from a work in progress “Dance of Tears”

Prayer is the restoration of the divine image through the restoration of the dignity of the word.
Prayer, teach the masters, models sacred speech.
Writes the Maggid of Mezeritch…

“Take special care to guard your tongue
Before the morning prayer,
Even greeting your fellow we are told
Can be harmful at that hour.
A person who wakes up in the morning is
Like a new creation,
Begin your day with unkind words…
Even though you may later turn to prayer,
You have not been true to your creation.
All of your words each day
Are related one to another…
All of them are rooted
In the first words that you speak –
{So begin each day with prayer}”

From a work in progress, Dance of Tears:

Our goal is to be able to access and listen to the voice of deep emotion and detect within it the voice of God. This is how these mystics read the text, “The masters are those who have mastery over their hearts.” Mastery, a kind of spiritual emotional intelligence, is understood as the ability to be not merely emotionally reactive, welling up with tears, laughter or anger only in response to some external event. To be a master is the ability to identify and access a broad range of deep emotions at will, using those depth emotions to guide and interpret reality with the eyes of God. While the intellect clearly remains a vital tool, the prophetic kabbalistic tradition insists that one who engages spirit, “with only mind and intellect….cannot attain the level of the Garden of Eden …. the inner emotional work of amazement, deep feeling and ecstasy … in this world {which is} part of the enlightenment of the higher worlds.” It is only by doing this work that “you can experience your future redeemed world, your portion in the Garden of Eden … in this world.”

The following video gives you a small taste of the Center for World Spirituality Mystery School of Love (aka Summer Festival of Love) run in partnership with Venwoude International retreat center. The Mystery School is an annual eight day event which takes place at the end of July and the first week of August. The morning dharma teaching is by Dr. Marc Gafni with an all star team of teachers leading breakout sessions in the afternoon. The Mystery School is a profound enlightenment teaching intensive where the practices revolve around awakening to what Dr. Marc calls Your Unique Self. This awakening to your true nature and to the sacred activism that is the invitation of your life is rooted in a powerful realization of the unique love beauty and love intelligence of all that is, that lives in you, as you and through you. Many students report profound enlightenment experiences during mystery schools. Those experiences however are but pointers towards a stable and integrated awakening to your unique self that has the potential to literally change everything even as you deepen and transform from where you are. This is the path of what Dr. Marc calls the evolutionary lover or the outrageous lover. At the core of the dharma is Dr. Marc’s core mantra: We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.

Next Venwoude Festival / Mystery School:  July 27th – August 3rd, 2013
Info here: http://www.venwoude.nl/summerfestival.htm

by Marc Gafni

Love between people, at its core, is not an emotion. Love between people, at its core, is a perception. Love is a Unique Selfperception. The emotion is a direct result of the perception. To be a lover is to have eyes to see. Love perceives the True Nature of things. To love another is to perceive their True Nature. Love is the joy and pleasure you receive from your perception of someone’s Unique Self. Deeper still, love is a realization of the infinite gorgeousness and beauty of other, which is their True Nature. Love of you is my realization of you. If love of other is the perception of the other’s Unique Self, then self-love is the perception, the realization, of your own Unique Self. Self-love is your realization of the grandeur of you.

By Marc Gafni

Your Unique Self is also defined by your evolutionary context. In a Unique Self encounter, you seek not only romantic, pragmatic, or emotional con- nection. You seek evolutionary relationship. In evolutionary relationship, you seek to manifest the evolutionary potential in your meeting. You let go of the narrow narcissistic needs that initially brought you together.
In an evolutionary relationship, you are obligated by evolutionary integrity. You identify the Unique Gift that your meeting holds. You see how this gift supports and furthers the ecstatic, evolutionary God-impulse that motivates and moves all of existence. Evolutionary integrity means that you bring all the people of the past, present, and future who might be affected by your decision into the room. You widen your sense of time from the immediate shallow time to deep evolutionary time.
The ethics of your decisions are then determined not just by the interpersonal matrix between the two of you, but by your evolutionary obligation to
all that might be born from your meeting.
This is why Unique Self encounters require not only integrity, but evolutionary integrity.

