CIW Founders: Marc Gafni Video Archives - Center for Integral Wisdom

Short Notes on Sense Making in Crisis

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.

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Spiritual Sense Making in Times of Crisis

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.

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Gafni on Eros

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.

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Why We Desperately Need a New Story Equal to Our Potential

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.

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Death and Reincarnation

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;

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.

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

Prayer

Watch and listen to this 5-minute video, the ninth part of a 10-part dialogue with Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Tuscany on the topic of Evolutionary Love–envisioning a new Renaissance that will take us to the future. Watch previous posts from this series;

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.

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

Appearing as the One – Unending Symphony

Watch and listen to this 8-minute video, the eighth part of a 10-part dialogue with Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Tuscany on the topic of Evolutionary Love–envisioning a new Renaissance that will take us to the future. Watch previous posts from this series;

Enjoy the eighth part of the dialogue here:

Transcript

Dr. Ervin László: Well you, in a way, you talk about also, but what is it? What is it that is making us enjoy what we call art, or music, or dance, or song, whatever, what is it? It’s an experience. It’s experience of sharing of oneness. You mentioned moment ago, you said, well, forgive me, but I look … pay attention, even though I’m closing my eyes. Did you notice that great conductors, and I had a privilege of knowing quite a few, but the conductors close their eyes most of the time. They open them a little bit, just to make sure that they’re there in the right place, and everybody’s listening, but because they are entirely inside their own experience. And they communicate that way.

Now, the difference between a poor orchestra and a great orchestra, is a poor orchestra is just plays the score and looks at the conductor as to say what does he say. In a great orchestra, the members become one, and they start to become one with the conductor, and they start feeling what the conductor does. It’s an instrument, it’s becoming one. It’s on a much higher level than driving a car, but it’s there, it’s the same thing. To me, I could feel becoming one with a piano, with an instrument, and then with the people who are work, who are playing music with me. And the people who are listening, because they are not passive listeners. Passive listeners are no good, people who are co-creating, who enter into this.

So, all of this is really that through our senses, we don’t need to just pick up on their ears, but we can use our sense as instrument to go deeper down into ourselves, where we perceive our oneness, our co-evolution, our co-creation, let me say, of other people, with other people. And that way, I think, that instrumentality, that to me is the aesthetic experience. I got it mostly through music. You can get it through dance. I would love to know how to dance. I was never very good at dancing, but when I did a little bit of it, I was felt like I moved together with somebody else, you’re becoming really part of that person. And whatever your way that you can enjoy the world around you, is that sense of that sense of significantly one, becoming significantly one with the other.

That, to me is the ecstatic experience, a really deep part of my life, and in a way I’m searching for that, also in my writing, in my talking. If I’m on the right track, I feel sort of one with the ideas, and if I give a talk some this, and I have to think of now, I have to talk about this, talk about that, that is artificial, it falls apart. If you feel that you can say something, and the other person resonates with what I think we are doing here also, it’s like that, then you’re beginning to feel like you’re entering into a common space. And that is just another form of evolutionary love.

Dr. Marc Gafni: Oh, that’s gorgeous. So you don’t disappear into the one, you appear as the one. That’s the location of the paradox that we’re pointing to here, and the reason I keep coming back to it, Ervin, is because I’ve found, and I don’t know what your experience is, is that the reason people reject the notion of oneness, because they’re afraid they’re going to disappear. There’s an enormous fear, and I think we have to, with great respect, hold enlightenment teachers responsible, of which I’ve been one of for many years, so I hold myself responsible, for teaching enlightenment improperly. We’ve always taught enlightenment as disappearing into the one. You become true self, and then there’s an intuitive rejection by the main stream, which says what about me, then the enlightenment teacher says, well that’s just your ego.

It’s not just your ego. There’s something deeper than the egoic self, which is the unique expression of oneness. You appear as the one, and let me stay with the symphony image. A number of years ago, someone from Booz Allen, that is a consulting firm in America, came into a seminar where I happened to be attending, and they played a symphony, a Beethoven symphony, and then they played the symphony again and they took out one instrument, and I can’t quite remember the instrument right now, but you actually could hear this one instrument, which was by itself seemingly irrelevant. Without that instrument the assembly could actually feel the difference.

So you actually realize, who are you, and that’s the great question, who are you, you are an instrument in the symphony, and without you, the symphony sounds different. If I would say it in the 16th century in Italy, Decapolis said, God needs your service. You’re actually needed by all that is. That’s a stunning realization, that I actually have a unique gift to give, a unique life to live, that’s irreducibly needed by all that is, and that’s not a kind of psychological idea, that’s actually the nature of reality is, you’ve described it in Self Actualizing Cosmos, and so many other books is, you’re a part, which is using your language, you’re a part that’s irreducibly needed by the whole. It’s utterly independent, and yet part of the whole at the same time. And without your part in this, the whole becomes a heap.

Dr. Ervin László: That’s the important difference, you just said it. A heap is more or less casual assembly of different elements. A whole is an integration of different elements. A whole is not a whole if a part is missing, it’s not longer a whole.

Dr. Marc Gafni: A whole is not a whole if a part’s missing.

Dr. Ervin László: No, it’s something that is … it’s something else, it’s a part of a whole, it’s a maybe on a way to a whole. It’s a degeneration of a whole, but a whole is that which integrates all its parts. A great work of art, and I say whatever you are sensitive to, it can be a great poem, it can be music, it can be whatever other form of art or literature, is one where you can’t take any element of it, as you just mentioned. To me, a great work of art, and here the prototype, the paradigm case for that is all the compositions of Mozart, is such that you can not simply change it. There was a famous dialog, I think in the film Amadeus, where the prince who was sponsoring Mozart said to Mozart, there are too many notes in that piece. He was just trying to be clever.

And Mozart said, no, no, there aren’t too many. He also said, there also aren’t too few, there are just enough. There are just as many as there have to be. And you have that sense when you hear a piece of music that is that level of wholeness, the perfectionist of a Mozart, gut you can have it in the Beatles. You can have it in many other ways, that every part has to play its role. If it’s not there, it’s not there, it disappear anymore. It benefits not there, it’s having cancer.

Dr. Marc Gafni: It’s having cancer, so symphony is really the primary image that’s emerging from today’s dialog, is unending symphony, Ervin’s next, next book. I think it’s after the next one, what we call a unique self symphony, which is one expression of the unending symphony. It’s a self organizing universe, in which the organizing principle is uniqueness.

