441—Talk to God Part 6: “A Blaze of Light in Every Word, the Holy and the Broken Hallelujah”: “I am Prayer” Sacred Autobiography - Your Story IS Prayer

My sacred autobiography, my story is prayer. Va’ani tefilla, I am prayer. My story is prayer.

Mar 28, 2025

This is Part 6 of a series Talk to God. Part 5 here. Part 4 here. Part 3 here. Part 2 here. Part 1 video here.

(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 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 Kathy Brownback).

Summary: Prayer is to experience the unique life force within me as my sacred autobiography—to know that “I am Prayer.” In prayer our individual will unites with the holy in the new Story of Value. Not an easy path—holy and broken hallelujahs line the depth of our unique stories. But the meaninglessness of postmodernism is a greater pit into which much of culture has fallen, shredding our covenant with each other and with future generations. Re-stitching that fabric is the evolutionary task of Homo amor.

What a crazy joy!
It is great to be with everyone.

Let’s set our intention.

We’re trying to do something very specific, very ecstatic, very sober, very serious, very wildly responsible, and wildly ethical, and wildly erotic in the deepest sense of Eros, 12 billion years of Eros before there’s any sex, wildly on the Inside of the Inside, wildly caring, wildly feeling the joy and feeling the suffering, and feeling this unique moment in time. All that’s part of our intention.

And our intention is to respond with all of that feeling tone into this moment in time, into what Zak Stein and I have called “a time between worlds,” or “a time between stories.” In the space in between, this empty space, as the poet Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

And we don’t quite know how to slouch towards Bethlehem. “Surely some revelation is at hand,” Yeats writes.[1]

Sacrifice is key to the evolutionary process

We’re in this time between worlds, this time between stories. In this space in the center, which seems empty, evolution can make a monumental leap, as evolution does in accordance with the law, which is:

the law of transformation
the law of sacrifice
the law of sacrificial action.

And we’re going to spend an entire week, in the next couple of weeks, on the law of sacrificial action, which is the law of intimacy. In the original Hebrew, the word for radical intimacy and radical sacrifice is the same, because to be intimate is to engage in sacrificial action.

All forms of intimacy involve a sacrificial action, which is received and witnessed by the beloved after all the witnesses are gone. And so we are in this time between worlds.

The first shock of existence is the realization that we human beings die. We encounter our death, which is sacrifice. And we’re only born anew from the full embrace of that sacrificial moment. We encounter our death, the first shock of existence at the dawn of humanity, when human beings realize, not just biologically that we’re going to die, but we have an experience of death.

And the second shock of existence is not at the dawn of existence, the death of the individual human being, but in this moment in time, this moment of meta-crisis, this time between worlds, this time between stories, when we realize that we face the potential, and even potentially imminent, death of humanity.

So, if the first shock of existence is the potential death of the individual human being, until we’re reborn, then the second shock of existence is the potential death of humanity.

And we face our death. And our death doesn’t kill us, but our death presses us into service, presses us into being reborn. And that’s the process of transformation, which is the evolutionary process.

It’s good science. I’m describing now good science. This is not just the interior sciences. This is the essence of the scientific paradigm at this moment in time.

If you can get beyond the superficialities and the jargon, science has recognized that in the evolutionary process, which is a sacrificial process,

I sacrifice what I am now for what I might become. And something new is born.

That’s what this moment is. That’s this time between worlds, this time between stories.

And in this moment in time, we have to stop competing for clicks with other organizations. And we have to stop spiritual or moral or cultural or public intellectual grandstanding, in which we’re just another form of commodifier seeking to accumulate likes and views. We have to actually realize the nature of this moment in time.

We have to enter into the urgent, ecstatic, painful, sacrificial act of opening up our hearts and minds and souls and swallowing whole:

all of culture
all of the past
all of the strains of gnosis and knowing from the ancient world, the traditional world, the pre-modern world,
all of the strains of gnosis and knowing, all of the knowledges, all of love’s knowledge born from the modern world
all of the strains of gnosis and all of the knowledge of post-modernity.

