Book Outline – Tape Transcript 1

MPI MEDIA PRODUCTIONS INTERNATIONAL

from Marc Gafni

(OFF MIKE)

MAN: Hope you all are well and wonderful and sweet flowing energy in your world. Bill, it was a pleasure meeting you. Bob, really a great pleasure. You are going to be my rebbe, my master in the art of television world. It’s more than television world. It’s the art of sort of creating this whole elaborate delivery system. And, indeed, it is an art and I just enjoyed our meeting. You’re just a wonderful man and I just enjoyed very, very much the prospect of just doing great, fabulous things together. And that’s number one. Number two, I thought about the book context and the kinds of books and I wanted to do two things before I actually started the actual recording of ideas for the book outline. And just to share with you a couple of images that came to mind. One image was Thomas Moore … whatever his name is … who did the book “Care of the Soul.” Is it Thomas? I think it’s Moore. Thomas Moore, who did the book “Care of the Soul,” which was a runaway best seller, which sort of uses myth, particularly Renaissance myth, as his basis. And sort of weaves out of the myth story sort of a course set of ideas, but he’s always weaving a myth. And that’s the kind of sense that I think if we go for stuff with biblical stuff in it, it shouldn’t be bible, as in fundamentalists obviously. It should be biblical myth. And myth is not a statement about whether it’s true or not true.

Myth in the sense of being larger of life, in the sense of Jung, right? A Jungian myth. In the sense of Joseph Campbell. You know, sort of the core myth, right? So using the biblical stories as the biblical myth and to write it in a way that sort of will both include the whole Rush Limbaugh/Michael Medvid/Dr. Laura crowd, and at the same time include the whole sort of liberal Bill Moyers kind of … LBJ liberal kind of crowd. I think biblical myth can sort of help us do that.

So as I refer to a biblical story along the way, I mean it in the sense of biblical myth, in the sense of Moore’s book, “Care of the Soul.” That’s number one. Number two, you actually got me very excited about the Richard Carlson(?) kind of book. I have a couple of them at home, because I was interested in those kinds of books a couple of years ago or a year ago, and actually picked up another one right after we spoke, a day or two later. And that book is definitely doable, it’s definitely possible to do a book like that. It’s a different kind of book. It would require me spending some time but basically I could take all of my topics. Let’s say we have ten topics … and do several pieces of that kind on each topic. I don’t know if that’s like the first book or the more kind of natural essay book that I write as a first book, and that’s like second or third book down the line.

That’s a question. That kind of book would require … in one sense, it’s easier. In another sense you sort of got to start collecting … I’m sure he sits every morning … and Carlson collects a piece, an idea, and does a one or two pager on it. I mean, the book is actually surprisingly not incredibly well written and it’s fairly simple and it’s lovely. It obviously works and it’s important and it actually has some lovely ideas. The random acts of kindness is wonderful.

But again, that’s a different direction and I would have to make a decision of that with your guidance and that would have major ramifications on time allotment. Because that’s not exactly the book that we have now. Okay? So my thinking was that maybe that’s a couple of books down the line. In any case, you’re the rebbe guru on this so (Inaudible). Right now I’m thinking more in terms of the kind of books we’ve talked about up to now, which is sort of a combination of different idea sets with the core stuff with already have. Perhaps develop it, expand it. You know, with laughter, soul prints, certainly, uncertainly, tears, etc. Okay, finally, my final disclaimer. Just important … I know this is obvious, but important for also your friend at Curtis Brown I’m supposed to see on Monday. The word Jew, which Shakespeare has something to say about, obviously wouldn’t appear in the book. We’d always go for person, we’d always go for biblical consciousness. When we talk about law in a Jewish sense, I wouldn’t talk about law in a Jewish sense. I would talk about law in a broader sense. So that’s an easy kind of transition. Okay. Finally, I want to give you an updated list of books and then I’ll get to work.

(OFF MIKE)

MAN: So the updated list of books would be as follows: “Certainty,” book one. “Uncertainty,” book two. “Lilith Reclaiming Feminine Eros, Sexuality,” book three. That book is already written. Those first three books are already written. The third one, “Lilith,” is written in Hebrew and it would need to be translated and popularized if we wanted to use it. Okay, that’s one, two and three. Next step. “Soul Prints,” which is essentially about loneliness in loving. Maybe a good sub-title would be “Soul Prints — From Loneliness to Loving.” In general, I thought “From Loneliness to Loving” is a good phrase that everyone understands and it’s real clear. That’s number four. Number five, “Dance of Tears.” Number six, “Dance of Laughter.”

Number seven, “Twelve Paths,” which is a book I’m working on with someone in Israel, which is basically twelve essays, each one twenty pages, on the topics we’ve talked about. Different set of topics slightly. More on dance, anger, to be a man, the essential nature of men and women, etc. Those are four out of the twelve topics. Shadow, creativity … those are six topics I remember offhand that are that book of essays, which for now I’ll call “Twelve Paths.” So that’s book … whatever number we’re up to. Okay, those are the major books.

Next book is “Twelve Paths.” Same kind of book, but based on Kaballah, which is super big in America today. Kaballah spirituality, which is sort of the basic personal psychology of the Kaballah, taking twelve basic Kaballistic concepts. So that’s book either seven or eight. Next book is a story book. Stories. You know, tales from mysticism, from the world. A story book. Could be just a great coffee table book with thirty stories, one for each day of the month. Each one about a personal myth topic, about a life topic. Okay? And final book after that is “Life Cycle,” a book based about rites of passage. From birth to death. Rites of passage book. That’s the book that I actually have to give a lecture series about. And which will help flesh out the book.

I think that about covers it for now. And the Carlson book is essentially a new book. In other words, the Carlson book would be sort of drawn out of this material in a different form. Okay. Enough introduction. Part two of the tape. And now I’m gonna try and do my spiritual ready master Bob, for television creativity and art. I’m gonna try and do what you asked me to do and talk for like an hour and a half about the different ideas in the various books.

Bill, you had said to try and include an outline on the “Certainty” and “Uncertainty” books. What I’m really gonna do is, I’m gonna cover essentially in details, “Soul Prints,” “Certainty,” “Uncertainty,” “Tears” and in slightly more sketch form, I’m gonna do a little bit on “Laughter,” a little bit on “Silence.” That’s about it. I think that’s sort of the step that’s immediately in play. Okay. Number one, “Soul Prints.” “Soul Prints” is really about loneliness to loving. That’s the move that we’re all trying to make in the world. You know, separateness to unity. From being apart from, alienated from, to feeling one with. The move that we all look to make in some sense, shape or form in the world.

A, B, I always start this with the story that I told you in the office, which is the story about being in a Denver hotel room and looking at a Gideon bible, where it has got all these directions for psalms, you know, which psalm do you want to read because you’re drunk or because you’re depressed. Or because you’re obsessive, etc. And it says read psalm 23 if you’re lonely, and I’m sitting there in my Denver hotel room and I read psalm 23 and of course after I finish reading it, I still feel lonely. And at the bottom it says, if you’re still lonely, call Lola.

Okay. And that sort of captures something. It captures this sense of loneliness we feel in the modern world. We’re all super-connected, right? We’ve got Internet, we’ve got the most advanced forms of communications, we’ve got more leisure time to talk to each other than any generation’s ever had, and yet paradoxically, we feel deeply lonely. Loneliness in a sense of emptiness, alienation, is sort of the demarcating characteristic. It’s the hallmark of modernity. It’s what Paul Telluch(?) called the age of anxiety. I would reframe it, not the age of anxiety … the age of loneliness. That’s where I start. Number three, it’s a great biblical framework. In the biblical story, in the biblical myth of creation, in chapter one of Genesis, it always talks about each stage of creation after each day of creation and each day of course can be six million years or a billion years.

Each day is a frame of time. (And by the way, that’s really the right reading of the bible. Of course the sun and the moon were created on the fourth day. So if the sun and the moon are created on the fourth day it’s clear that a day is not a twenty-four hour unit of time. A day must be some sort of other unit.) Back to point three, after each stage of creation, it says that god saw that it was good. And god saw that it was good and god saw that it was good. That’s the refrain, the crescendo of creation.

When we get to chapter two, after all the, it was good, it then says, it is not good. Only place in the entire biblical literary text where it says it is not good. What’s not good? It’s not good for the human being to be alone. And if you read it closely, it means that it’s not good for the human being to be lonely. And that’s very powerful. I mean the only thing … after all the good in the world … I’ve got everything. It’s not good for the human being to be lonely meaning, that basically if there’s no one there to share it with, did it really happen? The medieval adage, right? If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? So we can refrain that. If something happens to me that’s wonderful or that’s difficult, and there’s no one there to share it with, did it really happen?

All right, I win the lottery. And I run to call someone. You know, I just made the best PBS special in the world and it made $4-million in the first night and I run to call someone about it. And there’s not a woman to call and my brother’s not around and who do I call? If there’s no one there to share it with, did it happen? In other words, have we locked ourselves in modernity in this sort of fast track to success, but with no one there really to share it with? Okay. That’s step three.

Step four is, in this whole thing, we won’t always distinguish between definitions and descriptions. We often describe loneliness. Our argument’s gonna be that in order to work through something, in order to move past something, I need to understand it. And only when I understand something, when I’m aware of what its definition is … I can’t just describe it but I understand it, I can define it … that creates a deep awareness that leads to growth. And when I become aware of something per se, the essential act of becoming aware, of making consciousness, makes me free. I’m enslaved by things that I don’t understand. I’m enslaved by things I don’t have deep definitions of. I’m enslaved by things I’m not conscious of.

So the beginning of trying to grapple with loneliness is to become conscious of it, but to be conscious of it … not just to feel it … I feel lonely … to understand what does it mean to be lonely? What does that mean? I need to understand it. What makes a human being a human being is the ability not just to feel but to understand and to unite understanding and feeling, to unite intellect and emotion. To be split off from myself is when my intellect and emotion are split off from each other.

So emotionally we may know what it feels like to be lonely, right? But we don’t always understand it. We need to understand it. So I want to first distinguish between a description and a definition. That’s A. We need to become conscious, not just of the feeling of loneliness … although of course that’s critical as well. If I deny my loneliness, if I’m taking Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” soma pills all the time, or if I keep myself so busy that I’m not conscious of my loneliness, then basically it festers beneath the surface and ultimately leaves me with deep emptiness that I can’t understand. The first step is always to become conscious of something. Become conscious of my loneliness. But deeper … since we want to suggest strategies for moving beyond it … if I want to suggest a strategy for moving beyond loneliness, I need not only to be conscious of how it feels, I need to understand it.

And in that sense, we want to make it distinct from between a description and a definition. A great story … there was a guy who used to … a very, very wealthy guy, a lovely guy, Alan Rubin, who was a little bit of what we call in Yiddish a nudnik. Now (Inaudible) a little bit of a sweet holy pest. He would call me all the time with all sorts of questions. And one day he calls me … Rabbi, he says, I’m looking for holiness. And it happened to be a very busy day, so I said to him sort of tongue in cheek, Alan, if you’re looking for holiness, I’m busy now. Your clergyman is busy but go to the Holy Land, go to Israel.
So Alan gets in his jet from Palm Beach, Florida, and goes to the Holy Land. And calls me about a day later and he says Rabbi, I’ve been here for a day, I haven’t found anything holy. I said Alan, you know what? I’m really busy now. Why don’t you try and find a bufufstik(?). And I hung up the phone. And of course, what’s a bufufstik, is the question Alan called back two minutes later and asked me … Rabbi, what’s a bufufstik? I said Alan, I’m really busy now. Find a bufufstik. I hung up the phone. Called me two days later, screaming every expletive deleted in the book thrown at me at once, from Alan Rubin. Rabbi, I’ve been here for two days. I’ve talked to everyone, I’ve got the best guides.
What’s a bufufstik? I said Alan, isn’t it interesting? If you can’t define a bufufstik, you can’t find it. Same thing’s true about holiness. If you can’t define it, you can’t find it. The same thing’s true about loneliness. We need a definition. Okay. Next. Let’s try and define it. And there’s a story that I tell, which I’ve seen actually in different versions. This apparently hasn’t only happened to me. When I told it, people started showing me different places where it appears.

Actually, there are versions of it in print. But basically the story goes like this … my son Aton(?) … he’s twelve years old now, but he was about five then … when I’m leaving the house one morning, Aton says to me in Hebrew, abba, take this little box. It’s very important. So I grab this little kind of Israeli shoebox, run out the door. Long day, get back ten o’clock at night. Aton says, abba, what’s the story? Did you look at my shoebox. And of course, I had no clue where his shoebox was. And I went to the car and I found it in the back someplace and I come back in the house … it took me about ten minutes to find it in the car … and Aton’s got a tear rolling down his cheek. And of course I feel like absolutely nothing. And I say, Aton, what’s this box? And Aton says, abba, these are my things.

I open the box and there’s a faded picture of me and there’s a lock of Aton’s hair and there’s a piece of tile from his room and there’s all sorts of things. And Aton says, these are my things. And I wanted to give them to you and you didn’t care about them. And of course I sat with him for a couple of hours and we went over each one of these things and we had a great conversation. That’s what loneliness is. Loneliness means I’m trying to give someone my box, and they’re not receiving it.

Loneliness means that each of us has a bag, a box, with our things in it, and our things are special and they’re unique and they’re our hopes and fears and pathologies and dreams. Those are our things. In life, to be happy in life, to be joyous in life, to be fulfilled in life, one of the core requirements is, I need to be able to share my things with someone. That’s a very, very powerful thing. Okay? And that has a very dramatic ramification. Next step. Step six here … and that is what I call the confession date. When I’m going out with someone … we all put on our best face. You know, our best clothes and our best face and we just look fantastic. And it’s real tragic if we marry someone with our best face. Because our best face isn’t our things. And our best face is our Amy Vanderbilt self.

It’s our Emily Post self. But we remain lonely. If we’re always having to put on our best face, we remain loneliness. Loneliness is when we’re able to share our things, our intimate, personal little bag of things. And when I’m in a marriage where basically they don’t get my things, it can’t work. The confession date is sort of date five. We’ve been going out for a while … or date six or date seven. And I’ve put on my best face and she’s put on her best face and she’s beautiful and I’m beautiful.

We may have slept with each other, we may not have slept with each other. But we haven’t really been ourselves. And we have to understand that we have to break through that or it’s just not worth it. Hopefully we understand that. So we have the confession date and it sort of begins at a restaurant, with both sides looking down at the table, and then one side says, you know, I never told you I killed my cat. You did? Well, let me tell you something. You know, I stole something when I was thirteen years old from the teacher’s desk. Oh you did? Well, you know me … and there’s sort of this list of very funny and sometimes poignant and sometimes serious and sometimes not serious confessions. And you sort of keep looking up to see if the other person’s still at the table after each confession. That’s the game.

And if everyone’s at the table after all the confessions … so depending on what’s your life style, you either go home and make passionate love all night or you just have this incredible conversation through the night, because you realize that for the first time, maybe the other person is beginning to like you, beginning to love you, for who you are. That’s what I call a soul print. A soul print is the essence of who I am. We have fingerprints, but fingerprints are about my criminality.

Soul prints are about my beauty. And my beauty includes everything. It includes my weakness, my strength, my pathologies, my dreams. It includes the whole story. That’s my soul print. So let me give you the definition of loneliness. Loneliness is the inability to share my bag, to share my box, to share my soul print, with someone else. That’s the definition of loneliness. The inability to communicate the essence of who I am to another is the definition of loneliness. That means that I can be in Times Square when the ball is falling and be surrounded by people, or I can be in an office either as the mail boy or as the chairman of the corporation or as a mid level executive and be in constant communication and still be lonely because I haven’t shared my soul print. I can be a married single.

I can be in a relationship with someone and have three kids with them, and sleep with them every night and have mastered every sexual position in the world, and I’m still lonely. Because although we’ve merged physically, I haven’t shared my soul print. I think someone once said, there’s nothing more intimate than laughing together. Who was it … Barbra Streisand. It’s the laughter we remember when we remember the way we were. There’s also nothing more intimate than a couple crying together. Whatever kind of tears.

And this could be a good place to segue into laughter and tears and I’m not gonna do that right now. But it’s the deep sharing with each other of our soul prints, of the essence of who we are. Okay, now let me just add one more brief story, which kind of captures it. It’s a story that takes place in West Africa and the very brief version of the story is that the town runs out of sustenance, out of nourishment. And all of a sudden, after three weeks of starvation, somehow, a vat of milk appears in the middle of the town square. And I’m skipping a lot of details that make this story beautiful, but basically the entire town is thrilled that this vat of milk is here, but there’s one kid who’s like, hey, where did this milk come from?

You know, those eighteen year olds always ask the question that no one asks … where’s the milk from? So he gets up early in the morning and waits to see where will the milk appear. Everyone’s told him that it just appears miraculously and of course he wants to find the source of the miracle. And he sees the most beautiful maiden, the most beautiful woman in the entire world, who comes down … Helen of Troy ten times over … pick your woman and make it ten times over … who comes down and leaves this vat of milk.

And he’s completely struck by Cupid’s arrow, by Eros. He’s overwhelmed. He gets up every morning for the next four days and finally he can’t contain himself and finally he jumps out from behind the bushes and he grabs her wrist and he says, I cannot let you go. You must marry me. Now I wouldn’t suggest that to anyone as an approach to proposals. In any case, she says yes, with one condition. She says, I need to go back up to the heavens and I will come back and I will stipulate to you one clear condition. If you can meet that, I’ll marry you. She comes back from the heavens and she has of course a box. And she says … all right, her name’s not Pandora. She says, if you open the box, I may have to leave.

As long as the box remains shut, I can stay with you. And so they get married and they’ve got a bunch of kids and everything’s going lovely and she’s away one day and you know what men do when women are away. Right, he can’t resist. He slowly looks, he opens the box. He can’t believe it. He slams it shut. She comes home and of course women do know what men do when they’re away and she says, you opened the box, didn’t you? I think I may have to leave. He says, what do you mean you may have to leave?

I opened the box and the box was empty. And she says no, I have to leave. I know I have to leave. But the box was empty! She says, that’s exactly the point. When I agreed to marry you, what I did is, I went back up to the heavens to my place, to my story, to my home, and I gathered with me the scents, the fragrances, the smells, the images, the moments that were most precious to me. And I put them in that box. And you opened my box and you thought that it was empty. I can’t stay. That’s what it means to be lonely. It means someone thinks that my box is empty. It’s the inability to transmit my soul print to someone else. Now I need to add something really, really important here and this is step six.

And that is that what this basically means, this idea … is that every single person is unique. That’s a very, very powerful idea. It means that in the symphony of the world, everyone’s got their own instrument to play and no one can play someone else’s instrument. It means that I’m not replaceable. It means that I’m unique, that I am … a word that I made up … that I am infinitely special. Now the key point (Inaudible — audio glitch) essentially what we’ve said up to now is that being lonely is my inability to transmit my soul print, my bag, to someone else.

There’s now two ways that we can go, there’s two ways to understand that. And that’s really Roman numeral II and Roman numeral III. The first reason is, why am I unable to transmit the essence of who I am to someone else … is because there’s no one there to receive it. There’s no one there to accept it. I haven’t found a person who can receive it. That’s a very powerful idea, the idea of receiving. It will come up again and again in my philosophy. The word in Hebrew for mysticism … which I think, you know, everyone reading books in America … number one, amazon.com … is Kaballah. And Kaballah in Hebrew means to receive. And that’s the secret that no one knows. People translate Kaballah as mysticism.

That’s not what the word means. Kaballah is from the Hebrew word Kabal. It means to receive. There’s a story that a friend of mine tells … I sometimes tell it in the first person, sometimes in the second … about when I was going to learn mysticism in Jerusalem and I went to an inner group, esoteric elite group, studying mysticism. And there was an admission, sort of a rite of initiation. And I came in and the teacher gave me an apple. So I went to take the apple and you get a sense that everyone nods no. You’re doing it wrong.

And so they start studying and then a few minutes later, the teacher again gives me an apple. And so I reach out to take the apple and again, everyone nods no. And this happens three or four times, until I finally got it. You know, when the teacher the fourth or fifth time went to give me the apple, I cuffed my hands to receive the apple. The ability to receive is a very powerful thing. That’s what Kaballah means. Number two, in our deepest understanding of divinity … of George Lucas’ the Force … of the cosmos, is reception. To receive is the highest thing. So much so that in our understanding of divinity, god is imperfect unless god can receive. God created the world because god, being by him/herself, was just perfection, but perfection without the ability to receive is imperfect. So god created human beings in order to create relationship, in order to create the ability to receive another. Because even the divine, as it were, mystically, is imperfect, without the ability to receive. That’s a very, very, very powerful idea. It’s the idea that the divine limits him/herself in order to be able to receive other. And that’s a powerful idea and in biblical thought it’s a powerful Jesus idea as well. I don’t think we’ll get into that. But in any case, the idea is a powerful idea.

That’s number two. The ability to receive. God creates the world, god creates another, in order to be able to receive other, because I’m spiritually imperfect. I haven’t arrived unless I can receive. Okay? Number three in this Roman numeral … this is sort of seven three. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story. I’m not gonna tell you the whole thing now, but basically the point of the story is a very, very well known mystical master, sort of a Hasidic Zen master, goes with a number of colleagues to collect money from a person who’s a known miser. And everyone says, why are you going to collect money from him? He’s a known miser. And the master says no, that’s the person I need to collect money from in order to raise enough money for this particular bride and groom to be able to get married, and to buy them what they need to get started in life.

So they go and the miser entertains these three masters in a very lovely way, but when it comes time to ask him for money, he says sure, I’ll give you something. And he takes out this black penny. It’s actually a story that happened in Russia. A black kopek. And he throws it at them. And the other two masters are enraged at the insult to their teacher. He’s given them a little black kopek, less than a penny. And they’re about to strike the guy, they’re about to scream at him.

And the major master, his name is Zouman of Loudi(?) … says, no, no, no. Thank you so much. That’s such a beautiful gift. And he picks up the little black dirty kopek and he puts it into his pocket and he profusely thanks the miser. Thank you so much. And they walk out and they’ve taken a few steps and they hear footsteps running behind them. And it’s the miser, and he throws another black kopek. And again, the two lesser masters are insulted and the major master again picks it up off the ground and says, thank you so much. And he strokes it like he just received a billion dollars. He puts it into his pocket. And this goes on several times until they get to their place of lodging.

