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In World Spirituality we use practices from all different traditions as well as modern psychology and postmodern perspective taking. Basically, those practices can be divided into practices to wake up, grow up, show up, lighten up, and open up. Make sure that you practice in every of those areas since that ensures a harmonious development for you and also acts like a cross-training–boosting your overall development in all those areas.
Further down, you’ll find 3 videos with transcripts that Marc Gafni has made as introductions to these terms and areas of practice. For a deeper understanding read his Article on the World Spirituality Essentials.
But let’s start with our Ten Commitments of World Spirituality Based on Integral Principles.
The journey begins with a recognition of the fullness and depth of reality and to the specific experience and innate dignity of every human life. Every human being has an innate right to participate with joy in the fullness and depth of reality.
Awakened heart is a set of meditative practices which open the practitioner to the subtle dimensions of the heart, fostering the fullness of love and compassion.
Unique Self is a set of enlightenment principles and practices containing teaching maps and technologies which allow a person to identify the nature of their Unique Self.
Unique Self is the recognition that you are the personal face of essence, that God is having a You experience, that God loves you so much that His love signature is written all over you. Unique Self is the recognition that God lives in you, as you, and through you in the fullness of your being and becoming and that to love God is to let God see through your eyes.
Your Unique Self creates your Unique Perspective, which is in effect your unique love intelligence seeing the world through it’s own eyes. Unique Perspective creates Unique Gifts, which can be given only by you. Giving those gifts is your Unique Obligation. In doing so, you identify and embrace the Unique Life Mission for which you were born on this planet in this time and this place. That is what it means to answer the call.
Shadow Work is an intensive surfacing and cleansing practice, which shatters the lies of shadow and allows the person to once again tell the truth about who they really are. World Spirituality shadow work directly causes a person to reconnect, evolve, purify, or simply reclaim the dis-owned shadow dimension of their authentic and Unique Self. It is based on the 3-2-1-0 practice, which follows Unique Shadow back to Unique Self.
Awakened Eros is an embodiment practice in which the full power, aliveness, and wisdom of the human body is accessed and integrated into the fullness of the person’s life. The four faces of Eros, interiority, presence, yearning, and wholeness–which are embodied in daily living–are the core of Eros. The failure of Eros always leads to a collapse of ethos. So we realize that in source, Ethos and Eros are one.
States and Stages are both an experiential and mapping practice. To wake up is to awaken to your highest state and to grow up is to evolve to your highest potential stage. In state practice, a person gains access to state experiences, which tells the person something important about their true nature and mission in the world. In stage practice, a person studies the trajectory of human evolution in the life of the individual and in the lifespan of human history and culture along the major lines of development. In so doing, one is able to identify both their own location and to set concrete goals for the next stage of their evolution.
Social Service practice is the commitment of World Spirituality and of individuals to commit significant time to the betterment of the lives of others. In the experience of wholeness, you cannot be satisfied if someone else is starving. This is a violation of Eros.
Integrity is an evolutionary quality. In understanding this, an individual recognizes that integrity and not mere survival is the lodestone of human existence. Skillful means practice is a set of understandings, insights, and technologies that foster effective communication, teamwork, and relationship building skills, which all serve the larger integrity of the system or individual.
Devotional Work Practice serves the Divine within us and beyond us by recognizing, praising, honoring, connecting, and disclosing that very divinity. The commitment to devotion is a commitment to fall in love with reality time and again.
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By Marc GafniIt is time for a radical democratization of enlightenment.
It used to be that enlightened living was for the elite. The few great lovers, saints, and sages throughout history reminded us that something more was possible, that there was a better way to live, that joy and overflowing love could and did exist, at least for some, as the animating essence of everyday life.
This tiny elite of subtle and evolved minds and hearts held alive for all of us the possibility that human beings could genuinely realize a transformation of identity, that they could truly evolve from their small constricted egos into spacious, dynamic, enlightened beings. In days gone by, we relied on this elite to guide our world. Today, that age has passed. The old elite no longer has the power to guide us. We can no longer hope that in some room somewhere, in the halls of spiritual power or the inner chambers of an ashram or temple, there are holy, wise people upon whom we can rely for our salvation.
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 governments. 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.
The disciples of one master liked to explain this radical Unique Self principle with a story:
A precocious child was convinced that the king was not as wise as people claimed. And so he set out—as young people are wont to do—to prove his point. He came before the king with a question. “Sire,” he said with great audacity, “it is said that you know the future and can answer any question posed. Well, I have a question for you.” The assembled court gasped at his insolence. But the boy went on. “I have in my closed hand a butterfly, sire. Tell me, is it alive or dead?”
The boy thought to himself, “If he says ‘alive,’ I will simply squeeze and kill it, and if he says ‘dead,’ then I will open my hand and let it fly away.”
The sage was silent for a moment, even as the room grew very silent. When he finally spoke, it was with the gentlest voice the boy had ever heard. “My son,” said the king, “whether the butterfly lives or dies depends on you.” It depends on us. On each and every one of us.
