439—Talk to God Part 4: Prayer and Prophecy as Core Human Potencies in the Conversational Cosmos
Prophecy means you have a direct experience of being personally addressed by the Infinite Intimate that knows your name and is madly in love with you. That is conversation.
This is Part 4 of a series Talk to God. Part 3 here. Part 2 here. Part 1 video here.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 9, 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 Dorothea Betz).
Without a new Story of Value we lose the plot
Who are we? What are we doing here?
We are sitting in the heart of the Cosmos with our hearts aflame, with this deep knowing, both of the peril and possibility of this time.
We understand in our heart of hearts, on the Inside of the Inside that it's not about taking a deep dive into prayer, but it's about feeling the whole and feeling the urgent need at this moment in time to evolve the source code of culture and consciousness in response to the meta-crisis.
It is only telling a new Story of Value that is real, that can respond to the meta-crisis. It is new. It is emergent. It is a story. Story is the core structure of Reality, and it is a Story of Value.
I begin to be able to establish that value is real.
I begin to be able to identify the plotlines of the story.
When I locate myself within the story, my life comes alive.
If I can't locate myself in a story, if I have lost the thread, I am somehow lost in the labyrinth. If I can't find the plotlines of the Universe Story within myself, as they live in me, then I wind up plagiarizing my life. My entire being winds up being filled with grammatical errors, false constructions of sentences, distorted motifs, corrupted plotlines.
I am out of integrity with the vectors of my own life.
Even if I can manifest some degree of success,
I won't feel alive.
I won't feel at home.
I won't feel welcome in the universe.
That is why we are here. We are here to be welcome in the universe.
❖ The personal crisis of my life and the meta-crisis are the same crisis.
If I manage to be successful in a sick society, I will still feel sick. To be successful in the sick society we have created—
I have to abandon the authenticity of my life.
I need to, in some sense, abandon my heart.
I need to, in some sense, lose my deep sense, my deep compass, my deep orienting vision.
I need to abandon that orienting vision, that vision of value, that vector towards a victorious life, towards a triumphant life.
If I follow the interior vector of my soul, I will be unsuccessful in most of my life.
If I follow the vector of my own interiority,
if I follow the vector of the plotlines of value, which are the plotlines of the universe, which is ultimately the Universe: A Love Story, I will be in some sense unsuccessful.
To be successful, I have to become a kind of apex predator.
I don’t want to be an apex predator.
I want to be in the crucible of the heart.
We have created a society where to be successful, I need to be sick. If I am healthy and whole, I may well not be successful.
We are at this very precise point where there is this variance between the plotlines of the universe, which have been somehow corrupted in the way we have told the story of human life up until now. That is a very, very, very tragic disconnect, and that is what we are here to heal. We need to make that whole. That is our response to the meta-crisis.
The revolution is about healing the disconnect, and that can only be done by reorienting ourselves to the plotlines that have never been clearly articulated.
In Premodernity all of the different religions ignored the deeper underlying truths and actually focused on their individuated truths, as important as they were, but they all contradicted each other.
Modernity tried to create a broader shared sense, but then modernity said, we made it all up. Modernity didn't know how to locate it. Modernity didn't know how to recognize that value was real. So, modernity thought we could get away with ‘as if’.
Postmodernity then called the bluff of Modernity and said, you can't do ‘as if’. Doesn't work. We have to actually know that value is real, and Postmodernity said value is not real. So, therefore Postmodernity opened us up to the triumph of the superficial success story.
In the world today, we see the notion of success in its most superficial limited sense, success which achieves a certain level of surface prosperity and status within this one dimension, within this limited lifetime, often at the expense of others is the goal of life.
That is the source of the meta-crisis.
The meta-crisis is built on and emergent from a story of rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics, which itself, when you iterate that story again and again, destroys Reality. We are here to reorient, to retell that story. We are going to do it a chapter at a time.
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Prayer and prophesy—two conversations
We are going to talk about the chapter of prayer. Prayer and prophecy. We want to work those chapters in the plotline of Cosmos, because prayer and prophecy are two core dimensions of the plotline of Reality. Without the plotline of prophecy, without the plotline of prayer, I get lost.
