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Eros is to be on the inside, including the inside of your desire. What being on the inside does is invite a person to clarify his desires, yet not transcend them. True desire is attained through the deep meditation in which you access the internal witness. From this place of detachment, you survey with penetrating but loving eyes all of your desires. This place of internal witness allows you to move beyond an addictive attachment to any particular one. At that point the person engaged in Birur– clarification – does not abandon desire. Rather she moves to connect to those desires which were truest to her deepest and most authentic self. It is in the empty space between the spasm and the desire that the person is born.

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

Whenever we keep eros confined to one narrow frame of being, while de-eroticzing the rest of the picture – the Shechina remains in exile. Sex is only one of the places where we exile the erotic. There is a wonderful Balinese saying which goes something like, “We do not have art – we do everything as beautifully as we can”. When we build ugly cities where beauty is abused and people are depersonalized and then build a beautiful art museum, the Shechina is in exile. We exile the eros of beauty to the constricted precincts of formal art.

The same is true of music. Music is not limited to symphonies or rock concerts. We are all musicians and life is overflowing with music. Remember the Broadway show “Stomp”? There was no dialogue; it was all music and dance. The catch was that no musical instruments were used. The instruments were adapted from the fabric of everyday living. Pots, pans, brooms, sinks, faucets, garbage can lids, bottles, bags, newspapers, hands, feet, virtually every part of the body – all of these became instruments of music. The implication is stunning; what we usually do is limit art to formal work by people we call artists, just as we limit music to formal instruments. Formal music and art need to model the erotics of sound and beauty in all of our lives and not just in their narrow provinces. Music and art need to pervade all of living. Every moment is a canvas and is possessed of its own melody.

Rumi knowingly instructs us:

Let the beauty that we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the Ground.

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

In biblical mysticism love and oneness are identical. In Hebrew, there is a mystical technique called “gematria” in which each letter, and thus each word, has a numerical value. The Hebrew word for love, ahava, has a numerical value of thirteen. Echad, meaning one, also has a numerical value of thirteen. To the Kabbalistic mind, this coincidence of number is more than coincidence. It is as if it is a mystical law has been encoded into the letters of these words. Love is Oneness and Oneness is Love. One is but another word for the erotic interconnectivity of all being.

But the rhyme of mystical meaning continues, for these two words added together equal twenty-six. Twenty-six is a central number in Hebrew mysticism because it is the numeral value of God’s four letter name: Yud Hei Vav Hei – יהוה – the divine name of healing and love. Thus, God is One Love.  Love is the universe’s way of embracing us and telling us we are not alone. We have a home, a bayit. We are connected.

One + One = One.

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

If I listen to the murmuring of my soul, I am in effect listening to the murmuring of the sacred God.

(Rabbi Mordechai Lainier of Ishbitz, a radical Hassidic teacher of the nineteenth century, teaches in his stunning work, Mei Shiloach, Volume One, p. 19, Column 2)

Excerpted from The Erotic and the Holy by Marc Gafni

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

Love is all about insight–in-sight.  It is the ability to see in, to the inside of the inside, to the Holy of Holies that is your lover.  Eros is being on the inside.  Thus, love is an erotic perception of the highest order.  Naturally you have to move way beyond sexual seeing.  Sex only models eros.  To be an erotic lover you have to understand that “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

When something is far from you, you have to open your eyes really wide to see it.  As it gets closer you squint your eyes, when it gets really really close, you close your eyes.  Seeing with closed eyes is when we perceive way beyond seeing.  The adjective close and the verb close are the same word.  Closeness–intimacy–higher vision–all happen when we close our eyes.  We move beyond sight and invite the other faculties of perception to guide us.  Smell, sound, touch, and taste all become alive in a deeper way when we close our eyes.

The Mystery of Love
Page 114

Marc Gafni

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

In reaching for the awakening of love, we do well to bear in mind the teaching of mystical master Menachem Mendel of Kutz.  Writing in eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century he offers an original deeply resonant re-reading of a biblical myth text.  “These words which I command you this day should be on your hearts.”

How do words sit on a heart?  Do they not either enter in or stay outside?  What could it mean to have words sit “on the heart?”  Answers the master, ‘When dealing in issues of heart-lev-love — one cannot force the heart’s opening.’  Love is mystery — the word mystery deriving originally from the Hebrew word Seter — meaning secret.  The greatest secret, the most wondrous mystery, is the openings and closings of the heart.  ‘The best we can hope to do – and that is alot – is to place our words on the heart–and when the heart opens the words fall in.’

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 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 word ”˜dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila –forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah – fullness – used in the biblical myth text to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.

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

God in the first person is the experience of God flowing through you. God flows through you not by your denial of your unique perspective, or what Carlos Castaneda and many teachers influenced by him referred to as your  “personal his-tory” ”” rather, your unique perspective is precisely the place in which you the  human being meets and embraces the divine. Thus, God in the first person according to the Hebrew wisdom masters is realized not through generalized meditation which effaces one’s unique perspective, as is usually thought to be the case. Rather, it is accomplished by what Lainer of Izbica calls Berur – literally, clarification or purification.  Berur is a mystical technique which can take many forms, including meditation. The core of it, however, is that through Berur you merge with your  radically unique perspective.  This is your unique face.   It is only through the embrace of your unique perspective that you are able to transcend your narrow human perspective to embrace a divine perspective.

Book of Tears
Marc Gafni
Pages 10, 11

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

One of the places where we overcome alienation and step inside to an act of surrender is the sacred realm of music.  Eros cuts through ego and touches essence.  We feel alive and totally present in the fullness of our longing.  Mastery in song and music takes place precisely at the point where radical discipline and control are transcended.  At the intersection between control and surrender the singer or musician gives herself up, allowing herself to be played by the universe.  It is of course not an accident that an essential component of the Temple service was music.  The biblical myth text reads, “If you are searching for Shechina” then come to the Temple with its symphony of holy song.  Through music from exotic instruments and songs that opened the heart, the people were aroused to the erotics of desire and personal surrender.

Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 165

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

Her name means Indwelling Presence, “the one who dwells in you.” She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force that runs through and provides a womb for the world.  She is the underlying erotic, sensual, and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being.

Shechina captures an experience, a way of being in the world, for which we do not yet have an English word. For this is a way of being that we in the West are hard-pressed to articulate.  It is the experience of waking up in the morning full of utter joy for the arrival of the day. It is weeping over the splendor of the sunset or the scent of the ocean or the fragility of a newborn. It is a way of living in love.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 9

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

The Eros of evolution dances up the evolutionary spiral to higher and higher levels of complexity, and consciousness emerges from the evolutionary soup. It is a continual process of self-organization through self-transcendence, in which self transcends itself to recognize and join other in higher embrace. Love by any other name. The evolutionary ladder continues to spiral to ever-higher and deeper levels of complexity and consciousness. Each higher level is always defined by ever-higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union, and embrace between the evolving cells and organisms. Plants, amphibians, mammals, then higher mammals, until we get to the full bloom of human consciousness. This is the Great Story of One Love: Evolutionary Love.

Your Unique Self (in press)

Dr. Marc Gafni

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

The body leads to the soul, and the soul leads back to the body.  “When I look at the I of my body I find the I of my soul.  When I look at the I of my soul I find the I of God.”

The Sufis have a wonderful saying–“Say your praise to Allah and tie your camel to a post.”  What this really means is, touch the fullness of God and let that inspire even the simplest service.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 324

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

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.