From Your Unique Self, Chapter 3, Pages 19, 20
For more on the Democratization of Enlightenment read Marc Gafni’s White Paper on “Three Steps to the Democratization of Enlightenment” or watch his 11-part youtube video series here:
Or watch the 11-part YouTube video series here:
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by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 1 of 6)
The realization of the personal which has been derided as the separate self or ego is so important that I want to ask you to enter this even more deeply with me. You need to feel a sense of this realization in your own being. You need to feel the love and care implicit and explicit in the loving personal address of the Cosmos.
There is clear a moment in where you will need to move beyond separate self and realize the underlying unity of all that is as the seamless coat of the universe. You will need to trance-end the merely personal to realize the next station on the road to your enlightenment. This will engender in you a profound love. It will open your heart in a radical and unconditional way. It will move you beyond alienation into full integration and power.
However, and this is a huge caveat, you will have to not merely transcend but to transcend and include the personal. That means that when you enter into the realm of the transpersonal space in which we are all expression of the one, you will need to realize in joy that you are a distinctive unique expression of the one . You must transcend your separateness even as you must retain your Uniqueness. The ego, when purified of its grasping and freed of its fixations, is harbinger of your Unique Self. The personal is essential to your full enlightenment as your Unique Self. Enlightenment always has a personal perspective. Enlightenment according to the Sufis and the Kabbalists is an expression of purified personal essence. Anything less will make you insane. Remember, Insanity means a loss connection with reality. Sanity means a full joyful embrace of reality. Enlightenment is no more or less than sanity. Reality is not only impersonal. It is also profoundly personal.
In order to be able to realize the personal plus–not personal minus–nature of your enlightenment, you need a deeper feeling and understanding of the realization of the personal. Remember that the personal is achieved both in the life of the individual and the life of humanity with the evolutionary achievement of the experience of separate self.
It is a transmission of something of this realization that I wish to share with you in these pages…
For more of this essay, see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.
You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.
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Looking for more on the wisdom tradition that aligns you with your deepest creativity? In a three-part excerpt from the long version of Soul Prints, Marc Gafni writes that we can transform and raise our passion and artistic creativity into a powerful drive for the sensual and the holy, realizing that, in a redeemed world, they are one and the same. As long as our spirituality remains vapid and empty, we indeed need to repress the more primal, creative passion, lest it overwhelm us. Primal passion unrealized is soul print or Unique Self destiny unrealized.
You can view Part II of this essay in full by clicking here>>
You can view Part III of this essay in full by clicking here>>
by Dr. Marc Gafni
from “The Way of the Dragon“ in the long Soul Prints.
Part I.
In biblical spirituality, information about God is relevant for one reason only. Information about God is information about us. We are commanded to be little Gods – to imitate God. Just as God stood at the abyss of darkness and said let there be light, so are we commanded to stand at the abyss of our darkness and say let there be light. A little bit of light dispels so much of the darkness. Further, just as God is a creator – creating, sculpting, painting, composing a gorgeous physical world – so, too, are we invited to create, to sculpt, to paint, and to make music.
Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo created. And yet, creativity is still viewed as suspect by much of the religious community. Art per se and artists to be sure are suspected of being amoral at best and, more probably, immoral. Acting, painting, sculpture, song are held in both high esteem and moral disdain. Why? The answer, which we have already introduced in our earlier discussion, emerges from an understanding of the deep linguistic and conceptual relationship between the biblical myth terms Yetzer and Yetzirah. Yetzirah means creativity; Yetzer is best translated as primal instincts, including but not limited to libido (Freud), the drive for power (Adler, Nietzsche), and the need for meaning (Frankel). In the Hebrew language, which is the ultimate source of all biblical myth thought, Yetzer and Yetzirah are the same word, linked etymologically and conceptually. The point: I cannot create without connecting deeply to my most primal instincts.
In my earlier twenties, I attended for a short time a prestigious drama workshop in Greenwich Village in New York. When we would be preparing for a murder scene in a play, we would do exercises to help us access the murderous rage lurking untapped in the corners of our souls. I cannot create drama about murder without unlocking the murderer in myself. To create anything – and certainly for the ultimate creation, the creation of myself – I need to be able to access the most primal passions of my being. Herein lies the attraction and the danger. My primal instincts when not integrated into my fully developed self are often not channeled properly and can potentially destroy worlds. Witness Germany. My mother, who was there, told me almost every day as I was growing up that the same people who gassed Jews in the morning, listened, with great primal passion, to Mozart in the evening.
In response to this psychological reality, Biblical myth spirituality taught: “Who is heroic, he who is (Kovesh) conquers his Yetzer.” And if the price is also to sacrifice certain forms of creativity, so be it. Better to be moral, holy, and not creative, than creative and immoral.
And yet having to choose between the primal passion of creativity and morality is far from satisfying!!
Visit centerforintegralwisdom.org for more wisdom teachings from Dr. Marc’s writings and the other teachers of the Center for World Spirituality.
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