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Unique Self, World Spirituality, and Evolutionary We Space: Wake Up, Grow Up, Lighten Up, Show Up, Open Up – by Dr. Marc Gafni

By Dr. Marc Gafni

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

As the great connector, Unique Self is the only technology that can create the evolutionary We space necessary to affect the evolution of consciousness. Ego cannot form evolutionary We space. At best, ego can cooperate in limited ways for the greater good. Conscious collaboration, while better then mindless competition, lacks the necessary Eros and imagination to change the world. Unique Self is drenched in Eros and imagination.

One might assume that in order to foster an authentic We space, we must simply emerge into our True Selves. This is the teaching of the classical enlightenment traditions. Yet we know that True Selves cannot create a We space. For the total number of True Selves is one. In the grand impersonal realm of True Self, there is only one and not two and therefore not relationship and certainly not evolutionary We space. It is only our Unique Selves that have trance-ended separateness and entered the larger field of We as unique emanations of the all-that-is. Only through the profound and dynamic expression of our enlightened Unique Selves can we create the evolutionary we space necessary to heal the planet. Enlightened We space in which individuals and individual systems realize enlightened consciousness beyond ego is the essential technology of transformation for tomorrow.

It is a technology we must master today for enlightened consciousness that is essential if we are to find a way to heal suffering and ameliorate needless brutality and pain. Normal consciousness produces suffering. And if you think this is but a spiritual aphorism then you have only to inquire from the hundred million people brutally tortured and murdered in the last century — all as a direct result of the mad delusions of the grasping ego. The ego of normal consciousness is insane. Enlightenment is simply sanity. In enlightened space you realize that you are part of the one. You realize that you are not alone so there is no reason to desperately grasp. You realize that you are not limited to the power, healing or fulfillment available only to your separate self. But rather you know that all of the healing, goodness, power and depth of all- that- is lives in you, as you and through you.

Not to know this is not to know whom you are. It is to be essentially confused about your identity. The confusion between ego and Unique Self is far more substantive then a person who simply thinks she is someone else. This is a minor confusion of identity and hence a minor insanity when compared with the sheer madness of mistaking your ego for Your Unique Self as your essential identity.

Why is Enlightenment Rejected by Mainstream Society?

Given the power of enlightened consciousness, which I just described, how could it possibly be that mainstream culture, both east and west has rejected the attainment of enlightenment as the essential human goal? Should not this transformation of consciousness — which can do more then any other force to heal our planet — not be the essential and even passionately yearned for goal, of both every individual and every collective. And it is not. Enlightenment is simply not part of the mainstream discourse. Enlightenment is often mocked and at best relegated to the sidelines and not treated as a genuine option for fully normal people. Why not?

The answer is simple. It is woven into the essential teaching of Unique Self enlightenment. And it is as follows. Classical enlightenment says: to attain realization you must overcome your sense of being special and realize your True Identity as part of the one. This instruction is resisted by virtually everyone, for no one wants to give up their specialness. When the price of enlightenment seems to be to give up one’s innate sense of being unique and special, enlightenment is rejected by the intelligent mainstream because at his or her core virtually everyone in the world feels special. The reigning assumption is that to be special you must be a separate self, which is the core intuition of the western enlightenment. So it emerges that the core intuition of western enlightenment — that you are separate and therefore special — contradicts the core intuition of the eastern enlightenment which says you are not separate and therefore not special. For the west the affirmation of the special separate self is seen as the key to healing suffering while for the east overcoming a false sense of separate self and specialness is the key to transcending suffering.

When a person takes their nagging sense of absolute specialness to their spiritual teacher the usual instruction is: you must leave beyond this feeling of being special for the desire and experience of specialness is a function of the unenlightened ego. This instruction — while it speaks a great truth, is at its core not fully true. It is true but partial. For it fails to make two essential discernments. Those are the distinctions between separateness and uniqueness and between Unique Self and ego. At the level of ego you are separate and you are not special. This is the core and correct intuition of eastern enlightenment. And for this reason you must get over your sense of being a special separate self. But at the level of Unique Self — beyond your separateness — as a unique expression of the one you are absolutely and ultimately special. This affirms the special dignity of the special individual, which is the core intuition of western enlightenment. But it realizes that you are special not at the level of separate self-ego but at a much higher level of consciousness, the level of Unique Self.When you realize your enlightenment you give up the small games of your ego seeking to reify its specialness. You move beyond the alienation of separate self to realize the joy of uniqueness. You give up the small self-sense of being special as you begin playing an infinitely larger game in the widest context, the game of your Unique Perspective, which is ultimately unique and special and has singular gifts to give the world, which can and must be given only by Your Unique Self.

(more…)

Unique Self, World Spirituality, and Evolutionary We Space: Wake Up, Grow Up, Lighten Up, Show Up, Open Up – by Dr. Marc Gafni2023-07-16T11:33:26-07:00

White Paper on Unique Self & Education by Kathy Brownback

White Paper on Unique Self & Education by Kathy Brownback2023-09-12T10:21:17-07:00

Bypassing the Energy of F..k Creates Abuse – Dr. Marc Gafni

Download a PDF of this Early Draft Essay

This early draft of an essay was written in 2014 by Dr. Marc Gafni.

It will later become part of The Phenomenology of Eros by Drs. Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid.

Watch a 1-Minute Teaching:

Listen to Dr. Marc Gafni Reading a Version of This Essay at the 2016 Shalom Mountain Wisdom School on Outrageous Love:

Scroll Down for a Longer Video Teaching on the Divinity of F..k from Our 2014 Online Course on God Is Eros!

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A Word on the Word “Fuck”

The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.

—Nietzsche

Language, taught the Cherub Mystics,[1] is the building block of Reality. The word “fuck” says something that no other word is able to express. When you stop to consider, you begin to realize that fuck is one of the most fantastic words in the English language. And it says something very deep about Reality.

In some sense fuck is very much like the word God. Both words are considered unspeakable, other than in the right context. Speaking God’s Name is a sin for many religions because it holds an intensity of meaning that is beyond the ordinary. Moreover, we are not quite sure what the word “God” means. The mystery of meaning around God’s Name is part of its evocative power. And finally, the word God means different things to many different people in many different contexts. It is even strangely used as a curse word, as in “Goddammit!” What God means to you directly depends on your level of consciousness. Indeed, the God you do not believe in does not exist.

You begin to see that there is some similarity between God and fuck. Fuck, like God, is not to be spoken in ordinary circumstances. Pronouncing the word is not allowed in many contexts. Moreover, there is great confusion around the meaning of the word. Like God, it means many different things to many different people in many different contexts. The range of possible meaning is part of its evocative power. Fuck, like God, is often used as part of a curse. And like God, there is no easy stand in for the word.

The Multiple Meanings of Fuck

“Fuck” is an incredibly painful, beautiful, and magical word. Fuck is irreducible and not easily moved aside by imitators. It evokes pleasure and pain, as well as hate and love. So just to lovingly “fuck with you” a little bit, let’s look at some of the meanings of the word fuck. In broad brushstrokes, we might say that there are at least three general senses of the word.

  1. Fuck as an intensifier or exclamation of aliveness.
    Examples: “Fucking Gorgeous” or “Holy Fuck!” Or when used alone, as in “Fuck!!!!!!” it captures the pure intensity of experience.
  2. Fuck as playing with or pushing boundaries (of reality or relationships) or the order of things, moving towards or away from connection.
    Examples: “Fuck off!” (moving away from connection, pushing boundaries), “I want to fuck you,” (moving towards, breaking through emotional boundaries), “You are fucking with me” (playing with boundaries).[2]
  3. Fuck as being in the unknown/unknowable, or a statement of uncertainty.
    Example: “what the fuck?”

In this opening section, we are going to “fuck around” a bit, in no particular order, with all three of these meta meanings of fuck, and in doing so unpack something of why the word fuck is so “fucking” important.

The first sense of fuck—as an intensifier—might express radical amazement. “That was fucking awesome!” In this sense, fuck is used to connote the intensification of experience. As noted above, it is “Holy Fuck,” or just simply, “Fuuuuuuck!!” that most succinctly capture this sense of the word. This sense of fuck can express intimacy, wonder, and allurement.

You might also say, on the negative side of things, “I’m fucked,” “She fucking sucks,” or “He is a fucking asshole.” A “fucking asshole” is a more intense form than just an ordinary “asshole.” Or, in the more positive sense, “He is a fucking saint.” Again, “a fucking saint” is significantly more saintly than a regular, run-of-the-mill saint. But in both cases, fuck is an intensifier, evoking a heightened experience or expression of reality.

Another expression of fuck is as a particularly potent way of saying “hello.” “Hello,” in its ideal form, creates connection between conscious beings. In many languages, the word “hello” is also the name of God. For example, “Shalom” in Hebrew means both hello and God’s name. Famously, the Sanskrit form of hello—Namaste—means “I bow to the God in you.” It is in this context that we understand the intensified contact made through a fuck-based greeting like “How the fuck are you?” or “It is so fucking good to see you!” This last example already points us towards the second sense of fuck.

This second sense of fuck is about moving towards, making contact, being open, alive, and awake—“Let’s fucking do this.” This second sense of fuck also expresses the playing with, breaking open, or re-ordering of the ordinary boundaries of reality. For example, to “fuck with you,” means to confuse your sense of order, to throw you off balance. This usage can have a playful sense or a more sinister sense. It might show up as, “I was just fucking with you,” as in “I was just playing with you.” Or it might be deployed as “I am going to fuck with you,” as in “I am going to penetrate the apparently well-defended boundaries of your world and turn everything inside out.” “I am gonna fuck you up” generally expresses the more aggressive quality of fuck. In both senses, fuck is a verb. This sense of fuck implies an intensity of action, which intrudes on the ordinary sense of reality and boundaries in an either playful or violent manner. A sophisticated use of this sense of fuck, “let’s fuck it open,” almost ecstatically points towards the playing with or breaking open of boundaries. But this pointing towards a broken-open or broken-down reality might also be an adjective, as in, “this is so fucked.” The second sense of fuck as rupturing from, either by stepping away or moving towards, often confrontationally, often expresses itself through rage, aggression and alienation.

The third sense of fuck is the ultimate question, as in, “How the fuck?” In this sense, fuck expresses inherent unknowing in Reality. This could be said with a positive sense of wonder and awe or with a desperate quality of confusion and terror. Fuck holds both. In this sense, “What the fuck?” is similar to the phrase “God knows,” as in “God knows, but we certainly do not.[3] Notice again that fuck and God live in an overlapping field of meaning.

Fuck might also indicate a very sharp expression of questioning, as in “What the fuck is going on here?” Or it might express a sense of mystery, as with the phrase, “Fuck if I know.”

Are you getting a sense of the magic of the word “fuck”? We are having a “fucking great time” writing this section of the book!

Continuing on, fuck can also express an almost religious sense of awe or amazement in the face of surprising and mysterious revelation. This might show up in the classic phrase “Holy Fuck!” Or, in case you wanted to underscore the point, you could double on the word fuck, as in “Holy fuck, that is fucking awesome!!”

All of these express different dimensions of both radical aliveness and encounters with mysterious sources, both of which are fundamental to the experience of Eros.

On the other side of the street, there are a host of meanings of fuck that express the sense of things gone wrong. Fuck in this sense expresses disconnection, alienation, and even degradation. Failing in a relationship might be expressed as “I fucked up my marriage.” Being taken advantage of might be “I got fucked over,” or “I got totally fucked by the company.” This indicates a sense of having been exploited or objectified—fuck expressing disconnection. Fuck might indicate a sense of unrelenting and even brutal demand: “Just fucking do it before I kick you in the fucking balls.” Here again, the quality of this expression depends on context. This might stem from a hidden love, as in the tough coach, or a brutal alienation, as in the corrupt prison guard. Fuck might also indicate a sense of exasperation, as in “Aww fuck,” or a demand that someone sever contact immediately, as in “Get the fuck out of here.” Alternatively, fuck might be an expression of extreme hostility, “I am going to knock your fucking head off,” or apathy, as in “Who gives a fuck?” Fuck might also express a sense of things gone terribly wrong, as in “This is really fucked.”

Another deployment of fuck is used to intensify the sense of disconnection, bringing together the first and second senses of the word: “This mother fucker was so fucking weird that I think he was fucking insane.” You may even say that kind of expression includes the third sense of mystery. But back to the positive side of things for a microsecond, “mother fucker” can also indicate someone who is wildly gifted or competent. On the even more dramatic rupturing side of fuck are the words of a popular tee shirt: “fuck you, you fucking fuck.” The repetitive deployment of fuck indicates an extreme loss of contact—fuck as alienation. The other person is no longer human; they are literally alien to you. The sense of fuck as expressing a breaking of connection appears in many modes. “I don’t give a fuck” indicates I have no empathy or love left for this person or situation. “You stupid fuck” is an extreme form of severing contact from the humanity of another person. “Don’t fuck with me” means do not engage me, as in “stay out of my face or I am going to fuck you up.” “This is really fucked” means this is not how things should be in a good universe operating according to moral principles. “What the fuck are you doing?” reveals a complete lack of alignment with the actions or motives of another.

