Most Recent Posts on Spirit’s Next Move
Daily Wisdom: Distinction between Ego and Unique Self #21: Special Relationship or Open as Love
©Stuart Miles, www.freedigitalphotos.net
by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self
Your ego always seeks the “special relationship”—in the egoic sense—to cover the pain of your emptiness, and thinks the “special relationship” is better than all the rest of your relationships. The Unique Self does not limit love to one person, even though the traditional definition of marriage or a committed relationship can limit you to one partner at a time. The Unique Self lives open as love in the world.
Click here to read the full post with further discussion>>>
Unique Self in the World – “Slight Inklings: First Steps Towards a Celebration of Unique Self in Hospice”
It is a special privilege and delight this week to bring you an audio essay on Unique Self in hospice by Rev. John Hughes, entitled “Slight Inklings: First Steps Towards a Celebration of Unique Self in Hospice.” John Hughes wrote this essay about his discovery of Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment by Dr. Marc Gafni.
Slight Inklings: First Steps Towards a Celebration of Unique Self in Hospice
John Hughes, founder of Integral Earth, ordained Episcopal priest, and Hospice Chaplain in Wisconsin.
Rev. John Hughes is known as “grandpappy” by two sweet little boys in Kentucky, he is known as “Dad” by two beautiful young women, and he is known as “dear husband” by a woman of vast integrity, in Wisconsin. His cat doesn’t call him much.
By trade a spiritual caregiver at a hospice, John has had a checkered past, which included somehow becoming an ordained Episcopal priest and offering up his notions to two deeply merciful congregations. He practices meditation, yoga, and immersion in Integral theory, while sometimes wallowing in confusion, and often rocking out to it in his car. He is equally thrilled by Beat poetry, a swim, or a game of tennis, the sublime performance of the Green Bay Packers, and an incantation from Bob Dylan. He is an earnest newcomer to Unique Self.
John has also recently launched the organization Integral Earth. He writes, “Integral Earth is my new organization promoting environmentalism, human rights, and spirituality, from an integral perspective.” You can check out more about this project on Facebook or Twitter.
(The transcript of the essay follows the embedded audio.)
Click here for the full transcript of John’s essay with interview supplement on the CWS website.>>
Check out this book or one of Dr. Marc Gafni’s other books on Amazon.>>
Wisdom for your Week: “Open, Not Closed” Meditation
©2010. Photo courtesy of jscreationzs.
This week’s audio wisdom meditation with Dr. Marc Gafni comes from Week 7 of the Awakening Your Unique Self 10-Week Telecourse, themed “Unique Self: A Paradigm Shift in Loving.” This beautiful meditation, created by Dr. Marc for the course, takes us into the embodied taste of our own openings and closings, teaching us to recognize each moment and our relationship to it. In this meditation, Dr. Marc says, “Your true destiny unfolds freely when you live every moment open as Unique Self and shine as your unique offering of outrageous love.” So, to become Unique and Outrageous Lovers, we can learn to recognize how love is a “perception-identification complex,” which allows us to see with God’s eyes. In living from an open rather than closed place, we access our purpose and greatest offerings of love.
Please sit back, relax, and prepare to experience the tastes of living open as love as part of this Wisdom for Your Week offering. You can also access the transcript to accompany the meditation below.
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Click here to view the full transcript of the meditation on the CWS website.>>>
Purchase Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment today!
Daily Wisdom: Distinction between Ego and Unique Self #20 — Past or Present
From Your Unique Self by Dr. Marc Gafni.
©2012 Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles.
The ego lives in the past, thinking it is the present. Therefore, the ego unconsciously confuses past with present. The ego is unable to create intimacy, which means meeting each other in the fullness of the present moment. To make real contact, you must be personal and present. Only the Unique Self can make contact. For the Unique Self, the present moment consciously includes the past and anticipates the future.
The ego confuses the past and the present. When you are confused—thinking you are present in the present while you are actually lost in a past trance—you are unable to act effectively, lovingly, or powerfully in the situation that you are in. And the past remains always unhealed. Several years ago a friend and board member of my organization called me, angry at not being included in a particular email loop. Her anger was full of intensity and flaming aggression, which was vastly disproportionate to the ostensible exclusion from the email loop. I considered asking her to resign from the board, as this was not the first time such an overreaction had occurred. Of course, what was coming up was not her present exclusion, but a very old sense of being excluded. She held this sense of being left out from her early childhood as a girl with four brothers who were better loved by their father.
