Dr. Marc Gafni, as esteemed teacher, joins this Aubrey Marcus podcast to discuss what does it mean to have a conversation with God. 

Join Aubrey Marcus and Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation.

In Aubrey’s voice:

Is God real? And if so, can you have an actual conversation with the divine? I sit down with Rebbe Marc Gafni to go all the way in on the question that sits beneath every spiritual tradition, every psychedelic experience, and every 3am reckoning with the mystery of being alive.

From my transformation from teenage atheist to someone who has felt the whisper of the divine firsthand, to Marc’s radical framework for understanding God as the Infinite Intimate, this episode is for anyone who has ever wondered whether the universe gives a damn about them personally.

Spoiler: it does. And it’s open for conversation.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
03:08 The Nature of God and Personal Experience
05:45 Understanding Idolatry and the Concept of One God
08:52 The Problem of Evil and Theodicy
11:48 Prayer as Protest and Challenging God
15:10 Personal Experiences and the Journey to Faith
17:49 The Power of Intimacy in Prayer
21:13 The Role of Comfort and Challenge in Faith
23:59 The Personal God and Communication with the Divine
39:55 The Conversational Cosmos
45:40 The Nature of Prophecy
48:34 Divine Communication and Personal Experience
51:55 The Personal Face of God
54:24 The Dignity of Personal Need
01:07:02 Initiating the Conversation with God
01:21:37 The Nature of Relationality and Time
01:27:05 The Power of Affirmative Prayer
01:31:43 The Complexity of Suffering and Prayer
01:39:14 The Constant Conversation with the Divine
01:55:24 Discernment of the God Voice

Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis

by Dr. Marc Gafni (Author), Dr. Zak Stein(Contributor), Elena Maslova Levin (Contributor)

Story is the source code of culture and consciousness and of all Reality-all the way up and down the evolutionary chain. Story is the attempt to gather information about the nature of Reality and translate it into narrative frameworks bounded by Value.
Stories that organize culture are “Stories of Value, backed by the Universe”.

Postmodernity argues that Reality is just a story, and that all stories are created equal (equally meaningless of inherent value) because value itself is not real. And therefore, all stories of value are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.

The postmodernists are wrong.

Story is real. And not all stories are equal. There are better and worse stories. A better story is an eternal and evolving story of Value. Evolving Value backed by the Universe.

A worse story-one with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines of distorted value, like the story we’ve lived in the West for the better part of the last century-can, and will, bring us to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it.

Value is both real, backed by the Universe, and like everything in the Universe, value evolves. The evolution of value itself is the evolution of love, as Eros and evolution themselves, are inherent plotlines of value in the great story of Cosmos.

The goal of The Evolution of Love, and its companion volume Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, is to provide a first articulation of a new, better story of Value in the domain of relationship. At the core of this New Story of Value are a new Universe Story and a new narrative of identity, which we have called CosmoErotic Humanism and Homo amor.

If we fail to articulate this New Story of Value, the results will be excruciating for billions of human beings and for the entire life system–as for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.

All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.
All of the present depends on us to live.
All of the future depends on us to be born.