16 — Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder with a New Politics of Intimacy
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [February 11, 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 Benjamin Swartout, Krista Josepha, and Kristina Tahel Amelong.
Radical planetary intimacy
Barbara Marx Hubbard
I am coming to you from the Infinity of Intimacy. In order to experience the Infinity of Intimacy for ourselves, let us for a moment go into the infinite. The infinite is an extraordinary, almost impossible, concept to imagine — in terms of intimacy.
Give yourself evolutionary eyes.
See planet Earth as one living body from space.
Feel the pain of the entire planet for one instant in time.
Imagine the collective pain so great.
Feel the spreading of deep empathy, feel with one another that intimacy at the level of infinity. Breathing into how you feel, when you feel with someone else, deep, deep down — intimately empathic.
Imagine for a moment that everyone who is awake to the yearning for intimacy is feeling it together
— on a planetary scale
— as a living organism.
Feel that empathy becoming radically, massively experienced as the heart of our desire being fulfilled on a planetary scale, because…. the heart’s desire for intimacy is joining genius.
Joining genes means that we create the babies through intimacy.
What are we joining in radical intimacy and radical empathy? In infinite intimacy, we join genius through empathy, love, and attraction.
We are joining the unique genius of each person, the unique vibrational field of that inner impulse that is expressing as you, uniquely.
Experience yearning in your heart for union, communion, joining to create.
As in sexuality, ultimately nature’s purpose is joining to create a baby.
In radical infinite intimacy and desire, our yearning is to join genius to create ourselves —
- our new human,
- our full potential,
- Homo amor.
Our ‘babies’ are our work — all of us — creating the new planet together.
In this moment of radical intimacy and resonance, let us experience radical planetary intimacy. Joining our genius and making our work a point of expression of a planetary love. The intimacy of our desire to join leads us into what we have been calling the politics of evolutionary love at the social scale. This is our resonant field.
Missing tile syndrome
Dr. Marc Gafni
We just heard some distracting typing. Let’s use this as a pointing-out instruction for the Missing Tile Syndrome.
This community is gathering around the world. So imagine, in Castile Spain, in the medieval period, they had to work through —
— persecution,
— pogrom,
— plague and
— the Black Death
…to serve God.
But we, the challenged privileged, when something bothers us, all of a sudden we’re taken out of our center and then we focus completely on whatever that thing is that’s bothering us and the beauty, the gorgeousness, the joy that’s happening in that moment disappears into the sound of someone typing on the side while someone is talking.
Get what I’m saying?
Like hey everybody, relax.
We are okay, we are happening, we are alive, but the core teaching here is that —
Practice is in everything. The first thing you need for intimacy is to watch out for the missing tile syndrome.
The missing title syndrome is very simple: you are living your life, looking up and you got a thousand good tiles, and they are awesome. But, you’re missing one tile.
You’ve got a thousand gorgeous tiles, but one is missing.
Your eye moves to that missing tile.
You focus on that tile.
All the other tiles recede and all you can see is that missing tile.
That missing tile angers you.
You get upset.
Then you get more upset and more upset.
Practice is everything. The nature of being full and alive and intimate with yourself is that you learn to not get taken out of your center.
The Scroll Of Esther
I’ll tell you something wild: there is a sacred text called The Scroll of Esther.
In that sacred text there is a story about a man named Haman, who is second to the king. The king is Xerxes; Xerxes in the ancient kingdom of Persia where Darius was the king, the interlocutor and adversary of Alexander and Philip of Macedon. The second to the king, the Mishleh Le’Melech from the original Hebrew text, is called Haman.
Haman has everything.
There’s just one dude in the kingdom — that dude’s name is Mordechai — Mordechai bothers him. Because there is something about Mordechai’s Eros, about Mordecai’s authenticity, about Mordechai’s Outrageous Love — whatever it is that makes Haman feel less. The text reads: All Haman can see is Mordechai.
Mordechai makes him feel less than, so malice is aroused and he moves to destroy.