This inability to discern the past from the present has made her unable to effectively navigate her professional or personal world, because she is always prone to dramatic overreactions that undermine many key relationships. The Unique Self does not confuse the past with the present. When the past comes up in the present, the Unique Self recognizes it for what it is: the past coming up in the present.
The Unique Self then uses the present moment to heal the past. The Unique Self recognizes that the patterns of the past have no true foothold or power in the present.
Click here to read further discussion of this distinction on the CWS Website.>>
A Deeper Click on Recent Events: The Exciting Happenings at the Center for World Spirituality
This past weekend (June 6-9, 2013) Dr. Marc was honored and delighted to participate in some wonderful happenings:
- John Mackey and Marc Gafni in Dialogue:
Dialogue and Interview Host Michael Ellsberg
In New York, there was an awesome event organized by Kristina Kincaid, Lesley Freeman, and Michael Ellsberg. The event took place and was hosted in the beautiful Manhattan downtown apartment of Jose and Carmen Arozamena. The evening began with a private interview of John and Marc for a major US publication, talking about the important interface between their two books, Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Your Unique Self by Dr. Marc Gafni. In the interview, specific focus was given to an idea that John and Marc have developed together: the Unique Self of a corporation. A more complete discussion of this critical insight will appear later this year in the CWS white paper series.
©2012 photo courtesy of jscreationzs.
The second part of the evening was a public conversation between Marc and John, masterfully facilitated by Michael Ellsberg and followed by an invitation-only dialogue with twenty-five convened millennial leaders. John Mackey is the Board Co-Chair of Center for World Spirituality and Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market. And he is a fearless leader in the great calling for the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. The dialogue was filmed, and we will be sharing it with you as part of a new website unveiling in the early fall.
This dialogue comes on the heels of a seven-part dialogue series between Marc and John, which is available on the CWS website and the Whole Foods blog.
- Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt-Hendrix in Dialogue with Lori Galperin and Dr. Marc Gafni.
On Saturday, Marc was joined by Lori Galperin, co-founder of the Castlewood Treatment Centers and co-chair of Center for World Spirituality Board, for a filmed dialogue with Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt-Hendrix. The dialogue revolved around the relationship between the Imago theory and therapy method, developed by Harville and Helen, and the Unique Self theory and therapy method, developed and now being written by Marc and Lori.
Everyone participating in the dialogue was a bit blown away by the depth and critical evolutions in thinking that took place for all sides as a result of the dialogue. We will be posting this video for you as part of the roll-out of our new web presence in the fall. Lori Galperin is the lead writer on one of our think tank project books, Unique Self Recovery.
- Welcome to the World Ceremony.
On Sunday morning at dawn, Dr. Marc was delighted to officiate at the Welcome to the World Ceremony of the daughter of his close friends (who are also Wisdom Council members and board members of the Center).
In Other News…
- Web Upgrade of CWS Site
©2013 Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles.
We are delighted to share that Center for World Spirituality has just successfully completed a capital campaign to raise funds to significantly up-level our web presence. A board and professional committee is now actively engaged in interviewing different web designers. We hope to have this major project completed by early fall. We just finished a two-day conclave with a leading web group who has made an excellent proposal that we are now studying.
- Thought Leader Series: Richard Barrett
The third part of the thought leader dialogue with Richard Barrett is coming up on June 15, with an emphasis on social activism or societal development and Unique Self. Register here.>>
- Unique Self Medicine Initiative Meeting in Houston
Dr. Marc and Lori Galperin held a productive and wonderful meeting in Houston, TX, with Venodhar Rao Julapalli, M.D. and Vinay Rao Julapalli, M.D., F.A.C.C., two leading board members and the heads of our Unique Self Medicine initiative.
Venu and Vinay recently completed a first draft of a think-tank white paper on Unique Self medicine. The white paper draws on three theoretical frameworks: Unique Self, Integral Theory, and Conscious Capitalism. The meeting was held to get a sense of the next steps in unfolding the revolutionary vision of Unique Self medicine. We will be sharing that white paper with you in the fall, also as part of the new think tank website roll-out.
- Purpose Search Conclave in Pacific Grove with Rachel Resnick
Dr. Marc and Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie and CEO of Writers on Fire, just concluded a two-day conclave in Pacific Grove, CA, with Lesley Freeman and Lori Galperin. Rachel will be working with Marc and CWS to develop methods of doing what John Mackey has referred to as the “Purpose Search in Corporations.” The particular area in which Rachel and Marc have complimentary expertise is in a method of deploying sacred autobiography, memoir writing and sacred story telling as a way of recovering Unique Self and purpose on both the personal and corporate level. Stay tuned as we share with you this exciting unfolding.
Rachel and Marc will also be offering a by-invitation-only public offering called Erotics for Entrepreneurs this coming September 20 and 21st. For information, email lesley [at] centerforworldspirituality [dot] com. We will be sharing more in upcoming newsletters.
- CWS Think-Tank Updates
The think tank is highly active with many key projects in the pipeline, each at its own stage of development.
- The next three public talks are…
- Carmel-by-the-Sea Rotary Club on Unique Self – Carmel Mission Inn, Carmel, CA – June 19, 12 PM Pacific.
- Integral Theory Conference presentation with Sally Kempton – July 20, 2013.
- Up-Coming Mystery School at Venwoude Summer Festival of Love.
For a full list of the upcoming CWS events, see the Events Calendar on our website.
Daily Wisdom
Greater is the Light That Comes from the Darkness
by Marc Gafni
Carl Gustav Jung offered a profound direction in understanding shadow. His core teaching, drawn from many sources, is that we cannot be whole human beings without recognizing and incorporating our shadow energy. Jung has an expression that he uses constantly to express this idea: “In the Shadow is the Gold.” By this, he means to say that most of what is valuable in the human personality—the gold—can be mined only from the shadow. But what does that mean, and why should it be so? It is to this all-important question that we now turn our attention. We will seek to fundamentally evolve what shadow means and how shadow work is done! At this point, I am going to unpack directly from the original tantric sources a radical new teaching on shadow integration.
So let us begin. In the book of Genesis, one of the oldest texts of Unique Self teachings, the creation myth is expressed in the words, “God said, Let there be Light. And there was light.”
Light, with its unique frequency for every person, is—as we have already noted—one of the primary mystical symbols for Unique Self. In the third-century mystical esoteric texts on Genesis, it is taught that this original light that initiated the creative process was too much for the world to bear, so “God hid the original light. The light will be revealed to the righteous in the world of becoming.” In a similar way, contemporary neuroscience suggests that we deploy only a fraction of our mind’s potential for consciousness.
Some centuries later, the Zohar picks up the thread of the earlier teaching. “Where was the original light of creation hidden?” ask the masters. To which the masters respond, “The original light was hidden in the darkness!” “Where does the original light still appear in the world?” ask the masters once more. “In the person of the enlightened ones,” responds the text. And who are the enlightened ones? The enlightened ones, the righteous ones, according to the masters of Tantric Kabbalah, are the ones who have incarnated their Unique Self. The implication of the text is this: to realize your Unique Self, you must follow the path of the light hidden in the darkness.
Featured Post on Spirit’s Next Move
Wisdom for your week: Thought Leader Dialogue between Richard Barrett and Marc Gafni: The Unique Self and the Organizational Success: The Path of Organizational Transformation
©arztsamui, www.freedigitalphotos.net
In the second dialogue of this 3-part series, our two leaders, Richard Barrett and Marc Gafni, speak about how the teachings on soul and Unique Self can be applied to organizations and lead to more success of the organizations as well as the individuals.
To read more about the extensive work of Richard Barrett and listen to the first dialogue on “The Unique Self and Soul Activation: The Path of Personal Transformation” you can click here.
The third part of the series “Unique Self, Organizational Leadership, and the Destiny of Nations” on “The Unique Self and Societal Development: The Path of Societal Transformation” will be held on June 15th, and you can still register for it here.
Listen to this wonderful and insightful dialogue and read the summary of their discussion here>>
