Aubrey Marcus:
“When it was recommended that I do a podcast with Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni, I knew nothing about him. I dove straight into his body of work and my life will never be the same. This is perhaps the most paradigm shifting podcast I have ever recorded. It tells the tale of the greatest love story of all–the story of the cosmo-erotic universe Herself. In this paradigm shifting masterclass, we learn how a force he calls Eros is the fundamental substrate of creation all the way down to the first principles of subatomic matter. Gafni’s wisdom stretches back deep into the secrets of the Temple of Solomon and the mystic Kabbalist tradition. Our conversation touches a wide range of topics, including the nature of the Goddess, the democratization of enlightenment, and rewriting our sexual narratives.”
Dr. Marc Gafni and James Bampfield speak about Enlightenment and Intimacy in this beautiful conversation. “Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.”
In this video Dr. Marc Gafni explores The New Universe Story, Narrative of Unique Self, Ordinary Love and Outrageous Love, What is Unique Self Symphony and The Erotic and the Holy.
What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity’s ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?
ON VALUE, THE UNIQUE SELF, AND COSMO-EROTIC HUMANISM
For episode 39, Layman meets with Marc Gafni to talk about his thoughts on an emerging World Spirituality, grounded in ritual and practice; the need for an integral orientation to encourage “dual citizenship,” embracing a global spirituality while also preserving and developing historical religious traditions; spirituality as the ground of value for human becoming; Marc’s notion of the Unique Self and its relationship to enlightenment; cosmic history as intimate conversation; and Marc’s recent work with Zak Stein on developing a Cosmo-Erotic Humanism. Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, passionate philosopher, and author of ten books. He is the co-founder of The Center for Integral Wisdom, and a rabbinic lineage holder in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. He self-describes as a “citizen” of both Integral World Spirituality and classical Hebrew practice. He has been an editor of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice on issues of Integral spirituality and a faculty member of J.F.K. University. In 2014, Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, with John Mackey and Kate Maloney whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Evolutionary Love.
Layman Pascal is joined by Dr. Marc Gafni, the co-founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom and the author of multiple books and essays on integrative spirituality and spiritual activism. Marc presents his vision of what a planetary politics could and should be, and together they explore the question of AI and the enormous challenges manipulative algorithms pose not only to informed voting, but to sensemaking in general; the emergence of techno-feudalism; the problems with voting protocols rooted in rivalrous dynamics, and the possibilities for liquid democracy or a synergistic democracy; the viability and role of nation states in a globally interconnected and interdependent society; the dynamics of intimacy, and the importance of shared first principles and a shared story; and much more.
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, passionate philosopher, and author of ten books. He is the co-founder of The Center for Integral Wisdom, and a rabbinic lineage holder in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. He self-describes as a “citizen” of both Integral World Spirituality and classical Hebrew practice. He has been an editor of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice on issues of Integral spirituality and a faculty member of J.F.K. University. In 2014, Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, with John Mackey and Kate Maloney whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Evolutionary Love.
by Dr. Marc Gafni
This article is an edited Transcript from One Church – Episode 189 – May 24, 2020. You can watch the whole episode on the Watch page of the One Church Website. One Church: Many Paths, One Mountain is a project of our sister organization, the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.
Read below or download the article here:
The Great Conspiring of Reality:
What Do Conspiracy Theories Get Right?
On every news channel in the world in the last six or seven weeks, the conversation is around one thing. The conversation is around conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory has moved from the periphery of culture, from its fringe to its center. Why has conspiracy theory moved from fringe to center, at this particular moment in time? And why do we need to talk about it, why does it matter? In newspapers in Asia and in Europe and in South America and in Africa, all over the United States, Mexico, Canada, why is conspiracy theory in the mainstream media the lead item? Why is it so critical for us to understand this?
Because it’s actually speaking to something unbelievably important. The sensemaking that we need to do is to understand this in the largest light. The sensemaking that’s being done around conspiracy theory, there is some truth, there are some good things being said, but it’s so shallow, almost insipid, pallid. Neither the conspiracy theorists don’t understand the mainstream media, the mainstream media doesn’t understand the conspiracy theorists. Both of them dismiss each other. It’s an expression of the larger polarization, the larger culture war.
Why are we attracted to conspiracy theory? Why is it driving the click bait structure of the virtual world? What is attractive in it? Where is the allurement? Where is the attraction? That’s the deep question. Anyone who believes every conspiracy theory is a fool. Anyone who doesn’t believe any conspiracy theories is also a fool, perhaps a greater fool.
by Dr. Marc Gafni and James Bampfield
>>> Download a PDF version of this article by clicking HERE <<<
>>> Download a PDF version of this article by clicking HERE <<<
A crisis has swept over our planet. As the virus has woven itself into the fabric of society, so have many aspects of our ordinary lives unraveled. We may be in fear about our health and that of our dear ones. We may find ourselves locked down at home, we may have found that our work has ground to a halt. Almost certainly, many of our plans have disintegrated like sandcastles in the oncoming tide. This wind of collective change is probably the strongest many of us in the developed world have felt in our lifetime.
