Excerpts from as well as Articles & Dialogues on Published & Forthcoming Books
Remember Master Menachem Mendel who was asked by his students, “Rebbe (teacher), where is God?”
The master responds, “God is only where you let him in.”
Read the whole Daily Wisdom Post>>> by Marc Gafni on love, freedom, and responsibility.
The world over, God’s name is evoked in greetings. The Spanish hello – “Olah” – originated in Arab Spain from the term “O’Allah” – Allah of course being the Arab appellation of God. In Bavarian German they say “Gruss God”. In Hebrew, the common response when asked how you are doing is “Baruch Hashem” – Praise God, or Thank God. The Hebrew greeting “Shalom” is actually a name of God. In English, we still follow this custom when we part from someone and say “God speed” or “God be with you.”
God responds to the crying of Ishmael and not the crying of Hagar. Ishmael represents the crying of the baby with which all life begins. Why does the baby cry? The baby is hungry, the baby is afraid, the baby is vulnerable, the baby is lonely. The baby’s cry is a primal scream of protest. The shofar on Rosh Hashana is called by the talmud “Yeulelei Yallil,” the howling of the wolf. It is a kind of intuitive shriek, a pre-personal crying expressing a feeling of threat and a deep need for protection. It is motivated at least in part by fear.
Read Marc Gafni‘s whole article about tears as protest.
In order to identify our unique selves (in theistic terms – soul prints) and to respond to the voices that call us to meaning we need to first experience the world as meaningful. One of the great cries of modernity is that it all seems to be a house of mirrors. The image of the house of mirrors indicates our feeling that there is no core essence in the world; rather all is a grand joke, an illusion, a house of mirrors in a cruel carnival. Life too often seems absurd. Nothing really matters. Absurdus’ means “fully deaf” in Latin. So often we moderns, strain mightily and often vainly, to hear the call or sense the innate purpose of being.
I believe that any thoughtful person has house of mirror moments, maybe even house of mirror years. In the end however life is a decision for meaning. There are only two choices in life. Either everything is meaningful or nothing is meaningful. If choosing to be Mother Teresa instead of Hitler is meaningful then everything is meaningful. If remembering my son’s birthday matters then everything matters.
2010 Photo courtesy of Evgeni Dinev
We yearn – in our deepest hearts – not to take but to give, and in that giving to deeply receive. Sexuality is the model for this, because there one single act contains within it both giving and receiving. The same is true, however, in all of our relationships. Every interpersonal relation is an iridescent web of exchange. We each have a piece of each other’s story. A lover’s exchange is when I invest myself in our relationship sufficiently – that over time I share with you the piece of your story which I carry with me, and I receive from you the piece of my story that you carry with you. It may be an idea, an experience, a perspective, a song, a moment of intimacy or a thousand other possibilities. The nature of the world is that every significant meeting we have is choreographed in order to return to us a precious missing piece.
It is said that a true master is only able to give to his disciple if he is first able to fully receive him. This is accomplished by finding the spark of the disciple in his soul.
One Sunday morning the Mittler Master was seen to be exceedingly troubled. When queried by his students, he replied – Whenever someone comes to me with a sin – I help him to heal by first finding that sin in myself. This morning however someone came to me but I cannot help, for I cannot find it in myself.
In the written tradition the story ends here. In the inner circle it is told that a man whose wife had died, had come to the master. The man had refused to bury his wife immediately; instead he had sexual intercourse with her lifeless body several times before he took her for burial. The master simply did not know how to receive this story in himself and was thus unable to give healing. That is until the following morning when he is reported to have come to prayer services full of good spirit. Apparently he had found a way to locate this sin in himself. How? He answered, “In my prayer, I kept dancing in ecstasy for a few seconds after the ecstasy had gone!”
