Most Recent Blog-Posts

• Appearing as the One – Unending Symphony

  
  

  Watch and listen to this 9-minute video, the eighth part of a 10-part dialogue with Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Tuscany on the topic of Evolutionary Love–envisioning a new Renaissance that will take us to the future. Watch previous posts from this series;

  • The New Renaissance, & Love as an Erotic Force
  • The Second Shock of Existence
  • Evolutionary Love, the True Nature of Reality, & Unique Self Enlightenment
  • Supercoherence
  • Self-Organization, the Ability to Receive Information from the Larger System, & the Spiritual Dimension
  • How to Open the Eye of the Spirit & The Unique Self Symphony
  • Evolutionary Love – Personal and Cosmic Love Are One – the Personal as a Quality of Essence

  Enjoy the eighth part of the dialogue here:

  Transcript

  
  

  Dr. Ervin László: Well you, in a way, you talk about also, but what is it? What is it that is making us enjoy what we call art, or music, or dance, or song, whatever, what is it? It’s an experience. It’s experience of sharing of oneness. You mentioned moment ago, you said, well, forgive me, but I look … pay attention, even though I’m closing my eyes. Did you notice that great conductors, and I had a privilege of knowing quite a few, but the conductors close their eyes most of the time. They open them a little bit, just to make sure that they’re there in the right place, and everybody’s listening, but because they are entirely inside their own experience. And they communicate that way.

  Now, the difference between a poor orchestra and a great orchestra, is a poor orchestra is just plays the score and looks at the conductor as to say what does he say. In a great orchestra, the members become one, and they start to become one with the conductor, and they start feeling what the conductor does. It’s an instrument, it’s becoming one. It’s on a much higher level than driving a car, but it’s there, it’s the same thing. To me, I could feel becoming one with a piano, with an instrument, and then with the people who are work, who are playing music with me. And the people who are listening, because they are not passive listeners. Passive listeners are no good, people who are co-creating, who enter into this.

  So, all of this is really that through our senses, we don’t need to just pick up on their ears, but we can use our sense as instrument to go deeper down into ourselves, where we perceive our oneness, our co-evolution, our co-creation, let me say, of other people, with other people. And that way, I think, that instrumentality, that to me is the aesthetic experience. I got it mostly through music. You can get it through dance. I would love to know how to dance. I was never very good at dancing, but when I did a little bit of it, I was felt like I moved together with somebody else, you’re becoming really part of that person. And whatever your way that you can enjoy the world around you, is that sense of that sense of significantly one, becoming significantly one with the other.

  That, to me is the ecstatic experience, a really deep part of my life, and in a way I’m searching for that, also in my writing, in my talking. If I’m on the right track, I feel sort of one with the ideas, and if I give a talk some this, and I have to think of now, I have to talk about this, talk about that, that is artificial, it falls apart. If you feel that you can say something, and the other person resonates with what I think we are doing here also, it’s like that, then you’re beginning to feel like you’re entering into a common space. And that is just another form of evolutionary love.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: Oh, that’s gorgeous. So you don’t disappear into the one, you appear as the one. That’s the location of the paradox that we’re pointing to here, and the reason I keep coming back to it, Ervin, is because I’ve found, and I don’t know what your experience is, is that the reason people reject the notion of oneness, because they’re afraid they’re going to disappear. There’s an enormous fear, and I think we have to, with great respect, hold enlightenment teachers responsible, of which I’ve been one of for many years, so I hold myself responsible, for teaching enlightenment improperly. We’ve always taught enlightenment as disappearing into the one. You become true self, and then there’s an intuitive rejection by the main stream, which says what about me, then the enlightenment teacher says, well that’s just your ego.

  It’s not just your ego. There’s something deeper than the egoic self, which is the unique expression of oneness. You appear as the one, and let me stay with the symphony image. A number of years ago, someone from Booz Allen, that is a consulting firm in America, came into a seminar where I happened to be attending, and they played a symphony, a Beethoven symphony, and then they played the symphony again and they took out one instrument, and I can’t quite remember the instrument right now, but you actually could hear this one instrument, which was by itself seemingly irrelevant. Without that instrument the assembly could actually feel the difference.

  So you actually realize, who are you, and that’s the great question, who are you, you are an instrument in the symphony, and without you, the symphony sounds different. If I would say it in the 16th century in Italy, Decapolis said, God needs your service. You’re actually needed by all that is. That’s a stunning realization, that I actually have a unique gift to give, a unique life to live, that’s irreducibly needed by all that is, and that’s not a kind of psychological idea, that’s actually the nature of reality is, you’ve described it in Self Actualizing Cosmos, and so many other books is, you’re a part, which is using your language, you’re a part that’s irreducibly needed by the whole. It’s utterly independent, and yet part of the whole at the same time. And without your part in this, the whole becomes a heap.

  Dr. Ervin László: That’s the important difference, you just said it. A heap is more or less casual assembly of different elements. A whole is an integration of different elements. A whole is not a whole if a part is missing, it’s not longer a whole.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: A whole is not a whole if a part’s missing.

