Marc Gafni Teaching

“Unique Self is the enlightened realization that you are both absolutely 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?”

For some passages in the Zohar, the mysteries of the cherubs are virtually a synonym for unity consciousness.  The Zohar understands the union of the cherubs as symbolic of the union of all opposites.  This is what mystic Abraham Kook means when he writes, “While all qualities have their opposite, good and evil, life and death, and even holy and profane–there is no opposite to the Holy of Holies.”  The Holy of Holies is the place that overwhelms all distinctions.  That which unites opposites, writes Kook, is love.  It is love–the perception of the infinite Divine in all of reality–that allows us to embrace both paris in the opposition as glimmerings of the one.

The Chinese master Lao-tzu saw this clearly when he said all opposites arise simultaneously and mutually:

Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear?  What nonsense.
Having and not having arise together
Difficult and easy complement each other.

To suggest otherwise, writes Chuang Tzu, is not “to apprehend the great principles of the universe or the nature of creation.”

What does all this mean?  Ultimately reality is a unity of opposites.  What that means is that there are no real boundaries.  True wisdom is the sweetness of integration and union.  Ultimately the world of two does not exist in the deepest reality.  To love is to reach for the radical divine presence in all that is.  To love is to know that ultimately there are no boundaries.  And yet the road to the circle in which everything is on the inside is through the line. Ethics is the Hebrew mystic’s path to eros.
The Mystery of Love

Marc Gafni
Page 318, 319

The sages decide to go into deep prayer, asking God to enlighten them about the esoteric meaning of the powerful sexual drive and potentially destabilizing adultery that comes with it. In a vision they see a fiery lion jumping right out of the inner Sanctuary of the Temple. In this 5 minute audio clip Dr. Gafni inspires his audience with a mind provoking new interpretation of the old text. He elaborates that the ancient temple of Jerusalem once was the Sanctuary of Eros, depicted in the female Cherub, the Srinah, the Zohar, the Goddess, in a sexual embrace with her male counterpart crowning the Arc of the Covenant. The Srinah, the Divine Feminine energy, intoxicates and entrances us, moves us from deep within to admire her in all her expressions and manifestations. Her divine sexual energy, symbolized in the fiery lion, is the essence of Eros and was meant to be encountered in the mystical temple experience of ancient times.

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To be in Temple consciousness is to be in God–eros pure and simple.  This shift in consciousness is hidden within the folds of biblical myth text itself.
We have already seen that the biblical term Lifnei Hashem, which is usually translated as “before God,” can be more fruitfully understood as “on the inside of God’s face.”  This allusion plants the seed for the much more radical move made by the mystic Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century.  In Luria’s graphic and daring vision the world is not formed by a forward-thrusting male movement that creates outside itself.  Quite the contrary–Divinity creates within itself the sacred void in the form of a circle.  The creation not of the line masculine God but of the Goddess, of the Shechina!  This is the Great Circle of Creation.  The circle, unlike in the original biblical image, is within the Goddess.  It is an act of love that moves the Goddess to withdraw and make room for the other–paradoxically within God.

The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 192

The Arameic texts of the Babylonian Talmud tell the  story {Actually it is Dr. Gafni’s embellishment  of the core story} of a man, who comes home, and finds his wife naked in the bedroom. There are  cookies on the stand by the bed. The man is hungry; he reaches for a cookie, but suddenly the voice of the milkman cries out from the closet, Don’t eat it, it’s poisonous!”  The legal question in the Talmud: Is the milkman an  adulterer or not?

What is the psycho-spiritual message teaching underling this story?  Why is there is a strange attraction in transgressive behaviour?  Why does, at first blush, a boundary breaking sexuality seem to have more powerful psycho-sexual energy, then classical married sexuality? What does the nature of sexuality have to do with the fall of the temple?