Fuck and Sex

All of these meanings of fuck, however, need to be understood in light of fuck’s most common meaning, which is of course sex. In the sexual sense, fuck can be an active verb. “Jane is fucking John.” Or it can be a passive verb: “Jane was fucked by John.” It can be a noun, as in “John is a great fuck.”[4] But at the core of things, fuck expresses a dimension of the sexual experience that is not captured by the many meanings of love.

Fuck contains within it an inexorable urgency far bigger than the casual pettiness of personal whim. This is the sense of “Fuck me now,” or as it is often said without the temporal qualifier, “Fuck Me!” Sometimes, the ecstasy of the sexual leaves out even the word “me,” and fuck, by itself, becomes the central mantra of the sexual.

The Gravitas of Fuck Beyond the Sexual: Finding Your Fuck

Now, the conversation takes a somewhat more serious turn. For fuck is serious business indeed.

Fuck speaks to a primal, radical, and irreducible need. Fuck, in all of its expressions, seeks to articulate a dimension of lived Eros, which is both prior to and beyond all language and culture. Fuck cannot be denied. It is a demand which, on the one hand, lives in us and, on the other hand, is sourced in forces much larger than us. Its potency is precisely in its impersonal quality. It is exactly the paradox of that impersonal quality awakening personally in us that is the heart of both fuck’s peril and power.

When we choose fuck, then Fuck becomes conscious of itself in us. This is movement from unconscious fuck to conscious Fuck. It is in that moment that Fuck awakens as the sacred. When we deny fuck, then fuck demands its pound of flesh, virtually always devolving into its more pathological forms. Unpacking the depth of these qualities is the journey of the Phenomenology of Eros.

The sexual usage of fuck is the penultimate expression of the sense of fuck, which is about contact and connection. It is in this precise sense that the sexual models the erotic. Or said differently, the small-lettered fuck of the sexual models the erotic, capital-F Fuck of Reality.

We (the authors) often tell our students, “Find your Fuck” or “Feel your Fuck.” What this means is find and feel your radical aliveness. Find your purpose. Feel the evolutionary impulse throbbing in you. Feel the ecstatic, divine impulse for contact, intimacy, and connection pulsing[5] in you, as you, and through you. To find your Fuck, however, is not to be disconnected from Reality. Rather, to find your Fuck is to let the Fuck of Reality appear uniquely in you and as you.

Reality is allurement. Your identity is the unique constellation and quality of your allurements. Distinguishing between your authentic allurement and your pseudo-allurement, and then enacting your allurement in your life, is the very purpose of your existence. Reality desperately needs your enacted allurement. Reality needs you to Find Your Fuck. Your purpose is your telos. To find your Fuck is to find your telos—your ultimate aim.

To find your Fuck, you must first feel your Fuck. The feel of your Fuck is your Eros. It is in the sexual that you can learn to feel your Fuck. As we are sexually, so we are in the rest of our lives. The secret of the Cherubs whispers—the sexual models the erotic. Sex models Eros.

The sexual is but an expression of the core drive for contact that animates and drives all of Reality. In this very sense, we also speak of the “goodness of Fuck.” By the goodness of Fuck, we mean the radical goodness of the sexual, awake and alive in you, as the model of Fuck in every dimension of life. This is the new sexual narrative that we call Sex Erotic.[6]

Love + Fuck = Eros

Eros is a combination of Love and Fuck. Love and Fuck are not separate; they are different faces of the same experience. If they expressed the same quality of the same experience, however, we would not have two words.

Love and Fuck are not just any two words. They are two of the most popular words in existence (right up there with “God”). We have both words because they are not merely synonyms of each other. They are two aspects of the same experience; they are distinct but inseparable. This leads to the realization that Love + Fuck = Eros.

Eros is the experience of radical aliveness moving towards ever greater contact. Love and Fuck are the two qualities of Eros. Love is tender, passionate, and even fierce. Fuck is the inexorable, urgent desire that ceaselessly drives towards contact. Love is the passionate longing to embrace. Fuck is the unrelenting urge to merge.

When love loses the quality of fuck, then our lives become disconnected from the larger stream of life. Love becomes pallid. We wonder—secretly shamed—why love does not fill us. We suffer from the denial of fuck. The denial of Fuck is not a detail; it is the ultimate denial, and therefore the abuse and suffering it generates is equally large. We know that Fuck cannot exist without love; the denial of love brings monumental suffering. But we have forgotten that love cannot thrive without the feeling of Fuck.[7]

Fuck is the core nature of Reality—all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary ladder. When Fuck awakens in us, it expresses itself as the radical drive for contract and connection. It is not a uniquely human impulse, but rather the impulse of all of Reality becoming conscious of itself in us. When we feel our Fuck, we feel radically alive and at home in the Cosmos. We are filled with an unmistakable Eros and telos (ultimate aim). We begin to live purpose-driven lives, which drip with the nectar of Eros itself. Our lives become telerotic.

Fuck Is Our Birthright

Our bodies and hearts know that Fuck is our birthright. Fuck is not merely an intensifier of the ordinary. Rather, it points to the extraordinary—the true index of our deepest desire.

The failure of Fuck is the loss of aliveness, which Wilhelm Reich correctly diagnosed as the “emotional plague of mankind.”[8] It is not the loss of a particular privilege or experience; it is the deadening of all experience. The disconnection from Fuck is cause for the loss of our unmediated knowing that life is good. When we become alienated from Fuck, we forget our true identity and lose our dignity. We forget that we are good children of a Universe that desires our transformation.

It is in the dignity of Fuck that we recognize the glory of our true situation.

It is in the dignity of Fuck that we are personally addressed by Reality.

It is in the dignity of Fuck that we know that we are needed, desired, and chosen by All-That-Is.

The Exile of Fuck

It is for all of these reasons that the loss of Fuck is more than merely painful. It is intolerable. We cannot stand it. The result is a two-stage process of disintegration.

The first stage is the exile of Fuck. We exile the great Fuck of Reality to the exclusively sexual. The fuck of the sexual attempts to hook us up to aliveness. But when Fuck is limited to the sexual, the hook up does not work. We wind up with some version of four incomplete Sexual Narratives:[9] the narrative that sex is positive, negative, neutral, or sacred (because it makes babies). But in all of these narratives the fuck of sex is disconnected from the larger Fuck of the Cosmos.

The second stage of the downward-spiraling process is the degradation of Fuck. Fuck becomes a curse word. “Go fuck yourself” expresses the desperate pain of a person caught in the illusion of a flatland universe without fuck. Our own exile is reflected in the exile of Fuck into its degraded expression, “fuck.”

Bypassing Fuck Creates Abuse

The loss of the larger sense of Fuck reduces it to the mere fuck of sex. This, by its very nature, creates a rupture of contact and severing of connection that fosters the abuse of sex in all of its forms. Sex is abused when it is cut off from the larger context of Eros in which it lives. When sex is disconnected from the larger Fuck of the Cosmos, it cannot help but collapse in on itself because we are asking far too much from it. Sex then often implodes into every form of addiction and abuse.

It is only when sex becomes a portal to the unique potency that flows through us from Source—what we have called Sex Erotic—that the dignity and delight of Fuck is restored. When sex is cut off from our total being, from our deeper wholeness, and we ask it for favors it cannot grant, then fuck becomes a curse word.

The Liberation of Fuck

We are using the word Fuck with great intention, a dash of delight, and complete awareness and gravitas. We are using the word Fuck because the word itself matters. We are using it not to provoke or be superficially daring in some juvenile attention grab. Rather, we are using the word Fuck because we know that bypassing the energy of Fuck is a disaster. Bypassing the word and energy of Fuck fucks things up in big ways, in pretty much all fronts of life. The energy of Fuck is held in the word Fuck. In the mystical traditions, part of the emergence of new consciousness is when people begin to pronounce the unutterable—the Name of God. We need to restore the dignity of fuck by uttering the word Fuck not in a casual way, but as an iteration of God’s Name.

God Is Fuck

We need to liberate the great Fuck of Reality from the narrow fuck of the merely sexual. Fuck has been exiled into the sexual. But this is only the first exile. In the second exile, fuck has been banished even further. In this second exile, fuck is not identified with all of the sexual, but only with its degraded forms expressed in pornography, rape, violence, and dehumanizing sex. It is only by entering into the full desire of Fuck—and realizing that it is the primal desire of Cosmos for contact and connection awakening in us—that we are able to embrace the fully dignity of Fuck. God is Fuck.

Freud wrongly reduced all Eros to sex. He thought that culture was lower-case fuck in disguise, and that it covered up libido straining for expression. And yet all Fuck yearns for Infinity. This is the new sexual narrative of Sex Erotic, whose earliest seeds come from in between the sexually intertwisted Cherubs in the holy of holies of the Jerusalem Temple.

The Universe feels and the Universe feels Fuck. In that precise sense, Fuck is the Name of God. The greatest human desire is to participate in the Fuck of Reality. But we are afraid of the feeling of Fuck. It makes us feel out of control or vulnerable in a way we would rather deny or repress. But it is only by entering the feeling of Fuck, and tracing it back to its original Divine Source, that we begin to live the erotic life. The feeling of Fuck is the incessant desire of the Universe to contact new forms of itself in order to birth new creations from the joy of that contact.

God Is Love; God Is Fuck

There were legions of well-meaning people, liberal and conservative alike, who all told us not to use the word Fuck/fuck in this book. But they grew ever more insistent and shrill when they heard that one of the core realizations of the erotic life can be summarized in three words: God is Fuck. Never mind that this truth is rooted in the most central teachings of both ancient mysticism and modern science, as we will see. Never mind that it is true, they said. “This is a truth that cannot be spoken.” Even the people who got it said we should not say it. “Don’t say it because it is

too dangerous,

too shocking,

too easy to confuse with vulgarity,

too provocative,

and just too… much.”

There was a great demand to leave this teaching out, or at the very least to “tone it down a notch” by not using the word Fuck/fuck.

Why don’t we just say that “God is Love?” The reason, as we have already pointed out, is that God is Love is only half of the story. First, God is Love, for most people, implies an anthropomorphic god, entirely separate from Cosmos, who loves you much like your grandfather might. Or, in a more mystical reading of God is Love, it speaks of a caring, kind, and compassionate Cosmos.

But the quality of “God is Fuck” is not only soft and gentle; it is not all sweetness and light. This Love that drives the Cosmos is outrageous and fierce. This love is animated by an inexorable force that lies at the very Heart of the Cosmos. This is not a polite or well-mannered desire.

This force is a raw and primal desire for contact. It is the desire for Fuck. Fuck will not be bypassed and will not be muted. Fuck is a desire, which refuses to be ignored or denied. It is this raw desire for Fuck that animates all of Reality, including you.

At the core of Fuck is the very essence of life and the holy itself. Therefore, we need to liberate Fuck and not bypass it. As is already becoming clear, the liberation of Fuck has absolutely nothing to do with promiscuity, and certainly nothing to do with any form of demeaning objectification or abuse. It’s precisely the opposite, actually.

Meditation on the Name of God: The Name of God Is Fuck

This entire Phenomenology of Eros body of work can correctly be understood as a Meditation on the Name of God.

A central practice of the erotic mystics, recorded in the texts of the interior sciences of virtually all the great traditions, is to meditate on the Name of God. The Sufi Masters meditated on the Ninety-Nine Names of God, the Hebrew Masters on the Seventy-Two Names from the Kabbalah, and Christian practice in Christ does the same.[10]

Let’s turn to the fascinating realization of Fuck that forms the core of the twin forms of gnosis: mysticism and science. Mystics talk about this in their way, and science talks about this in its way.

The ancient Hebrew mystics, for example, say it unabashedly: The Name of God is Fuck. The only way to embody a sex beyond shame is to realize that the Name of God is Fuck.

The classic name of God was spelled Yod He Vav He (YHVH):

The first two letters (moving from the right because Hebrew text reads opposite English texts)—Yod and He—are the masculine and feminine; not man and woman, but masculine and feminine, or what we call lines and circles.[11] These are the two primary forces of Cosmos. The Universe, in every moment, every situation, every person, every entity, every dynamic, is the play between the line qualities of autonomy and independence on the one hand, and the circle qualities of attraction and allurement on the other. Science reminds us that it is the constant dance between attraction and repulsion that shapes the structure of Reality. Reality is the play between the line qualities of thrusting forward and directionality on the one hand, and the circle qualities of including and connection on the other. This is the Fuck of the Cosmos, which is the Name of God.

