This early draft of an essay was written in 2014 by Dr. Marc Gafni.
It will later become part of The Phenomenology of Eros by Drs. Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid.
Watch a 1-Minute Teaching:
Listen to Dr. Marc Gafni Reading a Version of This Essay at the 2016 Shalom Mountain Wisdom School on Outrageous Love:
Scroll Down for a Longer Video Teaching on the Divinity of F..k from Our 2014 Online Course on God Is Eros!
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A Word on the Word “Fuck”
The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.
—Nietzsche
Language, taught the Cherub Mystics,[1] is the building block of Reality. The word “fuck” says something that no other word is able to express. When you stop to consider, you begin to realize that fuck is one of the most fantastic words in the English language. And it says something very deep about Reality.
In some sense fuck is very much like the word God. Both words are considered unspeakable, other than in the right context. Speaking God’s Name is a sin for many religions because it holds an intensity of meaning that is beyond the ordinary. Moreover, we are not quite sure what the word “God” means. The mystery of meaning around God’s Name is part of its evocative power. And finally, the word God means different things to many different people in many different contexts. It is even strangely used as a curse word, as in “Goddammit!” What God means to you directly depends on your level of consciousness. Indeed, the God you do not believe in does not exist.
You begin to see that there is some similarity between God and fuck. Fuck, like God, is not to be spoken in ordinary circumstances. Pronouncing the word is not allowed in many contexts. Moreover, there is great confusion around the meaning of the word. Like God, it means many different things to many different people in many different contexts. The range of possible meaning is part of its evocative power. Fuck, like God, is often used as part of a curse. And like God, there is no easy stand in for the word.
The Multiple Meanings of Fuck
“Fuck” is an incredibly painful, beautiful, and magical word. Fuck is irreducible and not easily moved aside by imitators. It evokes pleasure and pain, as well as hate and love. So just to lovingly “fuck with you” a little bit, let’s look at some of the meanings of the word fuck. In broad brushstrokes, we might say that there are at least three general senses of the word.
- Fuck as an intensifier or exclamation of aliveness.
Examples: “Fucking Gorgeous” or “Holy Fuck!” Or when used alone, as in “Fuck!!!!!!” it captures the pure intensity of experience. - Fuck as playing with or pushing boundaries (of reality or relationships) or the order of things, moving towards or away from connection.
Examples: “Fuck off!” (moving away from connection, pushing boundaries), “I want to fuck you,” (moving towards, breaking through emotional boundaries), “You are fucking with me” (playing with boundaries).[2] - Fuck as being in the unknown/unknowable, or a statement of uncertainty.
Example: “what the fuck?”
In this opening section, we are going to “fuck around” a bit, in no particular order, with all three of these meta meanings of fuck, and in doing so unpack something of why the word fuck is so “fucking” important.
The first sense of fuck—as an intensifier—might express radical amazement. “That was fucking awesome!” In this sense, fuck is used to connote the intensification of experience. As noted above, it is “Holy Fuck,” or just simply, “Fuuuuuuck!!” that most succinctly capture this sense of the word. This sense of fuck can express intimacy, wonder, and allurement.
You might also say, on the negative side of things, “I’m fucked,” “She fucking sucks,” or “He is a fucking asshole.” A “fucking asshole” is a more intense form than just an ordinary “asshole.” Or, in the more positive sense, “He is a fucking saint.” Again, “a fucking saint” is significantly more saintly than a regular, run-of-the-mill saint. But in both cases, fuck is an intensifier, evoking a heightened experience or expression of reality.
Another expression of fuck is as a particularly potent way of saying “hello.” “Hello,” in its ideal form, creates connection between conscious beings. In many languages, the word “hello” is also the name of God. For example, “Shalom” in Hebrew means both hello and God’s name. Famously, the Sanskrit form of hello—Namaste—means “I bow to the God in you.” It is in this context that we understand the intensified contact made through a fuck-based greeting like “How the fuck are you?” or “It is so fucking good to see you!” This last example already points us towards the second sense of fuck.
