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.

The second face of Eros is presence—or perhaps better said, the fullness of presence. This is not a quality that is distinct and different from the erotic quality of being on the inside. Presence flows naturally with, and even overlaps, interiority. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course, being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean you derive joy, satisfaction, and self-worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty. Presence means you are fully showing up right here. You are not anywhere else in this moment.

Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2001

Matthew Arnold, writing in his celebrated work Culture and Anarchy, suggests that Hebraism and Hellenism are the two essential philosophies of life between which civilized man must choose. For Arnold, Hebraism is primarily a system of obedience to an external source (the Mosaic Law) while Hellenism advocates perfecting the self (as the Greeks did) by expanding our consciousness through culture. Chanukah is the tale of the clash between these two world visions, the clash between the Hebrew Maccabees and the Hellenist Romans. Thus, in the Jewish calendar, Chanukah becomes the time of year when we try to relocate our spiritual direction on the road between Athens and Jerusalem.

Often, as Chanukah approaches, I wonder if I am becoming more of a Hellenist. Am I unconsciously sliding towards becoming a sort of "inverted Marrano," biblical on the outside, Hellenist on the inside? In seeking an answer, as part of my own Chanukah ritual, I try and look at some new dimension of that ancient conflict of ideas.

This year I'm thinking a lot about balance and stability. How many of us at some point in our lives thought of pursuing a new direction but held back for fear of being branded unstable? Balance and stability are certainly important values. However, it may not be irrelevant that their source in Western intellectual history is rooted in ancient Athens and not Jerusalem.

For the Hellenist, the harmonious and balanced personality is the ideal. However, Hellenistic harmony comes from a place of detachment. In the platonic myth the ideal is to "become a spectator to all time and existence." This is certainly not biblical myth. The basic Hebraic posture in the world is passionate involvement in the realness of life (doing, not thinking, as Arnold would say).

The Hellenist seeks eternity. He cannot find it in the world of particulars, which are here today and gone tomorrow. So he searches in the realm of essences, universals, and principles of logic. In their unchanging shadow, he feels the breath of eternity. For the Hellenist, theory is always more important than application, thinking is higher and more pure than doing.

For the Hebrew there is no greater sin than the sin of detachment. The Hebrew requires the full embrace of the concreteness of being. God is in the details. God is in the ferment of our lives. Biblical wisdom-masters rarely make sweeping universal statements about the nature of reality. They are relatively unconcerned with grand systems and elegant structures of logic. Their vision is almost always of the particular individual and his or her choices. For the Jew, eternity resides in the human encounter with the moment.

The Hebraic worldview-or what I have termed in other I writings biblical myth-shapes the way we understand and live our lives in at least three important ways. Deep meditation on these particular dimensions of biblical myth is the spiritual technology of Chanukah.

There is a strong and deeply rooted tradition in the Kabbalah that says the Kabbalists inherited their spiritual techniques and their teachings from the ancient Hebrew prophets themselves. In other words, it is the path of the prophets one needs to follow to achieve the enlightened transformation that is Rosh Hashanah. One such Kabbalist was Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, the last great Hassidic master of Polish Hassidut. A resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during the Second World War, he was ultimately captured by the Nazis and murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. But before he died, he inspired thousands with his death-defying spiritual and physical courage. One of his teachings was that “the way of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, is the way of the prophets . . . this is the teaching of the Zohar . . . where Rabbi Yaakov said ‘how did I merit to be among the prophets, the people of faith, the students of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai?’”

The Zohar passage cited by Kalonymus Kalman places this belief on the lips of Rabbi Yaakov, a student in the innermost circle of the second-century mystical master, Shimon bar Yochai. Yochai is the primary inspiration behind the teachings of the Zohar. Yechiel HaLevi Epstein, another Hassidic master, closer to the founding generations of the Hassidic movement, also confirms this intuition. He claimed it as central to the self-understanding of modern day Hassidic Kabbalists saying, “The masters of every generation, students of the Baal Shem Tov . . . their path is the path of the prophets of God.”

This tradition can be traced back generation to generation in an unbroken lineage from the Kabbalists, to the prophets themselves. According to Kalonymus Kalman, the essence of the path of the prophets, and that of the Kabbalists, is both understanding and experience that “the depth of revelation for the sacred ones of God is in their very inner soul, their inner soul which is a substantive and real part of the Divine. It itself—the revelation of their soul to their soul—is the revelation of God to them . . . and thus, with their revealed soul, they are able to be a Merkava LaShekina, a vehicle for the Divine.”

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us,” Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out. He was speaking of interiority, the first face of Eros. Interiority is the experience of being and feeling like we are on the inside—on the inside of life, the inside of where it’s all happening, the inside of love, the inside of Eros.

The Jewish mandate which demands that the human being enter into partnership with God in the task of perfecting the world emerges, paradoxically, not out of answers but out of questions. The fact that the human being can challenge and that God accepts the human challenge implies a covenantal partnership between the human being and God. Both the human being and God share an understanding of the good, and thus God can turn to the human being and say: ‘I invite you, nay, I demand that you be my partner, my co-creator in the perfection of the world. I began the process of creation, I established the moral fabric of the world. It is up to you to take that cloth and to weave it fully. It is up to you to complete the tapestry, it is up to you to risk to grow and to create a world in which good, love, justice and human dignity flourish and are affirmed.’ A human being who cannot be trusted enough to challenge evil can also not be a partner in fostering the good.

It is true that God very often seems silent in response to our challenge. Yet Jewish consciousness, expressed through Jewish text and tradition, affirms that God accepts the validity of the question. In doing so God affirms our role as God’s partner in history.  If I am able to recognize evil for what it is, then I am ipso facto obligated in tikkun olam - the obligation to act for and with God in the healing of the world. Man is the language of God. We are God's adjectives, God's adverbs, God's nouns and sometimes even God's dangling modifiers. We are God's vocabulary in the world. When I love, when I am able to be truly vulnerable and intimate with another human being, when I am able to share the pain of another and to rejoice in their deep joy, I am acting for God. I become God's chariot in the world.87 More than this: if I can wrestle with God, if I can express my uncertainty with God in the intimacy of challenging relationship, then paradoxically, I convert my doubt into the core certainty of divine relationship.

Why cry out? As the Talmudic myth has it, there were three powerful people in the  Pharaoh’s court when he made his decision to oppress Jewish slaves. With them he consulted: Jethro, Bilaam, and Job. Jethro said, “Don’t kill the Jewish people.” Jethro ran away: he couldn’t participate in this canon of evil-doing. Jethro was rewarded (according to one version of the legend) with a son-in-law to be proud of - Moses. Bilaam, a Midianite prophet, said, “Destroy the Jewish people”, and Bilaam, “quid pro quo”, was destroyed by the sword. The Talmud then says, “Job was silent, and was sentenced to torment.”

The story is troubling! Punishment is always supposed to be quid pro quo, say the interpreters of the Talmudic text. Punishment is supposed to educate, to edify. Therefore there needs to be in the punishment some reflection of the violation. For example the Egyptians tormented the Jews through water – throwing their first born in the Nile; thus they were punished by water –drowning in the Red Sea. When I know why it hurts I can use the hurt for growth. God wants us to grow so she punishes us in a way which reveals the cause of the punishment.  How does Job’s awful punishment relate to his silence?  More essentially, all Job did was be silent. After all, what could Job have done? What difference could he have made? Jethro’s protest did not end the slavery: only God was able to do that. 

It would seem like Job was silent for the same tragic reason that most of us in the world did very little about Bosnia, about Rwanda, and about Cambodia. Suffering is all over the world, and yet how many of us even wrote a postcard in protest? How many people picked up a pen? Or picked up a phone? Why?  I don’t think it was because we didn’t care. So what was our rationalization? How do we explain it to ourselves? 

We say to ourselves, ‘You know what, we’re not really going to make a difference.’ The chances are that if most people knew they could definitely make a difference, knew that protesting or crying out would actually prevent atrocities, all our streets would be crammed with screaming demonstrators. Why does this not happen? Because we believe that we’re not going to alter anything. And because we believe we’re not going to make a difference, we are silent.

This is the Job story. He knew that pharaoh had already made up his mind to kill the Jews. His consulting with his advisors was an exercise in form not a request for substantive input. Job says to himself – if I could make a difference of course I would protest. But the die has been cast and I don’t have the tools to change anything. So I will be silent.

God doesn’t buy it. God says: ‘Let’s see, Job, if you’re telling the truth. Let’s see if the real reason for your silence was helplessness.’ And Job begins to suffer. Physically, financially, emotionally, he is nearly destroyed. And what does Job do? He yells. He screams. And God says, ‘Is that you, Job?’ And Job says, ‘What do you mean, is it me? It hurts so much!’ And God says, ‘Job, why are you screaming? Does it help? I know it’s uncomfortable, but does it help when you scream? Does the hurt go away at all?’ And Job says to God, ‘God, don’t you know anything about human beings? When it hurts, we scream.’ And God says: ‘Ahah, so if you’re able to be silent, it means that it doesn’t hurt.’

First 4 Chapters of the Book Your Unique Self

Ken Wilber writes about Your Unique Self:
DR. MARC GAFNI’S INTEGRAL UNIQUE SELF TEACHING IS SEMINAL. What you hold in your hands is a radically exciting and ground-breaking book that will change forever not only how you think about enlightenment, but how you understand, from a post-metaphysical perspective, the very nature of human life itself. The Unique Self work is magnificent, and it belongs among the “great books.” It offers what may arguably be one of the most significant contemporary evolutions of enlightenment teaching. Unique Self brings together East and West in a higher integral embrace of stunning implications. Unique Self is a pivotal step toward an authentic Enlightenment.

Because we are created in the image of God, when we look for guidance on how to shatter the boundary of self and create relationship we should turn to the creative process of the divine. The mystery of Creation is that God emerges Out of divine aloneness to create an other who is not God.

How does God create space for an other? The Jewish mystics' answer is tzimtzum--by the act of contraction, withdrawal. In early mystical sources, particularly talmudic mysticism, God is understood to contract all of his light, as it were, to one point--and from that point the world is created. This idea finds expression, for example, in the midrashic passage that describes God as contracting his light to the point of space between the two cherubs in the tabernacle. From that point--which is the point, according to the biblical story, from which the divine voice issues--the world is created.
The early kabbalist Isaac Luria, however, understands withdrawal not as being contraction into an intensified point but rather as meaning God's actual withdrawal from an area to leave behind an empty space--a space apparently devoid of God. It is from that place of emptiness that the world was created.

I would suggest that these competing images of Creation are not exclusive, as is usually assumed in scholarship, but paradoxical and complementary. Moments of fullness, presence, certainty, and selfishness are necessary for the creation of anything, including relationships, and are expressed by the talmudic understanding of creation as the intensification of presence--God contracts presence to one point and from that point Creation outflows. At the same time, however, there is a second prerequisite to Creation, and that is emptiness. Just as, in the kabbalists, understanding, God is portrayed as emptying himself of self in an act of radical selflessness, Creation is understood to emerge not from the certainty of presence but from the radical uncertainty of absence.

If I didn’t receive a certainty of being from my parents, if I had no Leah to make the messiah in me grow, or if my sense of self is but a poorly expressed survival instinct - then I need to work to transform it into a conscious and healthy self love. This is possible no matter who are parents may be. Mother is not the only path to core inner certainty. More on that at the end of this chapter were we will introduce the seven distinct paths to certainty which  we will unfold  in the coming chapters. 

Even however if I was given  initial core certainty from parents, I must still  receive their gift and make it my own. The act of receiving what I have been  given is the spiritual journey of a lifetime. Everyone has their own journey. Judah, our archetype of core certainty, also has to make his own journey from passive inheritor of riches, to deserving honorable Kingship. The nature of this journey in Judah’s life and our own is the subject of  the following chapter.

We have defined the Israel Moment and Jacob’s growth into uncertainty through a close reading of the two Ullai stories in his life. It is now time to examine three new Ullai stories in the book of Genesis. All of them revolve around different characters who use the biblical term for maybe - Ullai - in important ways. Each story will deepen our understanding of the ways we need to respond to uncertainty.

The biblical hero Judah is defined by his sense of inner certainty. In order to understand why this is so important it is worth looking for a moment at the anti-hero of the Bible. The Darth Vader of the bible is the biblical nation of Amalek. Amalek is the nation which attacks the Israelite people shortly after their exodus from Egypt. In the Talmudic tradition, Amalek is transposed from a historical people of the ancient Near East, to a literary symbol of evil. Amalek, motivated only by hatred, attacked the defenseless Jewish people in the desert, and was thus accorded ontological status as the personification of evil in Jewish tradition. In classical Biblical Midrash, from ancient to modern, expressions of root evil in history and in the human soul are seen as expressions of the phenomenology of Amalek. One modern example of this tradition would be the identification of  Nazism by some  modern theological writers as an expression of Amalek force in the world.

Much of religious tradition can be understood culture’s attempt to fully triumph over uncertainty. Indeed one of the most important modern Biblical commentariesi  argues that divine revelation is the gift of a loving God who wants to spare the world the pain of uncertainty.  Many voices in the religious world have declared unilateral victory, arguing that all of life’s doubts can be defeated through faith, religious observance and logic.

Safek, which we have translated as uncertainty or perhaps more correctly, ambiguity, is the greatest producer of anxiety, tension, and existential malaise. There is no joy like the resolution of doubt. But how do we know how to resolve and when to resolve? Emily Dickinson wrote ‘Hamlet wavered for us all’. His “to be or not to be” soliloquy is Shakespeare’s song of uncertainty which resonates in the melodies of all of our lives. How, if at all, can certainty be achieved? How are such decisions made? When to buy the tea and when not to buy the tea? When do we need to be safe and clear, when is risk irresponsible and immoral, and when is risk courageous, audacious and even the highest expression of our humanity?

Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2000

A hundred blasts shatter the somber silence of the biblical New Year ritual. The shofar, Rosh Hashanah's major prop, is a ram's horn blown in a strange and evocative combination of notes. In mysticism, the words "rosh hashanah"-- literally "New Year"--are understood to have deeper shades of meaning. "Rosh" means "the beginning," while the word "shanah" derives etymologically from "shinnui," meaning "change" or "transformation." Rosh Hashanah, in the mystic's pen, then becomes "the beginning of transformation." This transformation, according to spiritual master Schneur Zalman of Liadi, is essentially connected to the shofar. What is the secret of the shofar's sound, the pleading, broken, and yet triumphant notes?

The word for shofar in biblical myth is "teruah." Teruah is understood by Targum to mean "yevava"--crying. The shofar is a crying instrument; a crying that resounds beyond words, beyond the narrow confines of language. These are tears sourced in the limbic brain--in that fantastic seat of intuition and raw emotion, the amygdala. These are transformative tears.

"But whose tears?" asks the Talmud, "Whose tears are we trying to access in the ecstatic and painful ritual of shofar blowing?" While the ultimate answer is, of course, "our own," the nature of biblical ritual is to access the self through the image of an other, an archetype, who represents us all. In effect the Talmud is asking--who is the archetype for the tears of the shofar?

And here our discussion truly begins.