Life feels different. The world feels a different place.
Instability and uncertainty are here to stay for a while.
In times of crisis, there are two equally important responses.
The first is immediate and practical: help and protect those most affected. Attend to the frontline of suffering and disruption.
Acknowledge and feel the hardships round the world, acknowledge the privileged bubble in which many of us live – just having a garden is a massive bonus right now. Do what we need to do, take social responsibility.
The second imperative of a crisis is to make sense of it and learn from it. Crisis is an ‘evolutionary driver.’ Crisis is a potential birth. If we look at the way evolution has worked in all domains – biologically, psychologically, culturally, politically, economically, spiritually – it has often taken a crisis to precipitate the next level of development.
By Dr. Marc Gafni
>>> Download the Full Paper HERE <<<
Note from the Editor: This article is based on the transcript of an oral talk given by Dr. Marc Gafni towards the end of March, 2020 as well as a longer article by Dr. Marc Gafni. The original talk is found here:
>>> Download the Full Paper HERE <<<
Sense Making in Crisis
As I churn through an inbox filled each day with articles, questions, and commentary about the Corona virus, I see the incredible range of our response. I read about health care workers risking their lives to save the dying, and friends sharing recipes and cocktails on Zoom, and everything in between. I say this with no judgment—there is no one way to respond to such a crisis. But whatever our response, most of us are asking what sense we can make of the meteorlike (but actually well-predicted) arrival of Covid-19 in our presence. The crisis reveals our lack of a map, and the need to articulate a new one. We need a shared story that includes but is underneath all our experience, no matter how varied. This is a time for sense making, both personal and collective. A shared story includes a sense of where we are—a shared universe story, together with who we are—a shared narrative of identity, and what we should be doing—a shared ethos.
Decentralized Sense Making
We need this because we live in a moment of decentralized sense making. We cannot rely on the government, the universities, the press, or the religious institutions and the alternative churches of the human potential movement in its New Age varieties. There is wisdom in each of those, but they are as fragmented as our sense of larger patterns and larger worldviews is fractured. We need to find our way back to a vision of goodness, truth, and beauty, based on the best information in the interior and exterior sciences that we have available to us. By exterior science I mean the hard and soft sciences with their measurement, experimentation, and data collection. By interior sciences, I mean the validated gnosis interior experience—the world of spirit, feeling, and inner wisdom. Together they are teaching us where we are, who we are, and what needs to be done in response to the Covid-19 crisis.
The Realization of Unique Self
We are in a powerful moment of evolutionary reset. We have the potential now to redefine our identities as humans. The central knowing that is crystalizing in this evolutionary moment, sourced in the interior sciences, is that each of us is a Unique Self, with a unique perspective, quality of self and capacity for action. Our Unique Self is not simply our talent as separate monadic units. According to the best of the interior and exterior sciences, we are each—not fundamentally apart but rather—part of the larger whole of existence. But we are distinct parts. Each of us are unique emergents of the entire system. We are unique configurations of the larger field of life and consciousness. And therefore, we each have a unique gift to give that is needed by the whole. That is our core identity.
Blessed by Unique Self Heroes
This understanding of identity has not yet emerged into society. But more people are recognizing that we are not cogs in a production machine, nor merely a monadic separate self in a win-lose success struggle but rather—I am a Unique Self—had not yet emerged into society. The separate self identity still dominates culture almost entirely. But with the crisis of Covid-19 we have been blessed with so many heroes, Unique Selves in action every single one of them. Heroes, like poets, are often several steps ahead of culture. And as Unique Self the first response that our sense making demands is unique action. That is what it means to be the hero of your own life.
In the face of tremendous tragedy and urgent need we have seen so many people step up to give whatever unique gifts they have. They are not waiting for direction from others—they are putting their lives on the line and supporting others in every way possible. They are doctors coming out of retirement, they are teenagers delivering food, they are neighbors staging a drive-by birthday party complete with horns and balloons, they are sewing masks, they are applauding health care workers every night from their balconies, they are telephoning people who live alone, they are sending money to first responders and restaurant workers who lost their jobs. This is beautiful to experience, and tells us everything about one major thread of human nature—our inherent capacity to align with goodness and love even at great risk to ourselves. That makes sense only if we feel our identities to be unique and needed expressions of the large field of consciousness and love, not separate selves essentially alienated from the whole.
