406—Sally Kempton Memorial: The Only Sanity Is to Love Insanely

The path of Krishna and Radha is the path of Outrageous Love, and it is the ultimate path of self-realization.

Summary: In memory of Sally Kempton, this episode looks deeply into one dimension of her teachings, the teaching on Krishna and Radha. We explore the story of Krishna and Radha in Sally’s own words, to discover the bliss of the pain of separation. The path of Krishna and Radha is the path of Outrageous Love, and it is the ultimate path of self-realization. The postscript to the memorial goes deeper into the idea of seduction and its movement from the pre-tragic form to the tragic and, ultimately, the post-tragic, when we discover that all of Reality is seduction — arousal from above.  

Eulogy Is Liberation from Loneliness

Can you believe, my friends, that it’s been a year since Sally Kempton died? 

We are here to have a memorial service for Sally. (The words Sally and memorial service don’t go together well. Sally is alive.)

What is the nature of a memorial service? It’s to recover memory. We want to recover the memory of the past — not in a mechanical way, but in the sense of history — his story, her story. We want to capture something of her story. 

The job of memorial is eulogy. 

The job of the eulogist is not to whitewash, not to paint in pretty costumes, not to parade the soul of the one who has passed in politically correct forms. 

The job of the eulogist is to liberate the person who has passed, the beloved, from loneliness. 

The job of the eulogist is to ask forgiveness. We ask forgiveness for not having recognized you when you were here.

There is a beautiful text in Jeremiah, which points to this truth: me'raḥoq Adonai nir'ah li  ‘God has appeared to me from afar’, from a distance. That is to say, when She is right in front of me, I can’t see Her. It’s only when She is far away that we begin to see Her. When She is right in front of me, then we exchange words, and it’s sweet ,and it’s good, but we don’t quite see Her. And now, we would give everything to be able to exchange words one more time, to speak together one more time, to feel our Sally one more time. 

We just had the board conclave. Sally participated in every single board conclave we did since 2009. She was one of the cofounders of the Center in its originating vision as the Center for World Spirituality, and she was with us as we became a Center for Integral Wisdom (because we wanted to incorporate wisdom in the title); then, gradually, we evolved into the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. But it’s the same vision — the vision of articulating a world religion as a context for our diversity. 

Sally was profoundly religious. She was a profoundly religious person even as she was of this world entirely, and even as she wanted desperately to transcend the world and to merge ecstatically into the utter delight and erotic truth of Reality. Sally’s password was, blissfreak. That was her password to that which was most important, whether it was the internet at her house, or her computer. Sally was interested in bliss.

We want to recover our memory of Sally. Sally, we want to turn to you today. Not as your students, because our relationship — yours and mine — was of the most beloved and dear friends, a brother and sister in the Dharma, beloved whole mates in the Dharma, if you will, (although that wasn’t a term we used) — deep, profound, on the Inside of the Inside, hadi ona ha-pnimi she-b'fnim, peti, my beloved sister. 

I turn to you, Sally, as beloved — beloved brother, beloved visioning partner, beloved study partner — the many and beautiful meanings of beloved, and we should all be beloved to each other.

I turn to you as a friend, as a dear and wondrous friend. 

We turn to you here, not as your student community, but as the spiritual community of the Center — the think tank, the vision of changing the source code, One Mountain, Many Paths, the Great Library, the mystery schools, standing in this time between worlds and time between stories. 

You have a very important student community that your books, and your writings, and your meditations speak to, and I’m sure they did some form of memorial, which is beautiful. We are bowing to that world, and we are recognizing the beauty of the thousands and tens of thousands of students you have around the world in your student community. 

That’s not what this conversation is about.

This is about Sally — our friend Sally, who was the very fabric of the Center. She was, in some sense, part of the space in which the Center arose. All of us know it.

Sally was our friend — and we are turning to you, Sally, to liberate you from loneliness, to recognize you, to share you. We are coming, as an eulogist, to liberate something of your essence from loneliness, and to liberate something of your teaching from loneliness, to share some dimension of you that is radical, and potent, and needed, and gorgeous. This is so wildly important, because Sally was the ground of so much that was revealed and disclosed, and so much that was in the holy, esoteric places that were the very weave of the core fabric, the air, the oxygen, the breath that we all breathed together in this mystical society, in this revolution, in this think tank, in this band of Outrageous Lovers.

I would like to do this in two stages. 

First, I want to share with everyone a video that Chahatie made about Sally, which we played last year at the memorial. And then I want to do a short eulogy, but in the eulogy, I am not going to use my words. I am going to use Sally’s words. 

I am going to pick one dimension of Sally’s teaching, the teaching of Krishna and Radha. The great Krishna and Radha teaching first takes root in the early Vedas of Hinduism, and then around the 1300s becomes far more prominent, at the exact same time that The Zohar emerges in Hebrew wisdom. The teaching flowers for over 300 years, and then really explodes in the 16^th  century, much like The Zohar in the Hebrew wisdom side of things explodes in the 16^th century in the teachings of Luria.

It’s a teaching about Eros. It’s a teaching about what it means to be a lover — not in the narrow sense, but in what I would call the Outrageous Love sense. I was often at Sally’s house when these chapters were written, in a series of essays called Awakening Shakti, and we went back and forth on these essays. Many of our conversations will be clear in the writing. I would like to liberate from loneliness a dimension of her teaching that’s not quite fully grasped or understood; a teaching that lived in the space between us, but moves through Sally’s writing, in her own very unique structures. Sally and I engaged this teaching for five years at Esalen, where we taught five years in a row. My entire eulogy today will be Sally’s words; to weave together her teaching; — to transmit it, but also to share Sally, to share this dimension, this glimpse into what moved her heart, and what was this being named Sally-ness.

Hi, Sally. I apologize if I’m not getting this exactly right. I’m doing my best, and we miss you, all of us, we miss you insanely. You were — you are — beyond precious. About two weeks ago, they sprinkled your ashes. I don’t even know what that means that you have ashes. I can see you in front of me. 

We just found a picture. It’s a beautiful picture.

That’s Sally. 

Can you feel her? 

Can you feel this just utter delight in being alive? 

That’s bliss freak. 

