Most Recent Posts on Spirit’s Next Move
Wisdom for Your Week: A Conversation with Marc Gafni and John Mackey on Shadow
© Bird And Shadow by Bill Longshaw, www.freedigitalphotos.net
In this last video of our seven-part dialogue series, our two authors (Your Unique Self and Conscious Capitalism) discuss the issue of shadow – both in the context of our personal life as well as in the context of business. In our modern world the narrative of business seems to have become the shadow story, while its heroic part of creating value for humanity and the world has become hidden.
Additionally Dr. Marc Gafni brings the Unique Shadow into the discussion that can be easily recognized as the personal core-issue in each and every one of us that hints to and – when looked at – leads us back to our unlived Unique Self.
Don’t miss this or any other video of this series on our website or the Whole Foods Blog.
John Mackey is Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market, as well as the Co-Chair of the Center for World Spirituality Board of Trustees.
Click here for the CWS website link to the full post and video discussion.>>
Daily Wisdom: Distinction between Unique Self and Ego #14: Friendship or Pseudofriendship
©2011. Photo courtesy of David Castillo Dominici.
by Dr. Marc Gafni in Your Unique Self.
When you are in ego, you might help friends who are successful and even friends who are down, as long as it does not threaten your position. But you are not capable of truly delighting in your deepest heart in a friend’s large success. When you are in Unique Self, your deepest heart delights in your friend’s success, even if there is nothing in it for you at all.
Daily Wisdom: Betrayal or Loyalty – Distinction between Ego and Unique Self #13
©Heart Rotto by Idea go, www.freedigitalphotos.net
by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
The ego betrays. The Unique Self is loyal. When you are in your ego, and things go bad, you are willing—in your fear—to betray virtually anyone. Your ego is easily identifiable by the shallowness of its integrity. If you live in Unique Self and things go bad, you find your way, through thick or thin, to a deeper center of spirit.
Read our further discussion here…
Wisdom for Your Week: A Conversation with Marc Gafni and John Mackey on Jealousy and Envy
John Mackey is Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market, as well as the Co-Chair of the Center for World Spirituality Board of Trustees.
In the sixth video of the seven-part dialogue series, Marc Gafni (author of Your Unique Self) and John Mackey (co-author with Raj Sisodia of Conscious Capitalism) define and discuss jealousy, malice, resentment, and envy in the framework of business, Unique Self, and Conscious Capitalism. In this discussion, they reach the conclusion that every negative emotion has its own hidden virtue and that there’s no negative emotion without a higher form. Join them as they unfold this understanding while pointing to the way that envy can be made conscious, can be understood with compassion, and can be transmuted into a higher form. As Marc says in the dialogue, when we are living from Unique Self, envy falls away and entrepreneurial creativity blossoms. Don’t miss this or any of their other discussions from this series, which are available on our website and at the Whole Foods blog.
Click here for the CWS website link to the full post and video discussion.>>
Daily Wisdom: Distinction between Ego and Unique Self #12: Victim or Player
©2012 “Worried Young Woman On Bed” Courtesy of David Castillo Dominici
In your ego, you cling to every petty detail of your story. You never let go of any of your wounds. Your mantra is “I hurt, therefore I am.” Therefore, your ego can never wholeheartedly forgive. If it does, the ego’s forgiveness is a tactic, not a sacrament. Your Unique Self forgives freely without giving up your own truth.
From the evolutionary context of your Unique Self, you realize that you have a Unique Gift to give to All-That-Is. You are animated, driven, and drawn by that larger vision and obligation. This allows you to place your wounds in a larger perspective. Your Unique Self is not a victim. It is an audacious player in the Great Story of the evolution of consciousness. This larger perspective allows you to begin to let go of the story of your wounds. As it is replaced by the greater story of your Unique Self, delight and obligation begin to emerge.
From the place of your Unique Self, you are able to intuitively balance your outrage at injustice with an intuition about when to give up being right and move on. Because you are able to give up being right without giving up your core identity, it becomes infinitely easier to forgive.
Daily Wisdom
Daily Wisdom: Action or Reaction: Distinction between Unique Self and Ego #2
from Dr. Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self.
Ego reacts. Unique Self acts. Your ego is constantly in reaction to outside stimuli. It never thinks a spontaneous thought. It rarely acts because it is moved to do so by a freely arising thought or desire.
Unique Self is moved to action by the power and joy of its own authentic original impulse.
We are excited to announce a transformational 10-week Unique Self telecourse that starts April 24th!
Further discussion:
For an example of this distinction at work, view Dan Pink’s summary of motivation science through this link. Pink describes how researchers have found over and over that contingent or extrinsic motivations, which appeal to the ego, block original thought, while intrinsic motivations, which appeal to the Unique Self, lead to more innovative solutions to difficult problems. Pink explains that across cultures people are motivated by:
–autonomy–the desire to direct our own lives,
–mastery–the desire to get better and better at something, and
–purpose–the desire to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Unique Self is the route to the deepest and truest expression of all three.
Featured Post on Spirit’s Next Move
Ken Wilber and Marc Gafni in Dialogue: Unique Self Therapy (Part 8)
Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber continue the Unique Self dialogues with a segment of great interest to anyone concerned about healing modalities. Beginning with the opening question, “What would a Unique Self therapy look like?” and continuing on to groundbreaking discussion of nondual spiritual practice, this exchange provides numerous insights. From Wilber’s perspective, the essence of Unique Self therapy is uncovering the lies that we tell about ourselves, including lies about our grandeur. Wilber and Gafni concur that the Tibetan Buddhist practice of yidam (or “divine pride”) offers valuable wisdom that can be adapted for use within an integral Unique Self healing context.
This clip is a 16-minute excerpt which follows immediately from Part 7 on Unique Shadow. In the previous conversation, the pandits conclude that uniqueness paradoxically appears as a spontaneous level of consciousness at “second-tier,” the structure in which consciousness becomes more capable of looking at itself. They saw that key in charting the Unique Self’s position and understanding the nature of shadow is understanding is the relationship to levels of consciousness.
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Marc: This is exciting. This is going to allow for the emergence of … here’s our next topic. What would Unique Self therapy look like? We’re working with as you know the board chair of CWS, Lori Galperin, and her clinical co-director Mark Schwartz, the leaders in treatment about developing a sort of Unique Self therapeutic modality. We’re now testing it. How would that work? What would that mean? This will be a key piece of the story: to be able to, for someone who is relatively healthy, to be able to chart: where am I in my level of consciousness? To be able to see the level of consciousness and bring levels of consciousness directly into the Unique Self conversation as part of an actual enacted therapeutic modality. That’s exciting.
Ken: I agree. There are any things involved in the therapeutics of the Unique Self. One of them is certainly coming face-to-face with the fundamental lie or lies that one has got caught up with in the course of one’s life, facing those, and attempting to determine the particular level that they come from, just because that helps to clarify the structure of the lie, the type of lie, when it happened, the relationships that were probably part of it. What sort of talents do you seem to have? People will lie about their talents just as frequently as they lie about their negatives. Maslow called it the Jonah complex. We’re afraid of our greatness as much as our negatives and our smallness. That fear of greatness is simply the fear of your own Unique Self. That’s a terrible position to be in. [Read More...]
