Cosmic Allurement
More from the talk Jack Kornfield gave at the Fetzer Institute (which Mirabai shared with me during my visit with her):
“I think of love as mysterious, like gravity. You can research it in certain ways, but scientists cannot agree on the nature of gravity. Brian Swimme talks about cosmic allurement, that we came out of the singularity and we remember it.
“The great mystery is that we are interested in, attracted to, anything whatsoever. Love beings there: to become fascinated, to feel allurement, is to step into a wild love affair on any level of life. By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together. The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion.
“Contemplative practices are designed to re-establish or re-awaken the original visceral body sense, both physically and emotionally. In practice, all our senses are somehow awakened to love.
“The question for the future of humanity is: How will transformation happen in the world? Not by outer change alone. No amount of computers or internet or nanotechnology and biotechnology are going to stop warfare or racism or environmental destruction without an awakening to interdependence and to love.
“Without the inner dimension meeting the outer, we’ll achieve new scientific developments but probably also find new ways to oppress and harm one another. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Plato [may have] said that only the dead have seen the end of war. You hear that and you weep…
“We have to remember that we are all interdependent. Love is the shift of identity, the opening, the permeability in membranes. It doesn’t mean that you lose your individuality but that your uniqueness is linked to the whole. Love is what we long for, and it’s what makes us happy.
“Why not become the one who ‘lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in the world is dying to hear.'”