March 21, 2023

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Esalen 2014: An Outrageous Love Story in 4 Acts – Act 2

This is the second part of a series. For part 1 click here.

Dr. Marc GafniSally KemptonAs a lover of this trans-lineage World Spirituality Dharma that Marc Gafni and Sally Kempton wove together so beautifully during this Retreat and that is both deeply rooted in the age-old Wisdom Traditions and in the Integral Framework, I am always fascinated by how Marc weaves his magic again and again, how the Dharma stays fresh and alive and unfolds into ever more clarity and depths. And it was a pleasure to see Sally teach and get her transmission as well.

So, for starters, what is this Dharma we are talking about?

The following passage is a paraphrased summary of some of this weekend’s teachings.

First of all, Dharma is not Dogma. It is the best take on reality we have, based on pre-modern, modern, and post-modern insights, weaving together what we know about the patterns that connect.

Marc Gafni’s two sentence Dharma of this weekend:

“We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.”

So, what is the difference between ordinary love and outrageous love? Why doesn’t love do what it is supposed to do? Why doesn’t it have the healing powers we intuit it should have? [Read more…]

Esalen 2014: An Outrageous Love Story in 4 Acts – Act 1

The 5th Annual World Spirituality Retreat with Sally Kempton and Marc Gafni “Loving Your Way to Enlightenment: The Path of Outrageous Love”

Monarch Butterflies in EsalenAfter a truly magical trip along the Pacific Coast from LA to Big Sur, with Elephant Seals, Sunshine, and last but not least my dear friends Liza Braude-Glidden (CIW Board Member, Scholar and Senior Teacher for Unique Self) and her husband Reed, we arrived there early enough to wander around a bit and see the myriads of Monarch Butterflies and a stunning sunset. Yes, Esalen IS a magical place.

Yet, the best was still to come.

Seeing these two master teachers, Dr. Marc Gafni, Co-Founder, Lead Scholar, and President of CIW, and Sally Kempton, Co-Founder, Vice-President, and Senior Fellow of CIW, teach together, “Two Tastes of the Same Voice” as Marc said so beautifully, was what I would call Third Tier Magic. They gorgeously modeled for us how two strong teachers from different lineages can come together, make room for each other, and teach together. [Read more…]

Success 3.0 and Second Simplicity: Unique Self Dharma Goes Mainstream

The Success 3.0 Summit, this amazing gathering from October 30th to November 2nd, 2014 in Boulder, Colorado of the world’s leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and change-agents that was co-initiated by the Center for Integral Wisdom was a wild success.

Among the speakers were thought leaders like Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos Inc), Arianna Huffington (Editor in Chief, Huffington Post), Alanis Morissette (Singer/Songwriter & Activist), Blake Mycoskie (Founder, TOMS Shoes), Barbara Marx Hubbard (Author, Social Innovator, Evolutionary Thought Leader), Michael Franti (Lead Vocalist of Spearhead & Activist), Casey Sheahan (former CEO, Patagonia), Lynne Twist (Global Activist & Author), Adam Bellow (Vice President, Harper Collins), Ibrahim Husseni, Business leader, Ben Jealous (former President & CEO of the NAACP), DJ Spooky (Composer, Musician & National Geographic Emerging Explorer), Tom Chi (Innovator & Founder, Google Glass), Jack Canfield (Author, Chicken Soup for the Soul), and many others.

The goal of the summit was to articulate a new, transformative vision of conscious living, innovation, and social impact and to create a new definition of Success that can lead humanity into the future. And that was exactly what happened. The partnership between Marc Gafni, the President of Center for Integral Wisdom, and the other Leaders of the Center was so clear and beautiful that it naturally manifested this powerful event which so many people in the room felt was perhaps the most powerful event of this kind that had ever attended in their lives. I want to particularly note the love and respect between Marc and Kate that was subtle and quiet in the space but clearly lit up the room.

In the Media

About 600 people attended the event live and thousands of people watched at least part of it through the live stream. The event was wildly shared through social media with many thousand tweets on twitter alone. Gaiam TV will screen the videos of it by the end of the month. And last but not least, many of the speakers and attendees were recorded alongside the event as part of a movie that will emerge from this. So, stay tuned.

