011 — Celebrating Epiphany: the Birth of the New Human and the New Humanity
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 7, 2017] given by Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard 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 Kristina Tahel Amelong. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
Epiphany of Homo universalis, a new human
Barbara Marx Hubbard
This is a day that speaks directly to Evolutionary Church. It’s the day of the Epiphany weekend¹.
The Epiphany was an ancient Christian feast to celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus and the visit by the Three Wise Men that somehow realized that, in this baby, God was showing up as something radically new.
The question I ask is, how does Evolutionary Church celebrate Epiphany?
What actually happened there in that first Epiphany?
Another meaning of epiphany is manifestation. Something radically new manifested, and people were able to recognize it. This baby turns out to be able —
- to create in abundance,
- to transform the world,
- to fill it with love,
- to die and be reborn in a new body,
- and to tell us that we would be doing the works that He did and greater works than these would we do in the fullness of time.
That is what happened at that Epiphany.
He told us this very amazing phrase before the crucifixion,
Take, eat, this is my body. Take, drink, this is my blood given to you to transform into new beings.
The miracle of our epiphany is that it is all coming true when we view the story and promise of Jesus that we will do the works that He did, and greater works than these will we do in the fullness of time. If we look at our current life with evolutionary eyes, we see that it is all coming true.
Let us commit to infuse love into the new powers of humanity, which means that we are going to become new humans.
In celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus, let us celebrate the birth of baby Homo universalis. Let us celebrate the birth of —
— ourselves becoming new,
— becoming Unique Selves,
— joining in a Unique Self Symphony coordinated by the self-organizing universe,
— awakening the whole world to our potential to evolve into co-creative humans.
We can produce in abundance. We can travel with the speed of light. We can evolve new bodies. We can build new worlds.
The manifestation of the baby Jesus is now, today, declared to be the manifestation of the baby Homo universalis, the new human.
Evolutionary Church is literally announcing a manifestation, for the very first time, in relationship to the Epiphany of Jesus’ manifestation. Let us now — in a time of resonance, on Epiphany weekend manifesting the new human in the world — let us take a moment to affirm the reality that we are, each of us, a manifestation of the whole process of creation, of the 13.8 billion years, in every atom, molecule, cell, and brain.
We are coming alive right now, conscious of ourselves as co-creators, gaining the powers that Jesus actually had — and far more, able to heal, transform, prolong life.
Evolutionary Church is singing praises of the manifestation of the new human:
- to cultivate it,
- to care for it,
- to love it,
- to give birth to it and to send this new human forth into the Politics of Love,
- to rebuild the earth and carry out this mystical tradition in real time,
- to affirm that we are good, that we are whole.
Let us take this moment of time to incarnate the Reality as seen.
- Let us take a moment of deep communion with each other, in the first Evolutionary Church epiphany manifestation of newness of the emerging human, of the new powers that the new human has been given — spiritual, social and technological.
- Let us know what was stated by one baby Jesus and by many other great avatars from all great religions.
- Let us know that, whatever background we come from, we are born as new humans today.
We are spiritually incorrect evangelicals
Dr. Marc Gafni
You cannot wing holiness. What we are doing is wildly ecstatic, it is deep in the heart, and it is precise. We want to be precise, and ritual is precise.
We are trying to weave a new evolutionary, mystical magic, to convene an Evolutionary Church.
We are in Bethlehem.
We are in Mecca.
We are in Jerusalem.
We are in upstate New York, where a new church was founded in the nineteenth century.
We are founding something new, and it requires us to bring all of us.
Ein Kedusha Be’li Ha’Chana, my teacher used to say, There’s no holiness without preparation.
You cannot wing it — you cannot wing holiness.
You’ve got to bring all of yourself.
For this hour of Evolutionary Church, I am in preparation, Barbara is in preparation, all week. All week we are thinking about —
- What is the right holy word?
- How do we come together in full presence?
- How do we come together and actually storm Heaven?