The question is: Are we ready to play a larger game? This is not about self-help. We are beyond superficial fulfillment, beyond ‘seven steps to’.
We are participating in evolving the source code of culture and consciousness which is the evolution of love.
That's what we are here to do and we are madly delighted.
We are awake. We are alive. We are madly delighted. We are willing to be madly delighted. Let's do this.
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.Talk to God, because God wants to talk to you, and you want to talk to God, and this conversation is the purpose of creation. If this is true, everything changes. If I take this seriously, not as a dogmatic claim, but as a direct gnosis of the nature of Reality, everything changes.
Talk to God because God wants to talk to you. Do you feel that sentence? If that sentence does not give you chills, then I don't know, you have a fever and not of the right kind. This should give us a fever. This is a feverish set of words.
Talk to God because God wants to talk to you! Let me just stop there for a second. We are so used to hearing words. Let's just get that first sentence.
Talk to God because God wants to talk to you. If we just go on talking after hearing that sentence, we are out of our minds. We are asleep. We are in a torporific slumber. Let's see if we can get that again. I want to just read that again.
Talk to God because God wants to talk to you. Really? God wants to talk to me? Really?
I just want you to notice for a second, if you can—and I apologize to everybody for giving everybody a little bit of a hard time now—it is like we are asleep. We are like, okay, okay, we got the Code, we read the code, we got the context, this is exciting. Hello? What did Robin Williams say? How did he begin that movie? Good morning, Vietnam! Like, hello. Hello! Oh, my God!
Talk to God because God wants to talk to you. That is called prophecy, by the way. God wants to talk to you. That is prophecy, which is a primary potency of Cosmos.
❖ Prophecy is a conversation in which the Infinite, the Divine initiates and Divine invokes.
We think prophecy is like God is reading Aesop's fables out loud, or God is reading the Book of Proverbs to you out loud. That is not what prophecy is.
Prophecy is an erotic, passionate, mad love conversation in which the prophet is completely overwhelmed and overtaken and knocked on her feet and spread open and pulsating and trembling ecstatically and throbbing with the God voice.
In hearing that voice, the prophet is ravished open, and all ruptures disappear, and the ecstatic urgency of rapture takes over, and the conversation obliterates all else.
All of Reality is already good.
I realize I am completely welcome, and it is all already true and it is all already beautiful. That one moment of prophecy gives me the experience of truth.
Reality has truth in it
Reality has infinite care
Reality is filled with qualities of unimaginable intimacy and goodness.
That is the nature of the lover's conversation.
Prophecy is God, Infinity, She, He being madly in love with me, and being desperate to talk to me. Then I realize something else. I realize the second part of the Code: I want to talk to God!
What does it mean I want to talk to God? It means that
I want to be fully received.
I want to be fully welcomed.
I want to be fully heard.
I want to talk to God.
I want my Beloved to hang on to every word.
I want my Beloved to be there after all the witnesses are gone.
I want my Beloved to embrace all the shattered vessels of my broken heart.
I want my Beloved to witness my wholeness and my goodness.
I want my Beloved to know my superpowers.
I want my Beloved to not just love me but to madly adore me.
I want to talk to God.
I want an Ultimate Lover who knows my name and who loves me desperately.
I want to talk to that Lover.
I want to talk to that Lover in the face of my human beloved.
But I don't want to export that lover only to my human beloved. I don't want to give any separate self that power over me. I want to be madly in love with my human beloved, with my friend, my sister, my brother, my wife, my lover, my old friend, my new friend, my teacher, my colleague, my partner, my outrageous lover friends in the bands of outrageous lovers.
That is all true. But all those loves are rooted in something deeper: the Ultimate Lover who I am desperate to talk to, who knows my name, who made me manifest, who is in love with my unique configuration of beauty and goodness and desire and yearning in this great production of time in this great manifest world.
There is no future. There is just this crazy, wondrous, insane second right now where we actually can read this Code and say, oh my God, here is the Code! This is an Evolutionary Love Code. What does an Evolutionary Love Code mean?
❖ An Evolutionary Love Code is a structure of Reality.
