Books Posts

Photo Credit: Chi Gong by I’m Daleth

By Marc Gafni

From Your  Unique Self:

Joy is your life energy. Joy is a by-product of Unique Self living.

Joy, as we have seen, is realized as the natural by-product of the passionate pursuit of something other than happiness.

What is that other thing that you pursue passionately that is not joy, that is a by-product of its pursuit? Of course, you must pursue virtue, goodness, integrity, depth, values””all necessary, but insufficient to give you joy. It’s not just virtue, goodness, integrity, and depth that you need to pursue; you must pursue your virtue, goodness, integrity, and depth, that is to say, your story.

Joy is a by-product of Unique Self living.

The Chinese taught us that joy is chi, joy is energy. In Hebrew mysticism, joy is called chiyut, which means “vital energy,” or “life force.” So both the Chinese tradition and the Hebrew mystical tradition use virtually the same root word to allude to joy.

Photo Credit: the queen of subtle

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

One of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce spends reams of pages portraying the No reality encountered in the streets of Dublin by the main character, Leopold Bloom. Joyce masterfully maps the life of the archetypal human whose life is a series of unnecessary losses. The death of Bloom’s son and father, his daughter’s leaving, the passing of his youth, and finally the adultery of his wife.

Yet in the last scene of the book, Bloom returns home to his sleeping wife. Never mind it is a recently desecrated bed. Never mind he sleeps with his feet at her head. It is still home, the erotic haven of the inside. The book ends with a crescendo of Yes. As his wife feigns sleeping, we float along in her stream of consciousness, finally concluding with reminiscences of the early ecstatic hours of her and Leopold’s love. It is a definitive return to Yes:

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes
and then
he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain
flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down
to me
so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was
going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Photo Credit: Paul Gutman

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

Remember, we come into this world trailing clouds of glory with core knowledge of our omnipotence, beauty, infinite power, and infinite potential. And then we hear a chorus of voices for the first ten years of our lives, and the only word they seem to be saying is No, No, No. We gradually come to associate maturity with saying No. When an idea or new direction comes up, our first response is why it can’t work. We are brilliant at it. Even the most simpleminded person becomes a genius when it comes to saying No. We can think up twenty reasons why it will not work before we can think up two reasons why it could. We have all become Dr. No with advanced degrees. ”¨But somewhere deep inside, the Yes remains, an eternal child of your Unique Self. We know on the inside of the inside that Yes is the answer.

Photo Credit: Squiggle

By Marc Gafni

Love is a perception of the infinite specialness, the full uniqueness of the beloved. To love another is to say Yes to their Unique Presence, to their Unique Being and Unique Becoming. The greatest of love affairs begins with a simple imprint of Yes.

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self.

Excerpt from a dialogue with Bert Parlees and Marc Gafni:

• ”When we live on an Earth in which there’s enough food and resources to feed us all five times over, and 20 million children die of starvation every year, and we’re talking about being sane? Normal consciousness is insane. ”
• So enlightenment is about sanity. Sanity is about love. Love is about the force of attraction. Love is about mutuality, recognition, union and embrace. Love is the realization that we’re all bound by invisible lines of connection; that we’re all part of a larger whole; and if you’re not eating, then I’m starving.
• ”So enlightenment is about love. And the way to get to love is to love your way to enlightenment. What does that mean? We’ll talk about that later.
• ”The difference between “Bert” and “Marc” – we’re both men, about the same height and weight, same general age category. To mistake between me and Bert is a pretty minor mistake. A few details here and there. Basically, we’re the same general genre happening. It’s not that blatant of insanity.
• ”But to actually mistake your separate self as being all you are, and not realize that you are a True Self, which is an in- eradicable and indivisible part of the seamless coat of the universe? The gap between that lack of realization, that illusion, that limited sense of self? That’s truly insanity. So that’s enlightenment, and it’s why we care about enlightenment.

Read the whole transcription: Newest Thinking on Unique Self, from a dialogue with Bert Parlee and Marc Gafni, at the recent Integral Leadership Collaborative>>>

… you can move beyond your ego, your ego which is your separate self, your small self,  you can evolve beyond your exclusive identification with your ego and you can realize, oh my God, Oh. My. God., oh my, I am part of the divine.  Oh my, I feel in myself this love welling up, this care for someone else welling up.  I am crying in a movie, I see a flower that just blows me out of my mind, I have this deep yearning for someone outside of me,  to connect and be with that person, I feel this deep empathy and this deep open-heart space when I see that someone suffers.  I have this great joy when I know that I have done the right thing …

Anyplace where you are regarded only as a function, where your name is not known and honored, you are a slave. Anytime you regard another as a mere instrument in your design, you become a slave master and an oppressor. To be a lover is to know the name. It can be the name of the waiter, the taxi driver, of your accountants’ son or of the mailman’s wife. By remembering the name, you become a lover.