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Awakening Your Evolutionary Creativity and Reclaiming the Higher Obligation and Joy of Your Life
You can awaken to your Unique Self not only through a first person recognition of yourself as a unique expression of the love-intelligence of the Universe, but also through a second person encounter with the Divine. Here, through practice or as a gift of divine love, you can experience yourself being held in the arms of the Mother who both loves you and obligates you. This was the great realization of the Mother, central to the spiritual way of Hindu mystics, Kabbalists, Sufis, Christian mystics, and so many more. In Hebrew the same root word means both Love and Obligation. What that simply means is that to be loved is to be obligated. To be loved by the divine does not mean, as religions used to teach, that man is freed of obligation. Rather, it means that God loves and holds the human being as his/her partner in the creative process. To be loved is to be obligated. In the language of the second person mystics – the human being is obligated as the core essence of being alive to engage in imatatio dei – the imitation of god. The second person mystics now go the next step (and this is Rumi Hafiz, Ibn Arabi, Akiva, Luria, Augustine, Aquinas and the whole gang.) We are commanded by consciousness itself to be “like god”. To partner with God in the healing and transformation of all that is. But, how can you be like God if we do not know God? Ahhh. Remember there is one thing we DO KNOW about God. God is Creative. Consciousness is Creative. Creativity is the essential manifest quality of Consciousness. So therefore: Just as God is creative so you be creative. To use biblical language, just as God stood as the abyss of darkness and said “Let there be light”- so too shall you stand creatively at the abyss of darkness and say let there belight. Just as God creates worlds, so too shall you as God’s partners be a creator of worlds. God in the second person, who holds you and loves you, has but one wild, ecstatic, rigorous and uncompromising demand: “Be my creative partner in the healing and transformation of the world. Evolve consciousness, and fix the broken places with Me – because I cannot do it without you. I need your service. My gift to you in love,” whispers God in our ear even as She caresses our heart, “My gift to you is to make you my partner and allow Myself to be – at least in part – dependent on you!”

In this vision, life is a journey, not toward judgment but toward super-consciousness. This is commonly referred to as the transpersonal, but as we have seen, it is more accurately termed True Self. This is the third level of Hebrew mystical consciousness,hamtaka.

It is to this level that the Baal Shem Tov refers when he says the crying on the day of judgment leads to hamtakat hadin, the “sweetening of judgment.” Tears themselves are understood by Hebrew mystics both as the pathway to erotic union with the divine and as primary expressions of that very same union Transpersonal True Self teardrops hold the very divine image that is the essence of humankind, which when realized invites humans to transcend time for the timeless, mortality for eternity. In the erotic merger with the divine of the Songs of Songs, you realize that there is no outer and no inner, there is neither yes nor no, there is neither here nor there. There is only the radical One that arises and resides from your own True Nature. You are Abraham even as you are Sarah; you walk in Canaan and Manhattan in the self-same moment; the stars are your eyes even as the earth is your body. Your Unique Self rises spontaneously, and oceans of compassion flow from you to embrace all of Being in the One Taste of your Original Face that is the name of God. In that moment, your tears fall and purify all of existence.

Your Unique Self
(In Press)

Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 361

The technology for shadow integration is love.  Shadow causes a transformation of identity.  Love is the evolution–any force that transmutes shadow to light.

The inner magic and mechanism of love makes it the ultimate technology of Unique Shadow transformation.  The nature of that magic and mechanism is an essential sacred understanding necessary for your Unique Self enlightenment.

In order to integrate your shadow, your unlived life acting out and demanding attention, a transformation of your identity must occur.

The key Aramaic phrase used by the Unique Self masters to describe the nature of this path is be’chavivut talya milta, “It depends on love.”

Your Unique Self
(In Press)

Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 265

After the evolution beyond ego and the identification with the impersonal, a new personal essence arises out of the very ground of the impersonal.

This is Unique Self. This Second Taste is dynamic, creative, and world transforming. There is urgency to the Second Taste. The God impulse of Second Taste is no less surging, ecstatic, and powerful than was the urge to merge in One Taste. In Second Taste, however, the ecstatic urgency is to emerge. This Second Taste ecstatic urgency aligns not with the eternal transcendent face of God, but with the evolutionary impulse of All That Is. The spiritual path that this ecstatic urge invites you to is the way of Becoming.

Meditation is not only the path into pure Being; it is also a key path to access the surging life force that is the evolutionary dance of unfolding.

In particular, certain forms of tantric or Kabbalistic meditation open the door to that ecstatic evolutionary impulse toward unfolding that lives uniquely in you, as you, and through you. It is the same impulse that utterly demands the creativity of the artist even as it moves the mother to ecstatically suffer the pain of childbirth.

Your Unique Self
(In Press)

Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 95

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.”  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.

Your Unique Self
(In Press)

Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 275