That is what an Evolutionary Love Code is. It is an Evolutionary Law. It is a Code of Reality. It is not a dogmatic claim.
It is a knowing, it is a gnosis of the interior science that we articulate as an Evolutionary Love Code, which is validated by multiple streams of information through all forms of gnosis—interior and exterior.
So, talk to God. This is the Evolutionary Love Code.
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Cosmos is all about wild erotic conversations
Talk to God, because God wants to talk to you and you want to talk to God. This conversation is the purpose of Cosmos.
What we are saying here is that a plotline of Cosmos is conversation. We live in a storied Cosmos.
How do we talk about Reality? We live in a storied Cosmos, a Cosmos of stories, and a key element of story is conversation.
Story is the nature of Reality.
Reality is a story.
Reality is not merely a fact; it is a story.
The key dimension of story is conversation.
It is a storied Cosmos or, another way to say that, it is a conversational Cosmos.
The goal of Cosmos is to have a wildly ecstatic, delighted, fully heart-ripped open, erotic conversation. That's what Cosmos is about. Cosmos is about erotic conversations that are free. You are not charged for them. That's what Cosmos is about.
It is about wild erotic conversations, and, as you know, there are 12 billion years of Eros, before there is any sex. So, erotic conversations are not necessarily sexual conversations. That is just one small subset of erotic conversations.
Erotic conversations are conversations with my heart ripped open.
God is desperate to have an erotic conversation with me. Goddess is desperate to have an erotic conversation with me. The Infinite Divine, the Infinite Invisible, which is fully manifest and always visible, who we name God as the Infinite Intimate, is desperate to have a conversation with me, desperate to talk to me—And I am desperate to talk to God.
That means the plotlines of Cosmos are:
One: story
Two: conversation
Three: personhood
❖ Cosmos is personal!
There is a personhood to Cosmos. Richard Feynman, the physicist, talks about this sense of first-person all the way down.
Of course, first-person at the atomic level is different than you and me talking.
That is why we don't marry atoms,
we don't go out with atoms,
we don't do kind of certain kinds of conversations with atoms.
When we are lonely, we don't call an atom.
Evolution of personhood
And yet, there is a dimension of personhood. Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician who wrote Principia Mathematica with George Bertrand Russell, called it prehension. Prehension is this first-person desire to touch and be touched that lives all through Cosmos, argues Whitehead. It is also ratified by Richard Feynman, the physicist and ratified by the complexity theorist, molecular biologist, Stuart Kauffman in a complex paper.
There is some sense of first-person all through Cosmos.
There is a personhood to protons. There is an evolution of personhood.
Personhood means there is this sense of aliveness. There is a feeling. There is some sense of feeling. A rock doesn't have a feeling, but all the atoms of the rock do in some sense.
In other words, there is a sense in which atoms, molecules, macromolecules have feelings. That is different to the feeling that a human being has.
There is an evolution of feeling.
There is an evolution of pathos.
There is an evolution of personhood.
Then personhood moves into the sentient world, into the world of life.
Then personhood evolves all through the world of life through all the stages of the biosphere. Then the biosphere triumphs in the noosphere, the world, the depth of the self-reflective human mind.
Then there is this evolution of personhood through all the stages of history.
We experience how ontogeny and phylogeny recapitulate each other. That is a fancy way of saying we experience that evolution of person within our own lives. There is evolution of personhood. Reality is personal.
In other words, the sense of the enlightenment teachers, that say, we have to move from the personal to the impersonal is a mistake.
There is a level one personal. That is personality, separate self personality. That level one personal is reaching for something. I have to clarify that level one personal in order to access the personal Field of the Cosmos.
I have to go from level one personal, which is all of me, separate self and I have to access this larger Field, which the enlightenment teachers call the impersonal, but that is a mistake. It is not the impersonal. It is the infinite personal that holds all the personhoods. So, it is impersonal in the sense that it is not level one personality. It is impersonal in the sense it is beyond the state of merely personality of station one.
At station three we reclaim the personal on the other side of the impersonal.
Station one: separate self, personal.
Station two: True Self impersonal. It's the total number of True Selves is one. I am beyond the personal.