We can’t just dismiss post-modernity as being some horror. Post-modernity has insight. It has something to say. It’s important. It’s true, unimaginably partial, but it has some truth.

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Finding our shared story of value

So, we have to gather together, weave together in an act of tantra. Tantra is to expand beyond my narrow limits and then to weave, tantra, weave together a new Story of Value rooted in the deepest understandings of:

the exterior sciences
the chemical construction of Reality

o the connectivities
o the conduits
o the synapses
o the systems of complexity and allurement.

We need to realize, to feel all of that, to be able to see beneath the jargon of dogmatic scientism and into the eye of spirit, which is science—both interior sciences, sciences of my own interior transformation, and the sciences of the prior condition that’s evolving within me.

The sciences of the deepest Inside of the Inside, my own mysteries, which are the mysteries of the all, the mysteries that live within me, the interior sciences—we need to merge, to integrate those sciences with the exterior sciences, with all of the classical forms of knowing, in particular today some critical forms of science:

molecular chemistry
organic chemistry
molecular biology
evolutionary biology
cellular theory.

And we need to merge those, bring those, weave those together in a new Story of Value that we can tell anyone around the world. That is actually a shared Story of Value because

Without a shared Story of Value, we can’t end war.

I shared with some of you yesterday about a dialogue I recently did with a beloved young man who was doing a series of dialogues on war. He’s a great young man. In those dialogues the assumption is that war is an inevitability—for which we must somehow mythologically kind of understand why is that true in the psyche of man, what’s mythologically true in the psyche of the human being that war is an ever-present feature. No, that’s not the case. That’s not the case.

We have to come with the prophetic call of beating our swords into plowshares. Of lo yisah goy el goy cherev, no longer will a nation lift up sword against nation. Ve’lo ilmedu od milchama, we no longer need to spend all of our resources on war and not on education and health and wisdom and flourishing. Lo yilmedu od milchama, we will no longer need to spend our time in the art of war. And my sons won’t need to be commanders of commandos in order to prevent terrorist assaults, blowing up buses with schoolchildren. My two sons won’t need to learn the art of war anymore.

That’s only possible if we actually articulate a new Story of Value, of intrinsic value, inherent value. That’s only possible if we recognize that Cosmos is coded with value. Not possible any other way.

And it’s not happening at Oxford. I was at Oxford. I wrote my doctorate there. It’s not happening where Zak was at Harvard, where he taught in the School of Education, where he did his doctorate. It’s not happening there. It’s not happening at Harvard, not at Oxford, not at the Sorbonne, not at the University of Arizona, no place in Europe.

The university, the academy, it’s not going to come from the academy. The academy is confused. The academy has lost its ability to make discernments around ethos. The academy has actually led the charge in the flatlanding of Reality, in the flattening of Reality, in the denial of distinctions, in the failure to cultivate discernment between the most elemental forms of good and evil.

And the academy has made the false claim, based on confused value theory in postmodernity, that:

Value is not real
Story is not real
Story is contrived
Reality is “just” stories
Stories of value are contrived.

And that false claim has spread throughout the world.

And that indeed, as the parrot of post-modernity[2] declares again and again in 50 million books sold, indeed our superpower is to:

make up stories that are not true
teach them to our children
convince them that they are true
use them as organizing principles of Reality
so we can dominate the planet.

This is what he views as both the superpower and tragedy of the human being. But how could it be anything else, writes Harari, because value is not true. It’s just made up and stories are not true and there are no stories of value, and there is no evolution of value.

Any meaning that you ascribe to your life is mere delusion.” –Yuval Harari (italics his)

Delusion means psychosis, mental breakdown. So, here we have this figure who’s the potent parrot of post-modernity, whose books are endorsed around the world by all the leading figures in the legacy institutions, and who also writes bedtime stories for children. An entire industry, writing a series of children’s books to teach children that:

all the heroes in the bedtime story are just made up
none of the values are true
they’re all contrived
they’re just a means of organizing and controlling Reality.

