Co-Creation in Partnership with the Divine

—Andrew Harvey

A co-creative couple commits to being unified with the soul of the world and its epic evolutionary struggle to be embodied and realized in every institution, in every dimension, in every way of being and doing, all over the world. This dream is enshrined in all of the great visions of evolution of all of the great mystical traditions: in Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom, in the Kabbalistic vision of the Messiah, in the Tibetan Buddhist vision of Shambhala. At the core of our evolutionary journey is this desire of God to create with us and through us the Kingdom/Queendom on Earth, a totally integrated vision of compassion and justice in action, that springs from loving, committed, human beings coming together in love, to do the real sacred work of establishing the divine laws of justice and compassion in every realm of Earth life.

So what does it mean to ground the relationship in the Divine? You can only have a co-creative relationship with another human being at the level that we’re talking about and praying for, if the Divine is made a conscious partner in that relationship by both people. And the way I envisage it is as a pyramid. The two people are the base of the pyramid and the Divine at the top of the pyramid is the constant reference of both people, individually and together. Without that constant, subtle invocation of the Divine to penetrate and suffuse and inspire every single aspect of the relationship, an evolutionary relationship is not possible. You will not be able to sustain the rigors, stresses, ecstasies, revelations, passions, transformations, of a real evolutionary love unless both people have a material spiritual practice, separately and together, and unless both people have, in the deepest part of themselves, dedicated their love for the other to the realization of the Divine in themselves, in the other, and in the world.

One of the great blocks to an authentic co-creative attitude is the rampant narcissism of what is called the inner child relationship with God. Fundamentally, the narcissism of the self-proclaimed divine child works itself out in the following way: We are of the Divine. God will look after us. It’s all in divine order. We don’t have to transform ourselves. We don’t have to change. We don’t have to go through the death/rebirth crucifixion/ resurrection process of the mystical path. All we have to do is to basically turn up as relatively decent people with a few mantras and God will do the rest because God’s job is to be a perfectly indulgent, benign, infinite, benevolent, father/mother. And our job is just to sit there and receive these astounding gifts.

This is tragic and absurd because it is passive and un-transforming, an abomination which portrays God as a kind of sanctified servant, ready to do whatever you want, and manifest whatever you desire. This is a blasphemy against the Divine/human relationship. It’s a total misrepresentation of the authentic co-creative attitude, which depends upon our whole being’s embrace of the freedom that the Divine has given us and the ongoing responsibility to use that freedom justly.

This freedom has two potential forks in the road. One leads to dark freedom that creates out of the un-examined drive to power of the unhealed ego. It’s quite clear what that freedom has led to—a suicidal, matricidal situation, in which we are killing ourselves and killing the environment. This is the disaster of our evolutionary refusal to take responsibility for this freedom.

The other path leads to a sometimes frightening and adult acceptance of divine freedom as the supreme grace. What it allows us to do, if we really do the work of aligning with the Heart of hearts and with the soul of the world, is to become conscious, dazzled, divine children, in the highest sense, playing in the fields of life with divine inspiration, with divine love, with divine energy, with divine peace.

But the problem with this freedom, and the problem that has preoccupied people about this freedom, is that it requires profound responsibility. Once you have glimpsed the fact that God has given you the potential to be, as the Sufis say, the vice-regent of the world, the guardian of the world, you have to step up. You have to take on the burden and the pain and the difficulty, as well as the rapture, of that responsibility. You have to realize that every thought you think, every action you do, every time you let your shadow dominate without being scrupulous about it, you are creating karmic consequences. To be a co-creator without incurring devastating karmic consequences to yourself, both individually and as a couple, you must constantly work on claiming your authentic responsibility to the world and really doing your inner work to make sure your will, both individually and as a couple, is as clearly focused on the Divine will as possible.

There is no co-creation without total surrender to the Divine. This is one of the great paradoxes the New Age has been totally inept at uncovering. Those who are co-creators with the Divine of a new reality, are not working from their egos. They have surrendered to the Beloved. They have gone through the burning process of the authentic mystical path. Their full selves have been dissolved, so that who they truly are takes over. Only at this high stage is co-creation possible, because at that stage what is being co-created with God is God’s own will for your life, for your destiny, for your mutually shared path.

The New Age has told people, “Oh, we’re co-creators right now just as we are.” But we only become authentically co-creative when we have truly surrendered our ego to the self, our ego to the soul. Everything done before that stage has inevitable darkness and shadows. We cannot co-create with the Divine unless we co-create with the complete Divine. If we only co-create with what we imagine to be the light, the love, the spaciousness, the peace, the rapture of the Divine, it can take us quite far. But if we want to co-create with God a new world, both individually and as a couple, we have to find the strength to open to the heartbreak of God—heartbreak at injustice, at cruelty, at the madness of this fundamentalism of the bottom line that dominates our commercial culture. It’s this heartbreak that will drive us to give more and more, separately and together, to the world. This heartbreak is not something to be afraid of, it’s not something to deny; it is, as all of the greatest mystics of love have told us, something we can learn to bless and embrace as the source of our most potent creativity in the world.

If we’re not heartbroken at the state of the poor, we’ll never galvanize our energies to do anything about it. If we’re not heartbroken at what’s happening to the animals, we’ll never find the courage to stand up and witness the truth of the holiness of animals and call for a revolution in our relationship with them. If we’re not heartbroken at the way in which women have been raped, degraded, and humiliated, we will never find it in ourselves, either as a woman or as a man, to really integrate the sacred truths of the Divine Feminine and stand up for the social and political changes that are essential to honor them. If we’re not heartbroken at the way in which gay people have been degraded and downtrodden, we will never be able to really stand in solidarity with our gay brothers and sisters and celebrate their brave creativity. The New Age refusal to look at so-called negative emotions or the darkness in reality in the name of an adoration of the light side of God, is actually an insurance that the true birth will not take place. Without the passion energy that comes from heartbreak, the energy that streams from the light cannot co-create a new world.