This second sense of fuck is about moving towards, making contact, being open, alive, and awake—“Let’s fucking do this.” This second sense of fuck also expresses the playing with, breaking open, or re-ordering of the ordinary boundaries of reality. For example, to “fuck with you,” means to confuse your sense of order, to throw you off balance. This usage can have a playful sense or a more sinister sense. It might show up as, “I was just fucking with you,” as in “I was just playing with you.” Or it might be deployed as “I am going to fuck with you,” as in “I am going to penetrate the apparently well-defended boundaries of your world and turn everything inside out.” “I am gonna fuck you up” generally expresses the more aggressive quality of fuck. In both senses, fuck is a verb. This sense of fuck implies an intensity of action, which intrudes on the ordinary sense of reality and boundaries in an either playful or violent manner. A sophisticated use of this sense of fuck, “let’s fuck it open,” almost ecstatically points towards the playing with or breaking open of boundaries. But this pointing towards a broken-open or broken-down reality might also be an adjective, as in, “this is so fucked.” The second sense of fuck as rupturing from, either by stepping away or moving towards, often confrontationally, often expresses itself through rage, aggression and alienation.
The third sense of fuck is the ultimate question, as in, “How the fuck?” In this sense, fuck expresses inherent unknowing in Reality. This could be said with a positive sense of wonder and awe or with a desperate quality of confusion and terror. Fuck holds both. In this sense, “What the fuck?” is similar to the phrase “God knows,” as in “God knows, but we certainly do not.[3] Notice again that fuck and God live in an overlapping field of meaning.
Fuck might also indicate a very sharp expression of questioning, as in “What the fuck is going on here?” Or it might express a sense of mystery, as with the phrase, “Fuck if I know.”
Are you getting a sense of the magic of the word “fuck”? We are having a “fucking great time” writing this section of the book!
Continuing on, fuck can also express an almost religious sense of awe or amazement in the face of surprising and mysterious revelation. This might show up in the classic phrase “Holy Fuck!” Or, in case you wanted to underscore the point, you could double on the word fuck, as in “Holy fuck, that is fucking awesome!!”
All of these express different dimensions of both radical aliveness and encounters with mysterious sources, both of which are fundamental to the experience of Eros.
On the other side of the street, there are a host of meanings of fuck that express the sense of things gone wrong. Fuck in this sense expresses disconnection, alienation, and even degradation. Failing in a relationship might be expressed as “I fucked up my marriage.” Being taken advantage of might be “I got fucked over,” or “I got totally fucked by the company.” This indicates a sense of having been exploited or objectified—fuck expressing disconnection. Fuck might indicate a sense of unrelenting and even brutal demand: “Just fucking do it before I kick you in the fucking balls.” Here again, the quality of this expression depends on context. This might stem from a hidden love, as in the tough coach, or a brutal alienation, as in the corrupt prison guard. Fuck might also indicate a sense of exasperation, as in “Aww fuck,” or a demand that someone sever contact immediately, as in “Get the fuck out of here.” Alternatively, fuck might be an expression of extreme hostility, “I am going to knock your fucking head off,” or apathy, as in “Who gives a fuck?” Fuck might also express a sense of things gone terribly wrong, as in “This is really fucked.”
Another deployment of fuck is used to intensify the sense of disconnection, bringing together the first and second senses of the word: “This mother fucker was so fucking weird that I think he was fucking insane.” You may even say that kind of expression includes the third sense of mystery. But back to the positive side of things for a microsecond, “mother fucker” can also indicate someone who is wildly gifted or competent. On the even more dramatic rupturing side of fuck are the words of a popular tee shirt: “fuck you, you fucking fuck.” The repetitive deployment of fuck indicates an extreme loss of contact—fuck as alienation. The other person is no longer human; they are literally alien to you. The sense of fuck as expressing a breaking of connection appears in many modes. “I don’t give a fuck” indicates I have no empathy or love left for this person or situation. “You stupid fuck” is an extreme form of severing contact from the humanity of another person. “Don’t fuck with me” means do not engage me, as in “stay out of my face or I am going to fuck you up.” “This is really fucked” means this is not how things should be in a good universe operating according to moral principles. “What the fuck are you doing?” reveals a complete lack of alignment with the actions or motives of another.
Fuck and Sex
All of these meanings of fuck, however, need to be understood in light of fuck’s most common meaning, which is of course sex. In the sexual sense, fuck can be an active verb. “Jane is fucking John.” Or it can be a passive verb: “Jane was fucked by John.” It can be a noun, as in “John is a great fuck.”[4] But at the core of things, fuck expresses a dimension of the sexual experience that is not captured by the many meanings of love.
Fuck contains within it an inexorable urgency far bigger than the casual pettiness of personal whim. This is the sense of “Fuck me now,” or as it is often said without the temporal qualifier, “Fuck Me!” Sometimes, the ecstasy of the sexual leaves out even the word “me,” and fuck, by itself, becomes the central mantra of the sexual.
The Gravitas of Fuck Beyond the Sexual: Finding Your Fuck
Now, the conversation takes a somewhat more serious turn. For fuck is serious business indeed.
Fuck speaks to a primal, radical, and irreducible need. Fuck, in all of its expressions, seeks to articulate a dimension of lived Eros, which is both prior to and beyond all language and culture. Fuck cannot be denied. It is a demand which, on the one hand, lives in us and, on the other hand, is sourced in forces much larger than us. Its potency is precisely in its impersonal quality. It is exactly the paradox of that impersonal quality awakening personally in us that is the heart of both fuck’s peril and power.
When we choose fuck, then Fuck becomes conscious of itself in us. This is movement from unconscious fuck to conscious Fuck. It is in that moment that Fuck awakens as the sacred. When we deny fuck, then fuck demands its pound of flesh, virtually always devolving into its more pathological forms. Unpacking the depth of these qualities is the journey of the Phenomenology of Eros.
The sexual usage of fuck is the penultimate expression of the sense of fuck, which is about contact and connection. It is in this precise sense that the sexual models the erotic. Or said differently, the small-lettered fuck of the sexual models the erotic, capital-F Fuck of Reality.
We (the authors) often tell our students, “Find your Fuck” or “Feel your Fuck.” What this means is find and feel your radical aliveness. Find your purpose. Feel the evolutionary impulse throbbing in you. Feel the ecstatic, divine impulse for contact, intimacy, and connection pulsing[5] in you, as you, and through you. To find your Fuck, however, is not to be disconnected from Reality. Rather, to find your Fuck is to let the Fuck of Reality appear uniquely in you and as you.
Reality is allurement. Your identity is the unique constellation and quality of your allurements. Distinguishing between your authentic allurement and your pseudo-allurement, and then enacting your allurement in your life, is the very purpose of your existence. Reality desperately needs your enacted allurement. Reality needs you to Find Your Fuck. Your purpose is your telos. To find your Fuck is to find your telos—your ultimate aim.
To find your Fuck, you must first feel your Fuck. The feel of your Fuck is your Eros. It is in the sexual that you can learn to feel your Fuck. As we are sexually, so we are in the rest of our lives. The secret of the Cherubs whispers—the sexual models the erotic. Sex models Eros.
The sexual is but an expression of the core drive for contact that animates and drives all of Reality. In this very sense, we also speak of the “goodness of Fuck.” By the goodness of Fuck, we mean the radical goodness of the sexual, awake and alive in you, as the model of Fuck in every dimension of life. This is the new sexual narrative that we call Sex Erotic.[6]
Love + Fuck = Eros
Eros is a combination of Love and Fuck. Love and Fuck are not separate; they are different faces of the same experience. If they expressed the same quality of the same experience, however, we would not have two words.
Love and Fuck are not just any two words. They are two of the most popular words in existence (right up there with “God”). We have both words because they are not merely synonyms of each other. They are two aspects of the same experience; they are distinct but inseparable. This leads to the realization that Love + Fuck = Eros.
