By Marc Gafni
There is great danger in both in the New Age idolization of state experiences and the excessive premium that much of the Integral community places on complex levels of cognition. As I have pointed out in many teachings, higher levels of cognitive complexity do not a better human being make. It is not by accident that we rarely see posts in the blogs of persons at higher stages of development about kindness.
Kindness is a value that all to often is relegated by writers and thinkers to the lower levels of amber (AQAL) or blue (Spiral Dynamics Integral) consciousness. It rarely appears as a value in many Integral contexts. Or worse still it is given lip service even as it is ignored in practice when the real gods of cognition and power are worshipped.
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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 more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
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 paris in the opposition as glimmerings of the one.
The Chinese master Lao-tzu saw this clearly when he said all opposites arise simultaneously and mutually:
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense.
Having and not having arise together
Difficult and easy complement each other.
To suggest otherwise, writes Chuang Tzu, is not “to apprehend the great principles of the universe or the nature of creation.”
What does all this mean? Ultimately reality is a unity of opposites. What that means is that there are no real boundaries. True wisdom is the sweetness of integration and union. Ultimately the world of two does not exist in the deepest reality. To love is to reach for the radical divine presence in all that is. To love is to know that ultimately there are no boundaries. And yet the road to the circle in which everything is on the inside is through the line. Ethics is the Hebrew mystic’s path to eros.
The Mystery of Love
Marc Gafni
Page 318, 319
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org
The Temple Mysteries and the Next Stage in the Evolution of Sex!
Dr. Marc Gafni teaches about the ancient Temple Mysteries, in accordance with great esoteric kabbalistic tradition. Gafni, through his unique mixture of love, transmission, and esoteric teachings brings the temple mysteries to the modern and postmodern world.
At the center of the mystery are the two cherubs.
On the top of the Lost Ark in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple, there are two cherubs in radical sexual embrace! Why are love making cherubs the primary image in the holy of holies of the Jerusalem Temple. And why does the biblical tradition teach that God's voice speaks from between the cherubs?
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The Unique Self is the Eros, the life impulse that drives us forward. Shadow is Eros turned around against itself. By integrating your shadow, you are liberating the trapped life energy of your Unique Self. Your life energy is not generic. It is your life energy. The portal to your energy is none other than your Unique Self. Your most persistent shadow- structure is also your most abundant wellspring of energy and life. The reclaiming of life energy happens through shadow integration. Thus, the tantric masters of the left-handed path saw shadow integration as a process of revelation by which the previously hidden Unique Self””the secret mystery””manifests as inspiration and Eros.
Your Unique Self (In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 252
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org
“IT DEPENDS ON LOVE.” In this old Aramaic phrase, “it” refers to shadow. This phrase will guide you on the path of shadow integration that the old Unique Self masters called the “left-handed emanation” or the “way of the dragon. ” The left hand implies the power of transmutation, while the right hand symbolizes the power of force. The left-handed path is referred to by the Tantric Kabbalists as Derek Hataninim, which I have often translated as “the way of the dragon ”. The way of the dragon invites not the slaying of the dragon, but rather its befriending and healing.
To follow this way is to serve and to grow through the light and energy that emanates from the darkness itself.
With the understanding of the New Enlightenment, the energy that emanates from the darkness is not foreign to us. It is none other than the displaced fullness of your Unique Self and the dis-owned freedom of your True Self. It is the energy of the radical breaking of all boundaries. You have shattered the limits of your skin-encapsulated ego, and stepped into the fullness of your distinct expression of all that is. You have realized your full identity with the divine, and all false boundaries crumble before the audacious power of your penetrating love. This is the ultimate expression of Eros.
The energy of darkness is but the pseudo-Eros of breaking boundaries in the world of illusion. When you follow the attraction to the boundary-breaking pseudo-Eros to its root, it is revealed to be the yearning for the full enlightenment of Unique Self manifestation. The coiled boundaries of separate self melt before the radiance of Unique Self.
This is the hidden intention of the old Kabbalistic koan, “The contraction of darkness is only sweetened in its root.” The word for contraction, din, refers to your shadow. The word “sweetness” refers to the tantric level of consciousness in Kabbalah, where light that comes from the darkness is of a higher quality than light that bypasses the darkness.
In the way of the dragon, the energy of shadow is transmuted through love.
One of the people who intuited this truth of shadow energy, even though he did not have a larger Unique Self context within which to integrate his understanding, was the philosopher Nietzsche. He writes in his maddening and wonderful work,Thus Spake Zarathustra:
Of all the evil I deem you capable
Therefore I want the good from you
Verily I have often laughed at weaklings
Who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
Nietzsche believed that the good could never gain the upper hand unless it is infused with “the energy generated by murder.”
The poet Rilke captured the Kabbalistic consciousness of the way of the dragon in a few short lines:
Perhaps all the Dragons of our lives
Are princesses who are only waiting to
See us once, beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in
Its deepest being something
That needs our love.