Each time they hear the footsteps coming behind them and he throws them another kopek and then another kopek and then a ruble and then … until they finally collect all the money that they need from this miser by the time they get back to their place of lodging. And the two lesser masters ask the major master … they say, how did you know? What did you do? We don’t understand. And the major master says, we need to be able to receive from a person what they’re willing and ready to give at that moment. That’s the art of receiving. We always want from people what we need at that moment. But we need to be able to receive, to receive what you have to give at this moment. And if I’m able to do that, that creates the cycle, that creates the feedback loop of relationship. And eventually it all happens. How many times have we been .74? In other words, 74. How many times have we been in an argument with someone and it’s a difficult and maybe even a bitter argument. And one person makes an overture to make up, to create (Inaudible). And the other person says … instead of receiving their overture, they say you know, after you’ve said all that, you think that’s enough to apologize? Right. We’re not able to receive what they’re able to give at that point and of course the argument spins into its downward spiral once again until the other side tries to make up and then the first side refuses to accept it. The ability to receive what other has. The final image … an image that I saw in Jerusalem a couple of years ago … it was the most erotic, sensual image I’ve ever seen in my life … it was an image of a couple … he must have been 150, she must have been 170. God knows. They were as old as I’ve ever seen old. Older than old. And it was twilight and it’s one of those images you sort of catch out of the corner of your eye. And I see that her shoelace is untied.

And he sees it and she sees it. And he bends down very slowly. It must have been major rheumatism. It was the slowest bend down I’ve ever seen, and he just gently ties her shoelace. Now had I gone over there to tie her shoelace, she would have taken her cane and run me through with more precision than Lancelot. But she was willing to receive from him that small gorgeous erotic act of love, the tying of a shoelace. One of the greatest gifts that we give to a person is our willingness to receive from them, and that’s very powerful. That’s the idea of receiving. So I may be lonely because there’s no one to receive my soul print. The greatest gift that someone can give me is the gift of Kaballah, the gift of receiving. However … and here’s step eight. Major Roman numeral III.

This is the second reason why I may be lonely. It may be not because there’s no one to receive my gift. It could be for a completely different reason. It could be that I don’t believe I have a gift. It’s not that there’s no one to receive my soul print, it’s that I don’t really believe that I have a soul print. And that’s very, very important. In other words, I need to believe passionately that I have a soul print. I need to believe that I’m special. In other words, that is the great statement of faith. Faith that I’m special, that I am somebody.

The meditation I’ve got to say when I get up in the morning is, I am somebody. I’ve got to look in the mirror and just totally embrace that face that I see in the mirror and understand that I have a soul print. It’s when we forget that we’re special, when we forget our dreams, when we forget our uniqueness, when we forget that we have an instrument to play that no one else can play, that’s when depression begins and that’s when anxiety begins. That’s when the center begins not to hold, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase. A re-reading of his phrase. If you want to know the key to joy and happiness in the world, it’s the belief that I have a soul print, it’s the knowledge that I have a soul print. It’s being connected to my soul print.

It’s to wake up in the morning to know that I’ve got something unique in the world to do, that no one else can do. To know that I’m irreplaceable. To know that I’m existentially unique in the deepest way, that that is the essence of being a happy human being. And it’s the precise opposite of being in an assembly line where I’m completely replaceable, where I’m a cog in a machine. It’s known that I’m special.

Now this specialness, this infinite specialness … the connection to my infinite specialness, to my soul print, which is the key to being a happy human being, to being a joyful human being … that doesn’t … this is point nine … that doesn’t mean that every person has to be president of the United States or a senator. Or that every person needs to be a famous published author. That’s not what it means to be special. That’s what it means to be famous and we’ve created great confusion in modernity between fame and uniqueness and specialness and infinite specialness. Fame is something that became a value in the Renaissance and it became a value because basically people began to feel disconnected. There was a discarded image of the medieval world and the medieval image, for all of its problems, basically people felt they had a place in the world.

And as that image … in C.S. Lewis’ phrase, that discarded image … took root, as we lost the image of having a place in the world, the Renaissance began to emerge with all of its wonder and with all of its positive, with all of its fabulous progress. And I wouldn’t trade the Renaissance for anything.

Nonetheless, people began to lose their place in the world. They began to feel empty. They began to feel locked in their own self without being connected to anything else and without feeling that their self was in any sense unique or special.

That’s what happened in the Renaissance. In the Renaissance on the one hand, the word self was introduced in the dictionary. It doesn’t exist in the dictionary before the Renaissance. On the other hand, self just meant a disconnected unit. It wasn’t a sense of infinite specialness, of soul print or uniqueness, and so we came to replace that with fame. What we call today celebrity. If I can be famous, fame by itself will make me feel special. Fame covers up that feeling of emptiness. So we somehow identify soul print, uniqueness, a unique mission in life, with a mission that’s well known, that’s famous. Our fifteen minutes of celebrity. That’s not what unique specialness means. That’s not what infinite specialness means.

That’s not what a soul print means. Soul print can mean that I’m the only person today that’s gonna smile and say hello and how are you to the bus driver when I get in the bus. Soul print can mean that I’ve got a unique relationship with my son and something to share with him that no one else has. Soul print can mean that I’m in a relationship now and that this relationship is not replaceable. Even if it’s a relationship that’s not gonna last forever it’s marriage for a month.

It’s soul mate for an hour. Every meeting is a soul mate meeting. Every deep meeting is a soul mate meeting, and we may have something to share with each other in the world on our respective paths to growth, on our respective spiritual journeys, that no one else can share. There’s no one else who can share with this woman what I have to share and there’s no one else to receive from this woman what she has to give. That’s the notion of my uniqueness. That’s the notion of my soul print in the world. It’s not about fame, it’s not about celebrity, it’s about … in the constellation of my life, I have a unique role to play. And if I’m living passionately, if I’m living in an alive and powerful way, then clearly I’m gonna have something to share which is unique and special in the world that no one else has to share. Right?

That is … in the scheme of the cosmos … that’s my place in the forest. That’s my place in the world. To know that that place exists, to be connected to that soul print, to be connected to that unique ability to give and receive … that’s a function and an expression of my infinite uniqueness. That is joy, that is happiness in the world. And I’ve got a number of stories … at least three of them right here, which I’m not gonna tell you now … which will develop that idea in much greater depth.

Maybe just to say it in one other way … two other ways … you know, life is about living my story. If I live my story, then I can be happy, then I can be successful. And if I’m living someone else’s story, then I can’t be happy and I can’t be successful. To be living in my story, to reclaim my story. Jealousy means that I’m living in someone else’s story. Jealousy means that I don’t feel I’m in my story, so I need your story in order to be happy. When I live my story, then it fits. It’s like great clothes. When it fits, I feel wonderful. Everyone knows the feeling of fabulous, gorgeous clothes. They don’t need to be expensive. When they fit perfectly, that’s me. I feel bigger, I feel taller. My story is the clothes of my life. If I’m living my story, and it fits, I feel wonderful. When my pants are too short and my shirt’s too tight, I feel terrible, no matter what’s going on.

It just doesn’t fit. I’m not living my story. And the final image is, you get an Oscar for playing the part that you’re supposed to be playing to the hilt. It doesn’t matter whether the part is the chambermaid or the princess of the manor or the detective or the tycoon or the struggling artist. We fall in love with a character on the screen when they are the best that they can be. And somehow we understand that that’s what it’s about. We’re able to see the whole picture.

That’s one of the things that’s fabulous about seeing a great play or a great movie. We sort of lose all the petty ego things that drive us in our own life and we understand that the real hero is the person who’s being most authentic, most honest to themselves and who’s fulfilling Shakespeare’s dictum, “above all, to thine own self be true.” That’s the hero. That’s the person who wins the Academy Award. That’s the next (Inaudible) about lives. When we win our spiritual Academy Award by being the best we can be in our story, by playing our soul print. If I’m supposed to be the struggling artist and I’m playing the tycoon, then I’m in big trouble. And it doesn’t matter how well I play the tycoon. I’m playing the wrong role, I’m speaking the wrong part.

It doesn’t fit. I can’t feel good. I’m not gonna win the spiritual Academy. It can’t work. Okay. That is a sense of soul prints. Now soul prints in the “Soul Prints” book, as it were, would go in a number of different directions. Let me list six topics which each one would be expanded on dramatically in the context of a “Soul Prints” book. Topic one, dance. Dancing is one of the places where we sort of merge with ourselves. We feel at one with. So we would explore dance as one of the strategies to touch my soul print.

We would explore men and women, the essential natures of men and the essential natures of women. Number two. Number three, we would explore … and it’s a lecture I’ve given which is called “What does it mean to be a real man?” So we would explore masculinity in some sense or what does it mean to reclaim my masculine. That’s number three. Number four, we’d obviously explore sexuality. That would be a dramatic piece on sexuality. Number five, we would explore a topic which I call the stranger. The other. Who is the other? How do I become the other to another person? Who’s the stranger in me? Who’s the stranger in my life? How do I make the stranger from an “it” into a relationship? And number six, loving.

Definition of love, what does it mean, how does it work, etc. Those are six ways we can go. I actually have another four, five sort of chapter headings here which at this very moment I don’t’ remember. They were written down in Israel. In any case, those are sort of six ways to go and each one of these has six or seven points in and of itself. So that’s in a word, the “Soul Prints” book and the directions it can go. Let me just take one of those six, sexuality, Eros, and try and expand and give you a sense in one of the ways we can go in Eros.
The topic of loving actually we’ll talk about in the context of the “Certainty” book. So I’m gonna take one of these six sub-topics in “Soul Prints” and explore it a little bit more in depth. I’m actually gonna talk a little bit about the material, or some of it, that’s in the Tikkun article. The November Tikkun article that’s on the newsstands that I talked about with Bill a couple of moments ago. These are Daphnis’ nine rules of holy sexuality or of great sexuality or of authentic sexuality or of whatever adjective positive we decide to put before it. The point of these descriptions … nine rules, nine dimensions, nine … sort of like (Inaudible) seven habits. So these are nine paths of holy sexuality. Again, any other word besides holy will work as well.

Is that sexuality is the essence of the holy, sexuality is the essence of the sacred. Sacred Eros. We’re talking about sacred. Nine rules of spiritual sexuality, nine rules of sacred Eros. And the point is, that sexuality models authenticity in the world. We usually view sexuality as something which is great and fantastic, but it’s not about the sacred, it’s not about authenticity. Our idea is gonna be that there are nine paths, nine essential rules, which define sexuality, which define great sexuality, which are same nine rules which define authenticity in the world.

Sexuality is the model in the world for the sacred. Sexuality is the model for the authentic. That’s our idea. Let me go through all nine of them, step at a time. The first quality that the sexual models for the sacred and the authentic, is intensity and her twin sister, depth. The opposite of the holy is not the profane but the superficial. The enemy, the great enemy of authenticity, of holiness, is not, not holiness, is not impurity, it is superficial. To live superficially is to live in a way that’s neither intense or deep. It’s the first quality of the sexual … is that authentic sexuality is both intense and deep. Intensely and depth, is the first idea. Intensity and depth can’t be our constant companions but our peak experiences of intensity and depth in the world are the essence of our lives, it’s those that we strive for.