The Yod enters the He. We call this “constant Fuck,” following the wisdom of Solomon. It is the “sustained” or “perpetual” Fuck that lies at the center of Reality. The force of Fuck is the force of desire itself, built into the source code of Reality. Science says the same thing in its language. Desire, or what the cosmologist Brian Swimme calls “cosmic allurement,” is the essence of Reality itself.

Attraction, or allurement, is built into the very structure of the Universe. For example, the standard model of particle physics explains that electromagnetism causes atoms to form. Atoms are the basis of matter. A molecule is made up of atoms. Stable atoms have an equal number of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. This balances the electrical charge of the atom. But if the electrical charge of the atom is neutral, then what makes neutrally charged particles come together? How do the particles stick together? How do these atoms come together to form the molecules that are the building blocks of material reality? The answer is Fuck.

In most of the known elements, e.g., hydrogen (H), lithium (Li), and sodium (Na), the orbital electron shells[12] of the atoms are what science calls incomplete. Simply said, that means that the outermost shell of these incomplete atoms is not fully filled. Incomplete atoms are really hungry for a configuration of intimacy with a completely filled outermost shell. They are relationship hungry. They desire relationships. They are allured to other atoms with likewise incomplete shells. This is Eros. This is Fuck. This attraction, this allurement, is the base for the formation of molecules that make up all matter. This is the sustained Fuck. The Yod that is constantly entering the He.

There is, however, a second form of Fuck, in which human beings play the primary role. The last two letters of the Name of God are the Vav and the He. The Vav only enters the He when human beings arouse the Divine Fuck. You arouse the Divine Fuck when you live the unique quality of your full Eros and aliveness in every dimension of your life.

Recovering Our Memory of Fuck

The Great Fuck of the Cosmos has been forgotten. We forget that we live in a Reality whose core principle is allurement. We have lost our memory. For the Greeks, the loss of knowledge is the source of all evil. For the erotic mystic, it is the loss of memory that is the source of all evil. Our failed memory of Fuck is the source of great pain and confusion. On the one hand, we forget that, in accordance with quantum theory, Reality is coming in and out of existence in every second.[13] Some mystics call the interior of this same phenomenon “constant creation.” Constant creation comes from fierce and Outrageous Love—what the Mystics call Zivug Matmedet, or Constant Fuck—which Fucks Reality into being in every second.

It is not only that we have forgotten. Our denial of Fuck is so desperate and intense that we have forgotten that we have forgotten—what the Greeks called “Léthē.” And yet, in the midst of our amnesia, we yearn to participate in the Fuck of the Cosmos. Anything less will not satisfy us. We yearn for what we have forgotten. The result is, however, that we cannot explain our yearning to ourselves. We no longer understand our innermost drives. We have lost touch with the radical yearning for intense contact that is the axiomatic desire of Reality, alive in us.

We need to remember that if God is Fuck,

then it is no less true that Fuck is God.

Fuck must be engaged with rapture and reverence,

not only when it is sweet and tender,

but even when it is raw or rough.

All fuck is part of Fuck.

The fragrance of Fuck is always a rumor of Divinity.

God is Fuck,

Fuck is God.

Footnotes

[1] The cherubs are two figures that live atop the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. According to the sacred text, the voice of God “speaks from between the two cherubs,” (Numbers 7:89). What is not known from the sacred text, other than to initiates in the esoteric tradition, is that these two cherubs are locked in ecstatic sexual embrace. The voice of God speaks from between the sexually entwined cherubs. The “secret of the cherubs” will continue to be a theme throughout this book.

[2] Another way to imagine fuck as breaking boundaries is through the embodiment of destruction or deconstruction, as in “I’m fucked up” (my sense of reality is deconstructing) or “my car is fucked” (my car is in really bad shape).

[3] “What the fuck” indicates disorienting uncertainty which may still be seeking to orient to the situation, while “God knows” has a quality of giving up on ever understanding a situation or dynamic. Both, however, overlap in their quality of disorienting uncertainty.

[4] (Osho, The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here, English Discourse Series, Talks given in 1987) Chapter #23: “Knowledge is the corpse of knowing.” Section: “What is the most important word in our language?” There is also a book that published these talks in 1988, with the same titles.

[5] This is how we come to understand the nature of Eros as seeking greater evolutionary wholeness, as we will see. Eros, felt as aliveness, moves toward ever greater contact, intimacy, and connection.

[6] On the new sexual narrative that we call Sex Erotic, see Gafni, Marc and Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, Inc, 2017. For some excerpts, see here: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/drs-marc-gafni-kristina-kincaid-excerpts-from-a-return-to-eros/.

[7] We want to remind the reader of the sometimes unconventional deployments of Capitalization, in this case seen most clearly in sometimes capitalizing, and sometimes not, the word f/Fuck). This is an invocation of divine quality into otherwise ordinary words.

[8] See Reich, Wilhelm. The murder of Christ: the emotional plague of mankind. Vol. 1. Macmillan, 1953. See also Reich’s People in Trouble: Volume two of the emotional plague of mankind. Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1976.

[9] On the four sexual narratives, see Gafni, Marc and Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, Inc, 2017. For some excerpts, see here: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/drs-marc-gafni-kristina-kincaid-excerpts-from-a-return-to-eros/.

[10] For a contemporary expression of this practice in the Christian tradition, see https://www.cofchrist.org/spiritual-practice-meditating-on-gods-name.

[11] On lines and circles, see for example Isaac Luria, Sod Iggulim Ve-yosher. Jerusalem 1964. For a discussion of this Lurianic distinction, see Marc Gafni, The Mystery of Love, Atria, 2003, “Chapter Eight—Circle and Line: The Dance of Male and Female.” For classical Kabbalistic texts expressing the masculine feminine polarity in the Name of God, see, R. Moshe Cordevero’s Pardes Rimonim (Orchard of Pomegranates), R. Yosef Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah (Gates of Light), See also Sara Schneider’s Kabbalistic Writings on the Nature of the Masculine and Feminine, a carefully annotated translation and rudimentary analysis of a classic set of mystical Hebrew texts related to this trope.

[12] The orbital electron shells are a simplified model pointing towards the erotic dance of the electrons around the atomic nucleus. In that model, developed by Niels Bohr in 1913, an electron exists in the lowest energy shell available, which is the one closest to the nucleus.[For more about the Bohr Model of Electron Shells, see, for example, here: https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_General_Biology_(Boundless)/02%3A_The_Chemical_Foundation_of_Life/2.05%3A__Atoms_Isotopes_Ions_and_Molecules_-_Electron_Shells_and_the_Bohr_Model.]

[13] The quantum vacuum, for example, tells us that some elementary particles and waves simply leap into existence. A quantum vacuum is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. According to our present-day understanding, it is however never truly empty but rather contains electromagnetic waves, gravitons, photons, dark energy, and virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. Microwave technology invented for radar in the world-war era was co-opted to great avail in physics experiments interested in measuring particle interactions. The Lamb shift experiment was based on a discrepancy between theory (Dirac equations) and experiment in measuring two energy levels within the hydrogen atom. It was discovered that the cause of the discrepancy was interactions between vacuum energy fluctuations (free electrons) in the Maxwell field and hydrogen electrons bound to the proton as they revolved around the proton.

Download a PDF of this Early Draft Essay

Watch This Teaching on the Divinity of Fuck from Our 2014 Online Course on God Is Eros

Bypassing the Energy of F..k Creates Abuse – Dr. Marc Gafni2024-06-19T10:38:34-07:00

From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: Marc Gafni and the ‘Unique Self’ – A White Paper by Kathy Brownback

In her recent white paper from January 2014 Kathy Brownback, Instructor in Religion and Philosophy at the highly respected Phillips Exeter Academy, discusses how the Unique Self teaching goes to the heart of the deepest questions that students have asked her throughout the years. In her words:

Most likely you’ve asked yourself some of the same questions I’ve been asked by […] students:

  • “People keep telling me to be myself, but I don’t really know who that is. I feel pulled in so many directions.”
  • Do we have free will, at all? Or are we totally determined by our genes, and conditioned by our environment?”
  • “Why, in the midst of all they have, are so many people angry and dissatisfied? Can I hope to avoid this? Why is there so much addiction? Why depression, among people who have so much to offer?”
  • “I haven’t found any kind of God I can believe in, yet I somehow feel there is something more to life. Your thoughts?”
  • “Are science and religion looking at the same world? They seem so contradictory. Your husband is a physicist. Do you argue about this?”
  • “Is there such a thing as truth? Is there anything I can be certain of?”
  • “Do you think life has some kind of point, or meaning? Or is it, as Shakespeare said, ‘a tale told by an idiot’? It really feels that way. Then all of sudden, even though I have no real answers, the feeling goes away.”

She also asks what role contemplative practices should play in education and academic life and what they might have to do with the study of science, or the humanities and the arts. Should they have a place in the curriculum?

Contemplative practice can encourage the ability to focus and enter into a subject with minimal distraction and interruption. It can help a great deal with stress reduction.

Moving more deeply, it can foster the capacity to hold apparent contradictions in tension with each other without immediate dismissal of one side. It can encourage you to listen to and help develop the ideas of others from a less egoic perspective—and to see connections between disciplines that infuse their understanding of each other. It helps provide the space for deeper creativity and inspiration.

At its most profound level, contemplative practice has the potential to help you reconnect with a deeper sense of purpose, meaning, and value in your life.

This spring term Kathy Brownback taught a class in Mysticism for uppers and seniors.

From the course description:

It has been said that all religions converge in the contemplative tradition—the great world illuminated by the swamis and yogis of Hinduism, the core meditation practices of the Buddha, the Kabbalist teachers of Judaism, the Sufis of Islam, and the Christian mystics. What can we learn by reflecting on their teachings and their practices? How do they connect with current research on the mind-body connection? How do these make possible a deeper sense of self, or what we might call the “unique self”? What does it mean to speak of wisdom as a kind of knowledge? We will consider selections from all the major faiths, from the ancient texts of the Upanishads to the poets Rumi and Meister Eckhart to modern writers such as Marc Gafni and Pema Chodron.

Read the White Paper HERE
From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: Marc Gafni and the ‘Unique Self’ – A White Paper by Kathy Brownback2023-06-20T11:53:35-07:00

Unique Self Health & Medicine by Drs. Venu & Vinay Julapalli

Read this White Paper by Board Members Venodhar Rao Julapalli, M.D. and Vinay Rao Julapalli, M.D., F.A.C.C.

There is a dire need for the integration of the art, science, and morality of medicine. This paper explores the deep implications of the Unique Self in integrating medicine. Co-authors and physicians Venu and Vinay Julapalli call on their extensive understanding of the promises and pitfalls of modern health care to reconceive the practice of medicine. The paper provides the framework to evolve medicine through the emergent Unique Self insight. At stake is no less than the future of how we care for ourselves and each other.

Unique Self and the Future of Medicine

Abstract:

Medicine is at a critical crossroads in its evolution from antiquity to our modern age. This article aims to reconceive the future of medicine. Key to this conception is an understanding of the evolution of individual development. To this end, the discussion will first outline the stations of the selves, on the path to what has been termed the Unique Self by spiritual thinker Marc Gafni. Next, the discussion will distinguish between two poles of development and outlook, in order to understand how the insight of Unique Self integrates these dualities. It will then view the Unique Self from three perspectives, or four quadrants, of reality and also illustrate how Unique Self appreciates the balance between part and whole. The discussion will subsequently correlate the stations of the selves with the history of medicine and further examine dualities in medicine that parallel those of the self . It will then elucidate how an understanding of Unique Self fundamentally shifts our envisioning of the practice of medicine. This shift renews the unique calling that is the art and science of healing.

Introduction

Universal to the human experience is care of our health. Medicine is defined as “the science and art dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.” The topic of medicine is therefore relevant to all of humanity.In the United States, the practice of medicine has reached a critical crossroads. National spending on health care has been estimated to total $2.8 trillion in 2012, which is 18% of the gross domestic product (GDP). It is projected to increase to about 25% of GDP and 40% of total federal spending by 2037. Few dispute that this trajectory is unsustainable.

The dispute begins in how to alter this trajectory. The debate has raged on from multiple perspectives. Some have focused on the structures of payment for health care, while others have investigated the sources of health care pricing. Some have proposed the standardization of health care delivery with an emphasis on maximizing value through evidence-based medicine, while others have highlighted the role of the social determinants of health in influencing the rising costs of medical care. The Affordable Care Act, signed into law in March 2010, expanded health insurance coverage for Americans and introduced programs designed to slow spending on health care. However, there is no clear consensus on its ultimate effect in bending the health care cost curve down.

