This is an almost unedited and unplugged version of Dr. Gafni’s conversation from the previous weeks of One Mountain, Many Paths broadcast. Thus, the style of the piece is the spoken word and not a formal essay. Dr. Marc Gafni transmits a Unique Self Pointing Out Instruction about your thinking about yourself is God thinking about you.
Why do we pray?
The modern human being is ashamed of prayer. Prayer is understood as turning to a cosmic vending machine God. You put in a quarter and get out a result. And we know that the universe does not operate quite this way.
But it is not only the public teachings of many of the old religions. Much of New Age teaching actually portrays the Universe in the same way. Both the old religion and a lot of popular New Age dogma, talk about how you can manipulate the Universe through a series of actions to produce the results you want.
And of course Religion at its best as well as New Age thought at its best is partially right. There are things we can do to create ourselves, to be in resonance with the Kosmos and to generate new depth and new results. We can access “right mind and right intention” and we can turn in prayer to Source that knows our name and ask for the meeting of our deepest needs. These are both forms of prayer. And Prayer does generate real results. There is abundant science, much of it collected by Larry Dossey, which documents this empirical truth.
And at the same time the Universe is a mystery. We turn to God with the realization that God is not only beyond Kosmos, holding the whole thing. God is inherent in the whole thing. And God is Mystery.
The First, Second and Third Person of God
The New Age and some of the classical mystics in different traditions went too far. They said God is that spark lives only within us.
It is true that Divinity lives in us, as us and through us. This first person experience of God in meditation is beautiful. Tat tvam asi, Thou Art That. Divinity lives in me, as me and through me. This is God in the first person. This is true, but it is also partial.
God in third person is also true. The third person of God includes moral reasoning, physics, superstring theory, theoretical calculus and much more. But Divinity is not just God in the third person, not just the supernovas, not just the laws of physics, and not just chemistry.
Divinity is no less what we can refer to as God in second person, sitting in a chair next to you, yearning for you, loving you madly, desiring you, knowing your name. God is not only the Infinity of Power. God is the Infinity of Intimacy.
That’s not a dogma. That's not a faith assertion. That's not a belief. That's actually a knowing, a realization. Just like the classical realization of enlightenment. It's the realization of enlightenment, where we actually realize that Kosmos is personal. Kosmos is not less than personal, Kosmos is more than personal. Kosmos is personal plus, not personal minus. Human personhood - both as us and between us - participates in the personhood of Kosmos.
The Personhood of Kosmos, the quality that lives between us, is a second person quality. It is core to our lives. We wouldn't want to be alive without speaking to another human being, whose interior resonates with our interiors. We wouldn't want to be alive without being attuned with another human being, whose interiors are attuned with our interiors. That's the quality of second person.
That's as true a Reality as the third person of sciences. And it's as true a Reality as the first person of meditation.
God's not just the Infinity of Power [third person], God's not just Tat tvam asi, the consciousness that lives in me [first person]. God is my friend. He's my mad friend. God is my mad lover. That's why Rumi turns to the Divine and he says: “I'm mad for you in love. I am a mad lover of God.”. God is the Infinity of Intimacy. That is the essence of God in the second person.
Divinity is Madly in Love with You
The intrinsic structure and nature of Reality is that Divinity is madly in love with you. Have you ever had an experience of someone being madly in love with you? When someone is madly in love with you, that love is not limited to you and that person. That love participates in the quality of Kosmos that knows you personally - uniquely - the quality of Kosmos that is madly in love with you.
This is a pointing out instruction. When you've experienced someone being madly in love with you, or you're madly in love with someone, know that that love is participating in the quality of Kosmos. That quality isn't just living in you. It's not a local quality. You're accessing a quality that lives in Kosmos.
Unique Self Pointing Out Instruction
God is madly in love with you. That is why God is thinking about you. So you might want to know, how often is God thinking about you? Maybe she just thinks about you occasionally. After all she's got, 7.7 billion people to think about. So maybe God makes rounds, and comes around to you only occasionally?
How often do you think about your life? Where's your focus? Whose life do you think about more than anyone else's life? Whose life are you reviewing in your mind? Checking? “Should I do this? Should I access this? Should I open that door? How do I feel now? What do I want or need now? Should I make that decision?” Who do you think about all the time?
Yourself!
Not because you're a narcissist. You're supposed to be thinking about yourself. You're supposed to be meeting yourself. You're the captain of your ship. You're the captain of your destiny. Your thinking about yourself, participates directly in God thinking about you.
Your thinking about yourself is God thinking about you.
When you are thinking about yourself, you are eavesdropping on God thinking about you.
That's the experience of Unique Self. It's the realization that I'm irreducibly unique. I'm an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence, the LoveBeauty and the LoveDesire of all that is living uniquely in me, as me and through me. That's the animating Eros and energy of All-That-Is that lives in me, as me and through me, that never was, is or will be ever again, other than through me. Your uniqueness is the disclosure of reality madly loving you. Not love, love MAD.
God loves you madly. Madly means: I’m madly focused on you and I care about you insanely. That experience we have of self involvement is not narcissism. It's not a mistake. You don't want to evolve beyond your ego. Your ego points to your Unique Self. And your Unique Self is the irreducible uniqueness of you, that Reality is madly obsessed with. Your obsession with yourself is God’s obsession with you.
Personhood is a Core Structure of Kosmos
That's what we mean when we say, before prayer, that God's not only the Infinity of Power, God's the Infinity of Intimacy. Personhood is a core structure of Kosmos. In every place we fall, we fall into the arms of She.
You can't be welcomed home in the Kosmos, unless the Kosmos is personal. If there's not infinite personhood in Kosmos that knows your name, you're not welcome in Kosmos.
If your only beloved is a human mortal expression, fixating on you and then that love collapses, then you collapse. You need to be love, with an Eros that participates in the Outrageous Love that courses through Kosmos. Otherwise your center and the center of the love is not going to hold. We've exiled love from its source into this very narrow human expression, when in fact human love participates in the MAD love of Kosmos. That's why Rumi always says: Love mad.
We say to each other in our circle “I love you madly”. Not because we're delirious, but because we're drunk. But we're not drunk, because we're inebriated with empty wine. We're intoxicated because we're actually suffused with the depth realization of the most subtle and speculative minds through history.
Here it is:
We know that we live in an Intimate Universe and the Intimate Universe lives in us.
We are drunk with the Intimate Kosmos which knows our name and love us madly in every moment.
That is what it means to know that we are welcome in Kosmos.
Welcome Home.
[This blogpost is almost all direct quotes from Dr. Marc Gafni collected from the raw transcript of the featured clip below, which is created from the free weekly broadcast of One Mountain, Many Paths, happening live every Sunday at 10 am PT]
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