  Dr. Ervin László: No, it’s something that is … it’s something else, it’s a part of a whole, it’s a maybe on a way to a whole. It’s a degeneration of a whole, but a whole is that which integrates all its parts. A great work of art, and I say whatever you are sensitive to, it can be a great poem, it can be music, it can be whatever other form of art or literature, is one where you can’t take any element of it, as you just mentioned. To me, a great work of art, and here the prototype, the paradigm case for that is all the compositions of Mozart, is such that you can not simply change it. There was a famous dialog, I think in the film Amadeus, where the prince who was sponsoring Mozart said to Mozart, there are too many notes in that piece. He was just trying to be clever.

  And Mozart said, no, no, there aren’t too many. He also said, there also aren’t too few, there are just enough. There are just as many as there have to be. And you have that sense when you hear a piece of music that is that level of wholeness, the perfectionist of a Mozart, gut you can have it in the Beatles. You can have it in many other ways, that every part has to play its role. If it’s not there, it’s not there, it disappear anymore. It benefits not there, it’s having cancer.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: It’s having cancer, so symphony is really the primary image that’s emerging from today’s dialog, is unending symphony, Ervin’s next, next book. I think it’s after the next one, what we call a unique self symphony, which is one expression of the unending symphony. It’s a self organizing universe, in which the organizing principle is uniqueness.

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• Spiritually Incorrect: Some Remarks on the Teacher-Student Relationship by Dr. Marc Gafni

  
  

  – in Response to an Invitation of the German “Integrales Forum” in 2011
  

  Thank you for your kind invitation to comment on the Integrales Forum position paper in regard to teacher-student relations. First let me congratulate you on this paper, which serves to initiate this important conversation. This topic is a worthy one in need of urgent address on many levels. Let me also commend your excellent deployment of the Integral framework in discussing these issues. It is the use of the Integral framework that allows for this discussion to hold the necessary complexity, multiples perspectives, and nuance that it deserves.

  In broad terms, I agree with your conclusions in terms of the need for some essential standards in regard to spiritual teachers. Clearly we are all aware of the most horrific abuses that take place in the context of some pre-personal cults, as well as of some of the more subtle forms of psychological manipulation, financial dishonesty and sexual abuse that take place in these same contexts under the fig leaf of the teacher-student relationship for the sake of the dharma. To protect the potential victim and shield the powerless from the whims of the powerful is a core obligation of any community.

  At the same time, as you indicate in your paper, much discernment is needed in this conversation to assure that the teacher-student function is upheld. For indeed, without this teacher-student function, both the transmission of wisdom as well as the personal and collective enlightenment of the interior face of the cosmos would be severely impaired. The teacher-student function is essential for these evolutionary goals.

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• Evolutionary Love – Personal and Cosmic Love Are One – The Personal as a Quality of Essence

  
  

  Watch and listen to this 19-minute video, the seventh part of a 10-part dialogue with Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Tuscany on the topic of Evolutionary Love–envisioning a new Renaissance that will take us to the future. Watch previous posts from this series;

  • The New Renaissance, & Love as an Erotic Force
  • The Second Shock of Existence
  • Evolutionary Love, the True Nature of Reality, & Unique Self Enlightenment
  • Supercoherence
  • Self-Organization, the Ability to Receive Information from the Larger System, & the Spiritual Dimension
  • How to Open the Eye of the Spirit & The Unique Self Symphony

  Enjoy the seventh part of the dialogue here:

  
  

  Transcript

  Dr. Ervin László: So, I’m glad you brought in this whole topic of evolutionary love, because in this context, love is at the heart of the cosmos. Love is something that made the cosmos what it is. It’s the organizing principle, without which what would be the … space time world would be series of mechanically interacting parts. It would be a heap, an aggregate. It wouldn’t be whole, it wouldn’t be something that emerges, but emerges is the oneness, is the unity. And the way it emerges is through love. Emergence is evolution, and to become part of evolution, you have to feel the love, sense the love, recover the love, in the sense of Plato, as recover what the soul already knows, is through instinct and intuition, but through the conscious recognition of the truth, of the validity of this instinct and intuition, which I think is there in all species.

  It was there in the human species, up to 20, 30 thousand years ago or so, obviously this was expressed in an instinctive, intuitive way. And then you tell the story so beautifully, how the self then emerges, and it became submerged in the other elements of it, of become of what it is a part of, but it is basically there, without it life would not be possible. And if life is to continue on this planet, it needs human species, because we are capable of destroying life. I think life would continue if we just quietly disappeared, but there’s not much chance of that. I think we are become an essential element of the unfolding of life, and life itself is an expression of this trend, of this drive, of this will, if you like, in the cosmos, towards wholeness, toward increasing integration, with the consciousness arising and supporting and promoting, guiding this entire process.

  The divine consciousness, if you like, in these terms, comes to expression in our consciousness, because our conscience is part of that divine consciousness, that’s a hologram. We’re all intrinsic parts of it. We can interact with the whole, we can interact with any other part of the whole. If we can recognize this, then we can become conscious agents of evolution, by becoming consciously loving agents, consciously loving parts of it.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: What that really means is, Ervin, that when Ervin is … it’s 57 years ago, and he meets Carita, and they’re together for three, four days, they meet, and they’re in different countries, and then they write love letters to each other for a year, that is the evolutionary impulse of love that brought quarks together, and molecules together, it’s that same impulse that’s now bringing Ervin and Carita together. It’s the same love, it’s one love. There’s no distinction, is that fair?

  Dr. Ervin László: There’s only one love.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: Only one love.

  Dr. Ervin László: It’s only evolutionary love. There are aberrations of it, but evolutionary love is one.

  [Read More...]