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/
Interconnectivity, the fullness of presence, the inside of God’s face, the yearning force of being, they all characterize our experience of Union. This is enlightenment. Yet for the Hebrew mystic if Union does not lead us to compassion and great love then we have missed the point. The medieval intellectual mystic Maimonides wrote a great book of mystical philosophy, Guide for the Perplexed. In the last sentences, after the book reaches its erotic crescendo (Cheshek, meaning “raw sensual passion” is the Hebrew translation of the Arabic term employed by Maimonides), he appends an implicit postscript. Paraphrasing: If all this doesn’t make you a better lover of people then you are no lover of God and certainly no lover of your self. Eros must always lead to ethics.
The human being begins her journey as part of the circle of nature. In the creation story of Genesis 1, man and woman are created as part of the natural order. Ancient myth reflected this circle of being, in which mortals and immortals, humans and Gods, and all of nature participated together. This is the circle of eros.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 323
The Eros of evolution is love. Seen from the outside, it is what Erich Jantsch refers to as “self-organization through self-transcendence.” The individual “self” of an atom trance-ends itself. The trance of separation is broken, and the individual atom organizes itself as part of a larger molecule. A new identity as a molecule is formed even as the old identity as an atom is not lost. Rather, the core mechanism of self-organization through self-transcendence is “transcend and include.” The atom transcends itself to a higher level of complexity, even as its core identity is not lost, but rather expanded and evolved. It is this internal drive within matter that, according to Jantsch and many other leading-edge theorists, moves evolution to ever-higher unions, through ever-higher levels of complexity. From quarks to atoms to cells to molecules, onward and upward Teilhard de Chardin, Abraham Kook, and many other evolutionary mystics point out that complexity is but the outside view.
The interior””not addressed by Jantsch or any of the chaos theorists””reveals that the higher the level of outer physical complexity, the more evolved the inner depth of consciousness. What emerges is that the movement of evolution is the movement to ever-higher levels of complexity and consciousness. At this point, the eye of the mind has reached its limits. Now, a new faculty of perception enters our conversation, what the Christian mystics called the “eye of the spirit,” what the Sufi teacher Rumi called the “eye of the heart,” and what Hebrew mystics called the “hidden eye.” The eye of the spirit, deployed throughout recorded time by the great realizers in all the traditions, in a great double-blind experiment of spirit, always revealed the same inner picture. The eye of the spirit sees clearly that the inner fabric of consciousness is none other than love. It would therefore be entirely accurate to say that the Eros of evolution is none other than the force of love.
Your Unique Self (in press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 110, 111
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
In a globally interconnected world, one person acting alone or a small group of ignorant individuals has the ability to literally destroy humanity. This is a pointing-out instruction by the universal love-intelligence. Said simply, reality is telling us something that we desperately need to know. The lesson is clear for better and for worse, the age of ruling elites, be they spiritual or political, is over.
Democracy is the evolutionary unfolding of love-intelligence in our era. It began with the democratization of govern-ments. Now it must move to the democratization of enlightenment, and enlightenment of your True Self beyond personality and ego, which then expresses itself in the full glory and power of your Unique Self.
Enlightenment is a genuine possibility, and therefore a sacred obligation, for every single person. You are not obligated from without. You are obligated in love by your own highest possibility.
Marc Gafni
Center for World Spirituality
First we need to claim our body as part of our core identity. “Through my body I vision God,” a verse from the biblical book of Job, is one of the most important mantras of the Kabbalists. Nineteenth-century master Elimelech of Lishensk teaches that only by trusting our body can we decipher the word of God.
The second step in the redemption of Shechina would be to reclaim all of my psyche. This includes the furthest reaches of consciousness, including the unconscious. You must embrace all of your light as well as all of your darkness. Any part of me that I split off and reject is in exile. By placing it on the outside, I am emptying my self. The more I place on the outside, the more empty I become. Using the Shechina language of our quest, I de-eroticize my self. My life becomes boring, vapid, and empty. The more of my psyche I include on the inside, the more erotic I become, and the “holier” I become. To be holy = to be erotic = to be on the inside.
Biblical myth expresses the same idea in the language of love. There are three love mantras in biblical myth: Love God; Love yourself; Love the stranger. Deeply understood, all three are of course the same thing. To love yourself is to love all of you–the God in you and the stranger in you.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 315
The third century Babylonian myth masters say it like this: “There are three names in a person’s life. The name his mother and father called him, the name his friends call him, and the name he owns himself.” The choice of words here is important. We are called by names–that is to say names are the chorus of our calling.
