Posts Tagged: Thought Leader Dialogues

Randall Paul & Marc Gafni Unplugged: On Betrayal

The following dialogue from November 2007 is between Randall Paul, a Mormon scholar, businessman, and spiritual activist, and Dr. Marc Gafni. Randall is the founder and director of the Center for Interreligious Diplomacy.

Besides being a successful entrepreneur, Dr. Paul earned his Doctorate Degree from the University of Chicago and is deeply rooted both in his own tradition and in the major canons of Western religion, psychology, literature, and philosophy. The topic of this dialogue is the nature of Betrayal as a primary human experience and an invitation to one’s own spiritual evolution and liberation.

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Andrew Cohen & Marc Gafni: World Spirituality Dialogue

Perhaps no topic in contemporary spirituality is more discussed than the nature of enlightenment and how it relates to the modern, post-modern, and emerging integral world.

Andrew Cohen is one of the most influential figures bringing wisdom that is defining a movement called Evolutionary Spirituality, which identifies essence with the evolutionary impulse itself and issues a powerful call to shed limited identifications of the self. Cohen breaks from classical enlightenment thinkers in his description of spiritual realization as constantly evolving. Marc Gafni, co-founder of CIW and the most influential voice defining Unique Self Enlightenment, offers a view of enlightenment which overlaps and also differs from Cohen’s vision in important respects. Listen to their dialogue about world spirituality based on Integral principles.

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Angeles Arrien & Mariana Caplan: World Spirituality Dialogue

Angeles Arrien, Ph.D. was a cultural anthropologist, award-winning author, educator, and consultant to many organizations and businesses. Throughout her lifetime she lectured and conducted workshops worldwide, bridging cultural anthropology, psychology, and comparative religions, and contributed many practices from perennial wisdoms to medical, academic, and corporate environments. She was the Founder and President of the Foundation for Cross-Cultural Education and Research. Her books are translated into thirteen languages and she received three honorary doctorate degrees in recognition of her work in the world.

Angeles’ books include The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary; Signs of Life: The Five Universal Shapes and How to Use Them, (Winner of the 1993 Benjamin Franklin Award); and The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom, (Winner of the 2007 Nautilus Award for Best Book on Aging). Her recent book, Living in Gratitude: A Journey That Will Change Your Life is a Gold Medal Co-Winner of the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY Award) in the category of Inspiration & Spirituality.

She passed away unexpectedly Thursday April 24, 2014, and shortly afterwords her office started to inform hundreds of organizations, colleagues, friends, and thousands of students nationally and internationally of her unexpected death. Her business office is now closed.

Listen to this dialogue on World Spirituality between her and Mariana Caplan.

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Avram Davis & Marc Gafni: World Spirituality Dialogue

Rabbi Avram Davis, Ph.D. is the founder of Chochmat HaLev, Center of Jewish Spirituality, an active congregation serving over 250 households in the San Francisco, East Bay area. He is the author of two books: The Way of Flame, Judaic Mysticism, and the editor of Meditation From the Heart of Judaism.

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Claudio Naranjo & Mariana Caplan: World Spirituality Dialogue Long Version

In this audio-dialogue, Claudio Naranjo brings over five decades of immersion, study, teaching, research and publications into the world’s great wisdom traditions, as well as a profound immersion in psychological transformation and transpersonal psychology. Claudio’s life itself represents that of a man who has journeyed into World Spirituality.

This dialogue considers questions including: What are the possibilities and pitfalls of drawing from multiple traditions and paths in a holistic and embodied approach to transformation? How do we develop a personalized path to transformation in the context of respecting the great traditions? What wisdom does the Enneagram system offer to the evolution of a World Spirituality, and are their specific challenges and possibilities for specific ennea-types, and more. . .

Claudio is a Chilean psychiatrist who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions. He is one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls in the Gestalt movement, one of the pioneering developers of the Enneagram, and the founder of SAT (Seekers After Truth Institute), one of the most influential systems of psycho-spiritual transformation in Central and South America, and Spain. He is the author of numerous books, including Ennea-type Structures, The Way of Silence and The Talking Cure, Songs of Enlightenment, The End of Patriarchy, and the forthcoming, The Healing Journey: New Approaches to Consciousness.