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

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

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

Evolutionary Love – Personal and Cosmic Love Are One – The Personal as a Quality of Essence

Watch and listen to this 19-minute video, the seventh 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;

Enjoy the seventh part of the dialogue here:

Transcript

Dr. Ervin László: So, I’m glad you brought in this whole topic of evolutionary love, because in this context, love is at the heart of the cosmos. Love is something that made the cosmos what it is. It’s the organizing principle, without which what would be the … space time world would be series of mechanically interacting parts. It would be a heap, an aggregate. It wouldn’t be whole, it wouldn’t be something that emerges, but emerges is the oneness, is the unity. And the way it emerges is through love. Emergence is evolution, and to become part of evolution, you have to feel the love, sense the love, recover the love, in the sense of Plato, as recover what the soul already knows, is through instinct and intuition, but through the conscious recognition of the truth, of the validity of this instinct and intuition, which I think is there in all species.

It was there in the human species, up to 20, 30 thousand years ago or so, obviously this was expressed in an instinctive, intuitive way. And then you tell the story so beautifully, how the self then emerges, and it became submerged in the other elements of it, of become of what it is a part of, but it is basically there, without it life would not be possible. And if life is to continue on this planet, it needs human species, because we are capable of destroying life. I think life would continue if we just quietly disappeared, but there’s not much chance of that. I think we are become an essential element of the unfolding of life, and life itself is an expression of this trend, of this drive, of this will, if you like, in the cosmos, towards wholeness, toward increasing integration, with the consciousness arising and supporting and promoting, guiding this entire process.

The divine consciousness, if you like, in these terms, comes to expression in our consciousness, because our conscience is part of that divine consciousness, that’s a hologram. We’re all intrinsic parts of it. We can interact with the whole, we can interact with any other part of the whole. If we can recognize this, then we can become conscious agents of evolution, by becoming consciously loving agents, consciously loving parts of it.

Dr. Marc Gafni: What that really means is, Ervin, that when Ervin is … it’s 57 years ago, and he meets Carita, and they’re together for three, four days, they meet, and they’re in different countries, and then they write love letters to each other for a year, that is the evolutionary impulse of love that brought quarks together, and molecules together, it’s that same impulse that’s now bringing Ervin and Carita together. It’s the same love, it’s one love. There’s no distinction, is that fair?

Dr. Ervin László: There’s only one love.

Dr. Marc Gafni: Only one love.

Dr. Ervin László: It’s only evolutionary love. There are aberrations of it, but evolutionary love is one.

[Read more…]

How to Open the Eye of the Spirit & The Unique Self Symphony

Watch and listen to this 10-minute video, the sixth part of a 10-part dialogue with Dr. Ervin Laszlo and Dr. 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;

Enjoy the sixth part of the dialogue here:

Transcript

Marc Gafni: Let’s talk about what do we know? What exists? How do we know what we know?

So, Ervin, you’re talking about the quantum, and you’re talking about the deeper dimension beyond the quantum, which are the forms, which are the eternal objects, so in some sense, let’s make a kind of split that, you know, Habermas, who lives not that far away, actually kind of points out very beautifully, and we’ve built pieces of integral theory based on it, a distinction between the eye of the senses, the eye of contemplation and the spirit, and the eye of the mind, which is a distinction I know that you’re familiar with, and it’s a helpful distinction. So the eye of the senses perceives sensory reality, and even super-amplifications, in the best, in post modern technology, is still using the eye of the senses, or using the senses to actually detect either directly or by implication reverberations of reality.

Then there’s the eye of the mind, and the eye of the mind is a different epistemology, a different way of knowing. The eye of the mind knows, through inference, through deduction, mathematics. The entire system of mathematics, underlying much of physics, is the eye of the mind, which is another legitimate way of deriving information. Then there’s a third way of deriving information, which is, and this is really what Schrodinger understood, and a lot of the quantum physicists understood, who were misquoted, where the eye of the spirit, or the eye of contemplation, actually apprehends reality, the deeper reality of spirit, that births all of reality directly. It’s a direct way of apprehending Satori, Kenshu, in Kabbalah we call Ayin. You can actually touch the Ayin, but you do it, not through the eye of the senses, not through the eye of the mind, but through direct practice, that opens up the eye of contemplation, and gives you a direct, unmediated taste.

King David said, in the book of Psalms, taste and see divinity. It’s a direct, unmediated taste, which is why practice is so important, because actually the eye of the mind will get you a glimmer of it. It’ll get you a vision of it, but actually you can taste it directly, through prayer, through meditation. You point out in The Self Actualizing Cosmos, psychedelic experiences of different forms, through intensified practice of dance, through chant. There’s ways that are actual technologies, that give you direct knowing of this interior face of the cosmos, and recovering those technologies as part of our hygiene, as part of our spiritual hygiene, is actually seemingly essential for the evolution of consciousness.

Ervin László: Absolutely.

Marc Gafni: Does that make sense?

Ervin László: Absolute sense, yes, and it’s very important also. The question is, how we can do this, because what we are describing is sort of we are tapping into the Akashic field, because in a sense the Akashic field is just a concept of everything being conserved, everything still being there, everything that ever happened, in some sense, is there, and what is happening now.

Marc Gafni: Available.

Ervin László: Because nothing disappears in the world, everything gets conserved. We know that energy is conserved. It’s also suggested information is conserved. Once you create some information, in some way, you can recall it. It’s like entering into a giant computer system, the iCloud for example. You enter into it, and it’s all there. And what other people enter into it, they can recall as well. So there is this deeper level, how can we access that? How is it possible physically for, I would say, one principle to me, which has become very clear in the last few years, is because all consciousness, this internal element of our mind, is not in space time, is not on that level, where particles … things have externalities.

Our consciousness is an internality, and it’s on the same level as the logos, as the heart, as the consciousness of the universe. The universe is a set of very complex, exact instructions, algorithms, but that’s just putting it on one level, of course. But you can call it will or design, if you like, and that comes to the fore, that is expressed on this other level, on the level of the sensory level. So I talk about the space time level, and the beyond space time, because beyond space time, as we’ve discovered now in physics, and I think it’s important to really discover it as part of our experience also. Our consciousness is there, and it is a manifestation of a single integral cosmic consciousness, that infuses all things in space time.

It is like a hologram, you know a hologram, all the information is present of every point, so in every consciousness is actually all the information, and all the consciousness of the world is, in principle, present, and through our consciousness we can tap into this. But, for that, and you know that best of all, we must rid our mind of all the superficialities of all the concerns of the space time world, as it were, and enter into that stillness, which is entering into the deepest reality, into the Akasha, or into the world of the spirit, or the world of the soul, and different words that we can use for it.

But it’s the higher or deeper realm, and because our mind, our consciousness is in that field. It can enter into it. It doesn’t have to enter, that’s the wrong metaphor actually, it’s in it.

Marc Gafni: It’s there.

Ervin László: It’s there. It has to realize it. It’s come to operate with it, no only instinctively, but consciously, and that, I think, is the great challenge before us, to become conscious, that on a deep level we are one, is this field, and therefore we are one with each other, because everything develops out of this.

Marc Gafni: So now the conversation of beautiful, now the conversation is coming full around. So, I access the stillness, and our colleague who lives not far from here often, Brother David, David [Sindorast 01:05:41], loves to talk about stillness. And David, of course, is from a stillness tradition. He’s from a Trappist monk tradition, which is about stillness. Ervin is from a scientific tradition, but they’re both talking about stillness, about accessing that deeper quiet, accessing that deeper essence. Now, here’s the paradox, and here’s where we’re adding something undeniably new. There’s a novelty in what Ervin and I are saying. We’re not saying, okay, let’s go back to the old, let’s go back to the world, where we kind of get still, and we’re gonna access this eternal reality that lives in us. We’re gonna feel into this kind of deep field. We realize that we’re one with it, and then we’re at home.

No, that’s just the beginning of the story, and that’s when we access our location in this deeper field, at that point we then awaken to something about our irreducible, unique expression of that field, and we don’t try and get rid of it. We don’t try and meditate it away. We don’t try and prayer it away. We actually realize that the evolution of consciousness is the evolution of uniqueness, and that actually I can be irreducibly unique, and part of the larger field together, and when that happens, when I actually realize I’m completely part of a larger field, I’m inseparable from the larger field, and you spoke about, by the way, and to everyone listening, please go get this book, The Self Actualizing Cosmos, and chapter three and four is about fields, and it’s actually the best two short chapters I’ve ever read, about how fields work, and how fields originate in physics, and then what are the deeper fields.

And then the notion of a field is absolutely essential to your work, so you actually locate yourself in the deeper field, of infinity, which then expresses itself as the fields of quanta, but then you realize that you’re an irreducibly unique expression of that field, even beyond your location in space time. Your irreducibly unique perspective in space time, which expresses your irreducible uniqueness in this larger field, and that irreducible uniqueness is your gift. It’s your creativity. It’s your unique quality. It’s your unique taste. It’s your unique perspective, which has an ability to address a dimension of the world which is unloved, capital U-N, unlove, that can only be addressed by you, because your unique expression of that love intelligence and love beauty, that is the initiating and animating Eros of all it is, that’s living in you, as you, and through you, so you’re the only expression of that love intelligence that can address that unlove, and when you begin to address it, then you begin to play your instrument in the unique self symphony, which is the human dimension of this unending symphony, and that unique self symphony is a bottom up structure of a self organizing universe, that’s not top down.

It’s not national or governmental, or corporate, it’s a bottom up expression of unique self creativity within a larger context, which actually unleashes the infinite resources that can actually address the second shock of existence. That becomes insanely exciting, and utterly necessary to unleash the love intelligence of the unique self symphony.

>>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

In their dialogue, Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like super-coherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

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

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

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

Self-Organization, the Ability to Receive Information from the Larger System, & the Spiritual Dimension

Watch and listen to this 15-minute video, the fifth 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:

Enjoy the fifth part of the dialogue here:

Transcript

Marc Gafni: So, you remember that essay by Turing, morphogenesis, one of the classical essays of the last 50 years, where Turing, who was the code cracker in World War II, the Turing Test, that actually broke the Nazi codes, Turing introduces in this essay a lot of the notion of the self organizing universe, or what you called in your book the self actualizing cosmos, some of the building blocks of that system, of the entire world of self organization, were ready in Turing’s essay.

What does self organization basically say? Again, stating in accessible terms, you have an anthill. How does every ant in the anthill know what to do? The answer is there’s a self organizing process in which ants receiver chemical signals, pheromones, from other ants, and then the ant knows precisely what to do locally, but that local self organization produces this global process of an anthill, which is elegant, organized, industrious, creative, everything in its right location, kind of gorgeous. Now, human beings aren’t ants. Human beings are awakened consciousness, and yet human beings, like ants, live in this larger system that Ervin’s described, which is super coherent, a term that I had borrowed from his book, “Self Actualizing Cosmos”. I love when Ervin quotes “Supercoherence”, which I borrowed from his book, so super coherence is the kind of, what my friend Daniel calls, and omni-considerate universe. You’re omni-considerate, you consider all the factors.

You begin to produce solar, not coal. You realize that you’re part of the larger whole. Now, this system, what structures the self organizing universe of human beings, as opposed to aunts. Aunts operate in this interior system, which pheromone secretions guide the ant, and the ant, the way the literature says, the ant looks at 10 other ants at street level, and the ant receives the secretions and knows what to do. What happens with human beings? Fragrance is not what does it for us, we use deodorant to get rid of fragrance, so what actually happens to move human beings? What’s the organizing principle of the human self organization, and I would suggest, Ervin, that the organizing principle of human self organization, is this structure of consciousness, which we’re calling unique self.

Actually unique self is the principle which guides the self organizing universe, and that it’s actually the structure of consciousness that allows us to integrate in a higher, what we might call a higher integral embrace, autonomy in communion, of these two great principles of autonomy and communion, the emergence of the individual, and communion being a part of a larger community, which have actually fought with each other for 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, forever, for the first time we can integrate them, in the self actualizing cosmos, if we understand that the cosmos awakens through us, when we actually become the awake evolutionary impulse, but we’re the personal face of the impulse.

We’re the irreducible unique face of the impulse, so we have irreducible dignity, and yet our irreducible unique creativity is guiding the self organizing universe, so that’s a piece of the puzzle I want to introduce to the table, and see how does that play in the natural world, is that an expression of the natural world, how does it play in your thought, how does it feel to you?

Dr. László: I think that’s an extremely important concept. We can phrase it in different ways, extremely important as you put it. You talked about the anthill. What do the ants have? They have a set of signals, which are pheromones, pheromones, and that means that they perceive, they have a sense whereby they get signals from other ants, okay, and then they have an instinct, I’m just using quotation marks of these things, which tells them what to do with it, with those signals, how to process this. What happens in an information system in a computer? You get on the web, or when you connect, you get a set of information, and then your computer has a software and tells you what to do with it. And you have a further software here in your mind, where it tells you … you respond to the messages that you get, what to do with it.