In other words, a recipe for totalitarianism, a recipe for the death of our humanity and that becomes the dominant voice at the very center of culture.

And I’m just setting our intention. We realize that that this precisely is the cause for the meta-crisis. That the meta-crisis is our incapacity to respond to global challenges with global solutions because we don’t have global coordination, because we don’t have global coherence, because there’s no global resonance, because there’s no global intimacy between us, and there’s no global intimacy because there’s no shared Story of Value. There’s no shared Story of Value because post-modernity, emerging out of modernity, has told us wrongly that value is not real, that it’s made up.

And religions are lost in their own win-lose metrics, peddling their dogmas instead of disclosing the universal ground of the divine and allowing for the emergence of the evolution of Metatron, of the new human, which is the human divine.

It’s only the emergence of the new human, which is the natural movement of evolution itself, who breathes in Reality in a different way. It’s only the movement from Homo armor, armor as Wilhelm Reich described it, Homo armor to Homo amor.

Homo amor is the personal face of the amorous Cosmos. Who am I?

I am Homo amor
I am the personal face of the amorous Cosmos
I am the CosmoErotic Universe in person
I am a unique individuated expression of CosmoErotic Humanism

The new Story of Value is the realization that I am CosmoErotic Humanism in person.

And that that is not a fanciful conjecture. That’s not a fundamentalist claim. It’s not some abstract discussion about love or some kind of fundamentalist/New Age discussion that’s not grounded in science, not grounded in Reality. No, no, no.

Actually, the realization is that:

we live in an Intimate Universe
the Intimate Universe lives in us
we live in a CosmoErotic Universe
we are the CosmoErotic Universe in person
the new Story of Value integrates the best gnosis of ancient, modern, and postmodern eras
the new Story of Value is the urgent, desperate need of this time between worlds and time between stories.

And that’s what we do here in One Mountain. That’s what One Mountain is.

So, if you want to know where you landed—if I want to know where I landed—where did we land? That’s where we landed.

And we are dead serious about this and we are filled with laughter. We don’t take ourselves seriously at all. We make fun of ourselves all the time, as well we should.

And we take this more seriously than anything in the world because it is more serious than anything in the world. We are the only voice of trillions of unborn children. That is actually true.

We can become intimate with the future

It’s very hard to be intimate with someone you’re living with, let alone to be intimate with someone who lives next door, and then to be intimate with someone who lives across the country, and then to be intimate with someone who lives across the world. And by intimate, I mean to feel that person, to receive that person, to feel them on the inside of the inside.

We can talk about it, we can read it, but to actually feel the person I’m talking to right in front of me, and to feel the person who’s feeling me and know that they’re feeling me—that’s harder. It’s easier just to read the texts. It’s so hard to be intimate with a person who’s living in Bulgaria, or who’s living in Tanzania, and so Tanzania says about Vermont.

Can you imagine how hard it is to be intimate with a person who lives in a different time? A person who is from the future. We’ve gotten really good at becoming intimate with our caricatured visions of people from the past. Not that we really feel them, but we pretend to feel them. We have no way of feeling the people from the future. We’re not intimate with them.

But if we become Homo amor, then we actually enter into the field, into the current of eternity. And eternity, as we’ve said together so many times, is not everlasting time. It’s beneath time and beneath space. So, when I get beneath time and beneath space and I feel the current of eternity, I become intimate not only with my traumas of yesterday, with my memory of the past, I become intimate with my memory of the future and I become intimate with he and she that live in future times. I become intimate with the children of the future, with the boys of the future, with the girls of the future, with the men of the future, with the women of the future, with the non-binary of the future. Become intimate with everyone.

And we feel them calling us and saying, oh my God, this is yours to do. Most of the world is in denial of the meta-crisis. Or those who have studied the texts carefully are in doomer mode. And so, who’s going to discern and tell a new story of the baby face divine? Who’s going to Da Vinci as a verb? Who’s going to dawn a new era? Which is what’s always happened in evolution.

It’s always the leading edge of evolution that says

we’re going to discern
we’re going to see
we’re going to divinize
we’re going to engage in divination.

