438—Talk to God Part 3. Prayer and Prophecy: The Two Great Conversations of the Storied Cosmos
The conversational Cosmos is a feature of the storied Cosmos, and my conversation is the text of the Cosmos’ conversation.
This is Part 3 of a series Talk to God. Part 2 here. Part 1 here.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 2, 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 Elena Maslova-Levin).
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Talk to God because God wants to talk to you, and you want
to talk to God.
That conversation is the purpose of creation.Fore-pray
There is no sacred without preparing for the sacred; preparation matters (ein kedusha bli hachana). If you want to pray, you have to first do fore-pray. Fore-pray has to take place before the making love of prayer, just like there is a foreplay in the sexual kind of erotic relationship.
Foreplay doesn’t mean that I arouse particular body parts for a period of two minutes before penetration. That’s what men think foreplay is. Oh, got four things to do before that. Let’s get them done so we can get on to the real business. That is not foreplay.
Foreplay begins after the very last time that you made love, from the second after. For the entire day, two days, three days, week, two weeks, whatever it is. Everything is foreplay: everything that happens in the living room, and in the bathroom, and on walks, and in the details of life, it’s all foreplay. It’s all part of the fabric and the context out of which making love emerges.
Fore-pray is the same thing. Fore-pray means that I am always preparing to pray.
I am always getting ready to pray.
I am always on the edge of my seat.
I am on the edge of my life.
I am on the edge of my experience about to burst forth into prayer.
That’s fore-pray.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni
LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online:
We are mad lovers of Cosmos
Greatness doesn’t happen
when I move from thing to thing,
when I’m listening too fast,
when I’m getting things done while I’m doing something else.
Step out of being what Heidegger called the busy, busy, busy man. Don’t listen to things, read them. Sleep eight hours a night no matter what’s happening. Whatever you show up for, show up for it, and plumb the depths. Greatness is cumulative.
We are here together, my friends, not for some sort of weekly wisdotainment. This is not wisdotainment. This is mad love.
Mad love is the deepest art in the world.
Ours is a particular kind of mad love. It is the mad love that recognizes the meta-crisis and the existential risk — a profound risk to the existence of our humanity. We recognize the meta-crisis, and we don’t turn away from it.
This morning I had a conversation with a wonderful person. He is one of the most famous theologian scholars in the world today. I was trying to explain the meta-crisis to him, and he said,
I was just tolerating you the entire conversation. I’m not interested in this. There is nothing. I can’t engage in this.
I was trying to explain to him the information ecology, and why it’s broken down.
Well, that’s conspiracy theory stuff, he said.
No, no, it’s not, I said. There are conspiracy theories, but there is also a deflection of what’s really happening by calling it a conspiracy theory.
I spent an hour in intense conversation, and this beautiful person, who I love dearly, looked away. He couldn’t look at it. It was too much.
We are not looking away.
You can come close, you can step back, but we don’t look away.
We are mad lovers of Cosmos. We are a band of erotic mystics.
Being an erotic mystics means to feel the Eros of Reality moving through me. I know that the Eros of Reality is the love story of Cosmos — and love stories have agony, and love stories have ecstasy.
I know that the agony and ecstasy of my love story —
of my Eros,
of my relationship,
of my broken heart,
of my trauma,
of my potency,
of my possibility,
of the weaves of my heart, the murmurings of the sacred that palpitate in the flutters of my interiors —
— I know that all of that is the Eros of Cosmos moving through me. I know that as I make movement, as I step into my new living space, and reconfigure my possibility to create, Cosmos is reconfiguring its possibility to create. That every move I make in my life, every breath I take is cosmic.
Learn about our different newsletters here—the first one (Center for World Philosophy and Religion) is all our posts together—the other ones are the different sections you can subscribe or unsubscribe to separately by managing your subscription:
And manage your preferences here:
The personal is the cosmic
The erotic mystic realizes that there is no split between the personal and the cosmic.
In the sixties, women got something incredibly important. By the way, I am in love with the Helen Reddy song, I Am Woman, and I love the movie also. I Am Woman, woman rises. Luria in the 16th century calls it tikun ha’nukba ‘the ascent of the feminine.’ Women realized that the personal, the sexual, the intimate is political. There is not split.
That’s just the beginning, though. It’s so much more than the personal is political — the personal is the cosmic. There is no split between the pulse of my own Eros —
my own fore-pray and my own foreplay,
my tumescence and my throbbing,
my agony and my ecstasy,
my holy and my broken hallelujah
— and the pulse of She desiring to write the next chapter in the Universe: A Love Story.