Most of the recent discussions on the practice of medicine have preferentially approached health care as an object. Evidence-based guidelines, quality measures, value-based metrics, and pay-for-performance programs presuppose an objective perspective on medicine. The increasingly acknowledged urgency of controlling spiraling health care costs has certainly advantaged this perspective, along with desires to improve patient safety and even out regional variations in health care delivery.

Somewhat drowned out in the recent movements in medicine is the voice of medical humanism. This voice presents medicine from a subjective perspective, as it highlights the individual values, goals, and preferences of a patient with respect to clinical decision making. From this perspective, paramount are factors such as honoring the dignity of patients and their families, acknowledging their cultural and ethical sensitivities, sharing clinical decision making between the patient and the physician, and upholding the autonomy of the patient in making medical decisions. Physicians voicing humanism in medicine feel that the subjective aspect is crucial in maintaining medical professionalism, demonstrating good clinical judgment, and caring for patients near the end of life. They question the effectiveness of health care based merely on utilitarian medical decision analyses, rather than nuanced conversations between the patient and physician on the patient’s perception of his/her illness and its treatment.

The two perspectives, medicine as an objective science and medicine as a subjective art, are often diametrically opposed to each other. Health care objectivists regret that “Our current health care system is essentially a cottage industry of noninteg rated, dedicated artisans who eschew standardization.” They criticize the current system as one that “overvalues local autonomy and undervalues disciplined science.” In subjective medicine, “‘Good doctors’ are celebrated for their unwavering dedication to doing whatever it takes to care for their individual patients.” In their view, this leads to excessive tests and procedures, a fragmentation of care, limited oversight of such care, and ultimately wasteful and unreliable medicine.

Health care subjectivists, on the other hand, lament that “Reducing medicine to economics makes a mockery of the bond between the healer and the sick.” They eschew the replacement of terms such as “doctors” and “nurses” with “providers,” and “patients” with “customers” or “consumers.” They feel these terms are “reductionist; they ignore the essential psychological, spiritual, and humanistic dimens ions of the relationship – the aspects that traditionally made medicine a ‘calling,’ in which altruism overshadowed personal gain.” In objective medicine, the “discourse shifts the focus from the good of the individual to the exigencies of the system and its costs.” In their view, this results in diminished independent and creative decision making, dehumanization of the patient and professional, destruction of the trust so crucial to the patient-doctor relationship, and ultimately a demeaning of medicine.

How best can we reconcile these two positions in a way that includes and transcends them both? Is there another perspective that honors medicine both as a science and as an art, without congealing the two sides into a muddled compromise that satisfies neither?

Acknowledging the instability of the current system, can we evolve medicine to a practice of greater value, efficiency, meaning, and purpose?

In the rest of this discussion, we aim to reconceive the future of medicine. Key to this conception is an understanding of the evolution of individual development. To this end, we will first outline the stations of the selves, on the path to what has been termed the Unique Self by spiritual thinker Marc Gafni. Next, we will distinguish between two poles of development and outlook, in order to understand how the insight of Unique Self integrates these dualities. We will then discuss the Unique Self from three perspectives, or four quadrants, of reality and also see how Unique Self appreciates the balance between part and whole. We will subsequently correlate the stations of the selves with the history of medicine and further examine dualities in medicine that parallel those of the self. We will finally outline how an understanding of Unique Self fundamentally shifts our envisioning of the practice of medicine. Our discussion will highlight the physician as the exemplar of the medical professional but can apply to any professional involved in caring for patients. All are included in the future of medicine.

Download
Unique Self Health & Medicine by Drs. Venu & Vinay Julapalli2023-09-12T10:00:41-07:00

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 6

by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 6)

Two Faces of All That Is

This is the animating impulse that moved eastern spiritual teaching, motivated by love, to seek to free you from the illusion of separate self. Their great mistake was to jettison Uniqueness along with separateness by conflating the two in a way that was both unnecessary and wrong. This confusion of separateness and uniqueness forgot that you could be both part of the whole and a distinct part at the same time. The recovering of that memory is essential to healing the fractured and broken self. The dignity of the part can be held even as your are connected to the whole. You are part of the seamless coat of the universe. Seamless, but not featureless.  You can transcend your exclusive identification with your part nature, the ego, even as you identify with the larger whole. But that does not mean that your unique part nature is absorbed in the whole. Rather, it is integrated in the seamless coat of reality without compromising its unique features.

Funny thing is that the ego busting school of spiritual teaching seems to have lost touch with its otherwise finely tuned sense of paradox. The ego busters have adopted an either/or position in regard to ego/separate self.  The choice is stark in their presentation of things. Either you realize that you are not separate, you realize that you are one with all that is, or you’re separate and alienated from all that is. Either you are identified with the whole, or you are disconnected from the whole–deluded by your identification with your part nature. This presentation of things demands that a false choice be made which undermines most contemporary spiritual teaching. Genuine realization yields a deeper and more paradoxical wholeness as the truth of how things are. You are both a unique part and part of the whole at the very same time.  You have disidentified with ego and realized some genuine enlightenment in your felt identity with the larger whole, even as you delight in your post-egoic Unique Self.

At this point, you can open your heart to a second huge space of insight.  The same bad set of choices is offered by popular spiritual teaching in relationship to God. The East rejected the idea that God might be beyond the world. For much of the East and for many Western mystics, divinity is the ground of being. God, if that term means anything all, is the animating substance and energy of all that is. This is a great realization and insight that wells up from intensive spiritual practice and contemplation. But it is not the whole story. The second great realization and insight of spiritual practice is that there is a divine, which you encounter from beyond world and nature and self. All that is has a personal face that loves, cares, and holds you with infinite intimacy, tenderness, and grace.

Clearly this is not a different divine. Rather these two mystical realizations reflect the two faces of God. Two faces of all that is.

To force a person to make an either or choice between a divine force within or beyond world/self/nature is a bad choice and a wrong choice. The God of the encounter is revealed by the eye of the spirit through the deepest of spiritual practices and meditation. This face of God is no less real than the god within. Both are revealed by different sets of profound spiritual practices and meditations.

For more of this essay, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5.

You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 62023-06-20T13:53:52-07:00

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 5

by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 5)

God in the First Person:

“All at once I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant, I thought of fire and immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next I knew that the fire was in myself. Directly afterward there came upon me as sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is on the contrary, a living presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have an eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal, that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain.”

~R.M. Bucke

God in the Second Person addressing man:

I will be united with you in marriage forever

I will be united to you in marriage through justice and righteousness

I will be united with you in marriage through overflowing love and compassion

I will be united with you in marriage in complete trust

And you will erotically know the divine

Hosea the Prophet: 2: 21- 23

Only someone who lacks both of these realizations can identify all that is as merely a process or impulse. Realization teaches that the all that is expresses as a process or an evolutionary impulse, but that God is process plus personal, not process minus personal.

Entry Five: Love and the Encounter

What emerges from the encounter in love is the affirmation of the infinite adequacy worth and dignity of the separate self. What emerges from the encounter in love is the embrace of the separate self as an essential station  on evolutionary road, Up from Eden.* You ascend up from the pre-personal consciousness of Eden to the dignity and glory of being God’s beloved. You are  affirmed in your infinite adequacy and charged with genuine responsibility for the good.  The ego separate self or what is often called the individual is a great triumph. To fully understand the gifts of ego, we need to look at it’s alternative, the bad death of the ego.

Before looking at the bad death of the ego, it is worth mentioning that there is a way to kill the ego without suffering all the horrendous consequences that I am about to outline. This is the good death of the ego. To accomplish the good death of the ego, you have to distinguish between separateness and uniqueness. We saw earlier that the evolution of Eastern teaching required the discernment of this distinction in order to transcend ego and separate self even while embracing Unique Self. We saw as well that  the West needs to make the same distinction between separateness and uniqueness, which would allow the West to retain the goods of individuality through Unique Self and thereby let go of its grasp of separate self. But at this point too, we need to turn to the bad death of the ego in order to see why the ego separate self is so important to man’s healthy evolution towards enlightenment.

Really Bad results of the Bad death of the Ego:

Below are highly influential contemporary American spiritual writers talking in glowing terms about the death of the ego. The source is Aldous Huxley and some of the leaders of his circle. Huxley is particularly important because he was one of the most influential voices in bringing eastern mysticism to American shores. Huxley’s most famous book in this vein was the  classic little tome The Doors of Perception, which shows Eastern mysticism’s direct influence on Huxley. In Doors of Perception, he   passionately preaches the virtues of No-Self. The goal in many passages is to dissolve individual consciousness and replace it with cosmic consciousness. According to Huxley, with Ego death comes blissful passivity. Man gives up all of his ambitions. There is no more desire to act. Aggressions disappear and tolerances increase. Knowledge of the meaning of life is no longer dependent on the unreliable tools of logic and rational thought. One is blissfully freed from “the world of selves.” In this state, according to Huxley, one finds true enlightenment and love. Huxley and his circle write compelling verse:

“All the harsh, dry, brittle angularity is gone, is melted….Merged with all life. Your individuality and anatomy of movement are moistly disappearing. You control is surrendered to the total organism…. When controls dissolve in a milieu of trust, the world within is glowing serene and meaningful.”

“The ego is dead
Killed during its last hysterical ravings
To become we”

The problem with all of this is straightforward and simple. If you are a non-self, there is no possibility of love between me and you. What is love without an I and a Thou? We is the Union between two individuals. If there is no individuality, there is no love. As one writer critiqued Huxley, Once the I is killed and the Thou is dead too, there can be no We either. A herd of non-egos is not a We. What can brotherhood or sisterhood mean among non-selves.

One influential teacher from Huxley’s circle tells his students to the use the moment of egolessness for the attainment of love. But we know that love is between individuals. So love is not a possibility without two.

For the non-ego and non-self  there can be no freedom either. It can be neither oppressed nor liberated. Freedom for a non-self can only mean freedom from having to be a self. In that sense, the dead might also delight in their freedom. In this formula, the dignity of the personal is effaced in order to heal alienation. The problem is that alienation is healed by man losing himself through the dissolution of his separate self-ego sense.  With the death of the ego go all the goods of individuality–including love, freedom, ethical judgment, obligation, and responsibility.

All of these goods of spirit are attained by the evolution of the human ego. It is in the experience of the egoic separate self that man  discovers responsibility and love in the encounter with other and the encounter with the loving ground of all being incarnate in the personal face of God.

This, however, is not the end of the story. It is true that without the experience of a self, there is no possibility of genuine love and responsibility. But it is no less true that without the separate self – ego, there is also no fear and suffering. With the emergence of the experience of a separate self, what has been called the birth of the ego, comes fear. The more you experiences your selfhood as an independent expression of life, cut off from the larger currents, the more you fear your own extinction

You realize very clearly that your body will not sustain you forever even as you realize its frailty and vulnerability right now. You seek to protect yourself against death.  You feel like you should not die. You sense that you are part of the quality of infinite existence, which does not die. It is for this reason that the thought of your own death terrifies you. You mistakenly think that the part of you that is immortal is your separate self. So you seek ways to make your separate self immortal.

An animal that is rooted in the natural world lacks both the awareness of his own selfhood and the death terror that comes with it. With your new-found awareness as a separate self comes not only love, but also raw terror. As a result of your terror of non-existence, you engage in the most elaborate strategies to cover up your fear of death and to give you a sense of belonging in the world.

Your feeling is that if you belong to the world, you are safe from death. This is not a logical or rational feeling. But then neither is your terror of death. So, you begin the great competition for status, belonging, money, and goods. You think, this will give you a sense that you belong in this world, that you will live forever. The entire project of culture, including the murder, destruction, war, and competition that lies at its heart, is at a very elemental level, a desperate struggle to overcome the terror of your own non-existence.

Your experience of being a separate isolated ego puts you in direct competition with the rest of the human race. It also puts you in the position of constantly needing to protect your existence. It forces you to compete with the rest of the world for every form of resource from money, to shelter, to love. The great mystical teachers were not at all wrong in pointing to your illusion of being a separate isolated ego as the root source of your suffering.

You must evolve beyond the ego. You must deconstruct the illusion of the separate self. This is the key to your spiritual evolution. This is the path that can free you from most of your suffering. Most people of the world are afraid to go down this road because they are afraid that if they do, they will lose themselves. This is a fear based on a a gigantic misunderstanding. The core false assumption is that your uniqueness is identical with your separate self. Therefore, if you transcend your separate self, you are leaving your individuality, uniqueness, and specialness behind. That is precisely what is not true. As you transcend your separate self into the spaciousness that is the ground of all being, something absolutely radical in its delight takes place. Your personal Uniqueness rises out of the ground of your impersonal enlightenment.

