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World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity: Reclaiming Value in a Time Between Stories: The Evolution of Outrageous Love and the Universal Grammar of Value

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 17

World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity: Reclaiming Value in a Time Between Stories: The Evolution of Outrageous Love and the Universal Grammar of Value | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 17 | Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard

World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity is a visionary collection of “oral essays” by Dr. Marc Gafni that offers a new “Story of Value” in response to the collapse of a shared global ethos. In many ways, we must reclaim religion as part of this story—not a return to traditional forms of religion but a new shared Story of Value as a context for our diversity. At the core of world religion is a universal grammar of value. This grammar of value writes the chapters of a new Story of Value, not as mere conjecture or a constructed narrative, but as a story deeply rooted in the value structure of Reality itself.

Each of us participates directly in this story, as Unique Selves, individual expressions of the divine evolutionary impulse. We are all irreplicable verses in the cosmic scroll, which holds the record of the past and the memory of our future.

At the heart of this work lies the realization of Outrageous Love, a force that transcends ordinary romantic love. Outrageous Love is the animating Eros of the evolutionary impulse that drives the Cosmos. Outrageous Love incarnates Eros and Intimacy as the heart of Reality’s Field of Value in which all of the manifest world unfolds.

Marc Gafni, Zachary Stein and their colleagues are calling for the emergence of a new human and new humanity, it is time for Homo sapiens to be fulfilled as Homo amor. World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity invites us, in this time between worlds and time between stories, to tell a new Story of Value. It is time to evolve together into a future where ever-deepening Eros, ethos, and intimacy—First Principles and First Values—are the north star for Reality’s evolution.

Published by World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers. 

Book details:

Title: World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity: Reclaiming Value in a Time Between Stories: The Evolution of Outrageous Love and the Universal Grammar of Value
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 17
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340202
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1     “I AM GLORIA”

  • Oh My God! A Direct Apprehension of Spirit
  • Reality Is Made Manifest in Love
  • Reality’s Intention Is the Evolution of Love
  • Reclaiming the Glory of God
  • The Glory of the Physiosphere
  • The Glory of the Biosphere
  • The Glory of the Noosphere
  • The Glory of Homo Amor
  • Tribute to Ram Dass
  • The Second-Person Face of Gloria

CHAPTER 2     GLORIA: RECLAIMING RELIGION AT A HIGHER LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  • Gloria: The Gravitas of Reality, Lined With Love
  • Towards a Cosmocentric World Religion
  • Praying to the Divine in the Second Person: The Infinity of Intimacy
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Reality Needs Your Service

CHAPTER 3     HOMO AMOR, WE ARE ALL NEEDED

  • The Dangers of a Partial Story
  • Reclaiming the Evangelical Spark
  • To Be an Evangelist Is to Be an Outrageous Lover
  • Outrageous Love: We’re Outraged
  • Evolutionary Love Code: For True Evangelism We Need Both Ecstatic States and Developmental Stages
  • In Every Great Tradition There’s an Intimate Incarnation of the Divine
  • Passover: For the First Time, I’m Going to Find That Hidden Dream

CHAPTER 4    RELIGION NEEDS TO BE PART OF THE REVOLUTION: EVOLVING THE UNIQUE SELF OF THE GREAT TRADITIONS

  • No More “Business As Usual”
  • Becoming Homo amor
  • The Source Code Move
  • Honoring Islam: Allahu Akbar
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Religion Has a Unique Self
  • Eye of the Senses, Eye of the Mind, Eye of the Heart
  • The Interpretation of Revelation Through the Prism of Consciousness
  • Liberating the Experience of Revelation
  • Participating in the Evolution of Great Traditions

CHAPTER 5    REWEAVING CHRISTMAS: FROM BIOLOGICAL FAMILY TO HOMO AMOR FAMILY

  • Weaving a New Cloth of Outrageous Love Into New Visions of Value
  • Silent Night: Son of God, Love’s Pure Light
  • On the Other Side of Guilt Is Our Second Innocence
  • Outrageous Love Knows No Boundaries
  • Level One of Love: Biological Family
  • Level Two of Love: Romantic Love
  • Level Three of Love: Evolutionary Family and Outrageous Love
  • Articulating the Interior and Exterior Sciences of Love: Outrageous Love Drives Cosmos
  • We Are Evolutionary Lovers Looking Deeply Into Each Other’s Eyes and Together at a Shared Horizon, Ready to Lay It All Down for the Sake of the Whole
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Evolutionary and Soul Root Family
  • In Excelsis Deo: Liberating the Exiled Energy of Gloria
  • The Practice: Birthing a New Structure of Intimacy
  • Gloria: Feel Your Innocence Slipping Away
  • Gloria: In Excelsis Deo in the Field of Love’s Pure Light

CHAPTER 6    RECLAIMING THE EVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY OF CHANT FOUND UNIQUELY IN EACH RELIGION

  • Setting Our Intention in This Time Between Worlds, This Time Between Stories
  • How Do We Know Anything? Accessing the Field of Value
  • Accessing the Eye of Value By Becoming the Music
  • Entering the Practice of Chant: Let the Chant Enter You
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Path of Chant—Each Great Religion Is a Different Quality of Intimacy
  • Kashmir Shaivism: Devi Prayer
  • Cathars—Lo Boièr
  • Gyuto Monks—Mandala Offering
  • Native American—Sacred Spirit
  • Wisdom of Solomon Chants
  • Mizmor Shir Le’yom Ha’shabbat
  • Ki Atah Hu Ba’al Ha-Yeshuot: For You Are the Master of Liberation, For You Are the Master of Transformation
  • My Unique Self Is My Unique Chant

CHAPTER 7    THE NEW WORLD CALLS FOR A NEW WORLD RELIGION AS A CONTEXT FOR OUR GLOBAL DIVERSITY

  • What Would It Mean to Articulate a Vision of a New World Religion?
  • A Collapse of Value Is a Collapse of Eros
  • In the Absence of a Genuine Story of Value, Humans Create Pseudo-Stories of Value
  • Existential Risk Is a Direct Result of Pseudo-Stories of Value
  • Trialectics of Religion: We Need to Transcend and Include the Premodern and Modern
  • The New World Religion Can’t Be Local, and Compassion and Kindness Are Not Enough
  • A Shared World Needs a World Religion
  • Building a Foundational Framework of First Principles and First Values
  • Spirituality Without Religion Is Not Enough
  • New Life Conditions Demand a New Language of Value
  • “Until Philosophers Are Kings… Cities Will Never Have Rest From Their Evils” —Plato
  • Powerfully Addressing the Rigorous Critiques of Value

CHAPTER 8    TAKING THE NEXT STEP IN THE URGENT NEED FOR A NEW WORLD RELIGION: CELEBRATING BARBARA MARX HUBBARD

  • A Shared Grammar of Value for a Global Conversation
  • We Live in a Conversational Cosmos
  • Evolutionary Love Code: New Need Generates New Emergence
  • A Planetary Awakening in Unique Self Symphonies

CHAPTER 9    SEDUCING HOMO SAPIENS INTO HOMO AMOR: THE MORAL OBLIGATION OF A NEW WORLD RELIGION

  • The Root Cause of Existential Risk Is a Global Intimacy Disorder
  • The Modern Word for Armageddon Is Existential Risk, The Modern Word for Messiah Is Homo amor
  • First Values and First Principles Are at the Center of It All
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Holy and Unholy Seduction
  • Practice: Clarifying Your Deepest Heart’s Desire
  • Screaming the Name of God: The Sacred Mystery of Erotic Explosion
  • Seduce Me and I Will Run After You
  • Seduction, Unique Self, and Unique Self Symphony
  • The Distinction Between Holy and Unholy Seduction
  • Articulating a World Religion That Can Seduce Reality Towards the Highest Version of Itself
  • Prayer: Draw Me After You

CHAPTER 10    RESPONDING TO THE THREE GREAT QUESTIONS OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM

  • Two Kinds of Existential Risk
  • Evolving the Source Code of Consciousness and Culture
  • What Are Evolutionary Love Codes?
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Three Great Questions
  • Principle One: Outrageous Love Is Our Response Both to Pain and to Beauty
  • Principle Two: Outrageous Love Is the Heart of Existence Itself
  • Principle Three: I Am a Unique Configuration of Outrageous Love
  • Principle Four: Outrageous Lovers Commit Outrageous Acts of Love
  • Principle Five: Outrageous Acts of Love That Are Mine to Commit Are a Function of My Unique Self
  • Principle Six: Find the Others to Play in the Unique Self Symphony
  • Prayer: Hallelujah

CHAPTER 11    FROM PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY TO WORLD RELIGION AS A CONTEXT FOR OUR DIVERSITY: IN RESPONSE TO THE META-CRISIS

  • Outrageous Love Is Reality
  • Every Religion Has a Unique Self
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Religion Has a Unique Self
  • The Perennial Philosophy
  • The Name of God Is the Infinite Intimate
  • Every Unique Self Participates in the Name of God
  • The Seamless Coat of the Universe Is Seamless But Not Featureless
  • We Need Shared Universal Rituals to Bind Us in a Global Intimacy
  • Prayer: When I Speak, the Field of LoveIntelligence Listens and Responds

CHAPTER 12    RESPONDING TO THE META-CRISIS THROUGH THE EROTIC GNOSIS OF TEARS

  • Evolving the Source Code of Consciousness
  • Rosh Hashanah Is the Portal to Transformation
  • When God and Goddess Are Brought Together, Blessings Flow Into the World
  • Tears Are an Expression of the Eros of Cosmos
  • God Is the Infinity of Intimacy
  • Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Are Days of Tears
  • The Language of Mothers Is the Language of the Sacred
  • Tears That Shatter Our False Identity
  • The Gates of Tears Are Never Closed
  • I Am a Unique Desire of the Infinite
  • Tears Tell a Story About the True Nature of Self and Reality

CHAPTER 13    TEN PRINCIPLES OF OUTRAGEOUS LOVE: CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN FEELING AND HEALING OUTRAGEOUS PAIN

  • Crossing to the Other Side
  • The Dharma Is the Psychedelic of Reality
  • The Evolution of Tears on the Side of Joy and on the Side of Pain
  • Deepening Our Commitment to Rebuild the New World With “Monogamous Polyamory”
  • When God Is Dethroned, Our Solutions Become the Great Tragedy Itself
  • Prayer Is One of the Most Powerful Medicines
  • We Are the Influential and the Powerful
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Healing What’s Uniquely Yours to Heal
  • The Ten Principles of Outrageous Love

CHAPTER 14    HOW BIG IS YOUR HEART? FROM THE AGONY CRUCIFIXION OF THE CROSS TO THE BLISS CRUCIFIXION OF THE CROSSING

  • To Be Non-Intimate With Reality Is to Be Lost in the Drama of My Own Life
  • We Have to Face the Pain—But With Radical Joy!
  • We Have to Articulate a New Politics of Outrageous Love
  • We Live in an Intimate Universe and the Intimate Universe Lives in Us
  • We Are Coming Together from Around the World to Write a New Constitution
  • Forgive Yourself! Forgive All The People Who Betrayed You!
  • From the Cross to the Crossing
  • We Desperately Need Each Other
  • Infinity Needs Your Service
  • My House Is Your House
  • We Are Not Alone in Cosmos

CHAPTER 15    LIVING THE DREAM IN RESPONSE TO THE META-CRISIS: LIBERATING THE SPARKS OF CELEBRATION FROM ANCIENT TRADITIONS INTO A NEW WORLD SPIRITUALITY

  • Only a New Story of Value Changes the Vector of the Real
  • The World Itself Pulses With Joy
  • We Are Welcome
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Unique Self of Every Religion
  • Liberating the Sparks from Hanukkah
  • The Miracle of the First Day
  • Capacity to Celebrate Partial Victories
  • The Way We Decide to Tell the Story Defines Everything
  • Liberating the Sparks from Christmas: The Birth of God as Human Being
  • We Need the Democratization of the Christed One
  • Gloria In Excelsis Deo (“Glory To God In The Highest”)

CHAPTER 16    TELLING THE EVOLUTIONARY STORY OF CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION

  • Evolving The Source Code, the Inescapable Frameworks in Which We Live
  • We Cannot Evolve the Source Code Without Religion
  • Weaving Easter and Passover Into the New Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Hope Is the Ontology of Reality
  • Redemption Is a Political and Economic Event
  • Everything Is About the Story We Decide to Tell
  • Life Is a Series of Love Stories
  • The Evolution of Love Is the Source of Hope
  • This Lifetime Is a Chapter in the Story
  • Choosing to Tell the Most Accurate Story

CHAPTER 17    A HERETICAL BLUEPRINT FOR A WORLD RELIGION AS A CONTEXT FOR OUR DIVERSITY

  • We Don’t Wait for the Prophets
  • From Homo sapiens to Homo amor
  • Evolutionary Love Code: We All Stand Together on the Side of Love
  • A Shared Story of Value Is a Cosmic Anthem
  • “Show Me Something Real, Tell Me Something True”
  • The God You Don’t Believe in Doesn’t Exist
  • “What’s Real Is That You’re Loved”
  • “What’s True Is That You’re Not Alone”
  • Tenets of the World Religion

CHAPTER 18    ANSWERING THE CALL OF PROPHECY: ENVISIONING NEW POSSIBILITIES & THE DIGNITY OF PRAYER

  • We Become the Voice of the Next Iteration of Evolution
  • The Universe: An Evolving Love Story
  • We Are All Connected: Invisible Lines of Non-Locality
  • In the Separate Self, We Have Lost the First Principle of Personhood
  • Being a Prophet Means Accessing Your Unique Voice and Seeing New Possibility
  • Slow Down, Listen Deeply, Fill Up With Eros
  • The Prayer You Thought Was Prayer Is Not Prayer
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Prayer and Prophecy
  • Second Person: The Pan-Interiority of Cosmos
  • Third Person: All Fields Are Interpenetrating and Are an Expression of the Larger Eros
  • Prayer Is When I Turn to the Field of Infinite Personhood
  • Third-Person Realization In Prayer

CHAPTER 19    PRAYER: THE PERSONHOOD OF COSMOS—RESTORING THE DIGNITY OF PERSONAL NEED

  • We Are Allured to Each Other In a New Configuration of Intimacy
  • You Are the Radiance of the Big Bang Incarnate
  • Prayer: The Seven Steps of the Stairway to Heaven
  • Step One: Faces of God
  • Step Two: Realizing the Personhood of Divinity
  • Step Three: Prayer Is Always Heard By Divinity
  • Step Four: The Movement of Prayer
  • Step Five: Feeling the Infinity of Power
  • Step Six: The Infinity of Power Is Right Here With You
  • Step Seven: The Feeling of God

CHAPTER 20    PRAYER: THE PERSONHOOD OF COSMOS—RESTORING INTIMACY THROUGH PRAYER AS PROTEST

  • The Urgency of a World Without First Principles and First Values
  • It’s a Fucking Revolution
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The God You Don’t Believe in Does Not Exist
  • Reality Is the Progressive Deepening of Intimacies
  • Prayer Itself Is a Form of Protest
  • Protest, Laughter, Mysticism and Paradox
  • The Paradox of Choice and Choicelessness
  • Laughter Holds Paradox
  • When Will You Come Already? We’re Waiting for You
  • God, Show Up, Be Here
  • Getting Beneath the Space-Time Continuum and Reconfiguring the Past
  • God, I’m Done—Let Me Know If We Have a Deal
  • The Paradox of Hallelujah
  • In Genuine Intimacy With God There Is Protest

CHAPTER 21    PRAYER AWAKENS US TO THE APPROACHABILITY OF THE INFINITE

  • Intention Setting: Ratzon and Holy Seduction Into Outrageous Love
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Prayer Is Intimate Communion With the Infinity of Intimacy
  • Prayer: Turning to the Infinity of Intimacy
  • Personhood of Prayer: First Person
  • Personhood of Prayer: Second Person
  • The Butcher’s Prayer
  • Personhood of Prayer: Third Person and Second Person
  • Prayer: Tenderness and Fierce Passion Exponentialized

CHAPTER 22    THE THREE FACES OF GOD = THE THREE FACES OF LOVE—REWEAVING THE UNIVERSE: A LOVE STORY

  • Existential Risk Presses Us Into the Realization That the Evolutionary Impulse Is Living in Us
  • The Narrative Arc of the Story of Reality
  • I Participate as the Universe in Person, in the Field of Love
  • We’re Here to Tell the Best Love Story Ever Told
  • Outrageous Love Code: In the Greatest Love Story Ever Told, No One and Nothing Is Outside the Circle
  • We Can’t Leave God Out of the Story
  • The Three Faces of God Which Are First Principles and First Values
  • The Third-Person Perspective of Reality
  • The First-Person Perspective of Reality
  • The Third-Person and First-Person Perspectives of Cosmos Are Not Enough
  • The Second-Person Perspective of Reality
  • Enacting The New Story Through Lived, Direct Experience: the Practice of Prayer
  • The Field of Eros Has a Personal Quality
  • Atheism: There’s Heresy Which Is Faith
  • Prayer Is the Experience of the Personhood of Cosmos That Knows My Name
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About the Authors:

Dr. Marc GafniDr. Marc Gafni is a leading public intellectual and teacher impacting the source code of global culture.

Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings”, including Unique Self theory and the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy.

He is author of twenty five books, of which the first ten have been published, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment.

He holds his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.

He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy in the West, helping to evolve a new ‘dharma’ or meta-theory of Integral meaning that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in global consciousness and culture, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values’, Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value”.

This is the ground of a new shared universe story and a new narrative of identity for the new human and the new humanity. This is what they are calling the emergence from Homo sapiens to Homo Amor.

This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.

Gafni is considered by many to be a kind of Einstein of Philosophy who is leading a team of thinkers articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder together with Ken Wilber and Sally Kempton of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion where he serves as its co-president. Together with Dr. Zak Stein, they are co-leading a team of thinkers, articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

In 2014 Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Outrageous Love.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed evolutionary and activist programs rooted in his commitment to what he has termed “participating in the evolution of love.” Together with author and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, he is working on a series of new works revolving around Evolutionary Spirituality.

