3_Archives – General

One of the places where we overcome alienation and step inside to an act of surrender is the sacred realm of music.  Eros cuts through ego and touches essence.  We feel alive and totally present in the fullness of our longing.  Mastery in song and music takes place precisely at the point where radical discipline and control are transcended.  At the intersection between control and surrender the singer or musician gives herself up, allowing herself to be played by the universe.  It is of course not an accident that an essential component of the Temple service was music.  The biblical myth text reads, “If you are searching for Shechina” then come to the Temple with its symphony of holy song.  Through music from exotic instruments and songs that opened the heart, the people were aroused to the erotics of desire and personal surrender.

Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 165

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Her name means Indwelling Presence, “the one who dwells in you.” She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force that runs through and provides a womb for the world.  She is the underlying erotic, sensual, and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being.

Shechina captures an experience, a way of being in the world, for which we do not yet have an English word. For this is a way of being that we in the West are hard-pressed to articulate.  It is the experience of waking up in the morning full of utter joy for the arrival of the day. It is weeping over the splendor of the sunset or the scent of the ocean or the fragility of a newborn. It is a way of living in love.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 9

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

The Eros of evolution dances up the evolutionary spiral to higher and higher levels of complexity, and consciousness emerges from the evolutionary soup. It is a continual process of self-organization through self-transcendence, in which self transcends itself to recognize and join other in higher embrace. Love by any other name. The evolutionary ladder continues to spiral to ever-higher and deeper levels of complexity and consciousness. Each higher level is always defined by ever-higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union, and embrace between the evolving cells and organisms. Plants, amphibians, mammals, then higher mammals, until we get to the full bloom of human consciousness. This is the Great Story of One Love: Evolutionary Love.

Your Unique Self (in press)

Dr. Marc Gafni

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

In our previous post we introduced a provocative Hebrew wisdom masters koan, “Great is teshuva, for in it intentional sins become great merits.”

Here is the first interpretation to help animate this koan in our lives.

First, there is the great erotic principle of yearning. Sin in Hebrew mysticism is a force of separation and division. Sin separates the human being from her divine source. The further you pull away, the more powerfully the force to return builds. As Isaac Newton said, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The greater the separation, the deeper and more powerful is the yearning to return. (Imagine a rubber band that is pulled taut and then released.) The energy of the fall is transformed into yearning, and the person winds up being a much better person than had they never fallen. In this way through the process of teshuva–implying recognition, regret, and future commitment–intentional sins are transformed into virtues.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 300

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

The body leads to the soul, and the soul leads back to the body.  “When I look at the I of my body I find the I of my soul.  When I look at the I of my soul I find the I of God.”

The Sufis have a wonderful saying–“Say your praise to Allah and tie your camel to a post.”  What this really means is, touch the fullness of God and let that inspire even the simplest service.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 324

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Photo Credit: Chi Gong by I’m Daleth

By Marc Gafni

From Your  Unique Self:

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 your virtue, 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.

Photo Credit: the queen of subtle

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

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.

Photo Credit: Paul Gutman

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

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.

Photo Credit: Squiggle

By 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.

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self.

Excerpt from a dialogue with Bert Parlees and Marc Gafni:

• ”When we live on an Earth in which there’s enough food and resources to feed us all five times over, and 20 million children die of starvation every year, and we’re talking about being sane? Normal consciousness is insane. ”
• So enlightenment is about sanity. Sanity is about love. Love is about the force of attraction. Love is about mutuality, recognition, union and embrace. Love is the realization that we’re all bound by invisible lines of connection; that we’re all part of a larger whole; and if you’re not eating, then I’m starving.
• ”So enlightenment is about love. And the way to get to love is to love your way to enlightenment. What does that mean? We’ll talk about that later.
• ”The difference between “Bert” and “Marc” – we’re both men, about the same height and weight, same general age category. To mistake between me and Bert is a pretty minor mistake. A few details here and there. Basically, we’re the same general genre happening. It’s not that blatant of insanity.
• ”But to actually mistake your separate self as being all you are, and not realize that you are a True Self, which is an in- eradicable and indivisible part of the seamless coat of the universe? The gap between that lack of realization, that illusion, that limited sense of self? That’s truly insanity. So that’s enlightenment, and it’s why we care about enlightenment.

Read the whole transcription: Newest Thinking on Unique Self, from a dialogue with Bert Parlee and Marc Gafni, at the recent Integral Leadership Collaborative>>>

… you can move beyond your ego, your ego which is your separate self, your small self,  you can evolve beyond your exclusive identification with your ego and you can realize, oh my God, Oh. My. God., oh my, I am part of the divine.  Oh my, I feel in myself this love welling up, this care for someone else welling up.  I am crying in a movie, I see a flower that just blows me out of my mind, I have this deep yearning for someone outside of me,  to connect and be with that person, I feel this deep empathy and this deep open-heart space when I see that someone suffers.  I have this great joy when I know that I have done the right thing …

Anyplace where you are regarded only as a function, where your name is not known and honored, you are a slave. Anytime you regard another as a mere instrument in your design, you become a slave master and an oppressor. To be a lover is to know the name. It can be the name of the waiter, the taxi driver, of your accountants’ son or of the mailman’s wife. By remembering the name, you become a lover.

Marc Gafni
The Mystery of Love
page 225

Your Unique Self is radically singular, gorgeous, and special in the world. But it is even more then that. Your Unique Self is a puzzle piece that is utterly necessary to complete a much larger puzzle. The Unique contours of your puzzle piece are what allow you to connect with and offer your gift to all-that-is. Giving your puzzle piece unto the world adds an irreducible dimension to the completedeness of the kosmos.

Paradoxically, uniqueness is the currency of connection. It is the portal to the larger evolutionary context that needs your service. But it is even more then that. Your Unique Self is evolution waking up as you. Your Unique Self is animated by its puzzle piece nature. As such it is naturally connected to a larger context that it uniquely completes. It is paradoxically through the unique contours of your Unique Self nature that the alienation of separation is overcome. Unique self is the source code of all authentic relationships; and it is only through a fraternity and sisterhood of Unique Selves that we can begin to bring profound and loving transformation into the world.

To read the complete article go to:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/essential-world-spirituality-teaching/