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A Global Heart

I invite you to suspend disbelief for a few minutes and follow me on a radical thought experiment, or better yet, a radical heart experiment.

First, if you don’t already share this assumption, I ask you to allow the possibility that there is an unnameable Love/Divinity/Oneness/<your word here> that precedes and transcends everything. And further, that the whole point of the Universe is to manifest this … let’s call it Oneness for now … into the physical world.  And counter to this unchanging, undifferentiated Oneness, that the physical world is always changing and all about evolving relationships between separate “parts’.

Are you with me so far?  Okay, good…

If we accept these assumptions and step back from our personal, cultural, and even genetic narratives, then wouldn’t our ultimate purpose as “spiritual beings having human experiences” be to love as deeply and as often as possible?

I’m not talking about a superficial, “Sure, I love everybody!” or “Yes, we’re all children of God” kind of love.  I’m talking about that soul-to-soul connection you may feel with a parent, a child, a lover.  The kind of deep and permanent bond you can always access, regardless of circumstance or proximity.  The great loves we carry with us on our deathbeds and perhaps beyond.  The type of love we reserve for a select few in our “inner heart circle”.

What if we didn’t reserve this love? What if — and here comes the radical part — What if, over the course of a lifetime, we develop 100, 500, 1,000 love relationships where we touch each other from the core of our beings?  What if we all got so good at expressing our own and regarding others’ unique selves and vulnerabilities that we could fall deeply in love at the drop of a hat — with a stranger we meet at an office party, with a colleague we have a 5-minute breakout session with on Zoom, with the cashier ringing up our groceries? What if we were continually open to a depth of love that we repeatedly come away from the briefest of encounters feeling our souls will be connected forever?

Okay, I’m imagining at this point, you’re saying something like “Dream on Art! That may sound well and good, but we live in the real world! You’re forgetting about those annoyances called ‘space’ and ‘time.’ Leaving aside sexual relationships, we don’t have enough hours in a day or the emotional bandwidth to create anywhere near the level of heart-to-heart relationships you’re talking about, much less maintain them! I mean, seriously! Imagine the unceasing longing we would feel for so many loved ones and the unfathomable grief with their inevitable passing!”

Good points!  And so, here’s another radical idea…. What if, the fears and limitations we assume prevent us from loving more deeply and often, such as longing and grief, finite time and great distances — are actually less limiting and fixed than we thought? 

Two examples to explain what I’m getting at… The first comes from Joanna Macy, the beloved Buddhist scholar, systems thinker and peace activist who has been such a passionate advocate for us waking up to our fundamental interbeingness and us leaning into a “Great Turning” towards a more ecological age. She has also been a pioneer in facilitating despair and empowerment work to help many thousands process and release their deep feelings of grief and anger with the current and likely future state of the world.   According to Joanna…

The anguish we feel for what is happening to our world is inevitable … and normal … and even healthy. Pain is very useful. Just don’t be afraid of it. Because if we are afraid, we won’t feel where it comes from. And where it comes from … is love. Our love for this world, that is what is going to pull us through.

Might we also apply this perspective to our loved ones that are far away or have passed on? Might this be a skill we can develop? Might we learn to use “negative” emotions like longing and grief as beacons in the night that can help us navigate back to a sense of gratitude and fulfillment in the love that lies just beneath the surface?

This was confirmed for me personally when my wife (now separated) proposed we open our marriage way back in 1992.  At first, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to deal with all the associated fears and jealousies.  Over several weeks and months I meditated on these emotions and, every day, would ask myself two questions.  The first was “How am I feeling?” and the second was “Okay, how am I really feeling?” because I found it extremely difficult to separate how I was actually feeling from how I was supposed to feel.

To my great surprise, when I followed these feelings to their source, I discovered a wellspring of love for my wife and a deep desire for her happiness. Over time, my fears and jealousies, while never disappearing completely, took a backseat to a new feeling of compersion — empathic joy in her finding happiness with other lovers.