Theoretically at least, we all know the Shepherd. In the biblical tradition, every morning begins with a proclamation of this certainty. Before the start of the day, I say the prayer Modeh Ani Lefanecha and in so doing make the ultimate statement of certainty. Modeh ani lefanecha - I give thanks before You - I give thanks in Your presence - is a clear and strong statement of divine relationship. In it one speaks directly to the divine, acknowledging the daily presence of the *Spirit in our lives, the divine role in creation, and the divine aspect of ourselves created in the image of God. Emerging from the nightmares of ‘Maybe’, the darkness of ‘So what’, I  begin the day with the certainty of ‘Before you, I give thanks’.

This quote from Job will be the guiding principle of this work. For the mystical reader of the Bible, to ‘vision God’ is to understand being…for God and being are one.  Kabbalists read this verse with a pronounced emphasis on the word ‘my’. My flesh means not only my physical form, but the body of my life experience. The verse is thus taken to mean - I access the epic of being through the drama of the psyche. And I can only access psyche through my psyche i.e. my story. 

- from "Reclaiming Certainty" (translated from the Hebrew book "Vadaai")

Mystical master Nachman of Bratzlav tells the following story: A son leaves his home and travels for many years in distant lands. Upon his return he tells his father that he has become a master craftsman. Particularly he has learned to make menorot—candelabrum. His father, wanting to demonstrate his son's wisdom and craft to the community, invites all the master craftsmen to see his work. The craftsmen, however, all quietly tell the father that they think the son's work is lacking; indeed each points out a different deficiency in the son's work. Both hurt and disturbed, the father confronts his son with the poor reviews. To which his son replies: "You will notice, father, that each of the criticisms addresses a different part of the lamp. In fact the deficiency that each person saw was a reflection not of the menorah but of themselves—of their own particular emptiness."

The primary critique of Unique Self teaching, leveled by students of Authentic Self in all of its names—for example, evolutionary self—is that Unique Self is but a clever front for ego. Or that even if it is not actually identical with ego, it can all to easily be hijacked by the ego. The latter is a fair and important point. However, the same critique might be just as easily leveled at the clarion call to identity with the evolutionary impulse which lies at the heart of both Unique and Authentic Self teachings. (The difference, as we have already noted, is that in the Authentic Self teaching, the evolutionary impulse is wholly impersonal, while in the Unique Self teaching, the evolutionary impulse at its core is expressed only personally through you as the personal face of the process).  It is all too easy for the ego to hijack the evolutionary impulse as a fig leaf for every manner of ego’s misdeed. Indeed, this is not a theoretical concern, but a sadly well proved truth as the history of the evolutionary movements show. The grandchildren of Hegel’s evolutionary teaching, communism primary among them, deployed the evolutionary imperative to cover every form of heinous crime against humanity. And yet, that does not invalidate the sacred power of the evolutionary impulse, just as the crimes committed in the name of Christ do not  deconstruct the truth and beauty of Christ consciousness, nor does the atom bomb disqualify the nobility of the humanist creative urge born of the new scientific paradigm. Nor does the fact that ego might hijack Unique Self lessen the critical nature of Unique Self realization. All goods may be hijacked. We must, therefore, guard against the hijacking, but we must not refuse to fly. To guard against the conflation of ego and Unique Self, it is necessary to clearly discern between these two very different states and stages of consciousness. Below, I offer the beginning of a discussion of just such a set of discernments.

Rosh Hashanah is about transformation. At the highest level, it is about apotheosis: the transformation of man into God, man realizing his Divine nature. On Rosh Hashanah, man shows up in his highest self and realizes that he himself is the King. He actually participates in God. This level of Rosh Hashanah consciousness, however, does not replace the prostration of man before the God of Judgment in a process of personal healing and transformation. It is an evolution of consciousness in which the higher stage both transcends and includes the previous stage.

It is the collapse of Eros that leads to what we have called the murder of Eros. Wilhelm Reich called this “the murder of Christ.” By “Christ” he meant Eros or life force. This is one of the most common but hidden dimensions of human existence. To live an erotic life, we must guard against the murder of Eros. This is a fundamentally denied yet ever-present human impulse. Human beings may be ready to confess many sins, but all feign innocence when accused of the murder of Eros. And yet this primal impulse is as old as civilization itself. Despite our genuine moral evolution in many regards, this fundamental human compulsion has changed little. What has changed, however, is that because the murder of Eros is no longer socially acceptable, the impulse is carefully disguised.

