Sounds True: World Spirituality with Tami Simon and Marc Gafni
Tami Simon speaks with Marc Gafni, a rabbi and teacher of Kabbalah. He’s the author of several books, including The Mystery of Love, as well as the national bestseller, Soul Prints. In addition to an audio learning edition of Soul Prints, Sounds True will be releasing Marc’s newest book, Your Unique Self: The Future of Enlightenment. Marc speaks about love as the motivational force in the universe. He also discusses a new and important emerging topic, that of World Spirituality, and the possibility of creating a shared context of meaning between all the faith traditions of the world.
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Dr. Marc Gafni holds his doctorate from Oxford University. He is a rabbi and an iconoclastic teacher ofKabbalah and World Spirituality. He is the director of Integral Spiritual Experience. He is a core founder and faculty member of iEvolve: Global Practice Community. In 2011, Dr. Marc officially launched the Center for World Spirituality as the founder and spiritual director in San Francisco, CA.
Tami Simon is the founder of Sounds True, a multi-media publisher dedicated to disseminating spiritual wisdom. Over their 22 year history, Sounds True has produced over 600 titles, been nominated twice for the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies, and is North America’s leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings.
Take a Deeper Dive
With all the spiritual media offerings out there, it’s easy to get caught in the “listening” mode of practice. But we want to invite you to take the next step, a deeper step, an evolutionary step and join us for a weekend practice retreat, Evolutionary Love, Intimacy, & Activism, March 4th -6th in San Francisco, CA. Featured contributors include Marc Gafni, Sally Kempton, Jai Uttal, Mariana Caplan, Terry Patten, Decker Cunov, Nubia Teixeira, and Dustin Diperna. This is the weekend in which you will meet some of the people who will walk with you through your life. This is a place to meet people who share your values, your vision, and your evolutionary vitality. This is the weekend in which your core mode of engagement in the world may undergo a significant upgrade. Become part of a movement from the very beginning!
Full Audio Transcript
Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Marc Gafni. Marc is a rabbi and a teache of Kabbalah. He’s the author of several books, including The Mystery of Love, as well as the national bestseller, Soul Prints. In addition to an audio learning edition of Soul Prints, Sounds True will be releasing Marc’s newest book, Your Unique Self: The Future of Enlightenment.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Marc and I spoke about love as the motivational force in the universe. We also discussed a new, important, emerging topic, that of World Spirituality, and the possibility of creating a shared context of meaning between all of the faith traditions of the world. Here’s my conversation with Marc Gafni.
So today I want to talk about World Spirituality, which I know is a subject you’ve been deeply engaged in, studying, quite a lot, and speaking about more and more. So to begin with, what do you mean by World Spirituality?
Marc Gafni: The mystics, Tami, talk about via negativa, which is what it’s not. Sometimes we’re not sure what something is, but we know what it’s not. So let me just start with what it’s not. It’s not a world religion; it’s not a new form of Baha’i. It’s not a reducing of all the religions or losing of them. So that’s what it’s not.
It’s an evolutionary step. And it’s not interfaith; it’s beyond that step of interfaith when, as someone once said, Jews who don’t believe in Judaism get together with Christians who don’t believe in Christianity, and discover they have a lot in common. So it’s not a kind of reduction of interfaith, and it’s not a kind of homogenization that we’re all one, which is another form of domination, “Let’s create a new dominating world religion,” which is kind of scary. So that’s the mystical move of “We can’t talk about God, but we know what God’s not.” So that’s what it’s not.
So now what is it? What is its life-positive quality? So a World Spirituality is the understanding that there’s a deep, shared vision held by all the great traditions, both the spiritual traditions, the psychological traditions, the great traditions of knowing in the world, that if you link them together, and you take the best strength of each one, the best medicine of every tradition, and you link them together into a larger necklace, into a larger symphony, where each instrument plays its music to perfection, you get something that actually unites us. You get a shared context of meaning that we’re all living in.
And the goal of a World Spirituality is to address a world in which the leading edge of the world–the opinion-makers, the hundreds of millions of people living at certain levels of prosperity who are creating the future–are actually, to a large extent, living in a context of meaninglessness, of no ultimate sense of value, no ultimate sense of purpose, no ultimate sense of “Why am I here, and where am I going?” And when that happens, the center doesn’t hold. For the first time in the history of the human race, the leading edge of the world is living without a kind of moral, spiritual context, because they have in some sense internalized the critique of religion, which was so devastating in the last few hundred years. And so the context becomes a flatland context, without depth, without quality.
So a World Spirituality seeks to say, “Beyond all the dogmas, what’s the deep understanding of knowing that we have, of the nature of what is, what we’re doing here in the world, how to be kind to each other? What is it that unites us that’s so much greater than anything that divides us?” And that’s what a World Spirituality is seeking to articulate. [read more]