That’s why you can’t enter the temple of Eros at all times. We can’t live in constant intensity and depth. Intensity and depth are experiences that dot our lives, that dot the landscape or the spiritscape of our lives, but you can’t do it every second all the time. Great sex isn’t every second all the time. It’s moments because the nature of sexuality is intensity and depth. Right? Now it also tells us that preparation is required. Intensity and depth, which lack the vessels to hold it, shatter.

It’s a shattering, a damaging experience. So if I want sexuality that’s both deep … I want depth and I want intensity … I need to prepare like I need to prepare for any experience, which is demarcated, which is defined by its intensity and depth. That’s number one, okay? And sexuality which is not intense and which doesn’t come out of a place of depth so we feel it, right? And we may have an orgasm and it may be momentarily gratifying, but we haven’t felt like we’ve experienced something which was great, which was beyond this world, which was from someplace else. That’s No. 1.

No. 2, the second feature that sexuality models for the authentic … for the sacred, it’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasurable nature. Authentic experiences are always in some deep sense like they yield pleasure. They may yield pleasure immediately or one may first have to go through a certain amount of pain to get to the pleasure. No pain, no gain, right? But that implicit, whether it’s immediate or whether it’s delayed, they ultimately yield deep pleasure, right? The basic, cabalistic understanding of the universe is that the universe is good. The universe yields pleasure; that terror and fear can’t be the basis for our relationship with the Divine with the universe. That’s No. 2.

No. 3: the third quality of Eros, that is modeled, that is expressed in sexuality and that is modeled for the sacred and the authentic is the idea of eternity that resides in a moment. It’s a great phrase. Eternity that resides in a moment. It’s a phrase that I made up a couple of years ago. As in what experience in life does time stand still, and what experience in life I’m able to experience the full infinity out of every moment. Clearly that’s what the sexual is about. The sexual is that place in life where I’m able to hold the moment. Let me add something. I’m able to recover the moment. How many times do years of our lives go by and we just completely delete years of our lives – bad relationships, bad jobs, bad periods, from the story of our lives, and if we would try and recall what happened on a particular day, a particular week or a particular month, we’d have no clue. But we can completely recall great moments of sexuality, because within that sexuality, I’m fully alive. Within that sexuality, eternity resides in a moment. Okay? Now, one of the deep understandings of aging, of old age … and old age is the place where life is supposed to slow down and I begin to experience the eternity that resides in a moment, like in eating, in taking a walk, in spending time with my grandchildren, right? We’re able to shatter the prison, the invisible prison of our extremely hectic lives in which each moment blurs into the next. However, before we reach old age … old age is the place where we want to expand the erotic past the sexual into all arenas of living, right? In our sort of crazy lives, the place where we experience the erotic. The erotic is the place where eternity resides in a moment is in the realm of the sexual. So, sexual is the place where time stands still, where eternity resides in a moment. It’s the place where we are able to recover, therefore, experience of our past, old experiences of Eros and to hold on to them because we’ve so fully experienced them. Old age, in its beauty, is the place where we want Eros to shatter the boundaries of the sexual and each moment it becomes a place where eternity resides in that moment. That’s No. 3.

No. 3 leads us directly to No. 4, and No. 4 is as follows. The sexual Eros in its highest state is what I’m going to call for it’s own sake, right? In other words, Eros is not in order to network. It’s not in order to get something else. That’s why in Judaism we’re opposed to prostitution. We don’t think that there’s anything unholy about prostitution in the sense that, you know, sexuality is not holy. Sexuality is beautiful, but we never want to use Eros as a goal, as a means of getting something else; whether it’s money, whether it’s status, whether it’s a job. That’s all forms of prostitution; and, of course, we can prostitute ourselves in many, many different ways. It doesn’t have to be through sexuality. But it is the sexual is the place where it is for its own sake. The cabalistic word is “li shma,” which means for the sake of the name. In other words, the sexual is for the sake of the name. It’s for it’s own sake. It’s not in order to get someplace else. Right? It’s the place where past and future stand aside and the present reigns and present merely for the sake of being present. It’s not about utilitarian networking. It’s about an I/though relationship where the other is the full subject of my presence. I’m fully present. The other isn’t the object of my manipulation. All right, sex has got to be one of the areas, Eros, the sexual, where we’re not seeking manipulative gain. The goal and object of sexuality is sexuality itself. Okay? So, in its ideal form, the Eros of sexuality once again models authenticity in the world. That’s No. 4.

All right. No. 5 … let me just add a parentheses. These are great, because basically everybody understanding these. Everybody understands that this is what the sexual is supposed to be about. No one thinks that sexual is about, you know, using other people. In other words, no one thinks the sexual is about networking. No one thinks that the sexual is about superficiality. We know that sex like that exists in the world. We recognize that. We may not always achieve the ultimate sexual, and we recognize that there’s different kinds of sexuality, but there’s a broad, cultural consensus internationally what is great sexuality mean. And that’s what we’re defining here. And we’re using the sexual as a model to define what is authenticity mean in life in general, and the sexual becomes our great teacher. It’s our inner master. The sexual is our inner master for authenticity.

Area 5. No. 5. The fifth area is in the nature of giving and receiving. First, sexuality is a place which requires radical giving and radical receiving. Without both of them, sexuality remains unerotic. One of the problems with sex with the person that you’re paying is that they’re not really receiving. In other words, they’re giving you pleasure but rarely is the person actually receiving pleasure. Right? In order to have ultimately fulfilling sexuality, you require two things: you require the other person who is fully receiving which you’re giving them, and we know that it’s totally sexual to be giving and it’s total sexual to be received. But if I only have one or the other, then I don’t have profound sexuality. And it’s very powerful and something that everyone understands. Unconditional giving must be the order of the day. At the same time, the ability to be open and vulnerable to the extent that one can fully receive an other has to be equally unconditional. If either of these two ingredients is missing, sex can happen, but Eros isn’t a possibility. That’s No. 5.

What we’ll call, I guess, 5A or No. 6 … let’s call it No. 6. No. 6 is … well, we’ll make this as part of 5. Sort of 5A is that in sexuality giving and receiving cease to be two separate processes. You know, in the face of things in life, there is an essential difference, and we all know the difference very well between a giver and a taker, between giving and receiving. Generally, we hold them to be opposite of one another. Like Eros, the Eros of sexuality models the idea that this opposition between giving and taking is really only apparent, that in a deep place a giving and receiving merge into one. We derive pleasure in giving pleasure. We derive pleasure in the act of receiving. So, the Eros of sexuality allows us to redeem, to strip away the illusion that there is something called givers and takers giving and receiving in life, and in a deep place giving and receiving merge into one. So, that’s No. 5A.

No. 6: the sixth dimension in which sexuality models authenticity is not unrelated to the fifth. It’s in the area of defining self. You know, we moderns, we have this desperate need to be in control. The rugged individualist who is the captain of his fate and the master of his destiny. That’s our cultural, spiritual model. But we know in some deeper place that we can’t always … nor is it desirable for us always to maintain control. So, the Eros of sex is the place where we learn to give up control, and it’s the pleasure of giving up control. And when we give up control, so a great truth is revealed to us. But then in the act of letting go, of giving ourselves up of la petite mort, like the little death, in French, la petite mort – l-a p-e-t-i-t-e m-o-r-t – la petite more, the little death of orgasm, when we give ourselves up, when we give up control, at the very moment when we give ourselves up, we find ourselves, as well. But, at the very moment when the self is lost, it’s rediscovered in a higher, more brilliant form. Again, the sexual models for authenticity are the ability to move beyond old contradictions. Self-control is not the sole cauldron in which self is forged. Losing control with holy intentionality becomes the place where finding higher self becomes a genuine possibility. That’s No. 6.

No. 7. And No. 7, again, emerges from 5 and 6, right? The great quest of humanity is that we want to overcome separateness. To be lonely is to be separate from. To move beyond loneliness is to become one with. One of the ways we become one with is by transmitting our soul print to another. But that’s an expression of a broader kind of move, the quest to overcome alienation, to overcome separateness. How do we become one with? How do we move beyond our sense of being separate and estranged? How do we move beyond being Billy Joel’s “Stranger.” You know, the stranger that hits us right between the eyes. All of us, in some sense, are seekers of unity, seekers of oneness. Clearly, sexuality is the place that models the ability to merge. We merge with other. You know, for a fleeing minute, right, we were completely merged. At the moment of climax, we are one with the other, okay? That’s possible not only in sexuality, but mystical sources, cabalistic sources, basically view the entire world as a sexual world. What the cabalists call zivvug, z-i-v-v-u-g, merging between self and others, self and nature, self and work, self and conversation. I can be on the inside merged with the conversation or I can be on the outside of a conversation. Like that notion of merging, that’s what it’s all about in the world. That’s No. 7.

No. 8 is imagination. Greatness in the world always requires imagination. No form of greatness can be achieved without imagination. You know, imagination is what allows us to soar beyond the oppression of daily life. Imagination prods us to shatter the oppression of abuse of power. Imagination allows us to move beyond what is to what could be. Imagination is the possibility of possibility. In mystical thought, all spiritual growth and progress depends on the training, the accessing of imagination. Now, clearly what’s the model for imagination. The model for imagination, again, is the erotic. The erotic is the place where we naturally have imagination. We call it fantasy But it’s the ability to imagine a scene and to move totally into the scene, to merge with the scene so much so that it may cause a physical reaction. A person can have an orgasm just through fantasizing. A person can, through the act of imagination, merge and touch a whole other reality. So, we need to use Eros as the model for sacred imagination for holy authenticity. Again, the word holy is not critical here.

And, finally, No. 9, in “Dophenes(?) Nine Paths of Eros.” No. 9 is humor, right? Funny. In other words, in biblical thought, the word for the sexual and the word for laughter is actually the same word. It’s not noticed, I don’t think, by any biblical scholars that I’m aware of. But the word is tzchok: t-z-c-h-o-k. It means both laughter and sexual Eros. It’s not by accident. It’s not by accident.

No. 1, and in order for sexuality to work, first we need to be to laugh. We need to be able to laugh because sexuality is often funny, and when we take it so seriously, when something goes wrong, someone is incredibly hurt. Our pomposity is pricked, our balloons are pricked and shattered, and we need to be able to laugh at ourselves in sexuality. That’s No. 1.

No. 2, you know, laughing together is a great sexual, erotic act. It’s not only erotic in the sense that laughter is similar to sexuality in that it overcomes us and overwhelms us. You know, a deep laugh … our body rocks back and forth. We’re completely overwhelmed and we feel a deep sense of sort of relief and release at the end of the laughter, which is, of course, the same process of sexuality. But laughter brings us, merges us together in a way that almost nothing else does and I refer again back to mystical master, Barbra Streisand, “It’s the laughter we’ll remember when we remember the way we were.” So, those are the nine paths of Eros.

Just to make sure that we’re in the right framework here … in other wonders, we did soul prints; step 1. Step 2, we outlined …

(SIDE B)

No. 2, I listed six subtopics of the “Soul Prints” book and, No. 3, I took one of the subtopics, Eros, and I explained a piece of it. Far from the whole thing, but a major piece of how we would deal in a unique way with Eros. There’s, of course, a lot more pieces.