Second Simplicity of Dharma

Marc Gafni 2014It was gorgeous to see the many ways the Dharma of Unique Self, Eros, Outrageous Love, and World Spirituality, that Dr. Marc Gafni has been articulating and outrageously transmitting for the last several years, has played a role in this amazing happening.

Most of the speakers started to use the 6-word Mantra Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up. Dr. Marc Gafni, Visionary Scholar, Wisdom Teacher, and Co-Founder and President of CIW, brilliantly transmitted these thought forms in his opening speech. He suggested that every generation needs to participate in the evolution of consciousness. And:

“It is our turn. We are here to articulate an ethics of success that is rooted in Outrageous Love. Outrageous Love demands a new vision of success.”

He also introduced one of his key terms, the word Second Simplicity. Second Simplicity is what he calls the Simplicity that comes after Complexity. After having really grasped the complex concepts, we can get to a stage where we can express them in a compellingly simple way–thereby reaching people from all stages of consciousness. [Read more…]

In the Media: Success 3.0 Summit and Center for Integral Wisdom

Last week, our initiatives were featured in different ways in two forums: Patheos.com and the Integral Church Blog.

Interview about Success 3.0 Summit on Patheos

Patheos.com is running an interview with Dr. Gafni about the Summit–on their front page. Read all about the interior vision for the Success 3.0 Summit coming up Halloween weekend in Boulder here. Patheos is the leading religion site on the World Wide Web today with seven million unique hits a month.

success3-logoAt the end of October, a select group of the world’s leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and change-agents are gathering in Boulder, Colorado to articulate a new, transformative vision of conscious living, innovation, and social impact. The goal? To create a new definition of Success that can lead humanity into the future.

Leo Brunnick, co-founder and CEO of Patheos.com, invited Marc Gafni—author, World Spirituality leader, and co-founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom—to share the vision of the Success 3.0 Summit.

Marc, tell me about the Success 3.0 Summit. What’s it all about?

Success 3.0 Summit is an exciting gathering of the best hearts and minds around the one central issue that affects everyone: what does it mean to be successful? We all have hidden success myths that define our lives. We have a profound need to be successful, but in general we have separated being successful from being good. We have limited the criteria of success to things like money, status, or power, but have found that these things are not fulfilling or holistic or profound or joyous or energizing. In order to evolve the real source code of culture, we needed to rework this core issue.

Read more…

 

Center for Integral Wisdom featured as key new emergent in Integral Lineage

integralchurchCenter for Integral Wisdom was also featured as a key new emergent in the Integral Lineage beginning with Rudolph Steiner and running all the way through Ken Wilber’s seminal Integral work and then with Marc and Ken founding the Center for Integral Wisdom; this was reflected in an independent scholar’s Timeline of Integral Spirituality by blogger, interfaith minister, and co-founder of the Integral Church in St. Petersburg in Florida (founded in 2012) Joran Slane Oppelt.

Starting with a lecture in Paris by Rudolf Steiner in 1906 where he commented on the “integral evolution of man,” through Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Pitirim Sorokin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Aldous Huxley, Jean Gebser, Allan Watts, Arthur Koestler, Jane Loevinger, Clare Graves, Michael Murphy, Ken Wilber, et al. to the foundation of the California Institute of Integral Studies, the Integral Institute, and CIW, this timeline tracks the emergence of many strands of Integral Thought and Spirituality.

Click here to read more…

For those of you interested in the history of the Unique Self Teaching, which is one of several–in Ken’s phrase–“evolutionary emergent teachings” for which Marc has been the lead theorist in the articulation of an Integral Spirituality, see here.

Unique Self was featured in a special edition of The Journal of Integral Theory & Practice (6:1), the two-volume academic treatise on Radical Kabbalah, the classic Unique Self book Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment and a new work on Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism: Two Models and Why They Matter.

If you ask, surely you must be in need

The story of the holy snuff box

A beautiful story retold by Marc Gafni

Everybody knows that Holy Beggars hold the world together. Thus would one modern master introduce the following sacred story. Never, never pass by a holy beggar, and they are all holy. Walk across the street. Go out of your way! Who knows who he really is? Who knows what great soul lays hidden in that tattered beggar? You never know… You never know. All you can know that is if someone asks, they must certainly need.

One day a beggar came to see the Holy Israel, Master of the Name. He was angry and depressed. “What kind of a God do you have. I used to be rich – I helped many people. But now look at me – I have lost everything. It’s not fair. How did such a fate fall upon me?!” And with that the beggar broke down into tears.

Chinese Mother of Pearl Lacquer Box with Peony Decor“Sweet Yossele,” said Israel, Master of the Name. “All the mysteries are in your own life. Think back to Yom Kippur six years ago.”

And now the master Israel had Yossele’s complete attention. For how did he know that his name was Yossele – and how could he know what he had done six years ago? Master Israel continued. “It was a fast day, the holiest day of the year. A day when we pray all day long. People on that day are at their weakest, but also at their highest. You remember, Yossele, that you brought the snuff box to the prayer service?” For although on this fast day eating is proscribed, fragrance is permitted. Often, as in the prayer fellowship I grew up in, snuff boxes would be passed around, to offer fragrance to revive the spirits for prayer.

”Do you remember, asked Master Israel, how you went around to all the congregants giving snuff to everybody?” Yossele, now spellbound, could only nod silently. “Well there was a beggar in the back of the room, lying lifelessly on a bench. You said to yourself – just for a second, ‘Why should I walk back there for him? He can come up to me to get his snuff.” Yossele was overwhelmed as he recalled for the first time that fleeting thought. “Well,” continued Master Israel “that beggar hadn’t eater for three full days. If only you knew how much he needed that pinch of snuff! He was so inside of his prayer that the heavenly gates were wide open… listening to his every word, his every sigh.

“When the holy angels saw that you did not walk back and give this holy soul some snuff, that was it – they were enraged! They decreed you should lose all your money and that the beggar should become wealthy instead of you. Well, that beggar is now the wealthiest man in your town.”

At this point, Yossele’s contrition turned to anger. “You mean that beggar has all of my money? What chutzpah! How do I get it back?”

“Actually, you can get it back,” answered Master Israel with a twinkle in his eye. “If you can find a time when you ask him for a pinch of snuff, and he refuses, at that moment all of that lost wealth will be returned to you.”

Read the whole story here…

 

Dr. Marc Gafni on The Mia Connect Power Chat about Digital Intimacy

Mia Voss Hangouts: Digital Intimacy with Dr. Marc GafniCheck out this awesome Hangout with Mia Voss and Dr. Marc Gafni about Digital Intimacy:

Mia Voss chats with Dr. Marc Gafni on The Mia Connect Power Chat about Digital Intimacy and building your intimate tribe way beyond what the word intimacy implies.

During their lively and often humorous talk they engage topics like:

  • This photo is courtesy Mia Voss: “Here’s how it looked on HER side of the camera! Marc Gafni in full-on mode.”

    How we have exiled all of our intimacy, Eros, and all the beautiful dimensions of life into sexuality

  • How we can free sexuality and use it as a model for all the rest of our life to live life to its fullest
  • What our worst living nightmare is
  • How we need to show up in our Unique Self and live our Unique Story to really find our tribe–online or offline
  • How we can live a happy and fulfilled life and contribute our Unique gifts to reality
  • How we can use the web to create real intimacy
  • How Unique Self values authenticity AND context and is able to bracket his/herself
  • What it really means to love
  • How the self-organizing universe works and how Unique Self is the most important technology for it

Tune in to the replay! A shout-out to the great listeners and all their comments, which you can see with the replay.
Also this page with time-stamped sections by theme!

 

 

A Summer Festival of Outrageous Love

Summer Festival of Love 2014This Summer Festival of Love at our Teaching Center at the Integral Practice Community Venwoude in Holland has again exceeded all expectations. More than 175 participants came to love and be loved open, to break the boundaries of their smallness, and to participate in the evolution of love itself.

On a personal note, I, Kerstin, have been thoroughly cooked over the last 20 years with intense spiritual experiences at all kinds of events, retreats, and seminars. None of them have prepared me even vaguely for what I have found in retreats with Marc Gafni over the last 3 years: the depths of the dharma transmissions, the openings of hearts, minds, and souls, the embodiment of outrageous loving, the humility and audacity of his teachings, his passion and devotion that is deeply infectious, and the depths of community I have found here again and again. And although each time I think this is IT, that it cannot be any better,  it always gets better. It deepens, opens, connects us to the greatest depths and highest heights, and opens the gates to heaven, flying higher and higher and higher.