So you always have information and coding, or decoding, with information. Now, the big fallacy of the modern, western mentality is that it reduce the information that we are getting to a very small spectrum, the spectrum that you have consciously perceived through your sense organs. So the whole world became a set of sights and sounds and smells, even the smells and the tastes are less than that, and the touch is almost all what you see, sense data, as the analytical philosopher said, and sounds. And the whole world consists of those things. And many people try to reconstruct the world, what we have, just on the basis of what we understand of the terms of this sensory atomism or logical atomism, as Bertrand Russell called it.

Turns out it doesn’t work, because first of all, the universe is far more rich, provides a far more wealth, great spectrum of information, than just what comes through a few of our sense organs. Now we’re discovering that the microtubules, the subordinate, but extremely important networks in our brain, that’s below the level of neurons, Penrose and Hameroff and others talk about this, and they are networks of networks of networks below it, down to the nanometer level, to the extremely small level. And these networks resonate with information, that is … that appears on higher levels, but is there. And it connects us with the rest, th is is quantal level information, so we resonate with the rest of the world.

So we have, what I want to say, to make this point, we have an input of information, which comes to us from the world, much richer than what our sensory organs tell us, the great spiritual systems, as you well know, were much richer. They didn’t disregard these subtle intuitions, this sense of something higher, or something deeper, anywhere beyond the everyday world. And you get actually, real information of that, we can show how these networks of this subneural networks in our brain actually resonate with quantum waves that are propagated in space, because space is full of them, space is not a vacuum, space is planum, it’s a consistent wholeness of all of the information about all of the things that occur. It’s all there in space.

And it all produces signals, okay, so that’s one thing. So we have input variables, and perhaps the traditional people use more of this input than so called modern people do. But we also have to know what to do with it. Now, traditional people used instinctive orientation, or perhaps their intuitive wisdom, the wisdom iterations of what to do. Now, we have reduced the world to some information, and also reduced our idea of the world, of there being only matter like things that interact with each other according to laws of nature that Newton described, and so on. And everything else is just imagination.

So, if you recognize that this is about a ritual, it’s interacting on many levels, it’s producing information about all the things that are happening. We can be entangled with all the other things. We can perceive everything else in the world. In fact, deeply all of the meditative prayer for states of consciousness, as you well know, we can perceive a lot more of the world than we do, in ordinary states. So, we have information, and we have instinctive orientation of what to do, the code, how to handle it. We can decode the information, we can make sense of it. We have to open up our minds, open up our consciousness, so we can deal with this information that is coming to us, these signals.

Then we become anthills, but that’s an awful thing to say, because we don’t … we are not becoming ants in an anthill. We have the information and the code, but we have something else, we have ourself, our individuality, so that we know what to do with this, not purely as a mechanical part of a larger system that orients us, that tells us what to do, we can rediscover it consciously, we can act in a way that we know that we are part of the system. We know that we can further the system, we can be in alignment, we can be … we can be coherent with the coherence in the world. And that is what can give meaning to our existence. We can consciously become part of this unfolding symphony in the world.

Marc Gafni: Yeah, so consciously become part of the unfolding symphony, and so you describe, Ervin, two levels, and I want to be very precise here. So the first level is, we take in and … of course, I’m shutting my eyes on camera, because I’m thinking and forgetting about the camera, but that’s okay, so stay with us. So the first level is, Ervin’s describing that I actually recover my ability to receive information from the larger system.

Dr. László: Right.

Marc Gafni: and I do that through practice, and i want to be very clear friends listening, when Ervin talks about quanta, he’s not reducing the larger system to its physicality, he’s talking about quantum both literally, quantum are a literal, physical expression, but you also, if I follow you correctly in your writing as well, you use the word quanta in two ways. You use it as a kind of physical expression of reality, but quanta also refers for you to kind of, the underlying, deep dimension of reality, because quanta is both physical, it’s part of the world revealed by the eye of the senses, and the eyes of the senses doesn’t, of course, mean the naked eye. The eye of the senses means any way that we amplify senses.

Human beings have become very, very good at amplifying our natural senses. A telescope sees more. Positive emission tomography sees more, but they’re still operating in the sensory world, so in a certain sense, even beneath quanta, even beneath the sensory world, is the deeper dimension of what we might call essence, that if your will, births, that informs, that animates the sensory world. So when we’re talking about quanta reality, we’re not merely talking about, if my understanding of the way you’re using the word, Ervin, correctly, you use it in two ways. You use it to describe that the network of interlocking its, but you also use it to point towards the underlying world of essence, that animates the world of its, and that’s inseparable from them. Is that fair?

Dr. László: Well, absolutely, you put your finger on this. I’m obviously reluctant to come for with just my own particular concepts, but here’s you’re practically forcing me to do that.

Marc Gafni: Hopefully politely, because I’m in your home.

Dr. László: Yes, well I appreciate it, waiting for it actually. I’ve talked about a deeper dimension in the world, which I call the Akasha Dimension, because Akasha was the idea that 5,000 years ago the Rishis in India had talked about as the fundamental dimension of the world, and so I say that, yes indeed the world has not only … that manifest level, which are little particles of quanta joining in love together, and forming systems and living systems and ecologies and planets and galaxies and so on. There is, underneath, something which is a less dense, more ratified domain of the cosmos, where there are not actual things, but there is the software of the things. There is the information. There are the elements that Plato, that’s what I said I’m becoming more and more Platonic, that Plato called forms and ideas. That’s why they’re called eternal objects. There are … and today, increasingly in the quantum cosmology, we are discovering an area or domain of reality, which is beyond space time.

It creates space time, it gives rise to space time, so it isn’t in space time. So this is like a cosmic mind. It’s a cosmic logos. It’s a cosmic kind of consciousness. You can talk the divine consciousness if you wish, but it’s something that orients this process, whereby the denser energies become particles, the particles join together, and so the quanta on one level, which is a densified energy, arises out of the rarefied energies on the lower level. When you have a particle, virtual particle, you know, every once it disappears. In fact, extremely fast, and it just pops in and our of existence. So where is it? It’s the same particle, and it comes back is the exact same properties. If you modify it, it comes back modified, so what happened to the universe before it was born, before the Big Bang?

What happens when the last galaxy, galactic sized black holes, disappear? It falls back. The ancients called this fall … arises out of and falls into this Akasha Dimension. We talk about this unified field, which is there, so not everything is on the level where we can observe it, we can interact with it, but the other things is deeper, but it’s even more real, because it’s what guides, what orients, what happens in the world.

Marc Gafni: Right, and it’s really a beautiful way to say it, that actually what we think is real, is actually often just the surface expression of reality, and the actually deeper dimension … let me say it this way, spirit is more real than the physical, and the realness or concreteness of physicality doesn’t even begin to exhaust, it doesn’t have sufficient realness, sufficient thickness, to actually touch the interior dimension of spirit, which animates.