You seem to leave behind the personal by moving beyond the illusion that you are a separate self. But after you have transcended your identity with your separate self-ego, the personal comes back online as your Unique Self. But this time, your Uniqueness is genuine. It  is more evolved, powerful, and pure. It is true that your separate self-ego already held the great goods of individuality. But those goods were compromised by all of the grasping delusion of the ego. With the emergence of the ego, Other became enemy; greed, jealousy, horrendous stress, anguish, and murder became part of man’s everyday experience.

Before the separate self-ego emerged, we had no record in the world of people talking about their suffering.*

The emergence of separate self–ego created, at the same time, the emergence of Other. Put simply, the emergence of me creates in its wake the emergence of you. If I am I, then you are you. The Upanishads, great spiritual teachings of the East, say where there is other, there is fear. Where there is fear, there is suspicion, anxiety, and stress, which in turn, creates more fear.  What then follows is doubt and defense, which gives birth to projection. I project my hostility onto you. I then move to protect myself against your hostility.   And then, before you know it, the entire cycle of death destruction is in full bloom.

If you want to bypass this entire process, you must go to the source of the trauma. The source of the trauma is the original error of perception. This was the error of self-perception. When you emerged as a self, you thought that you were alone, separated from everyone else. You felt that you needed to develop deep defenses and armor to protect yourself from all the other selves. I am not talking about skillful means you deployed to take care of yourself in the world. That was necessary and important. Rather, I refer to your entire core stance in the world which was one of fear. Every move you made was to protect yourself from one person and win approval from another person, usually by pretending to be someone that you are not. This is the source of all of your anxiety and fear.

If you could just move beyond the fear which comes from your experience of being a separate isolated self–ego in an unfriendly world, everything would shift. This is the shift that changes everything. If you could but experience the true reality of being fully interconnected in a friendly universe which supports your existence, loves you, and desires your presence, it would all be different. If you could break free of the illusion of your being a disconnected isolated monad called an ego and perceive reality clearly, then your whole story would turn.

*See Ken Wilber’s book Up from Eden.

For more of this essay, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 6.

You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 52023-06-20T13:54:01-07:00

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 4

by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 4)

It is precisely this fellowship of prayer and prophecy, which we might refer to as the second face of God. In this pointing out instruction, God in the first person would be the face of god you feel flowing through you in meditation. God in the third person would be the face of God reflected in your radical amazement at the wonder and infinite intelligence displayed in every nook and cranny of existence. God in the second person is in the mystery of the encounter between God and Man. A relationship of intimacy is revealed between the finite and the infinite.  All of the infinite power, glory, and intelligence of the first person and third person of the divine were felt and revealed as relationship in the second encounter between the prophet and God. The precise flip side of prophecy is prayer. In their essence, they are the same. Both are expressions of the fellowship between man and God. The difference is simply this. In prophecy, God initiates and God invokes. In prayer, man initiates and man invokes.

What is key to grasp here is that the second person of God is not a primitive metaphor for the simple people who cannot quite grasp the depth of god as principle or Tao or spirit or the evolutionary impulse. God in the second person is not, as so many American spiritual teachers have suggested, a left over touching trinket of the old religion. Not in the slightest. The full integral realization of enlightenment feels in the core of it’s being all three faces of God. Central is the face of God the lover and beloved. This is God for whom we yearn. This is God of whom we know that wherever we fall, we fall into God’s hands. This is not a product of projection, childish fantasy, or immature imagination.

This is a knowing of the presence, which emerges directly from enlightened realization.

The personal, caring, compassionate embrace of the divine is a profound realization of the eye of spirit.  If a teacher has not realized the personal embrace of God as part of their realization, they would do well to bow their head in humility and yearning instead of dismissing that of with which they have no direct contact or realization.

None of this means that God is your grandfather in the heaven  waiting to give you candy. Your realization of God in the second person has little to do with a cosmic vending machine dressed as your favorite uncle.  Rather, God is the transpersonal nature of all that is.

The transpersonal is not pre-personal. God is more than personal, not less than personal.

God is Personal-Plus not Personal-Minus. It is somewhat like saying God is not physical. That does not mean that God is less real or less concrete than the physical. It means that the flatland of the merely physical cannot even begin to express the absolute sensual pulsating realness that manifests in the direct first-person experience of the divine.

God is not merely impersonal.  When you say impersonal, we think of a person with whom we cannot make contact. Impersonal means without the possibility of love and intimacy. In both the experience of  God in your first person as cosmic consciousness or your experience of God in the second person Encounter, you will realize that radical love, intimacy, and contact is the very quality of the experience.

For more of this essay, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 5.

You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 42023-06-20T13:54:12-07:00

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 3

by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 3)

The sense of peril resulting from direct contact with the divine ground has nothing to do with any ideas that the people are sinful or the god wrathful. It is more like the famous question of the Bhagavad Gita: “Suppose a thousand suns should rise together in the sky,” what would happen to our reality? How can the individual hope to survive contact with Source? Source incarnates all the energy and power in the Cosmos and infinitely beyond.

Presence by its very nature overwhelms all individual existence.

This strange and awesome paradox is resolved not by theory, but in the very experience of the encounter itself. The living presence of the divine “which is the suchness and substance of all that is” not only IS but is also FOR man. The person experiences an overpowering concern, in which they are held, cared for, recognized, and loved–within the very encounter itself. So the paradox of the encounter is that it is, on one hand, overwhelming and at the same time radically affirming. The individual is rendered powerless, almost lifeless before the divine, even as the individual is enlivened and empowered.

The core of the encounter is three fold. The revelation of love and concern for man, the calling of man to responsibility and action, and a radical affirmation of the dignity and meaning of personhood and individuality.

To sense this more deeply, hear directly the description of the encounter by of one of the great master prophets Ezekiel, “I fell on my face, then the spirit entered me and set me on my feet and spoke with me.” Ezekiel is overpowered and yet retains his personal identity. In all of the reports of the encounter, the same paradoxical quality is apparent. The divine reveals itself as all consuming energy, and at the same moment, hides the full intensity of infinity, holding the prophet in the protective embrace of divine love. Overwhelmed by the presence in the encounter, man finds himself affirmed. There can be no encounter with nothing. If human individuality is overwhelmed into nothingness, there can be no encounter. God invests with man the evolutionary impulse to stand up again and unfold his individuality. Even as he experiences his nothingness, he is affirmed as dignified, adequate, responsible, and beloved. Man is granted a measure of independence. He is free to be himself because God cares for and affirms him. God hides in his revelation in order to preserve the personality of man. The Wholly other reveals itself as friend, sustainer, preserver. This is what the prophets used to call the Humility of God.

So we see that the divine self-revelation in the encounter is dual. Radical presence, which is overwhelming, coupled with radical love, which is affirming of human dignity and preserving of human individuality.

The encounter invites man into fellowship with God. Communion and even Union are the divine invitation. But for the prophet and the Western spirituality that he birthed, there can be no identity between man and God, for in identity man is absorbed and the fellowship is lost.

For more of this essay, see Part 1, Part 2, or Part 4.

You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 32023-06-20T13:54:21-07:00

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 2

by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 2)

The most powerful expression of this realization is in the prophetic encounter with the divine mystery. This encounter runs like a thread from Abraham and Sarah to Moses, Miriam, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the larger legions of prophecy. As America’s second president John Adams has already noted, the best of everything Western man knows about freedom, love, ethics, and responsibility emerges from the great encounter between the finite and the infinite.

The Encounter with other marks the emergence of the pre-personal slumber. The baby encounters other even as the emergent human being who experiences his separate self turns to other. The  encounter–relationship–is born as the central dynamic of human existence.

In the encounter between separate selves, love is born.

In the encounter, the infinite creative intelligence, which is the underlying ground of the kosmos, reveals itself to you with compassionate face. Full of care, challenge, and concern.

The encounter is an actual experience, which engages all the sense of man. At the same time, it is well beyond any limited material apparition of deity.

The knowledge of the presence is conveyed with irresistible force even as the presence remains invisible to the naked eye. The encounter is not philosophical abstraction or metaphysical speculation. The knowing is not derivative.  It is immediate. The presence is directly felt and recognized. The nature of the experience is induced as an absolute certainty. Not certainty of dogma, not certainty that it is true, that you are true. You are fully affirmed in the encounter.

The experience combines two very different qualities. Radical love and radical danger. The presence by the very fact of its overwhelming power seems to threaten the very life of the person to whom it is addressed. Moses hears the voice and hides his face. Face means his singular individuality, which feels threatened by the encounter itself. We have scripture on this. “Did ever people hear the voice, speaking from the midst of the fire and live?”

For more of this essay, see Part 1 or Part 3.

You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.

The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 22023-06-20T13:54:31-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 1

by Dr. Marc Gafni | (part 1 of 6)

The realization of the personal which has been derided as the separate self or ego is so important that I want to ask you to enter this even more deeply with me. You need to feel a sense of this realization in your own being. You need to feel the love and care implicit and explicit in the loving personal address of the Cosmos.

There is clear a moment in where you will need to move beyond separate self and realize the underlying unity of all that is as the seamless coat of the universe. You will need to trance-end the merely personal to realize the next station on the road to your  enlightenment. This will engender in you a profound love. It will open your heart in a radical and unconditional way. It will move you beyond alienation into full integration and power.

However, and this is a huge caveat, you will have to not merely transcend but to transcend and include the personal. That means that when you enter into the realm of the transpersonal space in which we are  all expression of the one, you will need to realize in joy that you are a distinctive unique expression of the one . You must transcend your separateness even as you must retain your Uniqueness. The ego, when purified of its grasping and freed of its fixations, is harbinger of  your Unique Self.  The personal  is essential to your full enlightenment as your Unique Self. Enlightenment always has a personal perspective. Enlightenment according to the Sufis and the Kabbalists is an expression of purified personal essence.  Anything less will make you insane. Remember, Insanity means a loss connection with reality. Sanity means a full joyful embrace of reality. Enlightenment is no more or less than sanity. Reality is not only impersonal. It is also profoundly personal.

In order to be able to realize the personal plus–not personal minus–nature of your enlightenment, you need a deeper feeling and understanding of the realization of the personal.  Remember that the personal is achieved both in the life of the individual and the life of humanity with the evolutionary achievement of the experience of separate self.

It is a transmission of  something of this realization that I wish to share with you in these pages…

For more of this essay, see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

You can also join Dr. Marc Gafni’s contacts on LinkedIn.

Download the PDF Version of the Whole Paper HERE
Download the PDF Version of the Whole Paper HERE
Dr. Marc Gafni: The God of the Encounter: The Glory of the Personal, Part 12023-06-20T13:54:40-07:00

Malice: The Denial of the Unique Self Encounter

An Excerpt from Your Unique Self by Dr. Marc Gafni

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The opposite of a Unique Self encounter is an encounter motivated by malice. Malice manifests as both the denial of, and the attempt to destroy, the Unique Self of the other. The desperate attempt to destroy the Unique Self of an other is based, paradoxically, on a primal recognition of the other’s Unique Self, and a feeling that somehow the other’s self makes one less, or not enough.

Most of the literature of the human potential movement and its daughter, the new age movement, ignores or even denies malice. But you cannot skip malice if you want to truly understand and practice love. Love is a Unique Self perception that creates pleasure and joy in its wake. Malice is a Unique Self distortion that creates envy and hatred in its wake.

Malice is a verb in the same way that love is a verb. however, it is essential to remind you that being aroused to malice does not mean that you let yourself be seduced by the arousal. You have every ability to clarify your arousal and transmute it into goodness and love. The kinds of people that might arouse you to malice are:

  • People who remind you that you are not living your Unique Self.
  • People who you think, by their very existence, are taking away your ability to let the radiance of your Unique Self shine in the world.
  • People you believe stand in the way of you fulfilling your Unique Self.

In these situations you will be sorely tempted—if you think you can get away with it—to seek to destroy their Unique Self in order to cover up the inchoate yet agonizing pain of your disconnection from your personal essence.

Know in advance that you will experience great resistance to this teaching. Your  primal,  desperate  desire  is  to  deny  any  connection  between yourself and malice. it may be that you have never acted it out. This is good. or you may be one of the people that M. Scott peck describes in his book People of the Lie. I have called them people of malice. people of malice are people whose own early pain has made them evil in the way that they act in the world. The core expression of people of malice is that they attack, undermine, or demonize others, instead of facing their own failure. The attack may be subtle or overt. However, it is always covered by the sophisticated fig leaf of respectability, or even by noble motives.