In this Festival, everyone could feel the Goddess dancing among us again and again. And Marc danced her all the way, taking every one of us with him. And the wonderful community of Venwoude and of Center for Integral Wisdom created such a clear, warm holding container that new people could dive into it immediately with almost no resistance. Wow!

Let’s hear from two participants:

Blog post by Stefan Schoch: A Summer Festival of Love

“Actually” I just wanted to relax for 2 days, when I drove to Venwoude at the 4th day of the Center for Integral Wisdom/ Venwoude Mystery School of Love Festival (following a personal invitation).

On the other hand, I already suspected (after the experiences with Marc in 2011) that it might touch me deeper. [Read more…]

Special Community Lineage Days at Venwoude and Conscious Capitalism Event at Nijenrode University

We just completed a very special series of events at our Teaching Center at Venwoude in Holland. Dr. Marc Gafni taught two Valentine’s Day events in a very beautiful church in Amsterdam. This was followed by a wonderful and very intimate two-day retreat at Venwoude on Saturday and Sunday. Capping off the 4-day weekend, we had an outstanding presentation at Nijenrode University on Conscious Capitalism with Prof. Dr. Paul de Blot, Dr. Marc Gafni, and Ken Wilber (via Skype) in front of 150 enthused Entrepreneurs.

Valentine’s Day at Vondelkerk Amsterdam

Marc Gafni at Vondelkerk AmsterdamA packed house of people celebrated Valentine’s Day in an old beautiful Church in Amsterdam with Dr. Marc’s Dharma on Outrageous Love. It was a day of profound new dharma, deep practices, and a stunning community of Outrageous Lovers. Dr. Marc took us deeply into a practice space with dyad practices, chanting, and intimate sharing. The evening session seemed to explode–after a very quiet and subtle beginning with hearts meeting in Chant and Meditation and finally and melting open into the Inside of the Inside–with a fireworks of Dharma on Outrageous Love and Unique Intimacy. [Read more…]

Daily Wisdom: Ken Wilber on Shadow and Shadow Symptoms

by Bill Longshaw, www.freedigitalphotos.net

Bird And Shadow Longshaw, www.freedigitalphotos.net

from No Boundary by Ken Wilber

It should be apparent by now that shadow projection not only distorts our view of reality “out there,” it also greatly changes our feeling of self “in here.” When I project some emotion or trait as shadow, I still continue to perceive it but only in a distorted and illusory fashion—it appears as an “object out there.” Likewise, I still continue to feel the shadow, but only in a distorted and disguised fashion—once the shadow is projected, I feel it only as a symptom.

Thus, as we have just seen, if I project my own hostility toward peo­ple, I will imagine that people are harboring hostile feelings for me, and thus I will begin to feel a creeping fear of people in general. My original hostility has become my projected shadow. So I “see” it only in other people and I feel it in myself only as the symptom of fear. My shadow has become my symptom. [Read more…]

Programming Change in Evening Dialogue “The Future of Love, Sex, and Eros”

Click on Flyer to see an enlarged version!

Click on Flyer to see an enlarged version!

We are excited to announce a programming change to start off the weekend workshop, “The Radical Path of the Outrageous Lover.”

On Friday, October 4th, from 7:00-9:00 pm, Stuart Black replaces Warren Moe in the evening dialogue with Dr. Marc Gafni, entitled, “The Future of Love, Sex, and Eros!”

Stuart Black was the Director of the Core Energetics Institute for over two decades and is currently serving as President. He was also the creator of many classic Core Energetics events such as Take A Risk and the Core Spiritual Service.

Mr. Black and Dr. Gafni will spark a spirited and entertaining dialogue on The Future of Love, Sex and Eros!

[Read more…]

The Radical Path of the Outrageous Lover! A weekend workshop with Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Kristina Kincaid Oct. 4-6 in NYC

HeartAt this key time in history we are called to evolve and embody Love, Sex and Eros! The sexual is the ultimate spiritual master. Deep understanding of the sexual is the ultimate guide to accessing the spirit in every dimension of our reality. To be a great Lover — an Outrageous Lover in all facets of your being — you must listen deeply to the simple yet elegant spirit whisperings of the sexual.

This event is a co-production with our Teaching Center Institute of INTEGRAL EVOLUTIONARY TANTRA in New York City.