Israel, Master of the name, said to each student, “I am dependent on you; without you a part of my teaching can never be heard in the world.” And so it is with us. For we are all teachers and all students. And so it is with God. Every human being is a prism which can uniquely refract a particular color in the spectrum of divine light. We are all God’s faces.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
www.marcgafni.com
So far, the two major qualities of the erotic lover have been perception and giving. We have seen how the sexual models the erotic, hinting to us how we can live a deeper, more profound existence in all areas of our lives. In order to give in the realm of the sexual, we must be great listeners – fully attentive to the subtlest nuances of our lover’s desire. Similarly, to be a giver in all arenas of being requires our mastering the lover’s art of attention.
Just as the sexual lover listens deeply to the needs of the beloved and thereby brings the beloved to satisfaction, so too must the erotic lover, in all facets of life, be deeply listening and attentive to the needs of the beloved.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. ”” Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven
Loving and giving are inextricably bound up. The great medieval philosopher Maimonides teaches that to love God is to know the divine in both world and self. Maimonides understands well that to know and not to love is not to know. But he goes one step further; to love and not to do is not to love. Love is as love does.
So when Maimonides lists what it might mean to love God, he talks about a broad range of simple acts of goodness that we do for other people. Helping the poor, rejoicing with the bride and groom, escorting the dead at a funeral, and the list goes on and on.
Small deeds, simple acts of kindness – that is what makes me a lover of God. People are God incarnate in this world. Each person is a different face of God. To love people by being a giver is to love God. There is no great deed of loving God. There are only small deeds of giving to people – done with great love!
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
To be a lover is to be a giver. It is through the consistent commitment to the growth of the other expressed through regular and spontaneous acts of giving that you become a lover.
Slowly over time – in a gradual expanding of self – you are able to regain and surpass even the initial ecstasy of falling in love. The ego boundaries dissolve, self is expanded to include other, and the true intimacy of shared identity is achieved. This is the spiritual dynamic between lover and beloved.
It is of course important to remember that the beloved could be a man or woman, a community, a child, a vocation, location, animal or cause. The principle remains the same. There is no loving without giving. Love always involves the willingness to transcend self for the sake of the growth of an other.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
David Castillo Dominici, www.freedigitalphotos.net
As we have said, the model for being an erotic lover – in all facets of our existence – is the sexual. I see you and you are gorgeous, magnetically dazzling, to me. I yearn for you – all of me wants to break down and dissolve the barriers between us, to enter the inside, where the world stands still for a moment and I am inside the chrysalis of all reality. You-nified.
Since being a lover is modeled on the sexual, we understand that love too is a perception. Moreover, love is a Perception-Identification Complex. I perceive the infinite specialness, the God point in you, and identify that highest point in you as the Real You.
In the understanding of the quantum spirit, I understand that my perception not only discloses a reality that exists, it actually brings this particular reality into existence. “I love you” means both “I perceive you in your beauty” and “You become even more beautiful under my gaze.” Remember, love is a verb. So just as when I shine shoes, they become shinier, when I love you, you become lovelier.
Built into our spiritual hardwiring is a great desire to realize the beauty and divinity that is our birthright. The experience of falling in love is a true perception of this. It allows us a glimpse of union; of what life might be when the thick walls of ego dissolve. We understand, nevertheless, that those walls will always be raised again.
Though but a poetic paradox, it is true that that which is razed, will be only raised again. Ego separation will, sooner or later, always snap back into place. It is precisely at this time, that the real work of loving begins. We seek, by doing the work, to reclaim the heights we glimpsed in the initial ecstasy. Those heights, and even greater ones.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The perception of falling in love is but one expression, however of a broader kind, of perception. This higher way of seeing is the path of Ecstasy. Ecstasy, from the Greek word ex-stasis, means “to move beyond stasis,” that is “beyond the apparently solid, into motion, movement, and life itself.” Its Latin root ex-stare means to stand outside yourself. To say I’m ecstatic is to say “I am beside myself. I am overwhelmed by intense experience. The veils of my illusions have been pierced and something essential touched.”