You may know someone like this; they seem respectable, even noble, yet underneath the veneer, they have wreaked brutal destruction—often on those who were or are in their closest circles of intimacy. This might include parents driven by malice toward their children, an employer toward an employee or the converse, friends and colleagues, a teacher toward a student, or a student or group of students toward a powerful teacher. Their malice is almost always covert. Echoing Milan Kundera, it would be correct to say, “Since malice can never reveal its true motivation, it must plead false ones.” Leading British psychoanalyst Joseph Berke informs us that malice is to moderns what sex was to Victorians. It is to be repressed at any price. it is an obsession, best denied, avoided, or forgotten. The perpetrators of malice often claim to be “protecting” some imagined victim from harm. If you even suggest they might have any other motivation that is less than the pure mask they don in the world, they are outraged. There is nothing the people of malice fear more than having the lie of their motivation or the ugliness of their hidden machinations exposed. There is a ferocity to malice. This makes it intuitively frightening for people to confront. so most people withdraw into the shade of their own cowardice, covering their coward’s tracks with well-reasoned and plausible disclaimers.

Often the coward finds it easier to energetically join with the movement of malice than to oppose it. This is the worst and most deplorable form of laziness, albeit one of the most common, even if hidden from the public eye. It might take the form of blaming the victim or exaggerating their responsibility. If in some sense “he had it coming,” it is easier to rationalize joining the executors of malice than it is to arouse the discernment and courage necessary to oppose them.

In the great spiritual traditions, much of the judgment after our death about who we were in this world, as well as the greatest creator of karma, is related to how we behaved when confronted with malice that was disguised as a righteous cause. Did we speak truth to power? Or did we cleverly disguise our cowardice with a thousand rationalizations, even as the Unique Self of your friend, colleague, or teacher was thrown under a bus?

Malice Is Painfully Private, Publicly Dangerous

Let’s look more closely now at the phenomenon of malice, so you will be able to identify it clearly. It is absolutely necessary to liberate the world from malice. As you read, keep in your heart that malice is a poison that threatens the blooming of Unique Self more than anything.

Malice operates through a simple four-stage process: Malice (1) Per- ceives genuine flaws, (2) Exaggerates or distorts them, (3) Minimizes the good in the attacked person’s character, and (4) Absurdly and insidiously identifies the person with their distorted caricatures, painted by the purveyors of malice themselves.

The internal perception of malice operating in you or your friend is the same as love, for malice is love’s opposite. Just as love is Unique Self perception, malice is Unique Self distortion. The malice-motivated distortion happens in two ways. First, you might see the Unique Self of the other, but since that image provokes the pain of your own lack, you try to tear it down. Or second, distortion might mean that you cannot see—you see only distorted images of the other—you have lost the ability to see with God’s eyes.

In malice you sense the awareness of something provoking you as either an unbearable feeling of intense pleasure or as a “grenvious” vexation. “Grenvy,” a term coined by Joseph Berke, is the ill-fated brew of greed and envy that produces the potion of malice.

Malice elicits forceful attacking and even what psychologists in the field have called annihilating behavior. Malice is not connected with legitimate causes at its core—it always hides behind them. it is painfully private, yet when it bursts out of control, it is publicly dangerous in the extreme. It is fed by what Berke calls a distorted “inner world of fact and fantasy, brought about by the confused interplay of perception, memory, and imagination.” “There is bad intent that arises in the world; there is intent to hurt and do evil to other people—we have to confront that.” This sadly correct truth was spoken by my beloved friend Ken Wilber several years back in a public dialogue we did on the topic of evil in the world. Ken was responding to a questioner who made the all-too-common argument that all the tragedy that befalls us is ultimately our own creation, and thus we must take 100 percent responsibility for everything that occurs. The new age narcissists cannot bring themselves to bow before the mystery, so they claim all power to themselves.

Of course, more often than not, the hidden agenda is that the victim has no right to be outraged or demand justice. Since the victim is the creator of their own reality, the ones who have been hurt should be taking responsibility. This cleverly lets the inflictor of pain off the hook. The moral context of justice and injustice, right and wrong, and good and evil is undermined by a subtle relativism in which no ethical discernments are genuinely possible. Or, in a related scenario, the abuser themselves claim to have been abused, thus legitimizing the pain inflicted by them on the true victim. This type of claim is one of the most aggressive and insidious disguises of malice.

This new age view has found a strange bedfellow in distorted American presentations of Theravada Buddhism. since everything is the result of cause and effect, you must be the creator of everything in your reality. If you take total, 100 percent responsibility for everything, you will find your way to spiritual depth and maturity. so the popular dharma goes.

This view is not all wrong. It is in fact a powerful and desperately needed  antidote  to  the  victim  culture  that  so  pervades  much  of  the american spiritual scene. We have been ushered into a new world where any hurt party claims victimhood and uses the claim to inflict all manner of abuse. This often comes together with an abdication of responsibility and often the filing of some sort of suit or complaint. The filing of a complaint gains the ostensible victim a long list of goods, far beyond finances. attention, focus, community, love, and a feeling of power and aliveness are high on the list. Those who encourage and even instigate false complaints are often driven by hidden or disowned malice.

Often, the true predator is the victim who inflicts cruelty and pain on their alleged tormentor to a degree far greater than whatever imagined or even genuine hurt the victim themselves may have felt. Disguised as the victim, the true predator receives the communal love and support. The true victim, cast as the predator, is debased, dehumanized, and ostracized in a thousand cruel ways.

In this context, it needs to be said that while the Buddhist teaching, with its demand for self-responsibility, is a desperately needed and crucial counterweight to the abdication of responsibility through the false claim to victim status, it is only part of the story. At the same time, what is clear from the scenario of false complaints is that self-responsibility is no more than a partial truth. Whenever something happens, you must identify what part you played in creating the conditions that allowed for suffering to occur. You may have contributed 5 or 50 percent to the system. even if you have only 5 percent responsibility, you must take 100 percent responsibility for your 5 percent. But not more. The other part of the story is often the malice of other players in the situation.

Taking total responsibility is actually a disguised form of hubris. it is a refusal to give up control. in this case, the control is maintained precisely through “taking responsibility.” But your insistence on being the sole creator of your reality ignores the larger creative field of which you are but one small part. it ignores the greater evolutionary intelligence at work in and through your life. it ignores the mystery, and blithely dismisses all other people in the story as but supporting actors in your narcissistic control drama.

Total control of your life in the form of total responsibility is not an expression of spirit—quite the opposite. it is one of the more clever disguises of the narcissistic ego.

What is appropriate is for you to identify your contribution, if any, to creating the conditions that led to your suffering. You can and must take 100 percent responsibility for your part. This, however, is a more nuanced, sacred, and humble posture than 100 percent responsibility for everything.

This posture bows before the mystery, even as it recognizes the possibility of malice.

The Murder of Christ

Humans seek the death and destruction of others, even as we seek their happiness. Both drives and both voices exist in every person who lives in the separate self of the ego. We think that malice only appears “out there,” that it does not show up in respectable or polite society. Sadly, this is completely untrue. lynch mobs manifest in many and varied ways. The prime movers in lynch mobs are energetically attracted to each other. They find each other. They move in unison, almost always hiding their own malice, even from each other. They are drawn to the lynch party to partner in destroying the common energetic emotional threat.

Freud’s brilliant student and colleague, Wilhelm Reich, called this not-uncommon phenomenon “the murder of Christ.” The  murder of Christ is the attempt to murder life force. All sorts of reasons justify the crucifixion. A thousand demonizations build the cross. The murderers support each other, often outdoing one another in their maligning of Christ. “see, he is calling himself Christ,” they say, in order to give evidence of his narcissism.

Remember that  malice  is  sourced  in  Unique  self  distortion.  This  is the matrix of the endless cycle of demonizing by those disconnected from their daemon and incapable of owning their demon. They lack the spiritual courage to name what moves them in their breast, which is that “he,” the always-flawed Christ they seek to destroy, has a light that threatens their light. He has an appeal, a draw, that is different from theirs. They cannot explain it. so they seek out his imperfections, magnify them a hundredfold, distort and add some major dose of lies for good measure, and the necessary mix for murder is set. hidden envy, jealousy, and greed are the basic ingredients necessary to conjure the witches’ brew.

This is the source of the “Foul Whisp’rings . . . abroad” that Shakespeare saw as the source of villainy and even murder. as author Philip Roth describes it:

The  whispering  campaign  that  cannot  be  stopped,  rumors it’s impossible to quash . . . slanderous stories to belittle your professional qualifications, derisive reports of your business deceptions and your perverse aberrations, outraged polemics denouncing your moral failings, misdeeds, and faulty character traits—your shallowness, your vulgarity, your cowardice . . . your falseness, your selfishness, your treachery. Derogatory information. Defamatory statements. insulting witticisms. Disparaging anecdotes. idle mockery. Bitchy chatter. Galling wisecracks.

It is in this regard that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, “It is certain that envy is the worst sin that is: for all others sin against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and all goodness.”

The Evil Eye

Envy, as we saw earlier, is often the envy of an other’s Unique Self, which reminds you of your own unlived life. Envy that motivates malice is directly related to what has been called through history the evil eye. The evil eye is not a superstition, but an inner trait of black character. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “the evil eye is affected by strong imagination of the soul and corrupts and poisons the atmosphere so that tender bodies that come within its range may be injuriously affected.” Envy then partners with greed, which is an “insatiable desire to take for him what another possesses.” It is motivated by a ruthless acquisitiveness, which is publicly denied.

A greedy person is concerned with possessing. An envious person is obsessed with that which they do not possess. Often greed and envy come together in “grenvy.” Berke’s work remains the most insightful analysis of the inner dynamics that animate people of malice. According to Berke, for the envious person, the “goodness must not be preserved, only attacked, spoiled, and destroyed.”

The first stage of envy is often idealization. The idealization, however, cannot last. it arouses too much anguish in the heart of the envier. Therefore, the reverse process sets in. Denigration, equally extreme and unrealistic, follows idealization. This is done to mitigate the anguish of the previous perception. So the elephant becomes a midge, the palm tree becomes a toadstool, and a cloth coat turns into a rag. A kind of hysteria sets in, and there is a refusal to see any goodness at all in the person attacked.

The distorting impact on awareness shows up not only in the envier, but also in the envied. The envied often engages in two forms of self-deception: the envied person idealizes their envier, which is not that hard because often they were once loved by their envier; or they shut down in order to avoid the pain engendered by the awareness of the envy.

One of the demarcating characteristics of malice is its intense cruelty. King David writes in Psalms, “Many have risen against me,” and he goes on to describe in exquisitely accurate detail the dynamics of deception and self-deception that guide the ostensibly respectable lynch mob disguised by the fig leaf of the “noble cause.” In Joseph Berke’s incisive formulation, “The politics of envy culminates in the effective disguise of individual or collective enmity and its expression through political relationships or institutional decisions that are ostensibly virtuous.”

When an individual in the mob is confronted, they refer to “all of us,” or say, “There are many people throughout this life who say this,” and the like, ignoring the fact that the righteous and disgruntled always attract each other.

The philosopher Socrates is perhaps the most notable victim of the “slander and envy of the many,” including, of course, the political and religious establishment of his day. all of them nodded knowingly to each other, demonizing Socrates even as they—in their collective pathology—denied any suggestion of their own envy being a motivating force, discounting this as an absurd and malevolent suggestion that did not deserve serious rebuttal.

The envy of the “successful one” by students, teachers, and colleagues was much more forthrightly recognized in older cultures. among the Khoikhoi people of South Africa, if a hunter has scored a great kill, he is sent to his hut until the village elder calls on him. he is then placed in the center of the circle surrounded by his fellow hunters, who literally piss on him. In this way, a legitimate outlet is created for the enviers to express their discontent and even rage.

If this seems culturally hard to grasp, just note the same custom in Western culture. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish tradition, when the priest offers sacrifice to the divine in the temple, a sacrifice to the “other side” is offered as well. The psychological premise is that shadow must first be owned in the person of the individual and the community before it can be transmuted and atoned for.

Envy  corrupts  and  corrodes  love.  It  turns  good  into  bad.  in Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago accomplishes this by a lethal mixture of slander and duplicity, a process of bad-mouthing and backstabbing. Envious revenge is fueled by hidden arrogance, unyielding aggression, and pride. It is based on distorted or exaggerated hurts rather than significant injury. The envier, in their internal self, considers only their accomplishments in comparison to the one envied. Envy, at its core, is grasping for Unique Self. Envious destructiveness is deliberate. The envious person denies goodwill or love toward the object of their ire. What they want to do is remove the bilious anger and bitter vindictiveness that lurks just beneath their surface self. Their surface self appears more often than not as spiritual, and filled with ostensible good intention and light. it is also possible that the surface good intention and light are real. Envy is often a vicious streak in an otherwise decent and even good personality. This is precisely why the malice of seemingly good people is so persuasive. The envious person wants to get rid of the feelings that they vaguely know exist right beneath their surface personality. They violate their own sense of goodness and even righteousness. since he (unconsciously) blames the one he envies for how he feels, he sets out to make him feel bad or appear bad. It is no accident that “evil” is “live” spelled backward. Evil stands against life force. And life force is nowhere more powerful than in the full bloom of Unique Self.

