446—The Teaching of CosmoErotic Humanism:”Love Is the Placing of Attention”
The placing of attention is an act of love.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [April 27, 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 Talya Bloom).
In this Time Between Stories, We Need to Go Deeply Inside
Oh my God! We are in Holland. And it is a mad delight to be here, where many of us are traveling on the way to Mystery School. It’s great to see everyone. Oh my God!
Where are we? We’re in One Mountain, Many Paths. We’re in a time between worlds and a time between stories.
And a time between stories simply means a time when we don’t know how to orient. Our story is our North Star—but not a story which is a made-up story, not a contrived story, not a story which is “just a story”—but a Story of Value.
We’re in between stories. We’re in this place in between.
Where do we go in the place in between?
Where do we go?
Where do we find ourselves?
Where we go in the place in between is we go inside.
We’re in this time between worlds, this time between stories. Let’s find ourselves again, and then we go inside. Now notice what just happened. I was trying to get inside and then something takes you out from going inside. But it’s actually on the inside that we find the new story. So stay with me, my friends. Okay? Tender. Everyone, can we be tender here, like crazy tender? We find it on the inside, but it’s not easy to get inside.
So I got here to Europe almost a week ago. My dear friend, Aubrey, an initiate into World Philosophy and Religion and world religion, who’s going to be here with me at the Mystery School together with so many incredible people: Dr. Kincaid, Kristina Kincaid, my beloved, will be teaching. Vylana will be bowling and singing, Shimon will be here. And then this entire incredible team will be here. Aubrey actually just got here.
And so all through the week, I was trying to find my way in. Does that make sense? I was trying to find my way in.
What needs to happen here?
Because it’s not exactly a transformational event. It’s not exactly a seminar. It’s a Mystery School.
So Mystery School is we’re trying to reorient not only ourselves, but we’re trying to find our way, it’s our orientation to everything.
We’re trying to reset the orientation of Reality itself that has lost connection to itself.
And so what does that mean, that it’s lost connection to itself?
So does it mean that the oceans are not oceaning? Well, in part, it does. Dead zones in the oceans as big as Montreal and as big as actually half of Canada.
We have dead zones in the oceans.
We have biosphere depletion and degradation.
And we have probably 20 or 30 years to actually ecosystem collapse.
But that collapse is based on something deeper, which is our inability to get inside, to find our orienting North Star in the interior axis of Reality, to kind of set things right—because we can’t get inside.
So I’ll tell you something completely wild. This is absolutely true. I promise. This has just happened this afternoon.
I was trying to find my way inside. The trouble was is that we were doing so much this week in terms of so many various forms of preparation. So I had a phone, simple phone. And on my phone, I have WhatsApp, simple program. My simple program, my simple WhatsApp program. Now this WhatsApp program is such that people would text me and ask me just little questions. “Should we do this? Should we do that?” Very fair questions. Each one took about two minutes.
Each time I stopped trying to get inside to respond to a WhatsApp, which is about 25 times a day, I had to step out or respond to the WhatsApp and then try and get back in. It generally took me about 20 to 25 minutes each time to find my way back to where I was before. I couldn’t quite find my way back. And so I kept trying to find my way, but I couldn’t do it.
So I was actually up… my beloved, Kristina Kincaid, will attest to it. What would happen is it would get quiet around 11. So then basically 11 to pretty much, KK, what, five? Like eleven to five, every night I would have some degree of quiet, and it would get even quieter. And then, of course, people would start texting from the United States, but I’d turn the phone off.
But I still couldn’t quite get quiet until today. I stayed at this hotel where I am right before coming to the castle, and I had four hours of quiet this afternoon. And literally, I fell inside.
Pages literally got written.
Everything just constellated, organized itself, capitulated.
Connections started to become apparent.
Relationships, subtle directions, possibilities, potencies, new fragrances, new potentialities literally just in the last three, four hours.
After a week of actually quite painful frustration, I began to feel literally the fragrance again. I could feel like, “Okay.”
And again, I was trying to feel deeper than, “What’s a good program?” Who cares what’s a good program? Not even interesting.
It was more like,
What do we need to do in this moment to orient, to affect the future, to ripple into the time stream, to ripple into the Eros of Reality, and to create a sacred domino effect?
But instead of causing dominoes to fall, it’ll cause dominoes to stand, to stand proud and strong and to begin to ripple—
first to trickle like a stream,
and then to ripple like water,
and then to begin to torrent like a wave,
and then to become a mighty ocean of goodness.
But in order to try and feel that current, I had to get inside. It is such a struggle to get inside.
Your Attention Increases Exponentially When Your Phone is Unavailable
Now I’m going to tell you something. It’s amazing. We have about 15 studies that were done over two years. Nicholas Carr, in his five books, has collected some of this research, and he did a good job.
Here’s a study. Let’s say you have your phone. This is completely true. This is validated.
You can look at Nicholas Carr. He first started collecting these studies in his 2010 book called The Shallows, which is on the nature of the digitized society.
So if you have your phone, you have your phone, let’s say you have it next to you. Okay? Like this. You have it next to you. Right next to you. Everyone with me? You have it next to you, but you’re not looking at it. You decide not to look at it. That’s one level of attention.
Now stay with me. If you turn your phone over, your attention literally goes up in a significant percentage. Now stay with me for a second. You can literally feel it.
I could literally feel it. And I would be hesitant to turn my phone off because I didn’t want to not be available for people who are in the middle of a process, people who I love and are these incredible, Unique Self Symphony of gorgeous human beings. And I didn’t want to like, “Wow, I won’t be able to help them.” So I never wanted to turn my phone off.
\So I would turn my phone off. And literally, I could feel, as I turned my phone off, this relaxation go through my body. I would fall in.
And then I’d say, “Oh my God!” I would turn it back on, then I’d turn it back off, and you’re like, “Oh my God!” Right?
Now watch this. So Carr cites a recent study that was done again—it’s been done several times over the last 12 years—where if you actually take your phone out of the room, you not only have turned your phone off, but you take it out of the room. It’s in a different room. It’s not available to you. It’s simply in a different room.
—Even though I would put it in the bathroom and shut the bathroom door—
Your ability to be creative and to access depth information exponentially increases. Now I just want to notice something with you. Okay? I just want to notice something.
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We Desperately Need to Place our Attention on the Creation of a New Reality
So we’re at this moment in which we’re in a time between worlds and in a time between stories.
We desperately need a North Star.
We’re faced with a meta-crisis of unimaginable proportions
—and we’re going to talk about the meta-crisis in an entirely new way starting tomorrow.
We’re going to talk about the new Story of Value in an entirely new way starting on Tuesday.
And we’re going to enter into a new set of doors and hopefully be able to evolve the source code together and to engage in a process of transformation, which literally can potentiate the transformation of the whole.
It’s an incredibly important and exciting and tender and fragile and poignant moment.
We’re at this moment where we desperately need to go inside in order to find our way—and yet the digitized environment prevents us from going inside.
In other words, we desperately need to place our attention on the creation of a new Reality. And yet, we can’t—because our attention is being hijacked in every possible way.
Does that make sense?
When Infinity places Her attention, She generates finitude—Reality, creation, the manifest. That’s what the manifest is.
And the placing of attention is an act of love. Love is the placing of attention.
Love is the Placing of Attention
Love is the placing of attention.
When you place your attention on someone, all that attention is not just this half hour or this hour or this five minutes or this ten minutes. It’s every time you step out of your flow and you place attention, you place attention because you’re loving madly.
And you want to bloom your beloved. You want to bloom Reality. You want to get beyond and take off the armor, you want to unguard your heart.
It’s about unguarding our heart and falling inside.
Like, “Wow!”
And we’re going to journey both in the body with Aubrey, with Kristina Kincaid to unguard our hearts, and to go so deeply into the heart that the heart, which is actually the organ of intelligence—
We know that intelligence resides in this nexus between the brain and the heart. And there are specific forms of intelligence that reside specifically in the heart.
And there is both the cognition and mathematics of the brain, but there’s also the heart math.
And a group of people, a group of wonderful people, I know a couple of them started an organization called HeartMath, around the mathematics of the heart.
And the mathematics of the heart is the mathematics of intimacy.
But it requires us getting so quiet. So quiet. So quiet. So quiet.
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We Go Deeply Inside and Get Really Quiet
We place our attention inside our hearts and we begin to listen. And we disclose what we call anthro-ontological truth, that ontology, that the true nature of Reality itself lives in the depth of the heart.
Rachmana Liba Bai, the Aramaic Masters. She desires the heart. It’s so deep. She desires the heart. She wants the heart.
And the heart is the seat of wisdom. And the heart requires my ability—now, stay with me now—to drop inside. Can we do that right now together? We literally drop inside. And I have to clarify my heart.
In order to clarify my heart, I’ve got to get so unimaginably quiet. I have to get beneath all of the categories and begin to hear—not the drama. Lo b'ra'ash Adonai. Not in the drama of noise is God.
Ve’lo be’ruach Adonai. Not in great spiritual demonstrations is God.
Ki im b’kol demama daka - the still, small voice that lives on the inside of the inside.
Does that make sense, everyone?
So tender. So tender. So tender. Yeah. Like that.
And we’re so fragile.
We think that we’re immortal. We think that we live forever. We don’t quite own or get our own fragility. We don’t get or find our own fragility.
We’re so fragile. Life is so beautiful and so tragic. It’s so beautiful and so tragic.
And so I just want to show you something. I’m doing this thing, which my friend Daniel suggested I do, called nebulizing. And all of a sudden, you realize the very fragility of our breath. My friend Sally Kempton, Swami Durgananda, died from lung disease. And I went with her to the hospital for the first time in Denver in like 2009. And she died in 2023. But she had shortness of breath.
To be able to breathe together, to pay attention to our breath, to be in the mad joy of being alive together. And then to get so quiet.
Now stay with me, friends. Stay with me. So quiet.
I remember driving up to Bangor, Maine from New York when I was 20 and 21. It’s a particular place in Bangor, Maine, which is on the northeast tip of the United States. And I would drive and at a certain point, when there were no cars, I would pull the car over and turn the lights off. It was a straight road. Stars in the sky. 3:00 AM in the morning is when I like to drive. You could hear every animal. I’d step out of the car.
Can you feel that? So deep inside. So deep inside.
In Kashmir Shaivism and Hinduism, there are particular chants that are aligned to requesting, to desiring, to praying for certain kinds of gifts from cosmos—which means that those chants have to be precisely calibrated to the very rhythm of some of the interior sequences of cosmos.
I don’t want to go into the interior science of it now, but—how did they know those chants? So there’s no question in my mind that those chants never would’ve become available in my hotel room the last week with my cell phone on, answering texts. Never. They never would’ve been available.
They were available because the ancients went so deeply inside.
We have to go so deeply, literally to the inside of the inside—and that’s where She lives.
My Clarified Heart: All In For All Life
When we get to the inside of the inside, we have to clarify our heart.
The prophet is the one who speaks from the heart—but there’s also a false prophet. Meaning I’m in my flaming heart, but the prism through which I hear the voice of the heart is distorted.
It’s very deep. I’m in my heart. My heart is speaking, but the prism through which I hear the voice of my heart is distorted.
So I have to clarify the voice.
How do I clarify the voice of the heart?
How do I not be a crusader going to the Holy Land to slaughter infidels? Or how do I not be a Moor marauder slaughtering Christians, or the Moors and the Christians slaughtering the Jews, or the Sunnis slaughtering the Shiites?
How do I access the clarified voice of my heart?
How do I access a voice which is literally all in for all life?
And that’s one of the ways that you know: to be all in for all life.
All in for all life. No one’s excluded.
And stay close. It’s deep. All in for all life doesn’t mean that all life is equal. It doesn’t mean we treat bacteria in the way we treat human beings—there are our natural hierarchies of life. So a stone covered with bacteria—if you break the stone, you don’t go to prison for that.
A human being, who’s perfected the bacterial systems—human beings are hosts to extensive bacterial systems. If you kill a human being, you do go to prison.
Because there’s an appropriate hierarchy; there are different levels and qualities of life.
But all of life matters. And all of life is deeply interconnected. And when I get deeply quiet, I can feel that.
I know I am because we are.
Does everyone get that?
I am because we are.
And we are because I am.
And they can’t be split.
And so I can actually feel the field of life, and I become all in for all life.
Feel that? All in for all life. No one’s excluded.
And I begin to be able to feel the living field.
That’s what we call the sacred.
To Be Holy Means To Be On The Inside
What we’ve described up to now is what’s called—the English word is—the sacred. That’s what the sacred means. You ever heard the word holy?
What does it mean to be holy? We don’t know.
What does it mean to be holy? To be holy means to be on the inside.
Does that make sense? That’s what it means to be holy, literally. In the sacred texts, the mikdash, the sacred place is called penima, the inside place.
The sacred place called the Mikdash.
