Someone once said that reading the Bible in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. To touch the mystery of Hebrew mysticism, you need to touch your lips to the original words themselves. The key word describing the spiritual work in the ...
Archive for the ‘Blog – Spiritually Incorrect’ Category
February 26-March 1, 2009 – Kristen Ulmer’s Ski to Live Weekend – with guest Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni will be delivering several teachings at the world famous Ski To Live clinics of Kristen Ulmer. Kristen Ulmer, voted for twelve years running the best woman skier in the world, is a pioneer in the extreme sports movement. She currently stud ...
A Scene from Israel: The Holiday of Seeing: Part Three
cont’d from last two blogs but you can just step in here. Welcome. Dedicated to my son and all the young boys masquerading as soldiers who were left with no choice but to go to war yesterday. This Holidays of Seeing, known as the Pilgrim festiv ...
What Does it Mean to be a Spiritual Master: Part Two: Marc Gafni
It is the human being becoming a channel for love that one is invited to see and to imitate when one watches the priest give a blessing. It is in this sense that the ancient texts write — “When the priest gives a blessing the Shehina dwells b ...
What Does It Mean to Be a Spiritual Master: Marc Gafni
posted by Marc Gafni’s assistant Here we come to the essence of the whole Temple archetype. The priest’s most important job was to give blessings. The specific language employed by the sources to describe the priestly vocation is actually to ...
The Textualization of Eros or the Erotics of Text: Marc Gafni
To See These Three… The major players in the Temple drama were the priests. In truth, the self perception of the Kabbalists is that they are the inheritors of the spiritual work of the priests. Just as the Priests would gaze at God so the Kabbalist ...
Pornography: The Exile of the Shekinah: A scholarly note for those readers who Care about such things: Marc Gafni
My interpretation of the Tantric nature of seeing and its transmutation into loving – in the last set of blogs – derives from three primary sources in my study. First — a reading of primary sources — both biblical and mystical — in ...
The Sexual Gaze: Objectify Me… Now! Subjectify Me… Now!: Marc Gafni
The essence of the Holy of Holies: to become a lover and a seer. To love is to become God’s verb. To love is to see with God’s eyes. The end is rooted in the beginning, and the beginning is rooted in the end. We return to the Temple and the cheru ...
Who is Seeing Who: Part Two: Marc Gafni
Perceived upon entry! To be ‘seen before God.’ The word “before” as we have seen derives from the same root as face and inside. So the Pilgrim comes to experience himself as on the ‘inside of God’s face.” In the ecstasy of the f ...
Who Is Seeing Who: Part One: Marc Gafni
The End is in the Beginning and The Beginning is in the End We return now, full circle to the Cherubic mystery of love. When the pilgrims came to the Temple in Jerusalem three times a year, the biblical verse tells us that they came to “see and be ...
Perception – Love- Intention – Creation: Marc Gafni
Aboriginal traditions in Australia, the Hebrew mystics, Quantum Physics, a modern travel writer and the biblical myth – in the the last three or four blogs …. all come together and and remind us of the powerful spiritual truth; Love=Perce ...
Aborigines, Songlines and Love: Marc Gafni
Listen to a conversation in travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book The Songlines: “Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see it and sing it — just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the An ...
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: YES WE CAN: Marc Gafni
My son Eytan is visiting me from his homeland where I live with my family. Even as I live for a period of time in the United States, and my home is here now. I love America and am American in every fibre of my being. Even so, if that time will be for ...
Eyes to See: Marc Gafni
It is the Kabbalists’ erotic loving perception of being that helps create and sustain the very reality they observe. But observation doesn’t quite capture the sense of what the Kabbalist does. The Kabbalists were often referred to as Mistaklim or ...
We need to “Disturb” God: Marc Gafni
One of the leading physicists of the century, Werner Heisenberg, explained relativity as the paradigm shift in which we understood that “there is not a fact and an observer, but the joining of the two in observation.” Physicist J.W. Sullivan in h ...