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Claudio Naranjo & Mariana Caplan: World Spirituality Dialogue Short Version

In this audio-dialogue, Claudio Naranjo brings over five decades of immersion, study, teaching, research and publications into the world’s great wisdom traditions, as well as a profound immersion in psychological transformation and transpersonal psychology. Claudio’s life itself represents that of a man who has journeyed into World Spirituality.

This dialogue considers questions including: What are the possibilities and pitfalls of drawing from multiple traditions and paths in a holistic and embodied approach to transformation? How do we develop a personalized path to transformation in the context of respecting the great traditions? What wisdom does the Enneagram system offer to the evolution of a World Spirituality, and are their specific challenges and possibilities for specific ennea-types, and more. . .

Claudio is a Chilean psychiatrist who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions. He is one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls in the Gestalt movement, one of the pioneering developers of the Enneagram, and the founder of SAT (Seekers After Truth Institute), one of the most influential systems of psycho-spiritual transformation in Central and South America, and Spain. He is the author of numerous books, including Ennea-type Structures, The Way of Silence and The Talking Cure, Songs of Enlightenment, The End of Patriarchy, and the forthcoming, The Healing Journey: New Approaches to Consciousness.

Stream the audio here:


Frances Vaughan & Marc Gafni: World Spirituality Dialogue

Frances Vaughan, Ph.D. is a psychologist, educator and author of books, chapters and articles on psychology and spirituality. Her books include Awakening Intuition, The Inward Arc: Healing in Psychotherapy and Spirituality, and Shadows of the Sacred: Seeing Through Spiritual Illusions. With her husband, Roger Walsh, she is co-editor of Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision, and Gifts from A Course in Miracles, which includes Accept this Gift, A Gift of Peace and A Gift of Healing. Her books have been translated into eight languages.

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Byron Katie & Marc Gafni: World Spirituality Dialogue

In this dialogue from 2006, Byron Katie and Marc Gafni discussed the relationship between Katie’s system known as “The Work” and what Marc Gafni has recently come to refer to as Evolutionary Kabbalah (a term Marc Gafni coined formally only after this dialogue took place).

Key issues were the relationship of thoughts and inner states of being to the creation of reality in the manifest world. Byron Katie has said many times in her written and oral work that all suffering is a creation of our thoughts. This is the core premise, and one might even say dogma, of her entire teaching.Marc Gafni’s position is that while much of suffering is a creation of our thoughts, to say all of suffering is a creation of our thoughts is both not true AND creates more suffering.

The great contribution of Byron Katie’s work in Marc Gafni’s understanding is that it is utterly politically incorrect and a wonderful challenge to victim consciousness. Katie’s questions cut right through the core of illusion, narcissism and self-deception! She challenges the person lost in victimhood to reject a self-pitying stance and assume full responsibility for the way things are.
Is it true? Is it really true? How would it feel for you to give up that thought? And, Who would you be without that thought? And turn it around… That is, whatever you thought about the other person… and what they are doing to you… turn it around, take back the projection, and see how you are doing it to them.

Wow… How totally wonderful and great is this simply-formulated perception, which cuts to the core of the way things really are. A wonderfully elegant and simple expression of the non-dual realization that all is perfect – just as it is right now!
Marc Gafni both appreciated and challenged Byron Katie during their dialogue. The challenge was rooted in Marc Gafni’s position that while everything Byron Katie says is true as far as it goes, it is only part of the truth.

In Marc Gafni’s realization, based on the great tradition of Kabbalah, not all suffering is created by thoughts. Some suffering is real. Some suffering is not created by thoughts. Sometimes we are right to cry out in protest and say, “Let my People Go.” “It should not be this way.” “It must not be this way.”

This is the prophetic ethic of protest, which demands justice from everyone, including Job. It is in this prophetic tradition that it became possible for a Hasidic master in the late 19th century to put God on trial for the suffering of his community! Putting God on trial naturally assumes that it is legitimate and good to reject the status quo and affirm the possibility of possibility. If we do not affirm the dignity of our perceptions, which includes the reality and pain of suffering, then how can we trust our intuitions and perceptions to guide us in healing and transforming the planet?

Specifically, Marc Gafni discussed a story with Byron Katie about his mother being buried alive at age four by the Nazis in the midst of the Holocaust. Byron Katie suggested that this suffering was caused only by Marc’s mother’s thoughts about what was happening, and that absent her thoughts, which placed a hermeneutic grid on this incident, she might have been able to experience it as merely playing in a sandbox or some such.

Stream the audio here: