437—Talk to God Part 2: Three Stations of Prayer—Falling in Love with the Divine
I’m not just lived as love (first-person), but I fall in love with Reality again (second-person). I fall in love with the Divine.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [February 23, 2025] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Krista Josepha).
Love or Die
Why are we here?
There’s an essay I wrote called Love or Die. Essentially, what it says is that we’re at this moment in culture where we have a choice, and this choice is love or die.
By love or die, we mean that we will become something new—we will actually incarnate in our bodies a new level of being, a new level of becoming—we’ll actually become a new identity. And that identity will be what we’ve called Homo amor, the fulfillment of Homo sapiens.
Homo sapiens either lives in a world, which is created by a God who exists outside of the world, and so we try to be obedient to it.
Or Homo sapiens lives in the world and says, There’s no God force, and we’re the product of blind evolutionary selection processes.
And so, we try to get through this life one way or another—either by making up meaning and making ourselves feel good about it, knowing that it’s not ultimately real, or by amassing power, various forms of pseudo-Eros, finding our way through in whatever way we can, with as much or as little dignity as possible.
These are versions of Homo sapiens—
There’s the contemporary Homo sapiens who is a dogmatic religious fundamentalist, believing in a creator God that exists outside the world and demands obedience. Usually, that creator God is madly in love with one particular group of people who are only supposed to love each other and convert everyone else—one way or another.
Or we’re a Homo sapiens who correctly rejects that old God but lives in a world denuded of a Field of Value, stripped of the experience or knowing, the direct gnosis that value is real.
The Hermetic writers that the Renaissance picked up on were searching for something deeper. They didn’t quite get there, but they were looking in the right direction. They were searching for a deeper understanding of the great questions:
Who am I?
Where are we?
What’s there to do?
And now we’re at this moment in Reality, where if we don’t answer those questions in a deeper way—in a way that actually integrates all knowledge, all gnosis, and weaves it together into a new whole, articulating a new vision of what it means to be a human being—we will die.
So, when we say love or die, what we mean is either we’re going to become Homo amor—we’re going to fulfill Homo sapiens, we’re going to be in this evolutionary unfolding in which Homo sapiens becomes Homo amor.
There’s a birth of a new human and a new humanity.
It’s not going to be a top-down anointed savior, king, president, or dictator of any form. It’s going to be an anointment of humanity.
And it’s not that one person says fight—it’s that we all say fight, and we’re all fighting the good fight, the great battle for transformation. It’s a transformation of realization—of the true possible nature of the possible human.
The possible human will be born.
The possible human is lived as love.
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Three Stations of Love
In our first station of consciousness, we fall in love—with a religion, with a person, with a discipline, with a body of gnosis. We fall in love with nature herself. We fall in love. That’s always the first station.
Then, in the second station, we fall out of love. We realize that the person, the religion, nature itself—the law of the jungle—is more complex than we thought. Ot the discipline is filled with overreaches. We can’t actually stay in love. We separate, we feel a sense of alienation. We see the weaknesses, the holes, the overreaches, the intellectual dishonesty, the corruption, the deceptions. We struggle. We engage in a power struggle, trying to understand.
At the first station, we have full identification with the person we love, with the Reality we love, with the religion we love, with the body of knowledge we love. Then we disidentify. At station two, I disidentify. I’m disidentified.
But we don’t step out.
We try to work it out.
We try to understand.
We try to liberate the sparks from the broken vessels.
We struggle.
We feel alienated.
But we don’t turn our back.
We come closer, we step back—but we don’t turn away.
We stay in the conversation. And if we deeply stay in, we actually reach this third station.
At the third station, we fall in love again. But we don’t fall in love again in the old way. We fall in love in a way in which we are lived as love. We’re lived as love. In other words, it’s no longer the old kind of love—a secondhand emotion, as the song once said.
It’s not ordinary love.
It’s not love as a human construct to govern social relations.
It’s not the love that says God loves us even though we’re not worthy.
No, it’s not that.
It’s the realization that Cosmos is Eros.
That I participate in the Field of Cosmos.
That the Eros of Cosmos moves through me.
That the Universe is actually not empty—but it is empty of anything that is not ultimately full.
That the Universe is an alive and awake Field of ErosValue.
That the Universe is a Field of Allurement. That’s its nature.
Everything is held together in every second.
If the allurement, the erotic attraction, the aliveness and goodness of Reality—if the truth moving to create new coherences, and the beauty moving to display new allurements, and the goodness moving toward deeper contact and greater wholeness—if all of that disappears for one second, the Universe disappears.
And in every second, there is allurement. There is Eros, pouring through all of the physical structures of Reality.
Reality is, at its core, chemistry. Cosmos is chemistry.
That’s what Cosmos is. Cosmos is, functionally and literally, chemistry.
The molecular processes of chemistry and the metabolic cellular processes of chemistry move across the world of matter and the world of metabolics—all of that is chemistry.
Chemistry is not mechanics. There’s a dimension of chemistry that’s mechanical, meaning its structure, its process. Then there’s an intricate physicality—an intricate process of constructing from different parts, larger wholes.
That’s true. And those are the laws of science. And the law must be obeyed. But the laws of science are chemistry.
And chemistry is—
"There’s chemistry between us," said the proton and neutron to the electron.
"There’s chemistry between us," said the electrons that actually power the process of photosynthesis and oxidation, creating the currency of energy that powers mitochondria through the electron transport system.
If you want to actually get what’s happening in Cosmos—Cosmos, at its nature, is lived as love.
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The Existential Risk of Artificial Intelligence
I want to try and understand this so we really get what Reality is and why this movement from Homo sapiens to Homo amor matters. And what this station three is, where I actually realize I’m lived as love, I actually embody that realization, and then I’m alive. If I don’t realize that, if we actually remain Homo sapiens—locked in the polarization and locked in the win-lose metrics generating the fragile systems that we’re generating—we actually will self-destruct. And quite soon.
And I’ve talked about existential risk in such depth so many times, I’m not going to recapitulate the vectors of existential risk now. I’ll just share one example. Mr. Vance, who’s an American vice president, possibly future president, said at the recent Paris conference, "All bets are off. We are going full steam artificial intelligence—all the way, even though we don’t quite know how it works. But we’re going all the way. It’s not about safety, this is about possibility, and we’re going to make this happen."
We’ve known and talked about this existential risk for 15 years, but in that past two and a half years, it’s broken into the mainstream. I would say 50% of the significant figures in artificial intelligence today at the leading edge have one of two opinions:
Either artificial intelligence will lead to the death of our humanity—what we recognize to be a human being will be undermined in such a fundamental way that we won’t be human in the way we understand it anymore.
Or artificial intelligence will lead to the death of humanity. Humanity will become rapidly irrelevant.
We’re moving quite fast.
I’d say artificial general intelligence is about a decade away. That’s the best estimation now, which is moving through Silicon Valley. I hear it all the time on inside calls, but if you read carefully, you can find it—artificial intelligence is about 10 years away, and most jobs will disappear as we know them.
Human beings will not have to worry about exploitation. Human beings will be challenged by irrelevance.
And once artificial general intelligence takes over—meaning Reality will now be run by artificial general intelligence—the possibility of humans becoming extinct through multiple scenarios that have been described at great length becomes fully possible. You can read, for example, a book called Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom (2014), where this is laid out.
But no one is really thinking about that. The race to the bottom, the drive for immediate profit, and a very tiny group of people controlling the artificial intelligence conversation. The people who were serious thinkers, who were trying to create guardrails for artificial intelligence—for example, at OpenAI—were thrown off the board about 18 months ago.
And now, it’s full speed ahead.
There’s no essential difference between Elon Musk and Sam Altman—whatever their personal grievances are.
It’s full speed ahead in China, in the United States, and in multiple other countries. But China and the United States are at the center. It’s a full-on race for artificial general intelligence, come what may, because we don’t have a shared ground of value and a shared Story of Value that we live inside of.
We don’t have a vision of personhood.
We don’t believe that value is actually real.
We don’t know what actually being a human being is.
It’s not that computers are getting more human. It’s that humans are becoming more machine-like.
Like, wow!
So, we need to actually reclaim what it means to be a human being—and then up-level it and evolve it. Because evolution is the evolution of culture and consciousness, which is the evolution of love, which is the evolution of our understanding and our relationship to the nature of Eros and the nature of love.
And that understanding ultimately yields something very simple:
I am the Amorous Cosmos—amor, love.
I am the Amorous Cosmos in person.
The Universe is an Amorous Cosmos.
And I am the Amorous Cosmos in person.
But it’s a CosmoErotic Universe.
And I am the CosmoErotic Universe in person.
But let’s go slow.
Let’s go back to Cosmos.
All of Reality is Animated by Music
What is Cosmos? So, we said Cosmos is chemistry. Science at its best gathers information and provides an enormously critical service. Science at its best is a mode of revelation and an erotic mode of engagement and intimacy with Reality. That’s what science is at its best—one of the most beautiful expressions of Reality itself.
It is the creativity of the human being, in whom mathematics are alive and breathing. Therefore, as a mathematician, I can, for example, embrace the Cosmos because mathematics lives in me, and all of the Cosmos lives in me—mathematically, musically, and mystically.
But science in its contemporary expressions also madly overreaches. Science either denies empiricisms that are inconvenient for it, ignores empiricisms entirely, or simply distorts what’s empirically true. That’s critical to understand.
We need to become radical empiricists again. We need to bring together the STEM professions and the humanities—or, to say it differently, the interior sciences. But not just the humanities in their flatland form, what Jeffrey Kripal would call the superhumanities. Jeffrey is a good man; he moves back and forth between postmodernity and modernity, trying to hold both sides of the fence and doing a creative and brilliant job of it. But we need to say it more clearly than Jeffrey does:
There’s a ground of Reality, and that ground of Reality is Eros. That ground of Reality is allurement. That ground of Reality is not merely mechanics; it’s music.
I want to give you a sense of what most science is doing today. Imagine you were called to Reality, and your job was to explain people dancing. That’s your mission. You are scientists from around the galactic universe, backwards and forwards in time, and you’re brought to this age to explain the phenomenon of human beings dancing.
But you can’t actually hear the music. You can only analyze data.
So, you watch human beings dance. You’re aware of sound waves and vibrational structures. You analyze the vibrational patterns, the fields, and the structure of sound. You bring to bear incredible instrumentation to deeply analyze the data, and then you provide a profound explanation of dancing—which you don’t understand at all because you can’t hear the music.
If you can’t hear the music and you’re just describing the mechanics, you can’t truly be describing dancing. You can’t even understand what dancing is because you don’t actually hear the music. You’re tone-deaf.
We’ve developed both a dogmatic fundamentalist set of religions that are on the rise across the world and a reclaimed ethnocentric religion, which is resurging globally, either literally or as a fig leaf for some other form of totalitarianism.
In China, Confucianism is quite the rage. But you also have Maoism draping itself in Taoism. Xi’s brother-in-law is a Taoist scholar, and he’s using Taoism to justify China’s particular political position. Half of it is an attempt at meaning; half of it is a fig leaf. Taoism becomes the dominant framework, and anything non-Taoist is dismissed. There’s no sense of recognizing this as the voice of the one speaking through the vessels of the many.
We’ve lost our ability—which we gained in the Renaissance—to abstract universals from particulars.
We’ve lost the ability to honor the particulars, the local forms, and the depth of individual religions while also abstracting the universals and realizing they’re all part of the same score of music, with different dimensions and symphonies.
All of the symphonies and forms—they’re all music underneath. They’re all the Divine voice. We’ve lost that ability.
We’ve lost the ability to abstract universals from particulars and to generate universal principles.
We even deny universals, as insane as that is. Universals are a given in Reality. There’s no question about that.
