Psychology Today Interviewed Dr. Marc Gafni on Evolutionary Love

Evolutionary Love: An Interview with Dr. Marc Gafni by Mark Matousek

How can we consummate the marriage between sense and soul?

Marc Gafni is a cutting-edge thought leader and the founder, together with Ken Wilber, of the activist think tank, the Center for Integral Wisdom. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and is the author of eight books on spirituality and religion, including “Soul Prints,” “The Erotic and the Holy,” “Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment” and “The Mystery of Love.” I recently had the opportunity to speak with him about Eros and spirituality and how to bring passion to the seekers life.

Mark Matousek: I recently heard you say that “Eros and spirituality are misunderstood topics.” What did you mean, exactly?

Marc Gafni: When we talk about Eros or the erotic, we suffer from any number of confusions. There’s an important relationship between the erotic and the sexual, but they’re not the same thing. Eros is the essential aliveness of reality — it’s the experience of being on the inside. Like when you’re running and at some point you break through and you’re in the zone or the inside of experience. The second and third qualities of Eros include a fullness of presence and the evolutionary yearning of being. And the fourth quality of Eros is when you experience interconnectivity or the larger context, the wholeness of it all. Each one of those qualities of Eros is the experience that everything flows from. The goodness of life, the color in a black and white world and all ethics flow through that world.

The loss of Eros is the failure of ethics. Creativity, intimacy and relationship, politics, economics — nothing moves without the erotic. When there’s a disconnect from Eros, systems begin to break down both in the world of the personal and the world of the collective.

MM: How have we come to such an impoverished relationship to the erotic in our time?

MG: Over the last 30 to 50 years in America, we have begun to adopt a post-modern narrative that is essentially no narrative, no story.

Read more…

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Audio Dialogue with Ervin Laszlo & Marc Gafni: Evolutionary Love

Listen to this audio dialogue between Ervin Laslo & Marc Gafni. The topic is Evolutionary Love.

Ervin Laszlo is a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, originally a classical pianist. He is the Founder and President of The Club of Budapest, Director and Co-Founder of the Ervin Laszlo Institute for Advanced Study (ELIAS) and of the Laszlo New-Paradigm Leadership Center (Italy)… He is the author or co-author of fifty-four books translated into as many as twenty-three languages, and the editor of another thirty volumes including a four-volume encyclopedia.

Marc Gafni is the Co-Founder and President of the Center for Integral Wisdom, the author of many books including the award winning Your Unique Self, a visionary scholar and integral wisdom teacher.

Ervin Laszlo: “…everything that happens from the original Big Bang in this universe or in prior universes, when things fall together and move together and create wholes, larger and larger, more and more complex wholes which more and more interact, more and more communicate with each other, and they are really entangled as a physicist would say.

That’s because there is built into each element of this universe, each particle, each atom, each cell in a living organism, its belonging to the others, its coherence with this larger whole, which comes through in spirituality. It comes through in a deeper philosophy. It comes through in a deeper, honest theology. And this is basically what the motor is. If this universe was not built in such a way, was not created with its laws of nature and development in such a way that things pull together to create wholes, then we wouldn’t be here to ask these questions and the universe would still be a random concourse of perhaps carbon – but carbon is already highly integrated – so photons or initial particles, neutrons and electrons, and that wouldn’t be much more than that. Even creating an atom calls for pulling together the elements of the nucleus and the electrons that go around it. So, evolution is what happens, is the essence of things, and evolution is based on the attraction, on the relation of the parts to each other.”

Marc Gafni: “Allurement… you’re describing a core allurement that exists between all things. You just stated it, of course, so beautifully and so musically and poetically. So let’s try and enter into it for our listeners – and there’ll be tens of thousands of listeners on this set of calls – so I really want to try and break it down for people. So when we talk about – the phrase you use is, not evolutionary love, the formal phrase you use is an all-embracing love, which is a beautiful phrase, which is the force of – and I’m borrowing Thomas Berry’s word – allurement that coheres everything together. Let’s try, if we can, if I could invite just to show people three or four just simple examples. Although you mentioned a couple implicitly even in your first opening, but just as we come deeper into the symphony to get a sense of where do we see that? Where can an average, intelligent layperson see that as it’s unfolding in the evolutionary ascension?”

Stream the audio and read the transcript here:

Download the Transcript here: Evolutionary Love: Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Aug. 5, 2013

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