By Marc Gafni

To make contact in a Unique Self encounter, you must know how to avoid the ritual of rejection that so often arises from the ego’s contraction. When you feel hurt, your small-self ego contracts. Unless you make an effort to counter the ego’s inertia, you fall out of divine communion. You fall into UnLove. Unique Self encounter asks that you not fall out of divine communion and become degraded by UnLove. It demands that you not get stuck in the coiled contraction of the small self.
The ego will tend to take hurt and turn it into an insult, which offends your existence. Then to compensate, you set into motion the ritual of rejection. It goes something like this:

1. You experience the pain of hurt and/or rejection.
2. As a result, you feel small and insignificant. It even puts you in touch with your nonexistence.
3. To feel less small, you lash out and inflict hurt. In your ability to hurt the other, you experience power, which makes you feel like you exist again.

To enter a Unique Self encounter, you must resist the gravitational pull of UnLove. You must identify as part of the larger field of love. You experience yourself as part of the seamless coat of the Universe. This is the source of your authentic power. This will allow you to receive hurt inflicted by others as a wound of love and not as an insult. You wear your hurt as a battle scar in your struggle for love. You bear it with pride and dig- nity. You are freed from the compulsive need to inflict pain on the one who hurt you in order to prove you exist. You know you exist because you are in divine communion, that is to say, identified with the larger whole beyond your particular part nature. The trance-ending of ego into Unique Self- realization is animated by the quality of love. Love motivates and manifests the spontaneous action of care and compassion. Egoic self-contraction is the quality of fear. Fear motivatesand manifests the reactive rituals of egoity.

To live and act as love means to keep your heart open through the pain of heartache and hurt.

To live and act as fear means to allow the pain to close your heart. You can practice love by practicing opening your heart even when you feel hurt.

Rather than turning away, closing down, and striking out, you keep your heart open. This will help you act skillfully instead of reacting clumsily in these situations.

When you practice opening as love moment to moment in the face of the hurt, the power of the past weakens. Old wounds are in the past. If you open your heart in the present, time after time, the power of the past recedes.

You will probably always feel the pain when you meet UnLove in relationship. But you do not need to feel the closure, which deadens your heart and your life force. You can continually practice love rather than closing down into UnLove. You can feel your self-contraction and choose to change the way you react.

You are not a victim of your past. When you stop either ignoring or overdramatizing past events, you also stop unconsciously using life trauma from the past to avoid giving the depth of love that is yours to give in the present moment.
The pain of the past may have come to you through another. Your present reaction is yours. You are doing it. You must assume responsibility for your own complex of reactivity. Reactive emotion and reenactment do not need to be a fact of your nature. You can take your armor off. You can unguard your heart and trust yourself to live and love from an intense armorless vulnerability. This is the safest place from which to live.
For some people, especially those with fortunate childhood circumstances, opening through hurt is not so hard. For others, it may be the work of a lifetime. For all of us, it is perhaps the most important work we can do for our own love and freedom, and the love and freedom of the others in our lives.

To be weak in love is to exclusively identify with your separate self, which is always already insulted and empty with craving.

To love is to know that we are all lost and found in the same reality together. To love is to stay open in gratitude and joy even as you know that love breaks your heart.

In one of the great mystical moments of Western biblical myth, the patriarch Jacob sees Rachel, the love of his life, for the first time standing by the well. It is the original story of love at first sight. When you see another truly, your seeing plunges you into love. In their first meeting, the story goes, “Jacob kissed Rachel; he then raised his voice and cried.”

Why the crying? Answer the Unique Self mystics, “Because he saw he would not be buried with her.”

To love is to know that you will feel the pain of separation. This is the paradox of love: love is suffering, yet to live and not to love is madness. We do not liberate ourselves from the suffering of love by detaching ourselves from love itself. Liberation in the path of love is to suffer the mortal circumstances of your love so completely that you are moved beyond your self. You are moved beyond your small self to your True Self and then to your Unique Self, where you realize that you and your beloved will always meet again. Only then can you love fully from your unguarded heart. You are profoundly in relationship from the fullness of your unique personhood, even as you have evolved beyond the egoic self-contraction of your small self.

]]> http://www.marcgafni.com/the-sixth-law-of-unique-self-encounters/feed/ 0 http://www.marcgafni.com/the-fifth-law-of-unique-self-encounters/ http://www.marcgafni.com/the-fifth-law-of-unique-self-encounters/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:08:10 +0000 Steve Raymond http://www.marcgafni.com/?p=8218 Unique Self Encounters Create Evolutionary We Space

By Marc Gafni

Meaningful Unique Self encounters foster the experience of entering together into higher states of awareness and intelligence. The next evolu- tionary leap in consciousness involves a recognition that, together, we have access to a collective wisdom and intelligence that is much smarter than our individual intelligence.

This is, in a sense, something the mystics have always known: the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts. What is “new” is that nowadays, in workshops and retreats, in corporate boardrooms and organizational development seminars, as well as in spiritual groups, so many people are experimenting with engaging the phenomenon of collective intelligence.

Here’s how it works: a room full of people with clarity of intention come together with focused attention. They engage a challenge, seek a solution, or reach for deeper direction. They seek something precious that was previously unavailable to any of the individuals in the room. It was also unavailable through the classic collaborative methods of sharing information and comparing notes. They use certain group technologies to create a group consciousness within which a new space of insight is revealed. The insight that comes forward often has a visionary wisdom that exceeds the limitations of any of the individuals in the room. Something happens in the center of the room.

The “voice” that rises in the center of such a group, whether in an organizational setting or a spiritually oriented one, is the voice of an emergent higher intelligence. It is the voice of the “whole.” All the distinct parts are held, heard, and honored, yet the whole transcends them into the larger love-intelligence that speaks in, as, and through each of us, even as it calls from beyond us. It is from this precise space that collective intelligence wells up.

The famed basketball coach Phil Jackson, who brought the LA Lakers and Chicago Bulls to multiple championships, was explicitly referring to this phe- nomenon when he talked about “the subtle interweaving of the players at full speed to the point where they are thinking and moving as one.”
One participant in a collective consciousness exercise describes it as follows:

When someone else spoke, it felt as if I were speaking. And when I did speak, it was almost egoless, like it wasn’t really me. It was as if something larger was speaking through me. . . . And in that space we started to create. We started to say things that we had never thought before.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of this phenomenon: “All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all.” In Jewish Mysticism, this is called the voice of the Shekhinah—the feminine face of the divine, which in the Hindu traditions is called Shakti. Jewish mystics who wrote in the third century taught, “Whenever ten people gather with clear holy intention, the Shekhinah speaks.” Or as Matthew said, “When two or three gather in my name I am in the midst of them.” Modern Hindu mystic Aurobindo called this “the evolution of truth consciousness in which [they] feel themselves to be the embodiment of a single self.” Theosophist Rudolf Steiner said, “People awake through each other . . . then real communal spirituality descends on our workplace.” Finally, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, one of the key founders of modern evolutionary spirituality, describes this collective spiritual awakening as “sustained, certainly, by the individual person, but at the same time embracing and shaping the succes- sive multitude of individuals.”

The intelligence of wholeness cannot arise when people in the group are locked into their separate-self egos. Nor does it happen at the level of True Self. At the level of separate self, you remain separate from everyone in your community, so you cannot join to create a We Space that will yield a higher wisdom than that which emerges from the collaboration of separate selves. If you are living in True Self, then you are absorbed in The One, and your Unique Voice merges in silence. Collective intelligence is rather a direct function of shared Unique Self experience.

Through the unique contours of your puzzle piece, each member of the group merges with and completes both themselves and the larger whole. The Unique Self experience is both the heart of the phenomenon of collective intelligence and the key to its emergence in any given situation. Said simply, evolutionary We Space is only a genuine possibility if we deploy the awakened technology of Unique Self-realization. There are very few pleasures in life which compare to the awakened We Space of Unique Selves living together. It was toward this pleasure that Teilhard de Chardin pointed when he said,

“There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.”

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