This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.
Eros Is Subversive, Not Transgressive: Giving and Receiving Are One
[Editor’s note on the context of Dr. Marc Gafni’s teaching. In the introductory part of this One Mountain, Ely Marciano invited participants to join the ongoing online Mystery School ‘Who We Must Become’ and pointed to the great variety of programs and courses offered. Then Krista Josepha pointed to the beauty and vital necessity of supporting the community and the birthing of the Great Library through joining ‘Who We Must Become’ and thus participating in the birthing of the new human and the new humanity.]
The Split Between Giving and Receiving Is a False Split
I’d like to thank today particularly Krista and to Ely for taking us into ‘Who We Must Become’. I just want to notice, how they just held two poles very beautifully, kind of dialectically. Ely shared what you’re going to receive. He said like, here’s why you should do this because you’re going to receive so much.
And, you know, looking at the structure of what we’re doing and looking at ‘Who We Must Become’, there are people who say, you just should never do this, you know. Marc, you should make yourself available, not more than once a month for an hour. Your position in this kind of community should be that. You can’t have that kind of availability.
Yet, I’m going to be with the people, who step in in a real way [editorial note: who become members of ‘Who We Must Become’], like nine times a month, which is a little insane. We’re going to meet twice a week, as Ely said, in the morning, and do a very deep practice journey into connecting, contacting; being in the Field of the Divine and becoming who we are in a profound way. There are words for that. One word is ‘prayer’. Another word is ‘transfiguration’, which I’m going to talk about in a second.
That’s what we’re going to be doing nine to ten times a month. We come together both for prayer and for group Holy of Holies. And of course, there’s One Mountain. But that which is through the community is:
Prayer and
Group Holy of Holies [ deep dive study group once a month]
Unique Self courses [3-week deep dives intensive courses every 3 months].
Joining ‘Who We Must Become’ is a way to genuinely step in and study in a very, very profound way and to begin to create this community of ambassadors, ambassadors of the new Story of Value, which is unimaginably important.
At the core of the meta-crisis is this inability to articulate a new Story of Value. It’s everything.
Before we dive into our topic today, I’m going to return to Ely and Krista. Ely was just beautifully inviting and saying, just feel what you’re going to receive, which was beautiful and necessary and important and honors everyone. It was a very deep honoring of everyone and their integrity, their time, their resource.
And then Krista stepped in in beautiful musical harmony with Ely. And Krista said, now let’s not talk about what you’re going to receive; let’s talk about what you’re going to give, how you’re going to show up and what it means to show up. So, it wasn’t about the receiving, it was about the giving.
We need both of those poles Ely and Krista are holding, because in the depth of Reality is the realization that the split between giving and receiving is a false split.
Eros Is Not Transgressive—Eros Is Subversive
That’s the great understanding of Eros; the great understanding of Eros is not that Eros is transgressive.
My colleague, Esther Perel, and I did a public conversation about this at a conference call called Success 3.0 many years ago, and blessings to Esther, she’s doing great work in the world, I’m absolutely sure. She talks often about Eros being transgressive, as Eros causing the breaking of boundaries. But that’s, of course, a very limited separate-self understanding. Eros is the cause for transgression, for appropriate breaking of boundaries, because it wells over. It demands those boundaries to be broken. Eros is not transgressive at its core; it’s not transgressive in the sense of transgression meaning breaking appropriate boundaries.
Eros is subversive.
There’s an entire chapter in the book Return to Eros, which is a critique of Esther’s teaching. It’s very important to critique—and again, mad blessing to Esther—a misunderstanding of Eros, which breaks something in the human psyche. I didn’t mention Esther directly in the book, because of course I want to honor her and her wonderful work, but we have to take a stand on things and fix the source code.
Eros is not transgressive at its core—Eros is subversive.
There’s an entire chapter in the book Return to Eros, which is about Eros subversive, not transgressive, which is about this point.
What is subversive?
A revolution is subversive. We all get the word subversive. It’s a great word. Subversive means it subverts. It undermines the very core structure of the conventions of reality. Let’s look for example, at the sexual model of Eros, which is what Esther’s primarily, not exclusively, but primarily talking about. Let’s look at the sexual model of Eros.
If you understand the essence of sexuality, it’s not about being transgressive. It’s about being subversive.
What does subversive mean?
The classical structure of reality is either I’m receiving money from my account or I’m giving money into my account. Giving and receiving are utterly different. Ely talked about what you’re going to receive. Krista talked about what you’re going to give. And these are two entirely different things. That’s the classical understanding.
But Ely and Krista understood—and they were both in Eros beautifully—there’s no split between giving and receiving when you’re in Eros.
Let’s take, for example, the sexual model of Eros. There’s no split between giving and receiving. That’s true.
When you’re giving pleasure in sexing, you’re actually receiving pleasure.
And when you’re receiving, the biggest gift you can give is to receive the gift of pleasure.
When I receive, I’m giving you.
When I give you my gifting, when I’m gifting you, I’m receiving from you at the same time by your willingness to receive me.
It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful. The split between giving and receiving is fundamentally false. That’s what we’re talking about.
Transfiguration Is My True Nature: To Be Lived as Love
We’re talking about this distinction between transformation and transfiguration. Transformation is the beautiful work we do when we transform, right?
Transformation takes place in the realm of the separate self. Within the separate self, I do psychological work, I transform. Transformation is in the separate self. You do psychological work, you become more fluid, you become more open, you become kinder—these are all very important—you work with early attachment patterns. These are all unimaginably important. Transformation is necessary. Psychological transformation, moral transformation are utterly essential.
