Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Kyle Kingsbury Podcast.
ABOUT:
Kyle Kingsbury welcomes back Dr. Marc Gafni to continue their short-form series on the “12 faces/phases of Eros,” focusing here on Eros as perception. Gafni defines Eros as radical aliveness desiring deeper contact and greater wholeness, a cosmic force uniquely moving through each person, and argues love is not merely emotion but a “perception-identification complex” in which one perceives another’s irreducible quality/value and identifies their essence with that beauty rather than surface flaws. He critiques modern fast, negative, scandal-driven attention and “pornographic” surface gazing as anti-Eros, contrasting it with deep perception captured by Avatar’s “I see you.” He says understanding love as perception makes it trainable, and extends the idea to orgasm as an illumination and affirmation of divine intimacy.
Marc’s Books:
NEW BOOK: First Principles and First Values – David J. Temple
A Return to Eros (paperback)
A Return to Eros (audiobook)
The Erotic and the Holy
Your Unique Self
Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment
Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism
Listen to this podcast:
Discover the secret relationship between erotic, the sexual, and the sacred
Sex is not negative or positive. Sex is not just neutral, nor is it merely sacred because it creates babies. None of these old sexual stories work for us anymore. We need a new sexual narrative. This book gives the new sexual narrative, what the authors call Sex Erotic.
Erotic Mystics from the hidden tradition of Solomon’s temple taught a secret doctrine: sex is the source of all wisdom. It’s an expression of the erotic impulse of existence itself alive in us–the yearning for contact, pleasure, and aliveness. The sexual, however, is not the sum total of the erotic. Rather, the sexual teaches us how to live an erotic life in all dimensions of our existence. That is Sex Erotic.
A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, from Drs. Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, reveals the radical tenets of the relationships between the sexual, the erotic, and the holy. They share what Eros actually means and also the 12 core qualities of the erotic, which are modeled by the sexual. These include being on the inside, fullness of presence, yearning, allurement, fantasy, surrender, creativity, pleasure, and more.
A Return to Eros shows why these qualities of the erotic modeled by the sexual are actually the same core qualities of the sacred. The relationship between the sexual and the erotic becomes clear, teaching you how to live an erotically suffused existence charged with purpose, potency, and power. To be an empowered lover—not just in sex but also in all facets of your life—you must listen to the whisperings of the sexual. Transform your understanding and experience of love, sex, and Eros inside these pages.