The Paradox of Evolutionary Love

—A Dialogue between Andrew Harvey and Chris Saade

Andrew Harvey: The last thing we want to do is give the impression of evolutionary love as another New Age denial of the dark, or another purely heroic struggle. So much of the true nature of evolutionary love becomes evident in failure, in sadness, in loss, in vulnerability. This is the supreme paradox of evolution, which we really need to attend to: The greatest light is born out of the greatest darkness.

This is the paradox that we are living at this moment. As evolutionary partners, we cannot afford not to know that greatest darkness in the world, and in ourselves. This means radical confrontation with the unprecedented shadows of this unprecedented crisis. Both partners in an evolutionary love journey will be bombarded by the psychic free radicals of disbelief that the crisis could be so immense. To deny that the crisis is so immense is to threaten the whole of humanity and the planet itself. It exhibits a profound death wish not to be here, a profound hunger not to be here.

If two people take this evolutionary love adventure without knowing that their psyches are being bombarded at an unprecedented intensity by these communal shadows arising out of this devastating global dark night, they will not be able to tend each other’s being in the way that they will need to tend it.

We must all become aware of the shadows that we ourselves have that cause us to collude with these global shadows and keep them alive. We must all become aware of the ways in which we have been trained as narcissists in this culture, a culture that adores and rewards narcissism on every level. We must become aware of how dangerous this lethal self-love is. We must become aware that we’ve been taught to be slaves of comfort and to be afraid of losing comfort. We must become aware that we have been trained to be terrified of being our true selves because everybody knows that being your true self can provoke tremendous distress and rage and antagonism. If we are not aware we’re terrified of standing up and standing out, we will never be able to inspire ourselves to grow more courageous.

Chris Saade: Being aware! Being mindful of our true and unique individual authenticity! The great gift of feminist psychology and feminist theology is that it has shown us how oppression turns us against our body, our psyche, our authenticity, our emotions, and our heart. This is the real oppression. We see this in abusive families when abused individuals most often hate the reality of their body, and hate the reality of their humanity because their body and/or their humanity was rejected and shamed.

When we come to accept the truth that we are heroic beings with wounds, that we walk the heroic journey of the heart with our lacks and with our vulnerabilities, then we are able to love the real. We are able to see the magnificence of the person that walks beside us. He or she is trying within their means to bring that New Jerusalem on Earth, the day when the lamb and the lion will sit together in peace. We come to greatly respect our partner who is, though imperfectly, attempting to affirm greater freedom, peace, and justice in the world. That perception of the other as an activist of love will allow our loving respect to become the foreground of our relationship. This will allow us to love our partner in their authentic and so beautifully human reality.

Andrew Harvey: Right. And real compassion can be born.

Chris Saade: Great compassion! Then we come to our partner who is also lame and flawed, like ourselves, and we see the magnificence in the lame and the flawed, and then fall in love with their humanity again and again. Unless we do this with the understanding that the greatest light comes out of the greatest dark, we cannot love life in the world, in the planet, and in ourselves.

Andrew Harvey: How can we possibly take an evolutionary adventure into divine love without realizing that we’re doing it in a world exploding with potential destruction and all kinds of unprecedented problems and shadows? It would be like walking into a forest fire dressed in a paper tutu. It can’t be done.

Chris Saade: And the effect of these problems is also constantly exploding in our own psyche.

Andrew Harvey: Yes, exploding in us at all moments whether we realize it or not. There is no way out of this awareness. And thank God! This awareness gives us a much deeper level of compassion for ourself and our partner. Instead of using our partner as a narcissistic love object to project back to us some perfect version of ourself, we expose ourself in both our glory and our dereliction.

Chris Saade: That is the real hero.

Andrew Harvey: Right!

Chris Saade: If you look at the ancient Phoenician and Greek heroes, they were never perfect heroes. They were heroes with weaknesses, with vulnerabilities.

Andrew Harvey: Right, but they aren’t the kind of heroes that we celebrate in our power crazy culture. As the evolutionary adventure of love progresses, we will need great sober prudence, tremendous sober awareness. That can only be born out of our knowledge of our own shadow and the shadow of the partner, and the shadow of the world.

Chris Saade: That’s the wisdom of the paradox. There’s another paradox we haven’t talked about yet, the paradox of anger and peace. Anger and peace are not opposite to each other as pop spirituality teaches. Anger is such a reviled emotion. But it’s actually a sacred and necessary emotion. If we take the energy of anger and, instead of destroying and reviling others, we channel it to bless, to love, and to create justice, it’s an energy that then becomes a harbinger of peace—but to do so we have to feel and know our anger. As we go into the journey of love, there will be moments where we will experience anger at what is deeply hurting us. Listening to the signals and wisdom offered by one’s anger does not negate inner peace. Anger that is repressed will eventually shatter peace. Anger that is not intentionally and creatively channeled will be destructive. However, anger that is not dumped on the other, rather listened to inwardly, can become a source of deep knowing, a guide toward deeper levels of our own authenticity, and a blessing to self and partner. We need to learn to master the energy of anger, as an expert horse rider masters her skills in guiding powerful horses. To do so we have to first honor our feelings of anger, like a seasoned rider honors his horse- to welcome intentional anger (not abuse of course) as part of the healthy life paradox of peace and anger.

Andrew Harvey: We also experience anger at our partner for not being with us or not knowing what we’re feeling.

Chris Saade: Exactly. The relationship that is evolutionary and willing to be passionate creates the space for intentional anger. It does not accept a destructive expression of anger, but it accepts that the anger is there. An evolutionary relationship is committed to and engaged in bringing love, justice, and transformation to the world. Therefore, these emotions of sadness, anger, and anguish must become dedicated to serve life and love rather than be used in a privatized and destructive way. All authentic feelings are important—a window into the truth of life. However, we need to learn to express them with love and through love.

Andrew Harvey: If we aren’t aware of these communal challenges, at the deepest and fundamental level, we will never evolve the skillful means that enable us to work with our grief, our pain, and our outrage and transmute them into the fierce compassion energy that can fuel our service.

Chris Saade: When those emotions arrive in me, great grief, vulnerability, anger, or anxiety—let me transmute these (not block or denigrate) into a loving expression, into loving social action, into a longing for justice. But there is also another voice, one that is introjected in me, a remnant of oppressive ideation, that says, “Let me take your anger and your anxiety and make out of it a moment of victimization and aggression.” That is a slippery path that could easily lead into control or abuse.

I have to be aware of these two voices in myself, totally aware. Otherwise, I’ll be abducted again and again.

Andrew Harvey: Otherwise we don’t know the difference between our divine anger and our neurotic traumatized anger.

Chris Saade: All grief emerges as an authentic expression of life, and an intelligent response to events, but its expression can becomes abducted into self-victimization or into abuse of others.

Andrew Harvey: This is why the skillful means acquired from this radical shadow work is essential. Without these spiritual skillful means, the expression of what could potentially be divine becomes privatized, neurotic, and the source of abuse as well as a subtle, deadly self destruction.