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!)