There she is. It’s a picture that’s never been shown in public, that just appeared the other day. I don’t even know where it appeared from. That’s a direct transmission of Sally. It’s different from the pictures of her in The New York Times. Just feel the joy — the utter joy, the moment of bliss. 

We are going to feel something of Sally’s life, and then we’re going to go into Sally’s words, herself. The fabric of the feminine teacher, of a feminine power. The feminine quality of Shakti — of Radical Aliveness — is in Kashmir Shaivism, Sally’s root tradition, a quality of power. 

• Shiva is pure consciousness; the masculine, or the line quality, is pure consciousness. 

• Shakti is energy, but it’s also power. 

Pure consciousness and power — Shiva and Shakti, the line and the circle — meet, and then they become something new. The line and the circle become the spiral. Something new emerges. There is a hieros gamos, there is a new emergent.

Sally was very much the power of bliss merged with a deep profound consciousness. Sally meditated generally several hours a day, deep on the Inside of the Inside, for 40 years. 

V’eynaynu et merachoq ‘let our eyes see our beloveds.’ Just take a look at Sally, just see the bliss there. It’s the bliss of years of practice. We are here in this brother-sister place just filled with that joy. 

We can be Outrageous Lovers — we can love each other outrageously — beyond the classical structures. We get to love each other madly. Our love lists are too short. 

Let’s love each other madly. 

Let’s love each other outrageously. 

Let’s love each other in this holiest way.

It’s all rooted, it’s all held by the love of Krishna and Radha.

Let’s take a look at this clip, this beautiful clip that Chahatie prepared about Sally. 

All of Reality Is Great Seduction

I introduced Sally to one of my dearest friends, Fred Jealous, and they had wonderful, nuanced conversations about politics, and subtlety, and art, and human nature, and psychology. Sally knew all the kings and queens of England, and all of the subtle political plays. Fred knew Sally’s nuance, her depth, and many people did. She was unimaginably wide, she could talk to you about the currency fluctuations in China, and how they would affect American politics, et cetera, et cetera.

But at her core, at her very core, Sally was what I would call an erotic mystic. She was a mad lover of Reality. It was hard-won, it wasn’t cheap grace. It wasn’t, as she said in the story, in the film, ‘oh, haven’t you ever taken acid before?’ And Sally said, ‘No, no, but it wasn’t acid, I actually realized that love (or what we would call Eros) was the true nature of Reality.’ She says, I was to be a novelist of pain, but how can I be a novelist of pain when I realized the truth is ecstasy? And it was a long, hard-won path.

In the Dick Cavett clip where Sally and Susan Brownmiller are debating Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy on The Dick Cavett Show — one of the epic moments of second wave feminism in 1972 — Sally says we shouldn’t have seduction in the world. There should be no necessity for seduction in the world. She says, the good thing we can say about Helen Gurley Brown is that she legitimized women not getting married into their 40s, into their 50s. And, of course, Sally lived most of her life, other than a short marriage, alone.

Sally chose that path, but it wasn’t a loveless path. It was a path in which the love of any one single person, as beautiful as that was and needed to be, wasn’t enough. Sally shifted to a place in which she realized that the problem with the seducing in the world was not that there should be a world without seduction, but that seduction had become too limited. It had lost its radiance, it had lost its beauty. Seduction became unholy seduction, meaning: the world is really materialist, and seduction is basically a form of manipulation, where I get someone to break their appropriate boundary for the sake of my greed. 

That’s the exile of seduction.

But what Sally was going to come to realize — that’s her very core, and at the very heart of her teaching — is that all of Reality is a great seduction. All of Reality is a great seduction, but it’s a holy seduction, where people are invited — where She invites us — to break the boundary of our contraction for the sake of our own deepest need. 

Our own deepest need is the experience of radical aliveness, the experience of radical loving. Not just self-love, although self-love is critical. But self-love exists in this larger matrix of a world whose insides are lined with love in the language of Solomon, and it’s all about seduction. We are always seducing each other, we are always falling in love with each other.

There is a chapter about it in one of her books, but it was the essence of her teaching that she almost never talked about. She usually talked about the divine Mother. But there was another teaching, and it’s that teaching that I want to share with you, and I want to share it in Sally’s words. It is the teaching of holy seduction, the teaching of becoming insane with love. The teaching of love that’s not held by the conventional categories of loving, but actually points to a deeper truth and a deeper Reality. 

I want to just introduce one principle of tantra, and then I want to look at Sally’s texts.

The principle of tantra is the principle of non-rejection. 

Tantra is non-rejection. Tantra is a particular path. It’s a path that exists as deep in Hinduism, but there is also a Kabbalistic Tantra, there is also a kind of Christian Tantra, there is a Buddhist Tantra. What all of the tantric traditions share in common is: tantra means to expand, tantra means to liberate. The word tan means to expand, tra means to liberate. Tantra also means to weave. I am expanding, I am taking God out of the temple, out of the conventional. I am taking God and Goddess out of the conventional — out of the temple, out of the appropriate, out of the politically correct, so that I can actually experience liberation.

Liberation is when I can actually trust myself, I can trust my body, I can trust my desire, I can trust my passion. I know that this desire is expressing — when I clarify it — the deepest truth that emerges. I clarify my desire, I clarify my passion — not my politically correct desire and passion, but my lovesickness. I am sick with love. The great Vidagdhamadhava says, 

‘Who could cease to tell of that quintessence of erotic mood

Save one speechless utterly with ecstasy.’

 That’s the verse that Sally decided to translate, and it’s about Radha.

Radha’s Energy

So, from now on, it’s going to be Sally talking (she published this in 2013). 

Have you ever been so wildly in love that you could think of nothing but your lover? Has your heart ever ached with longing for another person, or even for an unknown beloved? Has separation from your lover felt like being torn apart from your own soul? Have you felt ecstatic with your lover’s arms around you, in despair when she doesn’t call for a day? Has your lover sometimes appeared so numinously beautiful—even when he leaves his towel on the bathroom floor—that you felt an almost worshipful adoration for him? Have you ever had passionate feelings for the divine or for the unknown beloved who can, perhaps, only meet you in your soul? 

