Marc (Mordechai) Gafni

In this essay, we are looking at some applications of the intimacy equation drawn from different domains to gain direct access to at least the fragrance of the True Nature of Reality as the Intimate Universe. We will elaborate more in some of these instances, while others are more self-evident and will be mentioned only in passing here. The search for ever wider and deeper intimate coherences animates this endeavor—operating across all the spaces of manifest reality and serving as the unifying ground of all being and becoming.

This early draft of an essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 2 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni with Dr. Zachary Stein & Barbara Marx Hubbard. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

The core Value of Cosmos is Eros. Indeed, the words cannot be fruitfully split. Eros IS ethos. Or said slightly differently, Eros is Value exponentialized as the Infinite Value, which suffuses Reality. Nothing exists outside of the circle of Eros as Value and Value as Eros. Eros IS ethos, and ethos, or Value, is the Ought implicit in Reality, which suffuses all of Cosmos. This is what we refer to in CosmoErotic Humanism as ErosValue.

On April 8, 2024 parts of North America experienced a complete solar eclipse. The cosmological phenomenon, when engaged from a mythological perspective, invites us to a conversation on the nature of the sun and the moon and their relationship to each other. As in many traditions, the moon in esoteric Hebrew wisdom represents the feminine, and the sun, the masculine. From a human perspective, during a solar eclipse, the sun and moon seem to be equal in size. The mystical implications of this are discussed in esoteric lineage tradition of the Wisdom of Solomon.

The solar eclipse coincided exactly with the molad, the “rebirth” of the moon, on the eve of the New Moon of the month of Nisan.

The juxtaposition of these two cosmological events invites us to a close study of  lineage sources discussing the relationship between the sun and the moon, the masculine and the feminine, poles of the Godhead and Sefirotic relationships.

In these Midrashic and Zoharic sources we will learn a multi-staged model of evolution of the feminine which was developed by Isaac Luria and democratized by Mordechai Lainer, and which provide a useful frame of reference for our times.

The Eye of Value is a term coined and shared by Dr. Gafni in multiple oral teaching over many years and in this more formal essay from 2018. This early draft was drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis by Dr. Marc Gafni with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zachary Stein. A more expanded version will also appear in forthcoming work by Gafni, Stein, and Wilber under the moniker of David J. Temple.
The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik.
We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

This is an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni, with added graphics. It is part of The Phenomenology of Eros: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire by Dr. Marc Gafni with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Dr. Kristina Kincaid. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

This is an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume Two of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein with Barbara Marx Hubbard. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

This is the Introduction from our new book “First Values & First Principles” by David J. Temple. David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

The following creed was written in 2017 and signed by Dr. Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Dr. Zachary Stein. It represents the core tenets of CosmoErotic Humanism.

THIS SHORT PROLOGUE MUST BE READ AS PART OF CREED:
The Evolutionary Love Creed is not merely poetry or metaphor. It is the most accurate take on Reality that we have today, based on the deepest integrated insights from all the premodern, modern, and postmodern sciences – and from both, what we call the interior and the exterior sciences – woven together in a higher evolutionary embrace. Elaborating the tenets of this creed in practice and theory constitutes the combined work of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.

This is an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 2 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard with Dr. Zachary Stein. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

An Early Draft of an Excerpt from the forthcoming Volume Two of The Universe: A Love Story - First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis

The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of a larger six-volume book series by Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard with Dr. Zachary Stein. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

"Exterior science has done crucial and necessary work in clarifying the field of knowing—itself a form of Love[25]—from its premodern dross, including its ethnocentricity, chauvinism, denial of universal human rights, oppression of the feminine, and overall devaluation of human dignity. This notion that the exterior sciences—or indeed all gnosis—is a form of Love is key to the Universe: A Love Story. In the language of the Zohar: “To be opened in Torah and to open his eyes to Her.” In the Universe: A Love Story, there can be no split between Eros and knowledge. But now, the clarified core of the interior sciences must be integrated with the exterior sciences into a new Story of Value—Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe. And the texts of the interior sciences expressing the early ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story are vital to reclaim. We will of course do so only very briefly in this context, but enough, we hope, to transmit some of the direct feeling of the realizations implicit and explicit in these texts."

This is an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships: The Evolution of Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis

Excerpt from the Pre-Version of the Book
The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships
The Evolution of Relationships
In Response to the Meta-Crisis
By Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard

Decades of research and study have led us to the conclusion, as we will briefly unpack below, that only a New Story of Value can avert unimaginable suffering or worse and change the vector of history towards ever-deepening expressions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As perceptive historians point out, history changes when a compelling New Story [hi-story] emerges that changes the vector of cultural evolution.
Indeed, it is only a New Story that has the capacity to change the course of history. Technology matters. But the story we tell about technology matters as well. Exponential technology matters. But the story we tell about exponential technology matters exponentially more.
Without such a new, shared, evolving Story of Value, our capacity to escape unbearable suffering and, based on hardheaded analysis, even extinction seems, from a human perspective, unlikely. The results of not being able to articulate a New Story of Value are excruciating, both in the level of suffering for billions of human beings, as well as the entire life system—and, more than even all that, for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.
All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.
All of the present depends on us to live.
All of the future depends on us to be born. 
This essay is also part of a whole volume, The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships: The Evolution of Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis. The purpose of that volume and its companion volume The Future of Relationships: On the Evolution of Love is to provide a first articulation of this New Story of Value in the domain of relationship, which, as we will see below, is the core structure of Reality itself.

This is the first part of an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volume of The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships: The Evolution of Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni (in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard). It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Foreshadowing arguments from the forthcoming book, Towards a New Politics of Evolutionary Love, this article suggests that humanity is in the throws of a species-wide identity crisis, precipitated by a broadening awareness of our impending self-inflicted extinction. This growing awareness that humanity is responsible for its own fate and the fate of the planet is referred to as the second shock of existence. The second shock has spawned a great deal of discussion about the need for revolutions in technological, economic, and ecological infrastructures, yet this focus on exteriors addresses only half the picture. Comparable revolutions of our interiors must also take place—radical transformations in the very structure of our consciousness and species-wide self-understanding. This is a call for attending to the interior dimensions of the current global crises, recommending in the strongest possible terms that tremendous energy and resources be re-channeled into planning for the vast educational reconfigurations facing humanity in the coming decades.

This is an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Table of Contents:
- Anthro-Ontology and the Three Eyes
-- First Principles and First Values Are Based in Anthro-Ontology, Not Natural-Law-Style Universal Epistemologies
-- Anthro-Ontology and Evolving First Principles and First Values Take Us Beyond the Naturalistic Fallacy
-- The Anthro-Ontological Method Can Be Specified and Evolved.
-- The Three Anthro-Ontological Methods of the Eye of Consciousness—Each with Seven Steps
--- Three Methods
--- The Seven Steps
-- We Must Recover and Renew the Eye of Value.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism—in contradistinction for example to the Kingship model of God that dominates much of classical organized religion, or the flatland reductionism not of authentic empirical science but, rather, of the dogmas of scientistic materialism—is the realization that Reality is Eros. Eros, as we have noted, is not a one-dimensional force of allurement. If it was, Cosmos would disappear in a split-second. Rather, Eros is the precise balance between allurement and autonomy—attraction and repulsion—fusion and fission.

It is this kind of First Value and First Principle that animates our words when we write, we live in an Intimate Universe—or what we sometimes refer to as a CosmoErotic Universe. Eros seeks intimacy. Indeed, the plotline of Reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies. Evolution is the Love Story of the Universe—The Universe: A Love Story.

This gnosis of First Principles and First Values, however, is disclosed to us not through natural law, which would then be subject to the naturalistic fallacy,  nor through what is classically termed a supernatural intervention of revelation. We do not turn first to nature. Nor do we turn to the caricature of a small local God, owned by one nation or religion.

Rather, we turn inward. And here, we invoke the Anthro-Ontological Method. At the core of Anthro-Ontology is the realization that not only do we live in Reality, but Reality lives in us. We not only live in an Intimate Universe, but the Intimate Universe lives in us.

This is an early version of an essay by Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zak Stein with Barbara Marx Hubbard - edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik.

In this essay, we cover the following topics:
- The Evolution of Conscious Evolution
- The Need for Metatheories: CosmoErotic Humanism Integrates the Interior Dimensions of Cosmos—Consciousness, Knowledge, and Value
- Three Universe Stories: Creationism, Scientism, and CosmoErotic Humanism
- The Anthro-Ontological Method
- Scientism, Creationism, and CosmoErotic Humanism on the Problem of Pain, Suffering, and Evil
- CosmoErotic Humanism: Beyond the False Binary Between Darwin and Design Suggested by Both Creationism and Scientism
- Do We Impact Reality in an Ultimately Significant Sense?

Written and published by Marc Gafni in 1986 for Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Vol. 22, No. 3 (FALL 1986), pp. 54-65.

In a very profound way, Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Avon Books, 1981) and the themes it treats evoke in the reader feelings of warmth, compassion, and drawing one closer to all who suffer in this world. The tragic story of Aaron Kushner (the author's son) and the very real depth with which his parents experienced suffering cannot but make one feel like reaching out in love and respect to the author. Yet, at the same time, I found the underlying premises of the book deeply troubling. Its message, meant to be comforting, is, in fact, nothing short of terrifying. Kushner, claiming to speak for Judaism, asserts that God is, in his term, "powerless" (pp. 42-44). "God does not, and cannot, intervene in human affairs to avert tragedy and suffering. At most, He offers us His divine comfort, and expresses His divine anger that such horrible things happen to people. God, in the face of tragedy, is impotent. The most God can do," Kushner eloquently proclaims, "is to stand on the side of the victim; not the executioner." That God gives free reign to an executioner is a common Jewish position, classical, medieval and modern. "Once permission is given for the destroyer to destroy, no distinction is made between the righteous and the wicked." (Rashi Exodus 12:22).

Eros is life. The failure of Eros destroys life. Our lack of Eros is poised to destroy the world. We call this existential risk, or the second shock of existence.

All civilizations have fallen because the stories that they lived in were, in some sense, stories based on rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. Every civilization was weakened by interior polarization caused by the lack of a shared story of value.

We now have a global civilization, but we haven’t created a shared story of value. We haven’t solved the generator functions that caused all civilizations to fall. Our global civilization has exponential technologies and extraction models depleting the earth of resources that it took billions of years to create, which is going to lead to a civilizational collapse.
Existential risk: risk to our very existence.

The choice is clear: love or die.

It is that simple. Eros is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet.

In the last half a century modern psychology has documented an age old truth: a fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personal and global — even with all the resources of intelligence and technology at our disposal — will die without being held in love. In the embrace of Eros.

We must embrace a personal path of love and a global politics of love.
Not ordinary love. Not love which is mere human sentiment — but Eros, or what we sometimes call Outrageous Love, which is the heart of existence itself.

We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.

These are core ideas I begin to unpack in this introduction.

This essay was originally written for what was then called The Center for World Spirituality, co-founded by Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, Sally Kempton, and others. Later, that think tank was renamed to The Center for Integral Wisdom, which is now in the process of being renamed to Center for World Philosophy and Religion.

