The Editors

Eros seduces man toward evolution, toward greater consciousness. Love seduces man to love. Eros is the inner animating quality of the ecstatic evolutionary impulse of the Ground of Being, evolving toward the most aware and noble expression of itself. It is love persuading us to ever-deeper levels of love.

Marc Gafni
Your Unique Self
p. 135

“To really get the great esoteric teachings of one love, to know love as the strongest force in the Uni-verse, we first have to understand that love is not just a feeling. Rather, love is the motivating force driving and animating the entire Uni-verse. Love is not merely a human emotion. Love is both the currency of connection between human beings and the essential Eros that drives the evolutionary process as a whole. Love is the Eros of all relationship even as it is the very Eros of evolution itself. Personal and impersonal love are one. One Love. Evolutionary Love.”

Your Unique Self
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 10

For some passages in the Zohar, the mysteries of the cherubs are virtually a synonym for unity consciousness.  The Zohar understands the union of the cherubs as symbolic of the union of all opposites.  This is what mystic Abraham Kook means when he writes, “While all qualities have their opposite, good and evil, life and death, and even holy and profane–there is no opposite to the Holy of Holies.”  The Holy of Holies is the place that overwhelms all distinctions.  That which unites opposites, writes Kook, is love.  It is love–the perception of the infinite Divine in all of reality–that allows us to embrace both paris in the opposition as glimmerings of the one.

The Chinese master Lao-tzu saw this clearly when he said all opposites arise simultaneously and mutually:

Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear?  What nonsense.
Having and not having arise together
Difficult and easy complement each other.

To suggest otherwise, writes Chuang Tzu, is not “to apprehend the great principles of the universe or the nature of creation.”

What does all this mean?  Ultimately reality is a unity of opposites.  What that means is that there are no real boundaries.  True wisdom is the sweetness of integration and union.  Ultimately the world of two does not exist in the deepest reality.  To love is to reach for the radical divine presence in all that is.  To love is to know that ultimately there are no boundaries.  And yet the road to the circle in which everything is on the inside is through the line. Ethics is the Hebrew mystic’s path to eros.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 318, 319

The trees are part of the Goddess’s erotic manifestation.  The central symbol of much of the ancient pagan cult in biblical Canaan was the Ashera tree.  The Ashera is the feminine earth goddess erotically expressed in the image of the Ashera tree.  In a wonderful phrase of Keats, “Even as the trees that whisper round the temple become soon as dear as the temple self.”  For the pagan, the hills were literally alive with the sound of music. Nature is the music of divinity undressed to the human ear.  Every hill, brook, tree, and blade of grass was invested with its own divine muse.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Pages 190-192

Before God”.

To be in Temple consciousness is to be in God–eros pure and simple. This shift in consciousness is hidden within the folds of biblical myth text itself.

We have already seen that the biblical term Lifnei Hashem, which is usually translated as “before God,” can be more fruitfully understood as “on the inside of God’s face.” This allusion plants the seed for the much more radical move made by the mystic Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century. In Luria’s graphic and daring vision the world is not formed by a forward-thrusting male movement that creates outside itself. Quite the contrary–Divinity creates within itself the sacred void in the form of a circle. The creation not of the line masculine God but of the Goddess, of the Shechina! This is the Great Circle of Creation. The circle, unlike in the original biblical image, is within the Goddess. It is an act of love that moves the Goddess to withdraw and make room for the other–paradoxically within God.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 192

The technology for shadow integration is love. Shadow causes a transformation of identity.  Love is the evolutionary force that transmutes shadow to light.

The inner magic and mechanism of love makes it the ultimate technology of Unique Shadow transformation.  The nature of that magic and mechanism is an essential sacred understanding necessary for your Unique Self enlightenment.

In order to integrate your shadow, your unlived life acting out and demanding attention, a transformation of your identity must occur. The key Aramaic phrase used by the Unique Self masters to describe the nature of this path is be’chavivut talya milta, “It depends on love.”

Your Unique Self
(In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 265

After the evolution beyond ego and the identification with the impersonal, a new personal essence arises out of the very ground of the impersonal.

This is Unique Self. This Second Taste is dynamic, creative, and world transforming. There is urgency to the Second Taste. The God impulse of Second Taste is no less surging, ecstatic, and powerful than was the urge to merge in One Taste. In Second Taste, however, the ecstatic urgency is to emerge. This Second Taste ecstatic urgency aligns not with the eternal transcendent face of God, but with the evolutionary impulse of All That Is. The spiritual path that this ecstatic urge invites you to is the way of Becoming.