Ecstasy is the highest perception of love. Ecstasy is modeled in the raptures of sexuality, but expresses itself in every facet of being as well. Ecstatic dance, music, exercise, study or work are all an essential part of what we need to be, both nurtured and wise in the world. The defining feature of ecstasy is that we touch a place of union where the walls have come down. In falling in love we touch it in the experience of intimacy. We have defined intimacy as shared identity. It is precisely this expansion of self which is ecstatic. The move from I to We is the greatest joy of a human life.
The circle expands however beyond the We of intimate relationship, beyond even the We of community. Ecstasy is the erotic place where we touch most clearly what the Hindu Upanishads call tat tvam asi, “That art thou” and thou are that.” Hebrew mystics called it Hitpaalut- radical amazement at wonder of being. In Hitpaalut you feel like you are enmeshed in the fabric of being – all loneliness and alienation are overcome – not the salve of relationship which can never fully ful-fill you, but a much more profound sense of being at home. A beautiful quote from the Chandogya Upanishad:
“This my spirit within my heart
is greater than the earth, greater than the sky,
greater than the heavens, greater than all worlds.
The all-working, all-wishing, all-smelling, all-tasting one,
that embraces the universe, that is silent, untroubled –
that is the spirit within my heart, that is Brahman.
There unto, when I go hence, shall I attain.
Who knoweth this, he” hath no more doubts.”
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
Love is almost always proceeded by an act of will. We do not fall in love unless we decide to fall in love. Only after we internally give ourselves permission are we open to the experience. But once we open the gate, the radically pleasurable perception of falling in love, and the joy and wonder created in its wake, are given to us free of all charges. The Kabbalists refer to falling in love as “arousal from above.” The love granted to us is real enough; it is simply not the result of human effort. It is something which is aroused from beyond.
According to the Kabbalists, there is nothing malicious or even capricious about the whole enterprise. Falling in love is a gift from God, pure and simple. Falling in love is a divine gift from a God whose primary characteristic is love for Her creatures. God bestows upon us a gift of inner certainty and clarity.
On the other hand, the nature of such a gift is that it is too great for us to accept fully. We cannot hold the dazzling brilliance of the light” something shatters. We can touch the love for a time, but we lack the vessels to hold it.
Falling in love is actually the core of the Kabbalistic Big Bang myth. A close reading of Lurianic Kabbalah reveals the powerful meditative truth that the motive force of creation was God falling in love with the world. Out of that love emerges the universe. God emanates a world in love. The image for this emanation is light pouring into vessels. God “in love” with the world. The emanation of light just keeps pouring forth. The vessels, however, are unable to hold the light. They shatter. The process of living is to gather the sparks of this fallen light and to repair the broken vessels.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
From The Erotic and the Holy, by Marc Gafni:
Now let me share with you something truly beautiful. It is a sort of Hebrew mystic expansion of Traherne’s moment of rapture. It is one of my favorite stories.
The disciples still tell of the time, more than two centuries ago, when the master known as the Bat Ayin, the Daughter of the Eye, received his call. The way the old students tell it, a mysterious man entered the study hall of the master in Europe and whispered with great intensity several sentences into his ear. On the very next day, the master gathered the community and announced that they had received the call of Lech Lecha, the call to go up to the Land of Israel.
The master was clearly roused to great passion. The disciples, infected by his ardor, were moved to action. The entire community over a period of a year was transplanted from Europe to the biblical land of Israel. It was around the time of the American Revolution. The community flourished in the mystical city of Safed, overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
One day, however, after many tranquil years, a mysterious man appeared in the study hall. The older disciples recognized him. It was the same man who had whispered into the master’s ear so many years before. Who was he? Where was he from? No one knew.
This time, however, he did not whisper several sentences into the master’s ear. He spoke to the master for only a moment, uttering perhaps one sentence. Then he was gone. The master’s face fell. He withdrew from the study hall into his room, where he remained seven whole days. When he came out, his face shone. That same ardor and passion that had moved him to make the initial journey once again lit up his countenance. “We are not there yet,” he said, “but we will get there.”
