On the Erotic & the Holy – Marc Gafni

by Marc Gafni

The following is part of a one-thousand page version of a book I wrote many years ago called “On the Erotic and the Holy.” We plan to post the full version over time. Part of this book, about 315 pages worth, was published as The Mystery of Love.

Every week or two we will add a chapter or section from this book to the website. It will appear as one of the new articles posted. This material in its entirety will, God willing, be published as a separate work under the title On the Erotic and the Holy.

A couple of points to share:

Avraham Leader and myself, in the context of our work together in Israel, footnoted The Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, and the first three chapters of On the Erotic and the Holy.

(Our footnotes to Soul Prints are truly excellent and deserve to be studied carefully. You will find this material available in the Books and Products section of this website under Soul Prints.)

The footnotes to these first three chapters are in part the same as the footnotes to The Mystery of Love. Also, the fundamental material is very much the same, only more expanded and extended. The footnotes themselves are highly important and provide the rooting of these books in the classical Hebraic sources.

To be fair, these books represent the sacred unfolding and evolution of classic Hebraic sources, particularly Kabbalistic sources. There are some people whose role it is to translate the wisdom of their tradition. Other people―far fewer―are intended to evolve the tradition even as it appears that they are only translating. That is what I am attempting to do in this book. I try to avoid, at almost all cost, getting lost in scholarly hubris. The language is simple and clear and the movements of evolution are hopefully relatively seamless in the fabric of the text.

FORTHCOMING NEW BOOK

A more elaborate version of this book, which has undergone a significant editorial process is forthcoming as what I hope will be a major new book.

In the meantime, in response to many requests for me to teach new material, I am sharing with you the original manuscript―replete with notes, questions, and suggestions to myself on future directions and issues and the like. It seems like there is something to be said for seeing a work in progress, still rough and unfinished.

TITLE PAGE

The picture on the cover is an imaginative rendering of the Ashera tree, divine symbol of feminine eros in ancient paganism. It is now time for the contemporary prophets of biblical myth to reclaim the legacy of the sacred Ashera and reinstall her within the precincts of the temple.

Note to me: Cite sources from Zohar; part 3, from Ramak/ Cordevero, Abraham Kuk on Ahserah; {Pattai cites Ramak, thank Tamar Ross who first referred me to Rav Kuk source on Idolatry; see also important article by Gellman on Akedah and important sources there on relationship between rav kuk and idolatry; seems like Gellman did not fully understand the impact of the sources but not clear; I feel he always hides his true radicalism in order to remain relatively kosher; need to thank him}

…and the ability to transmute the Asherah energy to the sacred. All of these sources in one way or another acknowledge that Ahserah participates in the energy of Shekinah. People have rejected Asherah. This is a mistake. Da Free John uses phrase in his work — Wilber picks up phrase – Transcend and Include – Wilber cites Hegel Negate and Preserve- when one ascends levels of consciousness. We need to negate that in Ahserha is pre-personal and included that which is at it’s core Transpersonal.

Level One Ahsera very problematic; Level three Ashera which transcends and includes the personal is messianic. Relate my level one level three confusion idea to Wilber’s Pre Trans Fallacy. Wilber article on Pre-Trans excellent. Need to meet him and discuss. Perhaps D.F might make introduction. Will ask him. Lovely man.

Epigrams

“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…”

-John Keats

“Jerusalem’s Temple, the place where heaven and earth kiss.”

-The Zohar

The Mystery of Love

Leshem
Yichud Kudsha Brich-hu u’Shechinateh.
May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess.

-Kabbalistic meditation

The Hole in our Wholeness

We are in pain. We are in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain. The Kabbalists call this Divine wound the Exile of the Shechina. This is a wound born of love.

{See Da Free John on Practicing the Wound of Love; My Kabbalistic re- read of Da Free John I light of Gafni- is that practicing the wound of love is an act of imitation; the wounds of love in human relation step from the exilc of the Shekina within the self — a form of self contraction and alienation/eros is so painful but that is not the subject for this book — need part two of the Erotic and the Holy on the Pain of Eros. I am publishing God willing a separate book called tentatively “The Pain of Eros: Practicing the Wounds of Love”. This book is about my personal experience of spirit and love between May 11 2006 and the present. It suggests a path in love which in my understanding is the core of the Hebraic notion of enlightenment}

The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us.

Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experiences of fullness, presence, interconnectivity and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience.² One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So later in our journey (in chapter two) we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence.

The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A —void —dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine – never realizing – that it is all a-void-dance. That if we could but taste fullness a moment – then the empty dances of addiction, power, violence and abusive sex¹ would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This book is about sharing that dance with you.

The Great Dancer

The truly great dancer – like all lovers – flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow.

The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila – forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah – fullness – used in the biblical myth text to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.

Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full.

The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina.

Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra―marketed to us in a million packages. To fill the emptiness, in any way at any price. We are desperate. We can hardly distinguish between our desires we are so pained by our emptiness. The natural result is that we fill up with much which is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment – full-fill-ment – in all the wrong places.

Pseudo-Eros

The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The move between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”

We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification – a quick fix – a book, a drug, a relationship, a job – anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages, if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole which might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide.

