguards and protects them with unconditional compassion without allowing themselves to be mauled or manipulated by the other. This takes an immense effort, because it takes an immense effort to understand your own shadow, and an even greater effort to face and comprehend, without illusion, denial or repulsion, the shadow of the other.
The sixth requirement is that if you are going to enter into the evolutionary process, you have to accept that it never ends, never stops unfolding.
There is no end to transformation, because divine love is infinite.
Evolution is fundamentally a death/rebirth cycle that repeats itself in higher and higher dimensions, and any authentic evolutionary relationship must have the courage to go through the deaths that engender the rebirths. Marion Woodman, the great Jungian analyst and pioneer of the sacred feminine, said to me, “I have had four marriages with my husband, and at the end of each marriage there was a crisis that we had to make the commitment to go through, a projection that had to die. But we stuck at it and we went through it, and the love that we know now in our eighties is the greatest and deepest love we have experienced.”
The seventh principle requirement is that from the very beginning of this adventure into evolutionary love you must make the commitment for it not to be just a personal orgy, a cultivation of an oasis of private pleasure. You must engage consciously in this relationship to make you stronger, to serve the planet, to recognize that it is a relationship not only grounded in God, not only infused by sacred practice, but it is from the very beginning dedicated to making both people more powerful, more reflective, more passionately engaged with the only serious truth of our time: The world is dying, and we need a major revolution of the heart to empower everyone to step forward and start doing the work of reconstruction and re-creation that is now desperately needed.
To hold a candle in the dark and illuminate what could not be seen
And often what would not be seen
To hold hold a pic in the minds of men to get to soul…
To get to Truth…
To chisel away at the Rock of Ages
Containing the living Beauty within
To crack the nut of Life
Of mine and of yours
I guess I don’t care how dirty
I get in the process
If trouble is what it takes
to get to the Center
Then I am an advocate for trouble
If chaos has to be entered into
In order to find order
Then you will find me there
Hanging by a single thread
Over the abyss…
I may be a sensitive
In the light of day
But there is much to life
that needs the inner goods
And I guess I was born to this work
I am coming back
with a piece of Eternity
A chunk of World Soul
that time and again
Gets forgotten
by the puppet world
Oh I know the game
I’m no different than you
You will find me well dressed
In my Sunday best
Gorging on this mock up life
(You know , we want and we want
But we don’t know
what we really want)
So we buy it all and we buy it up
But there’s never enough
of this puppet stuff
I’ve had my fill of what cannot fulfill
So weary as I am
and nearing “the end”
I’m going in one more time
I’m heading in for the Immortal Soul
The One with whom I fell
Deeply and eternally in love
The One who partnered
with Eros himself
And birthed the child called Joy
This is how the story goes
Such love cannot be bought or sold
Such joy cannot be measured
When I die my fellow man
I pray I will walk hand in hand
With my authentic Soul
And with my last breath
Thank God for the true life I led!
Oh dearest Life
may I be clay in your hands
responsible for only this:
To come back to rest in the Heart.
Trillions of times I reached out
trying to hold myself at any of your gifts
but you are moving Shakti!
Constantly moving…
Sand between my fingers.
You take away all hopes my mind can invent
shatter them with Love
and mind trembles before these uncertainties
begging for the land of the dead
where nothing moves
and calcified statues tell lies
about being rocks to hold onto.
But you know better Ma you know…
That there is only this one way:
To freefall
Into the vastness of the Heart
Where peaceful knowing lays
The one unmovable safe harbor
of resting in Shivas arms.
A darkening northern sky, mountains rumbled
to break the deadlock of drought,
but only a dribble fell that day.
It barely wetted the dusty earth,
leaving us hot, fractious, heavy-legged.
The next day dawned with black smoldering clouds
and then with a bang real rain finally came.
Down it poured, so we danced and sang
to celebrate relief for all that lives and breathes;
cool drops glistening on naked skin
leather-brown from months of sun & sweat.
The air cut fresh in our nostrils then
as we shivered and pulled on jumpers
unworn for many months.
And the thirsty land smiled, drinking its fill.
A musty smell of moistening earth
contrasted with the sweetly perfumed air
as all of nature breathed in gratitude.
May the dessicated clay of my heart
be softened by this vital element
to melt and become pliable again,
so that I may now love life to the full.
Praying for the Earth by Paul Swatridge
– adapted & developed from a talk by Lewellyn Vaughan-Lee in 2012.
At this time there is a real need in the physical and spiritual body of the Earth.
Creation itself is calling to us, sending us signs of its imbalance and distress. Imbalance that we can see in the tsunamis, floods and droughts, as they become more frequent.
The Anima Mundi (Soul of the World) is crying out.
Those whose hearts are open can hear this cry, a cry from deep within creation.
Just as our own soul can cry out for help at times of deep need, such that we are taken by prayer to implore to a higher power for direct help, a direct conscious connection that bypasses ego and words, going straight from our heart to the divine. In this same way, when our hearts are open, we can create a direct connection to the soul of the world.