Meditation is not only the path into pure Being; it is also a key path to access the surging life force that is the evolutionary dance of unfolding.

In particular, certain forms of tantric or Kabbalistic meditation open the door to that ecstatic evolutionary impulse toward unfolding that lives uniquely in you, as you, and through you. It is the same impulse that utterly demands the creativity of the artist even as it moves the mother to ecstatically suffer the pain of childbirth.

Your Unique SelfӬ (In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 95

The experience of being held in love by the gaze of the divine feminine can be accessed in three primary ways. First, the gaze of another’s love can hold you in the gaze of the divine feminine. Second, in meditation, your own Big Heart/divine feminine can consciously hold your small self in the gaze of the divine feminine. Third, the gaze of the divine feminine is the experience of being held by the personal God who knows your name. This is what we referred to earlier as “God in the second person.” This is what Solomon alluded to in the Song of Songs when he wrote of the divine embrace, “Your left hand is under my head and your right hand embraces me.”  This is the experience that you are resting in the divine embrace, held in timeless time and placeless place.  This is the deep knowing that wherever you fall, you fall into the hands of God. It is precisely the knowing that you are thus held in love that affirms your goodness. Chant and prayer are the two major spiritual practices for this realization.

Your Unique Self
(In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 275

The circle is more naturally erotic than the line. Recall that we identified four faces of the erotic: interiority, interconnectivity, yearning, and fullness of being. The circle evokes each of these qualities:

Interiority–The circle, unlike the line, has an inside and an outside. Its very essence is in the creation of an inner circle.

Interconnectivity–In the circle, all are interconnected.  All have a place.  No one is ahead or behind, above or below.  Because of this, the circle naturally invited cooperation instead of competition.

Yearning–Circles also bespeak our unquenchable longing.  It is not a line, where movement is pragmatic and linear.  In a circle one understands that no end will ever be reached.  This longing participates in the yearning force of being.

Fullness–The circle attracts us to the fullness of its curves.  Whether it be the round table, the swelling of a woman’s pregnant belly, the curvatures of thigh, breast, or shoulder, the gentle slopes of a lush countryside, circles vibrate with fullness and energy.

from The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 190

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of this phenomenon: “All are conscious of attaining to a higher self posession. It shines for all.”

In Jewish mysticism, this is called the voice of the Shekinah–the feminine face of the divine, which in the Hindu traditions is called Shakti. Jewish mystics who wrote in the third century taught, “Wherever ten people gather with clear holy intention, the Shekinah speaks.”  Or as Matthew said, “When two or three gather in my name I am in the midst of them.”

Modern Hindu mystic Aurobindo called this “the evolution of truth consciousness in which [they] feel themselves to be the embodiment of a single self.”

Theosophist Rudolf Steiner said, “People awake through each other …. then real communal spirituality descends on our workplace.”

Finally, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, one of the key founders of modern evolutionary spirituality, describes this collective spiritual awakening as “sustained, certainly, by the individual person, but at the same time embracing and shaping the successive multitude of individuals.”

Your Unique Self  (In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 330

Joy is your life energy. Joy is a by-product of Unique Self living.

Joy, as we have seen, is realized as the natural by-product of the passionate pursuit of something other than happiness.
What is that other thing that you pursue passionately that is not joy, that is a by-product of its pursuit? Of course, you must pursue virtue, goodness, integrity, depth, values””all necessary, but insufficient to give you joy. It’s not just virtue, goodness, integrity, and depth that you need to pursue; you must pursue yourvirtue, goodness, integrity, and depth, that is to say, your story.

Joy is a by-product of Unique Self living.

The Chinese taught us that joy is chi, joy is energy. In Hebrew mysticism, joy is called chiyut, which means “vital energy,” or “life force.” So both the Chinese tradition and the Hebrew mystical tradition use virtually the same root word to allude to joy.

Your Unique Self (In Press)
Page 264
Dr. Marc Gafni

The Unique Self is the Eros, the life impulse that drives us forward. Shadow is Eros turned around against itself. By integrating your shadow, you are liberating the trapped life energy of your Unique Self. Your life energy is not generic. It is your life energy. The portal to your energy is none other than your Unique Self. Your most persistent shadow- structure is also your most abundant wellspring of energy and life. The reclaiming of life energy happens through shadow integration. Thus, the tantric masters of the left-handed path saw shadow integration as a process of revelation by which the previously hidden Unique Self””the secret mystery””manifests as inspiration and Eros.

Your Unique Self (In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 252