There is a great story about this man who is a very busy man. Heidegger talks about the busy man. This busy man is from Chicago, and he is going to visit Paris, and he wants to visit the Louvre, which is the great museum of Paris. His friends have to ...
Archive for the ‘Sacred Text/ Textual Koans/ Talmud’ Category
Yom Kippur: The Day of Atonement
A story told by Marc Gafni in his book Uncertainty It had been a particularly hard year. The community of Chassidim gathered on the Day of Atonement, the fast day when all Jews pray to God for forgiveness for their sins, and the growling in their sto ...
Tears in the Mystical Tradition of Cosmocentric Consciousness
Enjoy this excerpt from Marc Gafni’s Book Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion and Rosh Hashanah: Let me tell you a story of holy tears of this kind. A Hasidic story. Isaac, the Vorker Rebbe, was best friends with another well-known mast ...
Certainty and Holographic Oneness as Spiritual Orientations by Dr. Marc Gafni
by Dr. Marc Gafni, from his Certainty book, which will be re-released as part of two-volume Integral Religion. R. Nachman is drawing on Biblical mysticism, which understands God’s presence in the world through the model of the sefirot, the framewo ...
A Story about Laughter and the Spiritual Practice of Sacred Study: Marc Gafni
Courting the Sacred When I sit down to prepare a teaching the process goes something like this. First is the attraction. I generally only teach that to which I am attracted. There has to be an almost unquenchable longing to explore the subject. Secon ...
Textualization of Eros: Part Three: Marc Gafni
The Torah is like a beautiful woman, who is hidden in a secluded chamber of her palace and who has a secret lover, unknown to all others. For love of her he keeps passing the gate of her house, looking this way and that in search of her. She knows th ...
The Textualization of Eros: Part Three: Marc Gafni
The Eroticization of Text: In a tour de force the process of study is described in the Zohar much in the way the 12th century troubadours a hundred years before described their flirtation with their loves. In the romantic ideal of courtly love, thoug ...
Textualization of Eros: Part Two: Marc Gafni
on the first day of Simchat Torah according to the count of the Land of Israel When the Temple was destroyed the masters knew that the holy writ of biblical myth needed to be expanded and deepened. The temple, which was the archetypal object of eroti ...
The Spiritual Practice of Study: The Textualization of Eros:Part Three
On the first day after Simchat Torah: by the counting of the land of Israel The Textualization of Eros When the Temple was destroyed the masters knew that the holy writ of biblical myth needed to be expanded and deepened. The temple, which was the ar ...
The Spiritual Practice of Study: Part Two: Marc Gafni
posted by Gafni assistant: We are used to thinking of intellectual pursuit as a pretty dry kind of affair. And even if it excites us it is clear that the mind is the primary faculty engaged in the pursuit of intellectual depth. Well, as you might exp ...
The Spiritual Practice of Torah Study: Marc Gafni
posted by Gafni assistant. More then any other spiritual art, study has been my life long spiritual practice. The Study of Torah. The study of Reality. Study is not the accumulation of information. It is rather – the suspension of ego and small ...
The Tale of the Harlot by the Sea
This article is an essay published in Marc Gafni’s English language book The Mystery of Love, and discussed in his audio series, On the Erotic and the Holy. In recent study, Marc Gafni has added and revised this article. In Talmudic Textual Koa ...
Textual Koans/Talmudic Poem
An Offering Of Words, of Beautiful Empty Pages, in Honor of the Text, and in favor of Spiritual Artists instead of Spiritual Teachers: What kind of work Can I do in this world? Who would be kind enough To hire an old holy Bum, One with a great reputa ...