In this moment in time, the next chapter is written by those who say, we are willing to do the crossing.
We’re going to cross to the other side.
We’re going to become the new human and the new humanity.
We’re going to move from being merely Homo sapiens, when my Eros and my story and my sexuality and my agony and my ecstasy and my emotional structure and the gestalt of my psychology, it’s all about me. No, no, no. That’s not true.
The erotic mystic realizes:
It’s not my life.
It’s totally my life.
It’s not my life at all.
I didn’t decide where to be born, and when to be born, and to whom to be born, and with what proclivities, and potencies, and poignancies to be born. I didn’t decide any of that. It’s moving through me. It’s in me, as me, and through me — and all of it needs me.
And I am willing not to look away.
I am willing to know that my story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story.
I am willing to know that I am God’s verb, I am God’s adjective, I am God’s participle, I am God’s dangling modifier.
I am the grammar of the Divine in the world, I am the language of Goddess.
Goddess is infinite. God is infinite. God is intimate, and God is intimate through me, which is why we say, God is the Infinite Intimate.
The personal is the cosmic.
That’s the realization of the erotic mystic. That’s what an erotic mystic is.
The erotic mystic realizes that the personal is not only the political. The personal is the cosmic.
The Eros of my life participates in the field of Eros.
The Eros of my story, my personal story, participates in the cosmic story.
The core of my story is a love story. My story is a love story. That’s what my life is about. If I write my sacred autobiography, I realize it’s a love story. To love is to be on the inside. To feel unloved is to feel like I am alienated, and I am on the outside. To be an erotic mystic is to know that my love story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story.
To be an erotic mystic means to live on the inside. I’m not living on the outside. I realize that it’s not just that my story is chapter and verse in Universe: A Love Story. I am the author of the new love story. I am writing the new chapters, because it is an unfinished story.
And I am cause.
I am the direct cause for the evolution of love, which is the plotline of the Universe: A Love Story.
The plotline of the Universe: A Love Story is more love, and more goodness, and more truth, and more value, and more creativity, and more depth, and more poignancy, and more gnosis.
I realize that —
it’s not just that my story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story,
it’s not just that it’s an unfinished story,
it’s not just that I’m writing another new chapter in the story,
— I am cause for the advancement of the plotline of Reality, which is the intention of all manifest existence. Manifest existence does not exhaust itself in one dimension. We live in a multi-dimensional world.
For the first time, we are poised between utopia and dystopia.
We are in this moment of unbearable meaningfulness.
We are in this moment of virtually unbearable intimacy with all that is.
We are in this moment of virtually unbearable significance.
And when we can’t stand the significance, we look away into the details of our lives —
and we get lost in portended pettiness,
going down pathways of irrelevant,
avoiding the perils, but also avoiding the full potency and power and poignancy of our lives.
We turn away because the significance of my life in this moment of time is virtually unbearable, until I realize that I have power, until I realize that I can affect the whole thing, until I realize that I am cause for the evolution of love.
That’s our context. That’s our intention setting.
Prayer is a potency of human power
One of the key sacred skills, technologies, potencies is the potency of prayer.
This is our third conversation, but in some sense it’s our first, because we’re going to go deep into the very core of prayer today and next week.
Prayer is a potency of human power.
We normally think that prayer is an abandonment of human power, that prayer is an emasculation.
Kant famously said that modern people don’t want to be caught praying, because praying is an abandonment of dignity and of possibility, and of potency, and of power. This is the way we experience it. We feel like we have to turn to prayer because we are not sovereign.
That’s precisely not true.
Prayer is this potency of human power. It’s an unimaginable potency of human power.
We cannot engage the meta-crisis without a new Story of Value, which becomes a grammar of value, which allows us to overcome the global intimacy disorder and respond to the meta-crisis through creating global coherence and global resonance, which is required for global coordination. It’s only a shared Story of Value that allows us to overcome the global intimacy disorder —
which then allows us to create global resonance and global coherence,
which then allows for global coordination in response to global challenges.
Without that we can’t move.
An intrinsic dimension of this new Story of Value is prayer. Prayer is essential to the story. There are multiple forms of prayer we’re going to talk about, but there is a core to prayer without which we can’t move, without which we are lost in an unbearable, and inappropriate, and epistemologically wrong loneliness.
Because prayer is the beginning of the end of loneliness.
We’re going to talk about prayer.
It’s insanely great to be together. It’s just an insane privilege.
I want to ask you: Please don’t take it for granted that we are together. It’s a big deal that we get to understand each other and create a community —
which is committed to the evolution of love,
which is committed to telling the new Story of Value,
which is committed to not getting lost — as most people did in Florence in that original time between worlds in the Renaissance, when most of Florence was partying or involved in papal politics, but there was this small group of people who created the new world.
We need to be those people.
This is our generation.
This is our time.
This is our moment.
We are erotic mystics.
We are ready to go.
Reality is a series of sacrificial acts in which we are born
I want to ask you the formal question — like we do every week, but we’re asking it not for information, we’re asking it as a ritual.
Here’s the question: Are we ready to go the whole way in this lifetime?
Are we ready to play a larger game?
We are not just doing “spiritual.” We’re not doing New Age. We’re not doing fundamentalism.
Are we ready to play a larger game?
Are we ready to transfigure from Homo sapiens to Homo amor?
Are we ready to participate in the evolution of love?
Are we ready to take ourselves seriously — and confess not our sin, but our greatness; and to know —
that we are the CosmoErotic Universe in person?
That Reality needs our service desperately?
That when I transcend the narrowness of superficial fulfillment, and bracket my superficial fulfillment in order to access my deepest heart’s desire, we create a relationship of sacrificial reciprocity with each other.
We think that if we sacrifice ourselves, we are being victimized, or giving something up, but actually, we are only born in sacrifice. There is no fulfillment without radical sacrifice. It doesn’t exist.
Sacrificial reciprocity is a rephrasing of an expression from evolutionary thought, where we talk about reciprocal altruism. David Sloan Wilson wrote a book about it, an evolutionary biologist at Upstate New York in Binghamton.
We sacrifice for each other. To be intimate is to sacrifice, and to sacrifice is to be intimate; there is no intimacy without sacrifice. A relationship is always about what I am willing to give up. Relationship is always sacrifice. It’s never not. Sometimes a person has to sacrifice their mood. I can’t have my mood be my idolatry.
In the original Hebrew, the very word intimate, karov (korban), has three meanings:
I am intimate;
I am a victim;
sacrifice.
The reason it has three meanings is because we generally view making sacrifices as being a victim. But that’s not the nature of Reality.
Reality is a series of sacrificial acts in which we are born.
Mutual sacrifice is the ground for individuation.
Mutual sacrifice is the ground for Unique Self.
Why does Reality exist at all?
Because Infinity sacrificed Herself to create, to manifest Reality. And Infinity fell in love with the productions of time, wrote William Blake. God, Goddess, Reality is not just Infinite Reality, it’s the Infinite Intimate, and to be intimate means to sacrifice. There is no intimacy without radical sacrifice. There is no being born other than out of sacrifice.
I am born out of sacrifice.
Freud talked a lot about a drive for libidinal pleasure. Alfred Adler talks about a drive for status. And then, of course, along comes the third school of Viennese therapy, logotherapy; Viktor Frankl talks about this drive for meaning. And there are other people who talk about a drive for creativity.
But underneath all of that, there is a drive to sacrifice. It’s deep.
Eros is the right sacrifice.
If I don’t sacrifice myself on the altar of a right cause, which is Eros, then I am drawn in by pseudo-Eros, and I sacrifice myself in a way that destroys the world — in all the wrong places, on all the wrong ways, for all the isms, for all the ideologies of emptiness.
I sacrifice myself because I can’t live without self-sacrifice.
I am born in the sacrifice of self, but the sacrifice of self means I sacrifice superficiality. I sacrifice the surface. The Zen master says to the novice, die on the cushion. Sacrifice yourself in order to be born.
I don’t sacrifice myself in order to disappear. I sacrifice myself in order to appear.
I don’t sacrifice myself to abandon my desire. I sacrifice myself to identify my deepest heart’s desire.
The sacrificial reciprocity is at the heart of existence. Temple sacrifice, and all the temples in the world are but one expression of it.
And sacrificial act evolves. If we don’t clarify the sacrificial act, then we blow ourselves up in jihadi movements. People don’t blow themselves up in jihadi movements because they are crazy. There is a drive to sacrifice, and I think it’s a fundamental human drive. It’s a fundamental human drive to sacrifice ourselves, and it’s our holiest drive. But the sacrifice has to be an authentic sacrifice in which we are reborn, or it becomes a pseudo-erotic sacrifice.