He had this desire to annihilate Mordechai.
This entire book, one of the twenty-four books of the sacred Canon of the Bible, is about a person getting lost in the missing tile syndrome!
Politics of Intimacy
Dr. Marc Gafni
Barbara just gave a gorgeous talk last night in Los Angeles where she is now, in the City of Angels, on the politics of attack.
The politics of attack is the opposite of the politics of intimacy.
We are here today in Evolutionary Church to talk about the politics of intimacy.
God is talking through us.
God is talking through Barbara.
God is talking through Marc.
We are intimate with each other as we step into Evolutionary Church at this time, in this place.
I am personally delighted. I am ecstatic. I am beside myself at the joy and the privilege of being with all of you today and being with Lady B and being with Evolutionary Church and stepping into prayer.
Because Barbara did Resonance — I just added a little extra dharma. We can use the Yiddish word chapped, I grabbed it. I gave a little extra Dharma, on the missing tile syndrome, about being intimate with ourselves, locating ourselves in our center and not getting thrown out of our center.
To be intimate with ourselves goes something like this:
Know that inside of you in this moment, right now, there are 75 trillion cells which are uniquely YOU!
They are dancing in a dazzling cacophony and symphony of —
— biochemical resonance,
— electromagnetic resonance,
— neurological resonance,
— nerve resonance,
— and atomic resonance
… in a dance, in a cacophony of light, sound, and vibration impulse that no super-computer could possibly imagine or produce.
Yet, it was produced as uniquely you, by the Kosmos.
It is happening right now, in this second — as you.
Oh my God! Wow!
The intimate kiss of prayer
From that place of gratitude, we move into prayer.
We are here to evolve prayer together.
To evolve prayer together means that we are here to evolve God together.
We are here to evolve religion together.
We chose the name Evolutionary Church because we wanted to run into the static of the word church, to walk through it, to reclaim a post-post-modern vision of God.
We are here to participate together in the evolution of prayer — in the evolution of God.
The god you don’t believe in doesn’t exist.
The prayer you don’t believe in doesn’t exist.
My friend Warren Farrell likes to say, I believe in prayer.
What does prayer mean?
Let’s do the meditation together that we do every week. Then we’ll do our hymn, then we’ll pray together and we’ll go into Barbara’s message on intimacy. Barbara mentioned, in her resonance, the relationship between the sexual and intimacy. We’re going to talk about that relationship. But to set the tone for it, Barbara reminded me of a reading from Rumi.
Here it is. It goes like this. Rumi says:
If anybody wants to know what Spirit is, or what God’s fragrance means, lean your head towards Him or Her. Keep your face there, close. When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot by knot, the strings of your robe, like this. If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead, don’t try to explain the miracle. Kiss me on the lips like this, like this.
So imagine friends — we are in the intimate kiss — not sexual.
The sexual models the intimate; we are in the intimate kiss of prayer.
Prayer is when we impress our lips on the lips of God.
Prayer is when we know that God yearns for us.
Prayer is when we know that God is not the fundamentalist, xenophobic God.
Prayer is not owned by the liberals bashing Trump or by Trump bashing the liberals.
Prayer is not owned by the Jews.
Prayer is not owned by the Christians.
Prayer is not owned by the Muslims — because God is not a Muslim, a Jew or a Buddhist.
God knows what Barbara is feeling because I am intimate with Barbara. I am close to her. I can feel her feeling, and I am a fraction, a fractal of the Divine.
God is the Infinity of Intimacy that knows our name.
The Divine feels Barbara’s ecstasy.
God feels Barbara’s ecstasy, my ecstasy.
God feels our pain.
God feels our brokenness.
God feels our holy and our broken Hallelujah.
God is the personal face of the evolutionary impulse that manifests everything before any neocortex, any supercomputer. God is the LoveIntelligence that runs through all of Reality that expresses itself uniquely as us, even as She/He holds us whenever we fall.
That is the God who receives our prayer.
That is the God of the holy and the broken Hallelujah.
We are here not just to say this to each other, friends —
We are here to reset church in the world.
We are here to reset synagogue.
We are here to create the Evolutionary Spirit of a world spirituality that becomes a language that is the new meaning that binds all of us!
Let us open our hearts, my friends.
Let us open our hearts in ecstasy as we step into Leonard Cohen, the poet of Evolutionary Church as he sings to us of the holy and the broken Hallelujah.
The holy and broken Hallelujah.
Let us love each other, my friends, and feel it out.
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need.
Let us pray now. Let us cry out our prayers.
I’ve been praying every day for a close friend of mine to get a beautiful return on her mammogram. And she did; it was clear yesterday, and we were ecstatic.
I pray for Barbara’s health. I madly love Barbara Marx Hubbard. She is awesome. I can’t imagine the world without her. Yes, I am praying for years and years of holy evolutionary partnership, fucking open the dharma, putting beauty and gorgeousness into the world. I am delighted to pray for that.
Everyone, cry out!
Cry out our prayers — our prayers are for ourselves.
We can’t bypass our own intimacy.
I ask everyone to put in our prayers.
Don’t think someone else will do it.
David: I pray for the fire burning in all of us, discovered and shared around us.
Simona: I pray to be able to fuck every minute of my existence open.
Chahat: I pray for finding my full strength.
Claire: I pray for my beloved sister that she may find peace in her heart and heal her sorrow and grief.
Friends, let the prayers rise up — all the gates are open.
Let’s pray for our President, my friends,
I pray for President Donald Trump to know how to evolve like we all need to evolve, to be able to discern between the general self-righteous liberal hatred coming at him, which is painful, and the real powerful liberal critique that he needs to take into account. President Trump, don’t get lost in what is wrong with the critique of you. There is a lot that is wrong in it, see what is holy in it.
We are praying for President Trump as Barack Obama did; as Oprah did before President Trump came into office. We are letting go of all demonization. We are praying for the highest expression of President Trump.
President Trump, we will challenge you as a democracy should — we will challenge you every step of the way, where we disagree with you, but not in hatred but in outrageous love, using every means at our disposal to create the America, the sacred America, that we love together.
We turn now to beautiful Barbara to take us into the intimacy message of today. What a pleasure and delight, Lady B, to be with you, evolutionary partner. Amen!
Radical fulfillment of living your heart’s desire
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Marc, you know, enthusiasm means — filled with God you are. Thanks Marc, for your beautiful enthusiasm.
Here is radical intimacy and radical fulfillment of our heart’s desire: Let us go the whole way in this lifetime with the fulfillment of intimacy and desire.
I am going to go the whole way with it.
Let’s first tune in, each one of us —
What is your deepest, most radical, heart’s desire?
Let it be deep, truthful.
Recognize that by our intention placed in our heart’s desire — the impulse of evolution in every one of us, which is the heart’s desire, is the longing of evolution for more life, more love, more freedom, more greatness — we are turning on the Unique Self, the essential self in every one of us that holds the power of the billions of years of evolution encoded within it, to fulfill your heart’s desire at its highest level.
In order for the universe, for God, to be able to fulfill your heart’s desire, you need to desire it.
The Unique Self desiring its fulfillment is the essence of evolution come alive in you — in Marc, in Barbara, in Kristina, in everyone.
I am reminded here of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, with a bit of an extension that Maslow himself did not give us.
- There are deficiency needs — of hunger, security, loneliness. Our heart’s desire is to fulfill those needs.
- There are our growth needs — to find our unique expression and creative vocation, powerful needs.
Let’s say at this moment all of those needs are fulfilled — basically we are not hungry, starving, or in the midst of a war. Most of us have found some expression of life purpose in this Church.
- Maslow had — at the third level of needs — transcendent needs. I am going to translate the words transcendent need to the words evolutionary need.
Beyond the very basic needs, and needs for some degree of life purpose what are the evolutionary needs of our intimate heart’s desire as Unique Self — expressions of the whole process of creation incarnate uniquely in every one of us!
I am getting an image of the Church being the seedbed of the evolutionary impulse of humanity taking off today! It is the seedbed of the joined genius of humanity’s heart’s desire.
What is the heart’s desire at this most radical, intimate level of joining?
I’ll tell you what mine is and then I’m going to ask you what yours is.
My most radical, intimate heart’s desire is for a degree of planetary union that could awaken our planetary body to its collective potential in Love.
That does not sound like an intimate heart’s desire, does it? There’s a lot of intimacy included in there. In fact everything I desire is included in there. But to express it the whole way — for radical intimate heart’s desire being fulfilled — it is that expression on a planetary scale.
Now I am saying — I am asking for that on this intimate scale of being together with all of us.
In this radical intimacy of heart’s desire, can you identify, if you go the whole way with it, to the third level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the fulfillment of your evolutionary need — of your Unique Self need in intimacy, in this moment?
I have shared mine. Let’s allow our most intimate heart’s desire to be God’s desire. We’ve done confessions of greatness. Let’s now do confessions of intimate heart’s desire, going the whole way in this lifetime. Because if we don’t desire this, overtly, do you know what? God cannot fulfill it, intimately.
- Evolution is longing.
- Evolution is yearning.
- Evolution is your heart’s desire being fulfilled in this moment.
Now let it move to actually join genius in this Church. Imagine this Church being a global church, a church of all those in whom this passionate heart’s desire to express unique genius exists. By joining together, we are joining genius.
Barbara: I am joining genius with you, Marc.
Marc: Amen, love. Amen, Amen.
Barbara: I am joining genius with you. That means the frequency of my deepest impulse of creativity, internally, is joining and fusing with your genius, Chahat, and your genius, Lydia, with your genius, Sarah. Wow! Kristina, I join my genius with you.
Feel it now, everybody, as you look, we are collectively joining genius to co-create.
What does co-creation mean?
It means that the creator within you — expressing the unique impulse of the God force, the evolutionary supra-mental genius force inside you — joins with the genius of others today.
We know the miracle of joining genes to have a baby — it is totally miraculous. Out of that sperm and egg comes the beginning, in this little egg, of a heart, a lung, legs and arms. It has not ever seen, walked, or heard, and it is grown in the womb from the joining of genes.
What happens to us with the joining of genius, if so much happens with the joining of genes to have the new baby? I am declaring that for me — the joining of genius with all of you in this very instant in time is creating a new human in me.
I am incredibly drawn by what I am doing right now.
Does anybody else feel this?
Can you be intimate together with all of us? What does it feel like?
Let us declare, in the presence of the Divine, that our yearning to join genius in this Church has created a field in which the heart’s desire of each of the members of the Church begins to pulse — like that egg when the sperm hits it.
Oh! I mean, I think if this is real, if I can allow and feel and invite the genius of —
— everybody on this call,
— everybody who will listen into this Church,
— everybody who will read this,
— everybody that I know on this call,
— everybody that I never have met before, but know intimately,
… because I am declaring our joining geniuses.
With that, Marc, I invite you to speak your word.
From a global intimacy disorder to the evolution of intimacy
Dr. Marc Gafni
Moving out of Barbara’s most beautiful word, we go inside each other.
Friends, we live at a moment of a global action paralysis. But that global action paralysis is rooted in something deeper — it is rooted in a global intimacy disorder. There’s a global intimacy disorder.
It’s not that we have lost intimacy on a global level, we have actually never had it. We have never evolved to that place.
As we are going to see today, evolution is no less than the evolution of intimacy — the entire evolutionary process. This is one of the great innovative dharmic structures, mimetic structures, of Evolutionary Church — to understand that evolution is no less than the evolution of intimacy itself.
Evolutionary Church is our vehicle. Evolutionary Church is not us and you. It is not Barbara and Marc and you. Evolutionary Church is us. It’s Gillian and it’s Oriana and it’s Chahat and it’s Nancy.
We need to evolve together. We are together evolving the source code. The evolution of the source code is the evolution of intimacy itself, because we have exiled intimacy.
The exile of intimacy
When we think of intimacy we think first of human intimacy — we think intimacy is a human experience. That is the first exile: only humans experience intimacy.
Then, we think that intimacy means a particular kind of romantic human experience. A monogamous, classical, white-picket-fence, dog, man-woman: we think that is an intimate experience. If we are liberal we allow man-man and woman-woman. If we are really liberal, sometimes, we allow three people to get together, but that is often the limitation of our intimacy.
Then, we exile intimacy even more when we say that intimate relations are sexual relations.
We’ve completely exiled intimacy.
But, no, intimacy is so much deeper.
Here is the Sutra of Evolutionary Church:
We live in an intimate universe.
Wow! Can you hear that my friends? Tweet that out into the world!
We begin with the Sutra of Evolutionary Church:
We need to move from global intimacy disorder, to a new order of intimacy, to the evolution of intimacy.
If you want to know, dear friends, why there is a global action paralysis, it is because shared action only comes from shared intimacy —
- There is nothing more erotic than creating together.
- There is nothing more intimate than awakening as a unique incarnation of intimacy that we call Unique Self.
- Then, participating together in the Unique Self Symphony in which the infinite and intimate resonance of our unique voices, in sacred activism to create a genuine sacred America.
- Not a top down, I am the President — but bottom up, We are the people.
Are we evangelists? Yes! We are evangelists means: we are bringers of the good news and the good news is the good news of intimacy.
- We are past the place of the sage from the stage.
- We are in the place where we recognize and understand that the next Buddha is a Buddha and a sangha filled with Buddhas.
Not that there is no hierarchy, not that there is no leadership — there is always leadership. And yet, we are all leaders. We are all evolutionary leaders because we are all offering our evolutionary intimacy into the space.
We can only do that if we do that for real, my friends.
— The second we demonize a person,
— the second we create a culture of attack,
— the second we lose our empathy,
— the second we get lost,
…we call it a failure of empathy.
Every second in our lives we are failing in our empathy. We fail in our empathy because it is too painful to open up all the way. We need to break down a little bit in order to break open:
- We’ve got to break down the walls of our ego.
- We’ve got to break down the places of being comfortably numb.
- We’ve got to break down living behind Pink Floyd’s historic, several decades ago, wall.
- We’ve got to break down living behind President Donald Trump’s wall.
We’ve got to break down the hatred that underlies the self-righteousness that underlies the righteous attack and critique of President Trump. Underneath it you feel an invective, which is an anger, a malice that no one wants to identify. There is not just an Alt-Right, there is an Alt-Left. But it is not a left-right issue.
Let’s be human beings together.
Let’s realize: that which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us.
Let’s realize that right now, as Libby Roderick said to us in her song:
How can anyone ever tell you that we are anything less than beautiful?
How can anyone ever tell us that we are less than whole?
How can anyone fail to notice that, in Evolutionary Church, our love is just a miracle and how deeply we are connected in our souls?
I want to make this real, my friends in the Dharma, right now. Let’s say, you think that Barbara said something in the Dharma you didn’t like. Or Marc said something you didn’t like for a second. There was something in the resonance you didn’t like. So, you know what? You are right, forgive us. Who cares? Forgive us.
You get what we do? We hold on to the missing tile — don’t like Marc’s hair, Barbara’s hair is a little off maybe, she needs new glasses, Marc change that —
Hey friends, give it up! Let’s surrender into intimacy. Do you get what I mean?
Yes! Because we want to know what love is. Give us the prayer — I Want to Know What Love Is.
I Want to Know What Love Is, that is our hymn. That’s our prayer.
Evolutionary Church is spreading to the world because it’s our turn.
It’s our turn.
It’s our song.
It’s our prayer.
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