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Eros is to be on the inside, including the inside of your desire. What being on the inside does is invite a person to clarify his desires, yet not transcend them. True desire is attained through the deep meditation in which you access the internal witness. From this place of detachment, you survey with penetrating but loving eyes all of your desires. This place of internal witness allows you to move beyond an addictive attachment to any particular one. At that point the person engaged in Birur– clarification – does not abandon desire. Rather she moves to connect to those desires which were truest to her deepest and most authentic self. It is in the empty space between the spasm and the desire that the person is born.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
Whenever we keep eros confined to one narrow frame of being, while de-eroticzing the rest of the picture – the Shechina remains in exile. Sex is only one of the places where we exile the erotic. There is a wonderful Balinese saying which goes something like, “We do not have art – we do everything as beautifully as we can”. When we build ugly cities where beauty is abused and people are depersonalized and then build a beautiful art museum, the Shechina is in exile. We exile the eros of beauty to the constricted precincts of formal art.
The same is true of music. Music is not limited to symphonies or rock concerts. We are all musicians and life is overflowing with music. Remember the Broadway show “Stomp”? There was no dialogue; it was all music and dance. The catch was that no musical instruments were used. The instruments were adapted from the fabric of everyday living. Pots, pans, brooms, sinks, faucets, garbage can lids, bottles, bags, newspapers, hands, feet, virtually every part of the body – all of these became instruments of music. The implication is stunning; what we usually do is limit art to formal work by people we call artists, just as we limit music to formal instruments. Formal music and art need to model the erotics of sound and beauty in all of our lives and not just in their narrow provinces. Music and art need to pervade all of living. Every moment is a canvas and is possessed of its own melody.
Rumi knowingly instructs us:
Let the beauty that we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the Ground.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
In biblical mysticism love and oneness are identical. In Hebrew, there is a mystical technique called “gematria” in which each letter, and thus each word, has a numerical value. The Hebrew word for love, ahava, has a numerical value of thirteen. Echad, meaning one, also has a numerical value of thirteen. To the Kabbalistic mind, this coincidence of number is more than coincidence. It is as if it is a mystical law has been encoded into the letters of these words. Love is Oneness and Oneness is Love. One is but another word for the erotic interconnectivity of all being.
But the rhyme of mystical meaning continues, for these two words added together equal twenty-six. Twenty-six is a central number in Hebrew mysticism because it is the numeral value of God’s four letter name: Yud Hei Vav Hei – יהוה – the divine name of healing and love. Thus, God is One Love. Love is the universe’s way of embracing us and telling us we are not alone. We have a home, a bayit. We are connected.
One + One = One.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
If I listen to the murmuring of my soul, I am in effect listening to the murmuring of the sacred God.
(Rabbi Mordechai Lainier of Ishbitz, a radical Hassidic teacher of the nineteenth century, teaches in his stunning work, Mei Shiloach, Volume One, p. 19, Column 2)
Excerpted from The Erotic and the Holy by Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
By Marc Gafni
From my book, The Mystery of Love:
Photo Credit: presta
Love is all about insight–in-sight. It is the ability to see in, to the inside of the inside, to the Holy of Holies that is your lover. Eros is being on the inside. Thus, love is an erotic perception of the highest order. Naturally you have to move way beyond sexual seeing. Sex only models eros. To be an erotic lover you have to understand that “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
When something is far from you, you have to open your eyes really wide to see it. As it gets closer you squint your eyes, when it gets really really close, you close your eyes. Seeing with closed eyes is when we perceive way beyond seeing. The adjective close and the verb close are the same word. Closeness–intimacy–higher vision–all happen when we close our eyes. We move beyond sight and invite the other faculties of perception to guide us. Smell, sound, touch, and taste all become alive in a deeper way when we close our eyes.
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By Marc Gafni
What does it mean to be fair? In one sense being fair means to be just and good. To be fair is to be honest and have integrity.
Fairness implies appropriate weights and measure. To be fair means to give things the right weight and measure accurately.
When my sons were young the phrase that would indicate that they were the most upset or disturbed was the mixed English and Hebrew idiom, “Zeh Lo Fair.” It’s not fair. When they said that, they were appealing to a universal standard of the good and the just, which has ultimate natural authority.
The word “fair,” however has a second meaning as well. To be fair means to be beautiful.
The Queen asks the Mirror in the famous Snow White legend, Mirror on the Wall, “who is the fairest of them all.” And of course there is My Fair Lady. To be fair then is also a quality of aesthetics.
This reminds us that a lack of fairness is not merely an issue of justice but also an issue of beauty. Goodness and integrity are beautiful. To be unfair is not only a violation of justice, it is to be ugly.
All too often in the spiritual world fairness is seen as a practical obligation and an ethical value. And it is that as well. But it is so much more than that.
When someone — anyone — is treated unfairly, a kind of sordid ugliness is born into the world. It can be papered over with a thousand popular albeit numbing spiritual platitudes. It remains just as ugly.
In a forthcoming book (Radical Kabbalah, 2012), I trace the original texts in Hebrew mysticism that talk of the goddess, especially in the work of one pivotal Hasidic master. From a careful reading of that the entire Eros of the goddess is really about justice. The erotic passion of the goddess in Hassidic teaching is about the radical erotic commitment to fairness.
It is in that sense that some of the minions of the goddess in this world are sometimes called fairies. A fairy is a gentle yet sacred and seductive incarnation of the goddess. The fairy is both fair and fair. Beautiful and just. Any good devotee of Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle knows is that to believe in fairies is to give them life. If we would chant Tinkerbelle’s mantra, “I do believe in fairies I do, I do,” fairies come to life as integrity and beauty are once again united and made manifest in the land.