>>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

In their dialogue, Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like super-coherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

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

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

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

Ervin Laszlo & Marc Gafni on Supercoherence

Watch and listen to this 7-minute video, the fourth 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:

Enjoy the fourth part of the dialogue here:

Transcript

Dr. László: The idea is in us, I think. This is what I want to emphasize. You know, it’s been only last few years that I’ve kind of rediscovered that I’m a Platonist, I didn’t know that. I always thought of myself as more Aristotelian, but I discovered that in Plato, this idea that our deepest level, what Plato called the soul, or the spirit, it knows it all. It’s there. When we discover something, we rediscover it. The knowledge is there, because everything that we need in this world, everything that brought us here to be a complex species, endowed with consciousness, had to be in us, had to be a part of our heritage, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, so there is this drive towards complexity, diversity in this unity.

And this is part of the unfolding of this evolutionary trend in the world. It unfolds because systems become integrated with other systems. Each of them maintains its identity, each of them contributes to it. Now if you could contribute to it consciously, you can carry forward this evolutionary trend, this evolutionary drive, toward higher levels of integration. This individuality, diversity, this unity, we can carry it forward much more effectively, enhance this process. And to my mind, this is what I’m thinking now, and what am working on now. This is the ultimate meaning, if there is such a thing, I’m think there is, ultimate meaning of existence, of conscious existence. That we’re able to prehend, to comprehend, that we are part of this evolutionary unfolding symphony. Which is taking us, like you have pointed out, is taking us as unique irreducible selves, into a larger unity, into a larger whole.

We don’t have to worry about surrendering ourselves, because as conscious being, we maintain the universe in us. The whole universe is encompassed in our consciousness, because we can grasp it, we can prehend it, as Whitehead would say. So we are there, as an irreducible whole, in the universe, which is unfolding around us, and unfolding in us. We can describe it objectively, as the coherence of elements in higher level systems. We can describe is subjectively, but just as meaningfully, and perhaps even more meaningfully, as the sense of becoming part, part of larger and larger communities, communing with others, and this is the world around us. And that’s the idea, that’s the element that we have neglected. That’s the element in our deep consciousness, that we have to recover, through meditation, through prayer. That’s where spirituality, I think, helps, to us, to rediscover that we are part of a cosmic symphony unfolding.

We carry our individuality as a force, as an element, not by disregarding and subordinating the rest, but by cohering, embracing this. I talk, you know, about all embracing love. You mentioned loved could be subverted a little bit if it’s limited to two or more individuals.

Marc Gafni: That would be ordinary love, egoic love.

Dr. László: Egoic love, but we could have a deeper love, which is our sense of being a part of the cosmos. Now, this seems to be like a very big statement, but part of reality, if you have that sense, you start relating differently, then you start not using coal, but using solar, for example. Then you start acting in a way that you can co-evolve with others around you. I’m convinced that biologists have also pointed out, there is no evolution in the world, except co-evolution. There is nothing except in partnership with others around it. Coherence is ultimately supercoherence, as you mentioned. To my mind, supercoherence as a very simple definition, is the coherence among coherent systems.

We are a coherent system, in so far as we’re healthy. When we have disease, then we’re breaking down as a coherence, but as healthy beings we are coherent. Now, we are also coherent with our group, with our fellows, with our communities, with our families, with our ethnic group, with our culture, with our nation, et cetera, and ultimately with human kind. Then we are supercoherent. And there is nothing on this planet, on the web of life, that would not be supercoherent, except modern people, because they have forgotten this larger part of their coherence, and that’s the task before us, to recover this, to be, again, feel ourselves a part of the unfolding symphony of life, on this Earth. That’s the only way I think we can overcome our problems. That’s the best way we can move into a future where we can participate, where we can flourish, and have the rest of the system flourish as well.

Marc Gafni: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. So there’s this dislocation, right, which is this unique dislocation modernity, and this dislocation, of course, has served initially the evolutionary process, because it has allowed for the emergence of self, and the self’s dignity, and the self’s right, so human rights and democracy and feminism, have been what’s emerged from the beginning of this dislocation, the beginning of the dislocation was, I’m not only defined in terms of my larger context, I actually have irreducibly, irreducible dignity independently. You’re following, everyone who’s listening, so this dislocation that Ervin’s describing begins as a health evolutionary movement forward, but then it pathologizes, because the beginning of it stated, I’m not only part of a larger context, I also have my own irreducible dignity, but then it lost, it forgot, of course, I’m part of a larger context, of course I’m located right in the larger context, it dislocated from any location other than the desiccated self. And then the desiccated self was unable to experience its own meaning, and its own sense of wholeness. It then absorbed, parasitically, everything into itself, whether as a nation, or as an individual, which began the massive consumption of energy regimes, which produced the second shock of existence. And as Ervin said, we’re telling the exact same story. You know, slightly different ways of telling the narrative, which makes it exciting, but it’s the same story.

>>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

In their dialogue, Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like supercoherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

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

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

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

Evolutionary Love, the True Nature of Reality, & Unique Self Enlightenment

Watch and listen to this 14-minute video, the third 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. In it, Ervin Laszlo introduces the concept of love and entanglement through physics, while Marc unpacks evolutionary love and its place in structures and society. Watch previous posts from this series, The New Renaissance, & Love as an Erotic Force, or The Second Shock of Existence.

Enjoy the third part of the dialogue here:

Ervin Laszlo introduces the concept of love and entanglement through physics:

Love is first expressed in this universe when particles emerged in the big bang. There were particles of matter and antimatter. These particles when they collided annihilated each other, the surviving particles are now the substance matter. What did these particles do? Hydrogen nuclide looked for a companion, the electron, which started rotating around the nucleus of the hydrogen nuclide. This formed the Hydrogen atom. The Hydrogen atom picks up another electron, and becomes Deuteron. Gradually these atoms themselves relate among each other and form to create further unions and integrations of more complex forms and life emerges out of non-life.
The way in which every particle is related and sensitive to one another is called entanglement.
Einstein didn’t believe entanglement when he tried to split an atom in half and project the other half further away, thinking that he would measure the two separately bringing in new results. It turns out the other particle felt when the first half was being measured, changing the result. This flabbergasted the science community. Every element of the natural world is related instantly to every other element. Information is instant, and much more direct than physics originally thought.
Entanglement is universal, is present in us, in our consciousness, because it’s part of our cosmic heritage. It’s part of the symphony of love.
In a coherence system every part is sensitively interconnected with every other part. New life wouldn’t be possible without coherence between cells, acting as one, so to speak. We are an integration of different cells, working together to create a symphony, a living organism. If any part of this unit breaks, we have disease.
There’s a need to rediscover this connectivity within us, outside of us. We have to recognize that we’re a part of these ongoing wholes, otherwise we cannot survive ourselves.