The baby’s cries are also a cry of longing. Longing is an essential part of prayer. Prayer expresses itself in forms that are personal and dialogic, as well as mystical and transpersonal. The core crying of prayer is modeled, however, in the crying of the baby—the crying of Ishmael. While the longing of the baby is of course pre-personal—the baby’s longing is not yet of a conscious interpersonal nature—we experience in the baby’s cry all of our own deepest yearnings. In this regard, Nachman of Breslov teaches that we need to learn the spiritual art of praying through crying “like that of the baby who longs for his mother and father.” The baby, recently delivered from the world of fusion, longs for the presence of his mother. The baby longs to return to the mother and to be held by the father. The crying of the baby, the crying of longing, is a crying of distance. When the baby experiences distance from source, the separation engenders anxiety, which in turn engenders the cry that expresses the yearning to restore the broken unity. This is a crying of separation. The baby who enters this world from the unity of the womb finds the world to be, in the language of the Zohar, “a world of separateness.” According to Nachman, this is the nature of the crying of liberation that appears in the Rosh Hashanah reading from the book of Jeremiah.

In the story of the exile of Hagar and Ishmael, God responds to the crying of Ishmael and not to the crying of Hagar. Ishmael’s tears represent the crying of the infant at the beginning of life. Why does the baby cry? And how do we integrate the tears of the newborn into the way we live in the world? What do the tears of the baby teach us?
The crying of the baby is in part the crying of survival fear. The baby is hungry; the baby is afraid; the baby is vulnerable; the baby is lonely; the baby is a newly arrived stranger to this life. The baby’s cry is a primal survival scream. The Shofar on Rosh Hashanah is called by the Talmud yeulelei yallil,1 “the howling of the jackal.”2 There is a moment in the sound of the Shofar in which we also hear the cry of the baby. It is a kind of intuitive shriek; a pre-personal crying that conveys a feeling of threat and a deep need for protection. The cry of a baby, then, is motivated at least in part by fear.

The Culture of Victimhood
The Hagar Complex
In rejecting Hagar’s tears, biblical consciousness speaks with great power to the epidemic of victimhood that threatens to cripple much of what is great and good in Western society. Hagar is abused. She is hurt. She is a victim. And Hagar has power. She has options. She can turn fate into destiny. She can embrace the desert. Her tears become not the ritual bath of her purification but the swamp of her drowning. She falls prey to the Hagar complex of victim identity.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Naftali of Ropshitz, a Hassidic Zen master of sorts, was once called upon to attempt an intervention with the son of a Polish nobleman.
For some reason, the boy has been crying nonstop. He refuses to be comforted. No one is quite sure what is the source of his pain. Days have gone by, and he simply continues to cry. All the great physicians and healers have been brought in to stop the boy’s crying and restore him to the land of the living—what we moderns like to call functionality.

The Culture of Victimhood
The Hagar Complex
In rejecting Hagar’s tears, biblical consciousness speaks with great power to the epidemic of victimhood that threatens to cripple much of what is great and good in Western society. Hagar is abused. She is hurt. She is a victim. And Hagar has power. She has options. She can turn fate into destiny. She can embrace the desert. Her tears become not the ritual bath of her purification but the swamp of her drowning. She falls prey to the Hagar complex of victim identity.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Naftali of Ropshitz, a Hassidic Zen master of sorts, was once called upon to attempt an intervention with the son of a Polish nobleman.
For some reason, the boy has been crying nonstop. He refuses to be comforted. No one is quite sure what is the source of his pain. Days have gone by, and he simply continues to cry. All the great physicians and healers have been brought in to stop the boy’s crying and restore him to the land of the living—what we moderns like to call functionality.

The Tears of Hagar.
“Hear my cry. Do not respond to my tears with silence.” —Psalms 39:13
The second voice we turn our attention to in the crying symphony of Rosh Hashanah is that of Hagar. The context of her tears is crisis and motherhood. Her tears are bound up with her child. As the stories of our symphony unfold, we will discover that this is a context shared by many of the key players in our drama. Hagar, Sarah, Rachel, Chanah, and, of course, Sisera’s mother, with whom we danced in the previous chapter. Each of these women represents a different face of the Shechinah; each is a mother struggling with family drama that takes place in the cracks between the generations. This is not accidental, as family is the crucible of our lives. It is there, in the arena of family, that we touch most intensely the primal world of tears.
Unlike the story of Sisera’s mother, the story of Hagar crying is not one that transcends the personal for the transpersonal, but rather it is a story at whose core stands a rejection of Hagar’s own story; a rejection of the personal and a reversion to the pre-personal that is born of Hagar’s radical alienation and pain. It is a rejection that is rejected by biblical consciousness itself, and which therefore invites, even demands, that Hagar rise to claim her story.

In the Kabbalah, the words Rosh Hashanah have deeper shades of meaning than the customary translation of “beginning of the year,” or “new year.” Rosh means “beginning,” but shanah derives etymologically from shinui, “change” or “transformation.” Rosh Hashanah then becomes “the beginning of transformation.” “Beginning” is in this sense then, an entry point, a portal or pivoting point on our journey toward fulfillment, whose goal is enlightenment—what Tzadok Hakohen and Mordechai Lainer call he’arah. For them, enlightenment is no less than the awakened state where man realizes his ontic identity with the divine. And, according to spiritual master Schneur Zalman of Liadi, this core transformation of man into God is both mystically symbolized and catalyzed by the Shofar ceremony.

Two narratives about the nature of our current historical moment are brought together in the interest of provoking a reconsideration of "collective enlightenment," or what we term the democratization of enlightenment. World-systems analysis is a trans-disciplinary field focused on the evolution and future of the modern world. Leaders in this field have charted long-term limits and end games, placing our current era in the heart of the modern world-system's epochal and final crises. Esoteric religion and mystical traditions have also located our era at the heart of a world-transformation. From Teilhard de Chardin to Process Theology, a divinely inspired turning point in Earth's evolution has been argued to be immanent. The process of replacing the modern world-system involves the widespread democratization of enlightenment. Engaging in concrete utopian theorizing we suggest that tomorrow's world will involve certain widespread "social miracles" - making enlightenment an everyday thing. Drawing on mythic and biblical imagery, we suggest the apocalypse of the modern world-system will be accompanied by widespread transformations of collective consciousness - a Planetary Awakening of Unique Self Symphonies.

Ultimate doubt, ultimate challenge, when conducted from within deep relationship, paradoxically can become the ultimate service, the ultimate worship, the ultimate intimacy.

To be close to God, to be intimate with God, to be Intimate with Self is to protest, to cry out even against God. Evil itself is a failure of intimacy. To heal evil, we must restore intimacy. The first step in restoring intimacy is to protest – even against God.

The second step is to be God – to be God incarnate in human form – and act for and as God. To act for and as God and participate in the evolution of intimacy in which no one is left out of the circle. For the only enlightenment is Intimacy with All Things, All Life, and All People.

This brief paper represents an overview of the project of CosmoErotic Humanism, which is a philosophical orientation conceived here as an emergent aspect of the historical moment. We view this moment as a kind of Da Vinci moment, when new syntheses and sciences become possible, when new worldviews can emerge. We are poised between potential dystopia and utopia, a position rooted in global intimacy disorder (who are we?) and a consequent global action paralysis or confusion (what should we do?), which itself is sourced in a foundational collapse of narrative frameworks including a shared universe story and its derivative narratives of identity, community, sexuality, purpose, and power (what is the nature of reality?).

When looking at the world situation, our first reaction is to ask about what, who, and how? What has happened? Who has gotten our civilization into this? How can it be helped or changed for the better? These questions are essential, and we encourage people to ask them. However, there is a more important question that is asked less often, which is: when is it? Which is to say: when are we? Or more basically: what time is it? 

It is time for a change. We live in a time between worlds; a time of almost unbearable intensity, potential, and change.

All the great traditions tell us about two selves. A true self and a false or fallen self.

Whenever someone realizes their true self they are realizing that they are part of the larger one. The overall number of true selves is one.

Your personalized expression of true self is your Unique Self.
The realization that true self shows up differently through ever pair of eyes is the realization of Unique Self. In the old enlightenment, true self was understood to erase all distinctions. In the new enlightenment, you realize that your enlightenment has a perspective. Your perspective.

Your gift to God is to allow God to look through your unique set of eyes. To love other is to see through God’s eyes. To love God is to let God see through your eyes. To do so, you must cleanse the doors of perception that distort your vision.

You must remove any obstacle or hindrance to your clear vision. All distorting prisms must be clarified. The distorting prism is called the false self. The nature of reality is that a false self develops. This is not bad or tragic or traumatic. It is very clearly the spiritual plan of the Uni-verse, core to the plot of your story. ...

Your Unique Self is who you really are. It is the unique expression of your enlightenment. The problem is that you have gotten so used to living and reacting from your false self, that you have forgotten that it is not your true self.
You live inside of your false self but you have forgotten that this is so.

The act of remembering is to make your false self visible. It is to identify the hidden chains that will not allow you to soar. You only soar with your own wings. You Unique Self.  Most of what is damaging and destructive in your life is rooted in the distortion of self in which you live. You are living inside all of the limiting and distorting prisms of your false self. Step out of the distortion, up-level your consciousness, and step into your life. This is the memory of your future. You cannot be anything you are not willing to become.

This essay, written by Marc in 2010 emerged from the ground of the Integral Spiritual Experience on the Future of Love, an event initiated by Marc Gafni in partnership with Ken Wilber and other Integral thinkers.

Marc and Ken, in this event, placed love at the center of the conversation. The term Evolutionary Love was originally coined by the great polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce, even as the vision of evolutionary love expressed in this essay is the implicit thinking of the Erotic Evolutionary Mystics, Abraham Kuk and Mordechai Lainer, both of whom are Marc’s primary lineage sources.

Marc’s dialogues with Ken Wilber and Howard Bloom, coupled with his own thought and his erotic evolutionary mystical lineage, came together to produce this emergent – the next state of Evolutionary Love.

It is a version of that core content with additional pieces integrated at a later date by Marc which was originally published as an Appendix in Your Unique Self (Integral Publishers, 2012). This might be considered a first take on this material.

The paradox of touching God through doubt is fundamental to an understanding of authentic spirituality. True, we talk about God all the time as if we knew him, but that is only because God contracts her essence to make herself known to us. Certainties describe the contracted God, but the absolute certainty which is God before contraction is beyond our reach. "Absolute certainty," mystic philosopher Abraham Kook tells us, "rests in the highest places. It is the God of the future, whose name is certainty and so is his praise."

The word "vocation" is derived from the Latin vocare, to call. Calling is an issue of voice. You must sense the voice of the caller, then find your own voice, and realize the two are the same. Our vocal expression in the world is melodious only if we sing in response to vocare, the call of our vocation. When you find your radical uniqueness, your voice, then you find God.
...
To deny the uniqueness of your message is to deny your ability to contribute to the community. Genuine community can only emerge when a soul print exchange takes place—when we share with each other our unique letters and piece together first a word, then a sentence, and ultimately, a world. 
---
An orchestra is composed of many instruments, all of them necessary for making music. Each instrument is distinct and special without being "better" than any other. To participate in the symphony, you must be familiar with all the instruments, yet be particularly responsive to the unique call of your own instrument. While you may be a dabbler at many instruments, you must be master of your own.

Every calling is great only when greatly pursued. If everyone played the same instrument, the music would just he loud and boring; it would lack texture and harmony. So it is with life itself. The great diversity of this world requires radical individualism. We contribute to the harmonious symphony of being only when we master our own unique soul prints.

