The Character Assassination of Marc Gafni & the Murder of Eros
Injustice via the Internet: Myths, Facts, & Smear Campaigns in the Marc Gafni Story — An Exposé by Kerstin Tuschik Part 4 of 4
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In Part One of this essay, we have looked into the regressive memes of the post-truth and post-fact era of postmodernity. In Part Two, we have introduced and applied the four litmus tests for discerning truth to the case study of Marc Gafni. In Part Three, we have discerned nine major myths about Marc Gafni and done some actual fact checking.
There is, however, another story with a deeper mythological storyline that deserves to be told.
It is the story of . . .
Marc Gafni & The Murder of Eros
Eros is a subject that Marc Gafni has been teaching on extensively and in depth for many decades and he has been making a substantive contribution to this field. Again, I want to quote and support Daniel Schmachtenberger’s evaluation of Marc’s contribution from his February 2016 post:
Re ethics and sexuality — I think Marc’s teachings on this topic are profound and offer something otherwise missing to the field ethics.
In my evaluation, a story like this smear campaign can only unfold in a world and an atmosphere where Eros has been suppressed.
This is clearly the case in many of the traditional circles that many of us, including Marc, have grown up in.
Yet, even the so-called sexual revolution hasn’t really healed this. We thought we had crossed the final frontier with the sexual revolution and its apparent sexual freedom but we didn’t get to the other side. The sexual revolution hasn’t healed shame nor has it ushered in a new vision of sexuality or — deeper still — of Eros.
In our public culture today, women are still seen as seducers, while men are seen as perpetrators. It is a culture in which terrible victim shaming abounds, while name rape generated by false complaints rooted in confirmation bias — aka powerful men must be abusers — has replaced public debate.
The sexual, which models the much larger Eros, according to Marc’s teachings, has withdrawn into the shadows. The shadow is our unlived life, the life we don’t dare to live, the life-force, evolutionary impulse or Eros in us that is suppressed and then gets distorted and projected outwards in its distorted form.
It is then in that atmosphere what we call the Murder of Eros, or what Wilhelm Reich has called The Murder of Christ, takes place. And no, I am not saying that Marc Gafni is Christ. What Reich is referring to as Christ energy is the unarmored and raw life force in human beings.
Throughout history, people like Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, people who have had an abundance of this erotic life force in them and have expressed it through in their sacred activism, have fallen victim to this Murder.
Today it is Marc Gafni, who not only clearly has an abundance of Eros, but has also wrestled with it in his own life. In some ways similar to his more famous predecessors, he is an activist who has come up with an audacious vision and — in his case — a post-postmodern “dharma” on Eros, Spirit, Self, and sexuality that has the potential to “shift the source code of culture.”
In his words from the Summer Festival 2014:
“Something started in the sixties. Something opened up. But that work was left undone. We are going to finish it; we are going to take it the next great step in the evolution of love.”
As Marc has pointed out so often:
“Every breakdown of Ethics is sourced in a failure of Eros.”
Or deeper still:
“When Eros is not realized, pseudo-Eros always comes in its place. When Eros is denied, pseudo-Eros demands its pound of flesh.
If the separate self will not die, there remains a deep knowing that some sort of death is still required. No longer will the death be that of our own ego, but the death of the other. And so we bear witness to some of the world’s most horrible atrocities, all in the name of a higher power to which we refuse to surrender our own lives.”
Read more here, in Marc Gafni: Your Unique Self Chapters 17–19, Integral Publishers 2012, and in The Mystery of Love, pp.24–31, Atria 2003. Or pre-order his new book A Return to Eros here.
What comes in the wake of shame and pseudo-Eros is Envy, Jealousy, and Greed, which lie at the core of Malice, as Joseph Berke has pointed out in his seminal book The Tyranny of Malice.
“Malice must never admit of itself so it must always plead other motives,” says Milan Kundera.
The other motives pleaded are that of being a protector, rescuer, or victim. This is famously referred to in Karpman’s “drama triangle”, or the “victim triangle,” where the actual perpetrator is either the seeming victim or the rescuer, while the seeming perpetrator is the actual victim.
“…some sort of death is still required.” Eros needs to be murdered, in the other person. If “I” cannot have it, nobody can.
This is why we need a new vision of Eros, of sexuality, Self, shadow, Evolutionary Love, and Spirit so desperately. Marc Gafni’s dharma and the work of the Center for Integral Wisdom are essential for our world.
Eros is the strongest force there is. It can either transform and uplift or degrade and destroy.
We need to engage in genuine “dharma combat” to clarify the dharma. We need embodiment practices and moral guidelines. We need purification of our own impulses and compassionate mutual feedback to start seeing our blind spots or shadows.
“First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5)
Let me conclude this article with Marc’s impossible dream:
“What if the result of this explosion was the seeking of a higher clarification? What if over time, all the parties could sit together, fact check, and seek genuine truth and reconciliation?
Some of the key actors in this story are the same people who demand that Israel sit and negotiate with the Palestinians. I understand that demand, despite the terrorism, killing of each other’s children, and countless atrocities.
Yes, Israel and Palestine must make peace. How can we demand that they make peace if we cannot, in far different circumstance, even make peace between ourselves?
I am ready and willing.”
Let us stop that age-old fight between dark and light, between love and un-love, Eros and Thanatos.
Let us heal the outrageous pain of the world through Outrageous Love.
May we all find peace — not the pseudo-peace of the death of Eros or what Reich has called the character armor, but a peace that is vibrant with life, love, and with the impulse of evolution that is Eros.
>> To Download a PDF of the Entire Essay Click Here <<
For more information on Marc Gafni and his story, please visit WhoIsMarcGafni.com.