The sexual models the erotic is true for both the pleasure of Eros and its pain. We have talked much about how sex models Eros in all of her faces, including pleasure. Now we turn to the pain of Eros. Here, too, the sexual models the erotic.

Sexuality leaves so many mortally wounded in her wake. There is so much pain from what is supposed to be the source of so much pleasure. We are confused about sexuality. And that confusion is the source of much of our distress, as Persian poet Hafiz attests below in his poem “A Barroom View of Love.”

Leiner had hidden in the folds of his text a great secret. Said simply, Leiner was the lineage heir and inheritor of the ancient Wisdom of Solomon. According to Leiner's hidden code, the covert teachings of the Wisdom of Solomon had been transmitted personally from master to student, down through the generations, until they reached him. But it was more than that. The very core of my being shuddered with some mixture of fear and joy when I realized that Leiner wanted to transmit these same teachings to me. – Marc Gafni

To live an erotic life is to know that you are part of a cosmo-erotic universe. We live in a cosmos driven by Eros. Eros is not an aberration but the natural pulse of reality. Our purpose in this chapter is to enter into some depth in describing the cosmo-erotic nature of our universe. This is what theologian and mystic Meister Eckhardt understood when he allegedly wrote, "We must learn to penetrate things and find God there." To get a sense of the Eros of the cosmos, we need to go back to how it all began. The innate design of the cosmos is one of attraction and allurement. The interior face of the cosmos is Eros— the motivational force of evolution itself, participating in the yearning force of being. Written in lowercase, eros is sex; written as a proper noun, Eros is the cosmic pulse of reality. The sexual models the erotic.

Reprinted from What is Enlightenment Magazine

Marc Gafni met Andrew Cohen through a mutual friend and student of Andrew’s in 2005. Andrew Cohen invited Marc Gafni to visit and teach in Andrew’s community to his senior students in Lenox, Massachusetts. Marc Gafni visited and taught and dialogued with Andrew Cohen in Fox Hollow several times.

As a result of their shared interest in evolutionary spirituality, Marc and Andrew planned a teaching week and retreat in Israel together, which was hosted by Marc Gafni. This teaching week and weekend took place in late December 2005. During this period of time, this article was published in What is Enlightenment.

The nature of the erotic (including the sexual) is subversive but not transgressive. The difference between these two positions is vast. Transgressive means to violate an appropriate value or boundary. Subversive implies the intentional subverting of cultural values or boundaries for the sake of a higher vision. Transgressive undermines that which should not be undermined. Subversive is revolutionary, undermining that which needs to be overthrown. The difference is subtle but highly significant. The goal is to move from the unconscious to the conscious, from shadow to light. When we liberate Eros, we are able to access the aliveness of transgressive sex in the context of our committed relationships of whatever nature they might be. The way to do so is to restore temple consciousness—that is to say, a world in which sex is not transgressive but subversive. Sex is subversive in that it points to an order of being beyond the conventional. Ordinary reality involves pragmatic surface relationships in which each person looks out for his or her own self-interest. The basic social contract of society is built on precisely such notions of individual self-interest and civil interaction. Sexuality models the possibility of breaking the boundary of the superficial to enter the deep. Sex, in its ideal form, subverts the “normal” order of society.

Eros and Tears

Society as it is currently constructed is designed to bypass your tears. Yet, crying is an art. Tears are the colors with which the tapestry of your awakening is painted. Sometimes we cry surface tears in response to stuff that happens – good stuff and bad stuff. But the truest tears are those that well up from the deepest place on the inside of the inside – they may by triggered by a specific event or image, but they are larger than any one event.

Every time you cry these true tears, you cry for all the times you never cried before. True tears come only on occasion, but when they do, they are harbingers of great wisdom and guidance. These are the tears of the holy of holies. They carry revelation. To receive that revelation, you must be willing to sit still and be truly alone, so that your deep core can come out naked. From that place you wail, flooded to the core by deep sadness or profound happiness. These are not superficial tears but what we might call source tears. To hear the voice of source tears emerge, we must access the ground of dynamic stillness which is the well from which this revelatory crying rises up.

A Return to Eros is a tour de force of the kind that comes along once in a generation. The way this volume brings Eros to consciousness as the fundamental force, direction, and “purpose” of reality on all levels and all quadrants, really is the discovery that now underlies, directs, and “explains” the sacred purpose of cosmogenesis, the birth narrative of the New Human. It’s the second coming of humanity for the first time in history incarnate as a fully embodied sacred sexual being. It’s the early stages of next evolutionary unfolding. A Return to Eros forms the basis of evolutionary spirituality. It captures the glory of its conscious experience from the inside out in the sexuality and Eros of the evolutionary unique self.
- From the Foreword by Barbara Marx Hubbard

Written for Tikkun Magazine March/April 2002
by Marc Mordechai Gafni

The goal of mystical consciousness is to fully receive the unique essence of another through deep understanding and empathy. Yet how often in life are we simply unable to understand one another? Receiving each other becomes next to impossible because of distance, strangeness, hurry, deafness, carelessness, or inevitable difference in the languages of our soul prints. Try as we might, the full depth of so many people are ultimately unknowable to us, much the same as God is ultimately unknowable to us. Are we to give up, or is there a path of receiving which is true even when we cannot fully grasp the soul print of another? Is there a way to receive what seems so unreceivable, whether human or divine?

This article by Zachary Stein examines the dynamics of authority in educational contexts where teachers and students engage with religious and spiritual subject matter. The aim of the article is to offer a framework that can be used to sort “good” educational relationships of this type from “bad” ones. After positioning the spiritual teacher in the context of eclectic traditions in American moral education, it looks into the structure of teacherly authority and into the dynamics of this authority when it is exercised in religious contexts.

In the process it teases apart two types of teacherly authority for heuristic purposes, the Classic and the Modern. It discusses their respective liabilities, affordances, and most typical spiritual teachings. Finally, it suggests that some contemporary spiritual teachers and teachings may be harbingers of new emerging configurations of religious authority—configurations dubbed Integral.

This rough triadic typology—Classic, Modern, and Integral—allows us to critically discuss the kinds of authority assumed by different types of spiritual teachers. Specifically, it uses EnlightenNext (Andrew Cohen) and the Center for Integral Wisdom (formerly Center for World Spirituality, Marc Gafni) as case studies, demonstrating how to use this framework as a way to explore preferable possibilities for the future of religion and the spiritual marketplace.

The Unique Self, A New Chapter in Integral Spirituality
by Marc Gafni

"In his keynote at the Integral Spiritual Experience, Wilber described Unique Self as 'something that is extraordinary, and historic, and not to be denied.' I want to share some of what I see as historic about the Unique  Self teaching, and why its birthing has been one of my primary commitments over the last two decades.
Unique Self is vitally important because it reclaims the centrality of the personal as a primary category in discourse about the realization of enlightened consciousness. Enlightened consciousness itself is a fundamental category in the integral spiritual discourse because it is the implicit or explicit goal of virtually all of the great spiritual traditions that inform Integral Spirituality. ... The myth of a commmunity shapes the norms of a community, even if only partially realized." 