Station three: and I reclaim this higher individuation in the context of this larger union within the Field.
I am no longer just a separate self.
I am in the Field.
I am in the Field of personhood.
Out of that field of personhood, I individuate as, oh my God, as me.
Here I am.
So, now I am the individuated personal that comes out of the Field. So, that Field is the Field of Eros. That Field is the Field of love. Now I am the individuated personal. Now I am Unique Self.
❖ From that place of the individuated personal, I can hear prophecy.
Prophesy can be clear or distorted
This is so deep. It is so crazy deep. You can't hear prophecy at the level of separate self. Prophecy is not clear. You can't hear a clear prophecy. You can sometimes get what is called the aspaklaria d'lo nahara, a distorted prophecy. But you can't get aspaklaria d'nahara, a clear prophecy, when you are not at that place which is the personal beyond the impersonal.
So, what we call in the canonical texts of the Solomonic mysteries false prophets, are people who are hearing prophecy either at the level of separate self/personality, which is bounded in the broken structures, in the fragmented places, in the broken vessels of the skin-encapsulated ego, which hears, but can't get the transistor clear. The vibrational waves, the sound waves are not coming in clear. You are getting a distorted signal.
Or you have a second kind of prophet who is hearing from this place of the impersonal. It might be a place of ideology which erases the personal, this place of the state or the religion or the kingdom or the tribe which effaces the personal.
We can get a prophecy from there, but it is from this impersonal place where the personal has been effaced, and you are going to get a distorted prophecy from there as well. You can hear something, yes. You can hear a voice, but it is distorted.
❖ You can't have a real conversation unless it is face-to-face.
Moses speaks to God face-to-face and face-to-face means the clarification of the face.The word face, panim, means interior.
It is the clarification of interiority, which is the personal beyond the impersonal.
That is the antenna that receives prophecy.
Now, you can be a prophet too! And you should be a prophet, but you can't be a prophet without the circumcision of the heart. The circumcision of the heart means the willingness to sacrifice.
I have to somehow surrender my trauma.
I have to surrender the recursive loops of my victim story.
I have to surrender the comfortable old slippers of my identity that keep me closed down in the personal before the field of the impersonal.
I have to be willing to somehow surrender into this larger field, which I have done time and again. I'm inviting you to do, but not in order to die in that separate field.
I have to start by dying. Die on the cushion, says the Zen master.
I have to start by dying, and then I am reborn. That is where the idea of being reborn came from. I am reborn into my Unique Self. I have to die to my separate self, my psychological personality that is actually searching for something. It is looking for something. It is reaching for something.
I have to experience the bliss crucifixion of the ego in order to be resurrected into my Unique Self.
My Unique Self is the antenna, the unique antenna of the search engine of the Cosmos, which is listening for the Divine conversation that addresses you directly.
When you hear the divine conversation that addresses you directly, you begin to be a prophet. Then you have something that you desperately need to share.
There is a conversation you desperately need to have.
You begin to become an artist. An artist is a form of prophet when the artist gets clear.
Artists are a form of prophet when they get clear
Artists think that they can just be in their pathos, they can just be in their pathology, and the more pathological you are, the better artist you are.
Not true! When you clarify your pathology into the root of your pathos, and then you follow the root of your pathos home to the root of your gorgeous, wild, unimaginably bliss-beautiful-crucified-resurrected Unique Self—then you become an artist!
Not all artists are the same, just like not all prophets are the same. You can have false artists, like you have false prophets. We think there can be false prophets and no false artists. Not true!
It takes everything to be a great artist. You have to be a prophet to be an artist, and we are here to be social artists, spiritual artists.
That is what it means to be Homo amor. It is to be a spiritual, social artist.
To be the artist of myself, to engage in my own self-creation.
That means I have to access and find and reach for the personal, the irreducible Unique Self, which is the quality of the personal beyond the impersonal.
Through my Unique Self I access, I can hear, I can dial into the voice of prophecy that personally addresses me directly.
That is a conversation that exists in Cosmos. I swear to you that it is true. I swear to you that prophecy is real.