The sacred place is called penimah, literally penimah means the inside place.
So there’s a mikdash, there’s a temple that is in the center of my soul.
The very center of my being is a temple, is a sacred place. It’s deep in the heart.
And that point of the heart, that inside place, that temple is the most inside of the inside.
Lifnai vlifnim, it’s the inside of the inside. It’s the most interior point.
But I can only get there if I unguard everything.
To unguard my heart, to remove all the armor, all the lies, all the pretenses, anything that blocks the currency of Eros from moving uniquely through me in the temple of my heart.
My heart is a temple.
All the way inside. All the way inside.
Waking Up and Opening Up
I open up—what’s called opening up. It’s not enough to wake up. We talk about waking up. Waking up is to be aware that I live in a field of awareness—classical enlightenment practice. But that’s just the beginning.
I’ve got to wake up—and then my waking up has to be merged with opening up.
When I wake up to my True Self—
My True Self is Eros.
It’s not just awareness. That’s a mistake. My True Self is not awareness. It’s not consciousness in any sense of awareness—although it is that, but it’s much deeper than that.
Wake up merges with opening up, and I open up and I’m in the Field of Eros. I’m in the Field of the Heart, and I’m in the Field of the One Heart, the One Power, the One Love.
One heart, One Power, One Love. In that field. Here I am, I’m in that Field. And then the desperate screaming stops.
I want to be open.
I want to be true.
I want to receive.
I want to get bigger.
I want to transform.
I’ve got to go from separate self to True Self. So I’ve got to do this very deep process. And in True Self, I am this Field of Eros, I’m opening up to this Field.
And then I individuate as this unique point of heart, which is a unique point of the divine Heart that is the temple that lives uniquely and specifically and particularly in me, as me, and through me. And that is my value.
That is my unique value, my unique valentias, my unique valentine—same word.
It doesn’t matter where we are this week. Lots of us will be together, online, in person. But if for some reason we weren’t ready to come—we were going to come, but somehow we stepped back, we were afraid to take the plunge, we didn’t have the conversations necessary, we couldn’t quite get there—that’s also perfect. That’s also perfect.
Then we’ll rip our hearts open from that place. And we’ll hold hands. And we’ll create together—wherever we are.
Just feel this with me for a second.
To actually know that I am a temple.
And my heart space is a quality of intimacy, a quality of interiority, which is some point of the divine heart that only pulses through my heart.
That the purpose of my being alive is to unguard sufficiently so that I taste that and know: that’s who I am.
And then I pour that taste into Reality.
Because Reality is hungry for my taste.
I’ve got to get so quiet, so quiet, in order to hear the beating of that unique point of the divine heart for which I was born and which pulses me.
And my friends, we’re so fragile.
We’re so fragile.
And we’re so fabulous and strong and resilient and potent and powerful.
And it’s only when we embrace that fragility that the feverish fantasy of the depth of our fabulousness finds its way forward.
So good to be together. So good to be together. And at the center of this great revolution, this response to the meta-crisis is no one person, certainly not me.
At the center is the Heart, the One Heart that beats uniquely in each one of us in a Unique Self Symphony.
And then the symphony creates a new heart and a new pulse and a new symphony.
As our hearts entrain to each other, our heartbeats literally entrain to each other, and a new pulsation emerges in the world from the band of Outrageous Lovers, from the field of erotic mystics, from all those who would dare to be together da Vinci, in this moment in which we are at a time between worlds and a time between stories.
And we go so deep into our hearts that our hearts open into the possibility of possibility. And we begin to imagine, we begin to find our way.
So that’s what this coming week is about. And if you chose to be with us, a gorgeous choice, whether it’s in person or online, perfect.
And if for whatever reason you chose not to be with us this year, that’s also perfect. We’ll be together wherever we are. Wherever we are. We’re holding hands. We’re holding hands. We’re holding hearts. Rachmana liba bai. She wants the heart.
It’s the Way of the Heart. It’s the Way of the Heart. Cha!
Let’s open up all the gates, my friends. All the gates.
Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing this week, we’re going to open up all the gates together, every gate.
For the sake of She, for the sake of the unborn generations that are not certain to be born. The trillions of love stories that are not sure they’ll be able to be written in the tapestry of the manifest unless we open our hearts.
That’s what’s at stake.
But what’s also at stake is so immediate and personal and intimate: your very own aliveness and joy.
What a mad delight and honor to be with you. Cha!
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