The immediate steps in sense making take place in the context of actions like these. The very first thing that needs to be done is to heal the sick, to have enough ventilators, to have enough beds in hospitals, to protect those who work in them, to make sure that everyone has access to basic necessities as we face a new economy.
Watch This Featured Clip by Dr. Marc Gafni
Transcript
Welcome, everyone. It’s a hard time. It’s a painful time. We live in a world of outrageous pain, and the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. One of the things that we’re trying to do here at the Center for Integral Wisdom and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and we’re also trying to do it in a broadcast program that’s its own world that spun off originally from the center and the foundation and is now an independent and beautiful movement which is called One Church: Many Paths, One Mountain—we broadcast every week and we’re together every week; it’s an incredible community of some 10,000 people around the world—what we’re trying to do is what I would call sensemaking. We live in a moment of decentralized sensemaking. We don’t rely at this point on the government or the church. Our information ecologies are broken. Our sense of larger patterns and larger worldviews has been fractured and fragmented.
So as we find ourselves in the middle of this outrageous pain, the pain of the coronavirus, which is now a collective pain across the world, I just read an amazing set of stories about five Italian doctors, heroes, heroes of outrageous love who died this week, and the stories abound across the world. And we don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re doing everything we can to flatten the curve, but we’re not doing enough. Will we be able to flatten the curve? What are the timeframes? There’s an enormous amount that needs to happen now.
But what I want to talk to you about in this moment is the sensemaking that we need to do. Now, sensemaking takes place in the context of action, so clearly the very first thing that needs to be done now is to heal the sick, to have enough ventilators, to have enough beds in hospitals, to not collapse the medical system, to not collapse the economy, because the economy is about people being able to buy basic necessities. It’s about survival in the most essential of ways. Let’s take the United States just as an example. Seventy percent of the families in the United States live from paycheck to paycheck.
So the amount of pain and dislocation and disruption and suffering is intense and real and we need to respond to it, and the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love, and outrageous love means that there are outrageous acts of love to perform, and it’s not just the Italian doctors who are being the most incredible—this is a moment where Italy truly is filled with outrageous lovers, unbelievable beyond imagination—but it’s not just those Italian doctors. It’s all of us who need to be, in this moment, heroes. We need to protect our elderly who are more precious than precious. We need to provide every resource we can. We need to share our homes when it’s appropriate within the context of physical distancing. We need to share our resources, which means our money and our time. We need to share our hearts. We need to join hands. We need to respond to outrageous pain with outrageous love.
Various aspects of Eros – Video with Dr. Marc Gafni
Eleven video excerpts from the Summer Festival of Love 2018, in which Dr. Marc Gafni discusses the term Eros from several different angles.
Stay tuned for the new Online Course with Dr. Marc Gafni to be launched soon: Our First Steps as “Homo Amor”. The course was recorded during the last Festival of Love in Holland and is being produced right now. It will be launched on our CIW Programs Platform. Snippets of that course were used for the video above.
Transcript
What is Eros?
So in A Return to Eros, we tried to define what eros means. And we got almost there. It was one of the more depressing moments. We got like, just about there, then we published it, and then I realized it was one tad off. Right? And I just like, killing myself, calling the publisher, “Stop, stop, stop!” And he said, “Fuck you, don’t talk to me. No one cares.”
But here’s the best definition of eros. This is what eros … right, we got almost there in Return to Eros. And I apologize, we’ll correct it in the next edition.
Eros is … and listen. Try and look like, wildly excited about this, because this took me 20 years, this very simple sentence. So just look … just, even if you don’t get it, just like look, like, “Wow, that got so amazing. Like, that’s so fantastic.”
Okay, ready? So Eros is … eros is … Eros is the experience of radical aliveness moving towards ever-deeper contact and ever-larger wholes. W-H-O-L-E-S. And those of us who are hanging out with Joost someplace in France, we did that sentence over there, right?
Eros is the experience of radical aliveness which desires. It’s filled with dripping desire to make ever-deeper contact and create ever-larger wholes. That is the quality of eros. Eros is all the way up and all the way down.
Eros and Desire
Every single person in this room, and every single person in the world has some experience of our basic needs, the dignity of our desire, being fundamentally degraded. Desire is the quality of finitude. It’s not just the shame of aliveness, it’s the shame of finitude. It’s the shame when my basic needs are shamed. My fundamental desire for the first scene, food, and the second scene, touch. Your Need is My Allurement restores the dignity of personal need, which is not a psychological category. It’s not an existential category. It’s not even a spiritual category. The word’s too narrow. It’s not even just a scientific category, but it’s the essential structure of reality. The structure of reality is eros, desire, is the intimate Universe, and the entire intimate Universe lives in me.