Let’s move on now to certainly. Now, when I say certainty, I don’t mean a boring topic of … I mean, certainty means to be sure, to feel a sense of inner certainty. This is our third topic. The first topic here, as we’re at roman number III. We’ve done Soul Print, we’ve done a subtopic, Eros, we’re now doing Certainty. And certainty is an experience of inner certainty. That’s what we’re all looking for. In a sea of doubt, we’re looking for some experience of inner certainty. Now, normally, inner certainty used to mean in the religions of the world, to know that It is true. If I believe in dogma, if I believe in It … and It can be many, many different things. If I believe that It is true, that is certainty. To have faith means to have faith that It is true. Our basic move is to say that to have faith … that faith is jot a word for the church. To have faith, to believe, is not to have faith that It is true, it is to have faith that I am true. Certainty is not to have faith that It is true, it is to have faith that I am true. Certainty is not about It being true, it’s not about dogma being true, it’s about me being true. It’s about my story being true. So, it is the move from It is true to I am true. That’s No. 1.

No. 2. And let me just start with an introduction. There’s a great story about a contest in England between various Shakespearean actors, where they were having a contest for the person with the best diction and elocution and other sorts of good acting skills and they had to read pieces of Shakespeare and pieces of Psalms. So, the piece that they had to read from Psalms was Psalm 23. You know, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, yea, though I walk in the shadow of the valley of death,” and all of us are familiar … in some sense we’ve heard the refrain of that psalm. And, apparently, one particular actor was very, very good and he was about to win. And in walks an old, kind of sage kind of guy, you know, old, bent over, long beard and he says “Can I read also?” And, of course, they sort of laugh at him, like, you know, the guy can barely talk. But, you know, the British are very polite, so they let him read and he begins to read very, very gently, very slowly, “The Lord … is … my shepherd, I shall not want … yea, through I walk in the shadow … of the valley of death … ” And he reads just so stunningly beautifully, so deeply, and the place is completely silent afterwards and then one (Clapping sound) person claps and then (Clapping sound) another person until the place just bursts out into this thunderous ovation that doesn’t die down for a full hour. And the actor, the young actor that was about to win until this old man, this old sage walks in … he says … you know, he’s a polite guy and he understands that he lost, and when everyone’s filed out, he says to them, “It’s okay that I lost, but just tell me. I’ve taken every course, I’ve acted in every major play. What do you know that I don’t know? And the old man answers, “I know the shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd. I know the shepherd.” That’s a very powerful thing. That’s not about theology. It’s not about believing that It is true. It’s about feeling a sense of myself because I’m in a relationship with the shepherd. hat’s the idea that we’re talking about. Now, how do I experience myself as valuable by being in this relationship with the shepherd. And the shepherd doesn’t have to be an external shepherd. The shepherd means I’m valuable in the world. I matter because I’m in a relationship with the cosmos, with the universe, with the Higher Power, with the Force, with God, with the shepherd, and that essential fact of relationship means that I’m valuable. I count, I matter. You know, the Force is concerned with me. It takes time out for me. I know the shepherd. It gives me an enormous feeling of inner certainty.

Now, how do I get to a place where I know the shepherd? A and B … you know, what is that sort of internal shepherd? What’s that internal sense of self? That internal guide that I need to touch in order to experience my inner certainty. That’s what we’re going to explore in the book on inner certainty. The way that we’re going to explore it, and I’m going to skip all the details here, because they’re fascinating and they’re beautiful, but it would just take too long. But we’re going to explore it through a biblical myth.

It’s a biblical myth about a woman named Leah and she is the wife of a person named Jacob. She’s got a little sister named Rachel and, essentially, she manipulates … and it’s an original reading of the biblical myth. She manipulates her sister, Rachel, in order to be able to marry Jacob when Jacob is really in love with Rachel, and it’s just a great emorscifee(?) kind of myth. It’s stunningly beautiful, and all through the book, the entire book, both of certainty and uncertainty, all the time returns to the myth story that we tell in the beginning. And this has worked for Thomas Moore and it’s worked for a million people. So, even if a person’s never heard of the Bible, they’ll understand the story, they’ll understand the myth. They’ll be able to return to it time and time again.

And, basically, we develop the idea … this is No. 3, that Leah needs to be … this is Jacob. Our question is why does Leah manipulate her sister? She loves her sister. Why would she manipulate her and try and become Jacob’s wife. Jacob’s in love with Rachel. Leah is a decent person. Why would she do something which is really, essentially, so wrong? Such violation of her sister and their relationship. You know, a deception of Jacob. And, usually, in the biblical story, people blame a guy named Laban, L-a-b-a-n, who is Leah’s dad. He’s the villain. But, really, he’s not the villain. He’s the other. We always make the other the villain. In other words, this deception of bringing Leah under the wedding canopy heavily veiled, instead of Rachel, it couldn’t have happened without Leah’s complete complicity. So, the way we try and approach this issue that we framed in this way is we explain that Leah desperately needs to be Mrs. Jacob because Leah feels like she’s not enough. In my own experience, my own enoughness, so I try and fill in, I try and become enough through getting something outside of me. It could be that I need to become Mrs. Jacob. It could mean that I need to get a particular job. It could mean … you know, all sorts of things which are exterior, which are external to me, which I feel that without getting them, I won’t be enough. Now, in order to get these things, I often have to manipulate people. And I’m willing to do that manipulation, and I’m driven to that manipulation because I feel like without these external things, without being Mrs. Jacob, without marrying Jacob in the darkness, I’m incomplete. I’m not enough. So I try and get Jacob. I try and make my story by merging my story with some external factor or external person or external position. Okay? That’s No. 3.

Now, No. 4, in the biblical text, in the biblical myth, this doesn’t work. Even though she marries Jacob, you know, Jacob never takes walks with her, and when I get something that’s not really part of my story and I may get it externally, but it’s not really me. In other words, Jacob doesn’t love me. Jacob’s not my story. Although I may be Mrs. Jacob to the whole world, in a deep, internal, authentic place, I’m not really Mrs. Jacob. So, if you read the biblical myth … again, this is all a completely reading of the myth, basically you see something very interesting that no one really catches and that is that Leah has three kids. And each one of these kids, she gives very specific names. And names in the biblical myth are very important. She calls her first kid Reuven – Reuben – and Reuben means God saw that my husband doesn’t’ like me, that my husband hates me and maybe now, through this kid, my husband will become close to me again. That’s the name of the first son. Second son is Simon, Shimone, and that means in Hebrew, and that’s what the biblical myth says God saw that I was hated. Maybe now, through my second son, my husband will become closer to me. Levi, as in Levi-Strauss jeans … Levi comes from the word accompany me. Take walks. She says now that my third son is born, maybe my husband will take walks with me. And the point is, of course, that she’s using her children to get Jacob, and her children become pawns in her game. She’s unable to give her children by the sense of marrying?), by the sense of space to be themselves, or the sense of their unconditional value, by the sense of unconditional loving … she can’t hold them in that way because, basically, her kids are serving her needs. She’s using her children to get something, to get something that she needs in order for her story to feel complete, in order for her to be enough. That’s the basic framework here, and that’s very, very important.

The point is … new point. Step 5 is she hasn’t resolved that essential uncertainty about who she is. There are certain uncertainties in life that we need to resolve. As we’ll see in the book of uncertainty, there are other uncertainties that we need to hold, that we can’t resolve, that we’re supposed to live in uncertainty and uncertainty can be a very high way of living. But that’s not where we are now. Right now, we’re talking about the uncertainties that we do need to solve, the uncertainty of identity needs to be resolved. If it’s not resolved, it always produces … you know, pathology. It produces evil, it produces wrong, it produces unhappiness, it produces depression. Whenever I haven’t resolved my essential identify … so that need is so powerful that I press everything into the service of my fulfilling of that need, including my children, and my children become part of my need fulfillment and that, of course, can destroy the children. And what we do is we then trace the story of Reuven, Shimone and Levi, her three kids, and we trace them in the Book of Genesis, and we see, in fact, as a result of them not getting what they needed from their mother, they have very, very difficult stories. They’ve got rage and complete pathology and tragedy overtakes their lives and we demonstrate from a close, stunning reading of the biblical myth … you know, it’s like a great novel, that this rage and this anger and this pathology comes from their not having received what they ended from their mother who was using them in order to get to Jacob.

The good news is, step 6, is that Leah has a breakthrough. She has a dramatic breakthrough moment, and the dramatic breakthrough moment is when her fourth son is born. Her fourth son is named Judah, a name familiar to all of us. When her fourth son is born, she says, now, for the first time, and this is, again, our reading of the biblical myth, “Now, for the first time, I experience myself in the presence of God.” Meaning now I experience my full enoughness. When she experiences her full enoughness, she’s able to love Judah in the way that he needs to be loved. So, this is a breakthrough moment. This is a moment in which Leah is able to experience her inner certainty. This is a place where she resolves the uncertainty of her identify and she realizes that she’s Leah; that, for the first time, in giving a name to the kid, she doesn’t use the kid to get to Jacob. Like she gives up, like she shatters the tyranny of the Jacob dream and she embraces her own identity as Leah. It’s the resolution of her inner uncertainty. She now attains inner certainty of identity. She no longer needs to be Mrs. Jacob in order to be true, but she’s, for the first time, certain of her own value. She becomes Leah.

This is a very, very powerful idea. In other words, whenever my children fill my needs or used for my needs, they can’t become themselves. They can’t attain inner certainty. Now, why would a parent do that? Why would a parent use their kids for their needs? Why won’t they be able to love their child unconditionally and give a child a space to be, to experience themselves as themselves. Well, clearly, you got to look into Leah’s past, and we do that. We look at Leah and her father and what her father essentially did to her; not in terms of abuse, just in terms of using Leah as an It. And that’s the cycle of generations. That’s the cycle that Leah’s able to break. She breaks it with her son, Judah. That’s why it’s so important. That is a breakthrough moment where she is able to experience herself as Leah. She’s able to experience her inner certainty.

Now, in the book, we’re going to talk about a number of paths. How do I get to this place of inner certainty? And we will discuss, essentially, five different paths: the path of memory, the path of friendship and loving, the path of falling in love, ecstasy, the path of holograph … we’ll talk about holograph, and the path of yearning and longing. What we could do is … the first of the paths could be the path of soul print, the path of knowing that I have a soul print and in owning that soul print. That’s the place where we could possibly add on soul prints.

That’s in terms a sort of a broad picture. Let me try to fill in some pieces here. Okay. I’m still in part one of inner certainty. What exactly happens when she sees Judah? You know, Judah’s born, and when Judah’s born, she says “This time I’ve experienced my full enoughness.” Well, how does that happen? Part of what happens is that when she holds Judah in her arms and she’s able for the first time just to experience unconditional love for Judah. In that experience of unconditional love, when I love someone else unconditionally, I feel myself being loved, as well. That’s one of the great paradoxes. When I’m able to let go of the using and the needing of the other to fill my goal, when I love Judah unconditionally … so in her unconditional love of Judah, she experiences herself as being loved, as being loved by God, as being loveable, as being loved by the universe. That’s one and two. In this sense, love becomes her inner master. It teacher her about that fact that she is loved. So, she loves Judah and that love reflects back to her and says “I am loved. I am valuable.” That’s one way to sort of develop the steps. The other way to develop the steps slightly differently is step one, she re-embraces herself through any one of the sixth paths that I just listed. Step two, that allows her to love Judah unconditionally. Step three, in her unconditional love of Judah, she experiences herself as being loved.

