Marc Gafni Teaching

Unique Self and Unique Shadow

The Unique Self is the Eros, the life impulse that drives us forward. Shadow is Eros turned around against itself. By integrating your shadow, you are liberating the trapped life energy of your Unique Self. Your life energy is not generic. It is your life energy.

The portal to your energy is none other than your Unique Self Your most persistent shadow- structure is also your most abundant wellspring of energy and life.

The reclaiming of life energy happens through shadow integration. Thus, the tantric masters of the left-handed path saw shadow integration as a process of revelation by which the previously hidden Unique Self—the secret mystery—manifests as inspiration and Eros.

Your Unique Self
(In Press)

Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 252

Integral Church is an enactment of Integral consciousness, initiated by Dr. Marc on New Years weekend 2010. In Integral Church, we engage a passionate and  integrated spiritual practice that is emergent from the  best of the world’s spiritual traditions.

Greater Is Wisdom Than Folly

For the Tantric Kabbalists, this nondual understanding forms the core of one of the great sources of World Spirituality, known as the Wisdom of Solomon.

The Unique Self master King Solomon says, “Greater is Wisdom than folly; greater is light than darkness.”

Simply read, this is a text about duality. Wisdom opposes and overcomes folly, even as light opposes and overcomes darkness.

The ancient Unique Self teachers, however, reread this text in a radically different way. The original Hebrew word min, can be read not only as “than” but as “from.” The reread text declares: “Greater is the wisdom that comes from folly; greater is the light that comes from darkness.” The poet William Blake, intuiting the tantric principles, writes, “If the fool would but follow his folly he would become wise.” The same may be said of light and darkness. If you but follow your darkness, you will come to your light.

You can now begin to feel into a core principle of Unique Self enlightenment. The source of highest light is the darkness itself. The tzadik, one who has incarnated their Unique Self, does this by accessing and transforming the light hidden in their darkness, and as their darkness.

The Shattering of the Vessels

It is this principle that informs the primary reality myth of these old masters—the myth known as shevirat hacaylim—the shattering of the vessels. In the Kabbalistic creation myth, this light streamed into vessels. Over time, the light became too intense to hold, and the vessels shattered. (For the Kabbalists, the big bang is virtually identical with this big crash.)

Some of the light folded back into its source. However, many sparks of light remained trapped in the shards of the shattered vessels—scattered across the kosmos. These dark shards, with their hidden sparks of light, are the source of the highest potential light for our world. The core of your life work is, in the language of Kabbalah, to raise up the sparks and return them to their source—that is, to free the sparks from their darkened prisons and let them shine again.

In this graphic image, the world is understood to be a place of broken vessels. Broken hearts, broken promises, and broken lives are all expressions of the primal shattered vessels. In revealing the light hidden in your brokenness, you are involved in an essential and primordial fixing. This, as we saw earlier, is what the Kabbalists called tikkun. Kabbalistic scholar Avraham Leader has correctly translated the Hebrew Aramaic deployment of the word tikkun in the Zohar, as “evolve.” 4   Tikkun is the obligation and privilege of every Unique Self. Tikkun is the evolution of consciousness, which is no less than the evolution of God. Every person’s tikkun is Unique. Every person’s tikkun is needed.

Your Unique Self
(In Press)

Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 243-244

Summary: In the excerpt below from his June 2011 TEDxSinCity talk “Your Unique Self: The Future of Enlightenment,” Dr. Marc lovingly draws our attention to the shared story of World Spirituality emerging at this moment in intellectual history. What we yearn for and already share, in spite of the many ways we focus on what divides us, are the deep structures of meaning we can know first-hand—in our first-persons—and that we can reveal using the Eye of the Spirit.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni

Page 81

Imagination

Sex models the erotic, but it does not exhaust the erotic.  One of the core qualities of the erotic is imagination.  The Zohar, the magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says explicitly in many places, “Shechina is imagination.”

In Common usage “imagination” is implicitly considered to mean “unreal.”  Indeed unreal and imaginary are virtual synonyms.  To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim we say it is “a figment of his imagination.”   In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real.  Indeed it would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.”

The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm.  Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves.  Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth.  But the imagination is our prophet, bringing us the word of the Divine, which speaks both through us and from beyond us.  This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed their God said, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”

From:

Unique Self, pages 366-368

Dr. Marc Gafni
In Press

Love is a perception of the infinite specialness,  the full uniqueness of the beloved. To love another is to say Yes to their Unique Presence, to their Unique Being and Unique Becoming. The greatest of love affairs begins with a simple imprint of Yes.
Remember, we come into this world trailing clouds of glory with core knowledge of our omnipotence, beauty, infinite power, and infinite potential. And then we hear a chorus of voices for the first ten years of our lives, and the only word they seem to be saying is No, No, No. We gradually come to associate maturity with saying No. When an idea or new direction comes up, our first response is why it can’t work. We are brilliant at it. Even the most simpleminded person becomes a genius when it comes to saying No. We can think up twenty reasons why it will not work before we can think up two reasons why it could. We have all become Dr. No with advanced degrees.

But somewhere deep inside, the Yes remains, an eternal child of your Unique Self. We know on the inside of the inside that Yes is the answer.

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

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

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

The Yes here is sexual. The sexual in this passage models the eros of life. The overwhelming perfume of this sexual Yessing signifies hope, promise, and possibility in the most expanded erotic sense. For the sexual is the full ecstatic urgency of the urge to merge and the urge to emerge throbbing inside of us. This final Yes has magically transformed the seven-hundred-plus pages of modern existentialist No’s. It was James Joyce who reminded us that Yes is a feminine word that signifies the end of all resistance.