What Whitehead called the Lure of Feeling for the primordial One, which drives every quark and atom, which is how we describe prehension, which moves atoms to come together, is alive in me all the way up and all the way down. When you have a structure of reality in which there’s no sexual narrative, and there’s no narrative of touch, and there’s no narrative of desire, and there’s not an understanding that I am a unique expression, a unique set of allurements, that allurement guides my life. Allurement is clarified allurement. I wrote 1000 pages on that. How do you clarify your desire, the clarification of desire? The distinction we’ve made between eros and pseudo-eros. Of course, that’s all in place. But, remember that all desire is the source of ethics.
From Pre-Modernity, through Modernity, to Post-Modernity – Video with Dr. Marc Gafni
In this video excerpt from the Summer Festival of Love 2018, Dr. Marc Gafni paints a historical overview of how humanity landed in this critical moment, where we have all the power in the world but lack a story to give it meaning in a way that evolves us all.
Stay tuned for the new Online Course with Dr. Marc Gafni to be launched soon: Our First Steps as “Homo Amor”. The course was recorded during the last Festival of Love in Holland and is being produced right now. It will be launched on our CIW Programs Platform.
Transcript
Dr. Marc Gafni:
We’re ready? We’re ready? Yeah? We have a little drum roll in the house. Drum roll in the house. Yes, drum roll in the … oh my God. Here we go, and…
You think by the way, what we’re about, the conversation we’re about to have all week, you think this conversation is happening everywhere, it should be. It should be happening at the best conservative think tanks, and the best liberal think tanks of Europe, and Asia, and America. It should be happening at the leading university departments all over the world. But it’s not.
This is the conversation that everyone knows needs to happen, but it hasn’t happened in a real way since the Renaissance. That’s a very big deal. When I make an assertion like that … So, I’m trust able on some things. I don’t make casual assertions. I’ve spent my life hanging out way too many wild central nights with books. Till 5:00 in the morning I’ve plowed through thousands and thousands of volumes in my life. This conversation is not happening. It’s the single most important conversation we can have, which is after all of the deconstruction, Postmodernity. How many people have heard the term Postmodernity? Anyone?
Postmodern, postmodern means really simply. This postmodern moment which says that all the earlier stories of the past were wrong. Postmodernity says that pre modernity meaning up to the Renaissance. The great traditions, the great religions, up to the Renaissance these guys got it wrong in a really bad way. Voltaire leads modernity with the cry: remember the cruelties. The great evil of pre modernity that was unleashed through the power of sanctioned official religion. So, Postmodernity critiques the hell out of pre modernity, but forgets to make a distinction.
The Law of Feeling and Healing
The Law of Feeling and Healing, while simple in explanation, is quite profound. As the gateway to a seemingly impossible evolutionary shift, this law is our access to the divinity and untold amounts of love, joy, and connection.
Fifty years ago, God was experienced by the great realizers and religions as both all knowing and all potent and powerful. Only God knew of the immense pain in the world. Today, boundaries around knowledge cease to exist and images of unbearable suffering penetrateour hearts, bodies and minds hourly. Consequently, there is an enormous amount of Promethean talk about humans becoming God-like with the power we wield. Ignoring the fact that such talk does not take into account the infinite power of cosmos, these erroneous conversations forget divinity is not merely the infinity of power but also the infinity of pain. As our power of knowledge increases so does our awareness of the depth of suffering. In one way, we are potent likegods; we have the never previously known ability to acquire depths of understanding and graphic detail about the horrific pain happening across the planet. Yet, while we know an enormous amount about the reality of suffering around the globe, we experience ourselves as impotent. We feel powerless. Unlike the gods, we are rendered powerless to heal the hurt surrounding us. For most of us, the only way we are capable of responding is to close our hearts.
The text in this document was taken from a first draft text of the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid. This article elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.
This beautiful eulogy was given by Dr. Marc Gafni during our Evolutionary Church Memorial. The written version below is taken from the lightly edited transcript. For the video of the service scroll all the way below.
Introduction by Dr. Marc Gafni
Every week we’ve been doing Evolutionary Church with Barbara and Lisa and myself and thousands of us from around the world. It’s been the heart and the throb of where we’re going and the vision we want to articulate together. Barbara and I loved Evolutionary Church. We started 131 weeks ago, and every week we would write a code together, and we’re now in Evolutionary Church.
For those of you who are wondering what to expect, there’s going to be two memorial services.
Barbara said to me, “Marc, when I pass, have a memorial service at church and have then a big evolutionary party. So, at that evolutionary party we are going to see lots of Barbara’s work and Barbara’s clips, and now we’re in church and we’re going to follow the order of church. …
Today in place of the sermons, I’ll gently and humbly offer a eulogy to Barbara, and all through we’re going to be resonating with Barbara, who’s here with us.
