On Being a Spiritual Teacher or Spiritual Artist; On Changing my Name and the Hate Blogs of History: Part One: Marc Gafni

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marc gafni
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On Being a Spiritual Teacher or Spiritual Artist; On Changing my Name and the Hate Blogs of History

Some notes to myself on Sunday morning after being forwarded an internet posting which said…..

“new rumor — Gafni is attracted to prepubescent boys”

after physically throwing up at the levels of malice that hate blogs are willing to dredge up …..

I wrote some informal and not worked out notes to myself which I share with you

This important article, about to be published in The New York Times Magazine, also discusses the dark side of the internet.

As always feel free to comment at info@marcgafni.com

How do you respond or engage hatred. A huge question. Do we need to engage hatred at all? Is there any point in engaging or responding to hatred?

Hatred is an intense emotion which is, as is well known, closely related to love.

It involves an obsession, a radical focus and intensification of emotion, which responds to and is provoked by every move of the “other”.

This is a question which the Jewish people have wrestled with for at least two thousand years.

The Jews have been the objects of the most virulent and vicious attack on the hate blogs of history.

The Jews were accused of, and in many circles continue to be accused of, everything from being the devil incarnate, to child molestation and rape, to having plans for world domination. As Jews we were declared guilty every form of abuse of power and manipulation throughout our career as a people.

As is the nature of hate blogs — the minor fact that none of this was true mattered very little indeed.

When an attack is rooted in the emptiness and desperation of the attacker, however well hidden and disguised, it tends to lose itself in the righteousness of it’s own rhetoric, flourishing phrases like manipulation, abuse of power, framing everything as scandal, claiming all manner of trauma. There is nothing to do to respond to this sort of content, because the ostensible reason for the hatred is but a lie. it is not the reason for the hatred; it is rather the excuse.

There is a basic distinction between something, which serves as a reason for hatred, and something, which serves as an excuse for hatred.

It is based on the difference between a reason and an excuse themselves.

If hatred is based on a reason then remove the reason and you remove the hatred.

For example let’s say the hater says; I will attack and malign you unless you do inner work. So you will do inner work and the hater will continue to attack and malign you.

Or the hater might say, I will continue to hate you, to attack and malign you unless you apologize. You will apologize from the depth of your soul and the hater will continue to hate and malign you.

For the source of his/her hatred is not their distorted retelling of your ordinary misdeed. But rather it is something far more fundamental and core.

Sometimes we are hated because we represent something in the world, that by virtue of it’s very existence “calls” people on their shadow qualities.

If hatred is primarily rooted in the emptiness and pain of the hater then remove the excuse and another will come in its stead to justify continuing the hatred.

A favorite tactic is to make an accusation and then when it turns out to be not supportable just switch to another accusation. The accusation is the excuse and not the reason.

The reason is, as we noted above, almost always far more intense and personal the the hater is willing to own. The core of the reasons is usually the inability of the person in question to bear their own legitimate suffering. Not being able to hold —for example — the pain of betraying, not being able to hold one’s own moment of Judas, one is forced to demonize, to attack and to even hate the object of one’s betrayal.

A rabbi who I spoke privately almost two years ago recommended to me a book by Wilhelm Reich called The Murder of Christ.

Reich describes the tendency of the mob, acting for the interests of the establishment, to murder life force.

If a person incarnates in his being a certain kind of life force he runs the risk of being crucified.

His or her very real imperfections and blemishes are magnified and distorted beyond recognition in order to excuse all manner of betrayal and murder.

There is a great need to justify the base impulse to murder life force. Yet the only real way it can be justified is to try and tarnish the reputation of the person incarnating life force, beyond repair and recognition.

This, as we noted above, is called demonization. At its core it involves being unable to own the demonic in oneself. The pain of one’s own demonic becomes so unbearable that it is disassociated into one’s environment and usually lands on a parent, partner, lover or former lover or teacher. Each of these parties have always hurt us in some real sense, thus allowing the hook necessary for the shadow projection to hold.

This is done in two ways; with the most astounding and sometimes frightening fabrications and with very broad general critiques aimed at dismissing any need to look at genuine issues carefully.
Canards of this nature define the history of the Jews.

Words like “manipulative”, “life long abuse of power”, “facile charm”, “narcissistic” are thrown around to describe the character of a person or a people, because they are impossible to verify and convey a general sense of malaise that can neither be effectively confirmed nor denied.

Often these kinds of charges appear on blogs or the protocols of the elders of Zion the most famous anti-Semitic document of the modern western world.

Like in the protocols, in modern hate blogs where people who have heavy personal investments and agendas, write under false names. Dominique pretends to be Heather and Monica pretends to be Danya.

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by marc gafni

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