Blog Post Two – Marc Gafni

marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
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The Evolution of Love
The Evolution of God
Practicing the Wounds of Love

These will be the three topics which I hope to talk with you about in this blog. They are very much in my heart these days and nights.

Two years ago, on May 19th, I arrived in exile in Salt Lake City. It is difficult for me to describe my internal state at the time. I felt like Caesar must have felt after his friends surrounded and stabbed him in the Senate, only unlike Caesar, I was still alive.

Strangely and unexpectedly.

Not that I mean any analogy to the grandeur of Caesar or even of my protagonists to Brutus and Cassius. Perhaps the analogy is to the complexity of it all. At least to my own personal complexity at that time in my life, almost two and a quarter years ago.

I loved my friends, my students, my colleagues, and my lovers. The love was true and genuine. But, in many cases, it was a love that was not deep enough. Not grounded enough in what is called in India Hara. Not pure enough. Not free enough of my own human desire to be loved.

I believed that I held a particular responsibility and obligation to shine my shakti in the world. To love everyone, to hug everyone in the most pure and sweetest and holiest of ways. It was an obligation that I knew to be true because it was as natural to me as breathing.

I still believe this. I still feel it. I thank god for not taking away my gifts in exile.

I also believed my love was powerful enough to transmute everything and everyone. I believed my love was so large and so good that it needed a world stage to hold it.

There was the hubris. In two distinct forms. Each one different and subtle. There was the mistake. Love is powerful, but it cannot transmute everything.

Love is simple and needs no world stage to play upon, for love itself is the stage and ground of the world.

Love by itself is beautiful, but not enlightened. Love needs light to illuminate it.

Love needs to evolve the spiral of consciousness in order to unleash it’s full potential to heal and transform. But more about the evolution of love in a later posting.

The Wounds of Love

Love needs vessels and boundaries, without which the intensity of the light shatters vessels. We live in a world of broken hearts and broken vessels.

Some of those hearts have been shattered because they became brittle for lack of love.

And to those people, and to those places in us,
we must open our hearts in full radiance,
even at the risk of suffering
the wounds of love.

The slings and arrows of outrageous loving.

But some of those hearts are broken because love overflowed its boundaries. I speak not here―just to be clear―not of pathological boundary violations like incest, child molestation or rape, of which I know nothing and therefore cannot refer to.

Rather, I speak of the boundary violations within beautiful and mutual loving relations, which are by themselves holy but which lack the vessels to hold the light of love to which they are exposed.

I know something of these vessels, and I have learned something of their fragility. They too shatter.

In Kabbalah, we talk of the fixing that comes after the shattering. The tikkun that comes after the shevirah. The word tikkun―as my brother and friend once pointed out to me based on a series of passages in the Tikkunei Zohar―the word Tikkun means healing or in some sense Evolution.

Evolutionary Kabbalah is rooted in these passages. (If you are interested in this and if this word opens your heart and quickens your mind, see the entry by the same name in the articles section of this website.)

In the teaching of Kabbalah, Tikkun―healing or evolution―emerges from the Shevirah―the shattering. The Hebrew word Shevirah, however, has another meaning hidden in its folds. Shevirah, Shever, also means sustenance. The sustenance that comes from the ability to engage in Meaning making.

One biblical verse talks about Jacob, who saw that there was shever―in Egypt. Shever from the same root as Shevirah means both shattering and nourishment.

In another biblical text, the author talks about “et ha-chalom ve-et shivro”―“the dream and its meaning”―or, the dream and the nourishment it gives through its interpretation and meaning.

So shattering or breaking in Hebrew also carries meanings of nourishment, healing, and meaning making.

We are all hurt in love. We are all shattered in love. The question always is, what do we do with our hurt? Do we turn it into insults of love that need to be repaid in kind? Do we replay and replay the ritual of mutual rejections that always escalates into violence and murder? Be it social murder or physical murder…

Or do we suffer our hurt as the wounds of love! Do we transmute our hurt into compassion and raise our wounds unto the altar of healing and transformation.

Life has gotten much simpler for me in the last two years. I have learned in the texts of life so much that was not possible to understand before the deluge of pain. Sometimes we have to close the door. But we almost never have to close our hearts.

Close the door but always keep your heart open.

We can practice the wounds of love with an open heart even as we hold our boundaries and protect ourselves from unnecessary hurt in the future.

But not all hurt is unnecessary. “We hurt each other and we do it again,” sings Bono. Some hurt is part of the evolution of our hearts. How we “play” our hurt is part of the evolution of God.

This is the tikkun―the healing of God―to which I referred above. You can find it if you read the passages carefully in the Tikkunei Zohar. This is the healing and the evolution of God: that we participate in the healing and evolution of God through the healing and evolution of both our own love and our own hurt. This is the great and wondrous esoteric teaching of Kabbalah!!!!!!!!

-Marc Gafni