We also have reductive materialism in science, which is its own form of dogma, which is equally tone-deaf. It doesn’t hear the music. It gives a full analysis of people dancing, which is anti-empirical. It’s anti-empirical because it doesn’t actually realize that it’s all music and that music and mathematics are intertwined.
Music is mathematics, and mathematics is music.
All of Reality is animated by music.
Scientific literature even describes primordial dimensions of Reality as having this kind of gong of music moving through Cosmos.
So, we need to be able to hear the music, and the music is allurement.
So when I describe molecular chemistry, organic chemistry, or metabolic chemistry—meaning cellular chemistry—what I need to understand is that what is animating the mechanics is literally the nature of Reality.
If you don’t get this, you’re not living in Reality. You’re insane. To be insane is not to know Reality.
The nature of Reality is that it is this movement of music, which then configures itself into stunningly complex, dazzling cacophonies of symphonic lovemaking and mutuality—erotic synergies.
Those erotic synergies are chemical compounds. They are the processes that drive oxidation and photosynthesis.
But what’s actually moving through the entire system is not just a generic music but a unique music—imagine a flute—that configures Reality.
It’s the music of the sirens, but not the sirens that seek to dash you against the rocks and tear you apart.
Rather, it’s the sirens of Reality that cohere Reality into ever deeper contact, ever greater wholeness, ever new emergent forms, ever new depths, and ever new capacities for perception, care, concern, mutuality, function, and ultimately, love.
That’s what Reality is.
Two Core Values of Cosmos: Autonomy and Communinion
Here’s an example. When we pick up a cup, it looks like an object. The cup looks like a nice object, but it’s not an object. It’s not an object.
The cup is—and you can actually feel it if you allow yourself to get quiet enough—you actually realize that the cup, this world of matter, this davar, this thing. The Hebrew word davar, also means word. And word means logos, and logos means there’s a pattern of relationship.
There’s a subatomic, atomic, and molecular structure at play here. That’s what science is saying. There’s a molecular structure at play. This is a particular configured form of allurement that brings together human aesthetics and human fashioning but is actually held together by a molecular dance of allurement—of Eros—that binds this object.
And not only is that true of the cup, but it’s also true of my sweater, my computer—just the very physicality of the computer—but also of all the networked cables and how they communicate.
The entire structure is a structure of communion happening at every level of Reality.
All of the four forces of Reality.
All of the cables that intertwist the world.
All of the objects that are actually subjects of allurement.
Every object is a subject—it has a subjectivity of allurement moving through it.
The Cosmos itself is a field of chemistry. There’s chemistry between everything.
All of Reality, at every second, is configured by allurement moving to create larger wholes.
So, that’s what we mean to be lived as love.
To be lived as love is to know that I live in that Field of Intimacy, that Field of Intimate Value, and that intimacy is the value of Cosmos.
Not only do I live in that Intimate Universe, but that Intimate Universe quite literally lives in me.
The millions of miles of nerve cable that move through my body.
The non-locality, the intimate communion between all the cells that know exactly what each other are doing.
The precise right relationship between autonomy and communion, which has existed since the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang.
There’s a very excellent Russian scientist who wrote a book redefining quantum physics. He worked with my friend Howard Bloom and spoke about two core values: autonomy and communion.
Autonomy means it’s me.
Communion means it’s us.
It’s I. And it’s we.
We exist in radical intimacy. We have shared identity, but always in the context of otherness.
We’re in relationship, yet we are independent. But independent not in the sense of being dissociated. The only true independence is within the context of union. Mature independence, mature autonomy, always exists in the context of union.
And that’s actually what Reality is.
That’s its nature, all the way up and all the way down.
That’s actually who we are.
Reality is Interconnected Living Configurations of Allurement
Who is God? God both is all that and holds all that. God is all of that. God is the Infinity of Intimacy. The entire cohered Field of Wholeness, the Field of Value—that’s the God Field.
Remember, the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. God is not a separate object outside of the world or a separate, all-powerful object within the world that controls everything for some capricious reason.
God is mystery.
God is revelation.
God is both beyond and fully present—directly and absolutely available.
The mysteries are within us, which means:
I’m intimate with the God Field.
The God Field is intimate with me.
I am the God Field.
The God Field is me.
And God is holding the whole thing at the same time.
That’s what we mean by God.
By God, we don’t just mean—as the Enlightenment theorists suggested—a system of interconnected mechanical parts. Many of the early Enlightenment thinkers saw Reality as a system of interconnected “its.” For example Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics, and later in The Systems View of Life (1996), and Ervin László and his early work.
The weakness of this kind of thinking is that it often presents Reality as a system of interconnected “its”—but it’s not just that.
Reality is:
Interconnected living configurations of allurement.
A world with intrinsic telos.
A world clearly moving somewhere.
The world has a vision.
The world has a purpose.
Scientists have a strange resistance to purpose. Alfred North Whitehead, in The Function of Reason, gave a lecture at Harvard in 1929 where he made a brilliantly ironic point: He said it’s strange to study scientists who write study after study, with the avowed purpose of proving that there’s no purpose in Cosmos. That animal life has no purpose. That humans are like animals and therefore also have no purpose.
It’s a strange phenomenon: purpose-driven scientists dedicating their entire lives to proving that Reality has no purpose.
He was being funny. But you get the point.
Reality has telos.
Reality has purpose.
Reality is moving somewhere.
There’s a plotline.
It’s a story.
And it’s going somewhere.
When I realize that I participate in that story, that the plotlines of that story quite literally live in me, then I become intimate with Reality.
It’s not that there’s a playwright out there—and yet, there is a playwright.
Meaning:
There is a set of mathematical values embedded in Cosmos.
Cosmos is mathematical values.
There’s a play.
The play of the manifest world was written at the moment of the Big Bang.
Now, where were you when that play was written, my friend? Where were you?
You were writing the play. It was you. You wrote it. Who else could have written it?
At the moment of the Big Bang, you were there.
You were in the singularity.
That was you right there.
You manifested the entire thing.
You did it.
It was you.
And of course, you’re also held by it at the same time.
It’s deep.
God in Third-person, First-person, and Second-person: Prayer is Relationships and Relationships are Paradoxical:
See, we’re entering into talking about prayer. This is Part 2 (read part one here) in this series in talking about prayer.
So, the first thing I want to say is that prayer is a relationship, and relationships are paradoxical.
So, when I’m madly in love with you, I don’t exist without you, and you don’t exist without me. I am a you, and you are me. We’re one breath, and we’re one heart, and we’re one love, and we’re forever. And I am I, and you are you. And I have to be “I” in order for you to be you.
If I’m only “I” because you are you, and you’re only you because I am I, then you’re not you, and I’m not I.
Does everyone get that?
That’s autonomy and communion.
I have to be me. And “me” is not “we.”
But also, there is no me independent of we.
And I’m only I because you’re you, and you’re only you because I’m I. And the opposite.
But it’s not a contradiction. It’s a paradox. It’s the nature of Reality.
Reality has two mathematical values that operate in all the mathematical equations of Cosmos and in all the moral equations of Cosmos. Because there’s a mathematical value, and there’s a musical value.
And in all the musical equations and all the metabolic equations, there’s always autonomy—the vector of independence, of individuation—and there’s also radical intimate communion.
Autonomy and intimate communion are the nature of intimacy. Intimacy is not refused. Love is the exact dance between autonomy and communion.
So, on the one hand, I’m independent of you. I’m autonomous.
On the other hand, I literally don’t exist without you. I desperately yearn for you. All of me is filled with an insane, erotic yearning to be close to you, to experience your full aliveness.
Now, let’s take one more step. Can we get even a little more intimate in it? Let’s look at the erotic mystics of the Solomon lineage. I was studying this text this morning. It’s a text written by Eliyahu de Vidas, around the time of the Renaissance, and he is describing the nature of Reality. And he says,
Hamazkirim et Adonai, al dami la'chem.
Those of you who arouse God, don’t be silent.
Those of you who arouse God, don’t be silent, because it’s only your arousal that allows, that causes, God’s arousal. And that is the essence of the Song of Songs. This is what David, Solomon’s father, meant when he said,
Let me sing and not be silent, so that God may sing and not be silent, and our arousals dance together.
What does that mean? It’s crazy beautiful. Here’s what it means. I’m not going to give you what it means in a kind of mechanical way. I want to, if I can, share with you the music of it.
The music of it is like this—
I am intimate with Reality.
I am intimate with Reality because the plotlines of Reality live in me.
So, all of Reality lives in me.
That’s what we call the first-person of the Divine. It all lives in me. God’s not an object out there. God is the infinite subjectivity of Cosmos in which my subjectivity participates. That’s true. That’s good.
And even as I participate as unique intimacy, as God’s unique intimacy in the Field of the Intimate Universe, there’s an Infinite Intimate that both is all of that and holds all of that in some mysterious way.
So this is not about the old prayer. This is not old religion. Old religion is a creator God outside of the world. But it’s also not a kind of New Age idea, where God is simply the force of Cosmos, the creative force of Cosmos, and that’s it—end of story.
So, it’s something much deeper. God’s not just within me. I am God, and God is me, in the most high, Divine, and beautiful way. That is true. Tat tvam asi. Thou art that. I am it, and it is me. That’s true. I am the Infinity of Intimacy. My subjectivity participates and holds all of the infinite subjectivity in some way.
That is why I, as a mathematician, can embrace the Cosmos. My mathematical value and my moral value actually embrace all of Reality. And that’s why I have an experience of wanting to be a hero and save all of Reality.
What is the reason I want to be a hero? And I do want to be a hero—anyone who tells you they don’t want to be a hero is lying.
I have a deep and profound desire to be a hero because I want to save all of Reality, because all of Reality is related to me.
In some sense, all of Reality lives in me. I actually have the capacity to be a hero because all of Reality lives in my first-person. Because I participate in the Field and the Field is in me, I can change, transfigure, and transform the Field.
That’s what it means to be an erotic mystic—to know that I live in the Field, the Field lives in me, and I can transform, move, and change the Field. That’s called tikkun. That’s called the fixing. That’s first-person.
It’s also true that the force, the intimate creative force of intimacy that moves through Cosmos—that’s third-person. That’s also the Divine. That’s the third-person force moving through Cosmos. That’s also true.
But there’s also something else. Stay close, friends.
There’s also second person. Second-person means that we need each other, and we’re madly in love with each other.
And this is what I’m going to pick up on next time. This is going to take us into how to pray. I want to get to where we can actually learn:
How do you pray?
What does it mean to pray?
Prayer is a stunning art—and it’s simple. But we need the ground.
Relationships are paradoxical. Prayer is a relationship. So, we need to understand something about the relationship.
There’s God as the third-person. But then there’s also this new dimension, which is the second-person. The second-person is the sense in which it’s not just that you’re in me, or that all of it lives in me, or that I have the power to fix and transform all of it in some way because it all lives in me. That’s insane.
So, it’s not just a classical enlightenment realization—I am it already, and there’s nothing to do, and there’s nothing to change because I’m already it.
Not that.
That’s classical enlightenment. That’s Kashmir Shaivism. That’s the kind of teaching that all enlightenment traditions told.
That’s not what we’re saying.
We’re saying:
I am in me.
It is in me.
I am in it.
It is in me.
The Infinity of all Intimacy lives in me. Therefore, I have the ability to transform it. Therefore, I’m powerful. Therefore, I’m responsible for it.
Therefore, I’m the hero who can and wants to change it all—because that’s what a hero is.
The hero is Homo amor.
The hero is lived as love.
And the love of the hero is wide.
It’s not just egocentric—not just about me.
It’s not just ethnocentric—my family, mypeople.
It’s not just worldcentric—all human beings.
It’s cosmocentric. It’s all of Reality—past, present, and future.
And I want to save it all.
I want to be God’s savior—meaning I want to be Reality’s savior.
I am God who is saving God.
It’s not just, okay, I’m enlightened. It’s not just, I realized that’s me. I’m it. There’s nothing to do. I’m already there. No, no, no. It’s me. I’m all of it. And now, let me save it all. And that’s not pathology. That’s the truest index of who we are.
We are heroes. And then, I actually realize that I can be a hero. I can actually change it all. I can transform it all through the transformation that takes place inside of me. When I transform some dimension of my ethos, of my quality, the quality of the whole changes. That’s first-person.
Third-person is the creative force of Cosmos, all the forces of energy, all the forces—interior and exterior—moving through.
But then there’s this other piece: second-person. Second-person means I’m in mad erotic relationship with Reality. I feel the chemistry. Not only does the chemistry move through me, not only am I held by chemistry, and all of the chemistry of the All is in me, but I’m also in chemistry with Reality.
So, what does it mean to love or die? It’s not just that I am lived as love, but that I fall in love with Reality.
So at station three, when I fall in love again, I’m not just lived as love (first-person), but I fall in love with Reality again (second-person). I fall in love with the Divine. I say, Oh my God, Christ, I am madly in love with you. Rama and Sita were madly in love. Krishna and Radha were madly in love. Shechinah and Kudsha Berich Hu were madly in love. The upper waters and the lower waters—we’re madly in love.
We fall madly in love with the Divine, and the Divine falls madly in love with us.
There’s a radical, erotic, trembling, throbbing, pulsing relationship. We’re madly in love with each other. And like all great beloveds, we need each other.
We need each other.
And there’s a way in which the human being needs God—and that’s prayer.
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need. There’s a way where I turn to God in radical need, and I say, God, fuck, help me. I can’t do it myself. I pray specifically and uniquely for particular dimensions of my life and particular people in my life. Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need. And I ask for everything.
And there’s a way in which God prays.
There’s divine prayer.
God prays.
God needs me.
God needs something from me that only I can give.
That’s what it means to be Unique Self. To be Unique Self means that there’s something that I have to give to the Divine that She needs. But She doesn’t need it theoretically. It’s not metatheoretical.
No!
There’s this desperate, burning, erotic, madly focused, unimaginably trembling, tremoring need that Divinity quite literally has for me—uniquely, personally, specifically, by name.
God is desperate for me.
So, prayer is complex. On the one hand, I turn to God, and God receives my desperation. I pray.
And prayers are answered.
Prayers are real and prayers are answered. The answer is not always yes. But prayers are answered. Prayers are heard.
We’re going to talk about what that means. And I mean it in a precisely not old Catholic church way. It goes much deeper. We have to evolve prayer—evolutionary prayer.
But prayer is real. Prayer is absolutely heard. I stake my life on that.
I pray. The God face, the personhood of Reality, hears my specific and personal prayer.
That’s what we’re going to talk about next week in One Mountain, Many Paths—what that means. Not as a fundamentalist idea, but as a structure of Cosmos itself—that, once you realize it, is self-evident and obvious, as clear as I’m breathing.
I desperately need to pray.
And God desperately needs me.
And there’s this desperate, stunning, beautiful, pristine mutuality.
We’re madly in love with each other.
So, it’s love or die.
Love or die means:
I recognize that Reality is governed by love. It’s the third-person of God. It’s Eros that defines and runs through all of Reality and animates all of Reality.
I am lived as love. First-person—I become love. I move from Homo sapiens to Homo amor. I am the Amorous Cosmos in person.
I fall madly in love. Second-person—I actually realize that Divinity is madly in love and desperately needing humanity, even as we are madly in love and desperately needing the Infinite Intimate.
God’s name is Infinite Intimate.
She needs us.
We need Her.
That’s the beginning—the beginning of the fragrance, of the conversation that we’re about to have next week in One Mountain, Many Paths on prayer.
So, this was just a little love note. It was first a hello on prayer.
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