Steve Raymond, Senior Teacher of Unique Self, and CWS Board of Trustees member sraymond77@me.com
Steven Raymond is a student of Marc Gafni and of Integral theory. For the Center for World Spirituality, Steve serves as a Unique Self teacher and a Board of Trustees member, and is delighted to be bringing Unique Self dharma to the New England states in collaboration with other teachers. His focus is on the integration of group experiential processes with Unique Self training for individuals and healthcare professionals, with a particular interest in the fields of conscious birthing and conscious dying.
Steve has broad experience in deep experiential transpersonal processes and therapies, and is a master of assisting others with shadow work. Steve has a private coaching/teaching practice, and provides transformative consultation to individuals, groups and small entrepreneurs. He is also a leader in foundational men's work, is an Alumni of the Breakthrough Men's Community in Carmel, CA, and is now setting up a men's community group and an Awakening Your Unique Self study group in Portland, ME. He is the parent of an adult son and daughter, and the grandparent of three children, who love him as a jokester and as a mythological god on the ping pong table.
Steve writes, "The essence of my spiritual practice, my Unique Self practice, is to live a fully embodied and passionate life of joy, clarity and purpose. This is how I Show Up for my family, friends, clients and students."
My First Unique Self Encounter: The First Time I Ever Fell Really in Love
by Steven Raymond
My Unique Self in the Third Person
The first time I ever fell really in love, I was an emotionally damaged 23-year-old man finding my way through the complex maze of my early life. My first real love was a dying 70-year old woman, and the radically Outrageous Love I shared with her transformed my life and revealed a path forward that 37 years later I assess as the discovery of my Unique Purpose, and a life-altering revelation””my Unique Self.
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Let me begin by telling you that until about a month ago, I had not known of Marc Gafni. My husband introduced me to Marc's Internet videos on Unique Self. With enthusiasm he told me that Marc was saying so many of the things I have been bringing forward to our gathering community. Upon watching the videos, the joy that burst forth from within me was beyond description. I immediately sent away for YOUR UNIQUE SELF and RADICAL KABBALAH, Books 1 and 2. I feasted on these sacred writings on each of the following three weekends. Page after page, Marc was describing the very experiences and understandings that have unfolded over the years of my own being's evolution and in my work midwifing souls on the path of consciousness. I felt I had known Marc for years. For me, there is the added nectar of Marc's saturation with Kabbalah which has been and is in great part my own portal and path into the deep mystical realms of understanding and living life.
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The Commitment to the Enlightenment of Fullness:
The journey begins with a recognition of the fullness and depth of reality and to the specific experience and innate dignity of every human life. Every human being has an innate right to participate with joy in the fullness and depth of reality.[Read more…]
Hello Beloved Readers,
I just returned from the Accelerate event in Chicago this past weekend where Marc spoke to over 500 participants. In 90 minutes, like a Maestro, he brilliantly wove together the patterns that connect with great humor and humility, while transmitting, in the way only he can, the deepest and most profound teachings of Evolutionary Unique Self.
Like a match, he ignited a passionate flame in each heart, inspiring cutting-edge entrepreneurs to write outrageous love letters and commit outrageous acts of love in the world. Wow![Read more…]
©Victor Habbick, www.freedigitalphotos.net
“Any part of your story that you do not live,
lives in darkness”¦
part of your story is in shadow.
To come home you must recover and
embrace the memory of your fullest self.
Until the story of your life is lived
you will go on yearning for it.”
Dr. Marc Gafni in Your Unique Self
It is so exciting to be on this journey together with all of you, our readers and participants in courses and retreats, my wonderful colleagues and friends, and my beloved teacher and friend Dr. Marc Gafni, who has invited me to team up with him in this sacred endeavor of writing this series of articles, which will ultimately become a book, as well as in this holy adventure of Integral Wisdom, World Spirituality, and Unique Self.
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On July 6, 2013 Simple Life host Cynthia Fernandes interviewed Dr. Marc Gafni, who shared with her and her audience some of the most cutting-edge teachings on Unique Self and the self-organizing principle of Evolutionary Unique We-Space.
They discuss:
- why people have a deeper need to start playing a larger game and stop doing business as usual.