Eros is the experience of radical aliveness moving towards ever greater contact. Love and Fuck are the two qualities of Eros. Love is tender, passionate, and even fierce. Fuck is the inexorable, urgent desire that ceaselessly drives towards contact. Love is the passionate longing to embrace. Fuck is the unrelenting urge to merge.
When love loses the quality of fuck, then our lives become disconnected from the larger stream of life. Love becomes pallid. We wonder—secretly shamed—why love does not fill us. We suffer from the denial of fuck. The denial of Fuck is not a detail; it is the ultimate denial, and therefore the abuse and suffering it generates is equally large. We know that Fuck cannot exist without love; the denial of love brings monumental suffering. But we have forgotten that love cannot thrive without the feeling of Fuck.[7]
Fuck is the core nature of Reality—all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary ladder. When Fuck awakens in us, it expresses itself as the radical drive for contract and connection. It is not a uniquely human impulse, but rather the impulse of all of Reality becoming conscious of itself in us. When we feel our Fuck, we feel radically alive and at home in the Cosmos. We are filled with an unmistakable Eros and telos (ultimate aim). We begin to live purpose-driven lives, which drip with the nectar of Eros itself. Our lives become telerotic.
Fuck Is Our Birthright
Our bodies and hearts know that Fuck is our birthright. Fuck is not merely an intensifier of the ordinary. Rather, it points to the extraordinary—the true index of our deepest desire.
The failure of Fuck is the loss of aliveness, which Wilhelm Reich correctly diagnosed as the “emotional plague of mankind.”[8] It is not the loss of a particular privilege or experience; it is the deadening of all experience. The disconnection from Fuck is cause for the loss of our unmediated knowing that life is good. When we become alienated from Fuck, we forget our true identity and lose our dignity. We forget that we are good children of a Universe that desires our transformation.
It is in the dignity of Fuck that we recognize the glory of our true situation.
It is in the dignity of Fuck that we are personally addressed by Reality.
It is in the dignity of Fuck that we know that we are needed, desired, and chosen by All-That-Is.
The Exile of Fuck
It is for all of these reasons that the loss of Fuck is more than merely painful. It is intolerable. We cannot stand it. The result is a two-stage process of disintegration.
The first stage is the exile of Fuck. We exile the great Fuck of Reality to the exclusively sexual. The fuck of the sexual attempts to hook us up to aliveness. But when Fuck is limited to the sexual, the hook up does not work. We wind up with some version of four incomplete Sexual Narratives:[9] the narrative that sex is positive, negative, neutral, or sacred (because it makes babies). But in all of these narratives the fuck of sex is disconnected from the larger Fuck of the Cosmos.
The second stage of the downward-spiraling process is the degradation of Fuck. Fuck becomes a curse word. “Go fuck yourself” expresses the desperate pain of a person caught in the illusion of a flatland universe without fuck. Our own exile is reflected in the exile of Fuck into its degraded expression, “fuck.”
Bypassing Fuck Creates Abuse
The loss of the larger sense of Fuck reduces it to the mere fuck of sex. This, by its very nature, creates a rupture of contact and severing of connection that fosters the abuse of sex in all of its forms. Sex is abused when it is cut off from the larger context of Eros in which it lives. When sex is disconnected from the larger Fuck of the Cosmos, it cannot help but collapse in on itself because we are asking far too much from it. Sex then often implodes into every form of addiction and abuse.
It is only when sex becomes a portal to the unique potency that flows through us from Source—what we have called Sex Erotic—that the dignity and delight of Fuck is restored. When sex is cut off from our total being, from our deeper wholeness, and we ask it for favors it cannot grant, then fuck becomes a curse word.
The Liberation of Fuck
We are using the word Fuck with great intention, a dash of delight, and complete awareness and gravitas. We are using the word Fuck because the word itself matters. We are using it not to provoke or be superficially daring in some juvenile attention grab. Rather, we are using the word Fuck because we know that bypassing the energy of Fuck is a disaster. Bypassing the word and energy of Fuck fucks things up in big ways, in pretty much all fronts of life. The energy of Fuck is held in the word Fuck. In the mystical traditions, part of the emergence of new consciousness is when people begin to pronounce the unutterable—the Name of God. We need to restore the dignity of fuck by uttering the word Fuck not in a casual way, but as an iteration of God’s Name.