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Barbara Marx HubbardBarbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx; December 22, 1929–April 10, 2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with the Wheel of Co-Creation and together with Dr. Gafni, the Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0, as well as the concepts of the Synergy Engine and the “birthing” of humanity.

As co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and the chair, for the last five years of her life, of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, she posited that humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises.

She was the author of seven books on social and planetary evolution. In conjunction with the Shift Network, she co-produced the worldwide “Birth 2012” multimedia event. She was also the subject of a biography by author Neale Donald Walsch, The Mother of Invention: The Legacy of Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the Future of “YOU”. Deepak Chopra called her “the voice for conscious evolution.”

In 1984, she was symbolically nominated for the vice presidency of the United States. She also co-chaired a number of Soviet-American Citizen Summits, introducing a new concept called SYNCON, to foster synergistic convergence with opposing groups. In addition, she co-founded the World Future Society and the Association for Global New Thought.

Gafni is a leading public intellectual impacting the source code of global culture. He is also a forger of new trails in the evolution of intimacy and love. In his own self-description, “Like all of us I am a flawed human being, an imperfect vessel for the light, radically committed to constant healing, transformation, and the evolution of love.” He has led international spiritual movements and learning communities, as well as created and hosted for several seasons a popular national Israeli television program on culture, meaning, and spirit on Israel’s leading network. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed educational programs, papers and content rooted in traditional wisdom and yet fully adapted to the needs of the contemporary world.

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Explore the Great Library:
Center for World Philosophy & Religion – Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/books/

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Dr. Marc Gafni Official Website: 
https://marcgafni.com/

Center for World Philosophy and Religion:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/

Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni:
https://www.onemountainmanypaths.org/

Join the community Who We Must Become: 
https://who-we-must-become-3166d4.circle.so/ 

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https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/

Formal refutations on controversy: 
WhoIsMarcGafni.com

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World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-17T15:33:06-07:00

Evolutionary Church | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard

Evolutionary Church: Reclaiming Love As Religion: A Human Being Is a Unique Word in the Cosmic Scroll: The Evolution of Our Intimacy Participates in the Evolution of the Intimate Universe

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 15

Evolutionary Church: Reclaiming Love As Religion: A Human Being Is a Unique Word in the Cosmic Scroll: The Evolution of Our Intimacy Participates in the Evolution of the Intimate Universe | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 15 | Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard

What do we mean when we say we are an Evolutionary Church practicing Evolutionary Love?

In Evolutionary Church we not reclaiming a religion of love. We are for the first time in history claiming love as a religion. We are the One World Church, telling the new Universe Story through a new Gospel. The Gospel of Love.

But it’s not just love, it is Outrageous Love which is not mere human sentiment but the heart of existence itself. It is not just eternal love but evolving love, Evolutionary Love-Love not only as a static, eternal constant, but love that is the ErosValue of all of Reality, grounded in eternity and yet ever evolving.

In Evolutionary Love, “evolutionary” means evolving, moving towards a more refined, more complex, more conscious, and more whole state. We evolve our understanding of what it means to be human, and what it means to love. We evolve our understanding of the nature of Reality, the nature of relationship, the nature of religion, of gender, of story, and of God.

In this new Universe Story, Evolutionary Love is the animating Eros of Cosmos. The One World Church becomes the institutionalization of a new politics of love, a new religion of love, a new science of love, and a new psychology of love, guided by the realization that eternal and evolving Evolutionary Love is the heart of existence itself.

These oral essays are edited talks delivered by Dr. Marc Gafni June and August 2019.

Published by World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers. 

Book details:

Title: Evolutionary Church: Reclaiming Love As Religion: A Human Being Is a Unique Word in the Cosmic Scroll: The Evolution of Our Intimacy Participates in the Evolution of the Intimate Universe
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 15
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340639
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    PARTICIPATING IN THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION & GOD VISION

  • We Need a Shared Story of Dharma
  • Reclaiming Love as Religion in Which Our Moral Community Is All of Reality
  • God Is the Infinity of Power and the Infinity of Intimacy
  • We Are Unique Members of a Living Body
  • Becoming Partners with Each Other in This Evolutionary Community
  • World Spirituality is Reclaiming and Upleveling Religion

CHAPTER 2    NOT THE RELIGION OF LOVE, BUT LOVE AS RELIGION

  • This Is Love as Religion
  • In Prayer, We Turn to the Infinite Intimate Who Knows Our Name
  • I Am an Outrageous Lover Committing Outrageous Acts of Love
  • We Need to Integrate the Local Self, Essential Self, and Universal Self
  • Unguard Our Hearts and Love Mad

CHAPTER 3    OUR MORAL COMMUNITY IS ALL OF REALITY

  • We’re Taking Responsibility to Be the Evolution of Love
  • Amor: The Universe Feels, and the Universe Feels Love
  • We Participate in the Three Faces of God
  • Prayer Affirms the Dignity of Personal Need
  • My Moral Community Includes All of Reality
  • There Are Six Levels of Pleasure
  • The Pleasure of Transformation: Partners in the Evolutionary Process
  • We Are All the High Priests and Priestesses

CHAPTER 4    GOD LOOKS AT US WITH A GOOD EYE; I SEE YOU & I STAND FOR YOU

  • Seeing Each Other with Ayin Tovah, a Good Eye
  • Reality Is Amor: Its Insides Are Lined with Love
  • We Come to God with Our Holy and Broken Hallelujah
  • Breathing Meditation with Sally Kempton
  • Intimacy Is Shared Identity in the Context of Otherness
  • In Every Moment Infinity Whispers to Us and We Reply Yes
  • Victimhood Is a Lie

CHAPTER 5    YOUR EVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL BLUEPRINT IS IN YOUR DEEPEST HEART’S DESIRE

  • The Minor Fluctuation Point That Jumps Humanity to a Higher Level of Order
  • In Prayer, We Experience Quivering Tenderness and Explosive Aliveness
  • The Universe Feels a Desire for Intimacy
  • My Deepest Heart’s Desire Holds the Blueprint for My Evolutionary Potential
  • We Have to Invest High Tech with Evolutionary Love
  • Activating Homo Amor by Accessing Our Deepest Heart’s Desire

CHAPTER 6    POWER IS HOLY DESIRE: EVERY HUMAN HAS AN OBLIGATION TO BE POWER-HUNGRY

  • To Respond to the Global Intimacy Disorder, We Need a New Story
  • The New Configuration of Intimacy Turns to the Infinity of Intimacy in Prayer
  • We Must Claim Our Holy Power Of, Power For, and Power Over
  • My Deepest Heart’s Desire Is the Impulse of the Holy Power of Evolution Inside Me

CHAPTER 7    CO-CREATING IN SOCIAL SYNERGY, AN EMERGENT PROPERTY OF EROS

  • Every Crisis a Crisis of Intimacy in The Universe: A Love Story
  • We Are Figments of God: Communing with the Field of LoveIntelligence
  • Reclaiming the Core Insights but Not the Hijacks of Fundamentalism
  • Reality Is a Self-Organizing Universe and You Are Tapping into It

CHAPTER 8    WE ARE THE POSSIBILITY OF POSSIBILITY THAT GENERATED BIG BANG

  • We Are Looking at a Shared Horizon
  • God Is Both the Infinity of Intimacy and the Love That Animates Cosmos
  • I Participate in the Conscious Intelligence That Moves Through the Whole Field
  • The Evolutionary God Is the Possibility of Possibility
  • Homo Amor Is the Possibility of Possibility
  • Imagine the Infinity of Possibilities Before the Big Bang
  • Our Contribution Allows Us to Stand for the Evolution of Love

CHAPTER 9    A HUMAN BEING IS A UNIQUE WORD IN THE COSMIC SCROLL

  • We Invest High Tech with Evolutionary Love by Telling a New Story
  • Barbara Is With Us in the Continuity of Consciousness
  • Allurement Is the Ultimate Personhood of Cosmos, the Infinity of Intimacy
  • Sentience Is the Sentences of Reality Weaving a Love Story
  • We’re at a Moment of Radical Newness on an Evolutionary Scale
  • I Am a Unique Configuration of Intimacy That Is Needed by All-That-Is

CHAPTER 10    BECOMING A WHOLE BEING: A UNIQUE COMBINATION OF LINES & CIRCLES

  • Beyond He and She: The Transgender Question of Who Am I Beneath My Gender?
  • Lines and Circles Are Qualities of Cosmos That Exist in All of Us
  • The Evolution of Gender Is the Evolution Into Wholeness
Buy on Amazon

About the Authors:

Dr. Marc GafniDr. Marc Gafni is a leading public intellectual and teacher impacting the source code of global culture.

Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings”, including Unique Self theory and the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy.

He is author of twenty five books, of which the first ten have been published, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment.

He holds his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.

He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy in the West, helping to evolve a new ‘dharma’ or meta-theory of Integral meaning that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in global consciousness and culture, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values’, Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value”.

This is the ground of a new shared universe story and a new narrative of identity for the new human and the new humanity. This is what they are calling the emergence from Homo sapiens to Homo Amor.

This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.

