CIW Founders: Marc Gafni Video

“We need a new success story. We need a new love story. We need a new outrageous love story. And so what we want to try and do structurally, poetically, evocatively, shamanically, in these days is to articulate this new story.” ~ Marc Gafni at the Success 3.0 Summit

Watch these beautiful talks by Marc Gafni from the Success 3.0 Summit:

Success 3.0: A New Outrageous Love Story

From the talk:

I talked before about Archimedes, who said, give me a lever, give me a place to stand, give me a pivot, and I will change the world. And Success—Success 3.0 is our pivot. And what we’re saying is we need a new story when all the other stories have been de-storied. [6:08]

When we live in a postmodern context that says that the only grand narrative is that there are no grand narratives. And that anyone who tries to articulate a grand narrative is viewed as being somehow regressive, the Blue level that John talked about. Right? That level of traditional consciousness. They’ve got—they’ve got grand stories. Rick Warren’s got a grand story. They’ve got a narrative. But we’re like, we don’t do the narrative thing. Right? Our grand narrative is that there is no grand narrative. [6:37]

But what happens is, we then live without a story. We live in a de-storied universe. I have some very good friends who recently moved to Memphis, Tennessee and they have a daughter, and they just put their daughter in preschool. And their daughter goes to a fundamentalist Baptist, beautiful preschool, and these two people are clearly kind of postmodern kind of consciousness, deep believers in science, skeptics. And I said to them, I can’t believe it, like Jan, like Tim, why—why are you sending your daughter to like a Baptist school? And they said, well she comes home, and she’s got like a story. And initially we tried to show her that the story that she had was wrong, and then we looked at each other and we realized we didn’t have a better story to give her. And so we’re sending her there. [7:21]

Like wow! What does that mean, that we don’t have a better story? What does it mean that in the progressive world we’re so lost in our uncertainties—which are wonderful. Our uncertainties are fantastic and beautiful because they are challenging the dogmatic certainties that took us so long to break out of—but then where is our certainty? Where’s our dance between certainty and uncertainty? Where are the certainties that we stand for, that we live for, that we die for, that we’re radically committed to? And so we’ve got this understanding that we have to articulate a new story. [7:57]

We need a new success story. We need a new love story. We need a new outrageous love story. And so what we want to try and do structurally, poetically, evocatively, shamanically, right, is to articulate, right, in these days, right, this new story. Now my tradition—my original native tradition—is Hasidic Kabbalistic and my teacher is the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, who founded the Hasidic movement that came out of the Carpathian Mountains. [8:28]

And in that lineage we tell this story about stories. Apparently when the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, was confronted with a challenge, he would go to a certain place in the forest, and he would light a fire, and he would say words, and it would somehow be okay. When he died, his lineage receiver, the Maggid of Mezritch, would go, right, to that same place in the story, and he would light a fire, but he didn’t know the words, but it was enough. And the crisis would be averted. [8:56]

And then when his student, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, would face a crisis, he would go to the place in the forest, but he didn’t how to light the fire, he didn’t have the words but he at least at the right place, and it was enough. And when his student, Moshe Leib of Sasov, was confronted again with a crisis, he didn’t know where to go in the forest, and he didn’t know how to light the fire, and he didn’t have the words. But he said, you know, at least—at least I can tell the story. [9:18]

Right? But we’ve forgotten the story. But we’ve lost the narrative thread. And when we lose the narrative thread—when we can’t find Ariadne’s thread—we can’t actually avoid the crisis. We live in a world in which everybody’s talking to each other. Everyone’s engaged, we’re virtually interconnected, but we don’t have a shared story. We don’t have an articulate realization that that which unites us, is so much greater than that which divides us. [9:46]

Success 3.0 Summit: Outrageous Love Letters

Watch and try the practice of Outrageous Love Letters that Marc introduced during the Summit:

While ordinary love is an emotion, a reaction, and even a strategy of the ego, it is Outrageous Love that is the love that moves the entire process of evolution. So, how can we access the outrageous lover in us? The answer is: by writing outrageous love letters.

In Marc’s words from his 2nd Summit keynote:

“You can write an Outrageous Love Letter to yourself. You can write it to a friend or a lover. You can write it to Source. But do it outrageously. Do it as reality itself.”

And with that he invited everyone in the room to write an outrageous love letter. The two lines of people wanting to share their letters at the mics were still long when time ran out. People were deeply moved by that experience and practice.