We have plumbed the mystery of the Secret of the Cherubs and gazed upon Eros’ many faces. Each face is both a destination and a portal, a path. In each one, sex models, hints at, and invites us to enter a deeper truth of Eros. Union is where all the paths lead. It is where Eros leads. In pursuing Eros, we seek not only wisdom but also enlightenment, in the realization of union with all that is. All mature individuality is in the context of union.

In biblical myth, the first mention of an idea is always significant. The first appearance in biblical myth of echad, the Hebrew word meaning “unity” or “oneness,” is made in reference to the sexual. “He shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be as one flesh,” states Genesis. The sexual in its highest expression is a moment of union. Similarly, the word devekut—meaning “cleaving,” which is often the term for unio mystica, total absorption into the one—appears for the first time in the same verse, describing sexual union.

We are so overwhelmingly drawn to the sexual because at our core we are all seekers of unity. During loving sexual connection, we realize that the ego walls we have worked so hard to erect and protect are not real. In moments of bliss we experience union with another person, and through that we catch a fleeting glimpse of the ultimate union that underlies all existence. We die to the world of separation and cry out “Oh, God” as we are ushered for a moment into the reality of union.

Union does not mean that we disappear or dissolve, losing our core integrity as distinct individuals. It does mean, however, that we understand that our separateness is a limited, albeit important, perspective on our story. At a far deeper and more primal level, we are like the cherubs atop the Ark, intertwined with others. And not just with other people but also with all of being. The poet William Blake was right when he wrote: “Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself.” This is the deep truth of the erotic interconnectivity of all things.

The twelfth face of Eros is delight, or pleasure. Eros is a pleasurable experience. Delight is a primary source of aliveness.

THE SEXUAL MODELS THE EROTIC: PLEASURE AND DELIGHT
Pleasure is another way that sexuality models Eros. Sex is the locus of pleasure. Sex and pleasure and delight are virtual synonyms in the consciousness of humanity. It is in sex that we experience the full meaning of delight.

The eleventh face of Eros is creativity—an infinite world of depth and delight entwined with agony and ecstasy. Sex is creative. Sex models Eros. The nature of Eros is ceaselessly creative. Creativity is a primary source of aliveness. The aliveness of the universe expresses itself in what Stuart Kauffman calls the inherent, “ceaseless creativity of cosmos.” The cosmos moves toward ever-greater levels of emergence; it is perpetually creating. We call something a new emergent when it emerges from all that came before, even as it is greater than the sum of its parts.

Creativity wells up from another face of Eros: uniqueness. Creativity takes place when new and unique configurations of intimacy emerge on both the atomic and cellular levels. New configurations of unique intimacy between atoms and between cells is what causes every breakthrough to new levels of complexity, consciousness, and love. The new interactions are drawn forth from the cosmos by its own inherent creative intelligence, what evolutionary science refers to as the “self-organizing universe.” Creativity awakens on the human level when the human being realizes his or her Unique Self. When people find their unique voice, then they become ceaselessly creative. We are not separate from the cosmos. Our creativity—an expression of our uniqueness—is simply the erotic cosmos awakening as us.

The next quality of love and Eros modeled by the sexual is play. Play is close in meaning to what the Hebrew mystics called lishmah, which is usually translated as “for its own sake.” We are engaged in the erotic when we do something simply for its own sake—when we stop networking and let go of goal-oriented thinking, when the activity itself is the end and not the means. This is the Eros of self-evident meaning. Lishmah is when loving is the motive, for the only ulterior motive of Eros is love. Indeed, the litmus test of true love is that it has no ulterior motive. It stands and endures for its own sake. Lishmah!

Human beings are educated to be in control all the time. Many of the messages we receive, beginning with early childhood, are that we must be in control. The first conflict with our instinctive natures is, for most toddlers, toilet training. We are taught to control our bowel movements. This is but the first step in a lifetime that will constantly demand we be in control. From early on in life we are rewarded for doing this. We get painful disapproval, or worse, when we fail to exercise control. One of the most damaging assessments one can hear about a person is, “He’s out of control.” The mantra hammered into our psyches is: “Get a hold of yourself. Control yourself!”

While control education could be accomplished a bit more gently, we all recognize its importance. Going with the flow has its limitations. Few of us want to live in a world where people let their bowel movements (or any other impulses) flow naturally without any restraint whatsoever. Civilization is built on the lucid understanding that the world cannot survive without systematic self-control. In the life of the individual, the ability to delay gratification and channel energy and impulses is the key to a richer and deeper life. As all jelly bean devotees know, five jelly beans are delicious. On the other hand, uncontrolled consumption—three hundred jelly beans in one sitting, for example—will make you very sick.

“Who is a hero?” ask the wisdom masters. “He who controls his impulses.” In the hero’s journey, control and discipline are what create ethical human beings. Moreover, exercising tight control is at least one stretch in the road toward transformation. It is true that, initially, control adds some pressure to our lives. It is worth remembering, though, that coal only becomes a diamond when subjected to significant pressure. Control is and should be part of our understanding of the heroic life. But this is where the popular Western educational myth usually ends, when in truth, this is really just the beginning of the story.

Built into the sexual is an enormous desire to give, particularly to give pleasure. In virtually all arenas of living, most of us are perpetually on the prowl for “the best deal.” The best deal is always about getting the most while giving the least. The great exception is the sexual. In sex, being a great lover is taken to mean that you give your partner an unbelievable, unforgettable experience. This ability to give pleasure (and the more, the better) is considered a great honor, a virtual badge of merit. As well it should be! Yet we need to expand this desire to give to apply to so much more than just sex. Sex models Eros. It should not exhaust Eros. The erotics of giving must engage every facet of existence.

In describing the two key Jewish moments of faith as the Judah Moment and the Israel Moment I mean to say that both are integral components of our spirituality. I do not maintain that we can be one or the other or that one form of divine relationship is preferable to the other. Religion is about the meeting between Judah and Israel. Each of us have met the Judah and Israel within us - the moments of calm certainty and other moments of painful wrestling. The secret of a full life is to live in the paradox. I think it was Chesterton who said that paradox is truth standing on it’s head shouting for attention.

It is time for Judah - the Jew - and Israel to meet once more. Perhaps it is time for the anger and recriminations to be put aside, and for Judah to seek the strength in Israel and for Israel to understand the love of Judah. Maybe Messiah is when the Jew and the Israeli will merge as one. Maybe

Longing, desire, and tears remind us of the fourth strand in the erotic weave. They whisper to us that we are all interconnected within a greater wholeness. No life stands alone. The feeling of standing alone is experienced as a violation of the very nature of reality. Reality is a larger whole in which all is interconnected. Everything is connected to everything else. Everything yearns for ever-deeper contact. We are all parts of a larger whole.

When I am on the inside, when I am fully present, I am able to access the third face of the erotic experience—yearning. Yearning, or desire, is an essential expression of love and Eros.

As long as I am on the outside, I can ignore my deepest desires and stifle my longing. But longing is a vital strand in the textured fabric of Eros. It is of the essence of the Holy of Holies.

Dr Marc Gafni discusses the verse in Songs of Songs, “It’s Insides are Lined with Love” in volume one of his Radical Kabbalah. (See Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Vol. 1 pp. 120-123) which talks about what is described there as a Hasidic expression of Acosmic Humanism, or what he also refers to in that writing as Nondual Humanism, grounded in the reality of love between divinity and humanity– and interconnecting all of reality– all participating in the same current of One Love, One Breath and One Eros. 
These ideas are grounded in Gafni’s, The Mystery of Love, Simon and Schuster, 2003, and the thirty pages of primary source footnotes prepared by Gafni and Avraham Leader to that volume. The Mystery of Love is the volume we are sharing here.  It is perhaps worth noting that these readings in The Mystery of Love were recognized and well received in both the world of Kabbalah scholarship and the leading edges of the mainstream and Neo-Hasidic worlds of Hebrew wisdom. This is crucial, because it validates the readings in The Mystery of Love as being original and even brilliant but non eccentric. Rather, in The Mystery of Love Gafni is uncovering and sharing a crucial esoteric lodestone in the Hebrew wisdom lineage.
In this regard, therefore, it is worth noting that Gafni discussed this volume and its general parameters in 2002 with Moshe Idel, one of his thesis advisors and a leading scholar of Kabbalah at the Bar Ilan Library, Oxford University. Idel enthusiastically validated Gafni’s direction and readings in general terms - Eros as the animating force of Cosmos in which we participate, as well as sharing with Gafni that he was working in a parallel direction. Idel published his magisterial expression of this core notion of Its Insides are Lined with Love, under the title Kabbalah and Eros, Yale University Press, 2005.
Another leading Kabbalah scholar, Eliot Wolfson, who Gafni did not know personally, also contacted Gafni after stumbling across a copy of the book, (after the first hardback edition was published before the paperback) expressing appreciation for textual readings, and generously added an approbation to the paperback work calling it “A beautiful book that will undoubtedly inspire many people and perhaps even bring some healing to a desperately ill world”.
Kabbalah scholar Daniel Abrams wrote about the book, “…an important book which unpacks with depth, power and clarity and important strain in Kabbalistic thought. [Gafni’s] original readings engage and provoke both scholar and layman alike.” 
Zalman Shalomi Schachter the founder and Rebbe of the Neo-Hassidic Jewish renewal movement wrote, “Reb Mordechai Gafni’s torah on love and eros is l’eyla u’layla, the highest of the high. Everyone needs to hear it.” 
From the leadership of the educational community, Irwin Kula, president of the Jewish Federation Center for Learning and Leadership, which serves the mainstream leadership of the American Jewish community, called it a “tour de force.”
Peter Pitzele, founder of Bibliodrama, on the faculty of Jewish Theological seminary, called it “an act of ecstatic scholarship. Reb Gafni comes among us a dancing ecstatic sage”.
Leading mainstream author Rabbi Joseph Teluskin called it radical and profound, with similar approbations from Noam Zion of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Rabbi Bradely Shavit Artson of the University of Judaism, Rabbi Roly Matolon of the leading-edge Congregation Kehillat Jeshurun in New York.
All of these approbations appear in the book itself. 
A related set of ideas (which however bypassed the relationship of the Erotic to the sexual, and with a somewhat different set of sources) was written by Arthur Green published as an essay called “Judaism as a Path of Love,” published in Judaism for the World, Reflections on God, Life and Love, Yale University Press, 2020.
Leading Kabbalah Scholar Yehuda Liebes and his student Melila Eshed Helner extending his work, are similarly crucial voices in the Interior Sciences of this tradition, in establishing this set of what Gafni calls, first principles and first values, which sees Eros as the motivational architecture of reality.
The point of this information about the reception of these ideas in Gafni’s work and the other key writers, is that this reading, while striking and original, is not idiosyncratic; but rather an accurate reading of the mystery tradition of one of the great traditions of Interior Science. A more advance version of some of these ideas was published by Gafni and Kincaid in 2016 with a mainstream publisher under the title A Return to Eros that was reviewed extensively in the academic journal, Integral Review by Dr. Zachary Stein in an article entitled, “Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern ‘Return’ to a Metaphysics of Eros.” Stein has called Gafni’s work, the kind that comes along “once in a generation”. He saw Gafni and Kincaid’s A Return to Eros as a seminal expression of the kind of new thinking that is so urgently needed in this time between worlds that we all now live in. Dr. Gafni, along with a brilliant circle of close colleagues and students, is now completing a new set of works which are the next stage in unfolding of the new world view of Cosmo-Erotic Humanism.
A public presentation of core ideas in The Mystery of Love, is available on CD; The Erotic and the Holy is available here. https://centerforintegralwisdom.org/media-store/product/the-erotic-and-the-holy-workshop/
This abstract was written by Jamie Long, a student and colleague of Dr. Gafni, who has taken responsibility for on the responsibility for managing his Academia.edu page.

The Culture of Victimhood
The Hagar Complex
In rejecting Hagar’s tears, biblical consciousness speaks with great power to the epidemic of victimhood that threatens to cripple much of what is great and good in Western society. Hagar is abused. She is hurt. She is a victim. And Hagar has power. She has options. She can turn fate into destiny. She can embrace the desert. Her tears become not the ritual bath of her purification but the swamp of her drowning. She falls prey to the Hagar complex of victim identity.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Naftali of Ropshitz, a Hassidic Zen master of sorts, was once called upon to attempt an intervention with the son of a Polish nobleman.
For some reason, the boy has been crying nonstop. He refuses to be comforted. No one is quite sure what is the source of his pain. Days have gone by, and he simply continues to cry. All the great physicians and healers have been brought in to stop the boy’s crying and restore him to the land of the living—what we moderns like to call functionality.
None succeed.

From the author of the award-winning book, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, in which Marc Gafni presents his view of the emergence of the personal beyond the impersonal, self beyond ego, we bring you the extensive research and analysis underlying his perspectives.

Radical Kabbalah provides material and analysis that will intrigue all readers interested in Kabbalah and the subject of enlightenment.

Book 2: The Wisdom of Solomon as the Matrix of the Enlightenment Teaching of Nondual Acosmic Humanism and Unique Self

In the second academic volume of this set, Gafni cracks an esoteric code deep within the Kabbalistic tradition that identifies "wisdom of Solomon" as being the source of the teaching of nondual humanism. He then shows that this teaching of the wisdom of Solomon, i.e. nondual humanism, did not originate with Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. Rather, it has deep roots in earlier Zoharic and Lurianic texts all of which received and transmitted the nondual humanism teaching of the wisdom of Solomon. Nevertheless, it remained to Mordechai Lainer of Izbica to fully explicate and evolve the radically empowering implication of this ancient teaching. In Book 2 Marc Gafni carefully and rigorously uncovers the hidden teachings of the wisdom of Solomon as they appear in encoded within Hasidic writings waiting to be  discovered.

Reviews of Radical Kabbalah

“I read Dr. Gafni’s masterwork on Radical Kabbalah in its first draft almost seven years ago… The breadth, depth and the sheer importance of the work moved me. I immediately recognized it as a seminal work, identifying a critical lineage of enlightenment from the tradition of Kabbalah, which needed to be incorporated into the Integral model.”
— Ken Wilber, Integral Philosopher and Author

“It appears that the rumors of God’s death have been greatly exaggerated! There may be no better way to understand the Divine in the coming decades than what is expressed in this book, where ancient traditions are cast in a new light and brought into a new Century. You will be compelled to respect the unparalleled rigor and depth of scholarship while at the same time swooning from the beauty of the ideas. A work like this comes along once in a generation.”
— Dr. Zachary Stein, Integral Scholar and Metrics Theorist, Harvard University

“This work is a true masterpiece of the sort our people have not witnessed for many centuries, shaking us out of our stupor toward reclaiming life again, reclaiming our goddess heritage and teachings, and the bond with the ancient spark of Eros. Rabbi Gafni in his fine and original reading of Mordechai Lainer in a Lurianic act of exalted scholarship and love raises the spark of paganism and sets it in new evolved ethical context.”
— Rabbi Gershon Winkler, author of ten books of Jewish teaching and scholarship

“Marc Gafni has written a magisterial work. Like Gafni himself, it combines depth of intellect with integrity of heart and has much to teach us, both from a scholarly perspective and as a contemporary transmission of what Gafni calls Evolutionary Kabbalah.”
— Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It

From the author of the award-winning book, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, in which Marc Gafni presents his view of the emergence of the personal beyond the impersonal, self beyond ego, we bring you the extensive research and analysis underlying his perspectives.

Radical Kabbalah provides material and analysis that will intrigue all readers interested in Kabbalah and the subject of enlightenment.

Book 1: The Enlightenment Teaching of Unique Self, Nondual Humanism and the Wisdom of Solomon - The Great Teaching of Ethics and Eros from Mordechai Lainer of Izbica
This "magisterial" academic volume lays the groundwork for key dimensions of the Unique Self teaching. Marc Gafni introduces in this work the enlightenment teaching of what he terms nondual humanism. Based on a deep re-reading of over a thousand Aramaic and Hebrew texts, Gafni first outlines the core teaching, and then traces the esoteric intellectual history of nondual humanism in five major matrices of the Kabbalah. In the vision of nondual humanism, the potential democratization of enlightenment opens up a genuine option in which every human being is called to live "as Source."

