Daily Wisdom Series

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

“IT DEPENDS ON LOVE.”  In this old Aramaic phrase, “it” refers to shadow. This phrase will guide you on the path of shadow integration that the old Unique Self masters called the “left-handed emanation” or the “way of the dragon. ” The left hand implies the power of transmutation, while the right hand symbolizes the power of force. The left-handed path is referred to by the Tantric Kabbalists as Derek Hataninim, which I have often translated as “the way of the dragon ”. The way of the dragon invites not the slaying of the dragon, but rather its befriending and healing.

To follow this way is to serve and to grow through the light and energy that emanates from the darkness itself.

With the understanding of the New Enlightenment, the energy that emanates from the darkness is not foreign to us. It is none other than the displaced fullness of your Unique Self and the dis-owned freedom of your True Self. It is the energy of the radical breaking of all boundaries. You have shattered the limits of your skin-encapsulated ego, and stepped into the fullness of your distinct expression of all that is. You have realized your full identity with the divine, and all false boundaries crumble before the audacious power of your penetrating love. This is the ultimate expression of Eros.

The energy of darkness is but the pseudo-Eros of breaking boundaries in the world of illusion. When you follow the attraction to the boundary-breaking pseudo-Eros to its root, it is revealed to be the yearning for the full enlightenment of Unique Self manifestation. The coiled boundaries of separate self melt before the radiance of Unique Self.

This is the hidden intention of the old Kabbalistic koan, “The contraction of darkness is only sweetened in its root.”  The word for contraction, din, refers to your shadow.  The word “sweetness” refers to the tantric level of consciousness in Kabbalah, where light that comes from the darkness is of a higher quality than light that bypasses the darkness.

In the way of the dragon, the energy of shadow is transmuted through love.

One of the people who intuited this truth of shadow energy, even though he did not have a larger Unique Self context within which to integrate his understanding, was the philosopher Nietzsche.  He writes in his maddening and wonderful work,Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Of all the evil I deem you capable
Therefore I want the good from you
Verily I have often laughed at weaklings
Who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Nietzsche believed that the good could never gain the upper hand unless it is infused with “the energy generated by murder.”

The poet Rilke captured the Kabbalistic consciousness of the way of the dragon in a few short lines:

Perhaps all the Dragons of our lives
Are princesses who are only waiting to
See us once, beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in
Its deepest being something
That needs our love.

Your Unique Self, (In Press)
Pages 271, 272
Dr. Marc Gafni

Sex models the erotic, but it does not exhaust the erotic. One of the core qualities of the erotic is imagination. The Zohar, the magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says explicitly in many places, “Shechina is imagination.”

In common usage “imagination” is implicitly considered to mean “unreal.” Indeed unreal and imaginary are virtual synonyms. To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim we say it is “a figment of his imagination.”  In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. Indeed it would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.”

The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm. Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves. Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth. But the imagination is our prophet, bringing us the word of the Divine, which speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed their God said, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”

The Mystery of Love, Page 81
Marc Gafni

Love is a perception of the infinite specialness,  the full uniqueness of the beloved. To love another is to say Yes to their Unique Presence, to their Unique Being and Unique Becoming. The greatest of love affairs begins with a simple imprint of Yes.

Remember, we come into this world trailing clouds of glory with core knowledge of our omnipotence, beauty, infinite power, and infinite potential. And then we hear a chorus of voices for the first ten years of our lives, and the only word they seem to be saying is No, No, No. We gradually come to associate maturity with saying No. When an idea or new direction comes up, our first response is why it can’t work. We are brilliant at it. Even the most simpleminded person becomes a genius when it comes to saying No. We can think up twenty reasons why it will not work before we can think up two reasons why it could. We have all become Dr. No with advanced degrees. ”¨But somewhere deep inside, the Yes remains, an eternal child of your Unique Self. We know on the inside of the inside that Yes is the answer.

One of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce spends reams of pages portraying the No reality encountered in the streets of Dublin by the main character, Leopold Bloom. Joyce masterfully maps the life of the archetypal human whose life is a series of unnecessary losses. The death of Bloom’s son and father, his daughter’s leaving, the passing of his youth, and finally the adultery of his wife.

Yet in the last scene of the book, Bloom returns home to his sleeping wife. Never mind it is a recently desecrated bed. Never mind he sleeps with his feet at her head. It is still home, the erotic haven of the inside. The book ends with a crescendo of Yes. As his wife feigns sleeping, we float along in her stream of consciousness, finally concluding with reminiscences of the early ecstatic hours of her and Leopold’s love. It is a definitive return to Yes:

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The Yes here is sexual. The sexual in this passage models the eros of life. The overwhelming perfume of this sexual Yessing signifies hope, promise, and possibility in the most expanded erotic sense. For the sexual is the full ecstatic urgency of the urge to merge and the urge to emerge throbbing inside of us. This final Yes has magically transformed the seven-hundred-plus pages of modern existentialist No’s. It was James Joyce who reminded us that Yes is a feminine word that signifies the end of all resistance.

The high priests entering the Holy of Holies once a year say Yes with his every step. The cherubs murmur to each other, “Yes, yes.” The Temples of God and Man are built with Yes stones. The Presence of God is a great green light that says, “Yes, you are gorgeous. Yes, I need you.” The Uni-verse is an open entryway, crowned by a neon Yes sign. To be lived as love is to know that””as Wallace Stevens reminds us.

After the final No comes a Yes

Marc Gafni

In those heart-opening moments when truth suddenly bursts through your everyday routines, you know that the purpose of your life is to uniquely incarnate in the story of your life the love-intelligence that governs the Uni-verse. Are you willing to utter a sacred “Yes!” to your conscious participation in the evolution of consciousness?

To awaken and say Yes to the unique invitation, delight, and obligation of your life is the reason you were born. It is the only authentic source of joy and meaning in your life. When you slumber and say No, your loneliness, fear, and contraction live in you, through you, and as you. When you awaken and say Yes, you are living as Source. When you awaken and say Yes, Source lives in you, through you, and as you.

“Unique Self is the enlightened realization that you are both absolutely one with the whole, and absolutely unique. You are free from the contractions of your personality, even as you experience yourself as personally engaged in the great evolutionary unfolding of consciousness.

Realizing your Unique Self will fundamentally change the way you understand virtually every facet of your awakened life. Once we’ve engaged the core teachings of Unique Self, we will look separately at how these teachings fundamentally reconfigure and dramatically re-vision our under- standing of love, joy, shadow, sexuality, parenting, death, relationships, loneliness, evolutionary spirituality, malice, ego psychology, and the inte- gration of East and West.

Your Unique Self is God’s love-signature written all over you. God loved you so much, He personalized himself as you. You are the indi- vidualized heart and mind of God. This is your Unique Self.

The creative process that mysteriously moves from nothing to something is the God-impulse. To live as your Unique Self means to align yourself with that process, with the ecstatic evolutionary impulse that initiated the kosmos, with the ecstasy of God, which re-creates all of reality in every second of existence.

Are you ready to respond to this invitation, to offer yourself to the infinite love intelligence that wants desperately to show up in the world through and as you?”