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Daily Wisdom Post: Unique Self and Unique Shadow, by 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


More on Unique Self

Evolution of Love, Marc Gafni — Nov. 11 – 13 and Nov. 15, 2011 · Dr. Russ Volckmann and Dr. Marc Gafni Dialogue on Leadership and Unique Self · Dr. Marc Gafni


Daily Wisdom Post: Unique Self and Unique Shadow, by Dr. Marc Gafni2026-06-10T03:29:15-07:00

Daily Wisdom Post: The Alchemy of Love

“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


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Daily Wisdom: Joy (Chiyut) · Dr. Russ Volckmann and Dr. Marc Gafni Dialogue on Leadership and Unique Self · Dr. Marc Gafni


Daily Wisdom Post: The Alchemy of Love2026-06-10T03:29:14-07:00

Daily Wisdom: Imagination

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


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Daily Wisdom: Joy (Chiyut) · Daily Wisdom: I NEED YOU · Dr. Marc Gafni


Daily Wisdom: Imagination2026-06-10T03:29:13-07:00

Daily Wisdom: From “Your Unique Self”

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-headshot-2012

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.


More on Unique Self

Exploring the Edge of Evolution Series with Mike Wombacher & Dustin DiPerna · Daily Wisdom: I NEED YOU · Dr. Marc Gafni


Daily Wisdom: From “Your Unique Self”2026-06-10T03:29:11-07:00

Daily Wisdom Post: Unique Self is God’s Love-signature written all over 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?”


More on Unique Self

Exploring the Edge of Evolution Series with Mike Wombacher & Dustin DiPerna · Daily Wisdom: “Through my flesh I vision God.” · Dr. Marc Gafni


Daily Wisdom Post: Unique Self is God’s Love-signature written all over you2026-06-10T03:29:10-07:00

Evolution of Love, Marc Gafni — Nov. 11 – 13 and Nov. 15, 2011

Evolution of Love

by Marc Gafni

Are you ready to participate consciously in the Evolution of Love?

If you are then come to study and practice with spiritual luminary Dr. Marc Gafni.

For registration Click Here

More info on Venwoude

Short video

Dates:
3 day workshop 11-13th nov 2011
1 day workshop 15th nov 2011

“I love you.”

Consider the impact that these words””spoken in the right place, at the right time, by the right person, in the right way””have had on your life. In our time, so many of the old words of the sacred have lost their capacity to move us, dethroned by the rigorous critiques of modernity and postmodernity. But the authentic expression of love always holds a radical power to touch and even transform our lives.

We sometimes wait our whole lives to hear “I love you” spoken with total authenticity.

We may wait even longer to be able to say it. But to hear or speak these words sincerely is a complete affirmation of all that is sacred. For many of us today, the words “love” and “meaning” are virtually indistinguishable.

Yet, what do we mean by “love”? Is love simply the tender feeling you have for a friend or a relative, a lover, or a spouse? Or is there something more profound about love’s meaning, something that accounts for its power to transform a life, in every way?

Love is more than just a feeling. Enlightened teachers through the ages have told us that love is the dynamic ground of all reality. If that’s true, then love can be seen as the actual force that drives evolution””the force the Greeks called Eros””as well as the enlivening joy that opens the heart.

So what is love, when we see it from both a personal and an evolutionary perspective? How do we find it, nurture it, and sustain it? Modern science and philosophy point out that all levels of reality are evolving. The world of today is wildly different then the world of yesterday. Matter, body, mind, and even spirit are in flux. When we understand the profound evolutionary context of life, we realize that love must be evolving as well.

Wow: The Evolution of Love

What a wild, important, and profound idea! Simply put: the meaning, purpose, and vision of love is changing. In our time, the great truths about love””taught in different languages by teachers of every tradition are being re-shaped by modern and postmodern considerations. In this unique conversation, we engage these truths through an Integral lens.

The Essence of Relationship is Love

Some hold Love to be the animating core of all of reality. Love is the Eros that drives evolution, even as it is the joy that moves our heart and fills our being. And, put simply: if all levels of reality evolve, then love must evolve as well!

This Evolution Needs Your Participation

We are gathering at Venwoude to explore and experience: The Future of Love – Evolutionary Integral Relationships to transform our “love lives” on a personal level and map a vision of where relationships will evolve for all humankind.

Guiding Inquiries

  • ”In an evolving universe, and in our evolving lives, what is the future of love and relationship?
  • ”As you evolve personally, how do you tap the great depth and fire locked inside each of your relationships?
  • ”How do you turn your relationships into the ultimate spiritual practice?
  • ”What startling insights and possibilities come alive for you when your relationships are seen through an Integral evolutionary context?
  • ”How do your relationships””your friendships, romantic partnerships, organizational encounters, and spiritual connections””help raise your level of consciousness as an individual? And how do you help raise others?
  • ”What is your totally unique way of being in relationship and what unique practices should you be doing to make your relationships even better?
  • ”What do the great wisdom traditions reveal about the “second person of spirit”””and how do we move beyond myths of the traditions while living more of the meaning?

