3_Archives – General

Love is almost always proceeded by an act of will. We do not fall in love unless we decide to fall in love. Only after we internally give ourselves permission are we open to the experience. But once we open the gate, the radically pleasurable perception of falling in love, and the joy and wonder created in its wake, are given to us free of all charges. The Kabbalists refer to falling in love as “arousal from above.” The love granted to us is real enough; it is simply not the result of human effort. It is something which is aroused from beyond.

According to the Kabbalists, there is nothing malicious or even capricious about the whole enterprise. Falling in love is a gift from God, pure and simple. Falling in love is a divine gift from a God whose primary characteristic is love for Her creatures. God bestows upon us a gift of inner certainty and clarity.

On the other hand, the nature of such a gift is that it is too great for us to accept fully. We cannot hold the dazzling brilliance of the light” something shatters. We can touch the love for a time, but we lack the vessels to hold it.

Falling in love is actually the core of the Kabbalistic Big Bang myth. A close reading of Lurianic Kabbalah reveals the powerful meditative truth that the motive force of creation was God falling in love with the world. Out of that love emerges the universe. God emanates a world in love. The image for this emanation is light pouring into vessels. God “in love” with the world. The emanation of light just keeps pouring forth. The vessels, however, are unable to hold the light. They shatter. The process of living is to gather the sparks of this fallen light and to repair the broken vessels.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

The Kabbalists were often referred to as Mistaklim or Chozim, roughly translated as the Lookers 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 that tarred 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 the mother – our first lover – 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.

Indeed Israel for the Kabbalists is not merely a national group. The very word Israel is far more profoundly translated from the Hebrew as ”˜The one who sees God’. Love is Perception. Perception is creation. That is the power of the original appearance of the perception word Ra’ah in biblical myth. After every stage of the unfolding creation process in Genesis the text reads ‘God saw and It was Good.’

Mystic Luzatto reflects virtually the entire Kabbalistic tradition when he reminds us that the motive force for creation is divine love. ‘God saw that it was Good’ could be re-read as God loved – perception is love – and brought the world into being.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

The Kabbalists takes the mandate of love–implicit in self perception–one step further. I need to understand that not only am I a part of God but I am  also a partner to God.

Renaissance mystic Judah Loew of Prague writes that the litmus test of true love is mutuality. For him, this means that you love the person whom you complete and who completes you. Remember Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece” where a packman shaped circle roams the world in search of that singular pie sliver piece which will complete him?

We are all on that epic quest for our missing piece. Lovers fill each other up. For the Kabbalists, this concept became the springboard for what is perhaps the most radical idea in biblical mysticism.  God the lover needs us just as we need God. We are God’s missing piece. The call of love is an expression of this missing piece need. God says, “I can’t do it without you. Come be my partner!”

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

The unfolding of the universe entails full divine loving presence. The divine perspective changes to include human beings. It is an intimate relation of shared identity. We participate in God and God participates in us. The great mystery of reality is the mystery of intimacy. God is both erotically within me and beyond me at the selfsame moment. Touching and not touching. The intimacy of shared identity without losing the integrity of individuality. Two solitudes that share in a sublime moment of Sameness.

This is the first intimation of union and the beginning of all self-love.  This is the great audacious mystical certainty that underlies every great religion, even if its contemporary leaders have long forgotten its wisdom. The world is not a dead end material universe, where separate entities constantly collide and explode, where all is  accident and chance fated for meaningless destruction. It is not, in Shakespeare’s pathos-filled phrase, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Instead, it is an infinitely conscious, integrated whole, whose underlying fabric is love.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being – the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The move between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”

The truly great dancer – like all lovers – flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow.

The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina.

To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives – beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is.  It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety.

The worlds of music, dance, and, most of all, orgasm, allow us glimpses of our higher reality. Here again the sexual models the erotic. The erotic being the experience on the inside of reality, where all of being yearns for connection and every living thing knows that it has a patch called home, which is part of the great quilt of the universe. Love is the Eros of connection – the underlying interdependence of things, the bond between all living things, the emotional ether in which we all live.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

The language of God is man. We are not just God’s messengers, we are God’s language and voice, the means by which she shares her message. This idea becomes a little easier to access in light of quantum physics. One of the essential mind-bending breakthroughs in quantum physics is that the observer is part of the experiment. That is to say, the perceiver influences the outcome of the experiment. Said more broadly, perception not only observes reality, it creates reality. To say that love is perception  is therefore to say that love–far more than a mere emotion–is  the erotic creative force which in-forms all of being.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes”

– Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It was to this that Emerson referred when he said, “Love is the affirmative of the affirmatives.” Love is the universe shouting out a joyful yes when our names our called.

In Hebrew the word yes – Kein – means integrity. Yes is the ultimate affirmation of our integrity. The question of your existence is whether you can say yes to the adventure that is your life. That is self-love!  When you wake up to a beautiful day which is simply divine – when you eat a piece of carrot cake which is just out of this world then you experience the universe embracing your with a resounding YES.

e. e. cummings always succeeds in capturing life’s little quintessential affirmations. I quote:

I thank you God for this amazing
Day: for the leaping greenly spirit of trees
And a blue dream of sky; and for everything
Which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

It is said that the Great Maggid would convene his inner circle  every night to teach them the sacred texts. All of his greatest students would gather. The Maggid would begin to speak, “And God said” and Reb Zushya would leap up, overwhelmed with desire. He would yell out, “And God said! God said!” He would spin around and around like a leaf in the wind, and then faint, unconscious for the rest of the teaching. Every night it was the same thing. The other disciples would tease him, “Zushya, you’re missing all the holy teachings!”

This teasing went on for days and days until finally the Master said, “Leave him alone; he’s the only one who gets it.”

For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred.  Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn therefore I am.  To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

The most important thing we can ever tell someone else is, “You are beautiful.” We were all made conveniently equipped with built-in mirrors – our eyes. They are the reflecting pool in which the person before us beholds herself. It is up to us to choose what she will see reflected there. To be a lover is to  make sure that whoever looks into your mirroring eyes will feel the embracing energy of  “You are beautiful”.

What a wonderful way to live! Spiritual tradition reminds us of what we often forget in the doldrums and tensions of the day-to-day. That is, that everyone is beautiful, and furthermore, that everyone is uniquely beautiful. Every human being on the face of the planet holds in his or her essence an utterly unique reflection of the infinite beauty of God.

We can respond to the biblical invitation to  “love everyone” by perceiving and honoring this light in all who cross our path. Lovers see infinity dancing in the looking glass of each other’s eyes. We need to become lovers again. It will make it all so different. And we want to. We all love being lovers. We have simply forgotten to look. We have forgotten to perceive that we are all stepping gently through God’s magnificent museum. Each soul we behold – a perfect masterpiece.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

Eros is to be on the inside, including the inside of your desire. What being on the inside does is invite a person to clarify his desires, yet not transcend them. True desire is attained through the deep meditation in which you access the internal witness. From this place of detachment, you survey with penetrating but loving eyes all of your desires. This place of internal witness allows you to move beyond an addictive attachment to any particular one. At that point the person engaged in Birur– clarification – does not abandon desire. Rather she moves to connect to those desires which were truest to her deepest and most authentic self. It is in the empty space between the spasm and the desire that the person is born.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

Whenever we keep eros confined to one narrow frame of being, while de-eroticzing the rest of the picture – the Shechina remains in exile. Sex is only one of the places where we exile the erotic. There is a wonderful Balinese saying which goes something like, “We do not have art – we do everything as beautifully as we can”. When we build ugly cities where beauty is abused and people are depersonalized and then build a beautiful art museum, the Shechina is in exile. We exile the eros of beauty to the constricted precincts of formal art.

The same is true of music. Music is not limited to symphonies or rock concerts. We are all musicians and life is overflowing with music. Remember the Broadway show “Stomp”? There was no dialogue; it was all music and dance. The catch was that no musical instruments were used. The instruments were adapted from the fabric of everyday living. Pots, pans, brooms, sinks, faucets, garbage can lids, bottles, bags, newspapers, hands, feet, virtually every part of the body – all of these became instruments of music. The implication is stunning; what we usually do is limit art to formal work by people we call artists, just as we limit music to formal instruments. Formal music and art need to model the erotics of sound and beauty in all of our lives and not just in their narrow provinces. Music and art need to pervade all of living. Every moment is a canvas and is possessed of its own melody.

Rumi knowingly instructs us:

Let the beauty that we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the Ground.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

In biblical mysticism love and oneness are identical. In Hebrew, there is a mystical technique called “gematria” in which each letter, and thus each word, has a numerical value. The Hebrew word for love, ahava, has a numerical value of thirteen. Echad, meaning one, also has a numerical value of thirteen. To the Kabbalistic mind, this coincidence of number is more than coincidence. It is as if it is a mystical law has been encoded into the letters of these words. Love is Oneness and Oneness is Love. One is but another word for the erotic interconnectivity of all being.

But the rhyme of mystical meaning continues, for these two words added together equal twenty-six. Twenty-six is a central number in Hebrew mysticism because it is the numeral value of God’s four letter name: Yud Hei Vav Hei – יהוה – the divine name of healing and love. Thus, God is One Love.  Love is the universe’s way of embracing us and telling us we are not alone. We have a home, a bayit. We are connected.

One + One = One.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

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

If I listen to the murmuring of my soul, I am in effect listening to the murmuring of the sacred God.

(Rabbi Mordechai Lainier of Ishbitz, a radical Hassidic teacher of the nineteenth century, teaches in his stunning work, Mei Shiloach, Volume One, p. 19, Column 2)

Excerpted from The Erotic and the Holy by Marc Gafni

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

Love is all about insight–in-sight.  It is the ability to see in, to the inside of the inside, to the Holy of Holies that is your lover.  Eros is being on the inside.  Thus, love is an erotic perception of the highest order.  Naturally you have to move way beyond sexual seeing.  Sex only models eros.  To be an erotic lover you have to understand that “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

When something is far from you, you have to open your eyes really wide to see it.  As it gets closer you squint your eyes, when it gets really really close, you close your eyes.  Seeing with closed eyes is when we perceive way beyond seeing.  The adjective close and the verb close are the same word.  Closeness–intimacy–higher vision–all happen when we close our eyes.  We move beyond sight and invite the other faculties of perception to guide us.  Smell, sound, touch, and taste all become alive in a deeper way when we close our eyes.

The Mystery of Love
Page 114

Marc Gafni

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

In reaching for the awakening of love, we do well to bear in mind the teaching of mystical master Menachem Mendel of Kutz.  Writing in eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century he offers an original deeply resonant re-reading of a biblical myth text.  “These words which I command you this day should be on your hearts.”

How do words sit on a heart?  Do they not either enter in or stay outside?  What could it mean to have words sit “on the heart?”  Answers the master, ‘When dealing in issues of heart-lev-love — one cannot force the heart’s opening.’  Love is mystery — the word mystery deriving originally from the Hebrew word Seter — meaning secret.  The greatest secret, the most wondrous mystery, is the openings and closings of the heart.  ‘The best we can hope to do – and that is alot – is to place our words on the heart–and when the heart opens the words fall in.’

The Erotic and the Holy

Marc Gafni

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

The truly great dancer – like all lovers- flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow.

The word ”˜dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila –forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah – fullness – used in the biblical myth text to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.

The Erotic and the Holy

Marc Gafni

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