How Love Can Change Your Day, Today! by Marc Gafni

We are all gathering this coming New Year weekend for the second great Integral Evolutionary Gathering: Integral Spiritual Experience. In our first year we practiced and celebrated the realization of Unique Self. We challenged the enlightenment conversation world over to realize that beyond true self is unique self. Or said differently, to wake up beyond separate self to the stunning realization of your true self — to know that you are an indivisible part of the great unified consciousness that underlies and animates all of reality is but the first step of your enlightenment. The second step is the grand and humble realization that you are an utterly unique expression of all that is, with all of the immense joy and responsibility inherent in that evolutionary awakening. You are a unique expression of the divine love which is the initiating energy of the Kosmos, living in you, as you and through you. It is truly all about that love, which is you, and which holds you and in which you hold everyone and everything else. What else could it possible be about?! For that reason we decided that the focal point of our practice and celebration for our second year would be the Future of Love.
The Future of love for us is not an abstract philosophical reflection but rather an ecstatic and urgent inquiry into the very core of our obligation as human beings on this planet. And dear friend — make no mistake about it. Love creates obligation. In the original hebrew — chovah and chibah, literally love and obligation derive from the same root word. Indeed in the deepest sense love is the discernment of the true nature of our obligation. Obligation in this sense is not a function of mythic meme membership consciousness, in which an external body or structure imposes obligation which violates our fullness and our freedom. Rather obligation is the the highest natural expression of our fullness and our freedom. Obligation wells from the self recognition that there are genuine needs that can only be met by your deeds. Obligation is the non dual recognition that your deed is God’s need. God, not merely on the old mythic grasping, rather God the pulsating reality of the divine all that is – gloriously revealed through the three faces of god in the infinite depth of first, second and third persons.
Divinity is infinite. Divine obligation is infinite. Obligations means that we care infinitely. Obligation means that we must act to free those on pain. Obligation means that we cannot be silent and go about our Integral writing and movement building and ignore the screaming reality of sexual slavery which brutally oppresses women all over the planet. The Future of Love is a stakeholder in our present decisions, in our present action or tragically a victim of our present inaction and silence. The Future of Love demands the fullness of our presence, the audacity of our action and the tenacious courage of our commitment.
The Future of Love demands that we re-claim the power of the masculine expression of Unique Self no less then our obligation to protect the feminine incarnation of Unique Self. In an era which has launched what Christina Hoff Sommers called “A War Against Boys”, love demands that we discern and demand for the dignity and sanctity of the masculine. This has been part of the life’s work of our friend Warren Farrell which finds wonderful expression in his contribution this week. The Future of Love demands that we honor the feminine against the potential abuses of the shadow masculine in all of its expression including sexual harassment in the work place. At the same time the Future of Love demands that we recognize feminine as well as masculine shadow, and calls us to repudiate the shadow feminine which hides under the veneer of sexual harassment or abuse rhetoric, which it is in fact abusive of sexuality, hijacking and distorting narrative to serve shadow ends which violate the dignity of unique self and miserably violate the obligations of love. It for this reason that Diane, Ken, Warren and myself have all chosen to speak out this week in favor of love as a power of discernment which calls us to the great joy of obligation and responsibility. It is in that light that we would ask you, to read the important conversations that Integral Life has brought to you this week.
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Below I have tried to articulate in a fuller way, the meta—frames of love and Unique Self realization and awakening that underly all three of the pieces in this week’s offering as well as the entire Integral Evolutionary enterprise of love. The invitation is to read not merely from a third person perspective but to read as an engaged lover who is living alive and aflame as love — and then to take a first step in your life today — which will alleviate suffering for some other being who awaits your helping heart and hand.
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Unique Self teaching demands that you to become a lover. To do so all that is required is a shift of perception in which you realize that your identity is so much larger than we were taught. To love is to realize that the boundaries are not ultimately real. We are all intertwined in what has been called “the seamless coat of the universe”. Christians called this unity the body of Christ, Buddhists talked about the Buddhahood of all beings, while the Kabbalist called this underlying unity Adam Kadmon.
All souls, the Hebrew mystics teach, come from different parts of the body of God. Being one body there is therefore a natural affinity between all souls and a special affinity between souls who come from the same metaphysical neighborhood. The essence of things is that no one is ever really a stranger. We all share soul.
Given that reality it is not surprising that the Unique Self mystics insist that every action has a cosmic effect which ripples well beyond the obvious. Modern chaos theory refers to the same profound intuition as “the butterfly effect”. For example, the gentle breeze from a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world can, two months later, be the “cause” of a typhoon on the other side of the world. For the Unique Self mystics, this is a core principle of enlightened awareness.
Let’s say you stayed a few extra minutes at home to make a phone call. The purpose of your call – you just had to share a piece of gossip. That caused you to leave for work late. Leaving late could set in motion infinite variables on the physical, physiological and emotional levels, which could eventually ripple into significant disaster for millions of people. To be a lover means to know that every action not born of love hurts the entire world, even as every action born to love heals the entire world.
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Love is a radical re-drawing of boundaries and complete re-visioning of the whole notion of self-interest. A re-visioning is, of course, a deepening of perception. The truth is, we all know that our narrow definition of the self, closed behind the walls of the ego, is not our highest truth. The movement from ego to unique self is powered by the expanded perception of love. Love is a Unique Self perception.
The underlying metaphysics are really quite simple. We are made of divine substance. This is the homo imago dei that Unique Self mystics speaks of which teaches us that every life is uniquely sacred. “There is no place devoid of Him,” writes the Zohar. “I am the light that illumines all things. I am all. Split a piece of wood and I am there; pick up a stone and you will find me there,” teaches the Gospel of Thomas. To love is to perceive the infinite divinity in everyone and everything.

God’s Disguise
You are called to live in the erotic awareness that we are interwoven with all of being. You are a unique part of a larger whole. No human being is a stranger to you. You cannot eat if everyone cannot eat. If there is brutality in the world it affects you directly. You do not want to wait till the butterfly effect shows your children why your limited consciousness of living as separate monads destroyed the world. The planet will not go on forever with haves and have nots. In our global villages, the intolerable proximity of massive starvation and obscene luxury will explode in our faces. When food is thrown out at the fancy uptown restaurant as a mother cannot feed her children in a downtown neighborhood we can expect no real peace.
In the old myth of the Garden of Eden God asks Adam, “Who ate from the tree?” Adam quickly responds — my wife did it. She and not me. Disconnection. Shifting of blame. You and not me. Them and not us. That is original sin. The evolutionary impulse up from Eden is to return to the realization of no boundary consciousness. We need to the Garden in conscious embrace of our authentic unique nature. That means nothing less than a return to Eros – to the essential redrawing of boundaries to include all those we have placed on the other side of the tracks.
In Hebrew myth the reclaiming of Eros always involves the shifting of boundaries.
An ancient tradition asks how it is that God chose this precise plot of land in Jerusalem as the place of the Temple. Does it have some special holiness built in from the beginning of time? At least one ancient tradition emphatically rejects such an understanding of Temple consciousness as the kind of thinking that just creates another boundary between those who control the land and those who don’t. As we see all too clearly in Jerusalem today, every boundary line is also a potential conflict line. It separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ and eventually ‘them’ will want to overrun the boundary.
The tradition tells a very different kind of story. A mythic story of the temple’s origins, a tale of brotherhood, not boundary-hood.

There were two brothers who long ago lived in the field where the Temple would be built. These brothers were partners in the ownership of the field and farmed it together. One brother had a very large family. He said to his wife, “We have so much together — my brother has never married and raised a family. The produce from the field is all he has. Let me go and move the boundary marker between his portion of the field and mine so he will receive more.” ” It is good,” said his wife, so, every night after midnight, long after the day’s harvesting was divided, he would go and move the boundary between his portion and his brother’s. At the same time the idea was going through his brother’s head. “I have no family, no obligation, no one to support. My brother has so much on his shoulders. Surely he needs a larger portion of the field.” So every night before midnight he would go and shift the boundary marker between his and his brother’s portion.

Naturally both brothers were puzzled how it was the other one was not receiving more. So one night the first brother went a little earlier than usual and the second brother a little later. They came to the field at precisely the same moment, each one to move the boundary in favor of the other. They realized what had been happening and fell weeping on each other’s shoulders.
On the surface, its just a sweet story about compassion and kindness. More deeply however, this Temple myth suggests that all kindness and compassion must be ultimately routed in the recognition of our radical interconnection. The boundaries of the field are the mythic expression both of ego boundaries and all the other lines that artificially divide reality. Tradition has it that on the very spot where those tears fell – the tears that washed away the illusory boundaries – the Temple was built. For the essence of the Temple is the ability to expand your boundary to include your wider self. It is from that place only that your authentic Unique Self emerges. And your wider self is everything and everyone. Your wider unique self is the very width and breadth of God.