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The future of our world depends on the great realization of love: that which unites us is infinitely greater then that which divides us. For the first time in the history of the human race, we are able to rise beyond the place of our birth, our religion of origin, our family circle and choose to live our highest truth. This truth transcends and includes all of our personal history even as it invites us to our singular and unique evolutionary destiny.
The Spiritual teaching for this age must be drawn from all of the great traditions of Spirit, pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. These great understandings must be lovingly integrated into a space of open heart, community and insight that has the power and the compassion to guide us on the next stage of our personal and global journey.
We live in an intimate Universe.
Every single pore of you is loved and accepted in Love.
Every single corner of you is actually seen in Love.
Every corner of you is held and witnessed in Love.
Every part of you is spoken to and addressed in Love.
Dr. Marc Gafni
This message from the Universe itself most of us can receive…… on a good day.
When the days are not so good, for most of us doubt kicks in and depending on the level of training and practice we have done, we are able to hold ourselves and deal with these hard and often lonely moments….
Stepping into private study with Marc is giving your self the actual experience that the message above, gets incarnate in human form and takes place in a chair next to you. From there a holy, total personal supportive loving relationship is being build.
In private study Marc offers a deep lineage transmission together with a deeply personal supportive loving relationship that addresses ALL of YOU.
In this context you will open up and also ground levels of Your Unique Greatness and Your Unique Brilliance that are beyond your imagination.
Do you hold big dreams, do you want to embody a big vision? (And big dreams and big visions can be public and can be private.)
What you bring down into this world is not only for you, it is evolving the very source code of all our lives.
In working and studying with Dr. Marc Gafni you will be both lovingly, totally challenged and lovingly, totally held at the same time as the most epic version of yourself.
Marc’s brilliant mind, his creativity and his deep heart are actually totally at your disposal.
You can totally use of all he has to offer for the creation of your deep dreams, which are in fact the dreams of our world.
Give yourself the best!
Chahat Corten
The term means different things in different traditions. We use it to mean someone who not only knows, but also has absorbed into and incarnated in their being, the wisdom of his or her lineage. This does not suggest that a lineage master is perfect or incapable of making mistakes.
It in no way suggests you give over your personal authority and responsibility for your life to your teacher.
What it does suggest is a passionate commitment to love, truth, courageous transformation, unflinching integrity, ruthless honesty that is demanding and forgiving, even as it merges with unending compassion, selfless service, wide and deep mind and heart.
It also suggests a mastery of levels of inner depth, wisdom, meaning and heart, which the teacher– with all of his heart and mind – is committed to gifting to you.
Unlike those traditions, Dr. Marc will both give genuine transmission as a teacher even as he co-creates with his autonomous students, a study track that meets their unique needs of heart, body and mind.
We reject for our community the image of the teacher as Guru even as we reject for our community the image of teacher as pal or buddy, who just happens to be teaching.
In our community we believe that the teachers must incarnate both Spiritual attainment, humility, willingness to own mistakes made, a commitment to constant deepening, giving over of his life fully to the Mystery, profound natural Spiritual authority, profound respect for his students autonomy, coupled with radical delight at all he can learn from his students. This dialectical balance requires a profound and mature autonomous student who can both be a student and master at the same moment.
You absolutely can be a full practitioner in a particular lineage and study with a particular teacher AND be a full Trans-lineage Path student at the same time.
- The student commits to purify and open their heart and mind to receive mind and heart transmission.
- The teacher commits to purify and open his heart to give heart and mind transmission.
- The teacher will own his Spiritual responsibility and authority even as the student owns his Spiritual responsibility and autonomy.
- Teacher and student recognize both the fixed nature and the fluidity of their roles. A deep commitment to honor and uphold the teacher is taken on by the student even as the teacher commits to guide, honor and love the student.
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From Shalom Mountain Wisdom School teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni. Transcribed by Adael Bullock.
Photo by Julie M. Daley
Divinity is not only the infinity of power; divinity is the infinity of pain. It is the infinity of tears. Divinity at its core is the infinity of intimacy. The infinity of intimacy feels your pain and doesn’t relegate it to separate self. Is there part of your pain and my pain and all of our pain that comes from an obsessive grasping in the realm of separate self? Of course. Is that unnecessary pain? Of course. And can we liberate from that pain by awakening? Of course. That doesn’t end the story of pain. That ends the unnecessary pain in the world. But then, there is the legitimate and the real pain that comes with being incarnate. That is where the Christ consciousness got it better than the Buddhist consciousness. The Christ consciousness didn’t say there is no pain; the Christ consciousness said, I die for your sins. That is a very different move. That is not the same spiritual move. One is, “life is suffering” because your mind is fucked up, so unfuck your mind, and you will not suffer – the 4 Noble Truths. The second is, suffering is so fucking intense, there is nothing you can do, so I am going to die for you.
