The Ultimate Aim of Passion

—A Dialogue between Andrew Harvey and Chris Saade

Andrew Harvey: Chris, I love your distinction between passion and compulsion, and I love your warning about confusing passion with blame or duty or self-sacrifice, because it cannot be divine passion if it isn’t free, if it isn’t freely and lavishly given out of a generosity that sacred practice and the experience of evolutionary love incessantly expands.

I want to make two other observations. Many people confuse passion with an overt emotionalism. This is neurotic human passion and it can be darkly exciting, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the noble grounded passion that you hear, for example, in the music of Beethoven, or you read in the great poetry of Rumi, or you experience when you’re being flooded by the majesty of what Shakespeare reveals in the great tragedies. This isn’t extreme emotionalism, it is direct, blazing initiatory contact with a primordial force.

It is very important that people realize that each of us expresses this direct contact in different ways. Chris, you and I are expressive people, dramatic people. You and I enjoy the exuberance of the theater of divine love and the dance.

But there are people who are just as passionate as we are, but who express that passion in a calmer, quieter, and more down-home way. A lot of animal rights people that I know, for example, are extremely shy people. In their introversion, they’ve connected with the silent agony of the animals, and in their service, they bring the sweetness and tenderness of that shyness into how they interact with the animals, and also into how they present the pain of the animals to the world.

It’s important to realize that everyone’s passion is different. We can learn how to be passionate from Rumi and Shakespeare and Beethoven, and of course from the Source of passion, the Beloved, but we still have to be passionate in our own unique way, from our own unique self.

Chris Saade: The expression of passion will be different according to the authenticity of each person. It might be dramatic or theatrical or contained, but there is an inner knowing about it. The person will know that they are standing in the space of passion, one that that is surging through their heart and authenticity.

Andrew Harvey: They’ll be in joy and know what Blake meant when he wrote, “Energy is eternal to light.”

Chris Saade: They will know their great joy and they will know grief—for life is always paradoxical. But they will know they are in life abundant, and they will be propelled to give because passion is something so big it cannot be contained. It cannot be privatized.

Andrew Harvey: I want to explore here a remark made by the extraordinary French clown, Marcel Marceau. He said, “Passion is a long patience.” When I first read that, I think I was in my twenties, I thought, “What on Earth does he mean?” But as I’ve grown, I’ve understood just how profound his statement is.

If you are in a relationship and you are not serving your own deep divine evolution, and the divine evolution of the person that you love, you will never know divine passion. Divine passion isn’t simply the outpouring of one’s self towards another, and the receiving of the outpouring of the other. Divine passion is also a commitment to the evolution of the other. It is a passionate commitment of the soul to the flowering of the unique self of the being you are privileged to be in relationship with—whatever that entails for you.

Two people who are deeply committed to the passion of the Divine must be deeply committed to serving each other’s divine evolution with total concentrated passion, which entails deep patience, because without that commitment to patience, the fire of the passion will run out.

When I interviewed Maria Callas at the end of her life, she said something about passion, which I’ve never forgotten. “When I sing, one-half of my mind is utterly focused, and the other half of my mind is utterly gone.” These two things that Marcel Marceau and Maria Callas said have really haunted me, and I think that they are the core of relationship. What Callas is talking about is what people need in their deep emotional, spiritual, and sexual relationship with each other.

First, they need to be completely present at this moment, in this moment, with the fullness of the other person. Totally focused on their own depths and on the depths of the other. This requires an immense effort of conscious presence, conscious alignment, conscious outpouring, and conscious deep contemplative, compassionate understanding. Alongside that, they also need to know how to enter the completely fresh lunacy of the moment, to be abandoned to the moment, to be surrendered to the moment, because something new is born every moment, which will be missed if they’re not totally open to it. You will not be able to give birth to what’s trying to be born if you don’t have these faculties of precision and clarity and presence.

What passion is inviting us to, is a marriage at the deepest level, of the highest clarities of the masculine with the wildest and profoundest compassion passion energies of the feminine. They need to come together so that we can live our truth.

Chris Saade: That is so true. Passion is paradoxical in nature. It lives in paradox. It’s the understanding and acceptance of paradox that allows passion to be generated and sustained—to be receptive, and totally open to the wildness.

Andrew Harvey: You can only surrender to the wildness if you are calm and clear. Otherwise, the wildness intimidates you. Callas can only sing the way she does because she’s done a hell of a lot of work to train her voice. She worked sixteen hours a day for twenty years to get her voice to a place where she can abandon herself to the music and know that her voice will carry it. That’s what we have to do in our personal relationships. The instruments of ourselves that we’re abandoning to passion can be trusted because they have been clarified, they’ve been purified.

Chris Saade: I fully agree. Passion demands a commitment to a life of growth, a life of tuning and honing our authenticity and its force within us. Passion is always supportive of the evolution of the other. In my experience leading workshops for several decades, when people are asked to look at their passion, they struggle with the privatization trap. They start thinking about their passion, but their passion shrinks as it is privatized.

Let’s say some have a passion to paint, or for music, or a passion for the mountains. To be developed and sustained, the passion of the heart must ultimately express itself as a passion to serve. An authentic passion will gift us with strength, pleasure, and meaning. A mature and developed passion will give us pleasure—for pleasure is very important and is holy—but at some point that passion needs to express itself as solidarity.

What is your passion to serve? If it is through painting, how does your work in some way and at some time speak to justice, to solidarity, to preservation of the natural world? If you write songs, are there some that speak out against homophobia, the abuse of animals, or the degradation of the environment? If your creative passion is from the heart, it will serve your partner and it will serve the world. If your passion is the mountains, how can your communion with the mountains at some time become a powerful inspiration for others.

There is an evolutionary lift when we ask the question, “What cause will the passion in me serve?” It will still be painting, or singing, or bicycling, or whatever it is, but it will ultimately go toward impacting others, toward supporting. Authenticity, pleasure, all merging with service.

Andrew Harvey: I love what you’re saying, Chris. Passion is a long work as well as a long patience. Let’s take gardening. If all you do when you’re gardening is simply enjoy gardening, that’s already something. But if you realize that you’re entering into a relationship with the tragically endangered Earth, then your gardening, if you really love it, will take you into a radical concern for the health of the environment that can lead you, if you’re brave and honest enough, to environmental activism.

What we’re really inviting people to do is to identify their passion, to work with it so as to embody it at the deepest levels, and to work at expanding it, so that its true, all-embracing nature can be experienced, so that you can come to the hidden mission in the core of that passion and dedicate it to the transformation of the world. Divine passion, the passion at the core of your most authentic self, the passion to fulfill the task your authentic self reveals to you, and the passion to serve the world, not from guilt or duty, but from sacred lavishness of being, sacred exhuberance—these all inter-penetrate and birth in you through their now mutually enriching and nourishing power a wholly new level of joy, energy, creativity, and radical effectiveness. There is a vastly transformative secret hidden in this conscious interweaving of the different expressions of the force of passion. If I had to put it into words, knowing the inadequacy of language to describe such a mystery, I would say this: when our ego becomes the loving servant of the self, when heart, mind, soul, and body are married in the fire of divine passion, a new Person is born. The actions that overflow in peace and joy from such a Person are embued with divine power and divine blessing and can effect miraculous transformations in seemingly hopeless and intractable situations. On millions of us living out the truth of this mystery fearlessly depends the future of the world.