Workshop Marc Gafni
November 15th
Integral Leadership: Your Unique Gift.

Every human being has a particular set of gifts that they can offer in the world. What are your unique gifts? The nature of the gift, like the perspective held by every human being, is utterly unique. The ability to offer this gift freely in the world depends on our ability to free ourselves of limiting and false notions of who we are, and identify with our larger service. Some of our gifts are modest, private, and intimate ””some are larger than life and have dramatic impact in the public sphere. However, every Unique Gift arises and may be offered in all four quadrants. From a non-dual perspective, your unique gift creates your unique obligation. In the language of one teacher of Unique Self, Man’s deed is God’s need.

God needs your service. God, in the first, second, and third person, needs your service. To live your Unique Self and offer your Unique Gifts is to align yourself with the evolutionary impulse and fulfill your evolutionary obligation as a Lover.

Living as an Evolutionary Lover is the passionate path of the New Enlightenment. The way you make this path real and alive in your life is by identifying and giving your Unique Gifts. Buddhism teaches the Enlightenment of Emptiness. To do this you must dis-identify with you personality story. And this is fully half the story.

The second half of the story is the Enlightenment of Fullness. To realize the enlightenment of fullness you must fully inhabit, embody and Live Your Story.

There are four key steps in this process:
  1. Evolve beyond exclusive identification with ego
  2.  Take off the mask of your particular false self
  3. Identify your Unique Gift
  4. Begin to give your Unique Gift in the world

More on Marc Gafni

Simplicity Beyond Complexity: The Question Is the Answer (A Response to Suffering) by Marc Gafni · Daily Wisdom: “Through my flesh I vision God.” · Dr. Marc Gafni


Evolution of Love, Marc Gafni — Nov. 11 – 13 and Nov. 15, 20112026-06-10T03:29:07-07:00

Exploring the Edge of Evolution Series with Mike Wombacher & Dustin DiPerna

Join Mike Wombacher and Dustin DiPerna for a series of three discussions in which they will compare the perspectives of the Integral lens and the lens of Evolutionary Enlightenment on three key issues of this emerging new worldview.

The evenings are designed to maximize engagement and intersubjective emergence. Mike and Dustin will set the course for each evening with a 15 to 20 minute discussion in which they will explore various themes related to the evening’s topic. Each night there will be opportunities to be part of a smaller group discussion as well as a larger discussion group facilitated by Mike and Dustin.

The emphasis will be on exploration, discovery and evolved intersubjective engagement as we all build our understanding through collective inquiry into the subtleties of this emerging new worldview. We hope you can join us for this exploration and exercise in community building…and please feel free to bring an interested friend!

Join us in a collective exploration of creative friction as we dive into:

Part 1: The Evolutionary & Integral Context – Thursday, June 9
Part 2: The Unique Self & The Authentic Self – Tuesday, June 28
Part 3: The Evolutionary Approach to Shadow &
The Integral Approach to Shadow – Thursday, July 14
Save the dates!

Rudramandir in the Lotus Room
830 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA

Cost – $15 per date
Special Price if you purchase all 3 nights – $39

Register here

*This event is sponsored by The Center for World Spirituality, EnlightenNext, and Bay Area integral.


More on Mike Wombacher

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Exploring the Edge of Evolution Series with Mike Wombacher & Dustin DiPerna2026-06-10T03:28:59-07:00

Now Accepting Private Students

Step into the Heart of World Spirituality Trans-lineage Practice…

Contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org  for private study or to book a public teaching

The future of our world depends on the great realization of love: that which unites us is infinitely greater then that which divides us. For the first time in the history of the human race, we are able to rise beyond the place of our birth, our religion of origin, our family circle and choose to live our highest truth. This truth transcends and includes all of our personal history even as it invites us to our singular and unique evolutionary destiny.

The Spiritual teaching for this age must be drawn from all of the great traditions of Spirit, pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. These great understandings must be lovingly integrated into a space of open heart, community and insight that has the power and the compassion to guide us on the next stage of our personal and global journey.

The lineages are the great teachings of Spirit developed by the great communities and masters of all the ages, in all parts of the world. Translineage means that we are moving towards transcending and including the Great Heart, Mind, and Body truths of all these lineages into an evolutionary integral Spiritual teaching. This is a down to earth, elegant, gorgeous teaching which embraces* all facets of your Unique Life.

Until very recently, you, like many other people received the lineage transmission of the Spiritual system that was dominant in your place of birth. You may have received it consciously. More likely, like most people in modernity, you received it unconsciously.

By lineage transmission we mean the absorption into your being of the great ideas, insights, maps, heart and mind knowings of a great tradition of Spirit, by whose lights you could orient and guide your life.

Usually the Spiritual transmission that you received was confused and diluted at best. You did not know quite how to integrate the apparently contradictory insights of modernity and post- modernity with what you understood to be the great truths of the wisdom traditions.

Considerations

What are the lodestones that can guide your ethical, Spiritual, and psychological journey through life?

Or…

Are you tragically destined *to stumble around on your own, alienated and isolated from larger currents and contexts of meaning?

How do you integrate the deep knowing of your heart aflame with the sober detachment of third-person study such as Science?

How do you weave together your profound desire for the Eros of sacred community with the prized autonomy and vaunted pseudo-skepticism of Western education?

And if you are to find your way back to the space of inner insight held by the lineages, which lineage to choose?

Historically you have been limited to the particular truth of your lineage. The problem is that this particular truth all too often seemed to deny or contradict many of the intuitively important teachings you heard from other paths.

You responded to this conscious or unconscious confusion on one of three core ways.

1. Sometimes you abandoned Spirit altogether and turned to the brilliant- if flatland – guides * of third-person objective knowledge. You looked to psychology to guide your inner process and for relational love to illuminate your heart. You looked to science to provide order and implicit meaning in your life.

But it did not quite work.

You greatly honored the wisdom of science. You appreciated the dignities it afforded you. Yet it’s flatland limitation and exterior functional orientation could never address the deepest yearning of your heart. **Without a firm grounding in the depth of Spirit you expected too much from your “Special Relationship”. In fact you became addicted to your “Special Relationship” expecting it to be a panacea for all of your dis-ease. The result: Your Special Relationship collapsed under the weight of pressure it was never meant to bare.

2. Sometimes you abandoned the core insights of modernity and post-modernity and aligned yourself with the goods of an old religion.

Even though you knew that it did not quite all hang together…

In your calculus, the goods of community, ethical guidance and personal relationship with the source of all being outweighed the shadows of the religious system you chose.

So you compartmentalized your life with the modern and post-modern person showing up in the world and the pre-modern old time religionist showing up at home and in church.
More often then not you took the third way.

3. You became a dilettante consumer of Spirituality from wherever you could get it.  At the same time that  you absorbed the truth of modern science you imbibed  the post-modern critiques of all objective truth. You never really worked it out. Your heart sometimes opened, but most of the time remained closed. You had occasional wondrous experiences of community, but most of the time you were alone. You were not sure how to even begin to integrate your Spiritual knowing and beliefs into a coherent system by which to guide your life. So you latched on to some aphorisms, perhaps a practice here and there and started to try and navigate your way through life. (more…)

Now Accepting Private Students2026-06-10T03:05:56-07:00

Series Finale: The Future of Love – Walk the Talk of Love with Ken Wilber & Marc Gafni- Dec. 18th!

The Future of Love: Walk the Talk of Love
with Ken Wilber and Dr. Marc Gafni
Rescheduled
Saturday, December 18th
11-12:30pm PT, 12-1:30pm MT, 2-3:30pm ET
Find your time zone here

Hi friends,

Doesn’t it feel like we just started the “Future of Love” conversation? And here we are, already wrapping up our 6-month series on December 18th with our favorite pandit, Ken Wilber, dialoguing with Dr. Marc Gafni. During these past six months we’ve heard from some of the world’s leading Lamas, Rinpoches, Swamis, Rabbis, Pandits, Zen Masters, Fortune 500 CEO’s, Artists, Musicians, Couples Experts, Yogis and Yoginis, and more””all discussing the Future of Love with our Integral Evolutionary community.

On behalf of Integral Spiritual Experience, Integral Life, and iEvolve: Global Practice Community, it’s been an honor to host and participate in this global We-Space of Love. We are humbled and gratified by the influence our Future of Love teleseries has generated in the larger spiritual community. It could not have happened without your full participation.

Since the inception of Integral Spiritual Experience over two years ago, we have seen a beautiful evolution of Integral discourse and community. Initiated by Ken, Marc, Diane, Sally, and Robb, ISE has reshaped the Integral conversation with the teachings of Unique Self, The Future of Love, and more. Love has become a central part of the evolutionary conversation and in reality we have together realized that love and integral are one and the same. Again, we thank you deeply for your participation.

For those of you who are interested in taking a deeper dive into the Future of Love, you are personally invited to join us at Integral Spiritual Experience 2: The Future of Love – Evolutionary Integral Relationships. Nothing can top our last six months together like getting offline and practicing with one another face-to-face and heart-to-heart.

Let’s take theory into practice at Integral Spiritual Experience 2!

We hope you join us Saturday, December 18th for the series finale of the Future of Love teleseries with Ken Wilber and Dr. Marc Gafni. In this dialogue Ken and Marc will pick-up where they left off, discussing Love as the very Eros of Evolution. They will explore the deepest meaning of Love and provide a theoretical framework for Integral Love Practice, as well as offer a guided meditation to move the climax of our series from talking about Love to engaging Love as a spiritual practice. This is a dialogue not to be missed!

With love,

Kelly Sosan Bearer
Executive Producer
The Future of Love Teleseries


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Series Finale: The Future of Love – Walk the Talk of Love with Ken Wilber & Marc Gafni- Dec. 18th!2026-06-10T03:28:53-07:00

The Future of Love

It seems like just yesterday we gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California for year one of the Integral Spiritual Experience. If you attended or heard about what transpired, you know that the collective intention of the 500+ participants led by teachers like Ken Wilber, Dr. Marc Gafni, Sally Kempton, Lama Surya Das, and Jean Houston raised the energetic roof on a new era in Integral Spirituality gatherings, diving deeply into our Unique Selves. It’s a tough act to follow, but in this extraordinary dialogue, Ken and Marc set the context for the Integral Spiritual Experience Year 2 exploration entitled: The Future of Love – Evolutionary Integral Relationships.

Who doesn’t want to transform their love lives with husbands, wives, partners, family members, and friends? In this dialogue Ken and Marc explore “The Miracle of We”, the space of mutuality that so defines our human experience. When we look into the eyes of love, who is really looking back at us? Are we just separate selves desperately seeking companionship, or are we perhaps each a unique expression of Spirit itself?

In this lively exchange Ken and Marc dive into the following questions:

  • What is love?
  •  How do we find it, nurture and sustain it?
  •  How does our conscious participation change the evolution of love?
  •  What are the structural patterns in the Evolution of Love?
  • What are the evolutionary Integral skills of love and relationship that have the power to deepen our realization and to liberate our true and unique self?
  •  What new gifts for the world can emerge from this evolution?

Click here for more information on Integral Spiritual Experience Year 2: The Future of Love.

Ken WilberKen Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the “everything” books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work).  Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc., the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc., and the Senior Fellow of Integral Life Spiritual Center.

Marc-Gafni Color-300x224SquareDr. Marc Gafni holds his doctorate from Oxford University. He is a rabbi and an iconoclastic teacher of Kabbalah and World Spirituality. He is the director with Ken Wilber, Sally Kempton and Diane Hamilton of the Integral Life Spiritual Center and core founder and faculty member of iEvolve: Global Practice Community. He has written seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints, and The Mystery of Love, an exploration of the relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the sacred. Gafni’s teaching is marked by a deep transmission of open heart, love and leading edge provocative wisdom. Gafni’s path of personal evolution, in both the agony and the ecstasy of what he calls “sacred autobiography,” woven together with profound reverence and reading of sacred texts have formed the context for his teaching. It is from this place of broken-hearted humility, radical joy and sacred audacity that he teaches. Gafni is considered by many to be a visionary voice in the founding of a new World Spirituality.

*Originally posted on Integral Life


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The Future of Love2026-06-10T03:28:43-07:00

The Future of Love Teleseries

Participate in the Future of Love Teleseries!

“I Love You.”

Consider the impact that these words””spoken in the right place, at the right time, by the right person, in the right way””have had on your life. In our time, so many of the old words of the sacred have lost their capacity to move us, dethroned by the rigorous critiques of modernity and post modernity.  But the authentic expression of love always holds a radical power to touch and even transform our lives.

We sometimes wait our whole lives to hear “I love you” spoken with total authenticity.

We may wait even longer to be able to say it. But to hear or speak these words sincerely is a complete affirmation of all that is sacred. For many of us today, the words ”˜love’ and ”˜meaning’  are virtually indistinguishable.

Yet, what do we mean by “love”? Is love simply the tender feeling you have for a friend or a relative, a lover or a spouse? Or is there something more profound about love’s meaning, something that accounts for its power to transform a life, in every way?

Love is more than just a feeling. Enlightened teachers through the ages have told us that love is the dynamic ground of all reality. If that’s true, then love can be seen as the actual force that drives evolution””the force the Greeks called Eros””as well as the enlivening joy that  opens the heart.

So what is love, when we see it from both a personal and an evolutionary perspective? How do we find it, nurture it, and sustain it?

Modern science and philosophy point out that all levels of reality are evolving. The world of today is wildly different then the world of yesterday.  Matter, body, mind and even spirit are in flux. When we understand the profound evolutionary context of life, we realize that love must be evolving as well. (more…)

The Future of Love Teleseries2026-06-10T03:28:45-07:00
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