Marc Gafni Teaching

The core intuition of all the great systems of the spirit is that love and eros are captured best by the image of light.  The Kabbalah teachers say that the light that fills the vessels of creation is love.  The word Torahitself –an all-encompassing Hebrew term meant to refer to all divine wisdom–means “light.”  (The root of Torah is orah, which is the Hebrew word for light, which is also the basis for the English word aura.)

When you give in love, much like a candle, you are able to illuminate many people without ever losing any of your own luminescence.  Giving love only creates more.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 133

From the beginning of my life
I have been looking for your face
but today I have seen it

Today I have seen
the charm, the beauty,
the unfathomable grace
of the face
that I was looking for

Today I have found you
and those who laughed
and scorned me yesterday
are sorry that they were not looking
as I did

I am bewildered by the magnificence
of your beauty
and wish to see you
with a hundred eyes

My heart has burned with passion
and has searched forever
for this wondrous beauty
that I now behold

I am ashamed
to call this love human
and afraid of God
to call it divine

Your fragrant breath
like the morning breeze
has come to the stillness of the garden
You have breathed new life into me
I have become your sunshine
and also your shadow

My soul is screaming in ecstacy
Every fiber of my being
is in love with you

Your efflugence
has lit a fire in my heart
for me
the earth and sky

My arrow of love
has arrived at the target
I am in the house of mercy
and my heart
is a place of prayer

Rumi

The Kabbalists were often referred to as mistaklim or chozim, roughly translated as the Looker or Seers. To get a handle on what that might mean, just imagine how we feel when someone looks at us with erotic, loving eyes.  We feel energized, uplifted, and embraced.  We become more vibrant, audacious, and alive.  We feel safer in the world.  The sense of alienation, separateness, and loneliness of our empty days and painful nights seems to lift.

The more steady the loving gaze is, the more we can steady ourselves and chart our direction and purpose on the path of being.  It begins with the loving eyes of mother and father–our first lovers–and continues throughout our lives.  Love’s eyes sustain us, nourish us, and connect us to the essential aliveness that courses through the universe.  Being seen makes us alove and alive.  The same is true of God.  The gaze of the mystic sustains and even “creates” God.

Once a few years back, my son Yair walked into the room. He sat and started playing with his Gameboy. I began looking at him, but really looking, perceiving him, loving him, with all my heart pouring out through my eyes.  I was seeing every beautiful detail of his being as he sat there innocently playing.  Suddenly he started singing. Yair singing?!  A rarity.  Could it have been from my love pouring out in his direction?  He got up and sort of danced his way out of the room.  Yair dancing?!

Well, proper scientific data it is not.  But it was enough for me. It was exhilarating!  Since then I have done this practice in a thousand different places–in streets, lecture halls, pubs, churches, libraries and synagogues.  As a result, the world has been much more full of singing and dancing.  I realized that a loving gaze can transform reality.  We call this in formal theology imatatio dei, the imitation of the divine force.  Just as God looked lovingly into the darkness and there was light, just as God’s gaze made it good, so too can our loving perception transform darkness into light and chaos into harmony.  Try it!
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 125, 126

Of course, to remind another of their full beauty you have to be fully aware of your own.  The Baal Shem Tov has a wonderful teaching on the biblical mandate “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  First it is a statement of fact–you love your neighbor precisely as much as you love yourself.  For in the end, you can only perceive another’s greatness if you have glimpsed and believe in your own.  Self-love is self-perception.
If this is so, then a powerful question arises.  How do you love yourself when you know all of your foibles, pathologies and blemishes?  Isn’t self-love self-perception?  And does not honest perception yield forth all of the reasons why we are not lovable?  And yet most of us manage, at least to some degree, to love ourselves.  Is it just self-deception?  No, not at all.  Love is not merely perception, it is a perception-identification complex.  Self-perception means that although you are aware of the full complexity of your personae–the good, the bad, and the ugly–you identify the essence of who you are with your good–your good, loving, giving, creative, and generous self.
That does not mean that you deny your beast.  It is, of course, critical to integrate all of you into your self picture.  To love yourself is to identify yourself as part of the Shechina.  Writes the Baal Shem Tov, “To love yourself is to love the Shechina.” Not to love yourself is to send the Shechina into exile. So proclaim the Kabbalists, to which Rumi adds:

By God, when you see your beauty
You will be the idol of yourself.