Your Unique Self, (In Press)
Pages 271, 272
Dr. Marc Gafni
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org
by Ken Wilber
I would like to take a slightly different approach to this month's column, and instead of continuing to outline an integral approach to spirituality, give an example of its use in the real world. What I am doing in this column is quite different from the other columns on Beliefnet (namely, give a serialized overview of an integral spirituality, which can get somewhat tedious). So, let's take a break.
What follows is a foreword I wrote for a not-yet-published book called Soulfully Gay, by Joe Perez. Joe is just now seeking a publisher, so you won't yet find his work on Amazon. I won't spoil what he's written by telling you the plot, but I hope you enjoy this note from the heart and see it as an example of integral thinking in action.
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(c) January 2012 Stuart Miles
October, 2011
by Mariana Caplan
"We become skillful actors, and while playing deaf and dumb to the real meaning of the teachings, we find some comfort in pretending to follow the path."
~Chogyam Trunpga Rinpoche
Given that global culture has been turned toward materialistic values in a way unprecedented in human history, it is inevitable that this same ethic would infiltrate our approach to spirituality. We live in a culture that values accumulation and consumption, and it is naïve of us to assume that simply because we are interested in spiritual growth that we have relinquished our materialism -- or even that we necessarily should.
There is nothing wrong with having an "om" symbol on your t-shirt or being an avid practitioner of meditation while also enjoying moneymaking and big business, but it is useful to explore, understand and check your integrity in relationship to your choices. Spiritual materialism is not a matter of the things that we have, but of our relationship to them.
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Your Unique Self: Giving Your Gift ”” Dr. Marc Gafni -- Audio Transcript
Bert Parlee: Marc has an incredible breadth of wisdom and knowledge, not only in the spiritual traditions, but his doctorate is from Oxford, he's a scholar, speaks various languages, and the way he weaves stories, drawing from all streams of life that he brings into his very embodied organic teaching style. Welcome Marc.
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By Dr. Marc Gafni
I actually began to re-think the whole "meaning of life" question some years ago when I was in a hotel in Denver, Colorado. You know how hotel rooms work, there is a television, bed, a lot of towels, and if you look in the drawer next to the bed you will almost unfailingly find, at least in the United States, a Gideon bible. My suitcase with my own set of books had missed its connecting flight and I was at the hotel tired, without books and not feeling that great. And you know empty hotel rooms far from home can be the loneliest places in the world. So I open the Gideon bible.
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by Sally Kempton
In my late 20s, as a recovering existentialist in the midst of a life-crisis, I came across he Bhagavad Gita, and read for the first time Krishna's wordson dharma. You probably remember the situation: the warrior-prince Arjuna, paralyzed by confusion at the prospect of having to kill his kinsmen in a war, begs his friend and teacher, Krishna, for help. Though Krishna's response touches on every essential aspect of the inner life, from how to meditate to what to expect when we die, the lines that struck me were these: "You are a warrior," Krishna tells his pupil, "your svadharma, your personal duty, is to fight. Therefore, stand up and do battle. Better your own dharma badly performed than the dharma of another done perfectly."
Is it possible to read that sentence without asking yourself the question "What is my dharma?" I felt that I'd suddenly found words for a question I'd been trying to formulate my whole life. I made my living as a writer””was that my dharma? I'd just begun serious spiritual practice””was that my dharma? I had a life-long aversion to the conventional rules of society””was that a sign that I was out of line with dharma, or simply that I followed a dharma that was uniquely mine? Was there really, as Krishna's words seemed to imply, a blueprint for right action, perhaps lodged in my DNA, that could provide my own personal path to truth? Was that the clue to the question that had confused me for most of my life, "What am I really supposed to be doing?"
Years of practice have convinced me that there is such a thing as personal dharma, and that unless we're in touch with it, we're out of touch with our real source of strength and guidance. When we are inside our dharma, spiritual growth seems to happen naturally. When we aren't, we feel stuck and stymied not just in our work and relationships, but in our inner life as well.
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By Trevor Malkinson
“The root of our restlessness is the whole evolution of the cosmos itself. When we think about ourselves and our destiny, we can't dissociate them from the destiny of the whole universe." – evolutionary theologian John Haught
At the 2010 Integral Theory Conference, I attended a presentation by Dr. Marc Gafni where he explored the core dimensions of masculine and feminine shadow. As Gafni went through his list of eight essential characteristics of masculine energy - and their attendant shadow possibilities - an explosive series of connections started to fire in my wee brain; the penny dropped, the slot machine alarms started to sound, and suddenly a hundred drinking nights from my life started to pass rapidly before my eyes. There were beer bongs, shot gunned cans, AC/DC, road trips and hazy mornings on unknown couches. Then scenes from the cult movie Fubar started to flash in my mind too, and at once I thought I'd understood the deeper motivations of the characters Terry and Deaner. In a sudden revelation, in an apokalupsis of sorts, I realized what had so often driven so many of us to just given'r (1).
