321 — Responding to the Meta-crisis through the Erotic Gnosis of Tears

Published in

Office for the Future

34 min readDec 9, 2022

A Note to the Reader

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, (on 11/20/2022) 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 Elena Maslova-Levin and Krista Josepha and prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

Elena Maslova-Levin. My greatest grief (Shakespeare sonnet 48).

Evolving the source code of consciousness

What we are here to do — our intention in One Mountain Many Paths — is to respond to the meta-crisis in the only way that it can be responded to: through an understanding

that crisis is an evolutionary driver,
that our crisis is a birth, and
that every crisis is, at its core, a crisis of intimacy.
And that at the core of the meta-crisis, in this moment in time — which is driven by extraction models, and exponential growth curves, and multipolar traps, and races to the bottom, and tragedies of the commons, which themselves are rooted in rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics, which generates fragile and complicated systems — that underneath all of that, the source of it is a global intimacy disorder.

A global intimacy disorder means:

We are split off from value.
We are split off from the Field of Value.
We are split off from each other.
We are split off from the deepest answers to the core questions of our lives, the deepest responses to the core questions of our lives: Who am I? Where am I going? What’s there to do?

And, of course, the win-lose metrics is an intimacy disorder; the rivalrous conflict is an intimacy disorder; fragile systems — in which parts don’t know what each other are doing — is an intimacy disorder. But most deeply, we are non-intimate with each other. We are not in a shared story of value.

The Dharma is a shared story of value that allows us to respond to global challenges, because every global challenge requires global co-ordination.

We cannot co-ordinate unless we have ordinating values, and we cannot co-ordinate unless we have global coherence.
And we cannot have global coherence unless we have global resonance; we have to resonate with each other.
And we don’t resonate with each other unless we are intimate with each other, unless we have global intimacy.
And we cannot be intimate with each other unless we live together in a shared story of value.

And so, that’s what we do here — we are in this revolution.

This revolution is about articulating the New Story of Value, based on the deepest read of the leading-edge wisdom streams of the premodern world of gnosis (= of knowledge), and the modern world of gnosis, and the postmodern world of gnosis. Every week, when we get together, we are here to move forward — to evolve, quite literally, to turn the wheel — to actually evolve the source code of consciousness and culture itself.

And we do that.

And then Kristina Amelong goes in, listens carefully, and reads the transcription, and then she retells the story the following week, and she re-weaves — exact same words, same sentences, but rewoven in a new order, mediated through the prism of Kristina’s Unique Self, and that comes out as the Dharma recapitulation. And that’s a great service, that’s a great devotion, that’s a great art. I want to just take the time this week to not take that for granted, to show up for the first time and be just absolutely delighted. We have actually made a decision, Kristina and I, last week in our Holy of Holies, that we are going to be putting out a separate book of the Dharma recaps together, which is fantastic and gorgeous.

Rosh Hashanah is the portal to transformation

This week, we are here to do something very, very specific. We are going to talk about tears, and we are going to talk about the language of tears.

Last week, we set up a context —

that every great system of gnosis, including every religion, has a unique instrument to play in the Unique Self Symphony.
And that we don’t want to merge religions together, we want each religion to be a unique instrument in the larger symphony of world spirituality, of world religion.
And “world religion” is really just another way of saying a universal grammar of value, embedded in a story of value, that generates intimacy, and generates resonance, and generates coordination — and generates goodness, truth, and beauty — and allows us to respond to the invitation of our lives and to the global challenges.

What we are going to do this week is we are going to model this, using one tradition.

We are going to do it, later in the year with Islam, and we will do it with Christianity. Every once in a while, we will actually model what does it mean to receive the esoteric, the deep — not the surface teaching, but the profound inner teaching of a great tradition, and actually listen to its voice, and begin to integrate it in our lives.

Because we are citizens of this new world religion, we’re citizens of this new global spirituality — and yet we are also often unique citizens of a particular dimension of a particular religion. And we call that dual citizens; we can actually be citizens of both together.

I can be a citizen of Christianity, and I can be a citizen of world religion.
I can be a citizen of Hebrew wisdom, often called Judaism, and I can be a citizen of world religion and world spirituality.
I can be a citizen of Sunni or Shiite, or Confucianism, or Russian Orthodoxy —

— and I’ve got to evolve those traditions. I cannot be in their old exoteric, ethnocentric, premodern versions. I’ve got to evolve those traditions from within, and let them speak their unique and gorgeous truths that then come together as part of the great Unique Self Symphony, where we see both the universal grammar of value that they all share, and the unique quality of intimacy — the unique insight, the unique heart, the unique ecstasy, the unique radical aliveness, the unique instrument, the unique music that each plays, writes — the unique melody that forms the score of this world religion, of this universal grammar of value.

We are going to model that this week with a particular tradition, a tradition that happens just to be up this week. Welcome, everyone. Welcome.

The tradition that’s up this week — and again, we’ll be doing Islam, we’ll be doing Christianity, we’ll be doing all the traditions as we encounter them — but this week, we just finished a Holy Day called Rosh Hashanah: New Year. Rosh Hashanah literally means the beginning of the year. But it also means, in the original Hebrew, the beginning of transformation. Rosh means not just the beginning, but the entry point, the portal for transformation. So Rosh Hashanah is better translated as the portal to transformation.

And again, in a world religion, this is not for the Jews who are here — this is for everyone, just like the Christmas conversation or the Ramadan conversation is for everyone. We are going to weave a fabric which we all can resonate and participate in, be imbued, and inspired, and transformed by each of the great traditions in their particular language.

When God and Goddess are brought together, blessing flows into the world

We are between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Yom Kippur is this coming Tuesday night and Wednesday). And I just want to share something with you, which is actually a little bit shocking, and it literally just happened.

I am going to be, this coming Wednesday, in Austin. There is a critical decision that has to be made about a very, very important piece of work called The Phenomenology of Eros, which is one of the key source code changing projects we’ve been working on for many years. It’s twelve volumes in the complete Phenomenology, and four volumes in the Abridged Phenomenology, and there will be a one-volume popular version. And I am going to be meeting with someone in Austin to make a very, very essential decision on Wednesday about The Phenomenology. It doesn’t matter what the decision is, but it’s a critical moment.

I want to just to get a sense of how the Intimate Universe works. This literally just happened, like, eleven minutes ago; maybe more than that, like, at 12:59.

The Phenomenology opens with the story of the cherubs above the Ark in the Temple in Jerusalem, because that’s core to Yom Kippur. This holy day that we are about to enter on Tuesday night, a twenty four hour fast day, revolves around the high priest in Solomon’s wisdom. Solomon, the great king in ancient Jerusalem, builds the Temple. And the Masons and the Templars all come from that world, and the Mary Magdalene tradition comes from that world, and all of the Great Western mystery traditions, and Eastern mystery traditions that are rooted in Solomon’s wisdom — that have actually formed the Renaissance, and formed modern science, and shaped the fabric of Reality — come in large measure from the wisdom of Solomon.

The wisdom of Solomon is connected with the Temple. And at the center of the Temple, there is what’s called the Holy of Holies. It is the place where the Ark of the Covenant rests. Remember, Indiana Jones, Raiders of Lost Ark, twenty five years ago, a movie of the Lost Ark? The Ark is the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant rests in the inner sanctum of Solomon’s Temple in ancient Jerusalem. And above the Ark of the Covenant are two cherubs, and these two cherubs are described in the hidden esoteric mystery tradition as being not hallmark angels with childlike faces. The two cherubs are childlike, they are innocent — but they are also locked in erotic embrace; they are sexually entwined, they are sensually embraced. They are entwined erotically, one with the other.

And on Yom Kippur, the High Priest enters the Temple, and the High Priest arouses the feminine waters of the Shekhinah, the feminine face of the Divine, the Goddess. And when Her waters are aroused, then the High Priest — that is to say, the perfected human being, the awakened human being — the High Priest brings the feminine Divine into erotic union with the masculine Divine.

And it’s not two puppets someplace.

It’s two qualities of Kosmos.
It’s attraction and repulsion.
It’s allurement and autonomy.
It’s the line dimension of Kosmos and the circle dimension of Kosmos.
It’s autonomy and communion.
It’s the two great forces of Kosmos, God and Goddess, who inhere in every moment in every person.

When they are split from each other within ourselves — psychologically, spiritually, existentially, emotionally — Reality collapses, and our own personal Reality collapses. But when we bring together these two qualities —

the quality of my own fierce unique autonomy and power — together with communion, my desire to love, to participate with, to be part of;
the desire to receive and be penetrated — and the desire to penetrate;
tenderness and fierceness

— when I bring those qualities together, the God and the Goddess, then blessing flows in the world.

That’s what the High Priest does in the Holy of Holies. That’s what Yom Kippur is. He literally enters the Holy of Holies, and becomes a catalyst of divine tumescence. He becomes, the High Priest, an arouser of the Divine — and that’s what the human being is, that’s the essence of the lineage. Human being arouses the Divine, and brings the world into erotic union, into intimate union. Wow.

The Phenomenology of Eros, it opens with this set of texts. And by pure Divine Intimate — we call it coincidence, but it’s not coincidence — by pure divine intimacy in the Intimate Universe, we’ve been waiting for about nine months, with lots of conversations about when to have this conversation. And I just got a text where my friend said, let’s have this conversation on Wednesday.

Now, my friend is a beautiful, beautiful man, and he doesn’t know that Wednesday is Yom Kippur. He doesn’t know that that’s the time, that that’s the moment. And that he picked the time and the moment in which the Priest is actually entering the Holy of Holies to catalyze and arouse the Divine, and that’s the time we are going to sit and talk about this Phenomenology of Eros which opens with that text, which is about bringing that particular teaching of Eros into the world.

So what a wondrous, gorgeous Intimate Universe moment, wow!

Tears are an expression of the Eros of Kosmos

Now, stay close, stay close, and it’s going to get wild.

I want to add a couple of things just to frame this, and we are going to create a model of how a unique tradition contributes to this world religion in a stunningly exciting and important way. So let’s see if we can get there, I want to just set up the context a little bit.

On Rosh Hashanah, we are engaged in the catalyzing of this divine union — this union that takes place all the way up and all the way down, everyplace, because this is a divinity that is inherent in Kosmos and holds Kosmos. This is the ceaseless creativity, the inherent ceaseless creativity of Kosmos that lives in us, that lives in every quark, lepton, and hadron, that lives in every dimension of Reality, that suffuses all of Reality.

When we bring together the two dimensions, when we bring together the masculine and feminine divine into a new intimacy, a new shared identity, then a new whole is created that explodes blessing in the world.

We do that politically.
We do that socially.
We do it economically.
We do that in every dimension of Reality —

— it always how am I bringing together the masculine and the feminine, the line and the circle, and creating a new whole. And that’s called, in the tradition, arousing the feminine waters.

The feminine waters is obviously an allusion, a sexual allusion — but by sexual we don’t mean, in this case, human sexual. Human sexual just approximates, it’s an intimation of the Eros of Kosmos — the Amorous Kosmos, in which lines and circles are seeking to come together all the time.

And in the Amorous Kosmos — and here’s the big sentence — in The Amorous Kosmos, there is not only the wetness, the tumescence, the feminine waters below. There is also the feminine and masculine waters above. There is what’s called in the lineage, a lower face and an upper face. The lower face, in the feminine expression, has lips, and cries, becomes aroused with the tears of the lower lips. But the upper face also has lips, both in the masculine and the feminine. And tears, crying, are considered the sacred waters of the upper face.

Tears are understood in the lineage to be erotic; tears are an expression of the Eros of Kosmos itself —

the arousal of tears,
and the engagement with the language of tears,
and the ability to hear the voice of tears,
to identify the revelation of tears,
and to let tears be my teacher, my master.

And when I allow tears to be my teacher and master, I gradually become in devotion to tears, and ultimately, I become a master of tears, and I participate in the process of the evolution of tears.

The instrument of tears in the lineage is the instrument that is used on Rosh Hashanah, and which ends the practice, the service on Yom Kippur, and it’s called shofar. It’s called shofar. And you blow a shofar, and that shofar, as we are going to see, is an instrument of tears itself. And that shofar — we’re going all the way inside now — that shofar, in the lineage tradition, arouses the tumescence of Divinity, arouses the feminine waters to bring the masculine and feminine Divine together. But the way the feminine waters are aroused is through shofar, and shofar is a crying instrument.

Shofar is tears. It is human tears, you get this now?
It’s human tears.
It is our capacity to cry, to engage in the great crying game of Reality, to enter into the wail of tears.

And there’s tears of ecstasy,
and there’s tears of union,
and there’s tears of breakdown,
and there’s tears of breakthrough,
and there’s tears of the shattering of the old paradigm —

— and there are many forms of tears. But our capacity to engage tears and to cry authentically opens all the gates, and arouses the healing, the fixing, the evolutionary transformation of all waters.

And every time I cry, those tears are original, those tears have voice, those tears speak.

Evolutionary Love Code for this week:- Tears have voice. The voice of tears speaks the language of the Divine.
- Tears are not one voice. There are many voices to tears, many dialects in the language of tears.
- Tears tell a story about the true nature of self or Reality.
- Tears of pain, tears of ecstasy, tears of breakthrough, tears of breakdown, tears of gnosis, tears of revelation, tears of transformation, and more. Tears are the poetry and prayer of Eros desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-deeper wholeness.
- The greatest tragedy is to die without having cried the tears that were yours to shed. Every time we cry, we cry for all the times we never cried before. There is not goodness, truth, or beauty, without cultivating the gnosis of tears.

The name of God is the Infinite Intimate

Can you feel that code, everyone?

So this is the language, this is the instrument of the lineage, speaking the language of tears. And we are going to enter tears. I am going to reverse the order with permission, everyone, if that’s okay, and we will do our prayer at the end. Because shofar, as we will see, these tears are actually a form of prayer itself. So we’ll climax, but in this new form of prayer. Not fundamentalist prayer, not a cosmic vending machine — but a reclaiming of our capacity to turn to the Infinity of Intimacy; to the Infinite Intimate — and that’s the name.

In order for a tradition to become real — to actually articulate in the world, to actually find its way to transform Reality, to evolve Reality — it needs to articulate its name of God.

What’s the name of God in CosmoErotic Humanism, in this great New Story of Value which we are telling at this moment — in this Renaissance moment, in this time between worlds and time between stories, where we are integrating the insights of Reality into a new tapestry of intimacy, into a New Story of Value?

What’s the name of God?
The name of God is the Infinite Intimate.

God is not only the Infinity of Power.
God is the Infinity of Intimacy, which is the quality of personhood that lives in Kosmos.

Personhood is a quality. Our personhood participates in the quality of personhood in Kosmos, which is not a person.

It is more than a person.

It is infinite personhood in which we participate. And that infinite personhood knows our name, just like we know each other’s names. The same quality that allows us to know each other’s name, participates in the Field of LoveIntelligence and the Field of personhood — and knows our name.

In prayer, we turn to that Infinite Personhood, and we blow the shofar; the shofar of the holy and broken Hallelujah. That’s where we are going to get, that’s where we are going to go.

But let’s take it step by step.

We said that the instrument of this lineage moment is the shofar. So let’s just take a look at what shofar looks like, what does it sound like. Just so we can feel that instrument in front of us. This lineage instrument which is 3,000 years old, in an unbroken tradition which was core to the practice of Solomon’s temple, and is actually core to the practice of this lineage all over the world till today. It’s an unbroken lineage chain. Let’s just hear it for a second, so we can feel it. Here we go.

Let us look at one more, just to feel it.

That’s a shofar.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are days of tears

We have a text in the canon of the lineage, which says: this shall be for you a day of blasting. The blasting of a horn.

What I am now going to engage in is a kind of the mystical hermeneutics: the weaving, the sharing of inner interior sciences. It’s what you don’t hear about in the synagogue. This is the inner interior science, which actually animates the tradition. It is almost completely hidden until you see it — and then it becomes clear. That’s the way secrets are: until your consciousness is there and you can access them, the secret can be spoken right in front of you — and you still won’t hear it. A secret is a secret because you don’t have a consciousness to hold it. And then, when the consciousness is there, then all of a sudden, you see it is everywhere.

So, the text reads: this day, Rosh Hashanah — and the day concludes with Yom Kippur (it’s a two-part holiday, it’s called the High Holy Days) — should be for you a day of shofar blasting. But the word for the shofar blast also means intimacy, friendship. So, it’s a day of deep friendship and intimacy. But in the inner tradition, those who read most carefully, the Aramaic writers, they said on this text — based on a set of reasons which I can’t go into now, but they’re accurate — they say, this day is a day of tears.

Now I am going to weave hidden, esoteric secret texts from different places. In another Aramaic text in the third century that no one notices, it is this hidden text — and it’s always hidden in the most obvious place — the Masters ask a question. They say, what is the reason that we blow shofar the way we do?

What do they mean, the way we do?
If you just heard the shofar blowing,

you heard: buuuuup — a straight blast.
Then you heard: Uh-uh-uh — three, sometimes four, wailing sounds.
And then you heard, remember, she said it (the woman who blew the shofar was actually overlooking Los Angeles) — she said then teruah, and teruah is tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu.

The word teruah means generally shofar blasting, but it’s also a particular kind. So, there’s basically a buuuup, that’s the introductory note, but then the essence of shofar is in uh-uh-uh, tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu, uh-uh-uh, tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu.

In the original tradition, there wasn’t someone who blew the shofar for the entire community. But actually everyone had a shofar, and they would blow it themselves. And shofar is an instrument, in this Aramaic hidden tradition, of tears. It’s a crying instrument.

Now, I want to look now at just one form of crying. Remember, we need to hear the voice of tears. There are about twenty major movements in the symphony of tears. And Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in the hidden lineage (you can go to lots of synagogues and never hear a word about it) these two days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — which are considered days of judgment, these solemn days of judgment — at their core, these days of accountability are actually days of tears.

And the entire drama is a theatre of tears, expressed through the heart and body and ensoulment and personal myth of different figures in the great drama of the text. The different biblical dramas that are read in the community, these great dramas are actually about people who are crying. It’s a symphony, a cacophony of tears. But it is hidden. You can participate in these services your whole life and not think about tears even for a second, which is what most people do. Because the lineage always hides its essential teaching until you have the consciousness to hear it.

The language of mothers is the language of the sacred

So, in the third century, an Aramaic text asks, why do we have this particular form of tears?

Why do we have uh-uh-uh, tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu?
Why do we need both of those, and what are they about?

And the Aramaic text says that this is a day of tears.

The word for tears comes from a particular story, in what’s called the Book of Judges, where there is a woman whose name is Em Sisera, the Mother of Sisera. Her son, Sisera, is an evil figure, like a Saddam Hussein figure of the Book of Kings. She’s his mother, she is Sisera’s Mother. He’s gone to battle against the Israelites. The Israelites are, in this story, trying to establish peaceful relations. He doesn’t want peaceful relations, he attacks them, he goes to battle. He has attacked this Israelite community. And his mother, Sisera’s Mother — that’s her name, her name in the text is Sisera’s Mother — waits for him to come home, and he doesn’t come home.

The text reads: Sisera’s Mother cries. She is looking out the window, and her son’s chariot is not coming, and she raises her voice in tears. And if you remember, the Aramaic hidden text said that this day of shofar-blowing is a day of tears, and these tears are based on the tears of Sisera’s mother. And we are not sure how Sisera’s mother cried.

Did she cry uh-uh-uh?
Or did she cry tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu? There are these two different qualities of tears, and we’re not sure which one she cried.
Or did she cry both of them together, uh-uh-uh, tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu? We’re not sure.
Did she cry three wailing sounds?
Did she cry nine or ten kind of staccato sounds, tu-tu-tu-tu-tu?
Or did she cry them together?

And since we are not sure, says the text, which way she cried, and we model and pattern our shofar-blowing after Sisera’s Mother, we cry all of them.

Now, if you’re with me, what you are asking is, what can that possibly mean? Obviously, it’s a code. Remember the da Vinci codes? The da Vinci codes is a popularization of the method of this lineage of the Solomon Temple, which is, it speaks in codes. This is clearly a code, it is trying to say something. It’s not just — oh, there was this historical woman named Sisera’s Mother who cried in a certain way, let’s make sure to pattern our shofar-blowing after her.

Why? Why would you possibly pattern after her the blowing of the shofar, which is considered in the tradition, in lineage, to be the most sacred ritual act?

Actually, the only ritual act in the tradition which is considered as if you are in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, standing next to the Ark of the Covenant, with the High Priest, the only ritual act that gives you that ontological status, mystically — in the entire lineage — is the blowing of shofar. Wow! So the blowing of shofar is the highest of the high.

It is the deepest of the deep.
It is holy of holies.
It is on the inside of the inside.

And this ultimate interior act of ecstatic expression, in which we actually become intimate with Divinity, is patterned after the crying of Saddam Hussein’s mother? Because remember, Sisera is a Saddam Hussein figure; Sisera is a Hitleresque figure. Could that be that we are patterning our crying on Yom Kippur after the crying of Saddam Hussein’s mother? And we are not sure how Saddam Hussein’s mother cried. Did she cry uh-uh-uh? Or did she cry tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu? Or did she put both of them together? So let’s make sure that we repeat precisely the way she cried. Does that make any sense to you at all?

What could that possibly mean?
There is a mystical, esoteric, profound, powerful source code, exploding discernment here.
What is the tradition saying?
What does that mean?
What could that possibly mean?

On one level, the language of mothers is the language of the sacred. And when a mother cries for her child, it doesn’t matter who she is, and it doesn’t matter whether she is the enemy or not the enemy.

There is a language of authenticity.
There is a language of integrity.
There is a language of the sacred, which is the language of the mother crying for her child.

B. F. Skinner, the great psychologist of the 20th century, who is, in many ways, one of the most influential theorists in the world still today, completely misunderstood this quality of Mother Love. And I’m completing, with my friend Zak Stein, a book on how Skinner’s thinking has actually formed the thought structures of modern Reality that are the source of the breakdown (it’s a very, very important piece of work, and we’ll talk about it at a different time). Skinner wrote a utopian novel called Walden Two (published in 1948, right after George Orwell’s 1984). Skinner says in Walden Two (which is about a community that he formed): we know that mother love is not real, we know that mother love is just a social construction of Reality. We know that it’s a social custom, it is not about anything that’s essentially real in Kosmos. We have a custom that mothers are sad when they lose their kids, because that is an evolutionary motivation for mothers to take care of their children.

All this is, of course, completely wrong.

The shofar is the language of the mothers. It’s the language of the sacred. It’s that which is the ultimate Eros of Kosmos. And therefore, we model the shofar-blowing, specifically, on the mother of an evil enemy. Because she’s still a mother, and her tears are still holy. And that’s beautiful, and there is some deep truth to that.

Tears that shatter our false identity

But it goes so much deeper than even that. So are you ready? Are you prepared, friends? Let’s go inside all the way, to the deepest of the deep now.

What is the shofar-blowing? The question of Rosh Hashanah, and the question of Yom Kippur, is the question of judgment. And judgment means, I’m accountable.

And what am I accountable for? I’m accountable for myself. But what am I accountable for?

Not for a petty list of kind of imposed obligations that I couldn’t quite meet perfectly, like did I miss some ritual prayer and I forgot to do it, and I did it a minute later or a minute longer; or I got upset one day. As long as I apologize, that’s okay.

I am accountable for one thing:

Am I myself?
I am accountable for my I.
I am accountable for the ultimate question, which is, who am I?

I want to read you a text. And it’s a text of Abraham Kook, the great evolutionary mystic. It is a stunning text. He is quoting a verse from the Book of Isaiah, where Isaiah says, I’m in the exile (because Isaiah was in Babylon, he was in the exile). And Kook rereads the text and he says, my I. Not I’m in the exile — historically, geographically, I’m in the exile — as Isaiah seemed to say it. Kook says, no, what Isaiah is really saying is my I is in exile. I can’t find my I. I don’t know who I am. So that question of identity, that question of who am I, is the ultimate question.

When we identify ourselves by labels like I’m a mother. I’m a father. I’m a musician. I’m a cellist. I am a plumber. I’m a friend. I’m a writer — that’s legitimate, that’s real, that’s not wrong. That’s real, that’s sacred.

I am part of my community.
I am part of my organization.
I am part of my company.
I am a brother.
I am a daughter.
I am a father.
I am a mother —

— these are all important and beautiful and critical ways to identify who I am. And yet, they don’t exhaust the question. I am more than all that. I am deeper than all that. And am I willing to rip away all of those surface identifications, and stand naked before Infinity, and ask the great question of who am I?

Now, what’s the name of the actor in our story? She is Sisera’s Mother. Sisera’s Mother. But one second. One second, she is Sisera’s mother? But what’s her real name? She is Sisera’s Mother — but what’s her real name?

The answer is, my friends, she doesn’t have a name. She is called Sisera’s Mother. Now, you are Sisera’s Mother, and Sisera is going out to battle, and now Sisera has not come home, so you’re sitting at the window, and your identity, your name is, I am Sisera’s Mother. And you are looking out the window, and you are waiting for him to come back, but his chariot is late.

How many of us have had the experience of someone being late?

When someone is late, first, we are mad at them. You’re late. I’m here, why are you not here? Like, I can’t believe you came late. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, you get really mad.
But by the time you get to like a half hour, you start getting worried. What if they are not here? What if they don’t come? What if something happened to them?
And if it’s someone close to you, somewhere about 45 minutes, you start having feelings. And we all recognize this, wow, what if something actually happened to them? And who would I be if — what if they had a car accident? And what would happen? And let’s say it’s a wife or a husband, a son or a daughter. All sorts of thoughts go through your mind about them, but also about you.

Who have had an experience of waiting like that, when you’re waiting and just everything goes through your mind?

That’s what this story is about, this is a waiting story. She is waiting. Her name, we don’t know. She’s identified by I am a mother. And I am a mother is real, and it’s beautiful. But it doesn’t exhaust her identity. And on Rosh Hashanah, she stands: I’m a mother, I’m Sisera’s Mother, and Sisera is not there, and she’s waiting.

Now stay close with me, friends. I’m going to tell you something, just a little dark secret about myself, just for a second (we’ve got to share a dark secret someplace). One of the ways I got through school, financially — I come from a family without financial means — one of the ways I got through school was babysitting. I’d be a babysitter, in high school, sometimes part of college also. I’d do some babysitting, in the summers, whenever I could. Now just between us, I am not sure I would hire me as a babysitter. I mean, I kept everybody safe and all that. But I was massively committed to reading, and to understanding as much as Reality as I could through reading. So I’d say Hi to the kids, and let them do what they were doing, and make sure they were safe, and I’d go to read.

Sometimes, I would babysit a family that had a little baby who was actually still in a crib. So there you’ve got to take a little more care, and you put the baby down. I happen to love babies. And so I’d put the baby down, and I’d go back and read. And then every so often, you would hear the baby crying: uh-uh-uh, tu-tu-tu-tu, which was this shriek, this wail. And I would drop whatever I was reading. I would, like, leap, jolted up, cross the house, run upstairs to find the baby. Who knows what I’m talking about? Who has ever had a baby cry like that? That’s an unmistakable wail, and everything stops. It stops Reality.

And what would happen almost every time when I got to the crib, is that the baby had lost a security blanket of some form, or a teddy bear, or a doll — something that, for the baby, gave them their sense of security, their sense of belonging. Winnicott, the great psychologist of the 20th century, called those things transitional objects. When the mother leaves, the baby forms their identity through holding what Winnicott called a transitional object, which could be that blanket, or it could be that teddy bear, or it could be a pacifier, or it could be a little ball. When that would drop from the crib, the baby would scream! Because the baby couldn’t find herself, didn’t know for a moment who she was. And then I pick up the baby, and we’d be together again.

That’s Rosh Hashanah. On Rosh Hashanah, we pattern the blowing of the shofar in the lineage. And we pattern the shofar-blowing on the crying of Sisera’s Mother.

Because Sisera’s Mother is the mother of Sisera, and then she realizes — in this moment in the text which shofar-blowing is patterned on, this lineage moment which captures the inner phenomenology of this moment — she realizes, all of a sudden, that Sisera, her son, is not coming home. She is the queen mother, and the king is clearly no more. So if the king is no more, if Sisera is no more, in some fundamental way, her position as the queen mother has disappeared. And her identity, her entire life has been to give birth to Sisera, to protect him, to ascend him to the throne, then to function as queen mother. And all of the sudden, she is not queen mother anymore, and she understands that in the depth of her being. And instead of turning away, she shrieks, she screams, she wails, she cries!

And we want to cry exactly like she did. Whether it was uh-uh-uh, whether it was tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu, whether it was two of them together — but we want to cry like she did, because we want to capture that capacity to shed those tears that shatter our false identity.

These are tears of shattering. These are tears of Shevirat haKeilim, the shattering of the vessels, when I shatter the identity that I am basing myself on (which might be: I’m spiritual, I’m perceptive, I’m writing books, I’m kind. I’m a lawyer. I’m a doctor. I’m an organization man — and those are all beautiful). However I form my identity, in this moment, in this New Year, in this Rosh Hashanah — as we translated at the beginning of our conversation, this portal to transformation — I have to be willing to shed tears which wash away all of my old identity, and to literally stand naked before Infinity and to recreate myself from the very beginning.

Wow, who am I?

Can I let go of the tyranny of all the yesterdays, and actually find my unique voice?

The gates of tears are never closed

Let tears clarify the confusion.

Tears, in Hebrew, is from the same root as the word for chaotic confusion.

Tears clarify the confusion: all of a sudden, I can see clearly now.
Tears bypass all of the rationalizations.
Tears bypass all of the stories we tell about what we need and who we are.

I remember I was in the Far East with an assistant of mine during three years, some twenty five years ago, when I had taken off from the world of teaching, to really understand what the world felt like from the perspective of business. So I was involved for three years in entrepreneurship, in a company that was buying, selling, and taking high-tech companies public. And we were in the middle of trying to close a particular deal with a particular company in the Far East, and I was there with my assistant, who was essential to the whole story. Her name was Mickey.

Mickey comes to me, and we are about to close the deal in the next two to three days, and we are being wined and dined. And she says, something happened with my family and I feel like I need to go home. She tells me what happened.

And I said, Mickey, you’re awesome, and I think they can handle this. We need you here to close this deal, we need to take this company public, we need this deal closed in order to do it. So I apologize. I love you madly, but I can’t let you go.

And by all rational calculation, I was right. And Mickey looks at me, and these tears start running down her cheeks. She is just crying. I said, whoa, Mickey! You know what? I got this wrong, I think we can manage without you. Get a ticket, fly the next day. It’ll be fine. Go home, take care of it. And Mickey goes.

What happened, what changed?

What changed was, her tears spoke something that entered my heart — and that communicated a truth, communicated a depth, communicated a value — that bypassed my words. Tears have a bypass mechanism; they take us directly into essence. When all the gates are closed, the gates of tears are never closed.

So on Rosh Hashanah, we cry. But these are the tears of transformation. It’s the willing to be naked before myself, and to literally recreate myself in the full depth and wonder of the unique expression that is me.

I am a unique desire of the Infinite

Now, who am I?
What is that unique expression that’s me?

That’s our topic for next week.

But to take that step to know who I am, who am I, I’ve got to first be able to cry the tears that shatter denial, the tears that upend the old paradigm, the tears that liberate me from the tyranny of yesterday, the tears that free me from my imposter stance.

Am I willing to actually be me?
And the truth is, it’s the only person you can be, because everyone else is taken.
But to be you is an outrageous act.
It’s an outrageous commitment.

It means to move through the traumas, to move through the contractions, to move through the pettiness, to move through the smallness — and actually feel a unique flame alive in you. And that flame — and we’re going to talk about this next week — but that flame is a unique constellation, a unique quality of Outrageous Love; the love that’s the heart of existence that moves through you. And that Outrageous Love, that Outrageous Love which is Eros, flames with desire.

Because really, the answer to the question of who are you is, I am desire.
I am desire.

In my deepest essence, in my clarified essence — in my clarified desire, what we call here my Deepest Heart’s Desire — I am the desire of the Divine.

I’m the desire of the Infinite.
But I am a unique desire of the Infinite.

The Infinite desires through me in a way in which She cannot desire through anyone else that ever was, is, or will be, other than me.

I am a unique configuration of desire, which means I’m a unique configuration of Outrageous Love — which means that I have Outrageous Acts of Love to commit in this world that are a function of my Unique Self. And the committing of those Outrageous Acts of Love is my Deepest Heart’s Desire, which is the desire of Divinity awake and alive in me.

But those aren’t words, to be a participant in Unique Self Symphony you actually have to feel — I actually have to feel, we actually have to feel — this quality in which we have washed away through the tears, we have screamed. We’ve screamed because we realize we are not Sisera’s Mother anymore. We are standing naked. We have dropped the pacifier.

And the pacifier takes many forms.

The pacifier can be I’m a mother.
The pacifier can be I’m an entrepreneur.
The pacifier can be I’m a writer.
The pacifier can be I’m a lawyer.
The pacifier can be I’m a sister.

And those are all beautiful. But they can ultimately be a security blanket, a transitional object, a form of idolatry, which actually stands between me and my Essential Self, my Essential Unique Self; my ani: me. The unique quality of desire that lives in me, as me, and through me.

That’s tears.

Tears tell a story about the true nature of Self and Reality

Let us just take a second and read the Evolutionary Love Code again.

Tears have voice. The voice of tears speaks the language of the Divine.
Tears are not one voice. There are many voices to tears, many dialects in the language of tears.
Tears tell a story about the true nature of Self or Reality.
Tears of pain, tears of ecstasy, tears of breakthrough, tears of breakdown, tears of gnosis, tears of revelation, tears of transformation, and more. Tears are the poetry and prayer of Eros desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-deeper wholeness.
The greatest tragedy is to die without having cried the tears that were yours to shed. Every time we cry, we cry for all the times we never cried before. There is not goodness, truth, or beauty, without cultivating the gnosis of tears.

What we have done is, we just gave voice to a particular form of tears. The voice of tears speaks the language of Divine. Tears are messengers of God. But tears are not of one voice. There are many voices to tears, many dialects in the language of tears.

And we just told one story that’s told by tears, one dialect. Tears tell a story about the true nature of Self and Reality. Tears of pain, tears of ecstasy, tears of breakthrough, tears of breakdown, tears of gnosis, tears of revelation, tears of transformation — that’s what we’ve just been talking about. Tears are the poetry and prayer of Eros desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. The greatest tragedy is to die without having cried the tears that were yours to shed. And every time we cry, we cry for all the times we never cried before. There’s no goodness, truth, or beauty without cultivating the gnosis of tears.

Can we feel that, friends? We didn’t talk about all of it, we just began.

We began with one movement, one language of tears. And it’s those tears that arouse the Divine. And those tears are tears that we can only cry in this time of New Year, when we are willing to shatter our yesterdays. I’m willing to literally be born again. And that notion of being born again that found its way into fundamentalist Christianity, is actually rooted in Rosh Hashanah.

But to be born again means — it’s not a fundamentalist movement — it means I can actually reclaim my Essential Self which I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten how to enter the question of who are you? I’ve given so many idolatrous and false answers. I’m willing to actually rip off that security blanket, to drop that pacifier, to drop all of the distressing disguises that stand between me and my essential identity.

I am desire. I am an irreducibly unique divine desire.

And when I’m willing to shed those tears, when I’m willing to clarify my desire — and you only clarify your desire through the deepest of tears — when I am willing to listen to the voice of tears, then I can pray.

See, tears are the ultimate form of prayer, that’s what tears are.

And in the deepest teachings of the tradition, they tell of a boy who comes to the service on the High Holy Days, and everyone’s there with their prayer shawls and they’re speaking all of their words. And the boy, he doesn’t know the words. He doesn’t know the prayers. So he takes out a whistle, and in the middle of the prayer service, he blows; he blows hard on that whistle. And everyone goes, stop! What’s the kid doing? He’s interrupting the services. And the master, the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the Hasidic movement, turns and he says:

— No, only that boy knows how to pray.

He says that’s what shofar-blowing is.

Shofar-blowing is the pure tears. When we shatter the yesterdays, and we stand naked before ourselves, and we say I am desire. Because that’s actually who I am.

In my very core, I am desire, and I desire value.
I desire goodness, I desire truth, I desire beauty.
But I desire it uniquely.
I am the unique desire of the Divine, who discloses value that can be disclosed only through me.

That’s what it means to be Unique Self. And it’s those tears that we pour into God when we pray. Wow!

So let’s turn to prayer. I know we’ve gotten a little bit over time today. But the evolutionary sense-makings in the High Holidays are always a little bit longer. So thank you so much for your patience. But I’m going to ask you to really stay with us.

We are going to turn to Leonard Cohen. And Leonard Cohen comes from this lineage tradition. And the holy and broken Hallelujah are about the act of tears. It’s about the act of coming before the Divine and offering my broken heart. It doesn’t matter which I heard, there’s a blaze of light in every word, the holy and the broken Hallelujah. And the holy and the broken Hallelujah is always suffused with tears.

And remember, friends, every time we cry, we cry for all the times we never cried before.

We cannot respond to the meta-crisis without articulating a universal grammar of value embedded in a story of value. And in that story of value, there have to be tears. We have to be willing to cry with each other. But not just to cry with each other —

We have to be willing to listen to the language of tears.
To hear, to feel the gnosis of tears, the revelation of tears.
We have to weave the tears into public policy.
We have to weave the tears into economic policy.
We have to weave our tears into cultivating a culture of Eros and a politics of Eros, into being Outrageous Lovers.

There is no response to the meta-crisis without tears. The holy and the broken Hallelujah.

Ask for everything.
Ask for the capacity to cry.
Ask for the ability to have those tears answered.
Pray for your uncle, and for your brother, for your sister.
Pray for the whole world.
Pray for all the tears that have been shed — so for the first time, we can dry up all the tears.

And transform the tears of pain and yearning into tears of ecstasy, tears of joy, and tears of tribulation.

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