- why people tend to close down when confronted with the huge challenges we are facing as humanity and what we can do about this.
- the path from Ego through True Self to Unique Self and what it means to be an outrageous lover.
- the clues to recognizing your Unique Self.
- how we can "unleash the symphonic creativity of every Unique Self" and how this is key to solving every challenge in the world.
- why both happiness as well as profit cannot be pursued directly - they are the natural by-product of living our Unique Self and striving for excellence.
Listen to the interview here and read the synopsis of some of the keypoints below:
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by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
Your egoic story can be taken away by the circumstances of life. Your Unique Self story can never be taken away from you.
Ego can be taken away from you. Unique Self can never be taken away from you.
Further discussion:
In his book Your Unique Self Dr. Marc continues with a beautiful, very personal, and deeply touching story, which shall be reserved for its readers. Another example for this would be the story of the great Rebbe of Piaseczno, who has found and lived his Unique Self story in the midst of the greatest destruction, so beautifully told by Dr. Marc in this video series.
For the conclusion of our series on the distinctions between Unique Self and Ego, it remains to be said: It is time to put it all to work in our daily lives, in our personal Unique Self stories.
©pakorn, www.freedigitalphotos.net
by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
The ego strives for immortality it can never achieve, and therefore displaces its grasping for eternity onto projects of control and conquest. The Unique Self experiences authentically what the ego longs for mistakenly””namely the recognition that it is divine and therefore eternal.
This distinction is essential and therefore deserves a brief clarification. The separate self emerges at a certain stage of human history and at a certain stage in the development of the individual human being. As the sense of separate self solidifies, so too does the terror of death. The person feels correctly that death is wrong, that they should not have to die. They feel that they are eternal and should live forever. They are right. The core intuition of immortality could not be more correct. But locked as they are in separate self ego awareness, they mis-apply that core intuition in two ways.
First, because they are utterly identified with the ego, they apply their intuition of immortality to the egoic separate self. They think that the ego will live forever. Second, because they are identified with the now-eternalized ego, and yet at the same time are gripped by the fear of death, which is oblivion to the ego, they seek all sorts of Viagra-like identity enhancers. They make the finite goods of the world into infinite goods. Money, surplus goods, power, accumulated pleasures””all become identity enhancers for the ego. Their purpose is to give the ego a felt sense of its immortality. But since the ego is not immortal, all of these death-denying immortality projects are doomed to failure.
Even though the ego does make these two essential mistakes, the ego's intuitions are not wrong. When the mistakes are corrected at the level of Unique Self, the truth behind those intuitions can emerge. After you disidentify with your separate self, your Unique Self appears as a distinct and indivisible part of the eternal one. It is in your Unique Self that you realize your immortality. The Unique Self expresses correctly the mistakenly applied, but inwardly correct, intuition of the ego.
Further discussion:
A 2012 article in The Guardian has gone viral and is still circulating in social media: “Top five regrets of the dying.“ An Australian nurse in palliative care, Bronnie Ware, had for many years questioned her patients during the last 12 weeks of their lives about any regrets they might have. She has recorded their answers in a blog and eventually wrote a book about them.
When looking at these responses from a Unique Self perspective, we read of the patients regretting not having lived their Unique Selves: “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me” was the most common answer.
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Listen to Richard Barrett, founder and chairman of the Barrett Values Centre and author of many books””e.g. What My Soul Told Me, The New Leadership Paradigm, and Building a Values Driven Organization””and Marc Gafni as they talk about an exciting new role that nations and our democratic systems can play in the evolution of consciousness, when they awaken to their Unique Selves, and what that might mean.
You can also listen to the first two parts of the dialogue and read a summary or partial transcript here:
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by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
The ego very rarely takes substantive responsibility. When the ego attempts to take responsibility, it creates a painful, virtually unbearable contraction in the self. So the ego becomes the master of the excuse. The Unique Self is able to take responsibility spontaneously, lightly, and with full gravitas. The Unique Self holds with equal measure of gravitas and ease its own responsibility and its rightful anger at injustice. Usually, the ego advises the other person to “take responsibility,” while the ego itself wallows in the real and imagined offenses that it has suffered.
Further discussion:
Just hearing words like responsibility or obligation often lets our ego contract in pain and sometimes anger. From our separate selves the idea of taking responsibility often seems like pure impertinence. Finding the balance between taking the right measure of personal responsibility and being gentle with ourselves seems to be an important issue for most of us.
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©2012 Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles
Your ego is always contracting and saying, “No.” Even when your ego says, “Yes,” it is only because it is afraid to say, “No.” Your Unique Self is always expanding and saying, “Yes.” Even when you say, “No,” it is only to make room for a more authentic “Yes.”
Further Discussion:
The following is excerpted directly from Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment (pp. 357-59), Chapter 25, “Say Yes”:
In Hebrew the word “yes”””kein””means “integrity.” Yes is the ultimate affirmation of our integrity. The question of your existence is whether you can say Yes to the unique destiny and adventure that is your life. That is self-love! From the place of ego you remain perpetually unsatisfied. Located in Unique Self, everything fills you.
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by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
When you are in ego, people feel smaller when you walk into the room. They feel invisible before you. The result is that they feel depleted and in danger. When you are in your Unique Self, people feel bigger when you walk into the room. They feel seen by you. They feel your desire to love and give to them.
Further discussion:
Don't we all recognize that? Somebody walks into a room, and we immediately feel smaller? And in somebody else's company we feel great, empowered, seen, and loved?
But why is this so? Aren't those feelings of smallness and our dependency on other people's acknowledgement related to our own bad self-esteem, as much of the New Age popular psychology makes us believe?
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In this last video of our seven-part dialogue series, our two authors (Your Unique Self and Conscious Capitalism) discuss the issue of shadow – both in the context of our personal life as well as in the context of business. In our modern world the narrative of business seems to have become the shadow story, while its heroic part of creating value for humanity and the world has become hidden.
Additionally, Dr. Marc Gafni brings the Unique Shadow into the discussion that can be easily recognized as the personal core-issue in each and every one of us that hints to and – when looked at – leads us back to our unlived Unique Self.
John Mackey is Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market, as well as the Co-Chair of the Center for World Spirituality Board of Trustees.
Don't miss this or any other video of this series on our website or the Whole Foods Blog.
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by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
The ego betrays. The Unique Self is loyal. When you are in your ego, and things go bad, you are willing—in your fear—to betray virtually anyone. Your ego is easily identifiable by the shallowness of its integrity. If you live in Unique Self and things go bad, you find your way, through thick or thin, to a deeper center of spirit.
Further discussion:
Betrayal: Isn’t this something from the soap operas on TV, but not something that we would ever do to another person? Can’t we all just relax and say: look at how advanced I am in living my Unique Self?
On the other hand: Haven’t we all had experiences where we felt betrayed? How do we react when we feel betrayed?
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©2012 "Worried Young Woman On Bed" Courtesy of David Castillo Dominici
In your ego, you cling to every petty detail of your story. You never let go of any of your wounds. Your mantra is “I hurt, therefore I am.” Therefore, your ego can never wholeheartedly forgive. If it does, the ego's forgiveness is a tactic, not a sacrament. Your Unique Self forgives freely without giving up your own truth.
From the evolutionary context of your Unique Self, you realize that you have a Unique Gift to give to All-That-Is. You are animated, driven, and drawn by that larger vision and obligation. This allows you to place your wounds in a larger perspective. Your Unique Self is not a victim. It is an audacious player in the Great Story of the evolution of consciousness. This larger perspective allows you to begin to let go of the story of your wounds. As it is replaced by the greater story of your Unique Self, delight and obligation begin to emerge.
From the place of your Unique Self, you are able to intuitively balance your outrage at injustice with an intuition about when to give up being right and move on. Because you are able to give up being right without giving up your core identity, it becomes infinitely easier to forgive.
Further Discussion:
As Dr. Marc reminds us, life is what we do with our hurt, which means that we can choose to be victims or we can choose to be players in the evolutionary context. In Your Unique Self, Marc writes, “Hurt is not an objective reality that gives you license for cruelty under the cover of ”˜I was hurt.' Hurt is a state, and it is interpreted through your stage or level of consciousness. As you evolve, your relationship to your wounds naturally shifts. More than any other single barometer, what you do with your hurt reveals to you and others your genuine level of consciousness. When you feel hurt, the masks of piety and the guises of liberation from ego are stripped away, and your naked heart is revealed to yourself and those with eyes to see” (426).