This article outlines the basic teachings of a new chapter in Integral Theory: the postmetaphysical evolutionary emergence of Unique Self. The article begins by contextualizing the Unique Self conversation within a larger discussion on individuality and traces the emergence of the Unique Self teachings through the life and writings of the author. The core Western understanding of individuality and its affirmation of the dignity of the separate self is contrasted with the Eastern teaching of dissolution of the small self, before both are integrated into a higher integral embrace through a new understanding of Unique Self. This article elucidates how the teachings of Unique Self fundamentally change the classical enlightenment paradigm through the assertion that enlightenment has a unique perspective, which might be termed the “personal face of essence.” Perspective taking, which emerges from enlightened consciousness, is rooted in the ontological pluralism that lies at the core of the Hebrew textual tradition. The new enlightenment teaching of Unique Self therefore rests on a series of integral discernments between separateness and uniqueness, ego and Unique Self, and personal and impersonal man. The Unique Self teaching suggests a new understanding of enlightenment through intersubjective love; the Unique Self perception is then set within an evolutionary context of being and becoming, in which it is seen to express one’s response to the personal address of the evolutionary God impulse itself. In this sense, Unique Self is understood to be an essential chapter in the emergence of a truly evolutionary mysticism.

This essay outlines one of the key sources in the great traditions for the integral teaching of Unique Self. The Unique Self is rooted in what is termed as nondual or acosmic humanism of a particular strain in Hebrew mysticism, as expressed in the teachings of Hasidic master Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. After examining and challenging previous scholarships on Lainer, the article reconstructs a theory of individuality from Lainer’s writings, which becomes the lodestone of his nondual humanism. In unpacking Lainer’s metaphysics of individuality, his ontological understanding of will, Torah, name, and uniqueness, the framework of the Unique Self teaching become clear. The article then reconstructs two matrices of sources from the intellectual history of Kabbalah, which serve as possible precedents to Lainer’s Unique Self teaching in the older traditions of Kabbalah. The article then outlines the seven core principles of acosmic humanism that are incarnate in the typology of Unique Self that appears in Lainer’s writing (in what is termed the Judah archetype). Finally, Lainer’s view is places in a larger context even as it is distinguished from the intellectual zeitgeist of its time.

Foreshadowing arguments from the forthcoming book, Towards a New Politics of Evolutionary Love, this paper suggests that humanity is 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 rechanneled into planning for the vast educational reconfigurations facing humanity in the coming decades.

Two major works have been written within the framework of Integral Wisdom about the nature of Self and God. While they share important features, namely the evolutionary context of the conversation and a vision of Self beyond Ego, their interior visions of the quality of the Self beyond Ego are profoundly different. Both of these visions of Self-or key dimensions of the two versions-have been adopted, directly and indirectly by many spiritual teachers. In this clear and compelling work Marc Gafni articulates the two models, their shared features, their differences and why - as we seek to articulate an Integral Wisdom - these differences matter so desperately.

You can buy the whole book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Self-Integral-Evolutionary-Mysticism-Models-ebook/dp/B00XQIDDES/

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.

In this paper, Gafni compares Kabbalistic and other wisdom traditions with regard to sex and Eros. He concludes that contrary to classical religion and much of psychology, Hebrew tantra insists that sex is integrally related to love and eros.

It was first published in the SpandaJournal.

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.

This paper celebrates the work of Claudia Kleefeld, one of the brightest shining lights in the universe of art today. The paper, “Post-postmodern Art: A Return to Belonging,” was first published in the Parabola Magazine.

This white paper, “Three Steps to the Democratization of Enlightenment,” by Marc Gafni suggests that the Democratization of Enlightenment is the evolution of an enlightened society, with Enlightenment defined as knowledge of one’s own True Identity. Accordingly, three conclusions are drawn: First, that enlightenment is sanity and hence a necessary ingredient for all individuals, not merely for elites. Second, attaining Enlightenment does not involve denying individuality, but grasping a key distinction between separateness and uniqueness. Third, the goal of enlightenment is said to be not the evolution beyond ego, but beyond exclusive identification with ego. After these three findings, Marc Gafni suggests that the Democratization of Enlightenment is essential both for individual mental health as well as planetary survival.

“Three Steps to the Democratization of Enlightenment” was originally published in the October 2012 issue of Integral Leadership Review.