Wisdom for Your Week: A Gift for You from the Summer Festival of Love at Venwoude

Marc Gafni teaching at Venwoude

The second annual Mystery School of Love has begun and is already in full swing. More than 150 people have come to celebrate with us this year’s theme: “Reclaiming Eros.” Many participants were here with us last year and are excited to be here again!

The festival revolves at its core around Dr. Marc’s several hours of Dharma transmission each morning. In the beginning of the day, spiritual teacher Chahat Corten, a leading luminary at Venwoude and a direct dharma student of Dr. Marc, begins the morning with a day-opening ceremony. Dr. Marc then meets with the twenty or so teachers gathered on the faculty of the Mystery School. Included are leading teachers who are each in their own right bright stars and key leaders of the Venwoude community where Dr. Marc serves as the World Spirituality Teacher in Residence. We will post a bit later a special piece about all the the wonderful teachers, each worthy of note and great appreciation.

The center of the emergence is the field of radical dharma and outrageous love that is woven and rewoven by Dr. Marc. The attendance at the festival has doubled in the last year and we expect that to keep doubling every year. Dr. Marc weaves a field of precise and powerful—truly “source-code-changing”—teaching, which transforms minds and explodes hearts. Dr. Marc’s mind and heart seem to merge as one and he lives for everyone as an overflowing and brilliant weaver of meaning, meta theory and grand narrative—even as he opens up spaces of genuine enlightenment that seem to shift the earth beneath people’s feet. It is an enlightenment teaching pure and simple, and the process is, as Dr. Marc calls it, Loving Your Way to Enlightenment!

To give you a little taste of it, we want to share with you just the first few minutes of Marc Gafni’s opening dharma talk, where he sets the frame by giving us 6 principles and commitments for the upcoming week. This is before any of the real dharma got started—this was the first hello:

The 6 Principles and Commitments

No 1: The principle of donkey-smuggling.

No 2: The opposite of pain is not pleasure but comfort. Pleasure always incorporates tension and pain. We are going for radical pleasure this week—not comfort.

No 3: The principle of strawberry ice-cream: We have to be able to taste it. You cannot touch God unless you are in the World Space that “knows God” (Integral Semiotics).

No 4: The Democratization of Enlightenment: A key term coined by Dr. Marc in 2006 and a touchstone of World Spirituality and Unique Self teaching.

No 5: The commitment to stay and be here all the way.

No 6: Loving Our Way to Enlightenment: the core of Marc’s enlightenment transmission—as someone wrote about him recently “he is Rumi.”

Listen to the audio here by clicking on this link to get an understanding of what these principles mean—you can also download the .mp3-file by right-clicking/control-clicking on this link and then Save As>>>