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Your ego is a slave that wants to be free. Freedom is the quality that we call autonomy. Your ego, however, understands and experiences freedom/autonomy as freedom from external influence. Only then does ego feel free to do what it wants. Unique Self is free. Unique Self understands and experiences freedom as the freedom to live your Uniqueness and give your deepest gifts in the world.
When you feel yourself demanding your egoic freedom, stop for a moment and feel into it. Do not cover over the emptiness that lies at the root of your desire for freedom and autonomy. Feel into the emptiness. Feel into the hole.
For example: Perhaps you are in a relationship that you want to leave. You are chafing to get out of the relationship. But as you contemplate this, stay in the discomfort that you can palpably feel””which lies at the root of this desire. For now, do not give the feeling words. Instead feel the quality of the vacuity and emptiness that arouses the desire.
If you stay in it long enough, the emptiness will begin to fill up with being and presence, with your Unique Being and Presence.
(c) April 2011 Courtesy of Graur Codrin
What happened?
You have discovered that the root of your desire to be free from another was your disconnection from your own personal essence, your Unique Self. When your Unique Self filled the hole, the desperate desire you felt to leave the group””or the marriage or the job””faded away. That does not mean that you should necessarily stay in the marriage or the job. It does however mean that you will make the decision from a grounded place of full presence as your Unique Self, and are therefore far more likely to make the right decision.
Further discussion: Three Steps in to the Distinction
“This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them anew each day.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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(c) 2012 Courtesy of Stuart Miles
When the ego’s heart breaks, then the heart closes and contracts. When the Unique Self’s heart breaks, the heart opens through the pain into greater love. For your ego, the interior face of the kosmos is at best a concept. For Unique Self, the interior face of the kosmos is the infinity of intimacy.
Further Discussion:
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by Dr. Marc Gafni in Your Unique Self
The Unique Self is in joy. Joy is the natural by-product of living your Unique Self story. The ego is rarely happy and often plagued by an underlying feeling of fear, deadness, or depression. The happiness that the ego does experience is of a heavier and less richly textured quality than the joy of the Unique Self. The joy of the Unique Self is lighter and freer, often verging on the ecstatic.
For further discussion:
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.” ~ Erich Fromm
Joy has become front and center in our everyday psychology. And we often feel that there is something wrong with us when we don't feel happy all the time. The pursuit of happiness is even one of our constitutional rights.
But what do we mean by that? And why is joy called a by-product here if it is that important?
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Enlightenment requires your ability to discern between your ego story and your Unique Self story. Your separate-self egoic personality has needs. It wants to make itself feel secure. So your ego tells you a story about yourself that makes you feel safe, valuable, and worthy. The inability to feel safe, valuable, and worthy is a devastating experience for the ego, one it will ward off at virtually all costs. So the ego hijacks everything that happens to you, and everything that you do, into a story about its own goodness, value, and worth.
The ego has a simple if ingenious mechanism for doing this. It disguises its ambition, its drive for power, or its insecure grasping, and converts them into narrative material that supports its own positive self-image. This is how the separate-self ego story develops. It is this story that teachers of True Self correctly tell you to leave behind when they say, “To be enlightened, you must let go of your story.”
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A second source of authority for the Bible is spoken of best by that greatly afflicted mythical figure, Job. Job tells us, “Through my flesh I vision God.” (Or, as nineteenth-century poet John Keats reformulated Job’s insight, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.”) For the mystical reader of biblical myth, to “vision God” is to understand being, for God and being are one.
Kabbalists read Job’s words with a pronounced emphasis on the word my. “My flesh” means not only my physical form, but also the body of my life experience, my heart’s affections, and my imagination. The verse is thus taken to mean that we access the epic of being through the drama of the psyche. Each of us can access the psyche only through our singular psyche–that is, through our unique story.
Radical truth is to be found, albeit paradoxically, in radical subjectivity–in the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.
Dr. Marc Gafni
Soulprints
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