In this dialogue, facilitated by Peter Limberg from The Stoa, Marc and Zak provide an overview of an emerging philosophy. Topics include neo-perennialism, Eros, ethics, evolutionary metaphysics, and the future of civilization.
Topics include:
Andrew Sweeny writes about this dialogue:
Dr. Marc Gafni is a Rabbi, an integral philosopher, and—and by his own description—an outrageous lover, as any good philosopher should be.
I spoke to him about his book A Return to Eros and the need for eros in spirituality, politics, and life.
In this conversation, I will query him about ‘the murder of eros’, based on the final chapter in his book—and ask him how spirituality and religion can integrate the erotic, beyond mere hedonism or repression. As Marc says, ‘We need to take sex seriously.’
We stand at a moment in time when the weaponizing of sex and the manufacturing of scandals is used to undermine leaders and manipulate politics, religion and culture via digital communications at a faster rate than any other time in history. The recent emergents of a post-truth society and fake or distorted news now generate more engagement than truth on social media and are having an enormous impact on the shaping people’s viewpoints and beliefs.
If you use the internet for any form of communication including…
…then you are participating in digital culture.
The question is, does your participation contribute to the awakening and evolution of culture, or does your participation contribute to the perpetuation of false negative memes and distortions of the truth?
It’s not an easy question to answer, because most of us believe that our actions are well intentioned…. for instance:
You see, if you don’t understand the basic tenets for discerning whether or not a post or an article is fact or simply opinion, stated as fact…and if you don’t take the time to weigh your opinions with basic moral and ethical standards before you press ‘publish’ or ‘post’, then you unconsciously become an instrument for the advancement of a post-truth society. In a post-truth America, justice, integrity, and basic goodness are sacrificed on the altar of click bait, political smear campaigns and corrupt grasping for profit or power.
Our response to post-truth and fake news was to create a series of blog-posts dedicated to restoring the fundamental principles of human dignity, fair process and integrity in the digital age. It’s called Evolving Public Culture.
The invitation of Evolving Public Culture is to become an activist for a planetary awakening by contributing to the conversation and choosing to take a bold stand for truth, integrity and justice.
The page you are trying to reach is part of our Great Library Stacks & Archives. If you already signed up for our FREE Great Library card, please log in to access this content.
If you are not yet a Library Card owner, you can sign up to get access.
The page you are trying to reach is part of our Great Library Stacks & Archives. If you already signed up for our FREE Great Library card, please log in to access this content.
If you are not yet a Library Card owner, you can sign up to get access.
“When it was recommended that I do a podcast with Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni, I knew nothing about him. I dove straight into his body of work and my life will never be the same. This is perhaps the most paradigm shifting podcast I have ever recorded. It tells the tale of the greatest love story of all–the story of the cosmo-erotic universe Herself. In this paradigm shifting masterclass, we learn how a force he calls Eros is the fundamental substrate of creation all the way down to the first principles of subatomic matter. Gafni’s wisdom stretches back deep into the secrets of the Temple of Solomon and the mystic Kabbalist tradition. Our conversation touches a wide range of topics, including the nature of the Goddess, the democratization of enlightenment, and rewriting our sexual narratives.”
“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” – Dr. Marc Gafni
In this video, Dr. Marc Gafni explores the New Universe Story, including the Narratives of Unique Self, Ordinary Love, Outrageous Love, Unique Self Symphony, and the Erotic and the Holy.
What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity’s ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?
For episode 39, Layman meets with Marc Gafni to talk about his thoughts on an emerging World Spirituality, grounded in ritual and practice; the need for an integral orientation to encourage “dual citizenship,” embracing a global spirituality while also preserving and developing historical religious traditions; spirituality as the ground of value for human becoming; Marc’s notion of the Unique Self and its relationship to enlightenment; cosmic history as intimate conversation; and Marc’s recent work with Zak Stein on developing a Cosmo-Erotic Humanism. Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, passionate philosopher, and author of ten books. He is the co-founder of The Center for Integral Wisdom, and a rabbinic lineage holder in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. He self-describes as a “citizen” of both Integral World Spirituality and classical Hebrew practice. He has been an editor of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice on issues of Integral spirituality and a faculty member of J.F.K. University. In 2014, Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, with John Mackey and Kate Maloney 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 Evolutionary Love.
Layman Pascal is joined by Dr. Marc Gafni, the co-founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom and the author of multiple books and essays on integrative spirituality and spiritual activism.
Marc presents his vision of what a planetary politics could and should be, and together they explore the question of AI and the enormous challenges manipulative algorithms pose not only to informed voting, but to sensemaking in general; the emergence of techno-feudalism; the problems with voting protocols rooted in rivalrous dynamics, and the possibilities for liquid democracy or a synergistic democracy; the viability and role of nation states in a globally interconnected and interdependent society; the dynamics of intimacy, and the importance of shared first principles and a shared story; and much more.
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, passionate philosopher, and author of ten books. He is the co-founder of The Center for Integral Wisdom, and a rabbinic lineage holder in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. He self-describes as a “citizen” of both Integral World Spirituality and classical Hebrew practice. He has been an editor of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice on issues of Integral spirituality and a faculty member of J.F.K. University. In 2014, Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, with John Mackey and Kate Maloney 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 Evolutionary Love.
The Salons were gatherings organized by Shareef Malnik & Gabrielle Anwar, former Co-Chairs of the Think Tank of the Center for Integral Wisdom, together with the President of the Think Tank, Dr. Marc Gafni.
The page you are trying to reach is part of our Great Library Stacks & Archives. If you already signed up for our FREE Great Library card, please log in to access this content.
If you are not yet a Library Card owner, you can sign up to get access.
Forthcoming book: The Intimate Universe by Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Marc Gafni
To understand the book you hold in your hands, you have to understand two people: Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni. Both of them are magic.
To reveal that magic, let me first tell you the tale of how I met Barbara Marx Hubbard, who was later to introduce me to Marc. It was 2005, and I was at a space conference at the Airport Sheraton in Los Angeles. This was not a conference I’d wanted to attend. I’d been pressured into showing up by people from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Space Society. Why had I refused to go? At first, I had been too embarrassed to explain. The fact was that I only attend conferences where I’m speaking. There’s a reason. If I am just another face in the crowd, that fact depresses me.
I told that to Feng Hsu, the senior risk analyst from NASA who had made himself part of the pressuring team. Feng volunteered to fly up from Houston to keep me company. And he made a promise. He would assign another babysitter to me, David Livingston, the host of the Space Show. Livingston, he assured me, had heard every one of my broadcasts on the highest rated overnight talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast, was a huge fan, and knew everyone in the space community. Feng was not kidding around. Not only did he team up with me when we attended lectures and peppered the lecturers with questions or criticism, but David Livingston was a genius at important introductions.
We live in extraordinary times. In the history of all humanity, there have only been five or six major world transformations: somewhere around 500,000 years ago, humans began to emerge as a distinct species, with an archaic worldview which separated us from the great apes. Around 50,000 years ago, the archaic worldview gave way to a magical worldview, anchored in foraging, hunting, and gathering. Then, around 10,000 years ago, farming was discovered. Simple farming, with a hand-held hoe, called horticulture. Concurrently, the worldview of simple magic gave way mythic-magic–more complex, and more sophisticated.
Around 4,000 B.C.E., the animal-drawn plow was discovered, and horticultural gave way to agrarian, while mythic-magic gave way to fully-developed mythic, with its traditional fundamentalistic values. The mythic world ruled until right around the Renaissance in the West, where myth began to give way to reason, which exploded during the Enlightenment. The rational worldview, along with its scientific materialism, and with its modern values, became in many ways the official worldview of the modern West. Until, that is, the 1960’s, which saw the last major world transformation–this time from modern to postmodern, from monolithic reason to postmodern pluralism and the “cultural creatives”.
“First Principles express the underlying – eternal yet evolving – universal principles of value that need to be the rudder of civilization’s next stage. First Principles are urgently needed – personally and collectively – to respond to the catastrophic and even existential risk that challenges us, invites us, and demands our response at this moment in time. First Principles are ancient, time-honored, and venerable, even as they are evolutionary, emergent, and new. First Principles are a weaving together of the most crucial validated truths from all the wisdom streams – premodern, modern, and postmodern – into a new whole greater than the sum of its parts. First Principles are what we have referred to as the New Story, or a New Dharma, or a Global Ethos for a Global Civilization. First Principles are implicitly shared by all the Many Paths. They are the foundation of the One Mountain itself.” – Dr. Marc Gafni
This 27-Part Video series is part of the 7-week Online Video Course:
When looking at the state of the world today, if your head is not in the sand, you feel a sense of urgency. There is outrageous beauty and goodness. But there is also outrageous pain. But not of the ordinary kind. There is the pain of dislocation as we enter a phase shift in human history where all of the old narratives of identity are collapsing. In this 11th hour, as we are poised between utopia and dystopia, we have no authentic sense of who we are and what is our personal place in this pivotal moment in human history.
This playlist is a short introduction to the 7-week Online Video Course: “the First Steps as Homo Amor” with Dr. Marc Gafni.
We are at a pivotal moment – in the 11th hour poised between dystopia and utopia – between the capacity to create heaven on earth or unleash, especially for the most vulnerable two billion people on the planet, a hell of suffering and death. We are at a tipping point, where our next steps can either usher in heaven on earth or all hell break loose. We are faced with global challenges at an existential level – threats to our very existence.
Global challenges can only be met with concerted global action. But we suffer a global action paralysis or rampant global action confusion. The global action paralysis is rooted not merely in political struggle but in something far more fundamental. Our global action paralysis is rooted in a global intimacy disorder.
Therefore, in order to move towards collective mutual action that can take us to the next level, we need to heal the global intimacy disorder that is at the root of our crisis.
Intimacy disorders – personal and collective – are always rooted in one root cause: living in different stories of reality. Intimacy disorders are only healed when partners, beloveds, parents and children, or tribes and societies, experience themselves as living in a shared story, with a shared vision and values. Whenever there is alienation, it is because there is a breakdown in our own story.
The purpose of this offering is to locate you in the most accurate, good, true, and beautiful story of the universe and your personal life that is available at this moment in time. This is the great eternal, evolutionary story of cosmo-erotic humanism in which you are personally implicated. This is the most urgent question of your identity. Who Are You? The truth of your identity is that you are Homo amor.
As such, your personal love story is implicated in the evolutionary story. But for REAL. This course is about YOUR transfiguration into Homo amor, a term we use to describe the New Human and the New Humanity, that is the evolutionary fulfillment of Homo sapiens.
In this program, Dr. Marc Gafni will take you deep into a new vision that understands the progressive deepening of intimacies as the core evolutionary driver. You will begin to birth the new human in your own being.
This is a personal invitation. Your response to this invitation may well be pivotal in activating Homo amor.
Welcome to this extraordinary journey that will show you the way to activate your identity as Homo amor.