The pre-modern idea of sacrifice is the beginning. It’s a contorted notion, but it’s pointing towards something. What it is pointing to is: if I don’t sacrifice myself, I want to kill myself. You can’t live without sacrifice.
Superficial hedonism is the refusal to sacrifice. But the depth of pleasure is right sacrifice.
My true desire is the desire of God
Intimacy is about sacrifice. No one wants to talk about it, they talk about self-fulfillment.
No. You fulfill Self through sacrifice. John Donne, come my darling that I may die with you. We have to die with each other in order to live.
But not to physically die.
Sometimes we have to physically die, but mostly we don’t. That hasn’t been demanded of most of us on this phone call. It has been demanded of many other people around the world. But most of us on this phone call, in the western liberal world, or conservative world — at least for now, that kind of sacrifice hasn’t been demanded. It’s a different kind of sacrifice: I’ve got to die to all that’s not my deepest heart’s desire.
I have to identify what my true desire is.
I have to clarify my true desire. My true desire is the desire of God.
It’s theosis: I am ontically identified with the Divine even as I pray to She. She holds me and yet, I am identified with Her, and my deepest heart’s desire is Her desire.
Devotion and desire are completely identical.
They are the same phenomenology. I am in mad devotion to you — whether it’s creatively, aesthetically, emotionally, sexually.
I am in mad devotion.
I am in mad desire.
They’re the same: devotion and desire.
We sacrifice ourselves in order to be born, which is why there is no split.
To sacrifice is not to be a victim. That's a false sacrifice. That’s pseudo sacrifice.
True sacrifice is: I sacrifice myself in the Field of Value in order to be born and individuated as the most glorious and wondrous Unique Self that’s madly needed by all that is.
It’s from that place that I pray.
That’s the context for prayer.
That’s who I am. That’s who I bring to prayer.
So, are we ready?
We are ready to play a larger game.
We are ready to participate in the evolution of love.
We are ready to do the crossing, to cross to the other side.
We are ready to be the ones that we’ve been waiting for. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
If you’re up for a small game, you came to the wrong place. I apologize for that. And if you feel like I’m a pain in the ass, you’re probably right. My mother thought so also. I apologize. And if there’s anything you think that I got wrong, take that for granted that you’re right. Who cares?
But let’s be in this together.
We need each other.
There is nothing more beautiful than to need each other. To need you is to love you. I love you, I need you. To really say ‘I love you’ is to say ‘I need you.’ It is not codependent need, not surface need, but the deepest, most profound need that beloveds have for each other at the very edge of fulfillment, where need is the highest dignity, where I say,
— Your need is my allurement.
Your need is my allurement.
Tell me how to take you home.
Tell me how to take you to heaven.
Let’s take each other to heaven.
Let’s be a Unique Self Symphony, where we feel each other. We know each other. We taste each other’s heart.
We are in the full dignity of playing our Unique Self instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
We see the meta-crisis, and we respond with mad sovereignty, mad agency, mad dignity, mad sacrifice, and mad self-fulfillment, and mad being born together.
These are the contexts.
These are the beginnings of the context for prayer.
We have de-storied the Cosmos
We live in a storied Cosmos. To step out of the plotline of the cosmic story is to lose the thread.
If you want to read maybe the best book in western literature that talks about losing the thread, it’s Kafka’s book, The Trial, where K, the protagonist, cannot find the thread of his story. He can’t follow what’s happening. He has lost the plotline. It’s incredible. Kafka’s incredible. He is talking about this sense that the modern human being has lost the plot line.
In some sense, premodernity falsified the story. Premodernity edited the story. Premodernity forged and plagiarized the story. Each nation said the plotline is the rise of my nation. The plotline is my ethnocentric triumph. The plotline is emasculation of self and obedience to a God, who is other and distant from Cosmos. It was a falsified story, sometimes distorted at its core.
But what happened in modernity is: we lost the plot line. We literally lost the plotline of the story. That’s what Kafka is saying through the figure K in The Trial. We’ve lost the plotline. We can’t find our way.
We have de-storied the Cosmos.
In order to respond to Reality,
we have to wake up — wake up to our genuine identity;
we have to grow up, and deepen our psychological maturity, and access, in a deep way, higher and deeper structure stages of developmental consciousness;
we have to lighten up — clean up the darkness, the shadow; we have to integrate shadow.
we have to open up to the Field and currency of Eros that moves through Reality.
Those are all true. Those are all important.
But I want to add one.
We have to story up. To story up is the opposite of to destroy. To destroy is to de-story.
