First Fridays! Next First Friday: March 2 at 7 pm

Welcome to Integral Church: First Fridays!
Integral Church is an enactment of Integral consciousness, initiated by Dr. Marc on New Years weekend 2010. In Integral Church, we engage a passionate and integrated spiritual practice that is emergent from the best of the world’s spiritual traditions. Each First Friday has a theme.  The themes deepen in each new cycle. The theme for our last First Friday was:

IDENTIFYING YOUR UNIQUE GIFTS: THE POWER & PRACTICE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY LOVER

WHEN: March 2 at 7 pm
WHERE:  1584 36th Avenue ( apt B) San Francisco, Ca. 94122
For Directions, click here

Give yourself a huge gift and come to First Fridays with us, where we will eat a festive meal and practice the ecstatic arts of meaning-making, loving, chant and dance.

Important announcement:
First Fridays is potluck-style this year; so bring with you after dinner food: snack or salad or desert dish or wine or drinks or fruit and nuts or whatever arouses your tastebuds
First Fridays will be deploying the Shabbot technology of the old Kabbalists .
The nature of First Fridays this year will be very different then it was last year. Let me share a few sentence about our intention here.

At First Fridays, we’d like to engage the direct evolutionary mystical consciousness of our emergent World Spirituality framework and lineage. We want to literally be able to taste God, the Divine beyond us and the infinitely gorgeous ecstatic Divine that lives as us. To make this available to you I am, with deep respect and honor, going to invite the lineage masters which whom I am most intimate, the masters of Kabbalah, to join us around a festive table.

Everyone please bring some wine, drink, or a simple dish of food to share of the kind described above. We will gather around the table as Plato did in his symposium, as Rumi did in his study hall, and as all the great evolutionary mystics who called themselves Kabbalists always did on every Friday evening.

Around the table together, we will engage in the tantric practice of Sabbath table mysticism. The core of the practice is to eat and drink a joyous meal together which is filled with intimacy, spiritual exercises, mediation, chant, partner work. The core experience of the Sabbath table is wildly beautiful which holds, honors and evolves all of our pained and broken places; even as the Sabbath table reminds us that we are kings and queens, wildly beautiful and pleasing to God as we realize that in our innermost being, we are actually part of God.

At the Sabbath table we will invoke the wisdom and practice of many of the great traditions, pre-modern, modern and post modern. Each will be invoked with honor and love, even as we move to integrate it all at a higher level – as the emergent tenets of World Spirituality practice. Join us in the World Spirituality lab as we humbly, audaciously and joyously, move to enact Spirit’s Next Move, World Spirituality based on Integral Principles.

Join your World Spirituality guide Dr. Marc Gafni and friends at First Fridays-for an intimate and deep evening of practice, love, and relationships as we explore Identifying Your Unique Gifts: The Power and Practice of the Evolutionary Lover. In world spirituality teaching, the core joy and obligation of a human being is to live and give Your Unique Gift.

Every human being has a particular set of gifts that they can offer in the world. What are your unique gifts? The nature of the gift, like the perspective held by every human being, is utterly unique. The ability to offer this gift freely in the world depends on our ability to free ourselves of limiting and false notions of who we are, and identify with our larger service. Some of our gifts are modest, private and intimate–some are larger than life and have dramatic impact in the public sphere. However, every Unique Gift arises and may be offered in all four quadrants. From a non-dual perspective, your unique gift creates your unique obligation. In the language of one teacher of Unique Self, Man’s deed is God’s need.

God needs your service. God, in the first, second and third person, needs your service. To live your Unique Self and offer your Unique Gifts is to align yourself with the evolutionary impulse and fulfill your evolutionary obligation as a Lover.

Living as an Evolutionary Lover is the passionate path of the New Enlightenment. The way you make this path real and alive in your life is by identifying and giving your Unique Gifts. Buddhism teaches the Enlightenment of Emptiness. To do this you must dis-identify with you personality story. And this is fully half the story.

The second half of the story is the Enlightenment of Fullness. To realize the enlightenment of fullness you must fully inhabit, embody and Live Your Story.

There are four key steps in this process:
1) Evolve beyond exclusive identification with ego
2) Take off the mask of your particular false self
3) Identify your Unique Gift
4) Begin to give your Unique Gift in the world

These four steps and the practices that take you there are the path to the Enlightenment of Fullness. The Enlightenment of Fullness – one of the core teaching we are unfolding at CWS – is a lodestone of the evolutionary emergent of World spirituality.

On each of the upcoming four first Fridays in December, January, February, and March we will engage in one of these steps:
Friday,December 2, 2011
Friday, January 6, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012

Join us and participate – for the sake of the all – in the evolution and ecstatic expression of your highest and best self.

Integral Church: First Fridays

To the church you never went to when you were growing up because it didn’t exist.
To the synagogue you never even dreamed was possible.
To the monastery where you can talk, celebrate, and play.
To the ashram that is fully relational, contemporary, and evolutionary.
To the dance party where you can learn, grow, and transform spiritually.
To the kirtan that also exercises the mind and interpersonal relationships.
To a place where single people can openly and fearlessly meet potential life partners.
To the conscious community where you can raise your babies, children,and teens with spiritual values and practice.
To the place where the disenfranchised become re-enfranchised, and thebelievers can dream into the future.
To a place where the lover is you, and you meet the beloved in your own body.
To a center of evolutionary activism.
To a place where the special guest is you, and what you bring to it effects the evolution of what we create together, and perhaps even the evolution of consciousness itself.

If you want to know what we are going to talk about at First Fridays watch this video.