This second example awoke me to the fact that all is not as it seems or as we have been told when it comes to emotions and love relationships.  If feeling jealous was not as compelling and consuming as our cultural narratives have led us to believe, I began to wonder what other societal norms and beliefs are just … stories. I began to wonder what else might be possible in our conscious evolution towards manifesting Oneness into the physical world.

Which brings us back to where we started. Imagine a world in which we are open to love in every moment and learn to not restrict our hearts for fear of the longing, grief or jealousy that might ensue. We would still enjoy householding relationships, but we would not feel strapped to the “relationship escalator” where we find our “one and only” and progress from dating to marriage to death do us part.  Could we embrace all forms of consensual relationships, both in partnership and in community, both proximally and virtually? Could we truly allow ourselves to experience both our essential uniqueness and our fundamental interbeingness with each other and everything?  Could  we sink into our collective purpose and live together like cells in a beating heart?

Humanity is at a fork in the road of our evolutionary journey.  With climate change and social injustice coming to a head, we have a stark choice to make. If we continue along the path of fear and separation, of greed and ego, I am sadly certain we will go extinct as a species and likely take most life on the planet with us.

But if enough of us allow the coming crises to strip away our illusions of separation and ignite a passion to heal ourselves, each other and the planet, I am convinced we will not only make it through this bottleneck, but we will be a fundamentally changed species on the other side.

Sit for a minute and recall the most significant love you’ve experienced and imagine feeling this love — or even something deeper — not with just one or a few others, but with multitudes.  And now imagine everyone you love also loving – and being loved by – countless others.  Imagine the joy, the connection and belonging, and collective purpose this would bring.  Can you feel it?

This is where miracles happen.  This is where everything changes.  This is where our hearts connect and bring into being a global network of love, a web of intimacy so profound and alive that, by comparison, the internet and our vast halls of information will seem like handprints on a cave wall.

For years, I imagined the next step on our evolutionary journey as the development of our collective consciousness and a planetary “sphere of reason” akin to Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the Noosphere — like the internet come alive.  Now, my gut is saying this Great Turning will be driven less by our heads and more by our hearts — by expanding our capacity and willingness to fall in love with the divinity in each of us, wherever it appears, over and over again, and together birthing a new world.

14 thoughts on “A Global Heart”

  1. Thank you so much for your beautiful article. Only yesterday I shared with a friend a question that had been on my mind…. Is it possible for love (in a relationship in this case) to really eclipse all other emotional issues or to eclipse the need to worry about the effect of a partners emotional issues?
    And your article has answered this; a day later! 🙂 It is not about the other person and needing them to be other than they are. It is about: ‘What am I doing? What perspective am I holding? Am I wearing lenses of the past, fear etc.’ For me it comes back to me then; how am I relating to myself? Can I be ‘in love’ with myself first? And can I therefor allow myself, with compassion and kindness, to sit in the feelings to return back to love; to not down my feelings and project them on to others or situations.
    Nearly three years ago an intention arose in me and found it’s way out of obfuscation into my life. I wanted to be free to love. This included polyamory/non-monogamy. The real understanding of my deep desire for this was only fully understood as being more than a longing for a wider sexual experience, when I read your article ‘Polyamory and Spiritual Growth: The Heart or the Matter.’ And since then life has changed completely. It is has been excruciatingly hard at times, I have grown A LOT, opened my heart and my experience of life and love. It was wonderful to see your article in my emailbox this morning, as an answer to my question and also as a re-alignment with your perspective and insight.
    Thank you 🙂

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  2. Margot, I had tears reading your comment. It touched me deeply to hear about your process and your growth these past few years and that our journeys have somehow been connected even though we’ve never met. Like you, these last few years have also been extremely challenging as well as incredibly transformative. You may have read a bit about this process in some of Morgaine’s posts, but I’m finally starting to feel ready to write about it all. Your heartfelt comment has inspired me to go for it! So thank you for sharing and for showing up to life and to love!! I’m really happy to feel we are walking this path together!

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    1. It’s such a pleasure! Please feel free to email me if you’d like to talk further, maybe on zoom or whatsapp… I’m in Australia 🙂

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  3. This resonates so deeply. I read “I Choose to Love” first and have to say I haven’t read anything in the poly literature that has touched me so. I’ve recently returned to a poly lifestyle after years of feeling jaded by folks either trying to fix their dysfunctional partnerships or using it to serially pursue the rush of NRE while avoiding the work of LTR.

    It’s come back around for me as a part of my spiritual awakening. All of which is intimately tied to the existential crisis we are facing as a planetary collective. You nailed it. And as Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

    I’ve been trying to frame for my partner (who is relatively new to poly after 20 years of a suffocating marriage and has taken on several lovers in the last few months) that the sweet spot in polyamory is when all the partners truly love one another and care about their impact. (To his credit, he’s the one that shared your blog with me.)

    Modeling this kind of love feels like the most important work we can be doing towards planetary ascension. This is an excerpt of a letter I started drafting to potentially share with future metamours…it could just as easily be written to a next-door neighbor in the context of our beloved, Earth:

    “How can we lift each other up? How can we recognize the gift of our mutual love for the same beloved as an opportunity to serve one another, to add exponentially more love to the unified field of the greater collective?…Let us continuously reach for each other in mutual support of what we both cherish. Separation is distortion of true love for at our essence we are All One.”

    I’m longing to connect with poly folk who want to co-create from this place.

    Thanks for your inspiring post!

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    1. Beautiful Boots. Thanks for sharing a bit of your journey and writing! Check out other posts in this blog as there are others along a similar vein. I also suspect others would also find value in your metamour letter and hope you find a way to make it widely seen.

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    2. Hello Boots!
      I’m not sure if anyone is still updating this site, but I agree with you that this post captures the most essential work we can do as humans: cultivating transcendent loving interdependence and co-arising.
      Your letter to new metamours is beautifully clear and expressive of the generosity and abundance that sets my heart on fire each time I am in service of that abundance.
      I would love to write with you if you are interested.
      In love and courage,
      Scott

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  4. Art, Your article echoed my feelings about love. I also feel “Why can’t it be boundless?”. I am relatively new to exploring Polyamory. I have a simple question. How do we do this and manage biological risks (STDs). I get that your point works with other types of relationships besides sexual. But I want it to work with sexual also. But i am concerned about the health risk. By the way, I can’t even get off when using a condom very well. I would rather talk on the phone with someone than have sex with a condom. Am i limiting myself here? It feels like the condom is a barrier to intimacy between the two (or more) people in love. Do other people overcome that feeling?

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    1. Thanks for your comment. I don’t have anything particularly unique to say about STDs. Of course, there are alternatives to condoms, but they come with their own benefits and risks. I wish you luck on your journey

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  5. This. This article encapsulates and sums up a very big part of my worldview and it is beautiful. I have questioned society’s rigid views on platonic and romantic relationships for a very long time (I understand that those view might be best for some people and I respect that but I do not think it’s for me) and it is awe-inspiring to step out into the world and discover that I am not the only one.
    Thank you for this post. It really means a lot to me.

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  6. This is truly beautiful and I can only say how much I agree. For me the spiritual path has gone hand-in-hand with the opening of my heart to non-monogamy. If you truly love someone why would you not want them to find happiness wherever they can? If you love all why would you not wish to be open a new expression of that love.

    The greatest spiritual truth is that there are no separate individuals in this world, there never was. Given this then when your loved one (who is inseparable from you) loves another (also inseperable from you), then what has been lost? For me this has lead to a practice of love without limits, without discrimation and without separation. I believe the journey of the human race is now to realize this deeply within our hearts, to love all openly, to never seek to own or control anyone. My greatest dream is a world where we can escape our limited, narrow sense of self and find our true self of oneness. Your post is the first that I’ve read in a long time where I’ve seen my vision shared, it touches me greatly.

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