Just a few days ago, we heard Barbara say, “I declare the continuity of consciousness.” So, Barbara, right in this moment we declare with you the continuity of your consciousness and know that you’re here with us.
Last Friday night I was talking to Barbara about the code for the next day, but then by the next morning I called and Barbara wasn’t vocal and they didn’t quite understand why. I asked the nurse to put her on the phone. They held the phone to her ear, and Barbara said, “Marc,” and she was excited about church, and then she wasn’t able to speak afterwards. Ultimately, she went into a coma and wasn’t able to wake up and began her transition, but Barbara’s not silent. Her silence in this moment is not a silence of absence. It’s a silence of presence, and it’s up to us to carry that torch.
Barbara’s passing the torch and it’s every single person in this church today that is invited to their, what Barbara called vocational arousal. In order for each of us to light the world on fire with that teaching, with that message, with that aliveness, with that Barbara-ness, and in that, Barbara then shifts now not to silence of absence but to silence of presence. Barbara’s going to become more present in her continuity of consciousness, more available, more alive, more impactful than even ever before.
So as we enter, I’m going to ask everyone just to write three words in the chat box, “Barbara inspires me.”
We actually feel Barbara here. Barbara inspires me. Barbara, can you feel that, love? Feel that everybody. Barbara inspires me, It’s not silence of absence. We’re actually triumphing over death, and the triumph over death was one of Barbara’s deepest heart’s desires, and we’ll talk about heart’s desire. Barbara inspires me. Feel that, feel that just ripple. Let’s lift that like a prayer to the sky. Barbara inspires me.
Barbara was, I believe, the greatest evolutionary storyteller of our time. Barbara was the feminine co-creator. She thought beautifully. She had a clear and sharp and wonderful mind, and anyone who’s read Evolutionary Synthesis, which is about 45 pages, she wrote in 2007 that we’re going to actually reissue, you’ll see the clarity as she gathered thoughts and extensively cited and wove the thoughts together. But Barbara’s essence was to inspire. Barbara told the evolutionary story. Barbara became the campfire. Barbara became the Word. She was the Logos.
Barbara inspires me, and in mysticism and all the great traditions we say that the challenge of death is that a person becomes non-dynamic. They become static. They can no longer influence and impact, which is why in mysticism what we do is, in order to give the person, and in this case, the great leader, the great visionary, the wondrous woman who passed, to give our Barbara, our beloved Barbara, the strength, the energy to take the next step in the journey of the continuity of consciousness. She’s turning to us now and she’s saying “Activate me.” She’s saying “Let me impact you so that I’m fully alive.” So when we write “Barbara inspires me,” it directly impacts and affects all the worlds, upper and lower, and it supercharges, if you will, it animates Barbara’s consciousness to take the next steps. Barbara inspires me. We’re ready to be impacted.
Enjoy this beautiful Video Tribute to Barbara Marx Hubbard
It was part of the Evolutionary Church Memorial for Barbara on April 13th – Created by the Executive Producer of Evolutionary Church and Executive Vice-President of the Center for Integral Wisdom Lisa Witter. If the embedded video doesn’t work for you, click here.
Eulogy by Dr. Marc Gafni
Beloved Barbara,
Could we be eulogizing you?
Barbara, you were so not ready to go. You were not done. You were in your 90th year. You are an evolutionary force of nature.
Here we are about to speak your eulogy. I promised you an evolutionary party, and so we’re going to have a big evolutionary party eulogy. Now we’re in church that you loved so much.
Let me begin with a word from my teacher, Barbara, that we spoke about so many times, Dr. Soloveitchik. He spoke about eulogy, drawing deeply from the lineage of the mystics, who said that eulogy is not a whitewash. Eulogy is not pretty words as Hafiz says, when he mocks eulogy.
Eulogy is two things. One is we ask your forgiveness, Barbara. We’re here to ask your forgiveness and we’re asking your forgiveness for not having fully recognized you, not having fully seen you, for somehow taking for granted that we could call you and that irrepressible, gorgeous, relentlessly alive, infinitely positive voice would always be there. It’s almost like we lived in this beautiful home on the ocean, but the ocean was just there, and we stopped quite seeing it. So we ask forgiveness.
Two, in the teaching of the mystics, in eulogy and the days after Barbara’s passed, as her spirit’s, in the continuity of consciousness, is both fully with us and moving beyond the world, in this moment, there is the last opportunity in this lifetime to liberate the person who’s passed, to liberate Barbara, from loneliness.
Social Justice and Superorganisms
A contribution for the roundtable discussion of David Sloan Wilson’s, Does Altruism Exist. Summer, 2015.
Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard
The Center for Integral Wisdom & The Foundation for Conscious Evolution
Abstract:
The New Paradigm Is Old Hat
Heterodox evolutionary discourse has long entertained the emergence of what Wilson calls superorganisms. These are emergent phenomena that functionally integrate lower-order organisms as parts, lessening within group selection pressure, making the many into one, and thus fostering the evolution of a new organismic totality. Over the years this idea led many to suggest the (inevitable?) emergence of some kind of new evolutionary event—a superorganism of humans. Wilson is interested to argue that, now, with new evidence, we finally really know that, for example, cooperation can have an impact on evolution via group selection, even as it seems counter intuitive to cooperate at the level of individual selection. Moreover, the dynamic systems and evo-devo researchers have been on to something: emergence often works via symbioses and “cooperation,” especially at the cellular and ecosystem levels. This provides a new and better platform for understanding human ethical and moral action in evolutionary terms.
We strongly support these directions and expansions in mainstream evolutionary science. We would only like to note here that heterodox evolutionists have already spilled a lot of ink about the role of morality, self-consciousness, and group-consciousness as a factor in evolution. This tradition has spent more time looking into the implications of evolutionary thinking for the self-understanding of the species, and less time working with models of mechanisms and exteriorities. So the question of whether altruism exists has not been as important as questions about the many forms of selfless behavior, as well as the higher levels of moral development individuals can attain while “becoming a part of something larger than themselves.”
In particular, the focus has been on this question: What would it really mean for our humanity if we become swept up into a superorganism, as if becoming cells organized for the benefit of some larger organelle? This is a profoundly important ethical question, and it tends to evoke, when asked, a religious or spiritual state of mind.
Some us who have been actively asking such questions have also sought to refine the phenomenology of moral consciousness associated with evolutionary emergence in human groups. The key focus is how to strike a balance between what Wilson calls (unfortunately) “selfishness” and “altruism.” We call them autonomy and communion. Too much of either and any group is pathological. Too much communion and you get a kind of totalitarianism or coercive fascism. Too much autonomy and you get narcissists and rouges, lawlessness and violence (like the wolves of Wall Street Wilson laments). These are the kind of phenomena studied in the field of conscious evolution, where the evolution of human consciousness itself is taken as both object and subject.
>>> Read more <<<
Join Us In Celebrating the Life, Work and Legacy of Our Beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard
Tomorrow, April 13th at 9am PT / Noon ET on Zoom
Dear Beloved Friends,
This is an event of a life time. Our Beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard has passed to the next world. In the days immediately after a great person’s passing, there is an opening… a moment of irreplaceable, unique revelation…
You are invited and you are needed!
Tomorrow at 9:00am PT we are going to, with Barbara’s ecstatic permission, lift her consciousness as a prayer to the sky, into the highest heavens and beyond.
In our 131st week of the Evolutionary One World Church we are holding a celebration memorial service for our Beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard.
Barbara’s has promised to join us. Her consciousness is alive and will be present with us.
Experience the radical joy that is One World Church of Evolutionary Love.
Learn what it means to know your clarified “hearts desire” as the divine desire that drives all of reality.
Let’s come together for this momentous celebration honoring Barbara and telling the hidden outrageous love story of her life.
Let’s Love it all open to God!
If you are a Church member, simply use the same link we use every week to join church. If you are not a church member, register for free to get the link here: http://bit.ly/Evolutionary_Church
We also invite you to read Marc’s prayer for Barbara and to leave your own prayers and a word or two about how Barbara impacted you in the comments on Barbara’s Facebook page and please share it with your friends!
Barbara loved parties, and we want to make this the greatest one ever… we hope to see you there!
With Love,
Marc, Lisa and Kerstin and the CIW Team
Join Us
Saturday, April 13th 2019
9 am PT – Noon ET – 6 pm CET
Dr. Marc’s Earlier Letter
Dearest Beloved Friends,
It is with great personal sadness that I share with you that our beloved Barbara has passed into the next world.
Barbara you were a blazing light in this world. The Wild Stallions that moved you were yoked to the evolutionary impulse itself.
Evolution was awake as you in Person. Reality delighted in having a Barbara experience.
You felt the ecstatic urgency of the evolutionary impulse moving through you all the time.
You took the pain of depression and turned it into the joy of evolutionary activism.
The Greatest Story Ever Told
with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni
Listen to the Audio Series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni above.
Or listen to and read the transcripts of the twenty Audio Sessions in this Series!
For more dialogues, see our Thought Leader Dialogues Portal!
In the words of CIW President Dr. Marc Gafni:
We’re here to tell the story that is the best understanding we have, integrating the best wisdom of all the traditional period of the entire modern period and the entire postmodern period. Integrating all that wisdom into one narrative stream.
