What is a mystery school?

It’s one thing to ponder

The great mystery:

What are we here for

Why is the world as it is.

But a school?

What is there to learn

In the face of this mystery?

What facts or ideas are there

To snatch from the unknown?

As we gather the first night

It begins to emerge

There is no dogma to master

No guru to follow

Marc is the teacher

But also on the same journey

Together we reach

For the inside of the inside.

At times tender

At times fierce

He gives up authority

To insist on self-authorship

The art of conducting

A symphony

Even with

Such real attainment

He remains a lifetime devotee

Pouring clarity

Illuminating

Bowing before the mystery

Always a student

Of the goddess

He calls She

The Shekinah

Of the Solomon  lineage

Which stretches from ancient times

To this very moment

Deepened by Marc

Who integrates

as Solomon

Did

All of the wonder, the mystery

The interior and exterior sciences

Evolution and eternity

Into a coherent story of value

A shared grammar of value

Today

In response to the meta crsis.

Most of us

Are not raised

In  the Hebrew

Or the Sanskrit

Or the other langagues

That we learn to sing

We are finding what it is

To be a mystic

Of any tradition

Or no tradition.

There are Buddhists here

And Christians and Jews

Avowed atheist and agnostics

But most had given up

On those old paths

Caught as they are

In rote rules and tired rituals

Or dogmas of denial

That have lost their meaning

At least for us.

Yet the core of their insight remains

There practices need to be reclaimed says Gafni

At a higher level of consciousness

We need the heiros gamos

The intimate communion

The integration

Of rapture and responsibility

Intimacy and obligation

Which Gafni repeats again and again

Can never be split

That there is a force in us

And beyond us

That gives us back our lives

If we can find it

And find what is in us

That blocks it

And keeps us separate

From each other

Even from those we most want

To love

And certainly from those

We don’t.

What does it mean to surrender

To that force of love

In a group of others who understand

Something of this resistance

Within

This desire to remain apart

In what feels like safety

But is really a kind of loneliness

That we are so used to

We hardly notice it

There is always something at hand

To keep it at bay

One of life’s endless distractions

To which we turn

And which so many are eager

To sell.

Love is often spoken of

And so hard to truly honor

There are many reasons to hate

And to judge

Some of them justified

Most of them not

Either way we pump them out

Like fumes from a factory

Toxic and deadly

We need each other

To find a different path

Under our feet

We are dancing our way

To a kind of ecstasy.

Even those who find that ecstasy

A little over the top

Join in

When Marc insists we blow

The gates open

“What gates is he talking about?”

Someone asks me

And we laugh

Peering through the mists

Looking for those gates.

But they aren’t up above somewhere

Or out there

They are

The gates of the heart

Yours, mine.

Marc has been through a lot

Occasionally you see the scars

Mostly you don’t

Mostly what you see is devotion

To opening the heart

His, ours

Sally Kempton called him a heart master

And she would know

In their deep friendship of more than 20 years

He taught her more about love, she said

Than anyone else.

I would say that as well.

The mystery of love

The great Eros

Drawn down from the great mystery

We all feel

However hidden from us

There is something to study

There is something to learn

There are truths and there is evidence

But in the end we bow

Amid laughter and tears

Because there is no other way to know

How deeply it matters

That we are here.

September 1, 2023

Eros Mystery School

21-25 August, 2023

Belgium, Europe
(online participation possible!)

This summer, a hundred of r/evolutionary mystics will gather in Belgium to study and practice these teachings, with Dr. Marc Gafni and our whole team of seasoned practitioners. Last year our castle was fully booked, so if you have been standing on the fence, wait no longer!

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE OUTRAGEOUS LOVE (R)EVOLUTION NOW!

Dr. Marc Gafni about the need for Mystery Schools

[Below is a lightly edited transcript of the video invitation above. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a written language.]

I am so delighted to be here in this moment in history, which is a time between stories and a time between worlds, to welcome you to Mystery School.

Now, Mystery School is not a new technology. Mystery School is sourced, in ancient civilizations and in both traditional societies and in the modern society that created all that emerged from the Renaissance, the forces that actually created the Renaissance itself— all of these societies were formed by Mystery Schools.

It wasn’t public universities, which barely existed.

It wasn’t governments with all of their politics and conflicts. 

Rather, it was Mystery Schools.

The Mystery School is a place where we come together to experience the future. In our heart, in our mind and in the pulsing movements of the body — in the body’s urgency, in the body’s quivering tenderness, in the mind’s urgency, and in the quivering tenderness of the mind, if you will, in the heart’s urgency and in the quivering tenderness of the heart – we come together in the Mystery School to experience the future.

What a Mystery School does is access a memory of the future: heart, body, and mind.

• In the Mystery School your future self calls you.
• In the Mystery School the future self of culture, of society, of our global civilization, calls to us. 

And we come to Mystery School always because we understand that we want to, we need to be more.  

We want to love more,
we want to feel more,
we want to know more.

We want to be more intimate and more creative and more alive and more kind and more ecstatically urgent and more deep and profound.

We come together because there’s none of us who haven’t experienced a crisis, and our crisis is a birth.

• Our crisis in our personal lives is the evolutionary driver that has the possibility to potentiate our new potential, to birth our new possibility.

In Mystery School, we understand that the Divine, Source, is the possibility of possibility.

In Mystery School, we understand that the very source energy of evolution —animated by Eros — that exploded in the Big Bang, is literally inherent in us waiting to emerge, waiting to potentiate our future.

But at this moment in time, Mystery School is different than it’s ever been in history because we’re in a different moment.

We’re in this moment in which exponential technologies, weaponized structures, have the capacity to literally bring about the end of humanity as we know it.

We’re faced with existential risk on ten or twelve different fronts, catastrophic risk on six or seven different fronts.

And risks of two forms, the possible death of humanity as we know it ­– collapse, stagnation, or actually extinction – or the potential death of our humanity, when what we understand in our most noble and profound knowing of what we understand to be a human being no longer exists.

Because it’s been superseded by a techno-feudalism, by a technological super structure, which upgrades algorithms and downgrades human beings.

So the technology of Mystery School that formed every momentous leap in evolution, within culture — where people would come together in a Mystery School and they would think the new thoughts and be the new feeling, and actually bring down into the personal and into the collective a memory of the future — is now utterly urgent, radically joyful, ecstatically privileged and necessary.

This is the moment in which we realize that the most personal is the most Kosmic; the most personal is the most global.

This is the moment in which we both step into our personal lives and commit to our own transformation in a way that we never have before.

But we also understand that our transformation must participate in the transformation of the whole.

So the Mystery School is ecstatically urgent. It’s a field of Evolutionary Love, of Outrageous Love. It’s a field of joy.

It’s a field of unimaginable transformation in which you actually go on a journey into the interior face of Kosmos and the interior face of your own being.

It’s the ultimate psychedelic mystery experience, if you will. 

But it’s political and it’s social and economic and spiritual, and embodied, and we touch on the erotic and the holy.

It’s all there.

This is Mystery School. This is what birthed the Renaissance. It’s what birthed the best of ancient Greece and ancient China, the best of Russia at its most potent moments.

The Mystery School.

This is where you take your seat and become the hero of your own life. Even as you take your seat at the table of history.

Here’s what we’re going to be doing in our 5 days together.

We’re going to be doing one hour of study and then one hour of music and dance, and then another hour of exercise and practice, and then another hour of deep dive into ancient texts, and then music and dance again.

And then, then we’re gonna raise our glasses. Salute, right?

And it’s gonna be this virtual feast, imagine Plato’s Symposium. We’re going to gather around the table. It’s not gonna be like any other seminar you’ve ever been at. We’re going to be gathered around the table. Food and wine and drink and dance and music, and the Gods and Goddesses are gonna dance with us, as we plunge into the senses of mind, and the senses of heart and the embodied senses of Reality.

Awake and alive, the leading edge of evolution, yearning to articulate the one great hope that we have:

Hope is a memory of the future.

Let’s do this together.

— Dr. Marc Gafni

Eros Mystery School

21-25 August, 2023

Belgium, Europe
(online participation possible!)

This summer, a hundred of r/evolutionary mystics will gather in Belgium to study and practice these teachings, with Dr. Marc Gafni and our whole team of seasoned practitioners. Last year our castle was fully booked, so if you have been standing on the fence, wait no longer!

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE OUTRAGEOUS LOVE (R)EVOLUTION NOW!

An early excerpt from Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s forthcoming book, The Universe: A Love Story; The Next Step in the Evolution of Love 

The Motive Force of Evolution: The Evolution of Love

The universe is part of a larger self-organizing universe—a self-actualizing Kosmos—that moves nonrandomly from the dazzlingly complex beauty of mud to the sublime beauty of Mozart, from bacteria to Bach, and from dirt to Shakespeare. (…) The methodology of evolution at times deploys randomness, but the structure of reality and the arc of evolution is nonrandom at its very core.

To realize rapture, one has but to contemplate a simple bacteria like E. coli with its thousands of allured movements toward ever-changing configurations of intimacy—chemical reactions—taking place every second. One must contemplate the dazzling dance of precise configurations of intimacy that is mitosis and meiosis, the chlorophyll molecule, or the microbiome. To then begin to contemplate the yearning movement of Kosmos—what we call evolution—toward ever-deeper consciousness and intimacy, expressed in myriad lines of cosmological, biological, and cultural evolution—including social, technological, aesthetic, and spiritual lines of development, and so much more—is to explode into an ecstasy of amazement that shatters the dogmas of human hubris, in which we claim to be the first instantiations of Conscious Evolution.

 JOIN THE OUTRAGEOUS LOVE (R)EVOLUTION NOW

It would seem at best blindly dogmatic to religiously declare this universe unconscious. Rather, by Conscious Evolution, we mean that, at this moment in history, we are becoming aware that the process of evolution is taking place within us as human beings. Evolution happens in us, as us, and through us. We awaken as Conscious Evolution. We become aware of the entire evolutionary process which came before us and of which we are an expression. We understand, not intellectually but as our core emergent identity, that we are a unique emergence of the Evolutionary Eros, the LoveDesire, LoveBeauty, and LoveIntelligence that allures and animates the evolutionary spiral of unfolding from no-thing to matter to life to the self-reflective human mind.

The interior sciences as disclosed in the great wisdom traditions meet the exterior science of evolution. Evolutionary science is then joined by systems, chaos, and complexity theory, coupled with the new physics and the new biology. These are integrated with the many varieties of developmental theories. What emerges from the synergistic mix of allured ideas in the communion of Eros is no less than a New Universe Story. (…)

Evolution becomes conscious of itself—in a new way—through us. We ourselves, through our lives, decisions, and loves, are the leading edge of evolution on this planet. The force of evolution is becoming conscious of itself in us. Or said differently, we are becoming conscious of our identity as the leading edge of evolution itself. To awaken as Conscious Evolutionaries, we must articulate and internalize the New Universe Story—the best take on Reality we have—the Universe: A Love Story. 

JOIN THE OUTRAGEOUS LOVE (R)EVOLUTION NOW

The emergence of Conscious Evolution is an expression of the evolution of love. For it is love, or Eros, which drives the whole process. Conscious Evolution is not simply the human awareness that evolution is taking place through us. This intellectual awareness is true but partial and by itself sterile in its transformative potential. This limited expression of Conscious Evolution does not take into account the implications, personal and Kosmic, of what physicist David Bohm referred to as the “strong suggestion” of the sciences. Rather, for Conscious Evolution, itself an expression of the Universe: A Love Story, to become truly conscious, it must integrate the wider and deeper reality of the Intimate Universe and the Universe: A Love Story.

The gathering together of the new data and what David Bohm called “in-formation” to embrace reality in a wider Integral Eros is driven by the same love that moves the sun and other stars. The New Story is the fierce and gentle persuasion of love, driving itself and moving toward its own ever-higher, wider, and deeper expressions. The evolution of love is the direction of Kosmos, the hidden impulse of the Evolutionary Eros, which itself is the impulse of our very own lives. It is the ever-more wondrous unfoldings of Eros itself, moved by itself toward ever-more good, true, and beautiful expressions of its own nature.

This summer, a hundred of us will gather in Belgium to study and practice these teachings, with Dr. Marc Gafni and our whole team of seasoned practitioners. As countries are slowly re-opening, we expect to be filling up quicky now, so if you have been standing on the fence, wait no longer!

JOIN THE OUTRAGEOUS LOVE (R)EVOLUTION NOW

“I have always been moved by love. Love has exalted my heart, shattered my life, broken my heart, caused me unimaginable suffering, and gifted me with unspeakable joy. Love has evolved, clarified, and even purified its intentions in me over the years. For all of it, I am wildly grateful to love”.

These opening sentences from Dr. Marc Gafni’s upcoming book, “The Universe, a Love Story”- set up the stage for the book he and the late Barbara Marx Hubbard wrote together before her passing – due to publication later this year.

“The Universe, a Love Story” is also our theme this year at the Festival – where the question of “what is our role, both individually and collectively in telling that story?” will be explored in depth.

The text below* – also excerpted from the book, introduces the themes at the core of Dr. Marc’s work, which together makes up what we call “the Dharma” also known as “CosmoErotic Humanism”.

“Since I was very young, all I have wanted to do is to love everyone as deeply and intensely as possible. The notion of limiting love to one person, to one nation, to one idea, to one place feels unbearably painful. Even as I happily know that love demands from me intense singular focus on the utter uniqueness and irreducible quality inherent in every encounter, be it fleeting or forever. And I know well the truth of the interior scientists, “there is nothing more whole than a broken heart.”
As you can imagine, this way of being, from which I cannot escape, has landed me in a certain amount of trouble along the way. It is the work of a lifetime or many lifetimes to clarify the nature of our LoveDesire, disambiguate love from grasping, and learn to truly live with an open heart. I am sure, as we all do, that I made mistakes, in the normal arc of life, and I regret those mistakes. That is part of what it means to be a human being. I have no ultimate regrets. I know I was making mistakes in the right direction.
My Deepest Heart’s Desire in life is to love and give as much as I can, as deeply as I can, as widely as I can, and as purely as I can. In the depth of true love, giving and receiving become one. Nothing else matters. Every day I seek to clarify my love, to evolve my love, and to purify my love. And I remain, as we all do, an imperfect and even flawed vessel for the light.
That is the nature of Infinity disclosed in “finitude”.

Sacred Texts and Loving Our Way to Enlightenment

I began my story with mad love for sacred texts, particularly from the Hebrew and Aramaic lineages of Hebrew wisdom. It was in the subtle weavings of the ethical pietism of the Talmud, the mystics of Merkava, the Eros of the Zohar, the heroic audacity of Luria, and the Hasidic masters that made me feel at home in the world.
For years, I poured over sacred text as a form of intellectual mysticism—with the deliberate intention of erotic merger with the Divine. I was driven by a yearning to become a sacred text myself. All I wanted was to become Outrageous Love—a unique expression of Outrageous Love—myself. I wanted to love my way to enlightenment.
But I knew in both my heart, mind, and body that this yearning was not original to my being. It was the core movement of apotheosis, the desire to realize our true nature—the possibility of possibility—that lives in the depth of all the sages, yogis, avatars, and saints in every era and in every part of the world. Apotheosis is the yearning to realize our literal participation in the LoveDesire, LoveIntelligence, and LoveBeauty of Divinity, and in doing so, come home to the fullness of our original identity, to live uniquely as love itself. It is this unbearable longing that has rigorously allured me for my entire life.

The Democratization of Enlightenment

It was, however, only in later writings that I realized that this is not merely the province of the leading edge of spirit or thought. It is rather the deepest, albeit unconscious yearning of every human being.
Every time we are on our knees, we are always on our knees to God.
We are devastated by our alienation from our own Divine LoveIntelligence.
We want to honor and follow this yearning home on a collective level. The manifestation that would emerge is what I began to call many years ago the “democratization of enlightenment.”
It is true that we must not lose our devotion to masters in every field. But we will not be saved by elites. Ultimately, every woman, man, and child must drink directly from the waters of realization.
We are, each of us, the unique intimacies of the Divine Field of LoveDesire who madly loves us, even as he/she/it lives, yearns, and loves as us.

Unique Self

In the late nineties, I began to write about what I originally called Soul Prints (in a book by that name), and later in the same book, I began to refer to it as Unique Self. Realization of our irreducible uniqueness within the greater field of being and becoming, not in the Myers-Briggs character-structure sense but as a unique expression of the seamless coat of the universe, seemed to be utterly essential in taking us the next step. Sharing the good news of Unique Self became core to my calling.

At the same time, in a second book, Mystery of Love, I began to realize that without a new vision of Eros, rooted in the evolutionary impulse itself, we would not be able to transform either ourselves or our planet. I understood then that all ethical breakdowns, personally and collectively, are rooted in a failure of Eros.
Eros, evolution, and Unique Self needed to be brought together in memory of our future, a vision of the New Human and the New Humanity.

Barbara Marx Hubbard met the evolutionary impulse and Conscious Evolution in the pages of Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, and later in the thinking of Jonas Salk and others. I had never read any of them. I met the evolutionary impulse and Conscious Evolution early in my intellectual development in the pages of my teachers Mordechai Lainer and Abraham Isaac Kook, their teacher Luria, and the masters of the Zohar and Talmud who preceded them. (…)

At some point, I realized that I needed to move beyond my ethnocentric joy and commitment. I found philosophers from Plato, Kant, and Saussure, to Sartre, Rorty, and many more. I devoured literature of all kinds. Kashmir Shaivism and the tantric strains of Buddhism allured me. And then at some later point, my focus moved from the interior sciences—as I have just described them in the preceding paragraphs—to the exterior sciences. Math, physics, molecular biology, and more seduced me with their wonder. Anthropology, emergence science, the implications of evolution, deconstruction, perennial philosophy, postmodernism, and Integral Theory each beckoned at the door.

2002 to 2003 was the beginning of a long, deep, wondrous and tumultuous, intellectual and spiritual friendship with Ken Wilber, which generated both great love as well as new chapters in Integral Theory—Unique Self—of which I was privileged to be the founding theorist—and helped catalyze other chapters like the Three Faces of God, World Spirituality based on Integral Principles, and new chapters in the Future of Love and Integral Sexuality.

My own academic work, including the two volumes on Solomon’s Wisdom, Radical Kabbalah, which I originally called Nondual Humanism, was mediated through the prism of Integral Theory. Especially the survey of structure-stages of consciousness was pivotal in inserting a developmental lens in the heart of my work. Wake Up and Grow Up—and later Show Up, Open Up, and Clean Up—the first two originally clarion calls of Trungpa Rinpoche—were reformulated in my writing and mediated through the prism of Unique Self. (…)

Waking up refers to contemplative stages of enlightened consciousness, where one realizes the Infinite, Eternal Ground of Being that imbues all of finitude. One has a direct experience that all of evolutionary manifestation is literally in-formed by the Eternal. The direct knowing of this truth is what is referred to in multiple traditions as waking up.

Of course, some traditions emphasized the quality of personhood in Spirit, and others focused on the more impersonal quality sometimes called the Tao. As I have explored in depth in Unique Self Theory, these are two sides of the One that we have direct access to in our own experience. We access the intimate personal quality of Kosmos, even as we access the surging life force that pulses through everything. Being radically informed and enlivened by the lived reality of both dimensions is the full experience of waking up.

Growing up refers to evolving through developmental stages of consciousness. At each stage, there is a new set of values, a new sense of identity, a new set of needs, and a new sense of purpose and community. These levels of developmental consciousness were famously mapped by Jean Gebser and later by Clare Graves, to name but two of literally dozens of theorists that have drawn overlapping maps of developmental levels.
The great traditions had an inkling that your social or economic matrix, as well as your character, are prisms through which your contemplative experience of enlightenment is filtered. For example, one text in the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom argues that one’s vision of the chariot (waking up) is directly changed by one’s cultural/social context, particularly whether one dwelled in a city or village. The point of this passage is that enlightenment is not a given. It is rather filtered through frameworks. But this realization was esoteric and underdeveloped. This understanding has been deepened by the leading edges of contemporary interior sciences into the crucial realization of the interdependence of waking up on the prism of growing up as we are unpacking it here.

This is a crucial realization. Let’s say for example that you are at a tribal level of consciousness—a stage that was dominant historically in the premodern period but continued into modernity and is re-emerging in the currents of retribalization around the world. At this tribal level of consciousness—which might be called your level or stage of growing up, you experience a contemplative state of consciousness—what we will refer to as a state of waking up.

The core insight of waking up and growing up is that your waking up experience (your state) is mediated through the prism of your level (or stage) of consciousness (growing up). So if you are at a tribal stage of consciousness (ethnocentric), you will experience your state of waking up as God speaking to only your people who are chosen, or you might experience the enlightened quality of Infinite Consciousness as living uniquely in your people and your land. If you further evolve your level of consciousness (growing up) to world-centric consciousness, the exact same contemplative experience (waking up) will be experienced by you as Divine Kosmic Force, personal and impersonal Kosmic, that suffuses, embraces or addresses every human being and every nation. The simple but profound point is that one’s state experience of waking up is interpreted through one’s level of growing up.

After many years of research and study, I understood that it is in Unique Self realization that “wake up and grow up” meet and merge. For it is only in the higher stages of development – what are often referred to as the second tier of developmental levels — that Unique Self clarifies as one’s natural life compass. (…)

Responding to the Second Shock of Existence

All of my work has been focused exclusively on one point: the healing and transformation of suffering. At some point, however, my work shifted from personal existential to collective existential.

I realized, as many of us did, that the level of risk we faced in the world—the potential death of humanity—was the “second shock” of existence.
The “first shock” was the realization of personal death at the dawn of history. This realization generated the momentous revelations of spirit that we call the great religious and spiritual traditions.

But I gradually understood, with many others at the leading edge, that we are facing the “second shock” of existence—not the personal death of the individual human but the death of humanity.

I realized that only a new vision of identity and a New Universe Story could respond to the second shock of existence.

Then around 2012, something happened. I was about to share a teaching on Skype with a group of some fifty students in Europe, but I could not find any words. The intense pain of the previous years welled up and choked my heart and chest. As the wave of pain rolled through, I went silent. The students thought it was a silence of presence, but in truth, it was a silence of absence. I had nothing left to say. I thought to myself in the apparent emptiness of that silence, “This is the end. I must stop teaching. I cannot find the Shekhinah, She, the Goddess, inside of my heart anymore.” Then somehow in the very long silence—I am not sure how—I began to talk. The words truly did not come from me. The following sentence spilled out, “We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.” And the entire teaching of Outrageous Love, mixed with the next level of the Eros and Unique Self teaching, poured out of my shattered but yearning heart. My mind disappeared and the inner pulsation of reality exploded from my broken heart garbed in language. At the core of everything is the distinction between ordinary love and outrageous love. Ordinary love is a social construction, a strategy deployed at the human level of consciousness to express and meet core needs for survival and connection. Outrageous love is not merely a human social construction, rather it is the heart of existence itself. Human love in its most wondrous forms participates in the outrageous love that is the feeling of the universe and the motivational architecture for all of existence. Human love is an evolved expression of the originating Outrageous love that flowed through the movement of Eros towards ever wider and deeper synergistic wholes generating ever new emergents, greater than the sum of all the previous parts, from the very dawn of existence. When the talk was over, my dear friend Sally Kempton, who had been in the other room writing, said to me, “Something happened today. I took notes on the teaching for you so you would have it. It is important.” And she very kindly gave me the notes because I remembered none of it.

I turned my attention to Eros, the evolution of love, the evolution of intimacy, the Tenets of Intimacy, and the laws of Outrageous Love—but all of them, from a deeply structural perspective, enlisting the gamut of exterior and interior sciences. Just like the great traditions that emerged in response to the first shock of existence, the second shock of existence generated in myself, Barbara, and our colleagues known and unknown around the world, a New Universe Story.

*NB: this excerpt was taken from an early draft and is NOT the final version which will be published later this year. Edited parts are indicated by these signs (…)

Abstract
This article outlines the basic teachings of a new chapter in Integral Theory: the post-metaphysical evolutionary emergence of Unique Self. The article begins by contextualizing the Unique Self conversation within a larger discussion on individuality and traces the emergence of the Unique Self teachings through the life and writings of the author. The core Western understanding of individuality and its affirmation of the dignity of the separate self is contrasted with the Eastern teaching of dissolution of the small self before both are integrated into a higher integral embrace through a new understanding of the Unique Self. This article elucidates how the teachings of Unique Self fundamentally change the classical enlightenment paradigm through the assertion that enlightenment has a unique perspective, which might be termed the “personal face of essence.” Perspective-taking, which emerges from enlightened consciousness, is rooted in the ontological pluralism that lies at the core of the Hebrew textual tradition. The new enlightenment teaching of Unique Self, therefore, rests on a series of integral discernments between separateness and uniqueness, ego and Unique Self, and personal and impersonal man. The Unique Self teaching suggests a new understanding of enlightenment through intersubjective love; the Unique Self-perception is then set within an evolutionary context of being and becoming, in which it is seen to express one’s response to the personal address of the evolutionary God impulse itself. In this sense, Unique Self.

Read the full article:
THE_EVOLUTIONARY_EMERGENT_OF_UNIQUE_SELF

You + The Universe
=
A Love Story

“The Universe is not a fact; it’s a story
Not an ordinary Story, but a Love Story
Not an ordinary Love Story, but an Outrageous Love Story
And YOU, are Chapter and Verse in that Story”

Dr Marc Gafni

These lines represent, in a nutshell, the core of what we will be diving into this summer, with Dr. Marc Gafni at the 9th Outrageous Love Festival.

Humanity today is facing multiple extinction-level crises unprecedented in the history of humankind. Attempts to address these crises focus, for the most part, on technological, scientific, and economic solutions to sustain life on Earth. We argue that our global crisis, at its root, is a global crisis of intimacy and of identity, and as such, the answers cannot just be exterior but must come from an Interior Revolution.

We call that revolution, the Outrageous Love Revolution. We claim that only an interior revolution at the very core of the narratives that give meaning to our existence, will create changes, that can address the existential risk humanity is facing today.

This summer, as each summer, we will come together to evolve Love. This time, we will do so, by enquiring into a series of questions, each one holding a key for creating a better tomorrow. With the guidance of Dr. Marc Gafni, who has been working relentlessly for the last 3 decades on articulating the memes for this new Universe Love story, we will explore how, while the Universe love Story is not a localized human love story, all localized human love stories are expressions—chapter and verse—in it.

This is what we mean, in our title, for this summer’s theme:

You + The Universe = A Love Story

In order to tell that Story, we will explore new narratives of intimacy and identity, as well as narratives of community and power. Each of these narratives ask an essential question and holds a key to creating a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

– Where Are We?

Through this question, we will unfold what we mean by an Intimate Universe. At the core, of this narrative, we have the notion that Love is not just a human emotion, but it is the Evolutionary force, the Outrageous Love and Eros that lives at the heart of existence itself.

– Who Are We (Who am I?, Who are you?)

This is the question of our identity, through which we will unfold the Unique Self narrative.
At the core of the Unique Self premise, is the realization of our irreducible uniqueness within the greater field of being and becoming, as a unique expression of the seamless coat of the universe.
Through these questions and more, we will unfold a world in which Eros, Outrageous Love, Evolution, and Unique Self together will be weaved into a memory of our future, a vision of the New Human and the New Humanity which are at the core of all of our Festivals with Dr Marc Gafni.

Join us this summer and discover how your life is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story, the Intimate Universe, the only story that can respond to the “second shock” of existence—which is not the personal death of the individual human, but the death of humanity.

Are you willing to participate in the Evolution of Love?

Join the Revolution

An article by Dr Marc Gafni and James Bamfield

A crisis has swept over our planet. As the virus has woven itself into the fabric of society, so have many aspects of our ordinary lives unraveled. We may be in fear about our health and that of our dear ones. We may find ourselves locked down at home, we may have found that our work has ground to a halt. Almost certainly, many of our plans have disintegrated like sandcastles in the oncoming tide. This wind of collective change is probably the strongest many of us in the developed world have felt in our lifetime.

Life feels different. The world feels a different place.
Instability and uncertainty are here to stay for a while.

In times of crisis, there are two equally important responses.
The first is immediate and practical: help and protect those most affected.
Attend to the frontline of suffering and disruption.
Acknowledge and feel the hardships round the world, acknowledge the privileged bubble in which many of us live – just having a garden is a massive bonus right now. Do what we need to do, take social responsibility.

The second imperative of a crisis is to make sense of it and learn from it.
Crisis is an ‘evolutionary driver.’ Crisis is a potential birth. If we look at the way evolution has worked in all domains – biologically, psychologically, culturally, politically, economically, spiritually – it has often taken a crisis to precipitate the next level of development.

We are suggesting here that crisis at every level of reality is of two kinds: a “crisis of intimacy” and a “crisis of imagination”[1]. Crisis of intimacy points to a new level of relationship, crisis of imagination refers to a new perspective, a new form, a new system, a new constellation of parts. Emergency must lead to emergence.

In order for this learning to happen, in order for us to re-imagine our world and create new possibilities, we need to be able to make sense of what is happening. We need to use and develop a ‘common sense’: we need to start with facts and build these facts into a compelling story. Facts alone are rarely persuasive, stories not based on facts are rarely trustworthy. A story can have a meaning, whereas facts only point towards themselves. We are also saying that not all interpretations and stories are equal. Some account for more of the facts and offer greater depth. Which one day, we hope, will be replaced by other better interpretations…

The central point of this essay is that some hard lessons need to be learnt from this crisis. Sacrifices will need to be made, and these lessons and sacrifices will bring us exactly the changes we need to grow up, liberate ourselves from certain destructive patterns, and achieve a deeper, more intimate, and more joyful world. On an interior level, here is an opportunity to release a new wave of love which is truly inclusive and transcends the usual barriers created by our many differences – of money, of race, of color, of species, and so on. On the exterior level, there is an opportunity here to re-imagine and re-build more coherent and intimate political and economic systems. For it is the failed coherence and intimacy of the current systems that are (at least in large part) cause for the problem.

What we are are offering is essentially a spiritual perspective that is part of a spiritual story, which includes but is not limited to the physical sciences. Our working definition of a spiritual perspective is that life and the universe cannot only be explained by physical laws, and objective proof is not the only source of knowledge. In other words, we are not just a bunch of atoms in a random universe, and we don’t only arrive at truth though microscopes and measurement. A useful distinction between these two kinds of knowing is by naming them the ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ sciences.

There are 3 key strands to our spiritual story/perspective:

1. Intimacy
2. Equanimity
3. Conscious evolution

Intimacy

There is little point in adding another “lovely essay” to the mix of public writing. We need to grasp new frameworks, we need to evolve the very source code of our frameworks if we are going to transform reality. So, let’s dive a bit deeper than a lovely article and see if get can get a hold of what intimacy actually means. By understanding intimacy, we will then easily grasp what we mean by ‘crisis is an evolutionary driver and every crisis is at its core, a crisis of intimacy’. What we will lay out is based on decades of research in both the interior and exterior sciences, that is now being published. But you do not need to have an extensive science background to track this. Like all deep truths, it is almost self-evident once it is pointed out. It is, in the deeper sense of the term, simply common sense. We think that to do sense-making with any degree of depth and accuracy, one first needs to lay out an accurate framework or story, in the sense that we alluded to above, which points towards the basic plotline of reality. That is what we will now do in several short paragraphs. It requires a bit of close reading but we invite you to stay in and can promise that it will be well worth the effort.

Reality moved forward through resolving crisis. Every successful crisis is a new birth. Evolution is a series of crisis that were successfully resolved. In every crisis evolution is trying to re-imagine itself. It does so by seeking ever deeper and wider forms of intimacy. Intimacy simply means a new shared identity between the parts in which the parts also retain their own integrity. Of course, we are following the leading edges of science in applying the term evolution here to all domains of life, not just the biological. These evolutionary principles are true of the evolution of single to multicell organisms. But they are no less true for the evolution of a relationship that can go through a crisis and emerge in a more intimate form. Evolution is guided by a set of principles that apply all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.

In studying the patterns of evolution one realizes that evolution has direction. In the macro, evolution moves from mud to Mozart, from Bacteria to Bach and from quarks to culture. That means the evolution is moving to ever great levels of coherence, complexity and consciousness. But if you look at the micro level of evolution you can see evolution’s arrow even more clearly. Evolution is always moving towards greater coherence between the parts. Just imagine for a moment a simple snippet of the evolutionary chain, the movement from subatomic particles to atoms to molecule to complex molecules to cells.

At each level, evolution is always bringing together separate parts to form a new whole. This process is called synergy. Synergy simply means the force of attraction between parts that generates new wholes. The new whole is shared identity between the parts. The parts do not disappear even as they form a new shared identity, the larger whole. That is the very definition of intimacy, separate parts coming together in a shared identity to form a larger whole. But in the larger wholes the parts do not lose their individual integrity.

If you put it all together you begin to realize that evolution is the evolution of intimacy. Evolution moves to ever more coherent wholes, for example as we just noted from subatomic particles to atoms to molecule to complex molecules etc. At each level there is a new whole -a new shared identity, for example the subatomic particles that make up an atom. But the parts – in this case the subatomic particles also do not lose their integrity as individuals or separate parts.

That is true from atoms through cells and all the way up the evolutionary chain. For example, on the human level, evolution moves from families to clan, to tribes, to kingdoms, to nation states to federations of states. At each level, separate parts come together in a new structure of intimacy – [ family, clan tribe, etc.] to create a shared identity, a new whole greater than sum of the parts.

A crisis is engendered when the part cannot survive by themselves or the parts are unable to create a genuine intimacy between them. To solve the crisis, reality has to imagine and enact a new set of relationships between the parts.

What is so beautiful about this, is that it allows us to understand reality at a much deeper level. Whether we are talking about the structure of an organization or the make-up of a family, or the dynamic on a team, or in a couple, the movement is always towards greater coherence or what we have called greater intimacy. That means the fostering of deeper coherence between the parts which form a shared identity, in which all of the parts have an honored place, even as they participate in the larger identity of the whole.

Every crisis at every level of reality, from atoms to molecules to families to organizations to nations, is a crisis of imagination and a crisis of intimacy. Crisis are always solved by reimagining new, wider and deeper structures of intimacies. That simply means that a crisis is resolved by imagining and enacting more coherent relations between the parts that allow for healthier and more effective shared identity within the context of the larger whole. Without however, losing the individual integrity of the parts, for example between all the team members.

When we awaken to these basic new insights about the nature and direction of reality, that reality is about the movement towards every deeper, wider and coherent intimacies, then in effect the evolutionary process is becoming conscious of itself in us. That is pretty cool stuff.

With this in mind we can now try and understand what we are experiencing in these corona times.

Origins

First, we need to understand the etiology of the virus. We need to gather as many facts as possible. As far as we can tell, it started in one of the ‘wet markets’ in poor areas of China, as have other viruses, such as SARS. The conditions in these markets are horrendous both in terms of treatment of the animals themselves and in terms of sanitation. The reason they are called wet markets is because a lot of water is needed to wash away all the blood, entrails and faeces from different animals being slaughtered. Some of the animals are the product of ‘wildlife farming’, providing alternative meat for poor people, other animals are exotic, often illegally traded, and used as ingredients for tonics, sex-enhancers, bodybuilding-boosters – none of which have any scientifically-proven value whatsoever.

Many of these animals are declared ‘natural resources’ by the Chinese government – meaning you can do what you want with them. China is one of the few countries not to have a law against cruelty to animals. Most studies think now that there is an intermediary host between the bat and humans, most likely the pangolin – which happens to be the most illegally traded mammal in the world.

In other words, the virus is most likely coming out of a highly ‘unnatural’, highly abusive environment. And before we are tempted to adopt any kind of moral superiority to the Chinese, we must look at the horrendous conditions for animals in much of our own meat industry and the untold harm that factory farming has caused the environment.

Let’s also not forget that diseases have historically been of positive interest to various governments in the world who seek to develop biological weapons in order to kill and maim members of their fellow species.

Whether it be the feeding poor populations with unsanitary food, unspeakable cruelty to animals or ethnocentric nationalism that excludes the rest of the world, it is all a story of failures of intimacy.

The overarching point here is that at key moments there is a ‘failure of intimacy’. What we mean by this is that our circle of care and compassion reaches a barrier, beyond which our love does not reach. We have no intimacy with what is beyond our particular barriers, we have no shared identity – we simply don’t care, or not enough.

We only care enough about ourselves and our own tribe or grouping.

All atrocities occur as a result of a failure of intimacy: when it comes to the crunch, the Nazi cannot feel the Jew, the rapist cannot feel the one who is being raped. The perpetrator cannot place themselves on the inside of the victim. The privileged cannot always place themselves on the inside of the disadvantaged.

Whether it be the feeding of poor populations with unsanitary food, unspeakable cruelty to animals, ethnocentric nationalism that excludes the rest of the world, excessive exploitation and devastation of nature – such phenomena are not just topics of ethical debate, they are failures of intimacy, failures of relationship.

Before we all lose the will to live on realizing the extent of this ‘global intimacy disorder’, we should also note just how much progress has been made. In general, animals are better treated, many forms of oppression have been reduced, violence is more widely condemned, and far fewer people die of disease. On the other hand, this outbreak is a sign that much more needs to be done: our hearts are not yet big enough. And the stakes seem to be getting higher and higher.

Global Vulnerability

Of course, this is not the first time the world has suffered from a pandemic and there have been much worse ones than this – the bubonic plague and the Spanish flu epidemic, to name but two. The difference is that the ease of mobility, both in terms of people and cargo, plus an enormously inflated world population, many of whom live closer and closer together in massive urban sprawls, has rendered us much more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Furthermore it is becoming abundantly clear that increased global connectedness is rendering us more vulnerable on many fronts – ecologically, economically, politically and socially. To use the modern expression we are becoming increasingly less ‘antifragile’. Our systems optimize for efficiency and not resiliency. We are obsessed with productivity and driven by a win-lose matrix.

But that is just the beginning of the story. If we really sense what is happening, we need to see Covid-19 as a dress rehearsal for other even worse disasters that may well befall us and our descendants. When we use the word ‘dress rehearsal’, we do not in any way want to diminish the intense levels of suffering and disruption it has and will cause, but we want to make a distinction between catastrophic risk and existential risk. Sooner or later, we will almost certainly be faced with a disaster that not only causes horrific suffering but also poses a risk for the survival of our species. Not to mention the survival of other species, which at the moment are growing extinct at a rate of one every 20 minutes, or 50% over the last 40 years, mainly due to human intervention.

Sense Making

Let’s first look at some of the ways sense is currently being made of the crisis.

Scientism/materialism

Embedded in the exterior sciences, the scientific-materialist view is often perceived to be in opposition to religious or spiritual views. In so-called developed societies the scientist worldview is the most dominant perspective in these days of secularization: ideas of truth and knowledge are increasingly being reduced to the exterior sciences.

Not surprisingly, therefore, most of the sense-making we read about and see on the screen belongs to this paradigm. Data-gathering, facts, graphs, prognostics, and so on. From the exterior perspective, the virus simply needs to be understood biologically, treated and vaccinated against. The physical trail of the virus is followed and measures need to be taken to minimize its recurrence. Understand, predict and control. The Chinese government have already closed down the wet markets – temporarily anyway – and even the Trump administration is unlikely again to slash budget and personnel from the office created after the 2016 Ebola outbreak to deal with pandemics, who were, ironically, working in close partnership with China.

These exterior measures are absolutely proper and necessary: of course governments needs to take far greater practical responsibility for possible future global disasters.

The reason why that is not enough is because these measures do not include the interior sciences. You cannot create new pattern of action unless you tell a new story. All actions we take come from the stories from within which we live our lives. We live inescapable frameworks. Those frameworks are not just exteriors. There are also interiors – namely the stories from within which we create our reality and make all of our decisions. Those stories include the answer to the question of Who Am I, my narrative of identity. Just think about this in your life. Everything you do comes from a set of beliefs from within which you are creating your reality. The values and beliefs that make up your story inform every choice your make.

That is why exterior change will not happen unless we first change on the inside. To change from the inside, we must evolve the story from within which we act and create our reality.

If we don’t care about animals, our change of behavior will be cosmetic and tend to happen only under duress – which is better than nothing but not enough. If we don’t care about groups of people who are ‘other’, and exist beyond our barrier of care and compassion, our actions and those of our governments will be very limited. If we don’t (re?)-learn to love nature from our hearts, our fundamental relationship to nature won’t change. We need intrinsic motivation, as well as extrinsic motivation. Any organisational leader will tell you that extrinsic motivation in employees is not enough – there needs also to be an inner sense of purpose, an inner sense of contributing to something worthwhile. We need to be acting out of some kind of genuine love that is part of our very identity, not mere obedience.

Lastly, the scientific-materialist approach is conducted ‘out there’ and for most people, remote political, legal and scientific circles and rarely engages us personally. We don’t need to change. They need to change and then we choose whether to follow or not. By cultivating our capacity to grow up and love, we can all take leadership. We need to claim our capacity for leadership and even for personal greatness.

The Democratization of Greatness:

We need to move towards the democratization of leadership and the democratization of greatness. If we think the only significant solutions to this problem are only top down political, then not only are we deeply deluded, we are being moral cowards. Your consciousness also needs to change, my consciousness, our consciousness needs to change. Politics is personal and it begins with you and me.

So by all means let’s listen to the experts of the exterior sciences to help combat the virus, just as we should when it comes to climate change and the other disasters waiting to happen in the physical world, but let us not be seduced by the story of scientism which will never touch our hearts and never bring the new, deeper level of intimacy the world so needs.

One of the wonderful movements that has already been born out of the crisis is the validation and appreciation for nurses and doctors. In general, the ‘care’ function in society is given little status, little reward. We bow to the ‘captains of industry’, we have lavish ceremonies and red carpets to elect the stars of the entertainment industry each year (and interestingly in some parts of the world we even think these two categories make for good political leaders) – but where is the nurse-of-the-year award or the mother-of-the-year award? “Captain of nursing” doesn’t sound quite right, does it? We don’t even have the language to praise these people! That is because we live within a success story in which success is measured almost exclusively by status and the level of renumeration.

Religious and Alternative Spiritual Interpretations

In the spiritual domain, various highly popular videos and messages have been circulating which see the crisis as something to be grateful for – purely a marvellous opportunity for change. A kind of gift from nature to wake us up. Although there is some truth in this in the sense that every crisis is indeed an opportunity and crisis is indeed an evolutionary driver, the suggestion that we should be grateful has a deeply unsavoury taste to those who are on the frontline of the suffering. A good litmus test for any message of this kind is: How would it go down in an intensive-care unit of a hospital? How would it go down if people who have just lost a parent were to hear that they should be grateful to the virus?

Any sense-making that does not include the immediate needs of the individual is cruelly incomplete. Any meta-level or story that ignores the suffering on the ground is callous and superficial. We cannot explain suffering away, we need to face and include it.

Beneath the broad umbrella of new age spirituality, another way that suffering is often explained and made sense of is through the popular lens of the Laws of Attraction. We create our own world, we are solely responsible for what we attract into our lives. Our thoughts create our reality. In other words, we bring suffering – and happiness – on ourselves. Although there is some truth in this and for sure our inner world affects our outer world (and vice-versa), it is a hopelessly simplistic and partial truth.

Disturbingly, this perspective actually mirrors traditional religious interpretations of suffering: you suffer because you have sinned. Even in contemporary society we hear countless fundamentalist statements to this effect: HIV was a punishment for the sin of homosexuality, 9/11 a punishment for the iniquitous ways of NYC, and just recently the pastor of a 14000-strong church in Dallas and regular Fox news contributor said every disaster, including this one, stems ultimately from human sin. Many of us cringe at such statements, but the essence of the new age interpretations above is the same: you are responsible for your suffering. So the children of the dying parents in the care home, whom they can’t visit because of the lockdown, are responsible for their own suffering? They have somehow attracted that situation, or somehow thought it into existence?

There is an obscene side to this perspective: apart from being heartless to those suffering, it strips suffering of all dignity and is these days called victim-shaming. Suffering and horror pose a serious challenge to any spiritual worldview. It’s called the problem of evil and the religious world has been wrestling with it for millennia. None of the above interpretations come even close to solving the mystery of suffering and ours does not come close to even claiming such a solution.

So, while we reject a story that “explains” suffering we do need a story in which we can live and love. It must be a story that is aligned with the most possible facts, that will inspire change, and that is an expression of the love that animates cosmos. And if you don’t think that love animates the universe then remember that you and I don’t only live in the universe. We are expression of the universe. And we love to love. Our music is almost all love songs. We feel, and at our best, we feel love. That is not an accident. We are the universe. It is not unfair therefore to say empirically that: The universe feels, and the universe feels love.

Conscious Evolution

The worst thing that could happen is that after the virus everything returns to normal. If ever there is a time for a new normal to emerge, this must be it. Throughout the lockdown, we (Marc and James) have felt two very different movements within us. On the one hand, we feel this strong yin movement inwards, a slowing down, a pause, a return home in ourselves. If we accept totally the situation we are given, if we embrace this disruption rather than fight it, we notice strong bursts of creativity, new ideas and practices being born. We are meeting new, emerging parts of ourselves – with delight, however sinister the context. We feel the spicy yang risk of the novelty and the excitement that brings. This a chance for me to change. This is a chance for us to change.

One of the most important assumptions about life we are proposing here is that crisis is an ‘evolutionary driver’. If you look back on your life, look how often you have come out of a crisis stronger, wiser, more mature. The horrific crisis of the Bubonic plague in the fourteenth century led to the rise of modernity and the scientific revolution, the horrific crisis of WW2 led to the formation of the UN and a new worldview of transnational collaboration. We are not talking about a direct chain of cause and effect here, we are saying that a crisis forces us to re-assess and re-imagine a better life or world. Plato is saying something similar in his famous dictum that necessity is the mother of invention.

So the vital question right now for anyone with a spiritual sensitivity, anyone with a social conscience is: What is trying to emerge right now in me, what is trying to emerge in society? We need to be courageous enough to allow our previous identity to be shaken. Who am I if I am not a successful businessman? Who am I if my status is taken away? Who am I if I can’t travel round the world anymore? Who am I if I am not part of a physical team? Who am I as a cook if I can’t get hold of my usual ingredients?

When we ask the question, what is trying to emerge in me and society, the position we are taking in regard to evolution here is more radical than it sounds. We are not just asking the question: How can I can make changes in my life and in the world as a result of this crisis? We are not just appealing to a sense of personal will and personal sense of responsibility. We are saying that if we allow ourselves to be disrupted, if we make space for the new, evolution will actually work through us. We are evolution in action. We are love in action. I don’t feel we have established this yet as a fact in any way, so I would rather not say it. We are more than contributors, we are embodiments of evolution. We are embodiments of evolutionary love, that Eros that animates the self-actualizing cosmos all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We can’t just bring in the word Eros unexplained – that is ok with the party faithful, but not for a broader target group. In order to comprehend this, we have to transcend our ideas of existing as a separate self. There is nothing grandiose about it, indeed it is humbling and awe-inspiring that there is something at work that is so much bigger than us and yet values us, uses us, speaks and acts through us.

We are part of evolution whether we know it or not, but to become a conscious part of evolution induces a different level of intensity and impact. This is the emerging story that we are espousing: given the massive leap in global connectivity, we are able for the first time in history to influence the evolution of culture and society in a large-scale, conscious way. That’s why we need to get a good story out there. Evolution does not follow a pre-destined course; it is not governed by physical laws in the way that matter is. Where is the mathematical equation that predicts what happens after homo sapiens?

Interior Evolution

If our part in the puzzle of conscious evolution is to be a noble one, our actions have to come from a trustworthy place within ourselves – our highest values, our deepest state of being. That is why we are saying that a spiritual perspective is needed. Inner work is needed for the outer work to be truly beneficial.

Heart

If we really look, we are faced every day with a bewildering juxtaposition of extreme suffering and extreme beauty. Outrageous pain, outrageous love. Right here in my garden, virtually every day of the lockdown has provided a teeming tapestry of budding flowers and blossoms. As news comes in of yet more death and hardship, the songs of the birds only seem to get more exuberant. Every story of woe is matched by a story of heroism and devotion. Any sense we try and make must surely include a reality which seems to pull us in two directions. Our hearts need to open both to the pain and the joy. We cry out of one side of the mouth and we laugh out of the other side.

Welcome to life.

We dare to be delighted even in the midst of pain, for we cannot live without delight. How many people have we heard saying: “I actually feel great, but I feel guilty about it.” No, let yourself feel great! But leave space in your reality for the many who don’t feel great and are racked with fear. Don’t turn away from what is going on outside your own bubble.

And we need to realize that actually the world is always like this, not just during Corona times. It is just that the bubble of safety, certainty and comfort in which many of us live has been pricked by this tiny virus. The world is ridden with misery all the time, we just don’t let it touch us. Most of it happens beyond the circumference of our care and compassion. Strangely, we also seem to have a joy threshold within our bubble too. A life led mostly on automatic pilot, rushing from one task to another, hopping from one click or swipe to the next, worrying about this and that, we have also protected ourselves from an ecstatic life. In reality, many of us never really cry from pain or joy.

Science itself is wonderful and is a life-saver. Unfortunately, it has turned into a story called scientism, which has dissected reality and led us to perceive ourselves as a separate self, separate from others, separate from nature: a solitary blob of consciousness (considered by many scientists even to be illusory!) in an essentially inanimate, purposeless, random universe. This is not a great story to foster intimacy. We are not truly intimate with the world around us. We don’t feel it, resonate with it, share a sufficient sense of common identity.

Right now, we can use the crisis to step into a broader, deeper intimacy with the world, with no part left out. Our sense of family needs to extend across the barriers of our usual identity group. As so often in a crisis, on the medical front line this is already happening, or on the street balconies in Italy, or in the many, many online offerings of help.

The first step is to let ourselves be affected, let ourselves be disturbed, let ourselves feel uncertain. Vulnerability is needed to melt the shell that has built up round our hearts. Vulnerability, when accepted, creates the soil from which the perspective of love can grow. If not accepted, it will lead to fight, flight or freeze.

So the first step is for each one of us to use this break of routine to perform some new act of kindness. We need to become more outrageous in our love, take risks in reaching out (non-physically for now!) to others, helping others – not just family members. Let our sense of family grow in all directions!

This not just a concept or an ethical standpoint. You can literally walk out of your door and see the world with the heart’s eye. This is not merely a mental decision, it is a form of spiritual practice. A spiritual practice that requires no religious orthodoxy.

The business world, for example, is under extreme pressure at the moment. The whole commercial network has been shaken to its core, people are losing jobs, companies are on the verge of collapse. This is the kind of time when people tend to discard their highest values – when survival of self and organizational tribe become the only goal. If human culture and collective psychology is to evolve, this is exactly the time when our highest values need to be lived. That is what defines heroism – and we can all be heroes in some small way. We can’t just ditch a long-time client, supplier, partner, associate without dialogue, without trying to find a middle way where the pain of the situation is shared. We have to share our loaf of bread even if it is our last. Of course we need to protect ‘our own’, including our own bodies, but that doesn’t mean we have to become defensive. Let’s not allow an appropriate level of self-protection to stifle our innate generosity which yearns to be activated.

The growing science of positive psychology shows us that generosity not only helps others but makes us happier. Not that we need any academic research to tell us that – duhhh! And our happiness is very much connected to our social contact, our ability to reach out and connect. And apparently – according to both psychological and neurological studies – one of the most acute social pleasures is caused by ‘fleeting contact with strangers’. Just the exchange of a smile while walking the dog, just a brief chat in the queue outside the supermarket, these are key paths to pleasure and ways to grow our capacity for love!

Our assumption here is that each person is not in essence separate from the natural world and all that is in it. The barriers and boundaries we have created are a mental and social construct. They may have served a purpose, may have corresponded to a certain phase of our evolution, but now in these fragile global times these divisions need to be loosened. We need to take a jump into a new kind of global intimacy where no person and no part of nature is left out. No one and nothing is left out of the circle. In Business terms we might say; Let’s reimagine a world with no externalities.

We need to feel ourselves as a planetary whole, which is seamless but not featureless. Every wave is different but there is only one ocean. This is an interior movement, it doesn’t mean you have to go and visit every country. And it has nothing to do with globalism, which has caused some of the problems we are faced with now. The appropriate exterior movement might be in the opposite direction: buy local, find holiday destinations that are driveable, stay closer to home.

Our assumption here is that each person is not in essence separate from the natural world and all that is in it. The barriers and boundaries we have created are a mental and social construct. They may have served a purpose, may have corresponded to a certain phase of our evolution, but now in these fragile global times these divisions need to be loosened. We need to take a jump into a new kind of global intimacy where no person and no part of nature is left out. No one and nothing, is left out of the circle. In Business terms we might say; Let’s reimagine a world with no externalities. We need to take a jump into a new kind of global intimacy where no person and no part of nature is left out.

Care and compassion for all sentient beings, to use the Buddhist language, is something that can be cultivated and practiced. There is a huge body of knowledge on this subject within all wisdom traditions, from shamanic indigenous ritual to Tibetan Buddhism to the Kabbalah.

This sense of unity does not exclude difference. The glory of the human condition at its deepest level is not only that we are not separate, we do belong, we are part of something bigger, but we are also each unique. We are all different but we all come from the same cosmic breath. Right now, there is some gift you can bring to world that could only come from you, only have your flavour, only be signed with your signature.

The one-world, one-planet, we-are-all-connected perspective has to change from a mental concept into a felt reality – which takes inner work.

The Still Point in the Storm and Unique Self

Our happiness and our capacity for right action is not only connected to our hearts. Our actions will be trustworthy only if they come from an open heart and an empty or equanimous mind – what has been called True Self in many spiritual traditions.

It is only from this place of True Self that what I [Marc] call Unique Self, the expression of your unique contribution emerges[2]. Unique Self is reality having a You experience. It is the source of both your greatest joy and greatest responsibility. And the two are indivisible.

Your Unique Self is the answer to the great question of Who Are You?

You are an irreducibly Unique Expression of the intimacy and imagination of cosmos, the love intelligence and love imagination of all that is, living in you, as you and through you. As such you have an irreducibly unique quality of perspective and imagination. You have an irreducibly unique gift and contribution, that lives in you, as you and through, that is needed by all that is. You have an instrument in the “Unique Self symphony, that can be played by you and you alone. Your instrument is an expression of your unique quality of intimacy and you unique capacity for being and becoming. Without you the symphony cannot play. With your reality cannot respond to the crisis of intimacy and imagination that we know find ourselves in. You are part of the solution. Your unique gift in your unique circle of intimacy and influence is part of the bottom up, grass roots response of the Unique Self symphony, which itself is an expression of the self-actualizing cosmos. Cosmos self-actualizes, self-organizes to its next level by re-imagining reality in a billion different unique ways. But each unique way is part of the new musical identity of outrageous love. Each of us emerges into a new human and together we form a new humanity. This new human and new humanity is a new identity. I am unique self, a unique gorgeous expression of the outrageous love intelligence of all that is, living as me.

Every person emergent from the depth of True Self, begins to learn their Unique Self instrument of care and compassion, of joy and delight. And the world begins to shift on its axis. A new dawn of hope and possibility arises.

This process of emergence, the Unique Self symphony of outrageous love, with each play committing their unique outrageous acts of love, can and must be born in the midst of these early Corona months.

The disruption of our daily routines and an enforced lockdown for many is the perfect chance to develop a more contemplative approach to life. The pace of our usual lifestyle for many of us is insane – also in the literal sense of the word: unhealthy. And even if we are now more still physically, our minds can be working overtime, and we are bombarded by an addictive avalanche of information and digital input. We need to find some inner spaciousness, some clarity of consciousness, a connection with a deeper existential reality.

Once again, this is an interior movement, and once again it is something that can be cultivated and practiced. The interior science around contemplative practice is impressive and easily accessible, supported by countless methodologies, coming from a wide variety of spiritual traditions, both eastern and western, both modern and pre-modern. Forget the various religious dogmas that may have surrounded these practices, forget the surrounding institutions that fell into the same traps and corruptions that every large institution falls into. At the core is a felt experience of the sacredness of life and all that is in it. Prayer, meditation, chanting, ritual, yoga, mindfulness in its many forms, these are ways of uncluttering our minds and making space for a deeper connection with True self and existence. And from that ground Unique Self emerges.

Contemporary society favours busy-ness, expression, action, growth, expansion.
From the Daoist spiritual tradition we can learn that these are essentially yang or masculine qualities. Nature moves in constant cycles of expansion and contraction, as do our bodies. Contraction, or withdrawal, has been slowly eroded in our lives – hence the whole concept of burnout. The lockdown has forced us into contraction. The virus can be seen as a kind of push-back from nature to restore a vital balance in ourselves and society. The movement inwards, the movement towards stillness and reflection is a yin or feminine movement and requires patience and depth, rather than speed and productivity. We need to move from routine to re-source, take the time to make contact with an inner state of being, an inner knowing that taps into a larger field of wisdom than our rational minds can access.

According to most analysis, we are likely to be faced with the mother of all economic recessions in the coming months. A recession, however painful, is also a kind of contraction, a call for reflection, a call to re-imagine our world.

Exterior Systemic Evolution

Sitting in meditation and chatting to strangers outside the supermarket is of course not enough to change the world, though it is a vital and grossly underrated step in the right direction. The world has become a highly complicated network of fragile systems. These systems do not comprise one big organic whole that naturally self-organizes and self-heals like the human body. If we think that the international political or financial system is simply too big to crash, we have our heads deeply buried in the sand.

If we think that someone somewhere, or some group somewhere is holding it all together, we are deluded. Any benevolent conspiracy theory, any malevolent conspiracy theory about some elite group pulling all the strings, are simply ways of abrogating responsibility, of avoiding the problems that face and involve us.

There is plenty we need to cry about. The increasing gap between the richest and the poorest, the continuing oppression of minorities, climate change, the devastation of nature, the list goes on… And there is also much to smile about, all the amazing changes that have emerged from the various crises. The reason that the celebration of our successes is so important is that it gives us hope: we know we can pull it together. Focusing only on the negative, as is very fashionable these days, especially in left-wing media and academia, doesn’t make for an inspiring story.
More or less the whole world has responded to the Corona crisis – many, many people are making huge sacrifices for the common good. There has been a massive amount of mobilization to combat the crisis.

We have to use this energy, surf this wave of change, and challenge our assumptions as to how we should live, how we should run our businesses, how we should run our politics. Not through blame, which is very much part of the old way of doing things. This is not about shaming and blaming. The culture of blame is antithetical to an evolutionary perspective whereby mistakes are seen primarily as a chance to learn, rather than as a trigger for punishment. Accountability for our actions needs to be evaluated according to our courage in facing the truth and our humility in acknowledging the need to learn.

Who are we as a society if we are not so productive? Who are we as a culture if we cannot be so active and are gently forced into being more contemplative?
Is the aspiration of constant expansion the correct one? Should our economies be built on a win-lose matrix?

Conclusion

Face the facts, don’t turn away.
Let ourselves be affected.
Allow vulnerability.
Find the still-point.
Open our hearts beyond the usual barriers.
Be courageous in questioning the old.
Keep what needs to be kept.
Let the new emerge.
Act with love.
Outrageous love.

[1] On Crisis of Intimacy, See Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Intimate Universe, Why Only A New Story Can Heal the Global Intimacy Disorder, (forthcoming) 2020, and on Crisis of Imagination see Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, A Return to Eros, 2018

[2] On Unique Self see Marc Gafni, Your Unique Self, The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, Integral Publishers 2012, Self, Two Models of Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism, Integral Publishers, 2013, and also Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, special edition on Unique Self, Ed. Marc Gafni Sean Esbjorn Hargens, 2010

We are filled with joy and delight in writing to you. As I have often shared with you, “we cry out of one side of our mouths and we laugh out of the other side.

We are moved more than we ever have been – at the depth, beauty and utter necessity of the dharma.

I have been sharing with you beloveds, for several years about the threat of catastrophic risk [like a pandemic] and existential risk and why a new vision of the human being and humanity is the most essential response.

Now we can grasp this  -sadly – in an entirely new way. We live not only in a time between worlds, but we are also in a time between stories. It is only a new story that will take us to the next step.
In this time between worlds and time between stories, our gathering in August is more important than it ever was before.
We are coming together to explode in joy, to laugh out of one side of our mouth and to cry out of the other – and most profoundly – to participate together in the evolution of love, in telling the new story – in being the new story.

Perhaps the most important lines in the dharma at this very moment are: “We live in a world of outrageous pain, the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love”. We cannot retreat into our small egocentric worlds. We are one love and one world and one heart. Let each of us commit our outrageous acts of love that the world needs so deeply.  But there is another line in the dharma which remains true even in the midst of outrageous pain. “We live in a world of outrageous beauty. The only response to Outrageous beauty is outrageous love”.

Now, more than ever, to telling the new story, to bringing the dharma of outrageous love, Homo Amor, True Self, Unique Self, Pleasure, and Desire.  To the world via the Outrageous Love Festival. We are happening. We hope and pray that we will be in person but whatever happens we are DOING THIS FESTIVAL TOGETHER. FOR THE SAKE OF THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE.