Review of “Your Unique Self” by Heather Fester

The stunning thing about Dr. Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self book is the deep conversation it opens, furthers, and makes possible. With Marc Gafni’s vision of democratized enlightenment and his artist-lover’s touch, he has found the key-tumbler combination for a previously locked moment in Western history.  This genuinely significant moment, when the Eastern and Western enlightenment traditions are greeting one another through a shared language, is the emergence of Unique Self, which can be understood as True Self + Unique Perspective. This book shines precisely because it prepares the way for questions of how beauty, embodiment, love, integral principles, and action in the world are newly invited players in conversations spanning the world’s non-dual, mystical, and religious traditions. In Your Unique Self, Marc Gafni challenges and explains his departure from interfaith dialogues that seek common depth structures for the worlds’ great religious traditions, noting instead the significance of unique depth structures specific to the individual religious traditions that are now converging in a larger moment and building their shared story.

The work also arrives in a personal way that is deeply characteristic of all of Marc Gafni’s teaching and scholarship, offering guidance to those of us who may fear the loss of something essential in transcending the separate self on the path to awakening or for those of us who may be looking for real invitations to articulate our unique perspectives and gifts. He explains that the something that we sense as missing is actually an essential ingredient in our enlightenment and the democratization of enlightenment in the West. This book partners us into a world of infinite intimacy with a God we can believe in and a Cosmos that knows our name, told through the lens of World Spirituality and Marc Gafni’s own kabbalistic lineage tradition and stories with depth, gravitas, humor, and profound joy. The distinctions between the personal and impersonal enlightenment traditions made here offer us healing for the shadows found in many forms of evolutionary mysticism and dialectical philosophy. To just say that this work offers a world-changing teaching, while true, is also to gloss over the depth, nuance, and intricacy of the movement of these teachings through the heart-mind of an artist and a friend of those along the spiritual path. This is a rare achievement, a moment captured and accessibly articulated with authority, grace, clarity, and style, that brings the personal and transpersonal into much longed-for dialogue.

~ Heather Fester, Ph.D.