What is the best universe story available to us today?
Why does that matter? It matters because we live inside of our story, but our story’s not just a creation, it’s a discovery. It’s a revelation of the best wisdom we have about the nature of reality, and what our place is in that story.
We’re interested not just in a theoretical universe story, but how are we personally implicated in that story? Knowing the story that I live in tells me why I’m alive.
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Who are you? You are an irreducible, unique expression of the love, intelligence and love beauty, that is the animating and initiating eros of all that is, that lives in you, as you and through you. That never was, is or will be ever again other than through you lady Barbara. As such, Barbara has and Marc has and… Every single person listening, each of us has an irreducibly unique perspective, and we have an irreducibly unique taste which is our unique quality of intimacy. That irreducibly unique perspective and taste and quality of intimacy manifests our unique capacity to give our unique gift, and our unique gift addresses a unique need. A unique need in us and a unique need in our circle of intimacy and influence that can be addressed by us and us alone, by no one else that ever was, is or will be, ever in history of reality.
Giving that unique gift and being that unique self, right, it’s about the giving of the gift and it’s the being, the incarnating of our unique quality of intimacy, that is the eros and telos of our lives, it’s the kilos and the eros of our lives. To live a telerotic life is to be incarnating your unique self but with one more step. As part of the unique self symphony, as part of the larger context, right, the great unique self symphony which is the basic structure of a new politics of evolutionary love.
Participate in the Church of Evolutionary Love
Co-Initiated and Co-Founded by Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni
Together with Executive Producer & Moderator Lisa Witter
Every Saturday 9-10 am Pacific Time Online
Watch and listen to this 9-minute video, the tenth 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
- Prayer
Transcript
Dr. Marc Gafni: So let’s go to the next topic, which is death, life and death. I know that you’re working on a book now on kind of the nature of immortality. So once we talk about unique self, as not social, psychological, or cultural conditioning, once we talk about uniqueness as a quality of essence, so it begins to make sense that a quality of essence can’t disappear. So share with us, how does that begin to play in your studies. If it was just true self, you would disappear back into the one. If there’s unique self, then the notion of immortality begins to make sense, not as egoic immortality, not as separate self immortality, but as this unique quality that lives on, and what you’ve called … you’ve rediscovered and reintroduced into thought, this Akashic record.
Dr. Ervin László: The key to it is, I think how you consider your mind, your consciousness, and you can say yourself. I’m using the term consciousness in this part. And I suggested earlier in our dialog, that our mind, our consciousness, is not in space time. It’s on a different level of reality, it’s on a deeper level. It’s connected with the rest. And it’s an expression in space time, like now there’s a scientific theory in quantum physics which says, the whole 3D, three dimensional universe is a projection of 2D codes beyond space time, and it sounds like a far out theory, but it explains very much how things are connected.
Dr. Marc Gafni: Understood, thank you.
Dr. Ervin László: If your consciousness is really beyond this space time level, then it means that it’s also beyond your space time body and brain. That means that when your space time body, your living brain shuts down, your consciousness doesn’t necessarily shut down. It could persist, because it doesn’t persist here on this level, it persists on another level. So in you, it gets just projected into you. It’s never actually in you, it’s in association with you. It becomes an element in you, but the consciousness is something which is beyond space time, beyond the brain. And in that case, of course, it’s like, we talked about the symphony, it’s like a symphony, that’s broadcast over the air. You can pick it up, and you can turn off your radio, or your TV set, or whatever.
The symphony doesn’t disappear. You don’t hear it anymore, and people say, of course, that’s a proof that if you turn off your brain, then consciousness disappears. It’s not a proof, because consciousness may not be limited to the brain. It appears in the brain. It’s in a very important essay that is not so much regarded, but it’s now being rediscovered, the great psychologist and philosopher, William James gave a talk in 1899, in the immortality series in Ingersoll talks on immortality. And he said there are really two theories of the relationship between brain and mind and consciousness, and one is the production theory, and the other one is the transmission.
Now the production theory is, the brain somehow creates consciousness. It generates it in the same way a turbine, if it runs, it generates electricity, you stop the turbine, the electricity stops. This is the dominant common sense, western concept. It’s a product, a byproduct of the brain. We can’t explain how that a brain neural interactions produce something, a sensation of a qualitative sensation of we call consciousness. That’s a big problem, a real big problem in consciousness. These are so called hard problem. But if our brain and body, because the whole body, I think, is involved in it, the heart is involved in it very much, only transmits consciousness, then we perceive it while our body is operating, we participate in it.