Then you know what it is to love like Radha.

Radha is the goddess of lovers and desperate romantics. The beloved mistress of the youthful god Krishna, Radha’s passionate, erotic drama is one of the world’s great myths of love and separation.

Radha is the beloved mistress of the youthful God, Krishna. Radha’s passionate erotic drama is at the core of divine worship. The Radha energy is present whenever there is a passionate love and the wish to become one with the beloved. Sometimes she manifests — you get glimmerings of Radha — (and again, this is all Sally talking) in a teenager’s romantic fantasies, or in the delicious experience of erotic truth and delight (which we’re told by psychologists should be pathologized), when you actually want to be just simply immersed in a beloved other. And she might show up as a reckless compulsion, which sometimes you should follow and sometimes you shouldn’t, to follow your erotic impulse in its clarified truth.

I’m not talking about being irresponsible in the superficial sense. The word that I added here is clarified — when you clarify and you identify your erotic impulse and you follow it, despite, as Sally says, ‘all reason and practicality.’

Radha is a divine force. She’s deeper than any of these human stirrings, but these human strings point to this divine force. 

As a divine archetype, however, Radha’s Shakti goes far deeper than the human impulse toward romantic passion. Tuning into the Radha Shakti can uncover the burning heart of universal Eros—the radically impersonal life-force energy that creates life’s sweetness—within your desire for a human lover.

Radha uncovers the burning heart of universal Eros, the radical life-force energy that creates life’s sweetness that lives as the inside of your desire for a human lover. The desire for a human lover is an incarnation of this deeper erotic yearning.

When Radha’s energy awakens within you, she can transform a mild interest in inner practice into a wildly personal love affair with the inner beloved. She is one of the secret Shaktis who transmutes ordinary desire into longing and passion into fuel for the spiritual journey.

This is the Radha energy. Teresa of Ávila held it, and John of the Cross, and Therese of Lisieux, and Mirabai, and Sufi mystics and Shimon bar Yochai. 

The Radha energy is imprinted in our heart and in our soul.

The Story of Krishna and Radha

In the original stories of Krishna’s early life, Radha appears only as a nameless cowherd girl, one of the group of the young God Krishna’s teenage companions and lovers known as the gopis (the cowgirls). 

She only emerges as a full-fledged Goddess in the 13th century.

Let’s talk a little bit about the story of Radha, who is in love with Krishna. The key insight is that any human emotion, if you follow it to its root, is turned in an expression of the mad love for the Divine. The way I would say it would be something like: whenever you are on your knees in mad love, you are always on your knees before She. This is one of Sally’s favorite ways of expressing this.

Radha and Krishna’s lives imply a radical possibility that any human being can be approached as a form of the Divine and can be loved with mad devotion. We bring it into our relationship. I can have a Krishna-Radha relationship with a teacher. I can have a Krishna-Radha relationship with myself. I can have a Krishna-Radha relationship with a very close friend in which there is nothing that can’t be spoken. It’s not like: Oh, this is appropriate to speak, this is not — no, we speak everything. We whisper sweet nothings into each other’s ears. We are passionately in love, and we are madly in love. 

Love mad!

Anyone who’s been drawn to this circle of Outrageous Lovers, this think tank that we are, knows what we mean when we say, let’s love madly. KK and I started using the word, love mad, when we wrote Outrageous Love Letters, and Sally was ecstatic, because, she said, Outrageous Love Letters, that’s the energy of Radha.

If you don't love madly someone other than yourself, you're not a mad lover. You'll be lost and wallowing in your own experience, and how you were hurt, and how you were offended, and how you are feeling. All you can think about is how you feel, because you've got no place to put it.

This is a very subtle moment. I can't even put words to it. It's deep. This is who we are. Let's love madly, unreasonably. Give to each other madly, unreasonably. Stand for each other madly, unreasonably. 

Truth is, it's the only way to be at home in the universe. If we don't love in that way, we are not at home. Everything else is boring and uninteresting, because God loves madly. That's the point. God wouldn't manifest reality without mad love. God loves insanely, madly. God is madly loving, desiring to be in us. That's the nature of reality. 

Chandidas, a poet who practiced the most radical form of bhakti, wrote exquisite devotional verses to a teenage prostitute whom he worshiped as the Goddess. He described his Tantric approach to communing with the divine through human love as “the natural (sahaja) path.” Ramakrishna taught a more conventional version of this principle of natural devotion. He once asked a woman devotee who complained that she couldn’t feel love for God, “Who do you love?” When she told him that she adored her baby nephew, Ramakrishna said, “Love him as Krishna.”

In other words, love Krishna in whatever way comes naturally — as a child, a youth, a friend, or a teacher. Any form of radical love of this devotional, wild, ecstatic, erotic nature, can trigger the flow of bliss, which, if you cultivate the flow, will melt you into the highest form of realization, of bliss fuck realization. It’s the realization of the bliss fuck of Reality, the bliss Eros of Reality.

It’s what Meister Eckhart means when he says, Reality is kissing in every moment. It’s the Eros that animates everything, all the way up and all the way down. I am mixing my words with Sally. This was the path. This is Sally speaking of the erotic romantic lover, the path that’s called, parakriya bhakti. 

Like the troubadours of medieval Europe, the bhakti writers believed that the obsession a woman feels for her paramour can transform the heart in a way that no ordinary, respectable love can ever do. It’s the greatest form of love, they argued, both because it’s dangerous and because it can never be taken for granted. Love outside of marriage, especially in those premodern days, could ruin your life. Your love could be discovered and you could be ostracized for it—or, in a traditional society, killed. At the very least, you risked heartbreak at the hands of a lover who had no legal obligation to go on loving you. To direct such love toward the divine was to court ego dissolution and risk your life (as happened to the poet-queen Mirabai). It also opened you to the highest form of sweetness. Real love risks everything.

Sally’s voice continues:

Radha is a young woman, growing up in the cowherd village of Vraja. Her lover, Krishna, had been sent there as a baby to escape death at the hands of his uncle, who had sworn to kill him. So Krishna was raised among the village children. He and Radha are childhood playmates, but as they grow, Radha falls helplessly in love with Krishna.

According to Indian myth, Krishna is the masculine incarnation of the Divine’s irresistible beauty, allure, and love. Krishna embodies the power of Divine Allurement, the radical bliss that turns a lover’s heart towards mystical union.

Krishna is distracting to the point of addiction. The Krishna energy is a cosmic intoxicant, which draws your attention away from your work, your duties, your very survival. This is the energy of Krishna.

In later life, Krishna would become a king, a statesman, and a world teacher. But at this stage, when he is just past childhood, he is simply, cosmically adorable.

He’s pure divine allure. Everyone in the town of Vraja adores Krishna. Everyone has a unique relationship with Krishna. Krishna is this energy of allurement, and everyone loves Krishna. Everyone loves Krishna, his mother, and the older woman of the village, they love him as a son, and they dote on his baby mischief. 

The cowherd boys love him as a friend and as a ringleader. Their sisters, the cowherd girls, the gopis are erotically and intensely in love with him.

In another situation, this would be scandalous. But because everyone in the village of Vraja is part of a mythic conspiracy to adore this incarnate deity, the conventional rules don’t apply. One of Krishna’s incarnational tasks, in fact, is to exemplify the secret truth that true devotion to God allows you to bypass normal social and religious boundaries.

The town of Vraja is a band of Outrageous Lovers. The conventional rules don’t apply. 

I just want to be clear, the energy of Krishna can live in both man and woman. Krishna and Radha live in each of us. Krishna and Radha, the line and circle that are the hieros gamos that create the spiral that spirals all galaxies, the love that moves the Sun and other stars, lives in each of us. We each of us have the capacity to be Krishna and to be Radha. But Krishna represents the mad distraction of insane love that fills me, and at the root of that insanity, writes Sally, is the ultimate sanity, the ultimate realization, the ultimate knowing.

So, in the magical world of Vraja, Krishna’s lovers spend their days in ecstasy. Their god is no invisible figure to be reached in prayer, but a living, breathing person. He is audacious, sweet, mischievous—and he also happens to be invincible. (All through his childhood, Krishna keeps casually disposing of the demons sent by his wicked uncle to assassinate him.) In paintings of Krishna, you see him playing his flute for the long-horned cows, surrounded by boys. You see him dancing with the cowherd girls. And you see him with one particular girl, the two of them entwined, embracing, gazing into each other’s eyes. 

That is Radha. Radha stands out among this village of Krishna lovers because she is his feminine counterpart—his Shakti—and because she loves Krishna to the point of losing all self-consciousness.

See, when it comes to loving the Divine, the devotional traditions tell us that the conventional affection isn’t enough. You need a radical pathway into the deep heart of Reality, which comes only from wild erotic love, in which I become literally lovesick, so that I am healed and whole. It’s only through becoming lovesick that I become healed. 

That’s the story of Krishna and Radha.

Radha’s Wound

 Chandidas, the poet who we cited earlier, has Radha saying: 

‘And now I know 

That love adheres wholly 

To its own laws.’ 

And:

‘I took no thought for what would be said of me. 

I abandoned everything.’ 

‘He takes my clothes away,’ the Bengali poet writes. ‘I lose my body at his touch.’

Sally writes: 

But Radha’s passionate attachment to Krishna contains its own wound, which is as much a part of her love as the ecstasy. She cannot ever hold Krishna, who will never be tied down to one lover. 

Krishna will never be tied down to one lover. He loves Radha, but he loves all the cowgirls. Krishna incarnates the personal face of God, and God is polyamorous. God loves every nation and every person. That’s the Divine nature.

The Divine is connected inside and out to every heart. The Krishna being is to share love, and never to confine it just to one person. 

With Krishna, opportunities for heartbreak and jealousy are endless. When he’s with her, Radha is lost in bliss. When he’s away, she wants to throw herself in the river. Radha lives in the midst of an emotional earthquake. Her state is the very reverse of yogic equanimity, but it affects everyone who meets her with a similar ecstasy.

The most famous of the erotic Krishna stories begins when the cowherd girls beg Krishna to dance with them in the forest at night. Smiling his mischievous smile, Krishna tells them, “Yes, we’ll dance when the moon is right. But when you hear the sound of my flute, you have to drop everything and come. Whatever you’re doing—feeding your child, cooking, serving dinner to your husband—you must come!” He’s voicing the ultimate demand that the divine makes of a devotional lover. Call yourself a lover? Then prove it. Don’t make love something that you save for your leisure time. Go for it. Throw yourself away for the sake of love!

One August night, as the moon rises over the river, the gopis hear the notes of Krishna’s flute lilting through the trees around the village. True to their promise, they put down their babies. They leave their cooking untended on the fire. Half-dressed, they run to the woods where he waits in a clearing by the river.

There, they begin to dance together. The dance is known in Indian myth as the raslila, or flavorful game, the sport of delight. One of the most famous images in Indian art shows Krishna dancing in the midst of the circle of young women. He plays his flute, the women sway and bend, so lost in ecstasy that their clothes are falling off their bodies. In another image, Krishna has multiplied himself so that each of the girls has Krishna in her arms. God belongs to everyone who loves Him as long as you don’t hold back. He won’t hold back Himself. 

And yet, Krishna cannot resist Radha. At one point in the evening he disappears from the circle and when the gopis look for him, they find him embracing Radha, the two of them lying in a bed of flowers by the river. Radha’s love for Krishna kindles his love for her, and it gives her as much power over him as he has over her. And Radha knows it. Sometimes, disgusted by his infidelity, she will refuse to speak to him. Then Krishna follows her, begging her to relent and embrace him. He demands her full attention. She weeps because she can never have his. 

Can you feel that?

The Bliss of the Pain of Separation

Krishna and Radha never marry, their time together is heightened by its shortness, tumbled hair, entwined limbs, long kisses, passion, arguments, passionate reconciliation. In the end, Krishna always leaves Radha. And yet, Krishna always comes back, and he never forgets. Radha is a peasant girl married to another man. She stays behind, and yet, as the chariot carries him away, Krishna looks back longingly at Radha. 

Radha, for her part, goes mad with grief. Krishna, too, is devastated. The bhakti poets describe how — at least for a while — he sees her everywhere he goes. “How is it,” he asks, “that for me, the three worlds have become Radha?”

Radha never forgets. For the rest of her life she spends her days meditating on Krishna. But in her obsession and grief at being separated from her beloved, something amazing happens. She begins to see Krishna everywhere. 

The whole world becomes her beloved, even as she loves Krishna himself most personally. 

Every leaf in the forest, the cows, the household butter churn, everything becomes for her, the form of Krishna. In the Indian devotional tradition, her state is called “the bliss of the pain of separation” and it is considered one of the highest of all spiritual experiences. When Radha weeps for Krishna, her tears wash away all veils from the heart and everything becomes the form of her beloved.

One day, Krishna, who never stops thinking about the people who love him, calls his friend Uddhava and asks him to go to Vraja and see how everyone is doing. “Especially,” he asks Uddhava, “find out how Radha is. She above all others holds my heart.”

When Uddhava gets to the village, he is shocked to find Radha and her friends walking around like crazy women. They are beautifully adorned, it is true. They are taking care of themselves physically. But it turns out that they are doing all this because they live in a fantasy. They walk around caressing the trees, embracing the cows, saying, “Krishna! Krishna!” When they walk from house to house to sell their milk and butter, they call out “Buy Krishna! Buy Gopala!”

Uddhava is a great yogi, a master of asana and meditation. He cannot believe his eyes. “These women have gone insane,” he reasons. “I have to do something for them.”

So he calls the cowgirl maidens together and gives them a lecture on yoga. “Krishna loves you all,” he says, in the tone that reasonable people use when talking to children. “He sent me to comfort you. Now, you should take that great love you have and turn it inside. Sit for meditation. Close your eyes and imagine Krishna in the heart. Do some breath control. Try to still those wandering minds!”

And Radha and the girls look at Uddhava indulgently because they see he doesn’t understand. 

“Oh, Uddhava,” says Radha, “you just don’t get it! Why should we close our eyes when Krishna is all we see? You might have to close your eyes and meditate in order to find God in your dry heart. But we see him with our eyes wide open. Everywhere we look, we see Krishna.”

Can you feel that, my friend? It’s the path of the wound. But all wounds become the wounds of love. That’s the way I would summarize this whole teaching.

The Path of Outrageous Love

Some of you might notice that the path of the Outrageous Lover is the path of Krishna and Radha. It’s not reasonable, it’s outrageous, it’s an unreasonable path. John of the Cross felt and understood this path. He writes, 

Oh living flame of love that tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest center!

Oh, delightful wound, oh gentle hand, oh delicate touch that tastes of eternal life and pays every debt, in killing you change death to life! 

The path of Krishna and Radha.

Feel the insanity of it all. It’s what we need when we talk of mad love. There is a reason why in our community, we look at each other and we say, I love you madly. It’s Outrageous Love, because we’re talking about the path of Krishna and Radha. It’s the liberation of insanity. It’s the holy spark at the center of insanity. 

Do you think that we can address the meta-crisis from a dry desiccated sanity, which dissects the world into materialist forms of causation?

No, we can only address the meta-crisis as a waiting lover, feeling the pulsing, throb and tumescence of Reality, and feel Her own urgencies in the Fields of Value that animate Her, and find our way into the very impulse of Reality itself, identify Her plotlines, and tell Her true story, and let that New Story of Value be the strange attractor, which begins to allow us to find a way home. That’s what Ficino did in the Florentine Platonic Academy in the Renaissance, in that time between worlds and time between stories.

We can only do it as Krishna and Radha. 

We can only do it when we actually realize that we live in a CosmoErotic Universe. 

Not as a mythopoetic statement. Krishna and Radha is not mythopoetry. Krishna and Radha is the very fabric of Reality itself. It’s the heart of existence itself. 

It’s what we always mean when we say, citing the Bengali mystics of Krishna-Radha: 

Love is not mere human sentiment, Love is not merely a social construction, Love is the heart of existence itself. 

It’s radical. Radical means it goes to the root.

Of course, in the deepest place, the radical and the responsible live together, because there is nothing more responsible and more responsive to Reality. It capacitates us to respond to the deepest yearnings of our own holy self, to claim the only true sanity which lives in the depths of insane love. 

Insane love is the only true sanity.

We love each other insanely in that unique way that Krishna loves Radha, in those unique personal bonds that are intimate, and irreplaceable, and irreducible, that live only between two people. And yet, that Outrageous Love that lives between two people has to participate in the Field of Outrageous Love, and then we have to fall in love outrageously, each time in the most right way. 

Every Outrageous Love has its own parameters, its own invitation, its own plotline.

Sometimes we fall in love outrageously with animals. And sometimes we fall in love outrageously with a tree. And sometimes we fall in love outrageously with a friend, a true friend, even if we haven’t talked to them for a long time. 

We love each other outrageously. 

We break convention, but not to become pre-conventional. It’s not a surface abandonment of responsibility. It’s not an abandonment of goodness or of integrity. It’s the ultimate integrity. It’s the highest integrity. There is room for everyone in the circle of Outrageous Love.

Our love lists are too short. 

We are not going to save our world through mere analysis, although analysis is necessary. We are going to save our world by being outrageously in love with our world. 

We are going to save the environment by being outrageously in love with the rivers, with the trees, with every species. 

And ultimately, we are going to save our world by being outrageously in love with each other. We turn the entire world into the Field of Krishna and Radha.

Now, friends, does everyone understand why Sally was so much at the core and fabric of the Center, and how her own Krishna and Radha teaching was the very core of her being, was the very core of her aliveness. She was madly in love with a new outfit and with new upholstery, and madly in love with the sacred texts. Madly in love. That’s where she lived.

She went from appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, where she said there is no place for seduction in the world, to realizing that she was rejecting unholy seduction, that the only way is the way of holy seduction. 

• We seduce our split-off selves into romantic union with ourselves. 

• We seduce each other into the holy union of radical responsibility and radical bliss, where we feel each other and we live alive. 

And as we live that, we pour it back into you, Sally. We pour it back into you, and tears were streaming down my cheeks at the very end of the film about you.

Thank you. Thank you, Sally Kempton, for walking among us. 

We need your help. 
We need your bliss freak. 
We need your wisdom. 
We need your laughter. 

We need your joy, and we need your willingness to wrestle with loneliness, to wrestle with the traumas, to wrestle with the demons, because you wrestled with the demons even into the last years, especially in the last four or five years. You wrestled with the demons, and you always came out on the side of love.

Postscript: From Pre-Tragic to Post-Tragic Seduction

As the day ended yesterday, which was a very, very, very heartrending, heart opening, and beautiful day, when we did the first Sally Kempton memorial Dharma talk, Kristina and I wanted just to do something to just feel Sally and her era, her life journey, the transformations that it went through. So we decided to find a ’60s movie of that era. It was about Helen Reddy. It was a biopic from Australia, 2019, which was the Helen Reddy I Am Woman song.

By the way, I recommend the biopic just because the actress is phenomenal. And you just feel, as Helen Reddy finds that space of I Am Woman, and sings the song and brings it into culture. I just literally broke down crying — just the Goddess. I’ve always been privileged to be in devotion, in devotion to She, in devotion to the Goddess. That was Sally’s time. They were in New York at the same time. They were part of the same circle. It was part of the same unimaginable emergence of the feminine, what Luria calls Aliyat HaNukva ‘the ascent of the feminine’.

Since then, I personally have gone through many stages of thinking and holding and feeling into what that ascent means. Of course, the feminine lives in the embodied She, but it also lives in all of us. The circle quality — the feminine quality, the Shakti quality — lives in the body of a woman in a particular way, but it also lives in the body of a man. We are all line and circle, Shiva and Shakti, or Shekinah and Kudsha Berich Hu in the language of the tree of life of Kabbalah.

I was feeling into this I Am Woman song in a haze of tears, at the ways in which we’ve lost the feminine, the ways in which the feminine has been hurt, has been degraded and defaced over thousands of years, and the ways that she’s been honored and held. I was thinking particularly about Sally’s journey, so I wanted just to add a thought. 

If you notice, when Dick Cavett asks Sally, “Can I light your cigarette?” and she says no, and they have this funny exchange. And then, Sally says in a very, very serious way, 

I want to live in a world where there is no necessity for seduction. There is no need for seducing.

That was the beginning. The more subtle play between men and women, the autonomy and the allurement, the surrender and the individuation — that play hadn’t been well articulated. The funny line in that Dick Cavett interview is when Susan Brownmiller says,

 You have conversations with very, very smart and powerful women.’ 

And Cavett says, 

That’s just because I like to be dominated. 

The whole place erupts in laughter because he is pointing to this subtle play in the space between men and women that hasn’t been articulated clearly. And then we did a eulogy, in Sally’s words, on the teaching of Krishna and Radha.

We noticed yesterday that the Krishna and Radha teaching is all about seduction being a fundamental quality of cosmos, the experience of being so deeply in love that all I want is to have my beloved cross the boundary of her contraction and open to me. Of course, we distinguished between what we call unholy seduction and holy seduction. When I go to seduce the beloved to break their appropriate boundary, for the sake of my greed, that’s unholy seduction. That’s what Sally was talking about in the Dick Cavett Show. 

But then, as she went deep into the world of profound study with a profound teacher in a deep lineage of Kashmir Shaivism, she began to realize (and I’ll use my language) that we have exiled seduction to its unholy form, that we need to liberate seduction — but not seduction in its unholy form, but we always want to seduce each other to our highest: we seduce each other in mad love to break the inappropriate boundary of our contraction, the boundary of our smallness, and we call each other to our greatness.

There is that great poem by Hafiz:

You are a divine elephant with amnesia

Trying to live in an ant

Hole.

Sweetheart, O sweetheart

You are God in

Drag!

This calling from our holy amnesia, this recovering of the memory of our true nature is what seduction is: I love you so much that I call you to your gorgeousness. And then, when you step out of your narrowed boundary, and you step into your fullness, you step into your beauty, then perhaps you’ll open that beauty to me, and you’ll invite me to open that beauty to you. 

Something happens in the depth of devotion that is the very intention of Reality’s manifestation. It’s so intensely beautiful.

I was feeling this morning that if you really chart it, you actually see something very beautiful. 

In some sense, the pre-tragic, level-one seduction is exactly the kind of seduction that Sally was saying we don’t need in the world, when the woman is forced to seduce for the sake of her survival. We need to move beyond it. It’s what she was referring to. To seduce doesn’t necessarily mean sexually. To seduce means: I got to put on the right makeup, and look the right way, and play the right part in order to survive. That was an evolutionary mechanism for a very long time. I submit to my role as a woman and I have to seduce you. And that’s the expectation, in all of its distressing disguises. Sally was saying, “Enough, enough, we need to move beyond that first level, that level one of loving to level two.”

Level two is: now we are partners. We are equal partners, and we are engaged intellectually, and we are in a 50-50, appropriate exchange. We’ve removed that element of Eros and seduction in all those forms. We are meeting in this fullness of our mutuality, which is necessary and sacred and important. It’s the next stage.

We moved from the pre-tragic to this next stage, but this next stage has something tragic in it. The tragic is the loss of the living, breathing Eros of the heartbreak and heart opening, of the heart ecstasy, and the heart explosion of great love — not in its narrow form, but in its widest, most stunning form. Mad devotion, Outrageous Love, awake in a flame as the beloveds turn towards each other, is the very intention of Reality.

Then Sally moved from the tragic, the utter rejection of that flame of Eros (it doesn’t have a place because it’s been too abused and too misappropriated; there is no place for that in the world) to level three, which is the post-tragic in the frame of the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the Hasidic movement:

• The first level is hachna’ah submission. “I submit to my role. That’s what I have to do. I’m the seducer. That’s how I survive.” And then the feminine becomes furious with that role. She becomes angry. 

• And we get to the second role, and it’s balanced, and it’s appropriate, and it’s mutual, but there is a bitterness on both the male side and the female side, because we can’t live in the world when we are not madly in love. To live in a world and not be madly in love, the suffering becomes unbearable. The world is filled with outrageous pain. The world is filled with unbearable suffering, and it’s only the experience of being madly in love which clarifies my vision. It’s the tears of mad love which purify my heart and allow me to live, and to see, and to act, and to create. the Baal Shem Tov calls the second level of the tragic Havdalah, separation. We are still in the relationship, we are still in mutuality, we are still whatever the relationship is, but there is a separation: I am separated from myself, my true nature. I am separated from Reality, the inner nature of Reality. I am separated from the beloved.

• And then, we move from the tragic to the post-tragic, which is hamtakah. Hamtakah means radical sweetness. It's post-tragic, but not of the saccharine kind. It’s not a saccharine, superficial sweetness. It is the experience that, every moment, Reality is seducing me. Every moment, Reality is waiting for me to seduce Reality. In every conversation, we are seducing each other to our highest, to our most beautiful, that desire and devotion merge. 

Desire and all of its levels — desire to create, desire to give, desire to be in radical amazement, desire for precision, desire for insight, desire for gifting, desire for tenderness, desire for quivering aliveness, all of it. Desire and devotion merge. I am at this higher level, where I am committed to always seduce you, like She, the Goddess, is committed to always seduce us. 

She sends us the depth of the color blue. And we look into the blue and She is seducing us. 

We look out the window here, and I see the dance of the tree, and the blue, and the green, and the brightness and the clarity of the day. We are just dazzled by the sunlight, and She is seducing us. 

She is seducing us. 

She is seducing us in every second — every taste, water in my mouth, an orange as I peel it. The ability to feel the ripple of communion that moves between people. An idea that clarifies in our mind. She is seducing us in every second. 

That’s actually the true experience of Reality. She is reaching for us. Hakadosh Baruch Hu Mit’Aveh de-Shekhinah Mit’Aveh  La’asot Dirato, Batachtonim ‘She, the Goddess, lusts to seduce us into mad desire and devotion,’ as we emerge, explode into our irreducibly gorgeous uniqueness, and then unfold the vector of our unique seductions.

We seduce Reality to our highest. We create. We are the entrepreneurial expressions of the Universe’s seductions. We seduce Reality, each other, ourselves, to our highest. All creativity, all science, all entrepreneurship, all invention, all activism, all intellectual work, all teaching, all studying, all studenting — it’s all seduction. In its most holy and most beautiful sense, it’s alive. 

That’s the post-tragic. 

We have to allow ourselves to be heartbroken because our hearts get broken again and again. 

We have to be able to live in the unbearable suffering of Reality, but the unbearable suffering becomes, in and of itself, unbearably sweet when we step out of the narrow contraction of our self-boundary, where we wallow in sense of being perpetually hurt, and perpetually offended, and perpetually hypersensitive expressions of victimization and hyper recursive loops, reviewing the places that we’ve been injured and offended again and again, even forty years later.

That happens. 

We get lost in that way. We are not seduced beyond that. The only way to engage the outrageous pain of my life is to love madly. Ordinary love won’t do it. That’s the Krishna-Radha realization. Ordinary love doesn’t do it. It’s only Outrageous Love. It’s only this mad, wild love where I step out of myself and I love you, She, the Goddess. 

She, the color blue. 
She, the dazzling sunlight. 
She, the animal that moves across my path that looks me in the eyes. 
She, my many beloveds — from the mailman, to the clerk, to the waiter, to the waitress, all of it. 

If I am not madly in love, I am insane. I cannot bear Reality. I am out of alignment with Reality. The only sanity, which is the only alignment with the Reality, in which I feel welcome and at home in the universe, is when I love insanely. 

That’s Krishna-Radha. 

That’s a world that’s filled with seduction.

We said yesterday, “We can only step into a meta-crisis, we can only step into the outrageous pain of it, through Krishna and Radha, through Outrageous Love, through all of the heartbreak and all of the pain that opens up. My heart breaks and then my heart opens.” 

That’s the Tantra principle of non-rejection.

That experience, that feeling is not a mistake of evolutionary psychology. It’s not that evolutionary psychology developed this human notion of love. Evolutionary psychology says that love is this unique human invention that is a social construction of a materialist universe. 

No, no. Outrageous Love is the very nature of Reality itself. It’s those lines from Yeats that Sally loved so much: 

‘When such as I cast out remorse, 

So great a sweetness fills my breast. 

We can dance and we can sing. 

We are blessed by everything.’ 

That’s level three. 

That’s the post-tragic. 

That’s the non-dual incarnation, my unique life of wild, Krishna-Radha ecstatic, Outrageous Love. And then we respond to the meta-crisis. 

That was just some thoughts as KK and I were watching Helen Reddy, I Am Woman — 

I am strong, 
I am broken, 
I am shattered, 
I am heartbroken, 
and I am invincible. 

It’s that energy of revolution. 
It’s that energy of possibility. 
It’s that energy of radical activism — evolution as love in action. That is the sense that we wanted to convey for Sally at her memorial.

Hope at the Edge of the Tragic: Post-Tragic Krishna-and-Radha

Here’s a little postscript on the postscript. 

It’s beautiful to clarify love. To clarify love is to participate in the evolution of love. 

In some sense, what we are understanding is that: 

• there’s a pre-tragic Krishna and Radha, 

• a tragic Krishna and Radha, 

• and a post-tragic Krishna-Radha. 

The pre-tragic Krishna and Radha is when we turn to love in all of its impossibilities, and we try and love anyways. We somehow think that it’s going to work out in a particular way, and it’s going to feel a particular way, and it’s going to look a particular way. We reach for impossibilities, and we break all the rules, thinking that somehow it’s going to come together, and be that white picket fence that we thought it would be.

We are in the pre-tragic, reaching where we think that, within this lifetime, that picture perfect dream that we had as the fulfillment of our fantasy of loving will inevitably be fulfilled. That’s this pre-tragic moment. It’s rooted in the field of what we would call ordinary love, the ordinary love that lives between human beings, which of course is not ordinary at all. It’s unique, and spectacular, and beautiful — but it’s ordinary in the sense that, as in the classical forms of evolutionary psychology, it’s a particular emergent, or a social construction, of the human world. It’s filled with pathos and beauty, and it’s essentially a pre-tragic form.

But of course, Krishna and Radha very rapidly becomes tragic. We dream of a possibility that can’t be fulfilled. Our hearts are shattered. We open our hearts so wide in expectation of a particular result, and when that result doesn’t happen, then our hearts hurt so achingly. We are so devastated by the tragic that our hearts close, and, very often, a person’s heart never opens again. 

We opened their hearts so wide, it’s so insanely painful that we have to contract, we have to close. 

We have met the tragic. 

Krishna and Radha hasn’t fulfilled itself. 

The white picket fence didn’t reveal itself, and we are dashed against the embankments — the sharp, angular, painful embankments — of the tragic. We feel shattered, and we somehow, with bubblegum, try to piece our lives and our hearts back together. But we never quite succeed, and our hearts close, and we never experience that sense of aliveness, that sense of yearning, that sense of sweetness, that sense of possibility, that sense of unimaginable, unutterable, unbearable joy. 

That’s the tragic. 

That’s where most people live. 

That’s the tragic of ordinary love.

And then, there is a place, there is a possibility, there is a portal, there is a poignancy, there is a potency, there is a promise that lives at the edges of the tragic, which is elicited by this deepening of love itself, where I begin to realize that love is not a coincidence of evolutionary psychology generating a social construction. It’s not that. It’s not that at all.

I realize that love is not only a human sentiment, and it’s more than just a sentiment. It’s the sentience of Cosmos itself. 

Love is not a mere human sentiment. Love is the sentience, the nature, of Reality itself. Love is the heart of existence itself. It is the animating force of all of Reality. It’s not ordinary love. It’s the Eros. It’s the ErosValue of Reality. It’s Reality experiencing its own radical aliveness, Reality desiring ever deeper contact, Reality desiring new wholeness. 

That quality of Eros is Outrageous Love.

When I love outrageously, my heart breaks again and again. But when my heart breaks, it breaks open. It doesn’t break closed. It breaks good. It doesn’t break bad. Shever is the word for the shattering, the breaking. It’s the breaking of the vessels that opens up Reality to a possibility that was unimaginable before. 

The crisis of the broken heart becomes a driver of new love. 

Our crisis births a new heart, and a new possibility, and a new poignancy, and a new depth, and a new sweetness.

We’ve moved into Outrageous Love in which I am — I become, I embody — I am the generous radiance of Reality living uniquely through me. It is most personal, most intimate and personal — and yet, it’s also the personal of all of Reality flowing through me. There is a depth to that, a goodness to that, a truth to that, a beauty to that, which opens me into the post-tragic.

Now I am Krishna and Radha at the post-tragic. 

Now the personal shattering and the personal heart opening participate in the larger field. My personal desire participates in the Field of Desire. 

I realize there is no local desire. 

I realize that the pulse of desire and devotion living in me are the pulse of desire and devotion, which is She — reaching, yearning for me in every second. It’s the post-tragic Krishna and Radha.

That move, that evolution of consciousness that takes place through the Krishna and Radha archetype, the Krishna and Radha incarnation, is the evolution of She. 

It’s the Evolution of Love. 

It’s the Evolution of Eros. 

That’s what we are reaching for. 

That’s what we know to be true. 

That’s what we were pointing towards, what Sally was pointing to in her teaching on Krishna and Radha, which we shared yesterday.

Outrageous Love Is the Ultimate Path of Self-Realization

What Sally is saying in her chapter on Krishna and Radha, what we are saying in the teaching of Outrageous Love is that this is the ultimate path of self-realization. 

This is the path to awakening. 

This is the path to maturity. 

This is the path to my full humanity, which is my full divinity. 

The tantra principle of non-rejection is pointing to something. It’s saying, “This is the most searing, the most radically amazing, the most static, erotic, the most radically alive human experience.”

That’s not a coincidence of evolutionary psychology. That’s what the lineage would call it’aruta dila’eila, arousal from above. It courses through me. That sense of the gift of it — of it coursing through me — is what the Greeks were talking about when they portrayed Cupid’s arrow hitting you. But it wasn’t the arbitrary arrow of a cherubic god who was bored. It is the radical gift of She. It’s arousal from above. It’s this gift that courses through me, that dashes me against the rocks, and yet holds me closer than close in every second, no distance.

That experience, which is at the very core of human existence, is of course the hidden path. That’s the hidden path. I go from tragic to post tragic when I realize that that radical, heart rending, heart agonizing, heart ecstatic, heart bliss is the path itself. 

The tradition said, stay away from that; let’s stay away from that; that’s dangerous. And we should stay away from the obsessive versions, the shadow versions of it, of course. But Chuang Tse wasn’t wrong when he said, I come to speak dangerous words, I ask only that you listen dangerously. That’s this realization that to go the whole way in this lifetime is to risk it all. 

To risk it all means to risk my heart again and again, which I can’t do from the place of ordinary love. Why would I risk my heart again and again? I’ll fall. I’ll be killed. I’ll die. I can’t bear it. But in the Field of Outrageous Love — in the chakal tapuchin kadishi ‘the field of holy apples’ —  the Field of ErosValue, the only thing to do is to open my heart again and again and again — and to keep receiving that gift of arousal from above.

When I’m willing to open my heart again,  She opens her heart again and again, and pours into me unimaginable power. Shakti is power in Kashmir Shaivism. Sally always taught that. It’s correct. Shakti is power. She pours into me unimaginable Shakti, unimaginable power. And it’s that power which transforms my essence, my personal. 

And it’s that power that’s the only true one heart of the political that transforms Reality.

It’s only by not turning away from the Krishna and Radha depths of my own life, it’s only by not turning away from the heartbreak and heart opening of the Krishna and Radha in my life that I find my way. 

That arousal from above is an invitation to my Unique Self, to my irreducible uniqueness, to my unique tikkun. The word tikkun means the unique way in which I make love to the Divine, in which I evolve God, in which I give my gift, and live a life that’s mine to live. 

Every place you’ve been, you needed to be. 

My Krishna and Radha dynamic, my Krishna and Radha aliveness is not a coincidence of Cosmos. 

It’s the intimate communion of She. 
It’s the invitation to my life. 
It’s not the place where I should turn away, it’s the place where I turn towards. 

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