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• Prayer

  
  

  Watch and listen to this 5-minute video, the ninth 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
  • Appearing as the One – Unending Symphony

  Enjoy the ninth part of the dialogue here:

  
  

  Transcript

  Dr. Marc Gafni: So Ervin, you mentioned prayer, so I think prayer is an important conversation, because we hear so much about meditation, and meditation is a critical practice. I practice meditation. It’s a beautiful practice that allows you to move beyond your separate self, and access your location in this larger context of ultimate ground of being Buddha nature, in Kabbalah we call it Ayin.

  Prayer I a different practice. Prayer is your access what we just called the personal face of the cosmos. If ervin is personal, ervin’s personal-ness represents this larger personal-ness. If I say i was at Ervin László’s house, and he was really impersonal, which I would never say, it was actually the opposite, but that wouldn’t be a compliment. Wouldn’t say he was impersonal. I would be like, I couldn’t quite find his divinity. When I say, well, I felt so personally welcomed, and so at home, what I mean is, I located the divine essence space that received me, so prayer is, in some sense, turning to the personal face of essence, and creating the personal relationship with the interior personal essence that animates the entire system.

  And when I begin to understand prayer that way, and not as a mythological cosmic vending machine, put in a quarter and get Ankara prayer, then we can actually begin to reclaim prayer, which is what I think you were pointing to. And I noticed that you actually, in all of your lists of practices, you always mention prayer.

  Dr. Ervin László: Prayer, to me, just in my experience, is a way to meditate, because I’m not sharing that belief, let’s say, in a system, which says that through prayer I’m addressing one particular personality, to whom I am praying. I’m not praying to anybody. What I’m doing, I suppose I’m meditating, maybe I’m not praying. I feel that I’m entering into a deeper field, and prayer, I think, to other people maybe, and you would know much more about this, may be addressing to whom you pray.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: Are you willing to play with me on this for a second? Okay, let’s play. So, prayer to a personality is the old prayer, ’cause that’s not the prayer I’m talking about. Let me try and talk about it differently. So, if I say, let’s see if we can kind of … we’ll do this spontaneously, if I say, I hear Professor László talking, so I hear you, so question is, how do I hear you? So I hear you through my ears, but not really through my ears. My ears are just the exterior expression of my intelligence, hears you, so now I think I’m pretty intelligent, but I’m not the most intelligent person in Italy, because you live here, and then there’s a larger intelligence of all of Europe, and then there’s the intelligence of the whole world.

  So if I hear you through my intelligence, so my intelligence participates in the larger intelligence of reality, it’s inseparable from that intelligence. I’m part of a larger intelligence, so in that sense I mean prayer. So, if ervin speaks, and Marc hears Ervin, through his intelligence, then obviously the intelligence of reality hears ervin. That’s what I mean by prayer.

  Dr. Ervin László: I’m perfectly happy to pray to the cosmic consciousness that infuses all of reality.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: Right, but it’s different than meditation, because meditation I’m merging with it, and prayer is I’m actually feeling that that personal quality isn’t only in ervin, the personal quality in Ervin reflects the personal quality of reality, and the reason this is so important, my friend, is because without this, we have this cultural divide. There’s the people that pray, and the fundamentalist world has so much trouble with the liberal world, because the liberal doesn’t pray. And the fundamentalist world, of course, has exiled prayer to a personality, gut they have an intuition that’s right. And the intuition is, that there’s a personal quality of the cosmos.

  And actually, everything you write about indicates that personal quality, so I’m gonna kind of suggest that we actually make that quality visible, not as personality, but as the personal essence of Ervin, and that intelligence participates in the larger personal quality of cosmos. We don’t exile personal to separate self.

  Dr. Ervin László: Okay, I certainly agree with that. In that sense, I am praying. I can’t pray if it’s not in the personal level. It’s the person is the cosmos.

  Dr. Marc Gafni: Right, the person and cosmos meet in some way, so that’s one … that just allows us to kind of heal a cultural divide, the kind of exile of prayer to this very narrow place.

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  If you like the dialogue, you may be interested in our online course “ Becoming a Future Human”

  Who do we need to become in order for humanity to make it though its current dangerous technological adolescence and to create a world that is truly commensurate with our full human, scientific, social, spiritual, and technological capabilities? If you are here to embody your unique gift fully for the benefit of all life and play your role as a steward of the cosmos and the birth of a new humanity, then welcome! This course is for everyone that knows humanity is at the brink of an epochal shift, that believes we can create the world the great sages knew was possible, and that wants to be a part of co-creating that world together.

  >>> Learn more about the course here <<<

  
  
  
  

• Appearing as the One – Unending Symphony

  
  

  Watch and listen to this 8-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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  If you like the dialogue, you may be interested in our online course “ Becoming a Future Human”

  Who do we need to become in order for humanity to make it though its current dangerous technological adolescence and to create a world that is truly commensurate with our full human, scientific, social, spiritual, and technological capabilities? If you are here to embody your unique gift fully for the benefit of all life and play your role as a steward of the cosmos and the birth of a new humanity, then welcome! This course is for everyone that knows humanity is at the brink of an epochal shift, that believes we can create the world the great sages knew was possible, and that wants to be a part of co-creating that world together.

  >>> Learn more about the course here <<<

  
  
  

• 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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