What it does is, it opens the door to my true nature. And my true nature is transfiguration. Transfiguration. We’re writing a chapter now in the Phenomenology of Eros, about the experience of Eros as transfiguration. When I become an Outrageous Lover, when I become lived as love, when I become—remember that old statement that we started back in the day—OLATT: Outrageous Love All The Time, I’m being lived as love. I’m Outrageous Love all the time. Dr. Kincaid and I, are now working on a chapter on this.
I’m now transfiguring.
I’m becoming not merely Homo sapiens, I’m becoming Homo amor.
I’m lived as love.
I am an Outrageous Love story.
That is what Claire and David are doing in the Unique Self Institute; to go through and become my Unique Self is not to sharpen my Myers-Briggs talents and capacities. That’s all fine., but that’s not what Unique Self is.
Unique Self means I move from separate self first to True Self, I’m one with the Field, not just of awareness, but I’m one with the Field of awareness, of allurement, of the pulsing Eros of Cosmos moving in me, as me, and through me. I begin to realize that giving and receiving are one.
I individuate uniquely as a unique expression of the entire moral urgency and Field of LoveDesire of Cosmos moving towards wholeness.
I’m now my Unique Self. I’m transfigured.
And Unique Self discloses as evolutionary Unique Self, the evolutionary impulse pulsed by evolutionary love living in me, as me, and through me. I’m Homo amor, I’m transfigured.
That’s transfiguration.
The response to the meta-crisis is transfiguration. It’s the new human, the new humanity.
It’s the place where both, the Ely and Krista dialectic, is completely whole, completely beautiful. We’re lived as love. We’re radically giving, we’re radically receiving.
That’s beautiful.
Teshuva—The Ontological Possibility to Go Back in Time
Now let’s step in. Last week we began to enter this love story between time and eternity and what that means and how I live that in my life. And then this week, we’re going to open up a whole new space. I’m going to step into two very, very beautiful texts.
Our topic today is Teshuva.
Teshuva literally means to return. It means the return. I’m going to try and do this in a way that you can get everything if weren’t here last week. I’m going to go relatively quickly in the beginning because I want to get to read two texts with you and do something which is so unimaginably shocking that it defies imagination. What we’re about to do is just so unimaginably beautiful, not in a kind of trivial sense, but in a way that just changes the fundamental nature of who we are. We’re going to talk about the ontological possibility to go back in time. We’ve talked about it before in the last three months, but now we’re going to talk about it precisely, and we’re going to look at an actual lineage text and we’ll look at precisely how that happens.
Okay, now go slow with me. I’m going to try and go like in steps but we’re going to go each step very, very brief. Okay, so we’re about to take off. Everyone buckle your seat if you can.
Everyone got a seat belt. Let’s buckle our seats, we’re buckling our seats, buckle up, buckle up, get the back buckles, rackets up, propulsion. Let’s go. Let’s step in.
The Classical Understanding of Teshuva as
The word Teshuva is classically understood as an action that takes place at the human level. It’s a human action. The human action takes place when there was a violation, an error. An error means, a mistake. It means not just a pragmatic mistake, but a mis-take. It was a failure to act in alignment with the plot line of Cosmos. It was an act of contraction or constriction. It was an act that was against life.
And it’s called a chet in Hebrew. And chet is a word from archery, which means to miss the mark. I’ve missed the mark. So that means that reality not just is, but reality is normative. There’s normativity to reality. Reality is normative. Reality is normative means there’s something that ought to be done. There’s something that ought to be done.
Reality is not neutral. Reality is what we call in CosmoErotic Humanism, a Field of Value. It’s a Field of Value. And we’re about to publish a couple of books on value. We’ve already published the first one, First Principles & First Values, and we’re going to publish a new book on what I call Value is Real. And another book on the eight fundamental understandings of value, what value means.
Value minimally implies an ought, a should. There’s something that ought to be done. Let’s say it’s musical value, which demands a response. If you’re sitting next to someone and there’s this stunning music and they’re just like, shrugging indifferently saying, “whatever”, well, there’s actually something wrong with that. They’re not responding to the music.
If you go and see the seven wonders of the world and you’re like, “Oh, whatever.” There’s something off there. In other words:
Value demands response.
I miss the mark (chet) is poorly translated as sin, but it’s not sin. No, it’s not sin.
It’s missing the mark. There’s a demand, an invitation in the moment, an invitation-demand in the moment. Missing the mark is, I didn’t respond to the invitation. I didn’t respond to the demand.
If a baby is left outside my door, I wake up Sunday morning, I’m in Manhattan (it’s an easy reference point for me) and I’m going to get my big Sunday Times. It was something we used to do back in the day, and you know, there’s a baby at my door and the baby’s all swaddled up and crying, I say, oh, I hope someone takes care of the baby and I pick up my Times, and I go to do the crossword puzzle. I’ve missed the mark, right? There’s a value there that needs to be responded to and that baby needs to be picked up and held and embraced. And if I don’t do so, I have missed the mark. There’s a violation. Even if I can get away with it legally.
Teshuva means in the classical literature based on the Talmud and Yoma (the Aramaic texts of the 3rd to 5th century; it starts with the Mishnah in the 3rd century, and the Aramaic texts that go into the 5th, 6th century) the response to this violation is to,
One, I recognize my mistake, which is not so easy; a direct recognition, wow, I got that wrong. I messed up. I didn’t respond when I needed to; a direct, clear recognition
Two, I experience an actual sense of loss or remorse or regret: God, I wish I had done that differently. And I’m so sorry that I didn’t respond. To have a genuine experience of remorse. A sociopath can’t experience remorse. A narcissist can’t experience remorse. And everyone has a little sociopath and narcissist in them and they’re very resistant to experiencing remorse. It’s very hard just saying, wow, I got it wrong. And we justify it in a thousand ways. But no, I got it wrong. I feel bad. I’m so sorry. It’s a remorse.