Marc Gafni
The Mystery of Love
page 225

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

To read the complete article go to:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/essential-world-spirituality-teaching/

Interconnectivity, the fullness of presence, the inside of God’s face, the yearning force of being, they all characterize our experience of Union.  This is enlightenment.  Yet for the Hebrew mystic if Union does not lead us to compassion and great love then we have missed the point.  The medieval intellectual mystic Maimonides wrote a great book of mystical philosophy, Guide for the Perplexed.  In the last sentences, after the book reaches its erotic crescendo (Cheshek, meaning “raw sensual passion” is the Hebrew translation of the Arabic term employed by Maimonides), he appends an implicit postscript.  Paraphrasing:  If all this doesn’t make you a better lover of people then you are no lover of God and certainly no lover of your self.  Eros must always lead to ethics.

The human being begins her journey as part of the circle of nature.  In the creation story of Genesis 1, man and woman are created as part of the natural order.  Ancient myth reflected this circle of being, in which mortals and immortals, humans and Gods, and all of nature participated together.  This is the circle of eros.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 323

The Eros of evolution is love. Seen from the outside, it is what Erich Jantsch refers to as “self-organization through self-transcendence.”  The individual “self” of an atom trance-ends itself. The trance of separation is broken, and the individual atom organizes itself as part of a larger molecule. A new identity as a molecule is formed even as the old identity as an atom is not lost. Rather, the core mechanism of self-organization through self-transcendence is “transcend and include.” The atom transcends itself to a higher level of complexity, even as its core identity is not lost, but rather expanded and evolved. It is this internal drive within matter that, according to Jantsch and many other leading-edge theorists, moves evolution to ever-higher unions, through ever-higher levels of complexity. From quarks to atoms to cells to molecules, onward and upward Teilhard de Chardin, Abraham Kook, and many other evolutionary mystics point out that complexity is but the outside view.

The interior””not addressed by Jantsch or any of the chaos theorists””reveals that the higher the level of outer physical complexity, the more evolved the inner depth of consciousness. What emerges is that the movement of evolution is the movement to ever-higher levels of complexity and consciousness. At this point, the eye of the mind has reached its limits. Now, a new faculty of perception enters our conversation, what the Christian mystics called the “eye of the spirit,” what the Sufi teacher Rumi called the “eye of the heart,” and what Hebrew mystics called the “hidden eye.”  The eye of the spirit, deployed throughout recorded time by the great realizers in all the traditions, in a great double-blind experiment of spirit, always revealed the same inner picture.  The eye of the spirit sees clearly that the inner fabric of consciousness is none other than love.  It would therefore be entirely accurate to say that the Eros of evolution is none other than the force of love.

Your Unique Self (in press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 110, 111

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

In a globally interconnected world, one person acting alone or a small group of ignorant individuals has the ability to literally destroy humanity. This is a pointing-out instruction by the universal love-intelligence. Said simply, reality is telling us something that we desperately need to know. The lesson is clear for better and for worse, the age of ruling elites, be they spiritual or political, is over.

Democracy is the evolutionary unfolding of love-intelligence in our era. It began with the democratization of govern-ments. Now it must move to the democratization of enlightenment, and enlightenment of your True Self beyond personality and ego, which then expresses itself in the full glory and power of your Unique Self.

Enlightenment is a genuine possibility, and therefore a sacred obligation, for every single person. You are not obligated from without. You are obligated in love by your own highest possibility.

Marc Gafni
Center for World Spirituality

The third stage to which Hebrew mysticism invites us–each in our own way–is the experience of unity consciousness as the guiding principle of our lives.  This is the final stage on our journey.  It is an invitation to Aleph consciousness.  Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  In Hebrew each letter is also a number.  So Aleph is echad, one.  Aleph has no sound of its own.

Aleph is the ecstasy that is beyond.  It is an invitation to the highest and deepest part of your soul, which is part of the oneness of God. Experience it, even for a moment, and your life will never be quite the same again.

Now the mystery of love can be fully revealed.  Love is the perception of the essential oneness of all of reality.  The Hebrew mantra of the Shema–“listen so that you know God is one”–is in biblical myth law the only prayer mantra that one recites every day. This Shema mantra is directly preceded by the word love and directly followed by the word love.  A love sandwich.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 307

Love is a radical redrawing of boundaries and complete revisioning of the whole notion of self-interest.  A revisioning is, of course, a deepening of perception.  The truth is, we all know that our narrow definition of the self–closed behind the walls of the ego–is not our highest truth.

The underlying metaphysics are really quite simple.  We are made of divine substance.  This is the homo imago dei that biblical myth speaks of, which teaches us that every life is sacred.  “There is no place devoid of Him,” writes the Zohar.  “I am the light that illumines all things.  I am all.  Split a piece of wood and I am there; pick up a stone and you will find me there,” teaches the Gospel of Thomas.  To love is to perceive the infinite divinity in everyone and everything.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 309

In the ecstasy of the festival the pilgrim reaches the consciousness  which moves him to cry out, “If I am here all is here.”  The Zohar explains that if I who am the Shechina is here then all is here.  The description is one of virtual unio mystica.  A shift in perception takes place in which the individual leaves his isolating identity behind and imagines himself as part of the divine body.  This results not in a loss of self but in the total reinvigoration of self as an infinitely unique reflection of God’s face. When the pilgrim feels seen and loved, he is able to open his heart and let it overflow in joy. He himself becomes a lover. That joy and love, writes the medieval sage Maimonides, must express itself in acts of kindness and love, which he in turn does for others.