When the body dies, consciousness continues. It could conceivably become re-associated with another brain and body, you know, which is the concept of reincarnation, or rebirth. The whole idea of past lives, where we saw so much evidence that we are not limited to the single lifetime, so I think that is, I think, the key to idea of death, death is of the physical body. Consciousness is infinite.
Dr. Marc Gafni: Consciousness is infinite, and I want to … and I’m looking forward very much to this new book, and our mutual colleague, Michael Murphy, of Esalen, has spent a lot of his time in the last 15 years funding, through Esalen, the best research on reincarnation. He actually funded the chair of Ian Stevens, at University of Virginia, went to a lot of the collection. Michael said to me that, yeah, the classic work, he said that he had once said in public that he was agnostic on reincarnation, and he went home and he felt sleazy, because he was unwilling to admit it publicly, and he made a decision 15 years ago that it was actually immoral for him not to claim what he actually knows, based on all the research, that actually the best explanation of reincarnation, really the only one that he sees, and Michael’s a hardcore rationalist, is the survival of consciousness beyond the body.
And we have a wealth of empirical information. In your book on this, I’m sure will be an important watershed, in kind of bringing and integrating and up-leveling this conversation, and if we can bring the two things together, as long as we had a notion of enlightenment being merging into the one, then there was no real reason to assume the immortality of the unique individual. The second you actually realize the irreducible uniqueness, again, not as personality, not as social, psychological, and cultural conditioning, but there’s actually a unique essence, which is Ervining in the world, then actually it makes all the sense in the world to actually think about the immortality of consciousness, which is I think why Buddhism actually reintroduced reincarnation on the side, and it’s Buddhism had a strong sense of oneness, and yet reincarnation, what’s reincarnating if you’re only part of the one, well, so the essential structure of unique consciousness, and there’s more and more and more writing on that. When is your book gonna be available, when are we gonna get to see it?
Dr. Ervin László: Well, I have to write it first. I have a draft of it now. I think it’ll be 2015-
Dr. Marc Gafni: So we’re gonna wait for that book. Well that’s a good place to end, we’re waiting for one of Professor László’s upcoming books, on the immortality of the soul. I recommend it, and I want to recommend again, everyone, just go to Amazon, and to get The Self Actualizing Cosmos. This is actually a great place, it’s a good access point, i think, for all of Ervin’s work, to the extent I’ve read four or five books. There’s many, many more, but this is a great beginning, I think, to kind of enter into the work.
Dr. Ervin László: But let me add, you can follow this up with a book that don’t have to wait until I finish the other one, which is coming out in October, so by the time perhaps you play this, by the time it will have been out, which is called “The Immortal Mind”.
Dr. Marc Gafni: The Immortal Mind.
Dr. Ervin László: The Continuity of Consciousness Beyond the Brain, that’s what the subtitle is.
Dr. Marc Gafni: Oh, so you already a backup, fantastic.
Dr. Ervin László: Yes, with a lot of lot of case studies, of the 180 pages or so, so 120 are case studies.
Dr. Marc Gafni: Okay, so this is The Immortal Mind: The Continuity of Consciousness Beyond the Brain, and I’m sure we’ll have a band on the bottom of this screen by the time this actually goes public, with the Amazon place to go on Amazon and to actually find the book, and I just want to say in conclusion, my delight in actually meeting Ervin about two years ago, doing a dialog or two, two dialogs actually, and then speaking a number of times on the phone, and then coming here in person, is I’ve had the privilege of actually falling in love with this unique genius mind, with this gorgeous, gorgeous human expression of outrageous brilliance, outrageous love, that’s making such a stunning contribution to the evolution of consciousness, that it’s been just, every moment a delight, and I want to thank you.
Dr. Ervin László: I can’t match your eloquence, but I can match your feeling. I feel just the same way about meeting you, and now getting to know you in person.
Dr. Marc Gafni: Thank you so much, what a delight, what a delight. Thank you everyone for being with us. Thank you.
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.
A Film Featuring Barbara Marx Hubbard, Michael Bernard Beckwith, & Marc Gafni
Enjoy the movie above with Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Michael Bernard Beckwith about our current crisis as driver for the evolution of love!
We live in the best of times. We live in a time where the average human being has more human dignity, more possibility, more potential, more material prosperity, more education than at any other time in human history.
We live in the worst of times. We live in a moment in which our progress itself threatens to consume us.
We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. – Dr. Marc Gafni
We need to close the gap between our ability to feel the pain and our ability to heal the pain. Only outrageous love can do that. Only through committing our unique outrageous acts of love can we do that.
Watch the video to learn more…
For a transcript of the film, turn on the English captions under Settings > Subtitles/CC.
Join the Church of Evolutionary Love
Join Us Online Every Saturday at 9am PT/ Noon ET
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.
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.
COE
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