Human beings, who are supposed to be the guardians of the planet, who long ago learned the sacred names of creation, have forgotten this reverence and their responsibility as guardians. Instead they have been systematically and heedlessly desecrating and destroying the Earth on a global scale. And now the Earth and its waters are dying.
The Earth needs us to acknowledge its sacred nature. It needs our prayers more than we know. It needs us to understand that it is not just something to use and throw away.
Real sustainability is not just on a physical level, it is also spiritual. It is not spiritually sustainable if it doesn’t nourish our souls; there is an emptiness, a desolation, there is no longer the joy that belongs to life.
The Earth needs us to help it connect with its own sacred source. We are the conduits who can create these connections in a new way. No longer the patriarchal order imposing from above; now is the time for the sacred feminine energy of Shakti – organic, life-giving, nurturing and infusing everything with love. We hear the cry of the world and like a mother with her child, we respond.
We are the ears and eyes of the divine.. Through us the beloved, the creator, can see directly into creation. If we can see with the eye of the heart, we can feel into the core of creation and recognise our responsibility to care for our planet with compassion, instead of blindly following the materialist path to destruction.
Even if we have forgotten over the centuries, it is still in our DNA. We can reconnect with the sacred substance in creation as the indigenous peoples of the world have always done; we can hold the earth within our hearts, nourish it with our love, offering it to the divine.
Each one of us has the possibility to make a direct connection and to make a difference, through the grace of our love and devotion. This way we can reunite spirit and matter, making a difference where it is most needed in the world. There are many ways to do this. We each have our ways to pray. Here are some suggestions to consider:
Acknowledge that the Earth is not unfeeling matter, but a living being that has given us life – a sacred life.
Remember that the Earth has a soul, as we have a soul.
Know and trust that the power of the divine has the potential to heal and restore creation.
Let ourselves be guided by the cries we hear, to offer our love and attention where it is needed, remembering the sorrow and suffering of the world and asking for the healing to flow to wherever it is needed.
Sit and breathe and feel the quiet energy and rhythm of our heartbeat as we breathe. Remember that our breath and the breath of the world are one. It is breathing through every leaf, every plant and tree, through the lungs of all living creatures, even through the earth itself.
As we breathe, let the love grow in our hearts – our love of creation. This is where, as we hold our focus, the reconnection takes place and the healing begins.
It may seem too late to prevent destruction on a physical level and we may feel too small and powerless to make much difference on the outside. But we can all do the powerful inner work in this way.
It is our inner sacred relationship with the Earth that we have neglected for so long and it is this that is most needed now.
This week I got a little closer to something I have been sidestepping for a long time. My partner tells me how I subtly withhold my self, my thoughts and feelings, my vulnerability, my love – for her and for others. I measure it all out from a distance.
It has been a feature of our relationship, as she has her own ways of holding back in her love-giving. We have both been hurt in previous relationships and both had parental influences in our childhoods, where our patterns of withholding began. We are kind to each other over this, but we both long for the other to let go so we can drop into deeper connection.
So we are gradually learning to heal and change these patterns. For me it has been clear for a long time that the root, the tap root at least, stems from the time when I was sent off to boarding school. I coped with the pain of separation from my parents by unconsciously deciding that I would not show them my love. I learned to withhold to protect myself, particularly from my mother. I was probably angry as well as sad and lonely.
Me with my mother, father, grandparents & great aunt (middle front).My withhold included not telling my mother about my pains and unhappinesses over those years at school, as I grew up. It continued through my adult years, that I didn’t show her my love and I didn’t speak to her about those years and about my awareness, as it became clearer to me. I found myself stuck with this behaviour, unable to change it, except on rare occasions when I managed to offer her a kiss, or a quick hug. I don’t think I really wanted to change this. Maybe I was still holding resentment, even though in my maturity, I could see she had done the best she could as a mother.
My mother is now 91 and although she is mentally alert, she may not have too much longer to live. Suddenly this week I could see the possibility of speaking frankly to her and trying to heal the lifelong divide that has sat between us, unaddressed.
A few months ago I found myself speaking to her about a traumatic event that happened in a class at school, which ever since has left me with a fear of speaking in public, afraid of being shamed, as I was back then, and specifically now, unable to learn and speak italian for fear of making a fool of myself.
My mother was shocked to hear of what happened to me at school and how it has left me with a lifelong scar of fear around performance related things. She has mentioned it several times and I am now feeling a strong urge to speak more openly with her about all of this and to try to close the ‘love gap’ that has kept us distant emotionally since I was eight.
I won’t be seeing her face-to-face now till september, but when I go, I wonder if we can heal my wound (and hers) so that we can shed some tears, hug and be close in the vulnerability of my truth for the first time. And of course I wonder if the healing will bring benefits in all my other relationships, especially with my partner.
By Andrew Harvey
An Excerpt From “Evolutionary Love Relationships: Passion, Authenticity,and Activism“
It is critical to remember that this crisis we are facing is a crisis in which the sacred powers of love in the human soul are being diverted by distraction, by greed, by ignorance, by the pursuit of power, so that they never irrigate the world and transform it. What is needed is a vision of evolutionary relationship as a relationship that helps us come into the real, take responsibility for it, and enact our sacred purpose with a partner, and for the world: when two lovers come together in this dynamic love consciousness, they create a transformative field of sacred energy, from which both can feed to inspire their work in reality.
There are seven requirements necessary, I believe, for this tremendously potent vision of evolutionary love to emerge in the world.
The first requirement is that both beings need to be plunged individually into a deep and passionate devotion of the Beloved, by whatever name they know the Beloved, because without both beings centering their life in God, the relationship will never be able to escape the private circle. From the very beginning it must be centered in the Divine. It must be a relationship that is undertaken in the conscious presence of the Divine for the Divine’s great work in the Universe. Only a relationship that is centered in God, and that has God as the prime actor in the relationship, will be able to bear the vicissitudes of authentic love, of dealing with the challenges of life and service in the world.
The second requirement for an evolutionary love is that both beings must develop a mastery of solitude. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote:
They “border” each other, they don’t infiltrate each other’s domain. They “protect” because they realize that the solitude that each one has is the source of inner wealth and inner revelation; they “salute” because they understand that the work of solitude, the work that goes into solitude, the heart work, the yearning, the longing, the deep contemplation of one’s gifts and one’s faults, is a sacred work that is the secret foundation of healthy relationship. In too many relationships in our current narcissistic model, what threatens the person most is the solitude of the other. In a true evolutionary relationship, what can exhilarate one person the most is the other’s solitude, because they know that solitude has the potential to make them a billionaire of generosity, of insight, and of creativity.
The third requirement is that in a true evolutionary relationship there is an equality of power, and that equality is born out of a profound experience of the sacredness and dignity of the other person’s soul. This new relationship that is trying to be given to us by the Mother is what I call the beloved-beloved relationship. One person isn’t the beloved and the other only the lover. Both partners recognize in each other the unique face that God is turning to them in order to bring them the essence of divine truth, which is embodied love. From that recognition of each other as the Beloved flows a natural movement of passionate honoring and service of the other’s life. This gives each person the freedom and the energy and the joy that they need to go out into the world and fulfill their destiny. This is crucial because in the past there has been a vision of inequality of power.
Now what’s emerging is the mutual recognition of holiness and sacredness expressed in tantric rapture, in an adoration and worship of the other in the core of life.
The fourth requirement follows on from the third: if you are going to have a beloved-beloved relationship, you have to center your whole being and work and evolution in God. You have to be a master of your own solitude so that you can work on what is necessary to deepen that sacred relationship of the Divine. You must also bring the sacred practice of prayer and meditation into the very core of your life, so that the whole relationship can be enfolded in a mutually shared sacred enterprise.
The fifth requirement is that both lovers completely abandon any Hollywood sentimentality about what relationships actually are. As love becomes more evolutionary and conscious, so does each lover’s understanding of each other’s shadow. One of the essential roles of this new love is to make each person in the relationship the safe-guarder of the other’s shadow—not the judge of the other’s shadow, not the denier of the other’s shadow, but someone who recognizes where the other has been wounded, and safeguards and protects them with unconditional compassion without allowing themselves to be mauled or manipulated by the other. This takes an immense effort, because it takes an immense effort to understand your own shadow, and an even greater effort to face and comprehend, without illusion, denial or repulsion, the shadow of the other.
The sixth requirement is that if you are going to enter into the evolutionary process, you have to accept that it never ends, never stops unfolding.
Evolution is fundamentally a death/rebirth cycle that repeats itself in higher and higher dimensions, and any authentic evolutionary relationship must have the courage to go through the deaths that engender the rebirths. Marion Woodman, the great Jungian analyst and pioneer of the sacred feminine, said to me, “I have had four marriages with my husband, and at the end of each marriage there was a crisis that we had to make the commitment to go through, a projection that had to die. But we stuck at it and we went through it, and the love that we know now in our eighties is the greatest and deepest love we have experienced.”
The seventh principle requirement is that from the very beginning of this adventure into evolutionary love you must make the commitment for it not to be just a personal orgy, a cultivation of an oasis of private pleasure. You must engage consciously in this relationship to make you stronger, to serve the planet, to recognize that it is a relationship not only grounded in God, not only infused by sacred practice, but it is from the very beginning dedicated to making both people more powerful, more reflective, more passionately engaged with the only serious truth of our time: The world is dying, and we need a major revolution of the heart to empower everyone to step forward and start doing the work of reconstruction and re-creation that is now desperately needed.
Andrew is the author of The Hope, Play Life More Beautifully and Evolutionary Love Relationships: Passion, Authenticity,and Activism.