But before getting to that story, a little legwork needs to be done. Firstly, for those who may be unfamiliar, what is meant by the word shadow in the paragraph above? Generally speaking, the shadow is a psychological term for aspects of our self that have been disowned or repressed by our conscious mind. To do ”˜shadow work' is to bring this material into our awareness, hopefully relieving us from its negative unconscious disruptions and re-integrating the suppressed aspects of ourselves into the totality of our conscious being. There's a rich psychological literature on the shadow, with different schools offering differing views, and it's not my intention to summarize or evaluate that body of work. For this article, I'm concerned solely with Marc Gafni's original contribution to that lineage of thought, and the important insights that I think can be drawn from it.
For Gafni our shadow is intimately related to another dimension of his work, the unique self. Somewhere on the continuum between personal ego and eternal Atman, Dr. Gafni has introduced a third dimension that he calls the “unique self”. You might say that the unique self is the flavor and character of the eternal as it pours through our own unique constellation of characteristics and into the world as form. If we can open up and be a vehicle for the animating depths of the cosmos that run through us - if we can put ourselves in alignment with Thy will- we can express this evolutionary thrust through the unique forms and capacities that make up our own (unique) perspective. We can serve the divine with the particular form that has arisen as us; we can become, as Gafni puts it, one of the divine's “infinite faces”.
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By Sally Kempton
Fran's cottage on the Oregon coast should be the perfect meditative retreat. The only worm in her apple is Larry, her landlord, who lives on the property. Larry is an acerbic critic of just about everything””the government, the art world, drug companies, and Fran. He can't believe she's so clueless about simple practical matters. Only an idiot, he tells her, would plant petunias without putting gopher wire around them, and that's just for starters.
Yes, he'll bring her groceries from town, and help her diagnose the weird noises in her car. But he also walks into her house uninvited, and doesn't understand why she minds. After all, they're neighbors, aren't they?
It's not that Larry is a bad guy, and Fran knows him well enough to know that he's harmless. But nonetheless, she feels crowded. She doesn't want to move, yet her landlord's presence hangs over her house like a dark, critical cloud. Worst of all, his irritability magnetizes her own irritation, so she often finds herself talking to him in the same harsh tone he uses with her.
As a conscious person doing her best to follow a spiritual path, Fran feels ashamed of herself for not knowing how to deal with Larry. You might feel that way too, when difficult people show up in your life. Yet the truth is that few of us ever get through life without encountering””often in our intimate personal space””more than one person who is staggeringly difficult for us to handle. Whether it's a manipulative friend, a prickly co-worker, an absent-hearted lover””some form of relationship stress seems to be part of the package we signed up for when we enrolled ourselves in the school that is life on this planet. If we don't have a few challenging people in our lives, we're probably living on a desert island.
So, how do you deal with a situation like Fran's without moving away, being harsh or wimpy, or putting that person out of your heart? How can you explain to your friend who keeps enlisting you in service of her dramas that you don't want to be part of her latest scenario of mistrust””yet still remain friends? How do you handle the boss whose tantrums terrorize the whole office, or the co-worker who bursts into tears and accuses you of being abrupt when you're just trying to get down to business?
More to the point, what do you do when the same sorts of difficult interpersonal situations keep showing up in your life? Chalk it up to karma? Find ways to resolve them through discussion or even pre-emptive action? Or take the truly challenging view – the view held by Jungians and many spiritual teachers--that these people are reflecting your own disowned, or shadow tendencies? In other words, does dealing with difficult people have to begin with finding out what you might need to work on in yourself?
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by Sally Kempton
Twenty-five years ago, inspired by Gandhi's autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, I decided to practice absolute truthfulness for one week. I lasted less than two days. On the third day, a man I was trying to impress asked me if I'd read Thoreau, and I heard myself saying, “Yes,” despite the fact that I hadn't. A few minutes later, I forced myself to confess the lie. Truth is, that wasn't so hard. What turned out to be harder was looking at why I'd lied. It was deeply humiliating to my ego to recognize that I had such an attachment to looking smart that I couldn't admit not having read the book. And once I'd started looking into the motive for that lie, it started a whole process of inquiry that actually hasn't stopped since.
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By Marc Gafni
Part I: The Question
The old world of the great traditions understood this very well. The framework is the meta-narrative, the big picture or worldview, the Great Story through which we interpret our experience.
To date in history, there have been three primary Great Stories. The pre-modern story was the story of simplicity, what I would call first simplicity. In terms of depth and interior enlightenment, this story was anything but simple in the simple-minded sense of things. It was the greatest interior view of the depths of kosmos, ever disclosed by the great human faculty of perception””the eye of the spirit. It was nonetheless, simplicity, because in large part[1], it claimed to have clear-cut answers to many of the great questions of Who we are, Why we are here, and Where we are going. Particularly, it claimed to offer clear and simple explanations of why human beings suffer or, said slightly differently, why bad things happen to good people. The Story was painful but simple. Suffering was a direct and clear part of the divine plan which human beings””if they looked deeply enough””were capable of understanding.
The Great Story of the old traditions was rejected by modernity and post-modernity. The profound simplicities were undermined and human kind found itself living in vast complexity. First Simplicity was replaced by a new complexity.
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