Prayer and prophecy are the two major conversations in Cosmos
A story means there is a conversation: we are talking to each other; there is an exchange of information.
Information is not bits and bytes. Reality is composed of information, but information is not bits and bytes that are neutral. Information is meaning, as Warren Weaver, who wrote with Shannon at Bell Labs in the late 40s, correctly points out. Reality is coded with information means that Reality is coded with meaning.
And meaning means value. Every conversation is, implicitly and explicitly, an exchange of value.
Prayer and prophecy are the two major conversations in Cosmos.
In prophecy, God initiates and God invokes.
In prayer, the human being initiates and the human being evokes.
But in both conversations, there is a realization that we need each other. For divinity to sacrifice Herself (Himself, Itself — because divinity is not Him, Her, or It; it’s all of it), for divinity to engage in kenosis — to empty myself out in order to receive you — that’s a sacrificial act.
It’s not a thrusting forward. It’s a withdrawal.
Fore-pray is not about thrusting forward.
Fore-pray is about stepping back to make room for you, emptying myself out so you can be here, and be present, and be alive with me.
The Infinite says, I’m going to disclose myself not merely as the Infinity of Power, but as the Infinity of Intimacy.
In every generation, we have to call the new name of God disclosed in that generation — and calling the name of God from the previous generation doesn’t work. God doesn’t respond, and we can’t hear the Divine. God is the Infinite Intimate. In our generation, the name of God is Infinite Intimate.
All of the exterior sciences, all of physics, and all of chemistry, all of manifest Reality, all the way up and all the way down — all of it is in the Infinite.
And it’s also so intimate, and so close, and so filled with pathos.
There is this deep, subtle, emotional, sensual, erotic relationship between the human being and the Divine. The major text for that in the canon of civilization is the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, which is called the Holy of Holies, the ultimate song. It’s an intimate, infinite, erotic, sometimes bordering on pornographic, explicit love story of the lover and the beloved coming together in a particular way. There’s the Infinite and the Intimate. God is the Infinite Intimate.
By saying ‘pray to me’ God (She who lives in us and who holds) us is saying,
You have something that’s of value to me. I value our relationship. I need your prayer. Something happens to you that allows me to gift you, to hold you, to love you, to respond to you, to hear you when you pray. I manifested Reality in such a way that there should be not just the Infinite, but the Infinite Intimate, and the language of the Infinite Intimate is prayer.
When the lover is on her knees before the beloved, in the mad devotions of desire, they are praying.
They’re saying, I need you.
They’re saying, your need is my allurement.
Whenever we are on our knees, we are always on our knees to God.
God says to the human being, I need your prayer.
What could that even mean?
The Infinite Intimate says to the human being,
Your need is my allurement.
The ontology of Reality is Story. Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. And both the Infinite and the Intimate — the Infinite Intimate Divine and the infinite intimate human being, both God and man, both God and woman, both divinity and frail, and fragile, and glorious human beings, are the actors. We are characters together in the story.
We’ve been cast by Eternity in the same story as God.
God’s the playwright, and God’s also the casting director. She cares about the details of my life, of your life.
How shocking is that?
How could that even be — in a Cosmos that’s Infinite and vast with a hundred billion galaxies? Doesn’t that by definition mean that God doesn’t care about me?
No, not in the slightest, not in the slightest. It’s an infinite galaxy, with a hundred billion galaxies in it, with unimaginable possibilities for life, for a galactic teeming with life. But that doesn’t in any way undermine — if anything, it amplifies — the utter dignity of my personhood, which is madly desired by the Divine.
It’s a conversation. It’s a story. We are in the same story together. But not only are we in the same story together, we need each other in this story.
To lose the conversation, to step out of the conversation is to be alienated from the essential nature of Reality itself. We are no longer in the conversational Cosmos.
But it is a conversational Cosmos. The conversational Cosmos is a feature of the storied Cosmos.
Does that make sense?
Feel it.
Don’t think about it. Just feel it.
My story, my conversations are the text. My story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story, and my conversation is the text of the Cosmos’ conversation.
Prayer is the apex of conversation, which is initiated by the human being and invited by the Divine.
Prophecy is the apex of conversation initiated by the Divine and entered into by the human being. The human being does fore-pray for prophecy, in order to access the possibility of the prophetic conversation.
We know our stories matter
We need to reclaim prayer. We need to evolve prayer. We need to articulate a vision of evolutionary prayer.
And we need to reclaim prophecy.
The artist is the prophet — the artist in their depth, not the surface artist.