Reviews of Radical Kabbalah
“I read Dr. Gafni’s masterwork on Radical Kabbalah in its first draft almost seven years ago… The breadth, depth and the sheer importance of the work moved me. I immediately recognized it as a seminal work, identifying a critical lineage of enlightenment from the tradition of Kabbalah, which needed to be incorporated into the Integral model.”
— Ken Wilber, Integral Philosopher and Author

“It appears that the rumors of God’s death have been greatly exaggerated! There may be no better way to understand the Divine in the coming decades than what is expressed in this book, where ancient traditions are cast in a new light and brought into a new Century. You will be compelled to respect the unparalleled rigor and depth of scholarship while at the same time swooning from the beauty of the ideas. A work like this comes along once in a generation.”
— Dr. Zachary Stein, Integral Scholar and Metrics Theorist, Harvard University

“This work is a true masterpiece of the sort our people have not witnessed for many centuries, shaking us out of our stupor toward reclaiming life again, reclaiming our goddess heritage and teachings, and the bond with the ancient spark of Eros. Rabbi Gafni in his fine and original reading of Mordechai Lainer in a Lurianic act of exalted scholarship and love raises the spark of paganism and sets it in new evolved ethical context.”
— Rabbi Gershon Winkler, author of ten books of Jewish teaching and scholarship

“Marc Gafni has written a magisterial work. Like Gafni himself, it combines depth of intellect with integrity of heart and has much to teach us, both from a scholarly perspective and as a contemporary transmission of what Gafni calls Evolutionary Kabbalah.”
— Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It

A Return to Eros - Chapter 1-2 of the Book

Discover the secret relationship between Erotic, the Sexual and the Sacred.

None of the four old philosophies about sex are sufficient to inspire us or even hold us in our sexuality. Sex is not merely negative or positive. Sex is not just neutral, nor is it merely sacred because it creates babies.

Erotic Mystics from the hidden tradition of Solomon's temple taught a secret doctrine. Sex is the source of all wisdom. Sex is an expression of the erotic impulse of existence itself alive in us-the yearning for contact, pleasure, and aliveness. The Sexual however is not the sum total of the erotic. Rather, the sexual models the Erotic. The sexual teaches us how to live an Erotic life in all dimension of our existence.

It is these secret doctrines that were later taught by Mary Magdalene and that sparked excitement around bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code.

Deep understanding of the sexual becomes the portal to accessing aliveness in every dimension of our reality. This realization demands that you live sexually without shame and shows you how to re-eroticize all areas of your life.

A Return to Eros: On Sex, Love, and Eroticism in Every Dimension of Life, from Drs. Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, reveals the radical secret tenets of relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the holy. They reveal what Eros actually means and share the ten core qualities of the Erotic, which are modeled by the sexual. These include being on the inside, fullness of presence, yearning, allurement, fantasy, surrender, creativity, pleasure, and more.

A Return to Eros shows why these qualities of the erotic modeled by the sexual are actually the same core qualities of the sacred. The relationship between the sexual and the erotic becomes clear, teaching you how to live an erotically suffused existence charged with purpose, potency and power.

To be an Outrageous Lover--not just in sex but also in all facets of your life--you must listen deeply to the simple yet elegant whisperings of the sexual. This book will forever transform your understanding and experience of love, sex, and Eros.

- Foreword by Barbara Marx Hubbard
- Foreword by Warren Farrell, PhD
- Preface: The Future of Love, Sex, and Eros
- Chapter 1: A New Sexual Narrative
- Chapter 2: Evoking Eros

You can buy the book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Return-Eros-Radical-Experience-Being/dp/1944648186/

This essay traces several biblical stories around the topics of losing and recovering face. Face is the portal between the finite and the infinite... The search for face is the greatest quest of life. The path that we walk in life traces the very lines of our face and God's. How do we quest for face? How do we stay planted on the path to our own innerness and God's? Only when one has touched an inner core certainty can one enter uncertainty, and then, acting from that place, reach for true voice and authenticity. The Jacob narrative, for example, is a story about Jacob finding voice in the uncertainty. Jacob's journey is also a dance with face. He has face, loses face, and must recover face. We will explore the stages of his journey in the course of our discussion. Jacob is the biblical paradigm of the path whose end is the re-covery, the revealing, of face. One comes face to face with God only when one has the courage to embrace uncertainty. In Jacob's meeting face to face with God, he finds not only God's Face but his own.

"When it was recommended that I do a podcast with Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni, I knew nothing about him. I dove straight into his body of work and my life will never be the same. This is perhaps the most paradigm shifting podcast I have ever recorded. It tells the tale of the greatest love story of all–the story of the cosmo-erotic universe Herself. In this paradigm shifting masterclass, we learn how a force he calls Eros is the fundamental substrate of creation all the way down to the first principles of subatomic matter. Gafni's wisdom stretches back deep into the secrets of the Temple of Solomon and the mystic Kabbalist tradition. Our conversation touches a wide range of topics, including the nature of the Goddess, the democratization of enlightenment, and rewriting our sexual narratives"  Aubrey Marcus

Foreshadowing arguments from the forthcoming book, Towards a New Politics of Evolutionary Love, this paper suggests that humanity is the throes of a species wide identity crisis, precipitated by a broadening awareness of our impending self-inflicted extinction. This growing awareness that humanity is responsible for its own fate and the fate of the planet is referred to as the second shock of existence. The second shock has spawned a great deal of discussion about the need for revolutions in technological, economic, and ecological infrastructures, yet this focus on exteriors addresses only half the picture. Comparable revolutions of our interiors must also take place-radical transformations in the very structure of our consciousness and specieswide self-understanding. This is a call for attending to the interior dimensions of the current global crises, recommending in the strongest possible terms that tremendous energy and resources be rechanneled into planning for the vast educational reconfigurations facing humanity in the coming decades.

We are storytellers, philosophers, poets, psychologists and scientists of the new universe story. We trace the new universe story, integrating for the first time diverse elements from all the leading sources of authoritative wisdom available today on the cutting edge of thought.

The result is the greatest love story ever told.
Recently someone came to us seeking advice. He was in a very scared, paralyzed state. We said to him, “If we lived inside of your consciousness we could be sacred and paralyzed too…” To up-level our consciousness is to evolve our worldview.

Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book "The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love" by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid. This paper elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after "Your Unique Self" was published.