In your deepest nature you must know that you are the hero of your story.  In your deepest nature you are love and grace and strength and splendor.  Now you must decide to identify with your deepest nature.  Do you focus on your innocence or your guilt?  Do you focus on your ever-inevitably dirty hands, or on your ever-eternally pure soul?  To love yourself or anyone else, you need to know that your innocence is your essence.  That you always remain worthy of love.  That your innocence is never lost.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 121, 122

A word in the Zohar used for those souls who are living their story is lechisah, meaning “whisper.”  To live your story is to be able to hear the intimate whisper of divinity erotically caressing your life.  We are all recipients of cosmic love notes.  Paul Tillich reminds us that we can only hear through the love that listens.  Buber captured the spirit of biblical myth when he wrote, “To live means being addressed.”

To live one’s story is erotic in the resonance of its melody and the fullness of its canvas.  The world, when we are in our story, is no longer empty.  The soul is not here just pay back karmic debts.  It has a contribution to make from the depth of its infinite specialness.  Through making that contribution a human being feels ful-filled.  That is the eros of living one’s story.

The universe is full of whispers, and they are talking directly to you.  And here is the paradox–the more you act as if you are being addressed, the more you will be. The world is filled with soul print hints.  It may be the lyrics of a song, a sign on a building, an old friend you meet after years of not seeing each other, or a book that grabs your attention and demands to be read.

Each person has their unique talent, pleasure, obligation, form of silliness, and pathology.  These are all personal soul print hints that direct you toward living your story.
The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 243, 244

The ultimate model for reality is the divine. The most central teaching of the Kabbalah is that God’s highest gift to world is to receive the human being as a partner in the perfection of the world. God allows himself, as it were, to need us.

This is God’s ultimate gift to humanity.  It is therefore not at all surprising to learn that the very word Kabbalah means to receive - for to receive in imitation of God is the highest level of giving – and is thus the most profound form of spiritual service.

A friend and colleague tells a wonderful story about going to a class in Kabbalah. The teacher handed him an apple. He stretched out his hand to take it. No, said the master withdrawing the apple. This process repeated itself several times until my friend finally understood. Instead of stretching forth his hand to take the apple he cupped his hand to receive the apple. And this is the essence of Jewish mysticism – to be a vessel, Kabbalah, to receive.

Certainty and Uncertainty
Dr. Marc Gafni

here is a story, about the old dancing master of Tibet, who conquers the Chineese kung-fu champion by leading him into a dance, which lasts for three days. This experience is a symbol of transforming the emptiness which is empty, into the emptiness which is full. In Hebrew the expression of empty also means forgiveness.

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Now, another term for soul print might be perspective. As we have pointed out many times the classic image for unique form or Soul Print in Hebrew consciousness is Panim, face. Face is an expression in Talmudic language for what we moderns and post moderns might call perspective. This is what the ancient sages meant when they taught; “they are seventy faces to Torah”. Torah contains both objective givens and can only be read through the prism of perspectives. Ultimately in Hebrew mysticism each human being is bearer of a unique face which is by very definition a unique perspective. This is radically particular perception of the world which is shared exactly by no other being. In this sense the person is the eyes of EinSof, of the absolute. The person is the eyes of the absolute in a way shared by no other being on the planet. This is the source of our grandeur, our infinite adequacy and dignity and occasionally our almost unbearable loneliness which for this very reason can only be ultimately quenched in the caress of the divine.

A communication on Soul Prints and Unique Self from Marc Gafni to a leading group of non-dual theorists and teachers in the United States

… there is no person who does not possess Unique Gifts that respond to unique needs. From a nondual perspective, it is your Unique Gift that creates your Unique Obligation. To live your Unique Self and offer your Unique Gifts is to align yourself with the evolutionary impulse and fulfill your evolutionary obligation.  The realization of your Unique Self awakens you to the truth that there is a Unique Gift that your singular being and becoming offers the world, which is desperately needed by all that is, and can be given by you and you alone. There is no more powerful and joyous realization available to a human being. It is the matrix of meaning that fills your life and is the core of your Unique Self enlightenment.

Your Unique Self
(in press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 33

Solomon, the builder of the Temple had developed a set of tantric mysteries. He had a thousand wives, which means that he invited a thousand faces of the divine goddess to the temple. For the Biblical writers (who represent level 2 consciousness, which is always about rules, permissions and separate self) Solomon is the great sinner of the Book of Kings. But actually, if we transcend level 2 consciousness and step into the post-conventional level 3, then our understanding expands. The Song of Songs and the Book of Books, the Kodesh Hakodashim and the Sanctum Sanctorium, are the Holy of Holies. In the temple, in the Holy of Holies, was the arc with the two sexually intertwined cherubs on top. This inner sactum of erotic energy is the door to mysticism.

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