And divination means we’re going to access a memory of the future.

And we’re going to tell the story of the humans that we can become.

Who must we become to become Homo amor?

Who must we become to survive and to thrive?

We’re in a time between worlds and a time between stories, which means that if we don’t cross over to the other side, the bridge over the river San Luis Rey[3] will collapse and not just five people will be killed. There is existential risk—that humanity will go extinct or humanity as we know it, the death of our humanity.

That’s what One Mountain, Many Paths is. It’s about who we must become. That’s what this is about.

We’re so grateful to each other. We’re here in Unique Self Symphony together. I’m not trying to share information. I’m trying to share invocation. So, I just want to give you an example.

Join the conversation below:

Prayer as a Human Potency

We’re in the middle of up leveling this understanding of the nature of Reality. As part of it we want to talk about prayer, prayer as a human potency. Both the New Age world and the scientistic world dismiss prayer. The religious part of the world embraces prayer. If we distort what prayer is, we create polarization. At the very heart we create this alienation, at the very heart of Reality. We create this global intimacy disorder.

So, one of the things we want to do is reclaim prayer. We’ve been working the last five weeks to articulate a vision of prayer, an evolutionary vision of prayer that:

liberates and evolves the sparks of the great wisdom traditions on prayer
articulates the greatest insights about prayer that emerge from the potencies of the new sciences
begins to articulate a new vision of Reality in which prayer is a primary human potency.

That’s what we’ve been doing the last five weeks.

I’m going to add one piece to that this week, but in doing that, we’re not just giving a talk on prayer. We’re re-weaving the Cosmos. We’re restitching the rends, the tears in the cosmic weave. That is the global evolutionary cosmic tantric act: to re-weave. The Solomonic mysteries call it tikkun, to fix, to heal, to re-weave the tears in the fabric of Cosmos itself.

That’s not a denier move at a moment of meta-crisis. It’s not a doomer move at a moment of meta-crisis.

It’s a dawning of the new human move. It’s a Da Vinci move. It’s a discernment move. It’s a divinization, an articulation of a memory of our future. That’s one thing we’re doing.

Two, at the same time, we are looking to claim, to reclaim our human experience. We want to reclaim the essential experience that there’s a shared Story of Value. Because without a shared Story of Value, there is no value in saving the future.

There is no capacity to become intimate as the new human, as Homo amor, with the members of the future, with the babies of the future, and the boys of the future, and the girls of the future, the children of the future age. We can only find the children of a future age when we can become intimate across time.

Can you feel that, everybody? We can become intimate across time. We realize the covenant is between generations. Ve’shamru bnei Yisrael et haShabbat, and the people of the covenant will hold the Sabbath time. La’sot et haShabbat, and they will live in the Sabbath time, meaning they’ll step out of the busyness in order to reflect on the nature of Reality. And they will create a b’rit, a covenant, beini, between me, u’bein bnei Yisrael, and between the children of Israel.

And that sacred text is usually understood as a covenant between beini, God, me, I’m God, and the children, the people, the children of Israel. But the erotic mystics in the Solomonic mysteries, they said, no, no, it’s so much deeper. Like, open my heart, open your heart. They say the covenant, the covenant is beini, is bein bnei Yisrael, is between the children of Israel.

And Israel means Israel, chapter 32, Book of Genesis, those who wrestle with God. It’s a covenant between the God wrestlers in every generation.

It’s not a covenant between some God outside of the world and some emasculated human being in the world.

It’s a covenant between the generations to participate in the story of evolution of love.

To cause the emergence of the new human, to cause the movement from Homo armor to Homo amor. And each generation passes its baton to the next generation. And then there are moments of acute crisis. And we are in a moment of acute crisis, unlike any we’ve ever had in human history, where the baton has been passed to us. And all of the gnosis of premodernity, modernity, and post-modernity lives with us.

And either we’re going to turn away, and we’re going to stop and be arrested in post-modernity and assume that stories are not real and value is not real—Harari being the parrot of that impotent position: let’s download it into children’s stories.

Or we’re going to actually participate in the evolution of love and actually reclaim value and reclaim story so that we actually can come to a place where they shall not learn war anymore.

Yuval predicted that based on the Western liberal secular story, that despite its being grounded in nothing, as he presents it, nonetheless, we’ll be able to get to a place, which he predicted a decade ago, where we’re going to be beyond war. As an historian of the world, he said we’re already beyond war just about entirely, and we’re beyond plagues. That’s how Harari opened his major work. We’ve moved beyond war and plagues.

Is that true? No. He got it completely wrong. Of course he did.

You can’t move beyond war and beyond plagues unless you have a shared Story of Value that allows for global action in response to global challenges, which is rooted in global resonance, which is rooted in the global shared Story of Value.

So, when COVID came, no one could get together. No one could organize information, which is meaning. No one could exchange conflicting forms of information, and Yuval himself came down on one side of the COVID conflict and called everybody else a conspiracy theorist. He just dismissed everyone else as being somehow a wack job, conspiracy theorists. He didn’t actually recognize that there were different currents of value that were saying things that were important that needed to be listened to, because actually there’s intrinsic value.

And of course, wars are now abounding again around the world in tragic ways, because we can only get beyond war if we recognize there’s a shared ground of value that lives inside of us, because the Intimate Universe lives in us, and therefore that which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us.

The Prayer That is My Story

Let’s see if we can bring these two things together, story and prayer. We want to show that story and Story of Value is real, and that story is a core structure of Cosmos, number one. And prayer.

I want to deepen something of our understanding of prayer. There’s a text of David, who is Solomon’s father, Solomon of the temple in Jerusalem, Solomon of the Ark of the Covenant.

And the text is, va’ani tefilla. I am prayer. Not the words I read, not the Dharma, not the prayer. No, no. I, I am prayer. My feeling tone. I am prayer. Not “I am.” I am prayer. I am not just awareness, I am prayer. Va’ani tefilla, I am prayer. Lecha Adonai, and I am in mad devotion to the Field of the Divine. Eit ratzon, and this is the moment of my will, ratzon, the moment of my will. And my will means ratzon, which derives from the first chapter of the Song of Solomon, in which the lover says to the beloved, draw me after you. Mashcheini acharecha, draw me after you, narutza, I will run to you.

And it’s describing that moment in the Field of Eros where I’m seduced by holy seduction. Not unholy seduction, not the seduction of greed, but the seduction of Reality that seduces, that allures me to fulfill my deepest need, which is the realization of my most profound identity.

Who am I? I am prayer. I am a song of prayer. My life is prayer. The poetry of my life is prayer. And the prophecy of my life is prayer.

I am prayer, I am poetry, and I am prophecy.
I am a priest. I am a poet, I’m a prophet.
I’m a priestess, I’m a poetess. I’m a prophetess.

That’s who I am.

And my prayer, the prayer that I am, that is my will—which is the unique life force incarnate in me, which emerges from the unique poetry of my life—is my story.

The invitation of my life is not to move to a place where I realize nothing needs to be done. It’s to move to a place where I realize that everything needs to be done. And it can all be done by me. And in some sense, it’s all already happened. But it also all needs to be done.

My story is my unique letter in the cosmic scroll. My story is my sacred autobiography. And biography is not a human invention. My sacred autobiography is the language of my poetry, which is the language and disclosure and the revelation of my prophecy. And I can go round and round. And I can have tears streaming down my face from pathos.

And I will not yet be in my prophecy unless I am in the center of my story, where I can feel where I’m intimate with Reality, where I’m engaged in a sacrificial act, where I let my rage go, and I let the inhibitions of the egoic self go.

And I am actually in devotional service to Reality.

And I realize that Reality is in devotional service to me in every moment. And we are in an intimate, erotic union, dancing together for the fulfillment, for the good, for the joy of all.

And my gift, my song, my unique song, my letter in the cosmic scroll, is inscribed in my sacred autobiography.

We are messengers who have forgotten our message. And my message is my story. And my story is my prayer. Va’ani tefilla, I am prayer. I am prayer. I am prayer. And my prayer is unique.

There’s a tradition in the Solomon Mysteries that the person who writes a prayer acrostically, in an acrostic, signs their name in the prayer. We sign our name. Why would the writer of the prayer, the author of the prayer, sign their name? Is this kind of egoic flourish? No. I’m signing my name because that is the signature of my life.

When I am born, my birth is an outrageous love letter from infinity to finitude, written in the language of my story, written in the similes of my story, written in the metaphors of my story, written in the psychological dynamics of my story, written in the poetry of my story.

And when I live my story, live your story is the categorical imperative of Homo amor. Live your story. Live it all the way. Live it out loud. Live it fully. Don’t be an imitator. Don’t be an idolater. Don’t live someone else’s story. Don’t live in imitation. Don’t live in comparison.

Live the depth of your story
Live from that unique musical refrain, which is the music of Cosmos played on the harp of your soul
Live that story, that poetry, that music
It’s what you were born to live
That music is your unique instrument in the Unique Self Symphony
That music is desired by all that is
That music was intended by all that is
That music is recognized and heard by all that is
That music is chosen by all that is
That music is adored by all that is
That music is needed by all that is

I am prayer. Va’ani tefilla. I am prayer. Va’ani tefilla, and my prayer, my very being, lecha Adonai, is for you. It’s that I am in mad devotion to you.

When I’m filled with mad, authentic, clarified desire, I don’t go to rape and pillage. That’s not desire. That means I can’t find my desire. That means I’m in a kind of pseudo-paroxysm of anti-desire and anti-Eros and anti-value.

When I’m filled with desire, I go to ravish your heart open in devotion. There’s no split between desire and devotion. When I’m filled with desire, I climb and ascend the mount of Dionysus. Dionysus in his full holiness. Not in his abandon. I abandon only my ego and I claim, as the Dionysian prophetic God, I claim my utter commitment to the depth of your full experience of aliveness and your goodness. And I, with your permission, on my knees, I become divinity in motion screaming the name of God in mad devotion to your emergence.

To love you madly is to bracket my egoic self in devotion to the gorgeous emergence of your music. Desire and devotion are the same. Va’ani tefilla, I am prayer. And when I am prayer, I’m in the depth of my song and my music and my story, my unique story.

And my story is in devotion to the whole thing. I want to give a gift to the all. I’m a superhero. I feel the all in me and the all desires and needs me. I’ve moved from Homo armor to Homo amor.

I’m no longer only in relationship with my immediate egoic survival circle, which is egocentric.

I’m no longer only in a place where it’s just me and my people, which is a broader egocentric. It’s a tribal egocentric. We call it ethnocentric.

I’m not just for human beings. I’m watching the movie Avatar, and I’m the colonel, I’m for all the human beings. It’s another form of being. We call it world-centric.

Every human being is beautiful, but it’s not big enough. It’s not wide enough. We’re in a galactic world. We’re in a world with animals and plants and a biosphere. I’ve got to move to become cosmocentric.

I don’t just sing the song of my egocentric world. I don’t just sing the song of my ethnocentric world, my tribal world. I don’t just sing the song even of every human being, the large, beautiful tribe of human beings, of Homo sapiens.

I actually move from Homo armor to Homo amor, and

I sing the song of the Cosmos and every animal and every babbling brook
I’m madly in love with nature herself and with every dancing molecule
I move from the global human to the galactic
I create a society of Homo amor, which sends a signal into the Cosmos, which allures galactic life, and a new conversation begins to take place.

I know that all of that moves through me. That’s what Homo amor is, I feel the whole thing. I’m willing to wake up and feel everything, to be in mad service to the whole, to know that the prior union that’s always ever and already true is only complete, is only perfected in my perfection, and I know that my transformation transforms the whole thing, and that my song is prayer itself.

Abraham Kook opens two volumes he wrote, which were collected at the end of his life, and more after he passed, and they’re called Olat Re’iya, The Great Sacrificial Act of Vision, and they’re about prayer.

And the opening line is, hanefesh mitpalelet tamid, my soul is always praying, whenever and wherever we are on our knees, we’re always on our knees to God.

And we need to weave together today all of the songs, the songs of science, the songs that deny superficial visions of spirit, that heresy which is faith, which is so important. All the songs of spirit that deny the superficial songs of the old religions that claimed ethnocentric privilege and domination.

We need to take the best from the fabric of the real, in all of its apparitions and all of its shimmering, in all of its glimmers and glimpses, in all of its disclosures, and weave it together into the Story of Value in which we all live, in which I realize my story is chapter and verse in that larger story. That’s the dignity of my life. That’s my dignity. My dignity is to know that I am prayer. My story is prayer.

I want to go for a moment to a song. But first I’m going to ask David to read us the code, so we’ll know the code that we’ve been speaking into this week. Then I want to look at the text of prayer as it has entered culture.

This Weeks’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. I am prayer.

In other words, the story of my life is the way I talk to God. Now, there’s a direct conversation where I turn and I have a direct conversation. But that conversation is actually always happening. Hanefesh mitpalelet tamid, writes Kook. The soul is always praying.

And I’m praying when I live the depth of my story:

I pray with my feet
I pray with my arms
I pray with my belly
I pray with my eyes
I pray with my body swaying in the motions of life in all of its ways

o in all of its undulating
o in all of its turbulence
o in all of its tumescence
o in all of its torporific moments.

I am prayer. Every move I make, every breath I take, I am prayer.

And Reality, She, the great story of Cosmos, desperately wants to receive my prayer, which is to receive the depth of my story well lived, my story fully lived. And my story fully lived means I’ve transformed. I’ve become, I’ve moved from Homo armor to Homo amor.

That is what human life is about. Human life is about becoming a God man and a God woman, nothing else. That is the entire purpose of all of Reality.

And that’s the evolutionary realization: that one occasion wants to birth a new occasion, and that new occasion has depth that the previous occasion didn’t have.

And that we go from matter to life to the depth of the human self-reflective mind, and we go through all the levels of humanity until the human being, just like macromolecules awaken as cells, the human being awakens as a conscious, aware, cellular structure, irreducibly unique in the great mind-heart body of the galactic and post-galactic, the cosmic, the Infinite Divinity.

I am God’s unique intimacy. I am the unique intimacy of the Infinite Intimate. My story is chapter and verse.

But it’s not a psychological realization. I actually realize I’m always singing. I’m always playing my instrument. I am always in the art of my life, and I’ve got to be willing to lay it down. I’ve got to become truly the hero of my own life, to become the hero of God’s life. When I become the hero of my life, I become the hero of God’s life.

And then I realize that every breath we drew was hallelujah. And I want to look at the song for a second, at the lyrics. It’s where we’re going to end, and we’ve been sharing Leonard’s Hallelujah as our prayer for probably five, six, seven years now.

And I want to understand why, and that’s what this was all about. When we pray, we turn to Cohen’s Hallelujah. So, turn with me. Let’s look at Hallelujah. Everything we said today was but to read, Hallelujah. So, I want to just read it. Let’s kind of feel it for a second. It’s just stunning.

The Baffled King Sings Hallelujah

And now I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord. Let’s talk about David and David’s life. David, Solomon’s father.

But you don’t really care for music, do you? And Cohen is saying, do you want to listen? Do you want to come in with me? Do you want to hear the story of music? Do you want to hear what it means to live and play your own instrument, your secret chord that pleases the Lord? That’s music.

And it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift. And who are we? We’re the king, but we’re the baffled king. And all of our lives, our sacred autobiography, we’re composing hallelujah.

Then we go into David’s story. Samuel 2 chapter 11. David is the baffled king. Your faith was strong, but you needed proof. And then you were allured. You saw this beauty. You saw her bathing on the roof. Her name was Bathsheba. Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you. She took you out of your story. She confused you. She tied you to a kitchen chair. She broke your throne. She cut your hair.