One of the cores of the chapter in the original book, which I think we can actually use, but I’m not sure, is there is a … this is a new point. There is a meditation which mystics talk about starting the morning with. The mediation is in Hebrew and in the same way as in a Buddhist book, they give you a Buddhist phrase. We could possibly use this. The meditation, in English it means “I acknowledge myself, I embrace myself before you.” The Hebrew phrase is “modah ani lefinecha.” I acknowledge myself before you, I embrace myself before you. Now, all the great writers try and find out where does this phrase come from? Did they just make it up? Does it have a source? And no one can find … you look at all the classical books. No one can find the source of this phrase. Essentially, I’ve discovered the source of this phrase, which is very exciting. In a scholarly book … it may be exciting in a general sense. The source of this phrase is actually this biblical story, this biblical myth of Leah. When Leah says, when Judah is born … when Leah says “This time, I experience my enoughness. This time I experience myself in God’s presence,” but in Hebrew, that actually is the exact same root words, it’s the exact same phrase as the morning meditation, “I acknowledge myself before you.” And in Hebrew, when you read them closely together, you realize … and I would actually anamalogically or phonetically put it in, you realize it’s actually the exact same phrase. So, that’s a very powerful point, because what it means is that the people who wrote … the mystical masters who wrote the morning meditation … actually, this three word mantra, “I embrace myself before you,” is really based on this moment in the Leah story. We try and re-access this breakthrough moment in Leah’s life, where Leah, for the first time, is able to own her own enoughness. We, basically, every morning, try and access that moment where we’re able to own our own enoughness and the way to read the morning phrase really is “I embrace my I, I embrace my enoughness and, in doing so, I am before you.” To be in the presence of the Divine means to be in the presence of myself. When I’m deeply present for myself, then I’m in the presence of the Divine. I embrace myself, my, hyphen, self … I embrace my I, in that sense I am in your presence. That’s the source of the morning meditation. That’s a major breakthrough. No one’s ever figured that out before. So, we basically located the source of the mystical masters morning meditation in this breakthrough moment in Leah’s life. End of part one of inner certainty.

Now, part two of inner certainty, which is really Chapter 2, and I think I got to make this shorter, but Part 2 is basically the idea that if I don’t attain inner certainty, if I don’t resolve the question of who am I, and I use other people to resolve that question, that is the source of all pathology and all depression and all evil in the world. The source of evil in the world is not economic forces, as Marx said, and it’s not metaphysical, satanic forces, as some people would have us believe. The source of evil in the world is using someone else to create my own enoughness. That’s a very, very powerful idea and I explore a number of myths that express that idea in great detail. That’s part one, and we basically identify … there’s a cabalistic statement that says that uncertainty equals evil. So, usually that’s taken to understand that when you don’t believe in dogma … ultimately, you lose dogma, you lose the belief that, right, than you lose your sense of goodness in the world. What we’re saying is no. That’s not true at all. There’s this equation, this cabalistic equation between uncertainty and evil has got nothing to do with dogma. It’s not belief that, it’s belief in. Like I got to believe in myself, like I got to resolve the core uncertainly of my identity, but in only when I do that, when I’ve reclaimed my story as being enough, at that point I don’t need to use other people in order to write my story. And, again, we develop … you know, there’s a great myth, the Abraham/Sarah myth, about Abraham going to Egypt. It’s a whole story, which I’m not going to go into now. You know, it’s stunning, mini-series, dramatic kind of novel with sex lives and videotape as pieces of it, and we develop this myth and explain this myth in terms of this principle.

We also tell a number of personal stories which are nice, beautiful stories about, you know, a story about me stealing baseball cards when I was a kid. And each story, basically, is a powerful, beautiful story which develops this notion that I do little acts, little acts of pathology. Little acts and big acts are really the same when I haven’t resolved sort of the certainty of my identify. need to resolve the certainty of my identity. We develop at the same time the idea that the certainty of my identity doesn’t mean that I need to be a celebrity. It means I don’t need to be a singer in Madison Square Garden, but if singing is part of my identity, I need to never stop singing in the shower and in singing with the broomstick as my microphone. Harry Chapin’s song, “Mr. Tanner, is about these small, private acts which I do to establish my identity and embrace my story, which has nothing to do with celebrity. That’s No. 3.

No. 4, we understand the idea of original sin, which is an idea that has made its way into Western culture as being not the lack of faith in dogma, but the lack of faith in myself. It’s the loss of self. When I eat from the tree of knowledge, it means I replace knowledge and information with wisdom. When I let go of wisdom and I exchange information for wisdom, which is much of our story today. We’re accessing information and losing wisdom, so there’s a whole thing about information and wisdom.

Chapter three begins with attaining core certainty, to attaining inner certainty, to the resolution of inner identity, which is what fills me with joy, with what fills me with aliveness in the world. So, let’s talk about three paths to inner certainty. Paths to reclaiming myself, to reclaiming my enoughness. So, the first path, as we discussed above, is soul prints.

Second path is what we’re going to call the path of passion, and the path of passion is based on Ecclesiastes, one of the biblical myth books, where the famous phrase “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” It’s a great book which basically says, no place needs anywhere. Everything is vanity. In the end, you die, and in the end, it doesn’t work. It’s sort of a depressing book. But Ecclesiastes actually offers a way out of the maze. And the way out of the maze is what I call the path of passion. And the path of passion is, he says whatever you do, do it with all your strength. Eat your bread in gladness, drink in joy, rejoice with your woman and your woman should rejoice with you. Wear beautiful, white shirts. Don’t let the oil cease from dripping on your head. He’s describing passion. Now, he’s not describing, as it’s been misread … it’s not eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. It’s live passionately, whatever you do. The first way to plug in, to access my inner self, is I’ve got to be passionate about it. Nothing that I do non-passionately will get me there. In order to get there, I got to get there passionately. We’ve traded in modernity passion for competence. We’re competent. We’re not passionate. Competence is functional. It can accomplish technical things in the world. It can’t open up my heart to myself, and it can’t, of course, open up my heart to anyone else.

Just a brief story. It’s a fantastic story. It could even be the opening story of the book. The Path to Passion could be how we start, but it’s about a bridge that connects, in New York, the Bronx to Manhattan. It’s called the Spuyten-Duyvil Bridge. It’s in Riverdale. And that bridge … anyone who has ever been a tourist in New York knows that there’s a Circle Line that circles Manhattan Island and it goes around the entire island and it goes through that bridge. That bridge actually opens and closes. You know, there are trains that come up from Westchester down through the Bronx and down to lower Manhattan. They cross that bridge when the bridge is closed, and when opens, the Circle Line goes through. So, apparently, like 70 years ago, there was some sort of accident and a train careened into the water on the bridge, or so the myth goes. The myth of Spuyten-Duyvil. I never checked if it was true, but it doesn’t matter. And, of course, you know, whenever there’s an accident, you got to blame someone. So, who did they blame? They blamed the lantern swinger. See, there’s a lantern swinger that, 70 years ago, used to stand there and if the bridge was open, he would swing his lantern and the conductor of the train would know that he couldn’t cross the bridge. So, of course, he was the only variable on the scene. So, of course, they accused the lantern swinger of not swinging his lantern. And the case was on for six months, and there’s no real evidence. It’s all circumstantial. And the lantern swinger seems to be a decent guy, but you got to blame someone. They’re not sure what to do. So, finally, in a dramatic break with courtroom precedent, they called the lantern swinger to the stand. And, you know, what’s your name? Mr. Lantern Swinger. Were you there that morning? Yes, I was. Were you drunk? No, I never drink. Did you have your lantern? Yes, I did. Did you see the train approaching? Yes. The court now goes silent, and they say, tell us, sir, did you or didn’t you swing the lantern? And it’s a hushed courtroom and reporters’ pencils are poised above their pads and the lantern swinger breaks out in a sweat and he begins to stutter and stammer and somehow he stutters out … he stammers out “Y-y-y-yes. I swung the lantern.” So, they acquit him. And everyone files out of the courtroom, and the last two people in the courtroom are his lawyer and the lantern swinger, and the lawyer grabs the lantern swinger and throws him against the wall of the courtroom and he says “I can’t believe it. I have spent six months defending you and I believed that you were innocent. I believed in you, and I asked you a simple question, ‘Did you swing the lantern?’ You know, you started stuttering and stammering and though we couldn’t prove it, it was so clear that you were lying. How could you do this to me?” And the lantern swinger says, “No, I wasn’t lying at all. You asked me the wrong question. You said ‘Did I swing the lantern?’ You forgot to ask if the lantern was lit, l-i-t. If the lantern was lit.” We’re so good at swinging the lantern in modernity. We’re so competent. We get degrees in competence, but we’ve lost passion. It’s the reclaiming of passion, it’s the path of passion which is almost a prerequisite for all of the other paths. And, you know, passion, again, is not sexual. Passion is the passion of living, of being fully alive. You know, passion is a decision, the decision to do something completely. To do it with my heart, to do it with all my soul, to fully invest myself in whatever I’m doing. It almost doesn’t matter what, and when I do that, then I become alive to myself. When I become alive to myself, at that point, I am able to try and reconnect to my soul print. So, that’s the path of passion. That’s not in the book, by the way. I just added that in. The path of passion is not in the book. I added it in, as Soul Prints is not in the present book and has been added in.

Chapter three of the book, as it exists now, is the Path of Memory, and it’s about reclaiming memories, reclaiming images, images of love, images of connection that allow us to reconnect to our deep sense of self, and we use the Joseph myth. Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, and we develop the Joseph myth in great detail. You know, the Broadway play revisited, the biblical myth Broadway play revisited, and we interpret the whole story, and it’s very stunning and beautiful in terms of Joseph recovering memory. Joseph recovering … and there’s really two stages. The first stage is Joseph at a critical, pivoting point sees an image of his father talking to him, and that image of his father talking to him, that moment allows him to basically access himself, his reclaiming his memory.

The second idea which we talk about … and, again, based on the biblical myth and our original reading of it is that even when Joseph loses himself, Joseph forgets his dreams. His father holds his dreams for him. And we talk about the idea of … you know, sometimes we forget our dreams and we need to have other people to hold our dreams for us at a time when we can’t access them, and we need to be fathers to other people. We need to be caretakers of other people’s dreams, and the idea of holding each other’s dreams. And when I hold someone else’s dream for them, I keep believing in them, even when they don’t believe in them themselves. That allows them to access themselves, to access their inner certainty, their story, when they’re ready to access it. That’s No. 2.

And No. 3, that is the whole Joseph Technicolor Dream Coat story of Joseph in Egypt, which we explain Joseph becoming an Egyptian. Joseph never wants to be Joseph again. Joseph never wants to hear from his brothers again. Joseph has remade his story. He’s cast off the moorings, the deep connections of his childhood, like we often do when we move to a new city, when we start a new career. We basically cut ourselves off from our earlier story. And the process of Joseph and his amazing technicolor dream coat in Egypt is the process of Joseph reclaiming himself. And we talk about a pivot scene in the biblical myth, where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and he says “I am Joseph.” And the way we understand it is he’s actually not saying “I am Joseph” to his brothers. He’s saying “I am Joseph” to himself. But in the biblical text, the chapter before, his name has been changed. He’s got at Egyptian name. He’s got a new job, he’s got a new country, he’s got a new city. And the last people he wants to see are his brothers. And we develop this stunning story as a story about Joseph solely reclaiming, re-accessing his memory, recovering himself. And when he makes this dramatic statement, “I am Joseph,” he is saying it to himself. He is the person who’s surprised. He can’t believe he is still Joseph. He thought that he left Joseph way behind, and that’s where Joseph breaks down and cries. It’s a crying of reclaiming of identity, and that’s part of the tears book, and we can actually develop it here. Joseph breaks down and cries, but in those tears, those tears wash away years of encrusted layers which separate him from himself. Those are tears, that’s breakthrough crying in which Joseph reclaims his Josephness. Okay. That’s one part of the path of memory.