He began to sing and dance. His display went on for nearly seven hours. What was most strange, though, was that every fifteen minutes or so, he would go to the window, look outside, and then return to the circle, dancing and singing with renewed intensity and passion.
At some point in the eighth hour, a smile of ecstasy and triumph spread across his face. “Yes,” he said softly, “they are rubies.”
He turned to his expectant disciples and explained. “When that mysterious man you saw spoke to me so many years ago, he whispered in my ear, “Go up to the Land and you will see that the air lifts you up and carries you on its wings. The water sparkles and tastes like the rivers of Eden. Even the stones in the street sparkle like rubies.” His call aroused in me great passion. I knew that it was a true call. I came to this land, and indeed the very air itself carried me on its wings. The water sparkled and even tasted like the rivers of Eden. However, the stones were stones! Rubies they were not. They were lovely and fine, but they didn’t sparkle. And that was sensible to me. I understood that he had exaggerated just a little, and all was well.
“When the same man reappeared last week, he whispered only six words in my ear: “The stones do sparkle like rubies. My heart dropped. I understood that I had not fully heard the call. My love had grown weak. And so I spent seven days meditating, sitting with my heart, and trying to rediscover my wellspring of passion. When I felt that I had touched it, I knew that I needed you, my community, to make it alive and real. So we danced and sang, and every little while I would look out the window to see if the stones were sparkling.”
The master smiled broadly at them. “And now as I look out the window, I can tell you that it’s true. I can see clearly now the stones do sparkle like rubies.”
The master understands that his ability to respond to his call is directly proportional to the love he feels. Our calls cannot be fully perceived other than through the eyes of passion. Love and perception are holy bedfellows.
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The Kabbalists were often referred to as Mistaklim or Chozim, roughly translated as the Lookers or Seers. To get a handle on what that might mean, just imagine how we feel when someone looks at us with erotic, loving eyes.
We feel energized, uplifted and embraced. We become more vibrant, audacious and alive. We feel safer in the world. The sense of alienation, separateness and loneliness that tarred our empty days and painful nights seems to lift.
The more steady the loving gaze is, the more we can steady ourselves and chart our direction and purpose on the path of being. It begins with the loving eyes of the mother – our first lover – and continues throughout our lives. Love’s eyes sustain us, nourish us and connect us to the essential aliveness that courses through the universe. Being seen makes us alove and alive. The same is true of God. The gaze of the mystic sustains and even ”˜creates’ God.
Indeed Israel for the Kabbalists is not merely a national group. The very word Israel is far more profoundly translated from the Hebrew as ”˜The one who sees God’. Love is Perception. Perception is creation. That is the power of the original appearance of the perception word Ra’ah in biblical myth. After every stage of the unfolding creation process in Genesis the text reads ‘God saw and It was Good.’
Mystic Luzatto reflects virtually the entire Kabbalistic tradition when he reminds us that the motive force for creation is divine love. ‘God saw that it was Good’ could be re-read as God loved – perception is love – and brought the world into being.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The Kabbalists takes the mandate of love–implicit in self perception–one step further. I need to understand that not only am I a part of God but I am also a partner to God.
Renaissance mystic Judah Loew of Prague writes that the litmus test of true love is mutuality. For him, this means that you love the person whom you complete and who completes you. Remember Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece” where a packman shaped circle roams the world in search of that singular pie sliver piece which will complete him?
We are all on that epic quest for our missing piece. Lovers fill each other up. For the Kabbalists, this concept became the springboard for what is perhaps the most radical idea in biblical mysticism. God the lover needs us just as we need God. We are God’s missing piece. The call of love is an expression of this missing piece need. God says, “I can’t do it without you. Come be my partner!”