Three, there’s a commitment to future action of a different nature. That when I engage this same dynamic at a future time, I’m going to do it differently.
Those three steps are clearly explicated in the fifth century Aramaic texts and 12th century texts by the great scholar Dr. Maimonides. He codifies this in a set of 10 chapters called “The Path of Teshuva,” the path of return.
So, that’s the classical exoteric public understanding of Teshuva, that Teshuva is an act of repair which allows me to both be forgiven, and to somehow mend the violation, to respond to, to transform this dimension of violation.
The Solomon Lineage Understanding of Teshuva
In the interior science lineage of the Solomon lineage, there is an entirely deeper, subtle, hidden understanding of Teshuva. It’s deep. Now I’m going to weave together like 20 texts and try and just unpack them for you and say it like this:
The texts speak in the kind of Aramaic Hebrew hidden tradition of the Solomon lineage that forms the Renaissance. The texts record in their own hidden code. Think ‘Da Vinci codes’. The Da Vinci Code, let’s say of Dan Brown, is an attempt to popularize one chapter in the Solomon lineage, which is around Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which is a chapter, a certain kind of chapter, which roots itself in the Solomon lineage. So, now we’re in the lineage. We’re not in a kind of novelistic adaption. We’re in the lineage itself.
In the lineage itself. This is where Dan Brown got it right, which is, the actual deep teaching is hidden because it’s so esoteric, it’s so beautiful, it’s so shocking that if you don’t know how to hold it, it actually undoes your actual ground and reality. It unhinges you. It’s so dramatic. It’s like taking a psychedelic that you can’t hold and you get unhinged and you can’t find your way back.
An actual deep, profound, esoteric teaching is esoteric. ‘Esoteric’ comes from the Hebrew word seter, which means hidden, holy privacy, secret in the best sense of the word, secret-sacred, and it also means to destroy, meaning if you don’t have a consciousness to hold it, then it gets distorted in your body-heart-mind, and it unhinges you from reality. So, one has to be very, very careful, which I want to be right now before sharing what we’re about to share.
Does everyone get just the reverence that we need to approach this with; like complete reverence, like complete tenderness and reverence and honor and gravitas and delight and joy? And oh my God, and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. And we’re going to unpack this.
It’s very deep, what we’re about to say, and we’re privileged to hold this depth of this deep understanding. So here it is.
The text reads, Teshuva kadma l’briyat ha’olam, Teshuva exists before the world existed, before the Big Bang, before the great flaring forth, there was Teshuva. What could that possibly mean?
If we just explain Teshuva as the expression of the human restitution or rectification of a violation, and there’s no human being before there’s a world, what could it possibly mean that there’s Teshuva before there’s a world? What does that even mean? What are we even talking about? That makes no sense.
It’s very deep. It’s like the holiest of holies. What does this mean? The deepest, deepest meaning is that Teshuva is at its core, not an exclusively human action.
There’s a human expression of the movement of reality, of Teshuva, which I’m going to call return.
But the basic movement of return is the intention of Cosmos prior to manifestation.
In every great interior science, there’s a deep, profound entry into the inside of the inside of reality through the validated methods of the interior science, forms of introspection, forms of meditation, forms of ecstatic practice, forms of journeying, forms of study, where we access the intention of reality that lives in us. It’s how we access it. All reality lives in us. All of the universe lives in us. We are the universe in person.
The deeper we go to our own interiors, the deeper we go to the interior motivational architecture of reality.
The deeper I clarify my own interiors, the deeper I purify that which occludes and obfuscates my ability to listen to the murmurings of the sacred as they move in me.
The deeper I’m able to eavesdrop on the actual motivational architecture of the Infinite Intimate of the Field of Reality itself.
Teshuva Is the LoveDesire that Motivates the Emergence of Time and Space
So, what is Teshuva?
Teshuva is the LoveDesire, which is the intention that motivates the emergence of reality, the emergence of the manifest universe, the emergence of space and time; time, which is of this world. Time is a quality of the manifest world. We don’t even know, we don’t recognize time exists—like a fish is not aware of water—because we live in time.
But time is an expression—time and space—there’s a deep relationship between the two, as the ancient interior scientists pointed out. Einstein, coming from a completely different set of portals, realized in a different way, the time-space continuum.
Time, the initiation of reality is driven not by meaningless accident, but reality manifests operating through the principles of physics, mathematics, once reality is created. But the process in which the Infinite self-contains, the Infinite intensifies its presence into a single point called involution, if you will—this is being talked about in different ways by multiple lineages—and then explodes from that point, the singularity, called in one language, the language of science the Big Bang, the great flaring forth.
That which is the motivation for the process of divine self-containment, the sacrificial act of withdrawal in order to cause the emergence of reality, that motivational architecture is LoveDesire.
LoveDesire is the motivational architecture of the world. LoveDesire is beneath time.
Now, when reality is manifest, all of a sudden you have this point in which the singularity, in which all of the universe lives, in this pinprick, as it were, meaning this utter contraction of all of Infinity. And all of the laws of physics, and all of the infinite gnosis, and all of the laws of mathematics, and all of future potentiated reality is potentiated from that seed, from that spark, from that singularity, from that pinprick.
That’s the contraction.
That’s the containment.
That’s the intensification of presence into a point.
That point is motivated by this LoveDesire, which is beneath time.
Now feel that. The intention of the evolutionary movement is the movement back towards wholeness, the movement of LoveDesire.
LoveDesire is always the movement of Eros.
CosmoErotic Humanism—the new Story of Value that integrates the best of the sciences, interior and exterior, pre-modern, modern and modern, into a new Story of Value— understands that the driving force of reality is Eros.
What’s Eros? —Eros is desire.
Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness.
The movement of Reality towards greater wholeness, Eros, is Teshuva. It’s the return; meaning the infinite disclosed in the discretion of a single point. That single point then begins the journey of return to wholeness. And then the return to wholeness is to return to the prior wholeness. The prior wholeness that lived, that existed before the Big Bang.
Teshuva is the movement of LoveDesire towards prior wholeness.
So far, so good. It’s deep. Now, let’s go. Let’s go into the deepest of the deep, the holy of holies, hearts open.
Teshuva Is the Current of ErosValue, the Pulsing LoveDesire of Cosmos
Teshuva is the LoveDesire of Cosmos.
Teshuva is not something that lives exclusively at the human level.
Teshuva is the quivering, pulsing LoveDesire , which is the current of ErosValue in Cosmos that returns to prior wholeness. But it not only returns to prior wholeness. When it returns to prior wholeness, when it arrives at this prior wholeness, it is more whole than it was in the beginning. It’s not just a return to what was. It’s not just a circling back to what was.
Teshuva is both a movement forward and a circling back.
It’s a line and a circle that merge in the equation of CosmoErotic humanism:
line + circle = spiral
Teshuva is a spiral of LoveDesire towards the prior wholeness that circles back to the prior wholeness, but actually moves forward (linear) and attains a level of wholeness of realization, of depth, of LoveErosValue that was never there before, entirely new, which is, of course, utterly paradoxical and utterly impossible, meaning, if the prior wholeness is the Divine, how could there be more God? But the paradox of Reality is that the entire motivational architecture of love, LoveDesire, which manifests Cosmos, is
Divinity disclosing itself in the productions of time.
Divinity disclosing itself as you and me.
Divinity disclosing itself as the entire world of matter and the entire animal world, the entire world of life.
When that disclosure takes place and reality evolves, we get to the human level, and the human being becomes more whole. The human being engages in a process of returning, of wholification, of clarification of desire, of disclosing that I’m not merely Homo sapiens, I’m not really a wise separate self. The qualities of sapiens are not just wisdom, not just the wisdom of a separate self, but we have to introduce new vocabularies, new subversive vocabularies of ErosValue that understand that when I transfigure, I become Divinity itself. And by me becoming Divinity itself, when I purify and clarify, I’m pouring blessing into the Divine Field, and the Divine Field is loving me so much that it’s willing to receive my blessing.
To receive my blessing is the ultimate gift, because giving and receiving are one. That’s how we started.
I’m blessing the Divine Field, and Divinity becomes more through me, through my transfiguration, through my becoming Homo amor.
Through my Eros, my return, Divinity becomes more.
The Evolutionary Process Is the Return to Eros
Now stay close. It gets insanely beautiful. So, when we get back to the prior wholeness, the prior wholeness is more than it was. When I say make sense, you got to feel it centrally in your body. By the way, T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets is talking about this, and he’s working with Teshuva. He’s heard about Teshuva. He’s trying to work it out in the Four Quartets, and people don’t realize the Four Quartets is a meditation on time and eternity. So, I’ll read you maybe its most famous passage. He writes kind of at the end, he says,
“We shall not cease from exploration…” —We’re exploring. I’m exploring. I want to feel every realm of radical aliveness. I’m radically curious. I am a soul that comes from the upper worlds of chaos, and I’m informed by reality, and I’m exploring.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…”
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place where we started. The end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place where we started and to know the place for the first time. When we arrive at the prior wholeness, we know it for the first time, and the prior wholeness becomes more whole. The movement of Teshuva is the movement of LoveDesire, which is the motivational structure which causes reality to come to being.
Reality comes to being because Infinity love-desires finitude. Reality love-desires finitude. Reality discloses in the singularity of a point, this divine self-containment-intensification in a point.
Then the evolutionary process begins, which is the evolution of love, which is the return to love, It’s the return to Eros.
It’s a return to Eros. That’s the name of the book we wrote by that name, A Return to Eros.
I’m returning to wholeness. Teshuva is a return to wholeness.
Now, here’s the story.
An atom is engaged in Teshuva. Atoms are engaged in Teshuva because atoms and molecules and macromolecules return to wholeness. At every level of reality, there’s a return to wholeness, there’s a movement towards wholeness.
Now, this is deep. How that return to wholeness takes place changes at every level of reality. Just like there’s a way that Teshuva happens in the world of atoms, as atoms become molecules, become macromolecules, as the process of
the evolution of Eros, which is
the evolution of complexity and interconnectivity, which is
the evolution of intimacy, which is
the evolution of wholeness itself.
As that takes place, we’re moving back towards prior wholeness, the world of matter. And then matter explodes into the world of life, and the world of life then explodes into the depth of the self-reflective human mind. We call those the three Big Bangs. But then it doesn’t end then. Now we’re in the human world. In the human world—just like there’s an evolution of desire-will, and will means desire, and free will means free desire—desire is not just an inherent structure of Cosmos moving towards fully alive, towards its own self-fulfillment in the original wholeness plus ever deeper wholeness. No, no.
Missing the Mark, Failure, Is Not a Bug but a Feature of Cosmos
The human being begins to have a conscious sense of being able to actively deploy desire for the sake of value. But to be able to actively make a choice, a will, a desire, a willed desire, a free desire, to deploy my desire for the sake of wholeness, for the sake of value, I also have to have the right to choose anti-value, to choose pseudo-value. The human being can make choices. That experience of choice means that there can be hate, there can be missing the mark, there can be sin.
We don’t like the word sin. I was like, oh, we can’t use that word. That’s the old Christian word. No, but Christianity and Judaism and Islam, many of the religions, they did beautiful, they made gorgeous contributions, but they also pathologized sin, and they located it in very particular areas of the body and made it this kind of repulsive violation.
But sin is part of the structure of Cosmos, meaning missing the mark is not a mistake. Missing the mark is not a mistake. Missing the mark is not a mistake at all.
Missing the mark is obviously part of the structure of Cosmos.
And if you read the erotic mystics, if you read the interior sciences, what’s called The Fall in the Garden of Eden, wasn’t a sin. The Fall is the beginning of the story because we all fall. There’s none of us who doesn’t fall. There’s no one who doesn’t miss the mark. Missing the mark is clearly not a flaw in reality, it’s not a bug in the system. It’s a feature. The intention of reality is for the human being to experience fall, failure. Failure is a structure of Reality. It’s not a mistake.
And the human being has the capacity to not just transform failure, but to transfigure and to take failure and transform it, transfigure it into fullness, the ability to go back to an action that’s already happened. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve fallen. I’ve pathologized. I failed and I violated in some fundamental way. The action has happened.
At the human level Teshuva means that I have the ability to make that violation, to make that action that happened, that those words I said, that act I did, it means I can go back to it and I can literally travel in time back to that moment and literally re-author what happened in that moment in time. That’s a dramatic claim.
In Spatialized, Linear Time I Can’t Return and I Stay Trapped in Shame
Teshuva is the movement of LoveDesire. The LoveDesire at the human level means the following, and I’m now kind of weaving lineage text. LoveDesire at the human level means the following: If reality is good, we have a direct experience of much of the goodness of reality. And even the reason we’re horrified by evil is because we know the goodness of reality. So, evil is a violation of that which we know. You can’t even name something as evil unless there’s good. Evil is only evil because it violates what we know to be the good. It’s deep.
If there’s a violation in goodness, which I’ve caused, and it happened three months ago, it happened when I was 15, 14, 16, it happened when I was 25, there’s this violation. If time is only a spatialized line of points, and now you’ve moved beyond that point in time, and there’s no way to go back in time because time is a line, then I’m trapped in shame. But not only am I trapped in shame,
I’m trapped in shame because there’s no way to go back in time because there’s a fundamental breakdown in my essential wholeness.
I’m shamed because my desires led me to violation, and that violated my wholeness, and now I’m a broken human being.
And I can do psychological kind of, oh, remorse and regret and recognizing the violation, and I promise I’ll never do it again to the best of my ability, but I still did it. I still did it for 10 years. I still did that action, whatever it was, or that set of actions, or participated in that dynamic. That’s still there.
If time is a spatialized line, there’s no place to go.
But time is also a circle; it’s the circle of return.
Teshuva is the circular movement of time at play at the human level, at the human level, where the human being has the capacity to return, to turn the circle, and to actually go back to that particular moment in time, and to literally re-author that moment in time.
Now, how does it happen? How does it happen? It’s crazy beautiful.
How Do I Return? —Entering the Eternal Now
I’m going to read with you a text. I want to say a couple more words. I want to read with you an original text which I mentioned very briefly at the Mystery School for three, four minutes, and which we alluded to last week. We’ve never studied it together, and it’s deeper than deep. It’s simply worth being alive to do this text together. It’s worth it. I know this is not simple. I know this is not an easy listening One Mountain. It’s a deep dive. We’re going to go all the way now. We’re going to go all the way home. You can’t change the source code on kind of populism. Reality is beautiful, and we want to talk to everyone, but first, we have to do the deep work and formulate it ourselves.
Let’s say something happened in the past, which is a violation.
What do I do? How do I get back? How do I find the circle that will take me back to that moment in time?
There’s this very deep understanding that what I do is, I enter the eternal now. I step into the moment, the depth of the moment, that is the eternal now. I am filled with the desire, the LoveDesire for wholeness. I step into the eternal now.
What’s the eternal now? The eternal now, that is where the now is real. The eternal now is this presence of Wittgenstein, who’s a logical positivist, who said, you can’t deny the eternal now.
The eternal now is not everlasting time. The eternal now is eternity. But eternity or the eternal now is not everlasting time. That’s what everyone thinks it is, but it’s not. If everlasting time is a lot of time, then there’s no difference between time and eternity: Everlasting time is a lot of time, so eternity is just a lot of time. No! No!
Eternity and time are of a different quality.
They interpenetrate with each other.
They inter-included with each other, but they’re of a quality.
The eternal now is the quality of eternity that’s available directly right now, and the quality of the now is this field of awareness. It’s this eternal field of awareness, but it’s also an eternal field of allurement. It’s this throbbing, pulsing field.
It’s Sat, it is being, and Chit, consciousness, and Ananda, the Field of bliss-Desire, as Kashmir Shaivism, the root tradition of Hinduism, formulates it.
I step into this Field of Desire, and in this Field of Desire, I access my own personal Will-Love-Desire to become whole.
That’s Teshuva.
It’s the desire of Cosmos moving through me, and through all the Cosmos, but moving uniquely through me as a human being, to become whole. At the human level, becoming whole means I have to have the possibility of making whole that which is broken.
I need to be able to take the act that collapsed, the violation, the breaking, the shattering of the vessels of my life or someone else’s life.
I need to be able to glue those vessels, those pieces, those broken pieces of the shattered vessels.
I need to be able to glue them back together in such a way that not just the vessel is repaired, but the broken vessel now becomes whole in a way that the vessel never was before.
How do I do that?
I enter into the eternal now, which is the Field of Desire of existence.
Then I have this yearning desire, this LoveDesire, to go back to that original moment in the past.
LoveDesire lives beneath time. LoveDesire brackets time. LoveDesire is the movement towards wholeness that causes reality to be birthed, and LoveDesire is the movement that moves reality towards wholeness, and LoveDesire is the quality of the field of the eternal now, and LoveDesire, that lives in me, which desires, yearns for wholeness, brackets time.
The eternal now takes me underneath time, and the eternal now can take me, and that’s not our conversation now, to the future of prophecy. But it can also take me back in the past.
Abraham Kook: The Light of Teshuva
With that in mind, I’m going to read the text.
The text is from a work called The Light of Teshuva, The Light of Return by Abraham Kook1. It’s chapter six, subsection five. I’m going to read it slowly and carefully, and it’s very easy to read and miss what it means. In fact, most people who read it miss what it means. But it’s there.
It says, All existence, number one, a particularly freely chosen act of a human being, so, a particular action of a human being, that’s two; three, each person’s, each human being’s, inherent will, each human being’s field of Will-Desire that is that human being.
He says, these three comprise one threefold chain that are never separated; they’re never dissociated; they’re always connected; they’re always of a piece; they’re always part of a larger one; they’re inter-included with each other.
What does that even mean?
Let me try and see if I can make that clear.
Imagine Reality as three Chinese nested dolls:
The first nested doll is the Field of Desire, which is Reality itself. Reality is desire. Reality is allurement. Reality is appetition. Reality is desire for value. That’s the nature of Reality. That’s the core plotline of Reality. Desire animates all the plotlines of Reality. That’s what Reality is. The story of Reality is a love story, and the love story is a desire. It’s a LoveDesire for wholeness. Let’s find this. It’s so deep. There are three Chinese nested dolls. The first doll is the Field of LoveDesire itself. That’s one.
The second nested doll is that Field of LoveDesire that lives in me. The second nested doll is that Field of LoveDesire as it lives in me. That’s the second nested doll. The second nested doll, the Field of LoveDesire that lives in me is nested in the first nested doll, the Field of LoveDesire that’s Reality.
The third Chinese nested doll in that image, is the unique LoveDesire that inheres, that suffuses a particular action that I did.
Nested doll level one is the Field of LoveDesire that is Reality. All of Reality, all of existence. Kook writes all existence. That’s the first field.
The second nested doll, the second field within a field is the LoveDesire that lives in me; my personal will, my personal desire.
The third nested doll is the LoveDesire that lives in a particular action.
That’s deep. You have to be inside of the inside. You can’t use your mind, although you need a little mind, but you have to feel it in your body.
There’s a Field of LoveDesire. That field of LoveDesire then—nested doll two—individuates in me. I’m now a unique individuation. I’m an entire Field of LoveDesire, which is a unique individuation of that original Field of LoveDesire. And then the third Field of LoveDesire is LoveDesire that’s poured from the original Field through me into a particular action.
Those three Chinese nested dolls of LoveDesire are not separate from each other, which means you can trace one back to the other.
So, listen. Kook says, a person’s desire inputs into her actions, meaning the LoveDesire in the nested doll that’s my Field of LoveDesire I then pour into the third nested doll, which is the actual action itself. So, now,
I did an action. I got angry. I engaged in a kind of acting out I didn’t want to do.
Or, my LoveDesire was I didn’t do something that needed to be done. I didn’t respond to the baby that was put in front of my door.
Whatever it is, I acted out either by not acting, not responding, or by responding inappropriately in a way that hurt, that was a violation.
In that action that I did that was a violation, I placed my personal desire, a slice, a piece of that desire, I placed into that action. But it’s not separate. The desire and that action never separate from my Field of LoveDesire, which is the Field of LoveDesire, which is existence, the eternal now, which is all of existence, the entire field of existence.
Following the Thread of Desire Back to the Original Action
All three of those are connected.
Look what happens.
When I’ve done something, I’ve done an action, my desire still lives in that action.
That action, even though it’s in the past, the desire is still there. And that desire is still alive. It’s not separate from my desire right now, which itself, my desire is not separate from the Field of LoveDesire.
That means that that action is not dead and in the past. And it doesn’t just have, in a Bergsonian sense, duration into the present. It’s a living desire in the present that lives in that action; still there. The kind of desire that I impressed into that action 20 years ago still lives in that action. Five years ago, two days ago, it still lives in that action. When I screamed and I kind of went into a rage that I shouldn’t have and caused whatever it caused, that un-whole, that tragic, that fragile, that collapsed will of mine that had me melt down and explode into an inappropriate rage, which was not commensurate with the situation that caused great hurt, whatever that was, that lives. That’s alive! Whatever that betrayal might have been, whatever I did, it’s alive. My desire lives in that action, which means it’s not in the past. That action of the past is literally alive in the present.
The now doesn’t exclude future and past, as Eckhart Tolle inappropriately argues, based on some of the great traditions that made that same mistake. That’s not correct.
The eternal now does not exclude the past and the future.
The eternal now embraces the past and the future.
The eternal now contains the past and the future.
And the eternal now, which is beneath time, is both the future and the past.
Now we’re talking about the past. So, now that I’ve entered the eternal now, I get on the memory-go-round and I circle back. I ride. But how do I ride? What is the fuel that makes the memory-go-round go round and allow me to circle back to that original action?
What fuels the memory go-round? What kind of gas pumps it? What animates it? What propels it? —DESIRE!
I’m following the filament of desire.
Those three fields of desire are not separate from each other. That’s how we started. What Kook writes is, the three Chinese nested dolls, the original Field of Desire, nested into that my personal Field of Desire of a unique individuation, that’s Unique Self—a unique individuation of that general field.
Then that desire, Field of Desire that lives in my individuated field is then poured into that individual action. But those are three Chinese nested dolls that are inter-included, and they’re never separated from each other. That’s the point of realization. That’s what we understand in realization. We enter into the eternal now, and we realize the eternal now is the Field of LoveDesire.
Then we realize directly in the Field of LoveDesire that I can trace the filament of desire back through the desire that lives in me, back to the desire that I invested in that action. That’s the time machine.
That’s an ontological time machine.
If you’re still breathing and haven’t fainted, I’ve done a bad job explaining this, and I apologize. I have the power—Now—I have the power to go backwards in time. I can actually go back to that moment.
The Core of Shame Is Desire that Stopped Short of Infinity
Now, what happens? I’m going to read the text.
Now, I’m standing before that action that’s inherent, invested, suffused with that particular desire that I invested in it 20 years ago, 10 years ago, two days ago. So, listen to this:
Even actions in the past never lose contact with the life essence and desire in the person who was their original source. I’m translating from the Hebrew. So, that desire that lives in the action is still connected to the desire that lives in me, which is still connected to the Field of desire, which is the eternal now. That’s how I got there:
I went to the desire of the eternal now,
followed it to the desire that lives uniquely in me,
and then followed it to that action in the past.
Why can I do that? Because no desire is ever completely disconnected. And now we need like a crazy drum roll throughout the universe. This is like insane; insanely beautiful. And if you actually get it, you will break out in tears.
You’ll break out in tears if you really get the level of hope, the level of possibility, the level of healing the shame that is the shaming of desire, which is at the very core of the meta-crisis.
This is not just that it’ll explode you into tears, not just that this is only the healing.
The core of the meta-crisis is, is shame.
And the core shame is the shame of desire.
And shame is by its very nature, the nature of shame is when desire stops short of infinity.
That’s what shame is.
Shame is when desire stops short of infinity.
Now, what do I do? I now have the capacity to return. I’ve taken the memory-go-round fueled by desire back to that action. And then a person’s present desire has the power to impress specific new character, even on acts in the past. So, I’m now at this action. I’m now encountering my friend, my cousin, my brother, my partner, my wife… whoever it is, and I now engage that moment. I now have a new LoveDesire and in that new LoveDesire, I reformulate the action of the past.
Let’s say, I got angry at my brother when I shouldn’t have. Let’s say I raised my voice at a close friend that I shouldn’t have. Let’s say I didn’t show up in a way that I would have desired to,
I access the new LoveDesire,
I witness, like theater, the formal play of action that is in the ostensible past, and then
In my mind, I go and reenact with my new desire that action in the past.
In doing so, I literally reauthor the essential action.
I reauthor the script of desire and the stain of the past action disappears.
Now, sometimes there was no stain and we were mistaken about there being a stain. That’s a different story. That’s not what I’m talking about now. I’m saying if there was a stain and I raged at someone I shouldn’t have raged at. There’s a stain because I hurt someone in a kind of fundamental way.
By going back and impressing my new desire on the old action, I override the old code of desire.
And I reanimate the action as an entirely new act. I’ve re-authored the story.
Now, that doesn’t mean, let me be clear, of course, that doesn’t mean if I hurt someone back then with that original action, I don’t need to apologize. It doesn’t mean I don’t need to make restitution, I don’t need to make amends—I do.
Once the action had effect in the world, then we need to deal with the effect or the karma, or the causation caused by that action. For sure. Of course you do.
But at the same time, the stain, the metaphysical debt caused by that violation, by that sin, if you will—I said before, we don’t like the word sin, but sin means missing the mark—but the metaphysical debt is obliterated.
Teshuva Is the LoveDesire to Restore Wholeness
Matthew Arnold, quotes Thomas Carlyle in chapter IV in his book, Culture and Anarchy, in the chapter on Hebraism and Hellenism. And he says, Socrates was terribly at ease in Zion. Socrates was terribly at ease in Zion2, meaning the Greek notion of a neutral cosmos, where there’s no Field of Value with a moral ought. You’re terribly at ease in Zion, meaning you don’t feel the pain of violation. You don’t feel the LoveDesire to restore wholeness.
Teshuva is the LoveDesire to restore wholeness.
And when wholeness is restored, the intention of Cosmos is fulfilled. Because the violation is not a mistake only. It’s not a—that’s what we said earlier—it’s not a bug in Cosmos. It’s not a bad version, like we need just a 2.0. It’s part of the original version. The fall begins the journey. That’s why The Fall from Garden of Eden is not actually the fall. It’s the beginning of the journey towards the wholification, towards the whole. Oh my God.
So this, writes Kook, “this is the secret of Teshuva.” This is Teshuva, Teshuva, at the human level. Teshuva, says Kook, that which was created before the world, expanded the human capacity of creativity and allowed the human being to imprint their creative, artistic re-authoring also on the past.
Until I realize that the LoveDesire act of Teshuva—which is the movement towards wholeness, but it’s the movement towards wholeness at the human level, meaning at the human level where there’s a violation, where there’s a falling away from wholeness—once I realize that’s the intention of Cosmos, I realize that Cosmos then needs to necessarily provide the path towards wholeness, which is itself the intention of Cosmos, which is Teshuva.
Teshuva, when it discloses itself at a human level, is the LoveDesire,
which we access in the field of the eternal now,
which takes me beneath time,
which allows me to access the memory-go-round,
which is the circle in time,
which is fueled by my LoveDesire for wholeness,
which is the movement of Teshuva, movement towards wholeness,
which at the human level means going back to that moment in time and impressing a new quality of desire and re-authoring the prior script of desire.
All of therapy changes.
Therapy doesn’t understand this to be possible.
Therapy is lost in a materialist separate self-predicament. All of my experience of who I am changes. What changes is how I experience my story. My story is not just a plot line moving forward. My story has a line dimension, but it also has a circle dimension. Part of my story is my capacity to return. Part of my story is my capacity to revisit an earlier chapter of the story and re-author that chapter.
I’m going to read you now the last paragraph of this mystical text, virtually unknown. It’s unimaginably beautiful. We just created the potential for hope.
We Can’t Heal Unless We Go to Root Cause, Which Is the Shaming of Desire
What do you do when there’s such trauma in the world, such trauma of violation, such trauma of ripped apart hearts and ripped apart bodies and ripped apart souls and shame and this kind of drenching in shame, this fundamental shaming of our earlier desires, which came out in distorted form, which hurt ourselves and damaged others and damaged reality?
When we actually recognize what happened, we’re trapped in that shame.
We can’t bear to be trapped in that shame, so we project the shame on another. We make the other evil, or,
We close down to our own sense of feeling. We become zombies, successful zombies, acting out until the day of our death.
We engage in rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics to cover over the emptiness.
You can’t heal it unless you go to root cause. You have to go to root cause, my friends.
You have to go to root cause.
Root cause is the shaming of desire, and shame is when desire stops short of Infinity.
If Cosmos created a structure in which this violation is part of a feature of Cosmos, and Cosmos is a movement towards wholeness, then—and Kook says this in a different text— then Cosmos also has to create the possibility of Teshuva, of moving towards wholeness. If that possibility doesn’t exist, then you can’t live in reality.
Kook writes, he says, Teshuva is inherent to man’s design.—I’m now moving to a different passage. He says, as I’m translating from Hebrew—he says, Teshuva, the LoveDesire that allows us to get beneath time and to fix, to repair, to make whole, a prior broken action, and he says,
Teshuva is natural to man’s design, and it makes her whole. Because man, woman, the human being is likely to violate, to stumble, to fall, to be flawed when it comes to ethos. But if this would essentially damage their perfection forever, then it would violate the wholeness of Cosmos. So therefore, the yearning desire for wholeness, which is the nature of Teshuva, directs a person towards, towards returning, towards restoring the original wholeness and adding to it.
That’s Kook. It’s another passage, same book [The Lights of Penitence,5:8].
I’m going to read you the last piece. Kook now ends this original text and he says,
and if Teshuva is not engaged, if we remain in this planet drenched in shame, if we don’t heal the desire in the past action
And how do we heal it? We go back to that moment in time through the merry-go-round, fueled by desire, and we literally impress a new desire, I engrave, I impress a new desire in that past action. And then the stain is removed and the shame is removed. The action is undone.
And I want to be very clear:
This is not a psychological point that Kook is making, although it has psychological implications—It’s an ontological point.
When Luzzatto discusses this in the 16th and the 17th century, Luzzatto says, this is ontological. It’s literal. It’s in Luzzatto’s book The Path of the Just, Mesilat Yesharim, chapter four. He says, this process of Teshuva is ontological. You return and you literally reauthor so that the past action, which was the violation, which was the degraded desire or the unclarified desire, now ontologically, for realsies, no longer exists in the flow of time. It’s not there anymore.
Yes, you have to deal with the effects, for sure, but you’ve undone the stain. You’ve undone the shame. It’s not there anymore.
Again, I want to be clear. Sometimes people have an experience of a stain that was never there. So that you fix by realizing it was never there. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when there was a stain.
But if you don’t do this, what happens?
Here’s the last paragraph [A. Kook, The Light of Penitence, 6:5]:
Without Teshuva, then the earlier violation of the past keeps showing up in different forms, spinning off, cascading ugliness and evil, loss and destruction. Until a radical interior creativity moves us to impress a new character of willed desire on the original act. And then the original act is reconfigured, reauthored into goodness.
You’ve now reauthored, you’ve reinvested the act with a new desire. You’ve recreated the past. And then the act itself is now an act of goodness. And it begins to generate waves of goodness and delight, joy in the Divine, and joy in the depth and the beauty of the light. Wow.
Teshuva is the LoveDesire of Cosmos moving towards wholeness. And because Cosmos intends to move towards wholeness, so at the human level, the existence of the possibility of violation can never be understood as an accident, as a bug. It’s clearly a feature of the system. No one escapes mistake, fall, some level of pathology, some level of acting out. If line is all of time, if time is but a spatialized line, I can’t go back. Time has to be a circle because I absolutely need it.
It’s an utter necessity of Cosmos that I can go back.
I can take the merry-go-round, fueled by desire, back and imprint a new quality, I can re-author the original script of desire, so that the action now becomes filled with the desire for goodness, filled with joy. And then that new action cascades, reconfigures, transfigures. I’m transfigured by this capacity.
Reality itself is transfigured into original wholeness and more than ever would have been possible without the fall.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. We did it!
I know that was not easy, but we needed to do it.
Oh, my God.
Abraham Kook, The Light of Penitence, 6:5:
“The cosmos,
a particular chosen deed of a human being,
and his permanent will
are one immense three-fold chain;
one is never disconnected from another.
A person’s desire/will is attached to his deeds.
Even deeds of the past
are not disconnected from the substance of Life
or from the desire/will at its source.
Because nothing is ever completely disconnected,
human desire/will has the power
to stamp a distinct shape even on deeds done in the past.
And this is the secret of Teshuva,
which the Holy One Blessed be He created before he created the world.
This means:
God expanded the spiritual creative power of the individual
in relation to deeds and to the cosmos,
to the point that it includes within its zone of dominion
even the past.
The evil act keeps rolling along,
spinning off ugliness and evil, loss and destruction,
as long as the desire/will has not impressed a new form on it.
Once the desire/will impresses upon it a form of good,
the act itself begins to generate waves of goodness and loveliness,
the joy of God and His Light.”
Mattew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, chapter IV: “…there is a saying which I have heard attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates—a very happy saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlyle’s or not—which excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism differs from Hellenism. “Socrates,” this saying goes, “is terribly at ease in Zion.”…”
Future Reading for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion
Learn about the full Oral Essays series:
Complete Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/oral-essaysFree Unique Self Mini Course:
https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/Download “Love or Die” essay here:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/love-or-die-white-paper-by-dr-marc-gafni/