Prophecy means you have a direct experience of being personally addressed by the Infinite Intimate that knows your name and is madly in love with you. That is conversation!
That is conversation. That is prophecy!
The poet has to reach for the prophetic. Poetry is at its best prophecy, but at its worst, it is lazy. We don't want lazy prophecy. We want the bliss-crucifixion that leads to resurrection.
What is that bliss-crucifixion?
What is that sacrifice?
We have to talk about that. It is wildly exciting. It is wildly beautiful.
❖ It is a sacrifice which doesn't kill me but births me.
I just want to establish today this principle. We need to be prophets. We need to re-invoke the capacity for prophecy, which means simply that I am addressed directly by a Cosmos, which is infinitely personal.
My uniqueness is the attractor for the voice of prophecy
When people say, “okay, God is not personal”. No, no, that is not true. Personal and personality are not the same. God is not personality; God is not a big separate self personality in the sky or in the depths.
But God is not impersonal. To say, “God is impersonal” is like when we say, “God is not physical.” When we say, “God is not physical”, we mean the concreteness of the properties of physicality are not concrete enough to exhaust the utter substantiality of God.
Physicality is too insubstantial to be the substantial body of the Christ, of the Christos, of Vishnu, of Rama, of Sita, of the Earth and Sky, of the God force. The God force is infinitely substantial, and the physical is too insubstantial to be the Divine. That is what we mean when we say, “God is not physical”.
When we say, “God is not personal”, we mean the separate self, skin-encapsulated, egoic personality. That is beautiful, it is reaching for something, but really, it is not personal enough to be the Divine.
I have to first surrender in the bliss-crucifixion into the Field that I am absorbed by the Field and then the Field births me into my irreducible uniqueness, which is the infinite quality of my infinite personhood. This then becomes the antenna, the attractor, the strange attractor, that which allures the Infinite Divine who desperately wants to talk to me and whisper sweet nothings filled with everything into my ear and my ear alone in that intimate glance.
I am intended and addressed personally
That divine whisper that is intended for me from the beginning of all of eternity. And all of eternity is sufficient and all of manifestation is sufficient for that divine whisper to be whispered in my ear and received. All of Reality has realized its intention.
And that is what the mystics meant when they say, bishvili nivra ha'olam, a person who is alive has to say, the world was created for me. Bishvili, the world was created for me. The word bishvil means for my path, which is my unique capacity to hear the voice. Ah, wow!
If the voice that I hear doesn't resonate with the larger Unique Self Symphony, I am probably distorted.
But the voice that I hear—if I am really listening—that voice that I hear has a message. And I am the messenger.
What happens to most of us is, we are the messenger who forgot the message.
The message is encrypted in my Unique Self.
That message becomes available for me through prophecy.
Prophecy is encoded in Reality.
Prophesy is activated personally by me when the voice addresses me personally.
I want to be really clear. This voice is not a recording that was left for me.
❖ The voice is alive now, addressing me right now.
It is not a recording that I activate. It is not mechanical. It is not that I have pressed a button and activated some music intended for me.
No, no, no! She is there! He is there!
The Infinite Divine Intimate is there holding a violin, holding a trombone.
I am ready to play and She is waiting to play music for me—now! Right now! She wants to play music for me, which is the music of prophecy, which is available, which is activated. I arouse that unique incarnation of She that addresses me personally and She is desperate to be in conversation with me.
That is just the first line of our code!
Let's go back to our code: Talk to God because God wants to talk to you.
It is a conversational Cosmos, and it is a storied Cosmos.
My story is not my victim story.
My story is my Unique Self story.
My Unique Self story is that sensuality that arouses the central unique voice of the Divine whispering in my ear about me and about my life and inviting me to share
my message,
my gift,
my unique quality of intimacy,
my unique perspective to step up and co-create the world.
That is the beginning of the new world. That is the beginning of beginning to play my instrument. It is the beginning of our movement towards a planetary awakening and love of Unique Self Symphonies. Wow!
Oh my God! Let's do this together. Cha! Mad love. Mad honor!
This is Part 4 of a series Talk to God. Part 3 here. Part 2 here. Part 1 video here.
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