Marc Gafni unpacks evolutionary love and its place in structures and society:

Evolutionary love is not ordinary love. What we’re describing here is awakening to the true nature of reality, an interconnected evolutionary love that lives at every level of reality. The human being can adopt this love in one of two ways, an egoic way – a disguise for the separate self seeking security – or awaken and realize love is living in me and I am an irreducible unique part of the larger whole, and I awaken to that reality as my actual consciousness otherwise known as enlightenment.
The universe has an interior, a prehension, allurement and entanglement that lives at the quantum level and the macroscopic level. This attractive force moves up and down reality. We’re not saying reality is an entangled system of interconnected “its”. Reality emerges from an erotic force, which connects everything and that force comes alive in us when we awaken (enlightenment).
The second shock of the existence (See the Second Shock of Existence post here) requires an evolution of self. A transformation of identity beyond the separate self, to be an enlightened unique self is to realize there’s no externalities.
The evolution of consciousness that responds to the second shock of existence we can call the democratization of enlightenment, enlightenment becomes democratized and the evolution of enlightenment from true self to unique self begins the symphony of love.

>>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

In their dialogue, Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like super-coherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

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

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

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

Ervin Laszlo & Marc Gafni: The Second Shock of Existence

Watch and listen to this 15-minute video, the second 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. Listen to the first part here.

Enjoy the second part of the dialogue here:

Marc Gafni introduces the first and second shocks of existence:

The first shock of existence is the emergence of separate self. We move from hunter/gatherer, whose concern is survival in a small clan to early horticulture, the emergence of the human being. The emergence of separate self confronts the human with death, and culture unfolds to confront death.
After we evolve through 7 culture ethics (instinct, early farming, mythological, industrial, informational, and post informational) the second shock of existence unfolds: The second shock of existence is the awareness of the potential death of the species (vs. death of the individual). We’ve out-used our resources in terms of our core fuels.
How do we move forward from this? A fundamental shift in our consciousness.

Ervin Laszlo talks in depth about the creation of the individual and their place in society:

From the observer’s viewpoint, this world is falling apart because the discovery of self during the renaissance era. A transition from roles in society that had individuals such as kings and heros with communities that were designed with roles (those who pray, those who fight, those who rule) has now come to such lengths that everyone is an individual. We serve the individual, the individual becomes dominant. Your role or place in the larger community is secondary.
The individual has no particular place and is supreme in this model. The individual becomes expressed in the seeking of power, wealth, and satisfaction. This has lead to a coming apart of natural relationships that create a community.
Looking at it through the lens of system theory, you could say you’ve sub-optimized the system. The individual parts of the whole can not all be the greatest part.
We must recover our oneness, our unity within a larger whole, to meet evolutionary love. In a way that doesn’t give up our personality or self but integrates the self in a larger whole. We can support both at the same time.

Marc Gafni Summarizes:

The individual lives within the context of a larger whole. The mass flowering of the individual happened in the renaissance. The self emerges, then gradually gets decontextualized. The self must validate their existence and they do this through consuming (wealth, power), while losing their connection to the larger context, leading to emptiness, which leads to more consumption.
The system begins to pull apart with depleted energy, depleted resources, and disconnection from the larger context. We’re looking to recover the larger we-space while reclaiming the individual within the larger system.
The individual remains a unique expression of that system, with unique dignity and unique creativity, which paradoxically becomes the currency of connection, not separation. My Unique Self, that’s part of the larger context, serves the larger context in love and the larger context loves and holds me in return.

>>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

In their dialogue they share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like super-coherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

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

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

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

Ervin Laszlo & Marc Gafni: A New Renaissance of Evolutionary Love

Watch and listen to this 10-minute video, the beautiful first 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.

Marc Gafni opens the space:

After we have killed all the gods except for Aphrodite, although we worship at her altar of love, we have lost the meaning of the word love.
“I love you” is our sacred word but we have forgotten what it truly means.
If we begin with a reconstruction of love and its actual meaning, maybe from there we will develop a super-coherent vision of the patterns that connect.

Ervin Laszlo then sets the stage for the rest of the conversation:

Love IS reconstruction. We need to reconstruct because the world is falling apart.
Love is the longing to become one.
We need unity in diversity and Love is that element of unity. It is what holds it all together.
It is there in the quantum world, the simplest systems, the planets… What makes a system whole is the sense of belonging of its parts.
In the sentence “I love you”, the YOU means everybody and everything.
Evolutionary Love is the love of reconnecting, of rebirthing the world, of becoming part of it.

Enjoy the first part of the dialogue here:

>>> You can watch the whole dialogue here <<<

In their dialogue they share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like super-coherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

The Evolution of Love: Activating Evolutionary Relationships & Unique Gender

An 8-Week Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

The Evolution of Love, Relationships, & Gender in 8 Steps

Session 1: The Principles of Transformation, The Evolution of Love, & The 3 Levels of Relationships
Session 2: Unique Self & Unique Self Symphony, Love Languages, The Six Big Bangs, & The Emergence of Evolutionary Relationships
Session 3: From Man/Woman through Genderqueer to Unique Gender – Lines & Circles All the Way Up & All the Way Down
Session 4: Light & Shadow, Hierarchy & Status, & the Beauty of the Line
Session 5: The Universe: A Love Story – Entering the World of Lines
Session 6: Take Responsibility for Your Own Arousal & Embrace Your Unique Risk
Session 7: The World of the Circle: Enlightenment Is Intimacy with All Things
Session 8: Potent Precision, & Spacious Expansion: The Higher Integration of Lines & Circles – Liberation from Loneliness through Evolutionary Relationships

>>> Learn More about The Evolution of Love <<<

Questions & Answers for Dr. Warren Farrell & Dr. Marc Gafni

The Boy Crisis Meets A Return to Eros – A Dialogue between Dr. Warren Farrell & Dr. Marc Gafni – Part 3

In this discussion between Marc Gafni, Warren Farrell, and the board members of the Center for Integral Wisdom we explore answers to several evolutionary questions such as:

How do we eliminate male disposability?
What impact has the charter school movement had on the boy crisis?
Do you find a different number of women who are willing to be a champion for men, than willing to be a champion for boys?
Kids that do the mass shootings are disproportionately white, is that fair to say? And if so, what do you think of that?
Men and women desire each other and we seem to have gotten to the point where men are asked to hold all of the desire in society. How did we get out of balance?

Enjoy the video here:

For the beginning of this dialog between Marc Gafni and Warren Farrell, check out part 1 and part 2.

A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

– On Sex, Love, and Eroticism in Every Dimension of Life, from Drs. Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, reveals the radical secret tenets of relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the holy. They reveal what Eros actually means and share the ten core qualities of the Erotic, which are modeled by the sexual. These include being on the inside, fullness of presence, yearning, allurement, fantasy, surrender, creativity, pleasure, and more.

A Return to Eros shows why these qualities of the erotic modeled by the sexual are actually the same core qualities of the sacred. The relationship between the sexual and the erotic becomes clear, teaching you how to live an erotically suffused existence charged with purpose, potency and power.

To be an Outrageous Lover—not just in sex but also in all facets of your life–you must listen deeply to the simple yet elegant whisperings of the sexual. This book will forever transform your understanding and experience of love, sex, and Eros.

>>> Buy A Return to Eros Here <<<

___________________

Reclaiming Eros

with Dr. Marc Gafni

Imagine being fully expressed with an unstoppable life force that aligned you with the will, the desire, the knowledge and the creative impulse to engage ALL areas of your life full-on; without fear or shame stopping you from moving forward. Imagine the transformative power and positive impact you’d have on your personal relationships and potentially be a major influence in the world.

This is the ideal companion to our think tank book A Return to Eros by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid.

>>> Learn More about Reclaiming Eros <<<

How Do We Steward the Power of Gods?

The existential risks we are facing “are not different in kind, but they are different in magnitude and speed,” says Daniel Schmachtenberger in a recent podcast—called the 2050 Podcast, The No Fluff Podcast about the Big Picture, Positive Impact & Life Purpose. The exponential tech we created cannot “be put back in the bag,” so we need to create what he calls “anti-rivalrous environments that make us safe stewards of the level of power that exponential tech brings, or the human experiment completes.”

In a more poetic way he elaborates further that exponential tech is bringing us the power of Gods. Now we have to have the love, prudence, and wisdom of Gods to guide us.

Daniel says that creating an anti-rivalrous environment has never been done and there are a few prerequisites that need to be built into the prototype system:

We need to make sure that the system doesn’t incentivize harm.
The prototype needs to be big enough, so it can be a close-loop system—meaning it needs to be something like a city-state.
The system needs to be anti-fragile and autopoietic.

In order to create it, we need to tap into a different sense of our humanity, says Daniel.

>>> Listen to the 2050 podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger here <<<

How Do We Create a Unique Self Symphony?

This new sense of our humanity is what we at the Center for Integral Wisdom and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution call the new human, Homo Amore Universalis, that is enacted by all people realizing their Evolutionary Unique Selves and coming together in a Unique Self Symphony.

Learn more about how to create a Unique Self Symphony in our 5-part video series “The Power of a Unique Self Symphony” on MarcGafni.com:

How can we create “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” that Charles Eisenstein alludes to in lots of his work? How do we co-create a world that works for 100% of humanity, as Buckminster Fuller has called it?

>>> Read more and watch the video with Dr. Marc Gafni here <<<

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Marc Gafni: If You Ask You Must Surely Need

Today is the first day of Chanukkah and we, the team of the Center for Integral Wisdom with our President Dr. Marc Gafni, want to give you a little gift.

Get a little taste from our Reclaiming Eros Self Study Online Course

Listen to the Story of the Holy Snuff Box

>>> Learn More about Reclaiming Eros Here <<<

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Marc Gafni has also told the Story of the Holy Snuff Box on his blog:

Everybody knows that Holy Beggars hold the world together. Thus would one modern master introduce the following sacred story. Never, never pass by a holy beggar, and they are all holy. Walk across the street. Go out of your way! Who knows who he really is? Who knows what great soul lays hidden in that tattered beggar? You never know… You never know. All you can know that is if someone asks, they must certainly need.

One day a beggar came to see the Holy Israel, Master of the Name. He was angry and depressed. “What kind of a God do you have. I used to be rich – I helped many people. But now look at me – I have lost everything. It’s not fair. How did such a fate fall upon me?!” And with that the beggar broke down into tears.

“Sweet Yossele,” said Israel, Master of the Name. “All the mysteries are in your own life. Think back to Yom Kippur six years ago.”

And now the master Israel had Yossele’s complete attention. For how did he know that his name was Yossele – and how could he know what he had done six years ago? Master Israel continued. “It was a fast day, the holiest day of the year. A day when we pray all day long. People on that day are at their weakest, but also at their highest. You remember, Yossele, that you brought the snuff box to the prayer service?” For although on this fast day eating is proscribed, fragrance is permitted. Often, as in the prayer fellowship I grew up in, snuff boxes would be passed around, to offer fragrance to revive the spirits for prayer.

>>> Read the whole story here <<<

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>>> Learn More about Reclaiming Eros Here <<<

Imagine being fully expressed with an unstoppable life force that aligned you with the will, the desire, the knowledge and the creative impulse to engage ALL areas of your life full-on; without fear or shame stopping you from moving forward. Imagine the transformative power and positive impact you’d have on your personal relationships and potentially be a major influence in the world.

This is what you will learn and become through taking this 9-week video course, professionally filmed on location during the First Festival of Love in Holland.

Uncover the Secret Powers of Eros in Order to…

Become fully alive, fulfilled, and at home in your own life
Live a life of passion, purpose, and integrity to fulfill your most important goals
Discover a new relationship to sexuality as teaching you how to live erotically in all the non-sexual dimensions of your life
Enrich not just our personal existence but our whole society
Find the power to kindle radical Outrageous Love in your life for your loved ones and beyond
Reimagine your life and all of the reality to create the world that works for everyone
Find joy, vitality, and success in every area of your life

>>> Learn More about Reclaiming Eros Here <<<

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

This course is the ideal companion to our wonderful think tank book A Return to Eros:

**>>> Buy A Return to Eros Here <<<**

Reclaiming Eros: The Inside of the Inside – Part 1

Watch this teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni as our special gift from our Online Course on Reclaiming Eros:

Some of the themes Marc Gafni covers in this video:

The lineage of the “Einstein’s of Consciousness”
King Solomon, his wives, and the Temple in Jerusalem
The Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Ark of the Covenant
The Practice of Jewish Yoga
The Talmudic Story of the Poisoned Cookies
Temple Consciousness and Sexuality
Eros in Exile
Reclaiming Eros = Reclaiming Temple Consciousness

>> Download the Transcript of the Video Here <<

Imagine being fully expressed with an unstoppable life force that aligned you with the will, the desire, the knowledge and the creative impulse to engage ALL areas of your life full-on; without fear or shame stopping you from moving forward. Imagine the transformative power and positive impact you’d have on your personal relationships and potentially be a major influence in the world.