Workshop: Oct 4 – 6, 2013
Fri 7–9 (free evening session)
Sat + Sun 10–5:30

Free Dialogue Evening! LOVE, SEX & EROS
Friday, Oct. 4 from 7-9 pm between Dr. MARC GAFNI
and WARREN MOE, Director, Inst. of Core Energetics

Please download the Flyer here for info on how to register.

[Read more…]

Wisdom for Your Week: A Gift for You from the Summer Festival of Love at Venwoude

Marc Gafni teaching at Venwoude

Marc Gafni teaching at Venwoude

The second annual Mystery School of Love has begun and is already in full swing. More than 150 people have come to celebrate with us this year’s theme: “Reclaiming Eros.” Many participants were here with us last year and are excited to be here again!

The festival revolves at its core around Dr. Marc’s several hours of Dharma transmission each morning. In the beginning of the day, spiritual teacher Chahat Corten — a leading luminary at Venwoude and a direct dharma student of Dr. Marc — begins the morning with a day-opening ceremony. Dr. Marc then meets with the twenty or so teachers gathered on the faculty of the Mystery School. Included are leading teachers who are each in their own right bright stars and key leaders of the Venwoude community where Dr. Marc serves as the World Spirituality Teacher in Residence. We will post a bit later a special piece about all the the wonderful teachers, each worthy of note and great appreciation.

The center of the emergence is the field of radical dharma and outrageous love that is woven and rewoven by Dr. Marc. The attendance at the festival has doubled in the last year and we expect that to keep doubling every year. Dr. Marc weaves a field of precise and powerful–truly “source-code-changing”–teaching, which transforms minds and explodes hearts. Dr. Marc’s mind and heart seem to merge as one and he lives for everyone as an overflowing and brilliant weaver of meaning, meta theory and grand narrative—even as he opens up spaces of genuine enlightenment that seem to shift the earth beneath people’s feet. It is an enlightenment teaching pure and simple, and the process is, as Dr. Marc calls it, Loving Your Way to Enlightenment!

To give you a little taste of it, we want to share with you just the first few minutes of Marc Gafni’s opening dharma talk, where he sets the frame by giving us 6 principles and commitments for the upcoming week. This is before any of the real dharma got started – this was the first hello:

[Read more…]

Unique Self and Shadow: An Introduction

Naked Female On Rocks Facing Lightening by Victor Habbick

©Victor Habbick, www.freedigitalphotos.net

 “Any part of your story that you do not live,
lives in darkness…
part of your story is in shadow.
To come home you must recover and
embrace the memory of your fullest self.
Until the story of your life is lived
you will go on yearning for it.”
Dr. Marc Gafni in Your Unique Self

 

It is so exciting to be on this journey together with all of you, our readers and participants in courses and retreats, my wonderful colleagues and friends, and my beloved teacher and friend Dr. Marc Gafni, who has invited me to team up with him in this sacred endeavor of writing this series of articles, which will ultimately become a book, as well as in this holy adventure of Integral Wisdom, World Spirituality, and Unique Self.

[Read more…]

Senior Teachers of Unique Self Process

Each of these Senior Teachers is at a different stage in their development in relation to Unique Self. Most of them have studied with Dr. Marc very actively for a period of years. Others are newer to our world but have stepped in with an enormous investment of self. Every single person is committed in significant long term fashion to the unfolding and spreading of the good news of the Evolutionary Unique Self and the emergent Evolutionary We space that is its natural result.

All of us understand at the very cellular level that the teaching of Personal Enlightenment, which is the essence of the Evolutionary Unique Self teaching, is a vital building block in the Evolution of Love. Participating—humbly and audaciously—in the evolution of love by awaking to our Evolutionary Unique Selves—evolution awakening to itself in us, as us, and through us—personally—is a lodestone in the emergent World Spirituality. Naturally, this entire teaching is refracted through the prism of genuine Integral thinking. The awakening to Evolutionary Unique Self needs to include growing up to your highest level of consciousness as well as waking up to your most profound True Self state; it must appear in all four quadrants; it embraces the unique combination of lines of development that form your gifts and that literally means that you awaken to your unique type expression of essence.

Read more…

 

Integral God: Sacred Activism and Falling in Love with the Divine – Excerpt

Excerpt of the Essay by Dr. Marc Gafni:

In their 2013 ITC conference presentation, Marc Gafni and Sally Kempton will explore “Integral God: Sacred Activism and Falling in Love with the Divine.” To explore this, they will consider two models of self in evolutionary mysticism and why these models matter. Both models emerge at the time of important updates to the source code of enlightenment. The first update is the understanding that all of reality, including spirit, is evolving, and this is a shared understanding of both Unique and Authentic Self teachings. The second update to the source code of the enlightenment teachings can be understood as the emergence of the awakened personal function, and this is a key area of divergence between the Unique and Authentic Self teachings. Read more in this excerpt from the introduction of the essay :

 

Unique Self and Authentic Self in Context:

Marc GafniWithin the Integral context, two ways of thinking about self have emerged which are distinctive both in their shared contours and significant distinctions. One framework or model has been called Authentic Self, and the other, Unique Self.[i] Their implicit assumptions suggest both a shared worldview and subtle but important distinctions in their vision of the ideal homo religiousus. These distinctions are foundational with vast implications in virtually every dimension of life, and therefore, need to be laid out with clarity and precision. Each suggests a different understanding of what it means to wake up from the narrow identity as a separate self or ego self into a more enlightened and correct identity as, respectively, Authentic or Unique Self.[ii]  Both the Unique Self and Authentic Self models locate themselves within the context of classical mystical enlightenment teaching. Neither emerges from a western flatland paradigm which views the self as an isolated and discrete unit, or what has been called a skin-encapsulated ego. For both Unique Self and Authentic Self, the first major step towards enlightenment is the realization that the person is not merely an ego or separate self, but rather that the person’s true identity is their absolute, essential, or true self. [Read more…]

Wisdom for Your Week: Unleashing the Symphonic Creativity of Every Unique Self

marc-gafni-headshot-2012On July 6, 2013 Simple Life host Cynthia Fernandes interviewed Dr. Marc Gafni, who shared with her and her audience some of the most cutting-edge teachings on Unique Self and the self-organizing principle of Evolutionary Unique We-Space.

They discuss:

  1. why people have a deeper need to start playing a larger game and stop doing business as usual.
  2. why people tend to close down when confronted with the huge challenges we are facing as humanity and what we can do about this.
  3. the path from Ego through True Self to Unique Self and what it means to be an outrageous lover.
  4. the clues to recognizing your Unique Self.
  5. how we can “unleash the symphonic creativity of every Unique Self” and how this is key to solving every challenge in the world.
  6. why both happiness as well as profit cannot be pursued directly – they are the natural by-product of living our Unique Self and striving for excellence.

Listen to the interview here and read the synopsis of some of the keypoints below:

[Read more…]

“Your Unique Self” reviewed by Mariana Caplan, PhD

Mariana Caplan, PhDMariana Caplan, PhD, co-founder of Center for World Spirituality, psychotherapist, professor of yogic and transpersonal psychologies, and the author of seven books in the fields of psychology and spirituality, has reviewed Your Unique Self:

“Your Unique Self is a great gift to the modern spiritual world. The author, Marc Gafni, has been immersed in spiritual study and practice for over three decades, and his work comes to a full flowering in this beautiful book.

In this way, Your Unique Self is both a philosophy and a practice that is relevant to seekers and practitioners of all traditions, both traditional and modern. The radical but grounded theory and method Gafni articulates offers the reader a chance to experience not only his or her unique gifts to the world, but to recognize uniqueness itself as an enlightened expression of our own inherent divinity. Unique Self in Gafni’s realization is the expression of the irreducibly unique “personal face of essence”. Here is a direct taste of the book itself.”

Read more>>>

You can buy the book and more books by Dr. Marc Gafni at Amazon>>>

 

Ego Story or Unique Self Story Reloaded – Ego and Unique Self Distinction #25

Paper Cut Of Dragon And Child by jannoon028

©jannoon028, www.freedigitalphotos.net

by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self

Your egoic story can be taken away by the circumstances of life. Your Unique Self story can never be taken away from you.

Ego can be taken away from you. Unique Self can never be taken away from you.

 

Further discussion:

In his book Your Unique Self Dr. Marc continues with a beautiful, very personal, and deeply touching story, which shall be reserved for its readers. Another example for this would be the story of the great Rebbe of Piaseczno, who has found and lived his Unique Self story in the midst of the greatest destruction, so beautifully told by Dr. Marc in this video series.