The second part of the path of memory will play one way in a particularly Jewish book and in another way in a broader book. It’s reclaiming the memory of the group. We’ve become little micro units. Little individuals. We reclaim the memory of my people, the memory of my family, of my church, of my country. to reclaim that memory. To reclaim the memory of my political tradition. And as to reclaim the memory of the broader group and to understand that there is a covenant between generations; whether it’s the history of democracy or the history of my family or the history of my religion or the history of my country. We’ve cut ourselves off from that. To begin to see myself as part of the flow of generations, to understand that the covenant isn’t between God and human beings exclusively, but there’s a covenant between the generations, and to understand myself as part of that broader sweep of history, to reclaim that memory. Those are the two ideas in memory.

Just to finish this with an image … you know, sometimes in order to know things, we talk about people need to open their eyes. You need to open your eyes. Sometimes to reclaim memory, you need to close your eyes. There are some things that you only know when you close your eyes. When we kiss, we close our eyes, because there is a deep reclaiming of self in connecting to self that you can’t do with your eyes open. There are some things that we know by opening our eyes. We know information. We need to have our eyes open to be competent. We need to have our eyes open to watch out and protect ourselves. But, in order to access our inner selves, we need to close our eyes. So, memory, the recovery of memory, in the deepest sense, in the most beautiful sense, both personal story and my group story … that’s something I need to close my eyes for.

Next section: Chapter four and path four is friendship and loving. Friendship and loving are very beautiful. The first step is that love isn’t about sex. Love is something beyond. I love myself. I love my friend. We sort of identified love and sex. We’ve identified Eros and sex, and sex can’t hold … like the genital sex can’t hold the full burden of love and Eros, that our need for Eros and love doesn’t exhaust itself by sexual fulfillment.

Love is something which is far beyond the sexual. What is love? So, first of all, love is not bound up with sexuality. We got to break that, No. 1. No. 2, we need a definition of love. Same kind of definition, description move that we did in the Soul Prints book. Now, in the certainty book, in Chapter four, I talk about the path of friendship and loving. I’ve got five other lectures on loving which are part of the Soul Prints book, which I just prefer to briefly, like in a couple of paragraphs here … this is another place in which we could potentially expand. Let me give you the basic love move.

Normally, we understand love as being an emotion.

Emotions are things that we can’t control. They happen to us.

We fall in love, we fall out of love, we get married, we get divorced and that’s sometimes true, and we need to honor that. I understand divorce close up. It’s something I’ve gone through. But, basically, love is not an emotion. The emotion of live is an expression of something deeper. Love is not an emotion. Love is a perception, and the function or the result of that perception is the emotion of love. What does that mean? Let me give you a definition of loving. Loving means to perceive the infinite special in other; step one.

Step two, to identify the other with that infinite specialness, to perceive the beauty in other and to identify the other with that beauty.

Let me explicate or unpack both those steps. First off, what that means is that love is not an emotion, love is a perception. I can perceive the infinite specialness in any person in the world. Once it’s a perception, it’s something I can access. I can decide. Love is a decision. Now, in order to make that decision real, I need to do certain things in the world, but in order to be able to perceive, all perception has prerequisites. So, we need to see what are the prerequisites for this perception, but the second that I’ve made this move of love from an emotion to a perception, then it’s something that I can access. It’s a decision that I make. And let me give you two examples to sort of bring this home. No. 1: there’s my kid and there’s the neighbor’s kid. My kid is beautiful, wonderful, sweet, stunning, smart, creative, fantastic. The fact that my kid has done a couple of things wrong, you know, killed the neighborhood cat, well, that’s a little problem we’re taking care of in therapy, but basically, my kid is fabulous. I mean the truth is I’m right. The neighbor’s kid is a complete mess and I know all the things the neighbor’s kid has done wrong. And the neighbor’s kid is completely in no sense has sort of the inner beauty and steadiness, the infinite specialness of my kid. Now, every parent, in some sense or another, may think that. And the truth is that that’s very clear why. Because we love our kids. What does it mean to love our kids? It means we’re focused on our kids because we’re invested. So, I need to be invested and I need to be focused. When I invest in something, I focus on it and I watch my stock. I follow my career path. I’m investing in it, and when I invest in something, I focus on it. When I focus on it, I can proceed. Focus is a prerequisite for perception. I’m invested in my child and I’m focused on my child. So, therefore, I perceive the infinite specialness in my child. That’s step one.

No. 2, I identify my child with that infinite specialness. Even though I know that my child does this wrong or that wrong, I say that’s not the real kid. The real kid is sweet and beautiful and fantastic, and these other things are really side problems. Now, although we can get carried away with that and the mother of the mass murderer can still say, oh, what a sweet little baby … so, obviously, that can be taken to an extreme. But, in principle, that’s true. In principle, every parent is right. A parent loves a child because the parent perceives the infinite specialness in the child, A, and B, identifies the child with that infinite beauty, with that infinite specialness. That’s a two-step process. Perception and identification. Those two steps produce loving. They produce loving and they produce, in the end, the emotion of loving.

Let me give you a second example that will bring this down and will bring this home. You know, you fall in love with someone. Now, I don’t want to talk about falling in love. Let me just say you love someone. We’ll talk about falling in love later. You love someone. Why do I love this person? I love this person because I perceive the infinite specialness in them. There is a mystical text that says that at a wedding, divinity is revealed. In my explanation of that mystical text is that the divinity that’s revealed at a wedding, and we all feel that moment at a wedding, that moment of it’s out of this world. It’s something beyond. There’s something enormously special about a wedding. We feel something higher is happening here. That divinity that’s revealed at a wedding is the divinity, the infinite specialness of the bride and groom. The bride and groom, when they decided to love each other and to commit to each other, that’s because they’ve revealed the infinite specialness in each other. Each one is perceived in other an infinite specialness that no one else has fully seen, and that’s step one. Step two, they identify the other with that infinite specialness. In other words, I know that my wife, like she may have this issue or that issue or that issue, but who she really is, her depth, her soul print, if you will, is that she’s this infinitely, special, beautiful, fabulous person, and I’m willing to work on all the problems because I’ve identified her essence as being all this beautiful stuff. So, again, it’s a two-step process of perception and identification. Other people I’ve gone out with, it could be that either I wasn’t able to fully perceive their infinite specialness or, even if I perceived it, I didn’t identify them with that. I maybe identified them with all sorts of failings or losses or pathologies they have. So, loving is both a perception, step one, and identification, step two. And the results of perception and identification is this powerful emotion of loving. Now, clearly, at this stage, we first understand this bedrock text of Western civilization of love your friend as yourself. There’s this command: Love your friend. Be a lover. I’m going to love my friend. How can I be commanded to love. Well, the second I understand … and the command is an internal command. It’s a commandment of the universe. The second I understand that love is not an emotion, but it happens to me and it’s a perception identification process, then I can be commanded and I can command myself to love.

Next point: I have not discussed here the unique attraction of lovers, and why am I more uniquely able to love this person and not another person? That’s part of the Soul Prints book, that’s part of the sexuality loving section in the Soul Prints book, which I’m not explicating in detail, but that’s a whole other chapter. So, why do I love, perceive and identify the infinite specialness of this person and not someone else? That’s particularly connected to sexual partner/married love. But love is not about just that. Love is about the ability to perceive the infinite specialness in any other, and identify that other with that infinite specialness. That’s loving. And particularly in this chapter, we talk about friendship love. We talk about friendship love as a path to inner certainty. The friend who loves me gives me the gift of myself, and we tell a fantastic, mystical, Zen, Hasidic story about a definition of friendship and what friendship’s about. It’s a fantastic, fantastic story. So, we tell that story. And then we … you know, moving out of that story, we develop what friendship means and how friendship … you know, the friend gives me the gift of myself. I see myself refracted through the prism of my friend. In my friend’s face, I see myself. That’s friendship. That’s No. 1.

No. 2: friendship always involves a giving up of control, and then we could expand … this is actually again in the Soul Prints book. This isn’t written out, but I could write it out. Deep friendship and loving always means giving up control. Love and control are opposites. There’s a whole development of that.

No. 3: we distinguish between friendship and co-dependency. And what’s the difference between friendship and co-dependency? And that’s a whole development. And then we tie this back in to the Leah/Jacob myth. Because all through the book, we always tie it back in to the Leah/Jacob myth, and whenever we tie it in, as is always true when you unpack myth, it gets deeper. And we use that to basically explain why Leah and Jacob … you know, Leah wasn’t Jacob’s friend. She was co-dependant with Jacob. She demands, she takes Jacob’s love from him. It’s not freely given. Friendship is always freely given. And we talk about Leah never being able ever to actually receive Jacob, being unable to receive his loving. That’s No. 4, 5.

And then we talk about how one of the ways to break the cycle of co-dependency is to decide to love. When they begin to love someone, I turn them from an It into my friend, and then I see myself reflected back to my self in that friendship. Pure love … love is one of the things that breaks the cycle. Loving breaks the cycle of co-dependency. To love other, I transform other from an It when co-dependent with into a friend who is able to love me. To love me, to value me, to honor me, and I’m able to experience myself reflected and refracted in the prism of their grace and of their love. And, again, there’s more detail; but, that’s essentially the path of friendship.

Chapter 5 is about love and law, love and obligation. In a Jewish book, it would play out in a particular way because law is a major part of Jewish context, but law and obligation is part of the whole world. And we talk about basically how I experience my inner certainty of self through obligation, through meeting obligation. That, initially, is not a popular idea. We all want to be free. But, really, go on vacation and try to stay there forever. So, I begin to feel empty, I begin to feel valueless. In the little acts of meeting obligation, the very essential act of fulfilling a purpose, a filling a need in the world, begins to allow me to experience my inner certainty. In other words, to fulfill obligations is not to fulfill technical obligation in the world. It’s not about being arbitrarily obligated. I mean obligation, in its deep sense, is about filling a real need in the world, which is why, in the original Hebrew, the word love and the word obligation are the same word. That I experience myself as beloved, as valuable. I experience my inner certainty when I find a place in the world where I fill a need. That’s a very powerful idea. You know, love always is best expressed when I do something that fills a need for other and, in the filling of the need, I experience my enoughness. And we talk about this in great detail. We talk about the relationship between love and law. Love and law really used and viewed as opposites, like love and obligation are viewed as opposites. But, in fact, we understand, and our whole marriage ceremony is based on the fact that love and obligation … I love other and I experience myself as being loved through this process of commitment and obligation.