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The unfolding of the universe entails full divine loving presence. The divine perspective changes to include human beings. It is an intimate relation of shared identity. We participate in God and God participates in us. The great mystery of reality is the mystery of intimacy. God is both erotically within me and beyond me at the selfsame moment. Touching and not touching. The intimacy of shared identity without losing the integrity of individuality. Two solitudes that share in a sublime moment of Sameness.
This is the first intimation of union and the beginning of all self-love. This is the great audacious mystical certainty that underlies every great religion, even if its contemporary leaders have long forgotten its wisdom. The world is not a dead end material universe, where separate entities constantly collide and explode, where all is accident and chance fated for meaningless destruction. It is not, in Shakespeare’s pathos-filled phrase, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Instead, it is an infinitely conscious, integrated whole, whose underlying fabric is love.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being – the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The move between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”
The truly great dancer – like all lovers – flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow.
The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina.
To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives – beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety.
The worlds of music, dance, and, most of all, orgasm, allow us glimpses of our higher reality. Here again the sexual models the erotic. The erotic being the experience on the inside of reality, where all of being yearns for connection and every living thing knows that it has a patch called home, which is part of the great quilt of the universe. Love is the Eros of connection – the underlying interdependence of things, the bond between all living things, the emotional ether in which we all live.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The language of God is man. We are not just God’s messengers, we are God’s language and voice, the means by which she shares her message. This idea becomes a little easier to access in light of quantum physics. One of the essential mind-bending breakthroughs in quantum physics is that the observer is part of the experiment. That is to say, the perceiver influences the outcome of the experiment. Said more broadly, perception not only observes reality, it creates reality. To say that love is perception is therefore to say that love–far more than a mere emotion–is the erotic creative force which in-forms all of being.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes”– Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It was to this that Emerson referred when he said, “Love is the affirmative of the affirmatives.” Love is the universe shouting out a joyful yes when our names our called.
In Hebrew the word yes – Kein – means integrity. Yes is the ultimate affirmation of our integrity. The question of your existence is whether you can say yes to the adventure that is your life. That is self-love! When you wake up to a beautiful day which is simply divine – when you eat a piece of carrot cake which is just out of this world then you experience the universe embracing your with a resounding YES.
e. e. cummings always succeeds in capturing life’s little quintessential affirmations. I quote:
I thank you God for this amazing
Day: for the leaping greenly spirit of trees
And a blue dream of sky; and for everything
Which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
It is said that the Great Maggid would convene his inner circle every night to teach them the sacred texts. All of his greatest students would gather. The Maggid would begin to speak, “And God said” and Reb Zushya would leap up, overwhelmed with desire. He would yell out, “And God said! God said!” He would spin around and around like a leaf in the wind, and then faint, unconscious for the rest of the teaching. Every night it was the same thing. The other disciples would tease him, “Zushya, you’re missing all the holy teachings!”
This teasing went on for days and days until finally the Master said, “Leave him alone; he’s the only one who gets it.”
For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred. Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn therefore I am. To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
The most important thing we can ever tell someone else is, “You are beautiful.” We were all made conveniently equipped with built-in mirrors – our eyes. They are the reflecting pool in which the person before us beholds herself. It is up to us to choose what she will see reflected there. To be a lover is to make sure that whoever looks into your mirroring eyes will feel the embracing energy of “You are beautiful”.
What a wonderful way to live! Spiritual tradition reminds us of what we often forget in the doldrums and tensions of the day-to-day. That is, that everyone is beautiful, and furthermore, that everyone is uniquely beautiful. Every human being on the face of the planet holds in his or her essence an utterly unique reflection of the infinite beauty of God.
We can respond to the biblical invitation to “love everyone” by perceiving and honoring this light in all who cross our path. Lovers see infinity dancing in the looking glass of each other’s eyes. We need to become lovers again. It will make it all so different. And we want to. We all love being lovers. We have simply forgotten to look. We have forgotten to perceive that we are all stepping gently through God’s magnificent museum. Each soul we behold – a perfect masterpiece.
The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni