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Malice: The Denial of the Unique Self Encounter2023-09-12T10:01:01-07:00

Marc Gafni on Post-Postmodern Art: A New Article in Parabola Magazine

By Marc Gafni

Artist Claudia Kleefeld is not the first person to see the symbol of the spiral as being a portal to a vision of a coherent cosmos. She is original in that she is a first-rate, old-master-style artist with thirty years of training, who paints the spiral as an expression of an Eros of certainty that asserts the utter meaningfulness, depth, and order of the cosmos. Kleefeld’s paintings emerge from her own opened eye of the spirit and speak directly to the higher spiritual intuition of her viewers. Finally, Kleefeld is unusual in that she is part of an emergent form of art, which seeks to reveal the enchantment of a cosmos ”” a cosmos that is good, true, and beautiful.

I am delighted to present an article which celebrates the work of Claudia Kleefeld, one of the brightest shining lights in the universe of art today. My new article, “Post-postmodern Art: A Return to Belonging,” is now published in the latest issue of Parabola Magazine.

(more…)

Marc Gafni on Post-Postmodern Art: A New Article in Parabola Magazine2023-06-21T08:36:24-07:00

Marc Gafni’s “The Future of the Holy: From Sex to Eros” Appearing in Spanda Journal

Marc Gafni was recently featured in Spanda Journal, the peer-reviewed biannual publication of the Spanda Foundation.

The Spanda Foundation offers publications related to “sustainable advancement of peace, knowledge, and understanding.”

Marc’s article, entitled “The Future of the Holy: From Sex to Eros,” begins like this:

“Sex. Is there anything else that so grabs our rapt attention, inessantly pursues us, occupies our daydreams, fantasies, and yearnings? The kabbalists state the obvious: God is trying to get our attention. Now I am not talking about the God who sends good people to burn in hell because they slipped up on one of his impossible demands. nor even the Grandfather in heaven who hands out chocolate to do-gooders. Forget that God. The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. Rather, the God that exists for us is the personal erotic life force that courses through reality. The God we believe in is the vitality of eros. The God we believe in is the force for healing and transformation in the world. The God who knows our name. That is the God who so clearly calls out to us that sex is the answer.”

For the entire article, click: SPANDAJOURNAL_C&D2.0_Marc_Gafni.

See: Gafni, M. (2012). “The Future of the Holy: from Sex to Eros”, Spanda Journal, ed. S. Momo, III,1: 131-139.

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Marc Gafni’s “The Future of the Holy: From Sex to Eros” Appearing in Spanda Journal2023-06-21T08:44:36-07:00

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 5 of 5)

Editor’s note: The following essay is published as a white paper of the Center for Integral Wisdom think tank. Our Spirit’s Next Move blog is pleased to announce the paper’s availability.

Implications: A Great Voice Which Does Not Cease

Some teachers have taught that revelation heard long ago at Mount Sinai when God spoke to human beings was an event occurring once in the lifetime of the universe, calling it according to its biblical phrasing, “A great voice which did not continue.” Again, the mystics insist that another reading is possible. In the original Hebrew, the phrase “did not continue” can paradoxically be read as “did not cease.” The voice of Sinai is accessible even after the echoes of the original revelation are long since lost in the wind. The voice of revelation has never ended.

So if the voice still continues, in what form does it live on?

It thrives in the voice of the human being who speaks from the silence. This is what I have termed Silence of Presence. When we listen deeply, we are able to uncover the God-voice within us. We become present in the silence. We are called by the presence–the God-voice within us–that wells up from the silence.

Indeed the entire cultural –spiritual enterprise of the Judaic spirit in the post biblical age is to hear the voice, even in – some would say especially in – the silence. The Biblical age ended when God stopped talking. For the Buddhist, even if one were to assume some notion of divinity – there is clearly no such absurdity as a talking God. For the Hebrew however, the essence of divinity is a talking God. Indeed the Hebrew God of the Bible talks almost endlessly, pouring out 24 books of divinely spoken or inspired word – the Hebrew Canon. What to do then when God stops talking and retreats into silence? In the interpretive reaction to this silence Judaism and early Christianity parted ways. For Christianity the cessation of speech by a talking God could only be a portent of divine withdrawal of favor. They interpreted the silence as a silence of absence. God no longer talked to the Hebrews for he had chosen a New Israel. The post prophetic Hebrews however refused to accept this understanding of God’s silence. This is the silence, not of abandonment they insisted – but of mature love. It is not silence of absence but silence of presence. Imbued with intense and profound religious passion they listened to the silence and insisted that they heard God talking. That speech is the Halachic enterprise, which insists on the radical presence of the divine in every facet of existence. It is only in this sense that we understand the Rabbinic comment after the temple’s destruction, “God’s presence in this world now rests in the four cubits of Halacha”. It is not a statement of dejection or resignation – it is rather the confident commitment of the lover.

The word Prophet in Hebrew is Navi – meaning literally – speech. Divine speech will no longer be channeled through a prophetic elite. The temple – symbol of the prophetic period – is no more. The divine voice – presence in absence – silence of presence – can be heard by all lovers who long and listen. All speech is potentially prophetic.

Learning the Language of God

Moses is the prophet par excellence and yet the Zohar suggests that Moses lives in every generation. For Moses is the model of the called human being. Indeed as the Kabbalists point out, the word Moses spelled backwards is Ha Shem, meaning “the name.” Importantly, Ha-shem in biblical Hebrew also is the most common reference to God’s name. When you respond to your call and realize your soul print, fully becoming your name, you become one with God. When Moses did this, he found his voice, he became a prophet.

In the beginning of the book of Exodus, Moses is described as stuttering, unable to speak clearly. He says, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh, I am not a man of words.” And yet by the end of the five books, Moses gives great and powerful speeches to Pharaoh, to the people, even to God. The beginning of the last biblical book, called Deuteronomy (which in Hebrew is Devarim, meaning “words”) opens with the sentence, “And these are the words that Moses spoke.” Moses, who in the book of Exodus says, “I am not a man of words,” has become the ultimate man of words. He now speaks the word of God. When we find our voice, when we connect with our inner soul print, then divine energy courses through us and we are able, each in our own way, to speak the word of God.

One of the great questions of biblical myth is how one can claim that there are five books of the bible. “Isn’t the bible the word of God?” ask the masters. “And isn’t the fifth book of biblical myth, Deuteronomy, actually comprised of the words of Moses, for does not the book begin, “These are the words which Moses spoke’”? The answer is clear: When Moses finds voice, finds vocation, then he hears God speaking through him. In the language of the myth masters, “The shechina” — divine presence ”–speaks through the throat of Moses.” The voice of God and the voice of Moses are one.

The artist, writer, creator, business man, doctor, and gardener, will all tell you that at the times when they feel merged with their calling, when they’re no longer standing on the outside performing a task but standing on the inside, flowing with their action, something higher speaking through them. I know that when I teach, often I get lost and I feel the words flowing by themselves, shaping and forming sentences almost magically before me. It is in these moments that we access our soul print and realize fully our unique voice in this world. At those moments of actualized soul print, our words are the words of God. We have learned to speak the language of God.

This post is part of a series of posts “Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God” which begins with Part 1. For Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4,  follow the links.

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 5 of 5)2023-06-21T09:05:46-07:00

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 4 of 5)

Editor’s note: The following essay by Marc Gafni is published as a white paper of the Center for Integral Wisdom think tank. Our Spirit’s Next Move blog is pleased to announce the paper’s availability.

Ten Words to Live By

The second biblical myth word symbol of freedom is actually mistranslated into English as the Ten Commandments. The people, so the story goes, having fled Egypt, gather at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Of course, nowhere in the biblical myth is there any mention of Ten Commandments. Here is where the old witty maxim, “Reading the bible in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil,” becomes not altogether untrue. In the original Hebrew, the people receive at Sinai not Ten Commandments but “Ten Words.” Here Voice becomes Word, the articulation of speech. It is the beginning of the vision that follows revolution.

The third word symbol is no less than the word “Messiah.” “Messiah” in the original Hebrew is understood by the Kabbalists, quite astoundingly, to mean “conversation.” Master Nachum of Chernobyl, mystic and philosopher, points out that the Hebrew word for messiah, Mashiach, can be understood as the Hebrew word Ma-siach – meaning “from dialogue” or “of conversation.” His assertion radically implies that the Messiah is potentially present in every human conversation””every mutual act of voice-giving.

All authentic conversation is sacred conversation. The ability to have an honest face-to-face talk in which both sides are true to themselves, vulnerable and powerful at the same time, is Messianic.

Simply put, sacred conversation is the vessel that receives the light of Messiah.

Sounds of Silence

The soul print of the emancipated storyteller is not entirely realized with the move from mute silence to sacred speech. It goes one rung higher, for soul print journeys are not only linear but circular, taking us spiraling upward and beyond. The path takes us from silence to speech and then back–to a higher silence that will birth a higher speech.

We return to the most famous biblical myth image of speech–the “Ten Words” spoken at Sinai. The Kabbalists, as you by now expect, have a different interpretation. In fact, according to the Kabbalists, God had nothing special to say that particular morning. God said what God says every day! “I am here,” he said. “I am present. The world is meaningful. Every human being is created in my image and therefore has infinite value and dignity.” In the language of the Kabbalists, “A voice issues forth daily from Sinai saying, ”˜I am the Lord your God.’” This is not a statement of theology but an affirmation of meaning and relationship based on voices in sacred conversation.

On that auspicious day at Sinai, we heard a voice not so much because God spoke, but because we listened. We got quiet. So did the whole world. In the wonderful imagery of the third century myth masters, “On the day of revelation a bird did not chirp, an angel did not sing, an ox did not bellow, the sea did not rage – the entire world fell silent”¦and the voice at Sinai was heard.”
The voice can be heard only from the silence.

This post is part of a series of posts “Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God” which begins with Part 1. For Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5, follow the links.

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 4 of 5)2023-06-21T09:06:24-07:00

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 3 of 5)

By Marc Gafni

Editor’s note: The following essay is published as a white paper of the Center for World Spirituality think tank. Our Spirit’s Next Move blog is pleased to announce the paper’s availability.

The Second Stage: from Silence to Sound

The beginning of freedom is the emergence of voice. This stage is expressed both by the initial cry of the Israelite slaves that broke their silence, as well as by Moses’ arrival on the scene. “When Moses came, voice came,” writes the Zohar. Moses does what the charismatic revolutionary always does: he gives voice to the people. Indeed, biblical myth text records the beginning of redemption with the following words: “”It came to pass in the course of many days that the King of Egypt died and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage and they cried out and their cry came up unto God.” The enslaved Israelites are received by the presence of God at the point when they move from the dumb silence of the slave to sound which is the beginning of speech, the characteristic of a free people. This “cry” is not an elegantly articulated protest – it is a cry as in the cry of a wolf, or the cry of an infant. It is primal, impassioned, pre-civilized, a howl of protest that makes it into the halls of heaven, heard by God himself.

For the first time the enslaved can express distress. They seek to articulate words that are not yet ready to form themselves on their lips. At this stage of moving toward freedom, we do not yet know how to tell our story. We do not know what we would do with the world if it were given over to our stewardship. We just know that we must protest.

The biblical myth symbol (Leviticus 25) for the transition from slavery to freedom is the primal blast of a ram’s horn. No trumpet of gold, it is rather the rawness of the ram’s horn that captures the slave’s first fitful sounds. The first thing a revolutionary movement must do is sound its ram horn–start a newspaper, set up a radio station, build an internet site. It is not by accident that the fundamentalist and totalitarian states are trying to disallow or severely limit internet access. Freedom’s beginnings are expressed in the first shouts of protest.

The sixties and seventies were such second-stage revolutionary generations. This helps explain why so many sixties hippies became late seventies and early eighties yuppies and then transformed again into the establishment of the nineties. The feeling of distress generated protest – sound and even the first glimmerings of voice–but there was no alternative vision of society to generate “speech.” Similarly, many third world revolutionaries reflect such second stage thinking. Consequently, as we all know, that not a few third world revolutionaries became the leaders of far more repressive regimes than the ones they overthrew. Because they lacked speech to articulate the primal manifestations of voice, they needed to repress all of their own pain, the very distress and disease that initially led to the revolution.

What can they do when the revolution has happened and the dis-ease remains? Only two choices are available. The revolutionary can choose to look inside personal and societal soul in a very profound way, attempting to wrestle with the dis-ease at its source and not merely on a symptomatic level. This would involve addressing the ills of society that provoked revolution–through the creation of a new society with just laws and a conceptual framework to insure the continued freedom of the people. This is the move from primal voice to speech. Or the revolutionary can lash out to avoid the necessity of confronting his own emptiness. Lashing out is always easier but not a stage of growth. It continues and repeats the stage-two voice of protest. The repression it produces is often brutal and animalistic.

Like all stages of growth – stage two is necessary and positive when it is part of a process. Arrested growth, however, always produces some form of pathology.

The Third Stage: From Sound to Word

In the third stage, voice gives birth to word. Now we are able to tell our story – to speak authentically with each other, to articulate clearly both our needs and our visions of a better world. A rebel newspaper is no longer sufficient. Only in the writing of a constitution or a Declaration of Independence is the next stage of freedom achieved. Or in the case of the sixties, a spiritual movement needed to be born which attempts, however imperfectly, to write the books of a New Age.

Three biblical myth word symbols capture this third stage in mystical consciousness.

The first word symbol is called in Hebrew the haggadah””literally, “the story telling.” This is the very name of the myth text we read from at Pe-Sach, when we reclaim our story. By assuming authorship of our stories, we assert spiritual authority over our lives. We are no longer subject to will and directive of the taskmaster, priest, or rabbi. By becoming authors of our own haggadah, we progress past the protest and actually become free.

The master Kalonymous Kalman explains that the demarcating characteristic of messianic times is that every person will be his or her own spiritual master. This is his radical reading of the biblical myth vision expressed by prophet Jeremiah “And no man will anymore learn from his fellow to know God, for everyone will know Me from the wise to the simple.” Every person will find voice and articulate speech and those words will be his or her spiritual guide. In the end, we will discover that we are the sacred book and the sacred book is us. In fact, there is a tradition in Jewish prayer to take the Torah scrolls adorned with crowns of silver and fine cloth and carry them around the prayer room, allowing everyone to touch and kiss them. Where I pray, we started a tradition of also kissing the person chosen to carry the scrolls, recognizing that she too is a sacred scroll.

This post is part of a series of posts “Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God” which begins with Part 1. For Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5, follow the links.

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 3 of 5)2023-06-21T09:07:07-07:00

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 2 of 5)

Editor’s note: The following essay is published as a white paper of the Center for Integral Wisdom think tank. Our Spirit’s Next Move blog is pleased to announce the paper’s availability.

The First Stage: The Silence of Absence

The aforementioned passage in the Zohar (Exodus 25a) suggests that there are three distinct stages in the continuum from slavery to freedom. The first stage is silence. The second stage involves moving from silence to sound without speech. And the third stage is speech–voice and articulated word.

In the first stage, slavery, we are mute and dumb. We live our lives without ever really crying out. The routines of the everyday deaden our sense of injustice, and our passions atrophy amid the narrowness of Egypt, when all sounds are smothered in our throats. In the biblical myth, the people were silent in the first stage of exile in Egypt. The pain broke their spirits and they became mute–no longer able to even cry out, much less to express the injustices with the eloquence of speech. We all have touched a fraction of that experience when, after a protracted argument, we are so worn down that we lack the strength to protest even the most blatant offenses of those who oppose or oppress us.

In a less familiar reading of the biblical story, Talmudic masters suggest that the slavery in Egypt was not of the usual kind. In fact, the Israelites were successful and prosperous. However, the deadening quality and comfort of their routine had anesthetized the sensitivity to their own wounds of alienation. How many of us suffer and hurt, yet remain fundamentally unaware of our suffering, deadened by the soma pills of the expected, and the narrow straits of success?

The disease of leprosy in the ancient world was considered so horrible not just because it caused extreme disfigurement. That was only a side effect. The agent of the disease itself was a bacteria called Hansen’s Bacillus, which destroyed the nerve fibers carrying the sensation of pain. In this painless state, a person could continue walking on a broken leg, thus causing irreparable damage and further disfigurement–and even greater estrangement from the world at large.

To be numb to pain is to be prone to a deeper damage. The anesthetizing effect of unbearable agony (or apathy) can be the most devastating enemy of all. The biblical slaves were broken bones being pressed with burdens they could not hold””and their nerve endings went numb to the weight. Their enslavement was complete when they “lost their nerve” to act up, and to cry out.

Biblical myth writer Y. L. Peretz, writing at the turn of the last century, tells the story of Bonsche the Silent.

All the heavens were in an uproar. Bonsche the Silent, the most righteous man, had died. Bonsche, who never complained and always accepted his fate with graceful silence, was coming to heaven– what a day! The angels exuberantly recounted the tales of humility of this silent saintly man–how he never asked for anything, was always simple, accepting, and sublimely silent! The angels rolled out the reddest celestial carpet they could conjure; the other celestial hosts were eager to honor their celebrity; and even God was getting involved.

On his arrival to heaven, Bonsche was granted a meeting with God. This was more than unusual – it was never done–but for holy Bonsche an exception was made. He came before the throne and heard the divine voice say, “Ask for anything. Anything you want is yours.”

Never had the celestial hosts heard anything like it. Every ear strained to hear – what would Bonsche say?

Bonsche was a little overwhelmed by all the attention. After all, he viewed himself as a simple man. He responded to God,. “It would be wonderful if I could have a roll and butter every day.”

When my Buddhist brothers heard this story, they went wild. What a Satori story, they said, what an example of total detachment and simplicity, the reduction of all expectations, the giving up of desire even when God offers you everything! Yet the biblical myth perspective reads this story differently. We say”–What a shmuck”! God offered Bonsche everything and all he could think to ask for is a bagel and butter? If he wanted nothing for himself, then what of a world which suffers so? For them as well he could think of nothing to ask? Master or not, was he so absent from himself that he also no longer feel the joy or pain of other?

Indeed, we biblical myth readers look at his life of silence and view it as a tragedy. Bonsche is totally disconnected from his own needs–from his own story. He is called Bonsche the Silent one because he has no voice. His silence is a Silence of Absence. It emmanates from the void and is a violation of divine presence.

The Disguises of Silence

How does this first level of slavery-silence play in our lives? Where do we hear the sounds of silence? One of the subtlest disguises of silence can be speech.

All of us, through fear or habit, create boxes of clarity for ourselves that reassure yet limit us. Mendel of Kutzk pleads with us to remember that the hebrew world for ”˜letter’ – the basic building block of speech is Teivah- not accidentally precisely the same hebrew word which means enclosure or box.

The loss of meaning that comes with the familiarity of speech is one of the subtler and therefore more insidious boxes of the human spirit. Words, with all of their power to reveal, can become hiding places through overuse. Once words and turns-of-phrase become familiar, they lose their associative depth and their power to lead us to the experience they represent. How many twentieth-century tired cliches were the dazzling wordplays of the Elizabethans? When it first appeared in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s coining of a term like the “mind’s eye” was an original, compact, and evocative condensation of a more internal form of perception. Now the phrase is the stuff of hack journalists and junk novelists. Speech can be nothing more than a noisy kind of silence.

Too often speech about emotions becomes the way to move away from feeling. We can define and redefine vulnerability through words until the truth of what we describe fades away. Too often we get lost in routine speak which, in the language of the mystics, has the quality of noise but lacks the quality of sound. In essence, it is silence”silence of absence.

This post is part of a series of posts “Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God” which begins with Part 1.  For Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, follow the links.

Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 2 of 5)2023-06-21T09:07:42-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 1 of 5)

Editor’s note: This is the first part of 5-part essay, published as a white paper of the Center for Integral Wisdom think tank. For Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, follow the links.

“As the Kabbalists point out, the word Moses spelled backwards is Ha Shem, meaning ‘the name.’ Importantly, Ha-shem in biblical Hebrew also is the most common reference to God’s name. When you respond to your call and realize your soul print, fully becoming your name, you become one with God. When Moses did this, he found his voice, he became a prophet.”

By Marc Gafni

To live your story is to move from a state of slavery to freedom. Slavery is not limited to our old image of the oppressed Hebrew or black slave being whipped by the cruel master. We are all potentially free, just as we are all potentially slaves. Our intent in this brief essay is to at least begin to unpack a core intuition of the Zohar that a free person is a person who has found voice. As we shall see in the very last paragraphs of this discussion the implications of freedom are wondrous indeed!

The Hebrew name for the Passover Storytelling Ritual, which celebrates and reenacts the dynamic movement from slavery to freedom, is Pe-Sach. Renaissance mystic Isaac Luria reminded us that Pe-Sach is a combination of two words Peh, meaning “mouth,” and Sach, meaning “talk.” Pe- Sach, therefore, means the mouth that talks.

One school of Hasidic masters unpacks this idea by defining redemption as the emergence of speech. To move from a dumb and mute existence to a communal storytelling existence is to undergo redemptive transformation. “To be redeemed,” writes one mystic, “is to lead a history-making, storytelling, communing, free existence.” To be in exile is to lack history, tell no story, fail to commune, and exist as a slave, silent.

The most oft cited source for this idea is a stunning passage in the Zohar which describes the Egyptian slavery as the “exile of speech.” In Kabbalah, every biblical nation represents a different organ of the body; Egypt represents the throat. The mystics read the Hebrew word “Egypt” literally as meaning narrowness. The throat is, of course, the narrow, constricted passage between the wide spaces of the heart and mind. The narrow throat, Egypt, is thus the ideal symbol for the exile of speech. Speech remains caught in the throat, in the dark passage, and can’t make it to freedom’s gateway, the mouth. Redemption comes in the birth of the word. In the actual process of your retelling, you reclaim your story. But to be capable of retelling your story you need voice. Redemption then is the process of finding voice.

The Greatest Persecution

In the Nazi concentration camps, certain people were referred to as mules. They were so broken that, although not physically impaired, they could no longer speak. Among animals, mules are the hybrid of a horse and donkey, unable to reproduce themselves. These human, muted mules were so traumatized, their souls so mangled, that they too were unable to “reproduce themselves”–to express themselves in speech.

The great master Kalonymous Kalman of Piacezna wrote from the flames of the Warsaw ghetto that the torture of the exile is not only in the physical suffering but in the inability to cry out – the loss of voice. “The people have become mute,” he cried out in a teaching given in 1940, just weeks after his son and daughter in law and many of his disciples were brutally killed. The teaching was on the story of Joseph and his brothers in the book of Genesis. In a dream, Joseph sees “the binding of sheaves in the midst of the field. And behold my [Joseph’s] sheave, rose up.” In the simple reading of the text, this is a dream of Joseph’s future power. The bound sheaves represent the servility of his brothers while the rising of his sheave is an expression of his potency. Joseph is predicting he will be lord over his brothers. Kalonimus Kalman uses the classical interpretive method of the mystic–reading the text independent of its context (here, Joseph and his brothers) and focusing on subtle wordplays and dual meanings–to extract a deeper spiritual meaning. For Kalman, the sheaves represent his disciples. The word for sheave in Hebrew also means “mute”: “My disciples are mute in the field of the spirit.” They have lost voice. Their suffering is so intense that it defies and destroys all expression. “However,” continues the master, “my sheave–that is, my muteness–must rise.” By this he means, “I must find voice.”

Kalman sees the role of the mystic leader, himself, as retaining voice, holding on at all costs to the ability to talk. He does not mean speech in the technical sense, of which even the slave is usually capable. He refers rather to the ability to have the voice that allows you to remain the storyteller of your own tale””even in the face of Nazi horror.

Kalonymous Kalman took on this role by continuing to teach even when he couldn’t be certain anyone survived to hear him. He risked all to record his teachings and hide them in the hope they would be found by some future generation. He was continuing to tell the story. In an act of heroic protest, he refused to allow the Nazis to claim “his-story.”

Kalman’s book, along with his voice, was lost in the war. He died in the Treblinka concentration camp and his book disappeared. Although he left word that he had buried his writings before being deported, they were not to be found. That is, until almost fifteen years after the Nazi defeat when a Polish worker miraculously discovered them in a pile of rubble and somehow understood their importance. The work has since been published. Treblinka may have succeeded in killing the Master of Piacezna, but it could not kill his voice. He died but his words did not. His voice triumphed.

Voices can indeed triumph even when the storyteller dies. For a version of Kalman’s story that is completely different yet exactly the same, we turn to Alice Walker’s classic work, The Color Purple. The novel focuses on two sisters, abandoned by their father to the custody of a man referred to as Mistah. One sister gets away. The other remains behind. What keeps the captive sister from losing her soul? The letters she sends to her sister. By telling her story she avoids be sucked into the slavery’s dark and deadly vortex.

In Blaise Pascal’s words, silence is “the greatest persecution.” Silence can forge the bonds of slavery even if you have not been sold by Dad to a man named Mistah or suffered the brutality of Nazism. Whenever you give up the belief that you are special and deserve to have a voice, you become a slave. Whenever you work in a place that instills fear, whenever you are afraid to speak up and ask for what is your due, you are a slave.

This post is the first in a five-part series of posts, “Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God.” For Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, follow the links.

Dr. Marc Gafni: Foundations for World Spirituality: Learning the Language of God (Part 1 of 5)2023-06-21T08:53:13-07:00
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