We tell a mystical story about Akiva, the son of Joseph, and he was the great of the greatest first century mystical scholars. He was a contemporary of Jesus. And he’s the person who reads the scribal text of the Bible, and he’s able to derive all sorts of inner meanings from the flourishes of the letters. You know, the calligraphy flourishes of the letters. And this same Akiva, scholar mystic, he’s the great lover. He’s the passionate lover. He’s the passionate lover of Rachel. It’s a great love story, and he’s the passionate lover of the Divine and, basically, what I try and explain is that the reason that he’s able to derive all this deep meaning from the text is because he’s in love. When I’m in love, I experience the world differently, and I’m able to interpret reality in a much, much deeper level, because love allows me to do that. Now, what Akiva is interpreting is what is called the law. Law and love aren’t opposites. I understand law in the deepest way when I am a lover. Obligation and love are not opposites. There’s a great story I tell about my wife where, basically, I say that 95 percent of what I do in the world that my wife asks me to do I understand. But there’s 5 percent of stuff that she asks me to do that I got no clue why she wants it. Why do I do it? I do it because I love her. And, funnily enough, those details of obligation, where my wife, as it were, obligates me, those express my love to her more than anything else does in the world, because those are purely in the act of the fact that my wife needs them, by doing them I’m expressing my love to her and I feel deeply valuable. My ability to freely give in order to fulfill someone else’s need returns to me, myself, in my sense of intrinsic and innate inner certainty.

In the second of love and law and love and obligation and love and need, those are the three … love and law, love and obligation and love and need, I would add a No. 4: love in details. Love is in the details. The experience of being loved and loving is in the details of living. It’s not about grand theories and dramatic formula. It’s about the details that we experienced together in the world, and the importance of God is in the details, of love is in the details, and I have a lovely story about that.

And, finally, I talk in great detail about love and receiving, which is actually very similar to the end of Soul Prints. It’s not only very similar, but I think, as I look at it again now, it’s actually the same piece. Love and receiving. That’s the path of love and law, love and obligation, love in the details, love and receiving. This whole chapter, actually … you know, we would take out sort of the essences of it and express it as a path by itself.
The next path, chapter six, is the path of falling in love. Now, loving and falling in love are two separate things. I only begin loving when I fall out of love. Falling in love is this ecstatic, you know, being shot by Cupid’s arrow experience. And so we talk about two things. We talk about the path of falling in love the path of ecstasy, the clarity I get from ecstasy. And in the Soul Prints book, there’s a whole development of ecstasy, which we don’t develop in this book, but falling in love is this flash. It’s this high. It’s this all ego boundaries shatter. We feel completely one. We don’t feel separate in any way. That’s step one. There’s a pattern to the universe and the pattern is that there’s always a flash, then there’s a fall, then life is about regaining the flash. Let me say that again. There’s a three-part pattern to the universe that applies to relationships, it applies to work, it applies to all forms of growth and all forms of deep involvement in the world, and part one is there’s a flash of grace, and it’s grace. It’s a gift, and it’s received as a gift. It shatters, it conquers all. That’s in terms of an idea. It’s in terms of loving. It’s ecstasy, pain and transcendence. Ecstasy is step one, pain is step two, transcendence is step three. Step three is always after I’ve lost the initial high, I’ve fallen and then I start working … I work, I invest the effort to regain that high, and when I regain it, it’s actually in the end higher than the initial flash. It’s always deeper. There’s love, there’s the fall out of love and then, when we decide to love each other and we work together, then ultimately what we gain, the relationship that we can establish is far higher than the initial falling in love. That’s a basic pattern of the universe.

Now, if that’s true, why is the flash important? Why is the falling in love important? Why don’t we just move directly to the stage of loving? Well, the answer is that falling in love, that initial ecstasy gives me an inner certainty of possibility that guides me. It’s the beacon, it’s the light that guides me, and when I experience myself in that way, when I experience our relationship in that way, when I experience the world from a place of ecstasy, it gives me an image of inner certainty, of core identity, that I can always come back to. And that’s why ecstatic experiences, falling in love and other ecstatic experiences, are so important in the world. I would even add, but I don’t think I’d add it in the book itself, or that it could be that we … well, I don’t know if I would add it. I was thinking about, you know, certain positive uses of drugs, but I think that would just sort of make the book controversial, so I think we’ll sort of leave that aside for now. Let’s just say ecstatic experiences.

In the Jewish book, which we may leave out, chapter seven is about Judah and Tamar. It’s the Judah and Tamar myth. It’s a fabulous story about a woman who is owed something by a man and the man doesn’t really see her, although she’s right in front of him, and she dresses up as a prostitute and seduces him and it’s a whole stunning story, and it’s really about … it’s about Judah. The story is about Judah. Judah is the person who has received inner certainty from his mother, but receiving it from my mother isn’t enough. I got to be able to access to it in life, and the whole point of this chapter is how do I access that inner certainty that I got as a birthright? How do I access it in life? In other words, even a person who has perceived it as a birthright and needs to be able to be able to access it, and there need to be guides along the way who teach us how to access it, and Tamar, this woman who dresses up as a prostitute and seduces Judah, she’s his holy guide. She teaches him … she’s his visionary guide. She teaches him how to access his inner certainty of self, and the chapter talks about the notion of guides. It talks about how, when we’re not seen, we need to dress up as someone else in order to be seen. It talks about accessing the inner certainty that I received as a birthright, how I access it in life, and it talks about the flow between a sense of personhood and a sense of personal responsibility. If I don’t have a sense of inner certainty of self, then I can never take responsibility. I can never act responsibly, because personal responsibility flows from personhood. And, finally, we talk about the differences between what we call in mysticism lower will and higher will. Lower will decisions and higher will decisions and higher will, of course, is my sense of the flash of clarity that I have in the world, my inner certainty, and how, basically, I need guys to help me move beyond my lower will, which is sort of rational, plodding, steady, slow, gradual. I need to be able to sometime be able to move beyond my lower will and access my higher will. That’s chapter seven.

Chapter eight: a very important chapter. Chapter eight is called “The Path of My Story.” Opens with a story about a stonecutter. A famous story. Not too well know, but it’s a famous story in certain kinds of literature and, basically, it’s about the stonecutter wanting to be everything else in the world but a stonecutter and, in five different transformations, he becomes … so, in the end, he wants to be a stonecutter again. It’s much more beautiful in the telling. It’s the path of my story. It’s owning myself. It’s going inside into myself and reclaiming myself. It’s about inside a relationship as opposed to outside a relationship, and we use, basically, a couple of vehicles to tell this story. We use the story, the David/Goliath myth. The David/Goliath myth is chapter two of a less well-known myth, which is a myth about Ruth, the Book of Ruth, and her sister, Orpah. And we talk about Orpah, and we developed something which we call the “Orpah Complex,” and it’s a really beautiful piece about Orpah appearing in the wrong story. The name of the book is the “Book of Ruth” and, of course, Orpah, Ruth’s sister, appears in the “Book of Ruth,” meaning that she’s in the wrong story. She’s in Ruth’s book, and it’s about how she tries to be like Ruth, and we cite a number of great mystical sources that talk about Orpah that, at the moment she departs from Ruth, she has this very, very dramatic fall, and it’s a whole, wild sexual story and we try to understand why did she have this fall. What caused the fall? And we explain basically what caused the fall was basically that until this point in her life, she was being Ruth. Ruth was her story, and at the point in which they split, and we explain it. It’s a whole story of why they split and what are these two paths that they diverge in the woods, but at the point in which they split, in which Orpah remains in her country, and Ruth goes back with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to the Land of Israel, to the point in which they split, that’s the point in which Orpah has her dramatic fall, that’s the point where Orpah is left without a story. And, so, when I build my life in someone else’s story, at a certain point, at a certain pivoting point, I realize I’m not them, I’m left without an identify. And when I lose my identity, that’s when I fall. I fall always when I lose my core sense of identify. So, if I build my story on someone else, then, ultimately, when that person falls and I fall, or when I realize I’m really not that person, that’s when I fall. And we critique here … in the next part of this chapter, we critique Anthony Robbins and his whole system of cloning, where I basically pick a person and build my life on imitating that person. But that’s exactly the opposite. That’s the success that Anthony Robbins is trying to teach, but it’s about competence. It’s about outside success. It’s not about inside success and, ultimately, it can’t last. I can’t clone. I’ve got to basically be my story. I got to be a stonecutter if I’m a stonecutter. To be holy, to be sacred, to be authentic is to live on the inside, to live on the inside of myself.

Now, Orpah has a great grandchild. His name is Goliath. Ruth has a great grandchild. His name is David. And, really, what we explain … you know, everybody knows in some sense the David and Goliath story with David and his famous slingshot, the David and Goliath story is really the biblical myth’s way of teaching us about Orpah and Ruth. And it’s David … it’s this little guy, but he has inner certainty. Goliath is this big, blustering bully, but he’s blustering on the outside. He really lacks any sense of inner certainty of identity. He is the great grandchild of Orpah. And, in fact, in Orpah’s fall, there’s this dramatic story of Orpah sleeping in the night of her fall with 100 men, and out of that night emerges Goliath. And the point, of course, is that Goliath has no paternity. He’s got no sense of identity. And it’s obviously a mythical image. Goliath, who has no identity, becomes this blustering, large kind of overblown personality and David, with his sure slingshot, is able to fell Goliath. The point is that David has inner certainty. David knows who he is. David comes from Ruth. David comes from a story which is his story. Goliath comes from Orpah, Orpah being a person who finds out in mid life that she has no story, that she’s based her whole story on Ruth. So, the meeting of David and Goliath is, in effect, the closing of the circle between Ruth and Orpah. Again, there are a lot of other pieces to this, but it’s a fantastic myth. And the Orpah complex, the Orpah myth, which we’re sort of developing here in an original way, which allows me to unpack the idea of living in my story, of living on the inside.

The next chapter, chapter nine, is the path of yearning. What do I long for? What do I yearn? I can use my yearning, my longing, to lead me to my true longing, to lead me back to myself. Ask a person what they long for, what they really want, what they yearn for in the middle of the night, you’ll find out who the person is. Our yearnings and our longings are beautiful, healthy yearnings and longings and it’s also our pathologies, our darkness. You know, disturbances in the force field, as it were or … excuse me, in the cosmic field of the universe point out black holes. But, also, our pathologies, our perverse longings also tell us about who we are and lead us back to ourselves, and I yearn, therefore I am. I long, therefore I am. That’s sort of part one.

Part two is what I call presence in absence. Let me explain it in two ways. Sometimes a person is most present in a room when they’re not there. That’s presence in absence. Longing always comes from place of absence. I don’t have something. I’m missing something, therefore I long for it. So, in that absence, when I allow myself to feel my longing, I experience for the first time my presence, and it teaches me about who I am.

There’s a great story called “The Tug.” It’s sort of my trademark story, and I tried to tell it on this tape, but I ran out of space, so I’m going to let the tape run the next 30 seconds and tell it on the beginning of the next tape. We’ve got about another hour, I hope not more, and that should give us a total of three hours. I’m going to do still Uncertainty. Uncertainty I’ll do in some degree of detail, but much, much, much detail than we’ve done up to now. I will then do a very brief sketch, Tears, ten kinds of tears, ten paths of tears; a very, very even briefer sketch, Laughter; even briefer than laughter, just a couple of lines on silence; a couple of more lines on loving, and I think we’ll have covered it for now. I can do this in much greater detail, but I think you all wanted a two-hour tape. I’m all ready going to be up to three hours and I don’t want to create a larger transcription than one you want to read, so I’ll try to limit it greatly to an hour of the next tape.

(END OF TAPE)

presented by Marc Gafni