On the outside our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside however there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance.

Erotic Living

The Dancing Master

There is a wonderful story of eros and love which hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void we come out stronger.

Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this Master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.

Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The Master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of dong you harm.”

“Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “What kind of harm can you do?”

“Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.”

The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu.

“Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.”

“Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama.

“Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.”

“Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king.
“Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.”

“If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.”

The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge.

The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.”

The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack.

The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows.

The master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time.

The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea.

A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch.

His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life.

The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.

What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more.

To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives – beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety.

When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result on a personal level is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level the result is terrible wars, as we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros.

Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum.

The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence.

If we do not choose Eros then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations.

A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Even when there was no such promise or even it’s opposite. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend, refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God —within themselves.

We abuse the earth and allow twenty million people to die of hunger or related diseases a year. The simple and essential cause is a lack of Eros. We desperately need to feel like we are full but we aren’t. So we settle for pseudo Eros. We pretend like we are in the inside by placing others on the outside. We do not feel embraced in real Eros of love so we grasp for the pseudo Eros of fear war and obsessive consumption. Life is a mess.

Even if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars – an even superficial view of our own society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the plumb line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by sixty percent worldwide. Among the leaders are western democracies like Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland and of course the United States.

Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. Not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news however is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note however that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years – twenty times more than “successful” suicides.

Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide there are a lot more people in just as much pain. Just as lonely Рjust as alienated and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo Рsuspended between hells Рall the while maintaining the fa̤ade of normal and even successful lives.

And yet our guilty feet have got no rhythm. Beneath our desperately dancing steps lurks a yawning abyss of emptiness that kills our joy and poisons our satisfactions. We need another way to dance. It is the old dancing master who shows us how. He reminds us that Eros is a genuine possibility in our lives. Stay in the emptiness, he tells us, and it will become full. Where before you danced to the music of competition and envy you know begin to feel that you are part of the seamless coat of the divine universe. You no longer feel like you must obey God – you participate in the divine. Eros is the sound of a woman singing, the caress of a small deed of loving, a gentle tear, or rocking laughter. Shechina is genuinely felt pain and joy, anger and ecstasy. All of these fill your emptiness and enliven your days. You are no longer alienated from your own life – living externally —wondering; is this all there is? To dance with the Shechina is to step inside to the full erotic glory and wonder of your life. To live and love erotically in all the facets your being is so to live a sacred life.

The Path of Love

One cannot be told that life is worthwhile – one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity and worth of their lives. It is however this very erotic sense that is so essential to making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second hand consumers of second hand joy – never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails there truly is nothing left to live for. For love – not the narrow romantic expressions of it – but erotic love in all areas of our existence is the core of life itself.

We are confronted, personally and globally with a stark choice – Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury – it is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half a century modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personal and global – even with all the resources intelligence and technology at our disposal- will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love.

Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners – desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master.

The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lays an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries we are taught that sex is not eros. But as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non sexual dimensions of our lives.

The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence.

We live in age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being re-claimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a New Age in which for the first time—after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution, we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. Suggest the mystics – we may well be able to hold the light more deeply then even ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only know after law, science and ethics have been integrated into our psyches that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment.

Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone – except yourself – will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the Biblical love book – the Song of Songs, reads “I am love sick on my bed at night;” Explain 19th century mystical master Nachumm of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual — but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom.

You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide.

I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israeli Oxford University in England and in Exile in Salt Lake City Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song.

The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world.

FOOTNOTES

1. There are two primary form of abusive sex. The first might involve rape, or sexual abuse within a family such as incest or the less severe but not insignificant issue of sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment means generally the usage by an employer of his authority to gain sexual relations or sexual contact with his employee. This means for example that the employee is given to understand implicitly or explicitly that there tenure or success with the company or organization is dependent on there be willing to engage the “boss sexually.”

However as the law of every country and many universities, recognize, this does not mean that there can be no sexual contact or relationship in the work place or the academy, between employer and employee or in certain cases between teacher and student, even if they seem to be enjoy different levels of formal power.

The law recognizes that is fully possible for there to be mutual and consensual sex between adults which is good and healthy and even holy, even when in one part of their lives there is a formal power differential.

Moreover law and spirit both recognize the natural truth that power is distributed in many and complex ways.

There is however a second form of sexual abuse which is no less severe then the first. This involves the abuse of sexual intimacy and vulnerability by mis- charactering a sexual relationship in a false or distorted manner after it has happened. Often this results in false accusations, complaints and the like. As important feminist thinkers have pointed out in their critique of patriarchy rape means much more then the violation of the body. It is the violation of the spirit of the other. I would term this form of sexual abuse Name rape. There has been in the last twenty years or more in western society a virtual epidemic of Name Rapes. In a manner similar to body rape, name rape almost always tries to justify or paper over the heinous nature of the crime by various forms of blaming the victim.

2. On the nature of this phenomenon and the enlightenment teachings of humility, grace, pain and liberation, inherent in the experience of name rape I will discuss in my upcoming work; The Pain of Eros; Practicing the Wounds of Love.

From Marc Gafni