- How do we storm Heaven, which is right here on Earth, and reveal together that the next Buddha is a sangha in this Unique Self Symphony, the new possibility of possibility.
After Barbara sets the resonance, we move into prayer and I just want to make a connection between resonance and prayer.
Whenever Barbara is talking, I am listening deeply. Barbara is listening deeply and you are listening deeply. We are listening to each other. We are feeling each other. Let’s feel it together, in the space, in the holiest way.
It’s so important to feel into it and be fully here.
We are all fully here.
Nothing is left out.
That’s how we feel.
No distance, nothing left out, no one is someplace else.
You cannot fool God! You can’t put on a show. Either we are all here, fully present, alive, awake, giving everything. That’s what an epiphany is.
Epiphany is transcending the regular
Epiphany means, How do I get out of the regular?
I can do Evolutionary Church in the regular. It’s another thing in my week, I’ve got to get Evolutionary Church done. It just becomes regular.
Regular, we said last week, is regel, meaning pilgrimage. When you go on a pilgrimage, called in the original Bible ‘going up’, aliya le regel, ‘by foot’. Regel is the root Hebrew word for regular. Going up by foot means transcending the regular, that’s what an epiphany is.
Epiphany means I transcend the regular, that’s pilgrimage.
The word for pilgrimage comes from the Hebrew word ‘going up by foot’ which means going up, aliya, transcending regel, the regular.
Can I get out of the regular? I can be giving the same talk I’ve given all my life and I’m doing the regular.
- But, am I willing to surprise myself?
- Am I willing to be surprised?
- Am I willing to transcend the regular?
We are going to climb this mountain together.
God is the possibility of possibility. That’s not regular, that means that something new is born that never existed before.
We are not here to do Evolutionary Church again like we did last week! Heck, that’s the whole point, that what Evolutionary Church isn’t! That’s exactly what went wrong with church. It’s why we’re choosing the word church intentionally, knowing that it’s a hard word.
We are saying, No, no, no let’s make it new every week. Can we show up as new every week? Can we let go of the regular?
There is no compelling vision of postmodernity
What we’ve talked about last week, and the week before, our dear friend Ken Wilber spoke about this beautifully in the last six months, and in the last few weeks we have been talking about it every week, what happened in this last election? [2016 United States Presidential]
Postmodernity, the liberal world, said you only get to be a hero if you are a victim. All heroic books are about victims. The great news is —
- Every victim we want to hear.
- Every victim we want to honor.
- Every victim we want to embrace.
- Every victim we want to transform.
The bad news is —
There are too many people claiming victimhood and not enough people claiming their power.
There is no positive vision.
What’s the liberal vision of duty?
What’s the liberal vision of honor?
What’s the liberal vision of integrity?
What’s the liberal vision of an ethic, a shared global ethic for a global civilization?
For the first time in history, love in postmodernity didn’t quite evolve.
Do you all get that? It’s a big deal!
- Premodernity had a big vision, the traditional religions. Lots of mistakes — a little xenophobic, a little homophobic, they’re all trying to kill each other. But, actually, Christ had some insight. Buddha had some insight, Lao Tzu had some insight. Confucius had something going on there, the Jews, not bad, but many weaknesses.
- Modernity came and critiqued the values of premodernity. Modernity added the good stuff and did a great job.
- But then modernity got critiqued by postmodernity because it was lost in its own narratives, too many people were excluded. Too many people were not part of the story. Postmodernity came and critiqued modernity and its vision of love, its vision of duty, ethics and honor.
What did postmodernity forget to do? To offer a new vision, a new Universe Story.
So what did Donald Trump do? He realized — not consciously, none of this is conscious — he realized there is no compelling vision of postmodernity in the liberal world.
So, when evolution doesn’t move forward it stalls, and then it meanders, as my friend Michael Murphy likes to say. It moves backward. Trump reanimated the early memes, the shadows of capitalism, the shadows of business. We’re not going to correct them until we actually get straight that we’ve got to offer a new vision.
We bring a new vision. We are bringing the good news! We’ve got to go into the word church and into prayer, into the word God and we’ve got to participate in it together. We are evangelicals!
What does that mean? Not that we’re fundamentalists, my friends, but that we are bringing the good news.
Can we open up to epiphany?
Steve Jobs wasn’t embarrassed to bring the good news, he called Apple people evangelicals. In the entire Apple world, they are evangelical, wow!
We are liberals, we are embarrassed to bring the good news. We don’t have the good news, we just have social constructions of Reality.
Really? Everything — ethics, loyalty, goodness — is it all a social construction of Reality?
No! If we say that then the fundamentalists are going to hijack God, hijack ethics and hijack the whole story.
My good friends, we are evangelicals. We are not politically correct, we are spiritually incorrect. We are bringing the good news.
The good news is not about any particular person’s charism, it’s about the charism of the good news. Charism means Spirit falling through. It’s about the vision of evolution in which we are aligned with the evolutionary impulse.
We are awakening as the personal face of the evolutionary impulse. At the same time we know that Reality has a personal face.
Reality is not just the Infinity of Power, it’s the Infinity of Intimacy.
The Infinity of Intimacy, wow! That is an epiphany, do you get it?
When you realize wow, Reality is not the Infinity of Power, Reality is the Infinity of Intimacy. When that goes in, that’s an epiphany. What Barbara means by epiphany so beautifully, as the theme of the Church, is epiphany means, Wow! I get it. It’s not regular, I’m willing to get something new.
The entire internet, my friends, is built on confirmation bias: confirm what you already know, refuse to learn anything new. The internet is an echo chamber.
The news feeds on the internet confirm what you already believe, you are never challenged. The internet is built in a way which is not open sourced, decentralized, everybody talking to everybody. That was the vision, to open up to new epiphanies. But, the internet has become a place of closed environments, confirmation bias confirmed time and time again, echo chamber, no challenge.
So can we open up to epiphanies? Let us wake up into this. We’ve got to offer this new vision.
Evolving prayer: God, love me open!
Dr. Marc Gafni
Part of our new vision is that we are going to evolve prayer.
What does prayer mean? Prayer means that not just is God having a Barbara experience, prayer means that God holds Barbara.
Do you get that, that God holds Barbara?
The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. It’s not the primitive God. It’s God which is the personal force of evolution that’s not just third person evolutionary impulse, but the Infinity of Intimacy.
If I love Barbara and Barbara loves me, that love that we feel personally for each other isn’t limited to us. It comes from the personal face of all of Reality, the Infinity of Intimacy which is all of the Infinite Power of Kosmos,
— all of the light years,
— all of the complexity of physics,
— all of the complexity of chemistry,
— all of the exponential power of which nuclear power is but a pale reflection (borrowing the phrase from Hamlet).
All of the Infinite Power of Kosmos is sitting in a chair looking at you saying, Oh my god, I love you so much.
You feel the intensity of the Divine gaze — and in that gaze you become whole. You know that God sees you, loves you, yearns for you, lusts for you.
That’s what the original texts say, Hakadosh Baruch Hu Mit a- vheh la’asot Dirato Ba-tachtonim, God desires to live in the incarnate place of humanness; God desires you.
God desires you in every second which is why the nuns talked about being penetrated open by Jesus, the fifteenth century celibate nuns.
When you realize that God knows me, desires me, adores me, loves me, holds me,
that the Infinite Intelligence of all of Reality yearns for me,
— to turn to Her,
— to turn to Him,
— to offer my prayer
— and affirm the dignity of personal need
— and ask for everything,
…then I can ask for everything for myself, I ask for everything for Barbara, and I ask for everything for each of you because I break my egocentricity.
And then I ask, and my ask gets wider and wider, but it doesn’t come from an automatic mind, it comes from my heart.
My heart. Rachmana Leba Baei, the words say in Aramaic.
God wants the heart.
God wants full presence.
God wants us to feel each other’s pain and feel each other’s joy.
God feels our pain and our joy in every second.
Sometimes men may live lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau was right in Walden. But men and women never live lives of lonely desperation because, in every moment of desperation, God is holding us. God is the Infinity of Intimacy that knows our name and holds us even when we don’t know She’s there. The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist.
We’ll come together in a way that’s new, that we never have before. This Evolutionary Church has never happened. We are founding it again every week and its word will spread through the land because,
— we are willing to be new every week.
— we are willing to prepare.
— we are willing to show up and give it everything.
— we are willing to storm heaven and bring it to Earth every single week as if it’s the only thing that matters.
Because you know what, my friends, it is the only thing that matters.
We pray for each other. We pray for ourselves because prayer affirms the dignity of personal need.
We ask for everything because, friends, the gates are open now, all the gates are open.
We’ve opened the gates together with the Holy and the Broken Hallelujah, the psalm of Evolutionary Church.
We offer our prayer up, and we pray for everyone who can’t pray, we pray for everyone who’s not here.
We pray to the Infinity of Intimacy.
Imagine — imagination is the source that opens the deepest truth — Al-Farabi said that the prophet uses imagination.
Imagination is when I imagine what’s real, and I know that God is listening to me at this very moment. And God is sitting in front of me knowing my name. The Infinity of Intimacy — all of the laws of physics in its intimate, personal face.
I am offering up my prayer.
I know that my prayer moves God. It moves All-That-Is.
Offer up prayer! Have the audacity to step in. And sometimes we pray for the very first time so softly, so audacious. God wants the heart.
Dare to pray. Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need. If I can’t pray for everything myself I can’t pray for anyone else. To be like God, to be like Christ, to be like Buddha is I feel you.
Find your most intimate words, your most true words.
God — the Infinity of Intimacy — is in front of us right in this very second! And we begin to actually pray for each other. We actually feel each other’s need. We feel each other.
We can be talking all the spiritual words in the world and be lost in egocentricity.
Or we can soften our hearts, unguard our hearts, let our hearts break open, and take each other in.
That’s the beginning of a politics of evolutionary love, the beginning of intimacy, the beginning of epiphany.
Tipping the scales of evolution towards more life and more love
Barbara Marx Hubbard
I am celebrating the epiphany of the amazing revelation of the story of creation that has only recently come to the human species.
We used to think it was done by an outside force, or the scientists thought it was done by accident, but we are discovering that the story of creation has a true line from the original Big Bang.
- Let’s go to the original Big Bang and feel the origin of you and me in that moment when the entire pattern of the Universe was established.
- Out of that, we go quickly through the billions and billions of years — every turn of the spiral. Go into the core of that spiral. See it as the impulse of the Divine, Creative Intelligence, supramental genius of creation, coming from Source, coming from the field of consciousness creating the single cells, the multi-celled organisms, the animals, and the humans.
- Now bring in all the great humans that came before us. Particularly, on Epiphany-day, let’s bring Jesus into the story of evolution. Let’s see the birth of that little baby that people recognized was holding something new, something great.
What was it he was holding? The precognitive Reality of what we are becoming.
You will do the works that I do and greater works than these will you do in the fullness of time because I went to the Father.
What did He mean by that? The Father, I call the source of creation.
When you and I go to the Father, the Mother, the Source, the Creative Impulse of Evolution, what we are going into is the passionate potential of evolution itself in every one of us.
So let us take that baby Jesus as a first symbol in our culture of the new human that we are now actually honoring in Evolutionary Church. I would like to take that big sweep from the life of Jesus to all the efforts of Western civilization, and now global civilization, to gain the powers of Gods, the powers of the young Jesus. We have achieved that.
We are right at the threshold of either destroying ourselves with the powers we’ve been given — or evolving ourselves through conscious evolution.
Conscious, ethical, loving evolution in the direction of the billions of years toward higher consciousness, freedom, and order.
What we are doing right now in Evolutionary Church is gathering to ourselves the awesome Reality of the story that has created us.
We are able to say Yes to the next chapter in the unfolding story of evolution.
This is precisely where Evolutionary Church takes its form. Many people have said don’t use the word church — call it a community, a communion, a center. I understand that problem. But the greater impact of the word church is that we now have an ongoing structure for the emergence of the new civilization.
We are inviting every single religious community with its different metaphors. All of us, for the first time in the history of humanity, have one sacred story, for all of us, all of us! And that’s the story of evolution. The beauty of saying yes to the story of evolution in ourselves — on Epiphany-day, in the first Evolutionary Church ever to exist on this Earth as we know — is that we can also see ahead, toward a vision of what our species can become if we, who know this, hold it together on mass scale.
If we do hold this together, and reach out as far as we can to humanity everywhere at the very moment of devolution or evolution, then what we are literally doing is tipping the scales of evolution toward more life, more love, more freedom, more consciousness, more awareness.
- We are bringing our noosphere, our thinking layer of Earth, our planetary nervous system into the awareness of the emergence of everything that we can do that’s good.
- We are declaring in Evolutionary Church that we are aiming at the awakening of our nervous system on a planetary scale to that which we are Universally and individually incarnating en masse.
All the people who are saying yes to evolution now are gathering their force in this Church.
We have a vision of a planetary awakening in love through Unique Self Symphonies.
Now, what is the Unique Self Symphony, Marc?
Marc: The Unique Self Symphony is when Unique Selves — irreducible unique expressions of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty that is the initiating and animating energy of All-That-Is — come together. And we create not a top-down but a bottom-up self-organizing Universe in which we are all giving our unique gift, and we unleash entrepreneurial gorgeousness which changes and transforms the world like nothing else can.
Amen.
Barbara: Yes. And we see our nervous system coming alive in a continual epiphany that we are starting right now, because the way evolution works is by manifesting what you are evolving. So what we have here at this very moment in time is the beginning of the Unique Self Symphony.
Marc: Yes and it is not bottoms up as in just having a drink, but it’s bottom up, it’s self-organizing.
Barbara: It’s us — and we are now contemplating the absolute glory of the manifestation right now of the people on this call.
We are saying that we are primary agents of evolution who have said yes to giving our gift to the world and to one another toward a Planetary Awakening, which is going to create a vision, in my humble opinion, of a universal humanity born into a universe of trillions of planets and galaxies.
Marc: In your audacious and holy and gorgeous opinion! The holy humility is total audacity. Let God speak through you. Amen
Barbara: So I am now declaring the first epiphany of the Evolutionary Church celebrating the miracles, the miraculous story of the entire process of creation as what Marc calls a love story. Marc, say a word.
Why is the Universe a love story?
Dr. Marc Gafni
Barbara says, Why is the universe a love story?
It means, my good friend Barbara, it’s so awesome to see you smile, and let the world smile with you… What it means is that for the first time, we realize that the essential nature of Reality is —
- Reality is not a fact, it’s a story, step one.
- Step two, it’s not an ordinary story, it’s a love story.
- Step three, when we say a love story we don’t mean a kind of New Age aphorism, we don’t mean a Harlequin romance. It’s not an ordinary story, it’s an Outrageous Love Story. Outrageous Love is Evolutionary Love.
- Evolutionary Love is not mere human sentiment, it’s the heart of existence itself. It’s the Love that allures Reality all the way up and all the way down. Because Reality is Desire, Allurement, Love, all the way up and all the way down until it appears in us, as us, and through us. Evolution, the allurement of Love, becomes conscious.
- We realize that not only is the universe a love story, step five, but that my love story is not by accident — my life is a love story. That love story is inextricably bound up with, and needed for, All-That-Is. My love story is part of the Universe: a Love Story. The Universe: a Love Story, cannot be successful, it can’t realize itself unless I give the unique gift and the unique presence and the unique quality of intimacy that comes out of my love story.
Which is why the sutra of Evolutionary Church is not ordinary love — a strategy of the ego — but Outrageous Love. The sutra of Evolutionary Church is:
We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.
Barbara: I am declaring that the noosphere — the universal intelligence system — is aware of us. The universe is responsive to requests. The universe is listening and we are coding our planetary nervous system with these memes. This is not a fiction of my imagination, this is the way evolution works.
The words we declare are becoming Reality to the love we infuse our words with, together. We are actually bringing forth this birth by our presence, now.
Marc: Friends, I could hear a couple people thinking, oh well, Barbara is just imagining it. I’ll just tell you something so deep. There was a guy named Feuerbach who said, God is a figment of your imagination. But you know what? Let’s tell Feuerbach, Our imagination is a figment of God.
The Divine Whisper: Synchronicity
Dr. Marc Gafni
Let us feel into it, friends. We live in an intimate universe. Can you feel that? We live in an intimate universe.
An intimate universe means that there are epiphanies happening all over the place that whisper particularly to me.
In the Aramaic that Jesus spoke we call it Lechisha De’Orayta — I was raised in Aramaic, Hebrew and English, together — which means the Divine whisper.
Aramaic texts say you are sitting in a restaurant, and as you are sitting in the restaurant you’ve been thinking about,
Should I move to Jamaica or not?
You hear someone at the next table talking about,
Wow, there’s these really great houses available in Jamaica!
The Zohar says, the Aramaic texts say, that’s a Divine voice. It’s a Divine whisper.
Jung talked about synchronicity. What he meant was we live in an intimate universe and the universe is speaking to me and is Lechisha, whispering in my ear.
I want to whisper in your ear friends, a wish. Libby Roderick sang it for us. I want to sing it to you, for you, to me, to all of us. Let’s feel it so we know it’s true. I am loving you, Barbara is loving you, we are loving each other.
[Marc singing: How Could Anyone Ever Tell You by Libby Roderick]
How could anyone ever tell you you were anything less than beautiful?
How could anyone ever tell you you were less than whole?
How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle?
How deeply you’re connected to my soul.
The truth is in the aftertaste.
We hold it so softly.
We hold it audaciously.
The true humility — Barbara said humbly, she used the world humbly — True humility is absolute audacity when I realize She’s speaking through me. She wants to and she needs to speak through me. I just want to conclude with a story.
Here’s the story. This is the epiphany.
Am I willing to receive epiphany?
It was on a holy day, a day which was the holiest of holy days. The Master turned to his students — and I want to try, with your permission, so gently, so fiercely, so audaciously, with quivering tenderness, to impress this story onto the heart of our Evolutionary Church.
The master on this holy day, which is the day Leonard Cohen sang, a day of, Who shall live and who shall die?
On that particular day the disciples are quaking and trembling because…
Who knows, friends, where we are going to be next week?Who knows where we are going to be next year, next New Year?
Who shall live and who shall die?
Who by the sword?
Who by sickness?
Who by delight — and who quietly and gently?
Who shall prosper, and who shall fail?
We don’t know. Everyone is praying for themselves, lost in the egocentric predicament.
The master says to the students, Do you want to know the holy secret?
They say, Yes, yes!
The master says, Do you want to know the holy secret that allows us to actually cheat the angel of death, that allows us to all live and all live together?
Yes, yes.
Are you really sure you want to know?
Yes, tell us.
He says, Here’s the secret. Turn to the person next to you and say, I’m not willing to be written in the Book of Life without you.
Reach out to someone today and say, I am not willing to be written in the Book of Life without you.
I am not willing to be written in the Book of Life without you, oh my God!
When that happens, when I can feel you and you can feel me, that’s intimacy. I feel you feeling me.
We end together in blessing. Oh my God. Om nama shivaya from every tradition. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Barbara: We are born as co-creative humans now awakening the universe to our presence.
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[1] Jan 7, 2017. Epiphany, also known as “Theophany” in Eastern Christian tradition, is a Christian feast day commemorating the visit of the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, and the wedding at Cana. source: Wikipedia
