Falling in Love: Part Twenty Four: Marc Gafni
Dedicated to the healing of my son eytan and all those in need of healing.
The Service of Ecstasy
The service of ecstasy, teaches the Holy Seer of Lublin, is the work of loving. It is the ultimate perception which is able to tease out the divine point in reality in every arena. Even, teaches the seer, when the divine point is in contradiction to convention, law and all of the norms by which society usually functions. The ecstatic is a visionary whose gentle yet piercing eyes see through all the veils, and see all as it really is: interconnected, alive and alove, pulsating with energy and purpose.
The Shadows of Ecstasy:
One of the Hebrew words which indicates in kabalistic sources both ecstasy and love is chesed. Chesed is the quality incarnated by Abraham, who is the only biblical figure called by the prophet “Abraham my Lover.” Abraham, who sees with God’s eyes, is the model of the ecstatic erotic and the iconoclastic.
And yet there is danger in ecstasy, great danger, because in its very essence ecstasy is about breaking limits. It undermines distinctions, between right and wrong and between each other; distinctions that are so necessary for our lives!
The word chesed itself is an erotic yet ethically neutral word in Biblical myth. It means both overflowing love in all the best ways and in the worst of ways. Chessed is one of the words for incest in biblical text. Both share in common the quality of boundary breaking. Ecstasy, like all erotic qualities, is a sacred perception with a shadow side.
The perception. Eros as the underlying reality of the universe. The ecstatic individual senses the erotic in every crack and crevice of reality. Love is the fabric of being. The ecstatic is on the inside. He feels the intensity of desire, the fullness of being, and the radical in-weaving of all reality. The paradigmatic ecstasy of falling in love, that cheap (but wonderful) grace which requires no work, moves us to our first glimmer of these cosmic erotic truths. Higher ecstasy requires commitment, effort, and will, but is fully available to virtually everyone and anyone who dares try. Ecstasy is present in each and every place and instant, even as it envelopes all of space and all of time.
Ecstasy at its core, teach the Hebrew mystics, is but a shift in perception. Remember that famous silhouette picture of two faces turned towards each other — which, if you just shift your perception, suddenly reveals the outline of a goblet. This is precisely the experience of ecstasy. Nothing changes. Everything is as it was.
And yet nothing is the same. A whole new gorgeous experience of reality has opened up to you. Alive and alove, you live the same life you live now — but it is radically different from anything you have known.
The Shadow: While the breakdown of ego is the most sought after experience, it can leave us vulnerable in a very painful way. There was a reason we developed those ego walls, and we need to let them down with great care for our soul. Ecstasy blurs the lines between good and evil. It undermines the ethical and social distinctions essential to living a moral life. Good and evil, mine and yours, true and false, all blur into one.
marc gafni
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