For the conclusion of our series on the distinctions between Unique Self and Ego, it remains to be said: It is time to put it all to work in our daily lives, in our personal Unique Self stories… [Read more…]

Wisdom for Your Week: Divine Tears

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
Piasetzener Rebbe

In this beautiful and deeply moving series of short videos from 2008 from the Treblinka death camp, Dr. Marc Gafni tells us the story of Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of Piaseczno, who–after his whole family was killed by the Nazis–kept on teaching and loving and writing down his sermons to his students in the Warsaw Ghetto. When he became aware that the end of the Ghetto and its inhabitants was near, he buried the book in a canister. This canister was found after the end of the war and the book was published in Israel in 1960.

In one of the teachings of this last Polish Hasidic Master–as Dr. Marc tells us here–he asks himself: “What is the internal vibration of the Divine?” In Jeremiah, God speaks: “In the inner places, I cry.” Yet, in another place, it is said that in God’s inner places, there is joy and laughter.

Dr. Marc reminds us here that “in the inner space between the contradictions–that is where God lives.” And he narrates further that the Talmud, in the Tractate Hagigah, states about this: “That is in the inner house. That is in the outer house.”–without telling us which is which. Most Kabbalists read this–like a classical Vedanta, non-dual position–that in the inner places God is not affected by the world. So, in the inner places, God is all joy and laughter.

Not so, the Rebbe of Piaseczno… Read the partial transcript of the story as told by Dr. Marc Gafni:

[Read more…]

Distinction between Ego and Unique Self #23: Eternity or Death

Dark Tunnel With Light by pakorn

©pakorn, www.freedigitalphotos.net

by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self

The ego strives for immortality it can never achieve, and therefore displaces its grasping for eternity onto projects of control and conquest. The Unique Self experiences authentically what the ego longs for mistakenly—namely the recognition that it is divine and therefore eternal.

This distinction is essential and therefore deserves a brief clarification. The separate self emerges at a certain stage of human history and at a certain stage in the development of the individual human being. As the sense of separate self solidifies, so too does the terror of death. The person feels correctly that death is wrong, that they should not have to die. They feel that they are eternal and should live forever. They are right. The core intuition of immortality could not be more correct. But locked as they are in separate self ego awareness, they mis-apply that core intuition in two ways.

First, because they are utterly identified with the ego, they apply their intuition of immortality to the egoic separate self. They think that the ego will live forever. Second, because they are identified with the now-eternalized ego, and yet at the same time are gripped by the fear of death, which is oblivion to the ego, they seek all sorts of Viagra-like identity enhancers. They make the finite goods of the world into infinite goods. Money, surplus goods, power, accumulated pleasures—all become identity enhancers for the ego. Their purpose is to give the ego a felt sense of its immortality. But since the ego is not immortal, all of these death-denying immortality projects are doomed to failure.

Even though the ego does make these two essential mistakes, the ego’s intuitions are not wrong. When the mistakes are corrected at the level of Unique Self, the truth behind those intuitions can emerge. After you disidentify with your separate self, your Unique Self appears as a distinct and indivisible part of the eternal one. It is in your Unique Self that you realize your immortality. The Unique Self expresses correctly the mistakenly applied, but inwardly correct, intuition of the ego.

 

Further discussion:

A 2012 article in The Guardian has gone viral and is still circulating in social media: “Top five regrets of the dying.“ An Australian nurse in palliative care, Bronnie Ware, had for many years questioned her patients during the last 12 weeks of their lives about any regrets they might have. She has recorded their answers in a blog and eventually wrote a book about them.

When looking at these responses from a Unique Self perspective, we read of the patients regretting not having lived their Unique Selves: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me” was the most common answer. [Read more…]

Wisdom for Your Week: Thought Leader Dialogue between Richard Barrett and Marc Gafni: The Unique Self and Societal Development: The Path of Societal Transformation

Corporate Social Responsibility In Word Collage by David Castillo Dominici

©David Castillo Dominici, www.freedigitalphotos.net

Listen to Richard Barrett, founder and chairman of the Barrett Values Centre and author of many books—e.g. What My Soul Told Me, The New Leadership Paradigm, and Building a Values Driven Organization—and Marc Gafni as they talk about an exciting new role that nations and our democratic systems can play in the evolution of consciousness, when they awaken to their Unique Selves, and what that might mean.

You can also listen to the first two parts of the dialogue and read a summary or partial transcript here:

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