The high priests entering the Holy of Holies once a year say Yes with his every step. The cherubs murmur to each other, “Yes, yes.” The Temples of God and Man are built with Yes stones. The Presence of God is a great green light that says, “Yes, you are gorgeous. Yes, I need you.” The Uni-verse is an open entryway, crowned by a neon Yes sign. To be lived as love is to know that—as Wallace Stevens reminds us.

After the final No comes a Yes

In those heart-opening moments when truth suddenly bursts through your everyday routines, you know that the purpose of your life is to uniquely incarnate in the story of your life the love-intelligence that governs the Uni-verse. Are you willing to utter a sacred “Yes!” to your conscious participation in the evolution of consciousness?

To awaken and say Yes to the unique invitation, delight, and obligation of your life is the reason you were born. It is the only authentic source of joy and meaning in your life. When you slumber and say No, your loneliness, fear, and contraction live in you, through you, and as you. When you awaken and say Yes, you are living as Source. When you awaken and say Yes, Source lives in you, through you, and as you

Unique Self, pp. 274-276
(In Press)

Dr Marc Gafni

5. It is the divine feminine, in self or other, that holds you in the gaze of love and catalyzes your transformation.

Being loved by another in a holding container is precisely the experience described in wondrous rapture in all the traditions—of being held by the divine mother, or mother energy The divine feminine manifests in the steady, loving gaze of both men and women It is the divine feminine in other or in our selves that looks at you with the eyes of love 3It is that very gaze of love that allows you to see yourself.  In the gaze of the divine feminine is the mechanism for shadow integration. The power of the love of the divine feminine gives you an experience of your own gorgeousness, goodness, and grandeur. This is precisely what allows you to bear the experience of being displeasing to yourself because of your shadow qualities. This allows you to stay in the transformative fire of deep self-scrutiny.

The experience of being held in love by the gaze of the divine feminine can be accessed in three primary ways. First, the gaze of another’s love can hold you in the gaze of the divine feminine. Second, in meditation, your own Big Heart/divine feminine can consciously hold your small self in the gaze of the divine feminine. Third, the gaze of the divine feminine is the experience of being held by the personal God who knows your name. This is what we referred to earlier as “God in the second person.” This is what Solomon alluded to in the Song of Songs when he wrote of the divine embrace, “Your left hand is under my head and your right hand embraces me.”4 This is the experience that you are resting in the divine embrace, held in timeless time and placeless place. This is the deep knowing that wherever you fall, you fall into the hands of God. It is precisely the knowing that you are thus held in love that affirms your goodness. Chant and prayer are the two major spiritual practices for this realization.

The experience of being held by the divine feminine in meditation is accessed through what I call the “holding heart” meditative practices. 5 If you are practiced in meditation, your heart will immediately recognize this pointing-out instruction If you are not practiced, this instruction will open your heart and bring you home.

Holding Heart Meditation

There are two simple steps in the holding heart meditation.

In your meditation, you fall into what the great traditions called “expanded mind and expanded heart.” You move beyond your small self and identify with the heart of the Uni-verse

From that place, you hold your small self Your small self feels totally held It is an experience of deep trust and acceptance.

Your larger self is your own divine feminine.

You have merged with the Shakti, the feminine goddess divine. She feels through you, is in you, and breathes as you.

You hold you. Your larger self holds your smaller self. You are held in the heart palm of existence. You are safe, beloved, with your goodness radically affirmed. You are held by the gaze of your larger self holding your small self.

With your goodness felt and affirmed, you are able to face into your shadow It is only the felt sense of personal love that releases the contraction of the ego, and allows you to bear the pain of being displeasing to your self, to face everything, and to avoid nothing.6  You own your shadow; listen to its whispering, and follow it back to your unlived life and light.

The key to the practice is to be so rooted in your absolute goodness as to be able to bear anything that arises in your meditation. 7 You have no relationship to the content that arises. At the time of its arising, there is nothing to do, say, or even feel. The practice is to hold an immovable center.

Do not identify with anything that arises. When you are not identified with your experience as it arises in your meditation, you are aligning with the deepest part of yourself, which is the free heart-ground of all being.

Hold the date in your heart!!

From

Your Unique Self
The Future of Enlightenment

Marc Gafni, PhD, p. 204
(In Press)

“Unique Self is the enlightened realization that you are both abso- lutely one with the whole, and absolutely unique. You are free from the contractions of your personality, even as you experience yourself as personally engaged in the great evolutionary unfolding of consciousness.

Realizing your Unique Self will fundamentally change the way you understand virtually every facet of your awakened life. Once we’ve engaged the core teachings of Unique Self, we will look separately at how these teachings fundamentally reconfigure and dramatically re-vision our under- standing of love, joy, shadow, sexuality, parenting, death, relationships, loneliness, evolutionary spirituality, malice, ego psychology, and the inte- gration of East and West.

Your Unique Self is God’s love-signature written all over you. God loved you so much, He personalized himself as you. You are the indi- vidualized heart and mind of God. This is your Unique Self.

The creative process that mysteriously moves from nothing to something is the God-impulse. To live as your Unique Self means to align yourself with that process, with the ecstatic evolutionary impulse that initiated the kosmos, with the ecstasy of God, which re-creates all of reality in every second of existence.

Are you ready to respond to this invitation, to offer yourself to the infinite love intelligence that wants desperately to show up in the world through and as you?”