Marc Gafni Teaching

Your Unique Self is radically singular, gorgeous, and special in the world. But it is even more then that. Your Unique Self is a puzzle piece that is utterly necessary to complete a much larger puzzle. The Unique contours of your puzzle piece are what allow you to connect with and offer your gift to all-that-is. Giving your puzzle piece unto the world adds an irreducible dimension to the completedeness of the kosmos. Paradoxically, uniqueness is the currency of connection. It is the portal to the larger evolutionary context that needs your service. But it is even more then that. Your Unique Self is evolution waking up as you. Your Unique Self is animated by its puzzle piece nature. As such it is naturally connected to a larger context that it uniquely completes. It is paradoxically through the unique contours of your Unique Self nature that the alienation of separation is overcome. Unique self is the source code of all authentic relationships; and it is only through a fraternity and sisterhood of Unique Selves that we can begin to bring profound and loving transformation into the world.

Interconnectivity, the fullness of presence, the inside of God’s face, the yearning force of being, they all characterize our experience of Union.  This is enlightenment.  Yet for the Hebrew mystic if Union does not lead us to compassion and great love then we have missed the point.  The medieval intellectual mystic Maimonides wrote a great book of mystical philosophy, Guide for the Perplexed.  In the last sentences, after the book reaches its erotic crescendo (Cheshek, meaning “raw sensual passion” is the Hebrew translation of the Arabic term employed by Maimonides), he appends an implicit postscript.  Paraphrasing: If all this doesn’t make you a better lover of people then you are no lover of God and certainly no lover of your self.  Eros must always lead to ethics.

The human being begins her journey as part of the circle of nature.  In the creation story of Genesis 1, man and woman are created as part of the natural order.  Ancient myth reflected this circle of being, in which mortals and immortals, humans and Gods, and all of nature participated together.  This is the circle of eros.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 323

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 pairs in the opposition as glimmerings of the one.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 318

The novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote, “Vocations that we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.” If we do not pursue our particular call, then the ghost of that call will pursue us, like a haunting that stains our days.

For when you respond to cues that are not yours, when you’re a police officer instead of a painter, ultimately you can’t be happy. Happiness comes from being yourself in the most profound way possible. The ancient Greeks referred to happiness as eudaimonia. “Daimon” is the word for calling. You are happy only when you are responding to your daimon. Your daimon calls you to realize your Unique Self. Your happiness lies in your hands, if you would but take it.

To be happy, then, is to be responsive to the call of your deepest self. To be happy is to wake up in the morning and feel that you have a mission in the world that no one else can perform. To be happy is to know that among the billions of people on this planet, you are irreplaceable. This is true for every human being on the face of the globe, for what we share in common is our uniqueness.

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The Eros of evolution is love. Seen from the outside, it is what Erich Jantsch refers to as “self-organization through self-transcendence.”  The individual “self” of an atom trance-ends itself. The trance of separation is broken, and the individual atom organizes itself as part of a larger molecule. A new identity as a molecule is formed even as the old identity as an atom is not lost. Rather, the core mechanism of self-organization through self-transcendence is “transcend and include.” The atom transcends itself to a higher level of complexity, even as its core identity is not lost, but rather expanded and evolved. It is this internal drive within matter that, according to Jantsch and many other leading-edge theorists, moves evolution to ever-higher unions, through ever-higher levels of complexity. From quarks to atoms to cells to molecules, onward and upward Teilhard de Chardin, Abraham Kook, and many other evolutionary mystics point out that complexity is but the outside view. The interior—not addressed by Jantsch or any of the chaos theorists—reveals that the higher the level of outer physical complexity, the more evolved the inner depth of consciousness. What emerges is that the movement of evolution is the movement to ever-higher levels of complexity and consciousness. At this point, the eye of the mind has reached its limits. Now, a new faculty of perception enters our conversation, what the Christian mystics called the “eye of the spirit,” what the Sufi teacher Rumi called the “eye of the heart,” and what Hebrew mystics called the “hidden eye.”  The eye of the spirit, deployed throughout recorded time by the great realizers in all the traditions, in a great double-blind experiment of spirit, always revealed the same inner picture.  The eye of the spirit sees clearly that the inner fabric of consciousness is none other than love.  It would therefore be entirely accurate to say that the Eros of evolution is none other than the force of love.

Your Unique Self (in press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 110, 111

Once a year in a spine-tingling mystery rite the priest would enter the Holy of Holies.  On this day, every person was forgiven.  On this day, every person was to re-experience themselves in the depths of their own true innocence.  For on the inside we are all innocent.  This day is called in biblical myth traditions the Day of Atonement:  At-one-ment.

The core erotic idea of the Bayit–the Temple–was that every person could and needs to access the Shechina experience.  Every human being has a primary erotic need to move beyond being the impostor and into his or her own deepest place of oneness, a oneness not only with the self but also with others, and ultimately with all of existence.  The Zohar refers to the exile from one’s deepest self as alma depiruda, the world of separation.  The most tragic separation is not from mother, not from community, but from the self.  The journey of a lifetime is to move from alma depiruda to alma deyichuda, from separation to oneness–At-one-ment.  Love is the path back home.  We are not talking about superficial love, not merely sexual love, but erotic love.

The litmus test of an erotic lover is this:  Does this person lead you back to your inner self?  Are you able to share with him or her your most vulnerable, fledgling, faltering dreams?  Every person has a Holy of Holies which, in the most intimate of times, we let another enter as the priest to worship at our altar.  And in the gorgeous paradox of the spirit, by letting a lover enter we ourselves are let in as well.  For when the Temple door is open and the love enters, we ourselves trail behind.  We gain uncommon access to our inner selves, a place that we are often unable to reach alone.  The true lover always takes you home. As Emily Dickinson wrote,

Eden is that old-fashioned house
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode until we drive away.

Love lets us realize the Eden we are dwelling in every day.  That is what it means to feel at home in your life, which is the greatest feeling in the world.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 20

The Kabbalists were often referred to as mistaklim or chozim, roughly translated as the Lookers 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 life.

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.

The Mystery of Love
Dr. Marc Gafni
Pages 125, 126

In a globally interconnected world, one person acting alone or a small group of ignorant individuals has the ability to literally destroy humanity. This is a pointing-out instruction by the universal love-intelligence. Said simply, reality is telling us something that we desperately need to know. The lesson is clear for better and for worse, the age of ruling elites, be they spiritual or political, is over.

Democracy is the evolutionary unfolding of love-intelligence in our era. It began with the democratization of govern-ments. Now it must move to the democratization of enlightenment, and enlightenment of your True Self beyond personality and ego, which then expresses itself in the full glory and power of your Unique Self.
Enlightenment is a genuine possibility, and therefore a sacred obli-gation, for every single person. You are not obligated from without. You are obligated in love by your own highest possibility.

Marc Gafni
Center for World Spirituality

The third century Babylonian myth masters say it like this: “There are three names in a person’s life. The name his mother and father called him, the name his friends call him, and the name he owns himself.” The choice of words here is important. We are called by names – that is to say names are the chorus of our calling.

First there are the names on our birth certificates usually given to us by our parents. Then there are all sorts of names given to us by our community. These may start with the affectionate or not so affectionate baby names we are called by our parents. They include the nicknames given by brothers, sisters, extended family or friends. Included in this category (isn’t this the second category?*) are also the cruel and jeering names of childhood that sometimes leave scars for life. Finally there are the names that we choose for ourselves, sometimes leaving behind an old name and choosing a new one which better reflects who we have become as life unfolded.

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