The pilgrim becomes a lover once again.  He is able to love himself, God, the world, and most importantly, his community and family.

This is the essence of the Holy of Holies:  to become a lover and a seer.  To love is to become God’s verb.  To love is to see with God’s eyes.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 126, 127

The core intuition of all the great systems of the spirit is that love and eros are captured best by the image of light.  The Kabbalah teachers say that the light that fills the vessels of creation is love.  The word Torah itself –an all-encompassing Hebrew term meant to refer to all divine wisdom–means “light.”  (The root of Torah is orah, which is the Hebrew word for light, which is also the basis for the English word aura.)

When you give in love, much like a candle, you are able to illuminate many people without ever losing any of your own luminescence.  Giving love only creates more.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 133

The Kabbalists were often referred to as mistaklim or chozim, roughly translated as the Looker 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 of 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 mother and father–our first lovers–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.

Once a few years back, my son Yair walked into the room. He sat and started playing with his Gameboy.  I began looking at him, but really looking, perceiving him, loving him, with all my heart pouring out through my eyes.  I was seeing every beautiful detail of his being as he sat there innocently playing.  Suddenly he started singing. Yair singing?!  A rarity.  Could it have been from my love pouring out in his direction?  He got up and sort of danced his way out of the room.  Yair dancing?!

Well, proper scientific data it is not.  But it was enough for me. It was exhilarating!  Since then I have done this practice in a thousand different places–in streets, lecture halls, pubs, churches, libraries and synagogues.  As a result, the world has been much more full of singing and dancing.  I realized that a loving gaze can transform reality.  We call this in formal theology imatatio dei, the imitation of the divine force.  Just as God looked lovingly into the darkness and there was light, just as God’s gaze made it good, so too can our loving perception transform darkness into light and chaos into harmony.  Try it!

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 125, 126

Of course, to remind another of their full beauty you have to be fully aware of your own.  The Baal Shem Tov has a wonderful teaching on the biblical mandate “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  First it is a statement of fact–you love your neighbor precisely as much as you love yourself.  For in the end, you can only perceive another’s greatness if you have glimpsed and believe in your own.  Self-love is self-perception.

If this is so, then a powerful question arises.  How do you love yourself when you know all of your foibles, pathologies and blemishes?  Isn’t self-love self-perception?  And does not honest perception yield forth all of the reasons why we are not lovable?  And yet most of us manage, at least to some degree, to love ourselves.  Is it just self-deception?  No, not at all.  Love is not merely perception, it is a perception-identification complex.  Self-perception means that although you are aware of the full complexity of your personae–the good, the bad, and the ugly–you identify the essence of who you are with your good–your good, loving, giving, creative, and generous self.

That does not mean that you deny your beast.  It is, of course, critical to integrate all of you into your self picture.  To love yourself is to identify yourself as part of the Shechina.  Writes the Baal Shem Tov, “To love yourself is to love the Shechina.”  Not to love yourself is to send the Shechina into exile.  So proclaim the Kabbalists, to which Rumi adds:

By God, when you see your beauty
You will be the idol of yourself.

In your deepest nature you must know that you are the hero of your story.  In your deepest nature you are love and grace and strength and splendor.  Now you must decide to identify with your deepest nature.  Do you focus on your innocence or your guilt?  Do you focus on your ever-inevitably dirty hands, or on your ever-eternally pure soul?  To love yourself or anyone else, you need to know that your innocence is your essence.  That you always remain worthy of love.  That your innocence is never lost.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 121, 122

A word in the Zohar used for those souls who are living their story is lechisah, meaning “whisper.”  To live your story is to be able to hear the intimate whisper of divinity erotically caressing your life.  We are all recipients of cosmic love notes.  Paul Tillich reminds us that we can only hear through the love that listens.  Buber captured the spirit of biblical myth when he wrote, “To live means being addressed.”

To live one’s story is erotic in the resonance of its melody and the fullness of its canvas.  The world, when we are in our story, is no longer empty.  The soul is not here just pay back karmic debts.  It has a contribution to make from the depth of its infinite specialness.  Through making that contribution a human being feels ful-filled.  That is the eros of living one’s story.

The universe is full of whispers, and they are talking directly to you.  And here is the paradox–the more you act as if you are being addressed, the more you will be. The world is filled with soul print hints.  It may be the lyrics of a song, a sign on a building, an old friend you meet after years of not seeing each other, or a book that grabs your attention and demands to be read.

Each person has their unique talent, pleasure, obligation, form of silliness, and pathology.  These are all personal soul print hints that direct you toward living your story.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 243, 244