God Is Fuck
We need to liberate the great Fuck of Reality from the narrow fuck of the merely sexual. Fuck has been exiled into the sexual. But this is only the first exile. In the second exile, fuck has been banished even further. In this second exile, fuck is not identified with all of the sexual, but only with its degraded forms expressed in pornography, rape, violence, and dehumanizing sex. It is only by entering into the full desire of Fuck—and realizing that it is the primal desire of Cosmos for contact and connection awakening in us—that we are able to embrace the fully dignity of Fuck. God is Fuck.
Freud wrongly reduced all Eros to sex. He thought that culture was lower-case fuck in disguise, and that it covered up libido straining for expression. And yet all Fuck yearns for Infinity. This is the new sexual narrative of Sex Erotic, whose earliest seeds come from in between the sexually intertwisted Cherubs in the holy of holies of the Jerusalem Temple.
The Universe feels and the Universe feels Fuck. In that precise sense, Fuck is the Name of God. The greatest human desire is to participate in the Fuck of Reality. But we are afraid of the feeling of Fuck. It makes us feel out of control or vulnerable in a way we would rather deny or repress. But it is only by entering the feeling of Fuck, and tracing it back to its original Divine Source, that we begin to live the erotic life. The feeling of Fuck is the incessant desire of the Universe to contact new forms of itself in order to birth new creations from the joy of that contact.
God Is Love; God Is Fuck
There were legions of well-meaning people, liberal and conservative alike, who all told us not to use the word Fuck/fuck in this book. But they grew ever more insistent and shrill when they heard that one of the core realizations of the erotic life can be summarized in three words: God is Fuck. Never mind that this truth is rooted in the most central teachings of both ancient mysticism and modern science, as we will see. Never mind that it is true, they said. “This is a truth that cannot be spoken.” Even the people who got it said we should not say it. “Don’t say it because it is
too dangerous,
too shocking,
too easy to confuse with vulgarity,
too provocative,
and just too… much.”
There was a great demand to leave this teaching out, or at the very least to “tone it down a notch” by not using the word Fuck/fuck.
Why don’t we just say that “God is Love?” The reason, as we have already pointed out, is that God is Love is only half of the story. First, God is Love, for most people, implies an anthropomorphic god, entirely separate from Cosmos, who loves you much like your grandfather might. Or, in a more mystical reading of God is Love, it speaks of a caring, kind, and compassionate Cosmos.
But the quality of “God is Fuck” is not only soft and gentle; it is not all sweetness and light. This Love that drives the Cosmos is outrageous and fierce. This love is animated by an inexorable force that lies at the very Heart of the Cosmos. This is not a polite or well-mannered desire.
This force is a raw and primal desire for contact. It is the desire for Fuck. Fuck will not be bypassed and will not be muted. Fuck is a desire, which refuses to be ignored or denied. It is this raw desire for Fuck that animates all of Reality, including you.
At the core of Fuck is the very essence of life and the holy itself. Therefore, we need to liberate Fuck and not bypass it. As is already becoming clear, the liberation of Fuck has absolutely nothing to do with promiscuity, and certainly nothing to do with any form of demeaning objectification or abuse. It’s precisely the opposite, actually.
Meditation on the Name of God: The Name of God Is Fuck
This entire Phenomenology of Eros body of work can correctly be understood as a Meditation on the Name of God.
A central practice of the erotic mystics, recorded in the texts of the interior sciences of virtually all the great traditions, is to meditate on the Name of God. The Sufi Masters meditated on the Ninety-Nine Names of God, the Hebrew Masters on the Seventy-Two Names from the Kabbalah, and Christian practice in Christ does the same.[10]
Let’s turn to the fascinating realization of Fuck that forms the core of the twin forms of gnosis: mysticism and science. Mystics talk about this in their way, and science talks about this in its way.
The ancient Hebrew mystics, for example, say it unabashedly: The Name of God is Fuck. The only way to embody a sex beyond shame is to realize that the Name of God is Fuck.
The classic name of God was spelled Yod He Vav He (YHVH):
The first two letters (moving from the right because Hebrew text reads opposite English texts)—Yod and He—are the masculine and feminine; not man and woman, but masculine and feminine, or what we call lines and circles.[11] These are the two primary forces of Cosmos. The Universe, in every moment, every situation, every person, every entity, every dynamic, is the play between the line qualities of autonomy and independence on the one hand, and the circle qualities of attraction and allurement on the other. Science reminds us that it is the constant dance between attraction and repulsion that shapes the structure of Reality. Reality is the play between the line qualities of thrusting forward and directionality on the one hand, and the circle qualities of including and connection on the other. This is the Fuck of the Cosmos, which is the Name of God.
The Yod enters the He. We call this “constant Fuck,” following the wisdom of Solomon. It is the “sustained” or “perpetual” Fuck that lies at the center of Reality. The force of Fuck is the force of desire itself, built into the source code of Reality. Science says the same thing in its language. Desire, or what the cosmologist Brian Swimme calls “cosmic allurement,” is the essence of Reality itself.
Attraction, or allurement, is built into the very structure of the Universe. For example, the standard model of particle physics explains that electromagnetism causes atoms to form. Atoms are the basis of matter. A molecule is made up of atoms. Stable atoms have an equal number of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. This balances the electrical charge of the atom. But if the electrical charge of the atom is neutral, then what makes neutrally charged particles come together? How do the particles stick together? How do these atoms come together to form the molecules that are the building blocks of material reality? The answer is Fuck.
In most of the known elements, e.g., hydrogen (H), lithium (Li), and sodium (Na), the orbital electron shells[12] of the atoms are what science calls incomplete. Simply said, that means that the outermost shell of these incomplete atoms is not fully filled. Incomplete atoms are really hungry for a configuration of intimacy with a completely filled outermost shell. They are relationship hungry. They desire relationships. They are allured to other atoms with likewise incomplete shells. This is Eros. This is Fuck. This attraction, this allurement, is the base for the formation of molecules that make up all matter. This is the sustained Fuck. The Yod that is constantly entering the He.
There is, however, a second form of Fuck, in which human beings play the primary role. The last two letters of the Name of God are the Vav and the He. The Vav only enters the He when human beings arouse the Divine Fuck. You arouse the Divine Fuck when you live the unique quality of your full Eros and aliveness in every dimension of your life.
Recovering Our Memory of Fuck
The Great Fuck of the Cosmos has been forgotten. We forget that we live in a Reality whose core principle is allurement. We have lost our memory. For the Greeks, the loss of knowledge is the source of all evil. For the erotic mystic, it is the loss of memory that is the source of all evil. Our failed memory of Fuck is the source of great pain and confusion. On the one hand, we forget that, in accordance with quantum theory, Reality is coming in and out of existence in every second.[13] Some mystics call the interior of this same phenomenon “constant creation.” Constant creation comes from fierce and Outrageous Love—what the Mystics call Zivug Matmedet, or Constant Fuck—which Fucks Reality into being in every second.
It is not only that we have forgotten. Our denial of Fuck is so desperate and intense that we have forgotten that we have forgotten—what the Greeks called “Léthē.” And yet, in the midst of our amnesia, we yearn to participate in the Fuck of the Cosmos. Anything less will not satisfy us. We yearn for what we have forgotten. The result is, however, that we cannot explain our yearning to ourselves. We no longer understand our innermost drives. We have lost touch with the radical yearning for intense contact that is the axiomatic desire of Reality, alive in us.
We need to remember that if God is Fuck,
then it is no less true that Fuck is God.
Fuck must be engaged with rapture and reverence,
not only when it is sweet and tender,
but even when it is raw or rough.
All fuck is part of Fuck.
The fragrance of Fuck is always a rumor of Divinity.
God is Fuck,
Fuck is God.
Footnotes
[1] The cherubs are two figures that live atop the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. According to the sacred text, the voice of God “speaks from between the two cherubs,” (Numbers 7:89). What is not known from the sacred text, other than to initiates in the esoteric tradition, is that these two cherubs are locked in ecstatic sexual embrace. The voice of God speaks from between the sexually entwined cherubs. The “secret of the cherubs” will continue to be a theme throughout this book.
[2] Another way to imagine fuck as breaking boundaries is through the embodiment of destruction or deconstruction, as in “I’m fucked up” (my sense of reality is deconstructing) or “my car is fucked” (my car is in really bad shape).
[3] “What the fuck” indicates disorienting uncertainty which may still be seeking to orient to the situation, while “God knows” has a quality of giving up on ever understanding a situation or dynamic. Both, however, overlap in their quality of disorienting uncertainty.
[4] (Osho, The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here, English Discourse Series, Talks given in 1987) Chapter #23: “Knowledge is the corpse of knowing.” Section: “What is the most important word in our language?” There is also a book that published these talks in 1988, with the same titles.
[5] This is how we come to understand the nature of Eros as seeking greater evolutionary wholeness, as we will see. Eros, felt as aliveness, moves toward ever greater contact, intimacy, and connection.
[6] On the new sexual narrative that we call Sex Erotic, see Gafni, Marc and Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, Inc, 2017. For some excerpts, see here: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/drs-marc-gafni-kristina-kincaid-excerpts-from-a-return-to-eros/.
[7] We want to remind the reader of the sometimes unconventional deployments of Capitalization, in this case seen most clearly in sometimes capitalizing, and sometimes not, the word f/Fuck). This is an invocation of divine quality into otherwise ordinary words.
[8] See Reich, Wilhelm. The murder of Christ: the emotional plague of mankind. Vol. 1. Macmillan, 1953. See also Reich’s People in Trouble: Volume two of the emotional plague of mankind. Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1976.
[9] On the four sexual narratives, see Gafni, Marc and Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, Inc, 2017. For some excerpts, see here: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/drs-marc-gafni-kristina-kincaid-excerpts-from-a-return-to-eros/.
[10] For a contemporary expression of this practice in the Christian tradition, see https://www.cofchrist.org/spiritual-practice-meditating-on-gods-name.
[11] On lines and circles, see for example Isaac Luria, Sod Iggulim Ve-yosher. Jerusalem 1964. For a discussion of this Lurianic distinction, see Marc Gafni, The Mystery of Love, Atria, 2003, “Chapter Eight—Circle and Line: The Dance of Male and Female.” For classical Kabbalistic texts expressing the masculine feminine polarity in the Name of God, see, R. Moshe Cordevero’s Pardes Rimonim (Orchard of Pomegranates), R. Yosef Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah (Gates of Light), See also Sara Schneider’s Kabbalistic Writings on the Nature of the Masculine and Feminine, a carefully annotated translation and rudimentary analysis of a classic set of mystical Hebrew texts related to this trope.
[12] The orbital electron shells are a simplified model pointing towards the erotic dance of the electrons around the atomic nucleus. In that model, developed by Niels Bohr in 1913, an electron exists in the lowest energy shell available, which is the one closest to the nucleus.[For more about the Bohr Model of Electron Shells, see, for example, here: https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_General_Biology_(Boundless)/02%3A_The_Chemical_Foundation_of_Life/2.05%3A__Atoms_Isotopes_Ions_and_Molecules_-_Electron_Shells_and_the_Bohr_Model.]
[13] The quantum vacuum, for example, tells us that some elementary particles and waves simply leap into existence. A quantum vacuum is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. According to our present-day understanding, it is however never truly empty but rather contains electromagnetic waves, gravitons, photons, dark energy, and virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. Microwave technology invented for radar in the world-war era was co-opted to great avail in physics experiments interested in measuring particle interactions. The Lamb shift experiment was based on a discrepancy between theory (Dirac equations) and experiment in measuring two energy levels within the hydrogen atom. It was discovered that the cause of the discrepancy was interactions between vacuum energy fluctuations (free electrons) in the Maxwell field and hydrogen electrons bound to the proton as they revolved around the proton.
