Eros and Holiness: Part Ten: Marc Gafni

marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
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I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force.

The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame — either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you this book as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational.
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I want to share with you an ancient reality map rooted in a secret tradition of the Hebrew mystics. This spirit map has within it to be, both the balm to our pain and the gateway to our bliss.
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Our pain is not caused by technology overdose, nor by communication problems; certainly it is not punishment because we were bad. All human beings, good and not so good, experience some endemic pain as part of their ongoing reality. Our suffering is caused by a misreading of our reality map, which prevents us from accessing the full joy that is our birthright. Ultimately the painful mess we are in is rooted in a failure of love.

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Now when I say life is a mess I am not only referring to the major and minor wars that rage around the globe. I could mention that in the past century over one hundred million people have been deliberately killed in wars whose goals we have long since forgotten.

Strange wars fought from places of smallness and fear. Wars in which countries go about brutally massacring each others children for a few years then have a conference where everyone smiles and it is called peace. It also might be worth remembering that that these wars that once seemed so distant to us have become much closer. Non loving and repressive regimes in Afghanistan have very direct and painful impact on morning coffee in Manhattan. Indeed as our planet shrinks we begin to awaken – even if initially it is only a political awakening – to that old mystical truth: we are interconnected with every other being on the planet. Yet all this is not the full measure of the pain I describe.

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I am also not ‘merely’ referring to the policies of non loving and alienation that leave twenty million people a year dead of hunger and hunger related diseases. Nor am I focusing primarily on the fact that the families of those twenty million people cannot help but despise the United States. They see us, the Western world as evil. We have the wealth and means to feed every mouth on the planet. But we don’t. We choose to let them remain hungry.. To a starving person or their brother all the complex explanations of inaction, rooted in sophisticated realpolitik, simply do not wash. Nor should they. They know that starving people in the world is a function of one cause only; a failure of love.

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Even however 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 core story 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 world wide. Among the leaders are western democracies like Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland and of course the United States.

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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.

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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 — just as alienated and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo — suspended between hells — all the while maintaining the facade of normal and even successful lives.

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Albert Camus once wrote “There is but one truly serious problem…judging whether or not, life is or is not worth living…”2 Tragically Camus, together with … answered the questions in the negative. The emptiness was to much to bear. He, like so many others could not find his way to the fullness of life.

Marc Gafni

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