The real way to integrate it is you bring both together. This is gorgeous. The world spirituality ninja move is, on the one hand, True Self. You actually realize True Self, and you know that you can deconstruct the illusion of a grasping separate self as being the fullness of your identity and actually realize your identity as True Self, as Christ awake and alive in you. When Christ awakens and lives in you, then you participate in the infinity of intimacy. You become Christ. As you awaken, you take the pain and joy of the world unto you, your own pain recedes. As you awaken as Christ, you don’t awaken as a neutral True Self, you awaken as Christ, you awaken with your own ability to feel the infinite pain and joy of the world. When you reach out to hold someone’s hand, your own suffering recedes. You wake up.
You wake up–not as No Self. You wake up as Christ, as a living, breathing, pulsing source of divine love and compassion, radical empathy, radical intimacy, radical caring, radical eros, awake, alive in you, and you feel AS Elijah, AS Bodhisattva, the full pain, joy and grace of the world coursing through you. And all of a sudden, your own wounds, they are in this much larger context. You own wounds, the fact that your father abused you, and your mother did not let you leave the light on by the bed is all real. When you actually take those wounds into the larger context of your own Christ consciousness, those wounds assume a different place, and they begin to melt, to dissipate, in the infinite Christ consciousness that is awake and alive in you.
Quote transcribed and edited by Adael Bullock from the 2013 Shalom Mountain Wisdom School.
Elizabeth Helen Adael Bullock is a Center for Integral Wisdom Senior Editor and empowered Senior Teacher of Unique Self. Adael has been trained in Introductory and Advanced Shalom Retreat Leadership Process. She has also completed training in Tantra, 5 Rhythms, Insight and Metta meditation, creative writing, and Integral Theory. Adael is currently editing the CIW think-tank book Teachings from the Holy of Holies: Daily Reflections on World Spirituality.
by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 6)
This is the animating impulse that moved eastern spiritual teaching, motivated by love, to seek to free you from the illusion of separate self. Their great mistake was to jettison Uniqueness along with separateness by conflating the two in a way that was both unnecessary and wrong. This confusion of separateness and uniqueness forgot that you could be both part of the whole and a distinct part at the same time. The recovering of that memory is essential to healing the fractured and broken self. The dignity of the part can be held even as your are connected to the whole. You are part of the seamless coat of the universe. Seamless, but not featureless. You can transcend your exclusive identification with your part nature, the ego, even as you identify with the larger whole. But that does not mean that your unique part nature is absorbed in the whole. Rather, it is integrated in the seamless coat of reality without compromising its unique features.
Funny thing is that the ego busting school of spiritual teaching seems to have lost touch with its otherwise finely tuned sense of paradox. The ego busters have adopted an either/or position in regard to ego/separate self. The choice is stark in their presentation of things. Either you realize that you are not separate, you realize that you are one with all that is, or you’re separate and alienated from all that is. Either you are identified with the whole, or you are disconnected from the whole–deluded by your identification with your part nature. This presentation of things demands that a false choice be made which undermines most contemporary spiritual teaching. Genuine realization yields a deeper and more paradoxical wholeness as the truth of how things are. You are both a unique part and part of the whole at the very same time. You have disidentified with ego and realized some genuine enlightenment in your felt identity with the larger whole, even as you delight in your post-egoic Unique Self.
At this point, you can open your heart to a second huge space of insight. The same bad set of choices is offered by popular spiritual teaching in relationship to God. The East rejected the idea that God might be beyond the world. For much of the East and for many Western mystics, divinity is the ground of being. God, if that term means anything all, is the animating substance and energy of all that is. This is a great realization and insight that wells up from intensive spiritual practice and contemplation. But it is not the whole story. The second great realization and insight of spiritual practice is that there is a divine, which you encounter from beyond world and nature and self. All that is has a personal face that loves, cares, and holds you with infinite intimacy, tenderness, and grace.
Clearly this is not a different divine. Rather these two mystical realizations reflect the two faces of God. Two faces of all that is.
To force a person to make an either or choice between a divine force within or beyond world/self/nature is a bad choice and a wrong choice. The God of the encounter is revealed by the eye of the spirit through the deepest of spiritual practices and meditation. This face of God is no less real than the god within. Both are revealed by different sets of profound spiritual practices and meditations.
For more of this essay, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5.
You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.