This is what you will learn and become through taking this 9-week video course, professionally filmed on location during the First Festival of Love in Holland.

>>> Learn more and register here for our online course Reclaiming Eros <<<

Responding to Existential Risk

Humanity is facing extinction level crises in not one but in multiple and distinct sectors. That alone could throw us into a personal crisis of overwhelming dimensions—without even beginning to take into account the many crucial personal existential challenges most of us face in our own lives.

How can we possibly look seriously into the face of global existential risk, manifest as extinction level threats and be motivated and energized into the joy of our lives? That is the question that Marc addresses in this very moving video.

How does Existential Risk become the catalyst to profound joy and awakening into the Outrageous Love we are capable of instead of shutting us down? That is the invitation that we all stand for at the Center for Integral Wisdom.

CIW President Dr. Marc Gafni has recorded a half hour video, where he shares some of the thinking that emerged from many of the great conversations during and after our CIW board meeting:

How do we live with and constructively respond to the existential risk we live in?
How can we use it to motivate us instead of shutting us down?
How can we make fear conscious so it enlivens instead of paralyzes us?

Listen to this inspiring talk by Dr. Marc Gafni:

Marc Gafni: Success 3.0 – A New Outrageous Love Story & Writing Outrageous Love Letters

“We need a new success story. We need a new love story. We need a new outrageous love story. And so what we want to try and do structurally, poetically, evocatively, shamanically, in these days is to articulate this new story.” ~ Marc Gafni at the Success 3.0 Summit

Watch these beautiful talks by Marc Gafni from the Success 3.0 Summit:

Success 3.0: A New Outrageous Love Story

From the talk:

I talked before about Archimedes, who said, give me a lever, give me a place to stand, give me a pivot, and I will change the world. And Success—Success 3.0 is our pivot. And what we’re saying is we need a new story when all the other stories have been de-storied. [6:08]

When we live in a postmodern context that says that the only grand narrative is that there are no grand narratives. And that anyone who tries to articulate a grand narrative is viewed as being somehow regressive, the Blue level that John talked about. Right? That level of traditional consciousness. They’ve got—they’ve got grand stories. Rick Warren’s got a grand story. They’ve got a narrative. But we’re like, we don’t do the narrative thing. Right? Our grand narrative is that there is no grand narrative. [6:37]

But what happens is, we then live without a story. We live in a de-storied universe. I have some very good friends who recently moved to Memphis, Tennessee and they have a daughter, and they just put their daughter in preschool. And their daughter goes to a fundamentalist Baptist, beautiful preschool, and these two people are clearly kind of postmodern kind of consciousness, deep believers in science, skeptics. And I said to them, I can’t believe it, like Jan, like Tim, why—why are you sending your daughter to like a Baptist school? And they said, well she comes home, and she’s got like a story. And initially we tried to show her that the story that she had was wrong, and then we looked at each other and we realized we didn’t have a better story to give her. And so we’re sending her there. [7:21]

Like wow! What does that mean, that we don’t have a better story? What does it mean that in the progressive world we’re so lost in our uncertainties—which are wonderful. Our uncertainties are fantastic and beautiful because they are challenging the dogmatic certainties that took us so long to break out of—but then where is our certainty? Where’s our dance between certainty and uncertainty? Where are the certainties that we stand for, that we live for, that we die for, that we’re radically committed to? And so we’ve got this understanding that we have to articulate a new story. [7:57]

We need a new success story. We need a new love story. We need a new outrageous love story. And so what we want to try and do structurally, poetically, evocatively, shamanically, right, is to articulate, right, in these days, right, this new story. Now my tradition—my original native tradition—is Hasidic Kabbalistic and my teacher is the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, who founded the Hasidic movement that came out of the Carpathian Mountains. [8:28]

And in that lineage we tell this story about stories. Apparently when the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, was confronted with a challenge, he would go to a certain place in the forest, and he would light a fire, and he would say words, and it would somehow be okay. When he died, his lineage receiver, the Maggid of Mezritch, would go, right, to that same place in the story, and he would light a fire, but he didn’t know the words, but it was enough. And the crisis would be averted. [8:56]

And then when his student, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, would face a crisis, he would go to the place in the forest, but he didn’t how to light the fire, he didn’t have the words but he at least at the right place, and it was enough. And when his student, Moshe Leib of Sasov, was confronted again with a crisis, he didn’t know where to go in the forest, and he didn’t know how to light the fire, and he didn’t have the words. But he said, you know, at least—at least I can tell the story. [9:18]

Right? But we’ve forgotten the story. But we’ve lost the narrative thread. And when we lose the narrative thread—when we can’t find Ariadne’s thread—we can’t actually avoid the crisis. We live in a world in which everybody’s talking to each other. Everyone’s engaged, we’re virtually interconnected, but we don’t have a shared story. We don’t have an articulate realization that that which unites us, is so much greater than that which divides us. [9:46]

Download the whole transcript here>>>

Success 3.0 Summit: Outrageous Love Letters

Watch and try the practice of Outrageous Love Letters that Marc introduced during the Summit:

While ordinary love is an emotion, a reaction, and even a strategy of the ego, it is Outrageous Love that is the love that moves the entire process of evolution. So, how can we access the outrageous lover in us? The answer is: by writing outrageous love letters.

Writing and Reading Outrageous Love Letters - Click for more Photos from the Summit In Marc’s words from his 2nd Summit keynote:

“You can write an Outrageous Love Letter to yourself. You can write it to a friend or a lover. You can write it to Source. But do it outrageously. Do it as reality itself.”

And with that he invited everyone in the room to write an outrageous love letter. The two lines of people wanting to share their letters at the mics were still long when time ran out. People were deeply moved by that experience and practice.

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

Enjoy the ninth part of the dialogue here:

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

Enjoy the eighth part of the dialogue here:

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

Enjoy the seventh part of the dialogue here:

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Enjoy the sixth part of the dialogue here:

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

Enjoy the fifth part of the dialogue here:

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

Enjoy the fourth part of the dialogue here:

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

Enjoy the third part of the dialogue here:

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

Enjoy the second part of the dialogue here:

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

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Enjoy the first part of the dialogue here:

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Success 3.0: A New Outrageous Love Story

Success 3.0 Summit: Outrageous Love Letters

Watch and try the practice of Outrageous Love Letters that Marc introduced during the Summit:

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