First, there are the names on our birth certificates usually given to us by our parents. Then, there are all sorts of names given to us by our community. These may start with the affectionate or not so affectionate baby names we are called by our parents. They include the nicknames given by brothers, sisters, extended family or friends. Included in this category are also the cruel and jeering names of childhood that sometimes leave scars for life. Finally, there are the names that we choose for ourselves, sometimes leaving behind an old name and choosing a new one which better reflects who we have become as life unfolded.
Soul Print Hints
See whole article>>>
The third stage to which Hebrew mysticism invites us–each in our own way–is the experience of unity consciousness as the guiding principle of our lives. This is the final stage on our journey. It is an invitation to Aleph consciousness. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In Hebrew each letter is also a number. So Aleph is echad, one. Aleph has no sound of its own.
Aleph is the ecstasy that is beyond. It is an invitation to the highest and deepest part of your soul, which is part of the oneness of God. Experience it, even for a moment, and your life will never be quite the same again.
Now the mystery of love can be fully revealed. Love is the perception of the essential oneness of all of reality. The Hebrew mantra of the Shema–“listen so that you know God is one”–is in biblical myth law the only prayer mantra that one recites every day. This Shema mantra is directly preceded by the word love and directly followed by the word love. A love sandwich.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 307
Love is a radical redrawing of boundaries and complete revisioning of the whole notion of self-interest. A revisioning is, of course, a deepening of perception. The truth is, we all know that our narrow definition of the self–closed behind the walls of the ego–is not our highest truth.
The underlying metaphysics are really quite simple. We are made of divine substance. This is the homo imago dei that biblical myth speaks of, which teaches us that every life is sacred. “There is no place devoid of Him,” writes the Zohar. “I am the light that illumines all things. I am all. Split a piece of wood and I am there; pick up a stone and you will find me there,” teaches the Gospel of Thomas. To love is to perceive the infinite divinity in everyone and everything.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 309
In the ecstasy of the festival the pilgrim reaches the consciousness which moves him to cry out, “If I am here all is here.” The Zohar explains that if I who am the Shechina is here then all is here. The description is one of virtual unio mystica. A shift in perception takes place in which the individual leaves his isolating identity behind and imagines himself as part of the divine body. This results not in a loss of self but in the total reinvigoration of self as an infinitely unique reflection of God’s face. When the pilgrim feels seen and loved, he is able to open his heart and let it overflow in joy. He himself becomes a lover. That joy and love, writes the medieval sage Maimonides, must express itself in acts of kindness and love, which he in turn does for others.
The pilgrim becomes a lover once again. He is able to love himself, God, the world, and most importantly, his community and family.
This is the essence of the Holy of Holies: to become a lover and a seer. To love is to become God’s verb. To love is to see with God’s eyes.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 126, 127
The core intuition of all the great systems of the spirit is that love and eros are captured best by the image of light. The Kabbalah teachers say that the light that fills the vessels of creation is love. The word Torah itself –an all-encompassing Hebrew term meant to refer to all divine wisdom–means “light.” (The root of Torah is orah, which is the Hebrew word for light, which is also the basis for the English word aura.)
When you give in love, much like a candle, you are able to illuminate many people without ever losing any of your own luminescence. Giving love only creates more.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 133
The Kabbalists were often referred to as mistaklim or chozim, roughly translated as the Looker or Seers. To get a handle on what that might mean, just imagine how we feel when someone looks at us with erotic, loving eyes. We feel energized, uplifted, and embraced. We become more vibrant, audacious, and alive. We feel safer in the world. The sense of alienation, separateness, and loneliness of our empty days and painful nights seems to lift.
The more steady the loving gaze is, the more we can steady ourselves and chart our direction and purpose on the path of being. It begins with the loving eyes of mother and father–our first lovers–and continues throughout our lives. Love’s eyes sustain us, nourish us, and connect us to the essential aliveness that courses through the universe. Being seen makes us alove and alive. The same is true of God. The gaze of the mystic sustains and even “creates” God.
Once a few years back, my son Yair walked into the room. He sat and started playing with his Gameboy. I began looking at him, but really looking, perceiving him, loving him, with all my heart pouring out through my eyes. I was seeing every beautiful detail of his being as he sat there innocently playing. Suddenly he started singing. Yair singing?! A rarity. Could it have been from my love pouring out in his direction? He got up and sort of danced his way out of the room. Yair dancing?!
Well, proper scientific data it is not. But it was enough for me. It was exhilarating! Since then I have done this practice in a thousand different places–in streets, lecture halls, pubs, churches, libraries and synagogues. As a result, the world has been much more full of singing and dancing. I realized that a loving gaze can transform reality. We call this in formal theology imatatio dei, the imitation of the divine force. Just as God looked lovingly into the darkness and there was light, just as God’s gaze made it good, so too can our loving perception transform darkness into light and chaos into harmony. Try it!
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 125, 126
Of course, to remind another of their full beauty you have to be fully aware of your own. The Baal Shem Tov has a wonderful teaching on the biblical mandate “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” First it is a statement of fact–you love your neighbor precisely as much as you love yourself. For in the end, you can only perceive another’s greatness if you have glimpsed and believe in your own. Self-love is self-perception.
If this is so, then a powerful question arises. How do you love yourself when you know all of your foibles, pathologies and blemishes? Isn’t self-love self-perception? And does not honest perception yield forth all of the reasons why we are not lovable? And yet most of us manage, at least to some degree, to love ourselves. Is it just self-deception? No, not at all. Love is not merely perception, it is a perception-identification complex. Self-perception means that although you are aware of the full complexity of your personae–the good, the bad, and the ugly–you identify the essence of who you are with your good–your good, loving, giving, creative, and generous self.
That does not mean that you deny your beast. It is, of course, critical to integrate all of you into your self picture. To love yourself is to identify yourself as part of the Shechina. Writes the Baal Shem Tov, “To love yourself is to love the Shechina.” Not to love yourself is to send the Shechina into exile. So proclaim the Kabbalists, to which Rumi adds:
By God, when you see your beauty
You will be the idol of yourself.
In your deepest nature you must know that you are the hero of your story. In your deepest nature you are love and grace and strength and splendor. Now you must decide to identify with your deepest nature. Do you focus on your innocence or your guilt? Do you focus on your ever-inevitably dirty hands, or on your ever-eternally pure soul? To love yourself or anyone else, you need to know that your innocence is your essence. That you always remain worthy of love. That your innocence is never lost.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 121, 122
A word in the Zohar used for those souls who are living their story is lechisah, meaning “whisper.” To live your story is to be able to hear the intimate whisper of divinity erotically caressing your life. We are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Paul Tillich reminds us that we can only hear through the love that listens. Buber captured the spirit of biblical myth when he wrote, “To live means being addressed.”
To live one’s story is erotic in the resonance of its melody and the fullness of its canvas. The world, when we are in our story, is no longer empty. The soul is not here just pay back karmic debts. It has a contribution to make from the depth of its infinite specialness. Through making that contribution a human being feels ful-filled. That is the eros of living one’s story.
The universe is full of whispers, and they are talking directly to you. And here is the paradox–the more you act as if you are being addressed, the more you will be. The world is filled with soul print hints. It may be the lyrics of a song, a sign on a building, an old friend you meet after years of not seeing each other, or a book that grabs your attention and demands to be read.
Each person has their unique talent, pleasure, obligation, form of silliness, and pathology. These are all personal soul print hints that direct you toward living your story.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 243, 244
Calling out “the Name” is evoked the world over in greetings. The Spanish hello–hola–originated in Arab Spain from the term “O’Allah” — Allah of course being the Arab appellation of God. In Austrian German they say Gruss God. In Hebrew, the common response when asked how you are doing is Baruch Hashem–Praise God, or Thank God. The Hebrew greeting Shalom is actually a name of God. In English, we still follow this custom when we part from someone and say “Godspeed” or “God be with you.”
In a wonderful and mysterious passage, the wisdom masters talk of a special decree made nearly three thousand years ago. It taught that one should greet his friend with the name of God. Although the Third Commandment proscribes such “idle use” of God’s name, this new law legislated special permission to use the divine name in casual greeting. The source for the decree is said to be the verse “In a time to do for the Name (God) you may override the Torah.”
The idea underlying the decree is very powerful. To greet a person, we are allowed to use the sacred name of God, which is never taken in vain, because to greet a person is to recognize them, to perceive them. Perception is healing through love, for there is nothing more painful than anonymity. Love, you remember, is the perception of the infinite divine specialness in other!
You came to a party alone. No one recognizes you for several long minutes. You feel forlorn, alienated. Then someone taps you on the shoulder and calls your name in warm welcome. The world is transformed. You have been recognized, perceived. Called by name!
Of course, true recognition is deeper than a mere greeting. It requires a true knowing, receiving, and even merging with the name. This is what happens when the Name (God’s and the beloved’s) is called at the height of sensual passion. If the passion is situated in the context of a shared story and commitment, then the calling of the Name in the cherublike embrace of sexuality is the ultimate transcending of loneliness, both for the lover and the beloved.
Minimally, however, the wisdom masters write that we must greet each other with the Name. The simple and correct reading of the text indicates that they are referring to the name of God. But on some deeper level, the Name they refer to is none other than the Name of the person being greeted. In this powerful rereading the new decree is that no person should remain anonymous. Every person should be called by their Name. Never allow yourself to be served by someone without knowing their Name. In knowing the Name of the waiter serving you there is a fixing and healing of God’s Name.
It is a time to fix divinity. To create God. God is created by revealing the infinite divine in every person. God’s name is emptied when people live without having their Names recognized, without being called by Name. So the wisdom masters decree, “Greet every man with the Name.” The Name of God and the Name of the blessed and beautiful individual before you, for they are one and the same.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 237, 238
The ultimate model for reality is the divine. The most central teaching of the Kabbalah is that God’s highest gift to world is to receive the human being as a partner in the perfection of the world. God allows himself, as it were, to need us.
This is God’s ultimate gift to humanity. It is therefore not at all surprising to learn that the very word Kabbalah means to receive – for to receive in imitation of God is the highest level of giving – and is thus the most profound form of spiritual service.
A friend and colleague tells a wonderful story about going to a class in Kabbalah. The teacher handed him an apple. He stretched out his hand to take it. No, said the master withdrawing the apple. This process repeated itself several times until my friend finally understood. Instead of stretching forth his hand to take the apple he cupped his hand to receive the apple. And this is the essence of Jewish mysticism – to be a vessel, Kabbalah, to receive.
Certainty and Uncertainty
Dr. Marc Gafni
Each one of these ten levels of divine presence represents another dimension of God in our world. They are referred to as the Ten Sefirot. When we perform a commandment, says Luria, we participate in one of these levels of the divine.
Indeed the mystical writers point out that the word Mitzvah has more than one meaning. Simply of course it mans commandment. The human in doing a mitzvah is thus seen as responding to a divine command which comes from outside the human being.
There is however a second sense of the word Mitzvah. It means Tzavtah – to be together with. When one performs a mitzvah one literally merges with divinity. One is together with God. Each Mitzvah in the mystical understanding moves me toward merger with a different Sefira, a different level of divinity. However, says Luria, we are only able to participate in the lowest seven levels. The human being, trapped in mortality, can never touch the highest three levels of divinity in this world. And yet one word can reach the heights. Ayeh.
Ayeh in Hebrew has three letters, alef, yod, hey. Alef, says Luria, is the letter that represents Keter – the divine crown, the highest sefirah – level of divinity in the world. Yod represents Chochmah – wisdom, the second highest level. And Hey is Binah – intuitive understanding, the third highest level. When the human being cries out to God in uncertainty – ayeh – he expresses the highest three levels of divinity and in so doing reaches beyond his mortal limits to touch “the highest.” Luria affirms that the expression of uncertainty in God does not contradict spirituality, but rather is the highest expression of the human search for divine connection.
Ayeh – where are you – the ultimate uncertainty – is then the highest level of religious authenticity.
… there is no person who does not possess Unique Gifts that respond to unique needs. From a nondual perspective, it is your Unique Gift that creates your Unique Obligation. To live your Unique Self and offer your Unique Gifts is to align yourself with the evolutionary impulse and fulfill your evolutionary obligation. The realization of your Unique Self awakens you to the truth that there is a Unique Gift that your singular being and becoming offers the world, which is desperately needed by all that is, and can be given by you and you alone. There is no more powerful and joyous realization available to a human being. It is the matrix of meaning that fills your life and is the core of your Unique Self enlightenment.
Your Unique Self
(in press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 33
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The goal of the erotic life is to engage every area of our lives with the mantra of lismah beating in our breasts. This means being fully present for each thing itself without needing always to justify our activity by recourse to some external gain. In the poetry of Hebrew mysticism this is referred to as taam haeitz ketaam haperi, meaning “the taste of the tree is as the taste of the fruit.” This phrase has its source in the delightful biblical creation myth where God commands the trees to be “trees of fruit which bear fruit.” The stunning implication of a precise reading of the divine instruction is that the tree itself, the bark, should also have the taste of the fruit. The point is, there should be no distinction between means and ends. A coarse tree that brought the fruit into being should share the very taste of its succulent fruit.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 218
“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.”
HERMANN HESSE
