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There are two questions that you must answer to make your life a triumph. The first is, Who Are You? The second is, are you willing to play a larger game?

We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. We live in a world of outrageous beauty. The only response to outrageous beauty is outrageous love.

What is the path of outrageous love?

It is to live as an outrageous lover. What does an outrageous lover do? She keeps every boundary that should be kept and breaks every boundary that should be broken.

But what does an outrageous lover actually do?

The outrageous lover commits outrageous acts of love.

But which outrageous acts of love should you commit?

There is so much that you might do, and so much that needs to be done. The answer is simple.

You commit the outrageous acts of love that are yours, and yours alone, to commit. You commit the outrageous acts of love that are an expression of Your Unique Self.

Who are you? You are a Unique Self. What does it mean to be a Unique Self? It is not merely the typology of your ego’s structure. To realize your Unique Self is to realize your essence. Your Unique Self is the answer to your most essential question, Who Are You?

Your Unique Self is the healing for your worst nightmare. Your worst nightmare is that you do not matter, that you are an extra on the set. Your Unique Self tells you, that You Matter.

Who are you?

You are an irreducibly unique expression of the love-intelligence and love-beauty that is the initiating and animating Eros of all-that-is. This irreducibly unique expression of the love-intelligence of all-that-is lives in you, as you and through you. The irreducibly unique love-intelligence lives in you and as you in a way that it never has, does or will ever again, other than through you.

You occupy a unique place in the space-time continuum. You have a unique perspective. Your unique perspective creates unique insight. Your unique insight expresses itself as unique gifts. Your unique gifts address a unique need in the cosmos that can only be addressed by you. To be awake, aware, and aflame in love is to live your deepest purpose, which is to live your Unique Self.

But your Unique Self is even more than that. It is the quality of intimacy that lives in you, as you and through you. It is the personal face of essence awake as you. It is god awake in you. And remember, the God you do not believe in does not exist. Who is God? The great traditions experience God as infinity. They emphasize particularly, the infinities of power and knowledge. Omnipotence and Omniscience. But the outrageous love mystic senses a different infinity in the divine. The infinity of intimacy. And that infinity lives unique in you. You incarnate a unique quality of that infinite intimacy that lives nowhere else but in you. Who are you? You are God’s Unique Intimacy.

Your Unique Self has two faces. Two tastes. Your Unique Self is the irreducibly unique perspective that lives in you, as you and through you. At the very same time, Your Unique Self is God’s Unique Intimacy that lives in you, as you and through you. Two faces of the one. In that unique insight and intimacy is your being and becoming, your spacious silence and ecstatic urgency, the two tastes of your love. Divine intimacy loves the world open uniquely, in you, as you, and through you. Divine insight and creativity evolve the world uniquely, in you, as you, and through you.

Now we can answer the question we posed above more deeply. What does an outrageous lover do? An outrageous lover commits outrageous acts of love. But which ones you asked?

You have outrageous acts of love to commit that can be committed by no one else other than you, that ever was is or will be. Your Unique Self has outrageous acts of love to commit that heal a corner of the world that is Un-Love, which can only be engaged and healed by you. You are God’s irreducibly Unique Perspective. You are God’s irreducibly Unique Intimacy.

But in our generations we have killed all the gods except for Aphrodite. All our sacred creeds are long forgotten, except one. I love you. These are our holy words. As the world trade centers flamed in lower Manhattan in the late twentieth century scores of people had time for only one phone call. They virtually all uttered the same sacred credo. I love you. Aphrodite is the goddess of love. Love is the answer. We cry out I love you in the face of death because love is stronger than death. Outrageous love is the opposite of dissolution and deconstruction and destruction. Outrageous love is the only force that is more powerful than entropy. Outrageous love is the eros of life itself.

The common use of the word love has grown stale. Even the credo ‘I love you” has begun to go the way of all credos, losing so much meaning for so many. The words have become tepid and worn. Their thrusting power made flaccid by tedium and their nurturing power dried by insecurity and fear. When words lose their power, culture collapses. The center does not hold.

Love has contracted and shriveled because love has been exiled. Love has been made small. It is why we always tell our students and friends, “never marry for love”. Or, “our love lists are too short”. They are shocked. And we continue and say, “If you look to marriage as the sole place to find love then your marriage will collapse.” We have exiled love to the merely human, and to very limited forms of human interaction. Love however is much bigger.

Outrageous Love is both the currency of connection between human beings and the essential eros that drives the evolutionary process as a whole. Outrageous Love is the eros of all relationship even as it is the very eros of evolution itself. Personal and impersonal love are one. One love. Evolutionary love. Outrageous love.