Gafni is considered by many to be a kind of Einstein of Philosophy who is leading a team of thinkers articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder together with Ken Wilber and Sally Kempton of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion where he serves as its co-president. Together with Dr. Zak Stein, they are co-leading a team of thinkers, articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

In 2014 Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Outrageous Love.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed evolutionary and activist programs rooted in his commitment to what he has termed “participating in the evolution of love.” Together with author and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, he is working on a series of new works revolving around Evolutionary Spirituality.

Read more… 

Barbara Marx HubbardBarbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx; December 22, 1929–April 10, 2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with the Wheel of Co-Creation and together with Dr. Gafni, the Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0, as well as the concepts of the Synergy Engine and the “birthing” of humanity.

As co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and the chair, for the last five years of her life, of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, she posited that humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises.

She was the author of seven books on social and planetary evolution. In conjunction with the Shift Network, she co-produced the worldwide “Birth 2012” multimedia event. She was also the subject of a biography by author Neale Donald Walsch, The Mother of Invention: The Legacy of Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the Future of “YOU”. Deepak Chopra called her “the voice for conscious evolution.”

In 1984, she was symbolically nominated for the vice presidency of the United States. She also co-chaired a number of Soviet-American Citizen Summits, introducing a new concept called SYNCON, to foster synergistic convergence with opposing groups. In addition, she co-founded the World Future Society and the Association for Global New Thought.

Gafni is a leading public intellectual impacting the source code of global culture. He is also a forger of new trails in the evolution of intimacy and love. In his own self-description, “Like all of us I am a flawed human being, an imperfect vessel for the light, radically committed to constant healing, transformation, and the evolution of love.” He has led international spiritual movements and learning communities, as well as created and hosted for several seasons a popular national Israeli television program on culture, meaning, and spirit on Israel’s leading network. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed educational programs, papers and content rooted in traditional wisdom and yet fully adapted to the needs of the contemporary world.

Buy on Amazon

Explore more:

Explore the Great Library:
Center for World Philosophy & Religion – Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/books/

Learn about the full Oral Essays series:
Complete Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/oral-essays-series-one-mountain-marc-gafni/

Dr. Marc Gafni Official Website: 
https://marcgafni.com/

Center for World Philosophy and Religion:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/

Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni:
https://www.onemountainmanypaths.org/

Join the community Who We Must Become: 
https://who-we-must-become-3166d4.circle.so/ 

Free Unique Self Mini Course:
https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/

Formal refutations on controversy: 
WhoIsMarcGafni.com

Social Media Dr. Marc Gafni: 

Substack: https://substack.com/@marcgafni
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcgafni/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcGafni
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrMarcGafni
Twitter:https://twitter.com/MarcGafni
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarcgafni/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drmarcgafni 

Buy on Amazon
Evolutionary Church | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard2025-07-17T14:56:47-07:00

God Is Intimate | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard

God Is Intimate: The Real Is Not Indifferent: The Cosmos Knows Your Name and Is Waiting for Your YES

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 9

God Is Intimate: The Real Is Not Indifferent: The Cosmos Knows Your Name and Is Waiting for Your YES | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 9 | Dr. Marc Gafni

In a time between devolution and evolution, between destruction and creation, the response that is needed is a new story. This book is a sacred call to step into your evolutionary purpose, join with others in synergistic action, and co-create a world infused with Evolutionary Love.

This book draws from new story of CosmoErotic humanism in order to ignite a planetary awakening into the new human and new humanity. Through teaching, meditations and prayers, they articulate a vision for humanity’s next step.

Gafni and Marx Hubbard guide you beyond the false separations of your psychological ego and the spiritual ossifications of True Self, into the fullness of your Unique Self.

Where we have historically confessed our sins, we now need to confess our true greatness.

The universe is not random and meaningless, but an evolutionary love story, calling you to participate in its unfolding. Your uniqueness is currency of your connection and co-creation. Evolution itself is Love in Action, and you are an irreplaceable part of this process. Just as our personal crises and wounds can give birth to the next stage of our personal evolution, the crises of our time are not signs of breakdown but the birth pains of a new humanity, inviting us to rise together in a global symphony of transformation.

With poetic depth and prophetic vision, this book invites you beyond ordinary love into the ecstatic urgency of Evolutionary Love. You are not an extra on the set of Reality. You are needed. Your gifts, your voice, your love-all are essential for the awakening of humanity.

Are you ready to play your unique note in the Unique Self Symphony?

These oral essays are edited talks delivered by Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard between May and July 2018

Published by World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers. 

Book details:

Title: God Is Intimate: The Real Is Not Indifferent: The Cosmos Knows Your Name and Is Waiting for Your YES
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 9
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340509
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    GOD IS INTIMATE: OUR DEEPEST YEARNINGS ARE GOD’S YEARNINGS

  • Evolutionary Love Code: God Is Intimate and Not Indifferent
  • The New Holy Trinity: Three Faces of God
  • Praying for Our Deepest Heart’s Desire
  • Yearning for the New Story
  • Intimacy Erases Difference and Manifests Uniqueness

CHAPTER 2    SHARED INTIMACY AND THE THREE WAYS WE HAVE EXILED LOVE

  • Evolutionary Love Code: We Are Intended by the Universe
  • Creating New Neural Grooves in Reality
  • We Are Unique Configurations of Intimacy
  • God’s Intention for Supra-Sexual Co-Creation
  • Reclaiming Evolutionary Love
  • Evolving What It Means to Fall in Love

CHAPTER 3    TRUE POWER IS HOLY; THE SHADOW OF POWER IS ABUSE

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Power Is Holy
  • Love Is Power and Power Is Love
  • Your Deepest Heart’s Desire Participates in Evolutionary Desire
  • Power in Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Forms

CHAPTER 4    REALITY NEEDS OUR SERVICE AND OUR DEVOTION

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Universe Needs Your Service
  • We Turn to God in Prayer
  • Your Deepest Heart’s Desire Is Your Service
  • Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0
  • Meditation on Allurement
  • Willing to Sacrifice My Unique Gift for Devotion
  • Motherhood and the Devotion to Live Your Unique Self

CHAPTER 5    ROLE MATE TO WHOLE MATE: EVOLVING INTIMACY FOR IDENTITY

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Intimacy Equation
  • Letters From Iwo Jima Reveals a Failure of Intimacy
  • Collective Purpose at the Moment of Crisis
  • Evolutionary Intimacy Expands the Circle
  • Intimacy in Relationships: From Role Mate to Soul Mate To Whole Mate

CHAPTER 6    ALL INTEGRITY IS EVOLUTIONARY INTEGRITY

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Evolutionary Integrity
  • Evolutionary Integrity Means a Widening Circle of Intimacy
  • Tikkun: Your Fixing Ripples Through Cosmos
  • The Practice of Being Intimate With the God Impulse Within
  • It’s Never Too Late for Evolutionary Integrity

CHAPTER 7    THE PLEASURE OF TRANSFORMATION AND REPATTERNING OUR LIVES

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Evolution Evolves Because It Feels Good
  • The Pleasure of Prayer: Meditations on the Three Faces of The Divine
  • Reality Is All About Relationship
  • The Telerotic Cosmos Yearning for Pleasure
  • Living Pleasure With an Unguarded Heart

CHAPTER 8    EVOLVING THE WAY THE WORLD HAPPENS

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Knowing the Laws of Interior Science and Activating the New Memes of Reality
  • The Power of the Now Includes the Past, Present, And the Future
  • The Church of Mass Evolution
  • Incarnating the Possibility of Possibility to Turn Fate Into Destiny

CHAPTER 9    WE ARE A UNIQUE LETTER IN THE COSMIC SCROLL

  • Evolutionary Love Code: A Mystical Act of Integrating the Lineages
  • Find Your Unique Sentence in the Self-Organizing Universe
  • To Author Your Story, Write New Sentences

CHAPTER 10    AWAKENING EVOLUTIONARY MAN & EVOLUTIONARY WOMAN

  • Evolutionary Love Code: We Need a Gender Liberation Movement
  • Praying as Unique Gender
  • Awakening the Evolutionary Woman

  • From Transgender to Unique Gender

  • We Are All in Gender Transition

  • We Have to Have Huge Compassion

Buy on Amazon

About the Authors:

Dr. Marc GafniDr. Marc Gafni is a leading public intellectual and teacher impacting the source code of global culture.

Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings”, including Unique Self theory and the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy.

He is author of twenty five books, of which the first ten have been published, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment.

He holds his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.

He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy in the West, helping to evolve a new ‘dharma’ or meta-theory of Integral meaning that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in global consciousness and culture, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values’, Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value”.

This is the ground of a new shared universe story and a new narrative of identity for the new human and the new humanity. This is what they are calling the emergence from Homo sapiens to Homo Amor.

This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.

Gafni is considered by many to be a kind of Einstein of Philosophy who is leading a team of thinkers articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder together with Ken Wilber and Sally Kempton of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion where he serves as its co-president. Together with Dr. Zak Stein, they are co-leading a team of thinkers, articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

In 2014 Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Outrageous Love.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed evolutionary and activist programs rooted in his commitment to what he has termed “participating in the evolution of love.” Together with author and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, he is working on a series of new works revolving around Evolutionary Spirituality.

Read more… 

Barbara Marx HubbardBarbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx; December 22, 1929–April 10, 2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with the Wheel of Co-Creation and together with Dr. Gafni, the Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0, as well as the concepts of the Synergy Engine and the “birthing” of humanity.