But through it all, you offered your story up as prayer. And from your lips, she drew the hallelujah. But it’s not an easy faith. My sacred autobiography being prayer is not an easy hymnal of any kind. I’ve got to be in my life, and I’ve got to be willing to be in the agony and the ecstasy of it until it transforms into hallelujah. And it only does that when I realize it’s all hallelujah.

Well, maybe there’s a God above. And let’s talk about the power struggle that lives in our lives. Maybe there’s a God above. But all I’ve ever learned from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. The power struggle that we all have to go through and have to let go of.

And then we realize it’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light. It’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light. Can you feel that? It’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light.

But what is it? What is it? It’s something else. It’s something else. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah. But even in that cold and broken moment, can you feel that, my friends? Even in that cold and broken moment, it’s still hallelujah. My sacred autobiography, my story is prayer. Va’ani tefilla, I am prayer. My story is prayer. My story is prayer, poetry, and prophecy. It’s all hallelujah. It’s all hallelujah.

Well, people, I’ve been here before. I know this room. I’ve walked this floor. You see, I used to live alone before I knew you. And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch. But love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

Do you see what Cohen’s doing? What Cohen is saying is it’s all hallelujah. The way my life becomes a prayer is when I realize that whatever happens,

· I’m transforming
· I’m ripping my heart open
· I’m loving the moment open
· I’m becoming more divine

o more discerning
o more filled with the lips of glory
o more whole
o more able to drop on my knees, in devotion in a second
o more easily apologizing
o more fiercely audacious and standing for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

It’s always hallelujah.

He talks about sexing, Leonard Cohen. There was a time when you let me know what’s really going on below. And then sometimes, sometimes we lose access to our own bodies. And that’s okay. Because we have the memory. Remember when I moved in you. The holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was hallelujah. And just the memory is enough. And we look in each other’s eyes and we hold the memory. And our hearts are aroused again.

And sometimes we feel like we’re taking the name of God in vain. We took the wrong cause and the wrong path. You say I took the Name in vain. I don’t even know the Name. But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you? Because here’s the thing. Here’s what I got to know. I know one thing, I know one thing only. There’s a blaze of light in every word. It doesn’t matter which you heard. The holy or the broken hallelujah.

Does everyone get it? Do you get what Cohen’s doing? Cohen is telling the story of his own sacred autobiography. And it doesn’t tell you what he’s doing. And he’s screaming, my life, my story, is prayer. Va’ani tefilla, I am prayer. I’ve done my best in my sacred autobiography and my story. I know it wasn’t much. I couldn’t feel, I tried to touch. I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you. And even though it all went wrong, I stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my lips but hallelujah.

And it’s then I realize that all of our stories are inscribed in the lips of God, not only stories of Allah, not only stories of a particular ethnocentric Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu. I have to be willing to create a pluralistic world, meaning there’s got to be place for everyone in that world. And I’ve got to be willing. I’ve got to be willing to follow a story back to its root to understand what’s happening. We live in a broken information ecology.

And if you form your understanding of a story, based on what you see right in front of you in that moment, then you can’t track the story. You can’t trace the story. You’ve got to be able to distinguish, to discern, to disambiguate, to trace a storyline, to clarify a storyline. Does that make sense? You’ve got to be willing to follow a story back to its root, whether it’s a political story or a personal story. Otherwise, you can’t distinguish. And that’s not easy, and it’s painful. But you can’t create peace. You can’t move beyond war unless we have a shared Story of Value. And a shared Story of Value has no room for any people that’s not willing to create a pluralistic democracy.

Deepest bow, my friends. Deepest bow. We’re here to reweave, to re-fabric Cosmos, to re-narrate, to evolve the story, to tell a Story of Value in which we can all live. And at the heart of it, I am prayer. Jew, Christian, and Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, atheist, agnostic, I am prayer. And value is real. And I am value. We hear each other and we feel each other. Mad love.

[1] William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

[2] The Israeli writer Yuval Harari, author of Nexus, Homo Deus, Sapiens, Unstoppable Us, and 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century

[3] An image from the novel by Thornton Wilder