There are false prophets, and there are superficial artists — but the depth of the artist and the depth of the prophet participate in the same field.
That’s what we’re going to talk about in these weeks, my friends.
We are going to talk about prophecy.
We are going to talk about prayer.
We are going to talk about these as core categories of what it means to be a human being — but not an emasculated human being, a human being who’s potentiated with potency and power that is unimaginable.
Prayer is a primary human potency of power, and it begins with the realization we are in a story with the Infinite Intimate. Can you imagine being cast with God in a play, in a starring role?
That’s actually the nature of my life. It’s not a metaphor. It’s ontology.
And you know that this is true. That’s what David Copperfield meant. It’s what Dickens had Copperfield mean when he said, I want to be the hero of my own life. That’s what Laura Riding, the great literary figure, meant when she said, until the story of my life is told, I will go on quietly craving it.
We know that.
We know our stories matter. That’s all we think about all the time is our stories, and our last set of conversations.
We live in a conversational Cosmos. We are that conversation.
And we live in this depth of our story. We are not focused on our story because our therapists didn’t free us from our egocentric predicament, and our Zen master didn’t liberate us and teach us how to move beyond the story.
Of course we should get out of the recursive loops, and we should get out of the trauma voices, and we should do our trauma work. Of course we should die on the cushion to a superficial version of a victim story, of course.
But then we’re born into the ultimate dignity of my story.
If I’m 38 years old, or I’m 62, or I’m 78, the question is, what is the next part of my story? How does my story cause the evolution of love?
Every single person on this phone call will die because that’s the sacrifice. And we know there is continuity of consciousness, but yet we need to experience the sacrifice. Come my darling, I may die with you. But at the end of our lives, we die. At the end of our lives, we need to be prepared for a moment of radical sacrifice.
And it’s that moment of sacrifice that orients our life.
And then, that sacrifice births us into the next chapter in the story. That’s how it works. It’s a story. And there is a continuity of consciousness in the story.
I was reading Plotinus this week. Plotinus is unbelievable. He’s one of my favorite human beings. And I came across a passage in Plotinus, which basically says something like the following.
Because my individuality exists in the mind of God, and because the mind of God is never erased, so the continuity of consciousness is such that the irreducible uniqueness of my personhood never disappears.
It’s not just that there is this general continuity of consciousness in some kind of vague sense. No, I go on. I might not have red hair. I might have a slightly different body shape. I might be a boy instead of a girl, a girl instead of a boy. I might be rich or poor, I might live in a different place. But the essential unique dignity of my unique personhood, which is my unique story, goes on.
That’s where prayer comes from. That’s the context of prayer.
It’s also the context of prophecy.
Prayer comes through the Unique Self, and prophecy comes through the Unique Self.
In any authentic conversation, everything changes
We set the stage today.
We didn’t get there.
Stay in. I want to just invite you: Stay in.
We are building something together. We are trying to do something in the source code. We are not going for a quick hit. We are in.
We’ve got to democratize prophecy.
We’ve got to reclaim evolutionary prayer.
That’s what we’re here to do. We’re going to unpack it step by step.
Next week, we’re going to pick up from here, but if you haven’t been here, you can just start afresh next week. We are going to enter our fourth conversation on prayer. We are deepening until we’re going to explode in ecstatic prayer.
We want to evolve the source code itself. We want to actually begin to feel and reclaim prayer in the very source code of Reality itself.
Whenever we’re on our knees, we’re always on our knees to God; and in that, we’re born. We die to superficiality. Opposite of the sacred is the superficial.
We’ve said before that the Hebrew word, Messiah, means the most beautiful, and good, and true world that we always imagined as possible.
It means the potential for a world in which debasement is not at the core, in which dignity is at the core. Human dignity, with no one left out of the circle, in which every conversation is a sacred conversation, in which conversation is not a ritual of rejection, but a ritual of mad love.
The word Messiah means conversation. That’s what it means. The vision of the possible world is a world where conversation happens the way it should. Every conversation — if I’m living on the inside, if I’m an erotic mystic — every conversation changes Reality.
Converse means it turns it around. It reverses.
Conversation is both a verse (it’s a text of the cosmic scroll) and it’s converse (it flips everything around). In any conversation that’s authentic, and real, and goes all the way, everything changes.
Remember, there is no split between desire and devotion. Whenever we are on our knees, we’re always on our knees to God. Madly!
This is Part 3 of a series Talk to God. Part 2 here. Part 1 here.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni
LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online]