As co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and the chair, for the last five years of her life, of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, she posited that humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises.

She was the author of seven books on social and planetary evolution. In conjunction with the Shift Network, she co-produced the worldwide “Birth 2012” multimedia event. She was also the subject of a biography by author Neale Donald Walsch, The Mother of Invention: The Legacy of Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the Future of “YOU”. Deepak Chopra called her “the voice for conscious evolution.”

In 1984, she was symbolically nominated for the vice presidency of the United States. She also co-chaired a number of Soviet-American Citizen Summits, introducing a new concept called SYNCON, to foster synergistic convergence with opposing groups. In addition, she co-founded the World Future Society and the Association for Global New Thought.

Gafni is a leading public intellectual impacting the source code of global culture. He is also a forger of new trails in the evolution of intimacy and love. In his own self-description, “Like all of us I am a flawed human being, an imperfect vessel for the light, radically committed to constant healing, transformation, and the evolution of love.” He has led international spiritual movements and learning communities, as well as created and hosted for several seasons a popular national Israeli television program on culture, meaning, and spirit on Israel’s leading network. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed educational programs, papers and content rooted in traditional wisdom and yet fully adapted to the needs of the contemporary world.

Buy on Amazon

Explore more:

Explore the Great Library:
Center for World Philosophy & Religion – Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/books/

Learn about the full Oral Essays series:
Complete Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/oral-essays-series-one-mountain-marc-gafni/

Dr. Marc Gafni Official Website: 
https://marcgafni.com/

Center for World Philosophy and Religion:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/

Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni:
https://www.onemountainmanypaths.org/

Join the community Who We Must Become: 
https://who-we-must-become-3166d4.circle.so/ 

Free Unique Self Mini Course:
https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/

Formal refutations on controversy: 
WhoIsMarcGafni.com

Social Media Dr. Marc Gafni: 

Substack: https://substack.com/@marcgafni
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcgafni/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcGafni
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrMarcGafni
Twitter:https://twitter.com/MarcGafni
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarcgafni/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drmarcgafni 

Buy on Amazon
God Is Intimate | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard2025-07-17T14:01:26-07:00

A Shocking Convergence: A CHANNEL Meets The Kabbalist Lineage of SOLOMON | Marc Gafni x Paul Selig

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast

Show Notes from the Aubrey Marcus Podcast Episode:

In all my years podcasting and working with the great masters of our time, I have never seen anything like this. Paul Selig is channeling information from who he calls “The Guides” and Rebbe Gafni is transmitting the deep lineage of Solomon and Kabbalist wisdom. What do they agree about? Where are the points of distinction and separation? In this shocking convergence, we see how the old Word of the Biblical texts meets the new Word freshly informed from extra-dimensional star beings. This is a conversation not to be missed!

Check out more of Dr. Marc Gafni’s work at ⁠⁠⁠https://worldphilosophyandreligion.or…

Download chapters of First Principles and First Values: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.or…

Aubrey Marcus | ► Fit For Service: https://fitforservice.com/

► Own The Day, Own Your Life: http://bit.ly/2vRz4so

Aubrey Marcus Podcast: https://apple.co/2ns8zFP

► Ayahuasca Documentary: http://bit.ly/2OrNBTf, dealing with the crisis of value, (a birth) and a resolution of a new structure of value.

FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come

by David J. Temple

AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.

First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.

Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.

“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary

Order Here

A Shocking Convergence: A CHANNEL Meets The Kabbalist Lineage of SOLOMON | Marc Gafni x Paul Selig2025-04-02T00:25:49-07:00

Is Religion for the Happy-Minded? A Response to Harold Kushner

Download the PDF of this Article

Written and published by Marc Gafni in 1986 for Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Vol. 22, No. 3 (FALL 1986), pp. 54-65.

In a very profound way, Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Avon Books, 1981) and the themes it treats evoke in the reader feelings of warmth, compassion, and drawing one closer to all who suffer in this world. The tragic story of Aaron Kushner (the author’s son) and the very real depth with which his parents experienced suffering cannot but make one feel like reaching out in love and respect to the author. Yet, at the same time, I found the underlying premises of the book deeply troubling. Its message, meant to be comforting, is, in fact, nothing short of terrifying.

Kushner, claiming to speak for Judaism, asserts that God is, in his term, “powerless” (pp. 42-44). “God does not, and cannot, intervene in human affairs to avert tragedy and suffering. At most, He offers us His divine comfort, and expresses His divine anger that such horrible things happen to people. God, in the face of tragedy, is impotent. The most God can do,” Kushner eloquently proclaims, “is to stand on the side of the victim; not the executioner.”

That God gives free reign to an executioner is a common Jewish position, classical, medieval and modern. “Once permission is given for the destroyer to destroy, no distinction is made between the righteous and the wicked.” (Rashi Exodus 12:22).

While Judaism certainly maintains that God, in His divine empathy, stands on the side of the victim, no classical Jewish position has ever maintained that God is incapable of controlling the executioner.

Kushner uses the book of Job to lend the weight of religious authority to his position. Merely to point out the obvious-that Kushner’s interpretation of the book of Job, for instance, has little or nothing to do with the Biblical book by that name-fails to undermine the popular appeal that has propelled Kushner’s book to the bestseller lists. In fact, Kushner feels quite comfortable admitting to intellectual dishonesty. In an interview with Moment magazine (November 1981), he was asked: “You argue that it is simply wrong to blame God for the bad luck, for the nastiness, for the evil; and yet you are perfectly prepared to praise God for the good, to thank God. How do you reconcile that?” To which he carefully replied: “Walter Kaufman calls it ‘religious gerrymandering’.’ That is you draw the lines for your definition of God to include certain things and exclude others.”

While I certainly believe that profound suffering moved Kushner to take up his pen, that still cannot justify intellectual gerrymandering.

The heart of Kushner’s position is the claim that traditional beliefs about God’s relationship to the universe, and to man, are wrong, and that his own account is right.

Kushner’s basic method of argumentation is anecdotal. He cites particular cases of suffering and then a,· mpts to demonstrate the inadequacy of various theodicies as applied to those cases. But the best theodicy is still a human, all too human, theodicy. No theodicy can give pat answers for every circumstance of suffering. Theological reflection can deepen our appreciation of the problem and provide frames of reference with which to approach the experience of suffering. However, from no single set of theological premises can an all-embracing solution be expected. God, we believe, knows the results of all good and evil, past, present, and future, and measures the diverse values (spiritual; intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, hedonic, etc.) which the universe displays, and with which man is confronted. Man does not. Therefore, we must beware of “refuting” theological reflection by showing that it has difficulty fulfilling claims that it has never made.

II

It is instructive to examine Kushner’s position on his own terms. This section of the essay will comment on six of the life cases which Kushner cites to support his general conception of religion, his rejection of classic theodicy and his central claim: that God cannot control what happens in our world.

The Case of Bob (pp. 94-96)

Bob has just made the difficult decision to place his mother in a nursing home. Although his mother is “basically alert and healthy and does not require medical care” she can no longer live alone. After a brief attempt, Bob and his family decide that “they are not prepared to make the sacrifice of time and lifestyle which caring for a sick, old woman requires.” That weekend, Bob, who did not usually go to synagogue, went to services hoping they would give him “the tranquility and peace of mind he needed.” As luck would have it, the sermon that morning was on the fifth commandment. The clergyman spoke of the sacrifices parents make in raising children and the reluctance of children to make sacrifices for older parents in return. He asked: “Why is it one mother can care for six children, but six children can’t care for one mother?” It bothers Kushner that Bob was made to leave the service feeling “hurt and angry.” Bob feels that religion has told him that he is a “selfish and uncaring person.” He is haunted by the idea that if she dies soon he will never be able to live with himself “for having made her last years miserable because of his selfishness.” And Kushner, too, is upset with religion because “the purpose of religion should be to make us feel good about ourselves” after making difficult decisions. (more…)

Is Religion for the Happy-Minded? A Response to Harold Kushner2023-11-01T04:56:14-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Calling in an Integral Religion

An Excerpt from Dr. Marc Gafni’s Book Tears

Society, as it is currently constructed, is designed to bypass your tears. Yet, crying is an art. Tears are the colors with which the tapestry of your awakening is painted. Sometimes we cry surface tears in response to stuff that happens – good stuff and bad stuff. But the truest tears are those that well up from the deepest place on the inside of the inside – they may be triggered by a specific event or image, but they are larger than any one event.

Every time you cry these true tears, you cry for all the times you never cried before. True tears come only on occasion, but when they do, they are harbingers of great wisdom and guidance. These are the tears of the holy of holies. They carry revelation. To receive that revelation, you must be willing to sit still and be truly alone, so that your deep core can come out naked. From that place you wail, flooded to the core by deep sadness or profound happiness. These are not superficial tears but what we might call source tears. To hear the voice of source tears emerge, we must access the ground of dynamic stillness which is the well from which this revelatory crying rises up.

Download the PDF Version of the Paper
Dr. Marc Gafni: Calling in an Integral Religion2023-06-17T14:35:30-07:00

Love and Teaching, NonDual Humanism and the Democratization of Enlightenment (A Book Excerpt from Radical Kabbalah by Dr. Marc Gafni)

Introduction to the book Radical Kabbalah by Dr. Marc Gafni

Mordechai Lainer of Izbica is my chosen lineage master. My prayer is that I have honored him with a correct and proper understanding of his trans-mission and teaching. I believe that I have. Though this personal introduc-tion is not meant to fully outline his teachings, a few remarks may orient the general reader and guide the initiate.

An Esoteric Transmission

First of all, this book is both an academic study and a transmission of an esoteric doctrine. Part of the disguise of this work is its presentation as a piece of academic scholarship.

Of course, on one level it is precisely that, for which I have to thank Professor Moshe Idel. At some point in 2001 or so, Professor Idel told me off-handedly that I needed to do an academic doctorate at a good univer-sity in order to insure that my non-academic writing and teaching be taken seriously. He very kindly accepted my request that he act as my co-advisor at Oxford University. I am in his debt for his gracious, insightful and often penetratingly brilliant remarks, which guided the unfolding of this work in an academic context.

Having said that, the academic framework is just that, a framework—and something of a fig leaf—for the deeper teaching of Lainer, which I have humbly and perhaps audaciously tried to unfold in this volume.

When I was thirty-one, living in Israel near Tel Aviv, Prof. Moshe Halamish suggested that I study and write about this great master. I had barely heard of Mordechai Joseph Lainer, and was wholly unfamiliar with his writings collected in two volumes under the title Mei Hashiloah (MH). Halamish’s prompt was the beginning of my relationship with Lainer, which deepened and shifted again many times over the years. At the time, thanks to Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who was deeply connected to Lainer’s teaching, the Torah of Izbica was just beginning to gain currency in cer-tain neo-Hasidic circles in Israel and the United States. At some point,

I realized that I felt a soul root connection with his teaching, and began to teach his Torah to my own circles of students.

This period of teaching Mei Hashiloah lasted about ten years. Some five years into this teaching period, I spent one year of 16 hour days in the li-brary at Oxford in an intense, in-depth encounter with Mordechai Lainer.

In approaching the master and his text during that year, I followed the three-stage path of textual reading taught by the Baal Shem Tov. First, in a state of what the Baal Shem calls hahna‘ah, reverential submission to what one is learning, I read every passage again and again, praying that I might realize Lainer’s deeper intention and receive his transmission. Second, I moved from submission to what the Baal Shem calls havdalah, separation. In this stage of havdalah, I deployed a method of analysis which involved two basic steps. As I read, I made a list of key topics, words and texts in Lainer. I subsequently gathered every reference to that text, theme or image, searching for the underlying pattern. At the same time I learned, together with my friend Avraham Leader, many of the original Zoharic sources that would have influenced Mei Hashiloah, to get a sense of how he was reading the tradition, what he changed in his interpretation, and why.

Eventually, stage two yielded to stage three, which the Baal Shem Tov calls hamtakah, sweetening. Hamtakah involves an erotic ‘nondual’ merger with the text, which occurs when the reader and that which is read become one. It is at this stage that the deeper intention of the Lainer’s Torah became startlingly lucid, delightful, and beautiful, and the entire teaching opened up with radical clarity and joy.

As I continued my teaching in the world, I sought, as every authentic student does, to both teach and evolve this Torah. One expression of this process was the book Soul Prints (Simon and Schuster 2001) and the Soul Prints Workshop, (Sounds True 2004) which I published dur-ing the years 2001–2003. Another is the book you have before you. This academic work of mystical hermeneutics is complimented by the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 6:1 (Suny Press 2011) and Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, (Integral Publishing 2012).

Read More & Download the PDF Version of this Introduction
Love and Teaching, NonDual Humanism and the Democratization of Enlightenment (A Book Excerpt from Radical Kabbalah by Dr. Marc Gafni)2023-06-17T14:36:46-07:00

The Evolution of Divinity – From What Is Enlightenment Magazine – by Dr. Marc Gafni

A New Spiritual Vision for Our Time

Reprinted from What Is Enlightenment Magazine

Abstract:

Marc Gafni met Andrew Cohen through a mutual friend and student of Andrew’s in 2005. Andrew Cohen invited Marc Gafni to visit and teach in Andrew’s community to his senior students in Lenox, Massachusetts. Marc Gafni visited and taught and dialogued with Andrew Cohen in Fox Hollow several times. As a result of their shared interest in evolutionary spirituality, Marc and Andrew planned a teaching week and retreat in Israel together, which was hosted by Marc Gafni. This teaching week and weekend took place in late December 2005. During this period of time, this article was published in What Is Enlightenment.

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The Evolution of Divinity – From What Is Enlightenment Magazine – by Dr. Marc Gafni2025-02-25T03:07:03-08:00

The Evolutionary World Spirituality Unique Self Vision of Dharma, Lineage, Students, and Teachers (by Kerstin Tuschik)

From the abstract:

In this article, I want to elaborate on the concept of “Dharma, Lineage, Transmission, and the Student-Teacher Relationship” in the specific way these words are used in my World Spirituality community and specifically by the initiating teacher of the community, Dr. Marc Gafni. Marc has infused the word “Dharma” with a series of meanings which have become self-evident in our community. Because Marc has not yet written about his expansion upon the meaning of “Dharma” for the broader public, I have felt that it is necessary to do so.

The Unique Self teachings that Marc has brought into the conversation are now changing the way that enlightenment is experienced and taught around the world. In my perception, the power, love and clarity of his teaching and transmission of Unique Self enlightenment has been so profound that now, in many enlightenment circles around the world, Unique Self thinking under a host of names is virtually a given. And that although ten years ago, Unique Self Dharma was still unheard of in the enlightenment world. While this (often unconscious) adoption of the core teaching of Gafni’s Unique Self Dharma is an excellent achievement and a necessary and gorgeous step for a cogent meme to become mainstream, I find it—for the many reasons that I will discuss in this article—very important to give honor to Marc Gafni’s original inseminating work and transmission as well as to the lineage(s) that he is part of and whose wisdom he is embodying and evolving.

I, myself, have come a long way from studying cognitive concepts and maps, methods of self-transformation and healing, to studying and embodying a comprehensive dharma. The insights and discoveries I want to share with you in this article have also occurred along with the transition from being a devoted and passionate student of the Dharma to becoming more and more a teacher and lineage-holder of the Dharma myself. Specifically, I have been teaching, sharing and representing Unique Self Dharma in the German-speaking world, which in turn has deepened my own studies. So, let me share the frameworks that I have encountered and that have worked or not worked for me in relation to the teacher-student-relationship and in relation to the “Dharma.” These discernments are I believe critical for what my teacher Dr. Marc Gafni calls the “post-postmodern integral reconstruction project” which is so profoundly needed in our post-postmodern world.

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The Evolutionary World Spirituality Unique Self Vision of Dharma, Lineage, Students, and Teachers (by Kerstin Tuschik)2023-06-18T07:56:05-07:00

Spiritually Incorrect: Some Remarks on the Teacher-Student Relationship – by Dr. Marc Gafni

By Dr. Marc Gafni – Originally Published in Response to a paper by the Integrales Forum Germany in 2011

Thank you for your kind invitation to comment on the Integrales Forum position paper in regard to teacher-student relations. First let me congratulate you on this paper, which serves to initiate this important conversation. This topic is a worthy one in need of urgent address on many levels. Let me also commend your excellent deployment of the Integral framework in discussing these issues. It is the use of the Integral framework that allows for this discussion to hold the necessary complexity, multiples perspectives, and nuance that it deserves.

In broad terms, I agree with your conclusions in terms of the need for some essential standards in regard to spiritual teachers. Clearly we are all aware of the most horrific abuses that take place in the context of some pre-personal cults, as well as of some of the more subtle forms of psychological manipulation, financial dishonesty and sexual abuse that take place in these same contexts under the fig leaf of the teacher-student relationship for the sake of the dharma. To protect the potential victim and shield the powerless from the whims of the powerful is a core obligation of any community.

At the same time, as you indicate in your paper, much discernment in needed in this conversation to assure that the teacher-student function is upheld. For indeed, without this teacher-student function, both the transmission of wisdom as well as the personal and collective enlightenment of the interior face of the cosmos would be severely impaired. The teacher-student function is essential for these evolutionary goals.
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Spiritually Incorrect: Some Remarks on the Teacher-Student Relationship – by Dr. Marc Gafni2024-11-01T07:03:36-07:00

Unique Self, World Spirituality, and Evolutionary We Space: Wake Up, Grow Up, Lighten Up, Show Up, Open Up – by Dr. Marc Gafni

By Dr. Marc Gafni

Your Unique Self is radically singular, gorgeous, and special in the world. But it is even more than 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 completedness 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 than 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.

As the great connector, Unique Self is the only technology that can create the evolutionary We space necessary to affect the evolution of consciousness. Ego cannot form evolutionary We space. At best, ego can cooperate in limited ways for the greater good. Conscious collaboration, while better then mindless competition, lacks the necessary Eros and imagination to change the world. Unique Self is drenched in Eros and imagination.

One might assume that in order to foster an authentic We space, we must simply emerge into our True Selves. This is the teaching of the classical enlightenment traditions. Yet we know that True Selves cannot create a We space. For the total number of True Selves is one. In the grand impersonal realm of True Self, there is only one and not two and therefore not relationship and certainly not evolutionary We space. It is only our Unique Selves that have trance-ended separateness and entered the larger field of We as unique emanations of the all-that-is. Only through the profound and dynamic expression of our enlightened Unique Selves can we create the evolutionary we space necessary to heal the planet. Enlightened We space in which individuals and individual systems realize enlightened consciousness beyond ego is the essential technology of transformation for tomorrow.

It is a technology we must master today for enlightened consciousness that is essential if we are to find a way to heal suffering and ameliorate needless brutality and pain. Normal consciousness produces suffering. And if you think this is but a spiritual aphorism then you have only to inquire from the hundred million people brutally tortured and murdered in the last century — all as a direct result of the mad delusions of the grasping ego. The ego of normal consciousness is insane. Enlightenment is simply sanity. In enlightened space you realize that you are part of the one. You realize that you are not alone so there is no reason to desperately grasp. You realize that you are not limited to the power, healing or fulfillment available only to your separate self. But rather you know that all of the healing, goodness, power and depth of all- that- is lives in you, as you and through you.

Not to know this is not to know whom you are. It is to be essentially confused about your identity. The confusion between ego and Unique Self is far more substantive then a person who simply thinks she is someone else. This is a minor confusion of identity and hence a minor insanity when compared with the sheer madness of mistaking your ego for Your Unique Self as your essential identity.

Why is Enlightenment Rejected by Mainstream Society?

Given the power of enlightened consciousness, which I just described, how could it possibly be that mainstream culture, both east and west has rejected the attainment of enlightenment as the essential human goal? Should not this transformation of consciousness — which can do more then any other force to heal our planet — not be the essential and even passionately yearned for goal, of both every individual and every collective. And it is not. Enlightenment is simply not part of the mainstream discourse. Enlightenment is often mocked and at best relegated to the sidelines and not treated as a genuine option for fully normal people. Why not?

The answer is simple. It is woven into the essential teaching of Unique Self enlightenment. And it is as follows. Classical enlightenment says: to attain realization you must overcome your sense of being special and realize your True Identity as part of the one. This instruction is resisted by virtually everyone, for no one wants to give up their specialness. When the price of enlightenment seems to be to give up one’s innate sense of being unique and special, enlightenment is rejected by the intelligent mainstream because at his or her core virtually everyone in the world feels special. The reigning assumption is that to be special you must be a separate self, which is the core intuition of the western enlightenment. So it emerges that the core intuition of western enlightenment — that you are separate and therefore special — contradicts the core intuition of the eastern enlightenment which says you are not separate and therefore not special. For the west the affirmation of the special separate self is seen as the key to healing suffering while for the east overcoming a false sense of separate self and specialness is the key to transcending suffering.

When a person takes their nagging sense of absolute specialness to their spiritual teacher the usual instruction is: you must leave beyond this feeling of being special for the desire and experience of specialness is a function of the unenlightened ego. This instruction — while it speaks a great truth, is at its core not fully true. It is true but partial. For it fails to make two essential discernments. Those are the distinctions between separateness and uniqueness and between Unique Self and ego. At the level of ego you are separate and you are not special. This is the core and correct intuition of eastern enlightenment. And for this reason you must get over your sense of being a special separate self. But at the level of Unique Self — beyond your separateness — as a unique expression of the one you are absolutely and ultimately special. This affirms the special dignity of the special individual, which is the core intuition of western enlightenment. But it realizes that you are special not at the level of separate self-ego but at a much higher level of consciousness, the level of Unique Self.When you realize your enlightenment you give up the small games of your ego seeking to reify its specialness. You move beyond the alienation of separate self to realize the joy of uniqueness. You give up the small self-sense of being special as you begin playing an infinitely larger game in the widest context, the game of your Unique Perspective, which is ultimately unique and special and has singular gifts to give the world, which can and must be given only by Your Unique Self.

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Unique Self, World Spirituality, and Evolutionary We Space: Wake Up, Grow Up, Lighten Up, Show Up, Open Up – by Dr. Marc Gafni2023-07-16T11:33:26-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 1

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.

Download the PDF Version of the Whole Paper HERE
Download the PDF Version of the Whole Paper HERE
Dr. Marc Gafni: The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 12023-06-20T13:54:40-07:00

Enlightenment of Fullness — Yetzir and Yetzirah, Part I

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>>

Yetzer and Yetzirah: Raising the Primal Sparks of Creativity and Passion

by Dr. Marc Gafni
from “The Way of the Dragon“ in the long Soul Prints.

Part I.colorful

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.

You can follow Dr. Marc Gafni’s posts on Facebook.>>

Enlightenment of Fullness — Yetzir and Yetzirah, Part I2023-06-21T07:04:44-07:00

Marc Gafni on Post-Postmodern Art: A New Article in Parabola Magazine

By Marc Gafni

Artist Claudia Kleefeld is not the first person to see the symbol of the spiral as being a portal to a vision of a coherent cosmos. She is original in that she is a first-rate, old-master-style artist with thirty years of training, who paints the spiral as an expression of an Eros of certainty that asserts the utter meaningfulness, depth, and order of the cosmos. Kleefeld’s paintings emerge from her own opened eye of the spirit and speak directly to the higher spiritual intuition of her viewers. Finally, Kleefeld is unusual in that she is part of an emergent form of art, which seeks to reveal the enchantment of a cosmos ”” a cosmos that is good, true, and beautiful.

I am delighted to present an article which celebrates the work of Claudia Kleefeld, one of the brightest shining lights in the universe of art today. My new article, “Post-postmodern Art: A Return to Belonging,” is now published in the latest issue of Parabola Magazine.

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Marc Gafni on Post-Postmodern Art: A New Article in Parabola Magazine2023-06-21T08:36:24-07:00

Marc Gafni’s “The Future of the Holy: From Sex to Eros” Appearing in Spanda Journal

Marc Gafni was recently featured in Spanda Journal, the peer-reviewed biannual publication of the Spanda Foundation.

The Spanda Foundation offers publications related to “sustainable advancement of peace, knowledge, and understanding.”

Marc’s article, entitled “The Future of the Holy: From Sex to Eros,” begins like this:

“Sex. Is there anything else that so grabs our rapt attention, inessantly pursues us, occupies our daydreams, fantasies, and yearnings? The kabbalists state the obvious: God is trying to get our attention. Now I am not talking about the God who sends good people to burn in hell because they slipped up on one of his impossible demands. nor even the Grandfather in heaven who hands out chocolate to do-gooders. Forget that God. The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. Rather, the God that exists for us is the personal erotic life force that courses through reality. The God we believe in is the vitality of eros. The God we believe in is the force for healing and transformation in the world. The God who knows our name. That is the God who so clearly calls out to us that sex is the answer.”

For the entire article, click: SPANDAJOURNAL_C&D2.0_Marc_Gafni.

See: Gafni, M. (2012). “The Future of the Holy: from Sex to Eros”, Spanda Journal, ed. S. Momo, III,1: 131-139.

Download the PDF Version of the Paper
Marc Gafni’s “The Future of the Holy: From Sex to Eros” Appearing in Spanda Journal2023-06-21T08:44:36-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 1 of 5)

Editor’s note: This is the first part of 5-part essay, published as a white paper of the Center for Integral Wisdom think tank. For Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, follow the links.

“As the Kabbalists point out, the word Moses spelled backwards is Ha Shem, meaning ‘the name.’ Importantly, Ha-shem in biblical Hebrew also is the most common reference to God’s name. When you respond to your call and realize your soul print, fully becoming your name, you become one with God. When Moses did this, he found his voice, he became a prophet.”

By Marc Gafni

To live your story is to move from a state of slavery to freedom. Slavery is not limited to our old image of the oppressed Hebrew or black slave being whipped by the cruel master. We are all potentially free, just as we are all potentially slaves. Our intent in this brief essay is to at least begin to unpack a core intuition of the Zohar that a free person is a person who has found voice. As we shall see in the very last paragraphs of this discussion the implications of freedom are wondrous indeed!

The Hebrew name for the Passover Storytelling Ritual, which celebrates and reenacts the dynamic movement from slavery to freedom, is Pe-Sach. Renaissance mystic Isaac Luria reminded us that Pe-Sach is a combination of two words Peh, meaning “mouth,” and Sach, meaning “talk.” Pe- Sach, therefore, means the mouth that talks.

One school of Hasidic masters unpacks this idea by defining redemption as the emergence of speech. To move from a dumb and mute existence to a communal storytelling existence is to undergo redemptive transformation. “To be redeemed,” writes one mystic, “is to lead a history-making, storytelling, communing, free existence.” To be in exile is to lack history, tell no story, fail to commune, and exist as a slave, silent.

The most oft cited source for this idea is a stunning passage in the Zohar which describes the Egyptian slavery as the “exile of speech.” In Kabbalah, every biblical nation represents a different organ of the body; Egypt represents the throat. The mystics read the Hebrew word “Egypt” literally as meaning narrowness. The throat is, of course, the narrow, constricted passage between the wide spaces of the heart and mind. The narrow throat, Egypt, is thus the ideal symbol for the exile of speech. Speech remains caught in the throat, in the dark passage, and can’t make it to freedom’s gateway, the mouth. Redemption comes in the birth of the word. In the actual process of your retelling, you reclaim your story. But to be capable of retelling your story you need voice. Redemption then is the process of finding voice.

The Greatest Persecution

In the Nazi concentration camps, certain people were referred to as mules. They were so broken that, although not physically impaired, they could no longer speak. Among animals, mules are the hybrid of a horse and donkey, unable to reproduce themselves. These human, muted mules were so traumatized, their souls so mangled, that they too were unable to “reproduce themselves”–to express themselves in speech.

The great master Kalonymous Kalman of Piacezna wrote from the flames of the Warsaw ghetto that the torture of the exile is not only in the physical suffering but in the inability to cry out – the loss of voice. “The people have become mute,” he cried out in a teaching given in 1940, just weeks after his son and daughter in law and many of his disciples were brutally killed. The teaching was on the story of Joseph and his brothers in the book of Genesis. In a dream, Joseph sees “the binding of sheaves in the midst of the field. And behold my [Joseph’s] sheave, rose up.” In the simple reading of the text, this is a dream of Joseph’s future power. The bound sheaves represent the servility of his brothers while the rising of his sheave is an expression of his potency. Joseph is predicting he will be lord over his brothers. Kalonimus Kalman uses the classical interpretive method of the mystic–reading the text independent of its context (here, Joseph and his brothers) and focusing on subtle wordplays and dual meanings–to extract a deeper spiritual meaning. For Kalman, the sheaves represent his disciples. The word for sheave in Hebrew also means “mute”: “My disciples are mute in the field of the spirit.” They have lost voice. Their suffering is so intense that it defies and destroys all expression. “However,” continues the master, “my sheave–that is, my muteness–must rise.” By this he means, “I must find voice.”

Kalman sees the role of the mystic leader, himself, as retaining voice, holding on at all costs to the ability to talk. He does not mean speech in the technical sense, of which even the slave is usually capable. He refers rather to the ability to have the voice that allows you to remain the storyteller of your own tale””even in the face of Nazi horror.

Kalonymous Kalman took on this role by continuing to teach even when he couldn’t be certain anyone survived to hear him. He risked all to record his teachings and hide them in the hope they would be found by some future generation. He was continuing to tell the story. In an act of heroic protest, he refused to allow the Nazis to claim “his-story.”

Kalman’s book, along with his voice, was lost in the war. He died in the Treblinka concentration camp and his book disappeared. Although he left word that he had buried his writings before being deported, they were not to be found. That is, until almost fifteen years after the Nazi defeat when a Polish worker miraculously discovered them in a pile of rubble and somehow understood their importance. The work has since been published. Treblinka may have succeeded in killing the Master of Piacezna, but it could not kill his voice. He died but his words did not. His voice triumphed.

Voices can indeed triumph even when the storyteller dies. For a version of Kalman’s story that is completely different yet exactly the same, we turn to Alice Walker’s classic work, The Color Purple. The novel focuses on two sisters, abandoned by their father to the custody of a man referred to as Mistah. One sister gets away. The other remains behind. What keeps the captive sister from losing her soul? The letters she sends to her sister. By telling her story she avoids be sucked into the slavery’s dark and deadly vortex.

In Blaise Pascal’s words, silence is “the greatest persecution.” Silence can forge the bonds of slavery even if you have not been sold by Dad to a man named Mistah or suffered the brutality of Nazism. Whenever you give up the belief that you are special and deserve to have a voice, you become a slave. Whenever you work in a place that instills fear, whenever you are afraid to speak up and ask for what is your due, you are a slave.

This post is the first in a five-part series of posts, “Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God.” For Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, follow the links.

Dr. Marc Gafni: Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 1 of 5)2023-06-21T08:53:13-07:00

Tears and Transformation: Toward the Redemption of a Crying God

Excerpted from Chapters 1, 10, and 11 of Reclaiming Rosh Hashanah: The Dance of Tears (forthcoming, Integral Publishers)

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography

Summary: In this essay, excerpted from Marc Gafni’s forthcoming publication Reclaiming Rosh Hashanah: The Dance of Tears, we encounter biblical myth character Rachel and her three levels of tears of transformation: human empathy for the suffering of other human beings, human empathy for the pain of God, and empathy of God for man. These three strands of Rachel’s tears form “a sacred circle of nondual love,” according to Marc in this passage. Furthermore, these tears of redemption express a core idea in Hebrew wisdom: “The human being, by engaging the Rachel archetype and entering into the pain of the Shechina in exile, can “through his tears” realize his ontic identity with the Shechina herself, and in this very realization, be aroused to great compassion and achieve redemption.” This excerpt introduces the mystical techniques of the crying of transformation and the transformation of crying. It is by accessing these tears that we offer redemption for a crying God.

In order to fully appreciate the nature of Rosh Hashanah theatre and the dance of tears, it is necessary to point out the implicit distinction between this biblical form of holy day theatre and the concept of theatre inherited by western civilization from ancient Greece. In classical Greek theatre, the operative principle was Aristotle’s understanding of catharsis. Catharsis for Aristotle meant the purging of the emotions.

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Tears and Transformation: Toward the Redemption of a Crying God2023-06-16T14:37:49-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Protest as Prayer (Part 1): A Response to Tragedy the World Over

God = The Infinity of Intimacy: From the Infinity of Power to the Infinity of Intimacy

Part 1:

By Marc Gafni

The mandate of biblical consciousness demands that the human being enter into partnership with God in the task of perfecting the world. The classical expression of this in the lineage of Kabbalah is the obligation of Tikkun. Tikkun means not merely to hear or to fix but to be co-creative evolutionary partners with the divine.

This evolutionary mandate to co-create and to heal the world with and as divinity emerges, paradoxically, not out of answers but out of questions. The fact that the human being can challenge and that God accepts the human challenge implies a covenantal partnership between the human being and God. Both the human being and God share an understanding of the good, and thus God can turn to the human being and say: “I invite you, nay, I demand that you be my partner, my co-creator in the perfection of the world. I began the process of creation; I established the moral fabric of the world. It is up to you to take that cloth and to weave it fully. It is up to you to complete the tapestry, it is up to you to risk to grow and to create a world in which good, love, justice and human dignity flourish and are affirmed.’ A human being who cannot be trusted enough to challenge evil can also not be a partner in fostering the good.

It is true that God very often seems silent in response to our challenge. Yet Jewish consciousness, expressed through biblical text and tradition, affirms that God accepts the validity of the question. In doing so God affirms our role as God’s partner in history. If I am able to recognize evil for what it is, then I am ipso facto obligated in tikkun olam – the obligation to act for and with God in the healing of the world. Man is the language of God. We are God’s adjectives, God’s adverbs, God’s nouns and sometimes even God’s dangling modifiers. We are God’s vocabulary in the world. When I love, when I am able to be truly vulnerable and intimate with another human being, when I am able to share the pain of another and to rejoice in their deep joy, I am acting for God. I become God’s chariot in the world.

More than this: if I can wrestle with God, if I can express my uncertainty with God in the intimacy of challenging relationship, then paradoxically, I convert my doubt into the core certainty of divine relationship.

Note: This post is part of a 15-part paper.

Download the PDF Version of the Whole Paper HERE

Read More Parts Here:

Part 1
Part 4
Part 7
Part 10
Part 13
Part 2
Part 5
Part 8
Part 11
Part 14
Part 3
Part 6
Part 9
Part 12
Part 15
Dr. Marc Gafni: Protest as Prayer (Part 1): A Response to Tragedy the World Over2023-06-21T10:22:40-07:00

Lilith: Re-Reading Feminine Shadow by Dr. Marc Gafni (Hebrew Version Co-Authored by Ohad Ezrahi – Modan, 2004)

Download an Unplugged, Raw Version of English Translation of the Book

In Lilith, Marc Gafni provides insights into the deep context in sources of Hebrew wisdom for this core idea that that the exile of the Shekinah is in one expression, the exile of the erotic into the sexual. This idea is possibly best expressed in the Raya Mehimna and Tiqunei Zohar literature. Based on the biblical verse “and a maidservant that inherits her mistress” (Proverbs 30:23), the Shekina in exile is said to be the state in which the maidservant has inherited her place.

This book represents an integration of ideas from Marc Gafni and Ohad Ezrahi. At his request the first writer during the physical writing was Ohad. It was co-authored by them and published with intention as a shared book reflecting their partnership at the time and the shared intellectual content in the core of the book. This is reflected in the joint publishing of the book, the shared content, and the signed contracts with the publishers and dozens of extant letters between the authors during the process. For more info, click here.

Download an Unplugged, Raw Version of English Translation of the Book
Lilith: Re-Reading Feminine Shadow by Dr. Marc Gafni (Hebrew Version Co-Authored by Ohad Ezrahi – Modan, 2004)2023-06-21T11:20:18-07:00

Tikkun Magazine Articles by Dr. Marc Gafni

Between 2000 and 2003, Tikkun Magazine published a series of articles by Dr. Marc Gafni. You can download and read them here:

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Tikkun Magazine Articles by Dr. Marc Gafni2023-06-21T11:22:18-07:00
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