374 — Holding the Impossible Paradox: Fully Responding to the Evil of Hamas AND Liberating the Spark of the Sacred in the Failed Love Story of Jihad
We are called to create a culture of life
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [December 10, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni 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 Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
Summary: In response to the culture of death, we are called to create a culture of life — and the culture of life has to include everyone and everything. We cannot tell a coherent New Story of Value if we split anything off, and that includes jihad. We live in the world of broken vessels, and our job is to liberate the spark of the sacred from broken vessels. It means holding an impossible paradox: the need to respond to its ability to perpetrate evil — and yet to liberate the spark. The first step to liberating the spark is knowing there is a spark, to discern truth in jihad: its desperation for meaning, its realization that there is a divine force in the world, and we need to partner with it, and act for it, and sometimes sacrifice for it.
The narcissist exercise
Israel has been at war since October 7th.
Israeli or Palestinian lives are not more precious than any other lives on the planet. All life is equally precious and equally beautiful. It needs to be equally protected.
The same thing is true when we lose someone close to us.
It shouldn’t change our view of the world — because other people have lost people that are close to them. But when things happen very close to our heart, we have an interior experience that either breaks us or opens us, but it gives us new information.
Let me give an example of what that means.
Sometimes people will say to me, “Wow, I just went through this very, very painful experience, and I can’t believe in spirit, or in God, or in love anymore. Because I just saw this betrayal. And really the nature of the world is that everyone’s for themselves, and there is no goodness in the world.” I’ve heard people say that, even recently.
That’s not true, right? Because even before you — whoever you might be (you, we, I) — even before we had our personal experience of pain, we had been deeply aware of the fact that there’s lots of pain in the world. We don’t want to be narcissists whose experience of Reality is: we can be filled with joy and love of spirit as long as the pain doesn’t affect us too directly.
- Okay, we are aware of Rwanda.
- We are aware of Uganda.
- We are aware of the Holocaust — but that didn’t affect us.
But now that something happened directly to us, our whole view of the world changes. We don’t want to be that. We want to feel beyond ourselves.
Back in 2006 and ’07 and ’08 and ’09, which was a difficult time in my life, when I experienced, particularly in 2006, this very intense kind of unimaginable sense of betrayal, which could have shattered me, I did what I called the narcissist exercise.
Every time I felt shattered by the pain of betrayal, I reminded myself that I was aware of very deep betrayals that had taken place in the world before I experienced it myself, and it didn’t cause me to abandon the world, or to reject the goodness of the world. It had happened to other people, and the only thing that was new was that now it happened to me. If my worldview changed because it happened to me, when the tragedy itself wasn’t new, that would mean that I was a narcissist, only obsessively interested in my own experience. Since I certainly didn’t want to view myself as a narcissist, I said, “You know, Marc, I think you can hold this, transmute it, get over it, and not have it shatter you.”
It’s a great exercise. I’ve been recommending it to students and friends all through the years. I call it the narcissist practice, but it’s actually wildly hopeful. If we are fine as long as it’s happened out there, but when it gets close, then it completely changes us — that’s fundamentally wrong.
Personal experience can change everything
But now I want to give you the flip opposite of it.
- When we are talking about not the pathology of the world, but the beauty of the world,
- when we’re talking about the illusion of reality,
- when we’re talking about enlightenment,
- when we’re talking about the one heart —
— then personal experience is everything. It changes everything.
Let me give an example of that. I’ve always known with great clarity that when you close your eyes at the moment that you die, and then you open your eyes, you open your eyes into a new world. Death is not the end of the story. Death is not the final frontier. It’s a frontier in which we cross over into a new world. And we’ve talked about death as a night between two days.
And yet, we remain very attached to the world.
We should be passionately committed, and we should be passionately attached to the world, and we should be madly committed to the urgency of transmuting suffering in the world. We never want to look at the fact that this world is a corridor, a hallway to the next world, as a way of abandoning responsibility for this world. That’s all completely true. That’s deep. It’s true.
And there is something about a personal experience that changes things.
I can’t quite believe that my beloved friend Sally Kempton is gone. It’s actually shocking to me. It’s like, “How could that be?” It’s unimaginable to me. I can’t grasp it in my body. I have a little text thread here on my phone — I just sent Sally texts every day, just to say hi. I asked Sally for help in this world, and I asked Sally if I can help her in the next world. Her leaving the world gave me a direct experience of the continuity of consciousness in a way that I never had before. Because Sally is so real, her life force is so absolutely real, that the notion that it could have disappeared into oblivion is an absurdity. In other words, I have a self-evident direct realization of Sally’s continuity of consciousness. A direct experience of enlightenment. I go through the reality — not the intellectual reality, the lived somatic reality — of Sally’s existence, and I can locate myself in that existence. And then I realize that existence is existent. That existence is existent.
And just locate yourself where you have that experience, where you just have a direct experience, an embodied knowing of the continuity of consciousness.
That’s a really big deal.
This is a place where my personal experience does completely change my actual knowing. That’s called the Eye of the Heart. That’s what the Eye of the Heart means.
Creating a culture of life has to include everyone and everything
My country, Israel, has been at war.
I don’t say my country in the sense of my country right or wrong. Israel has made mistakes, for sure. That’s not my conversation. It’s just my country. And I have a little text thread that I look at every day. This text thread is essentially photographs of people who have just been killed. It goes on and on — and these are just boys. And I’m deeply, deeply aware of — and I hold in the same way — every innocent death in Gaza in this tragedy.
Of the boys in this thread, six are personally close to the family. I know, directly or indirectly, the families of others. But I know all of them. Every single day, I get myself on this text thread, and every single boy or girl that passes, I try and be with them and hold them. And they’re gone.
The last five days has been worse than ever. It’s been the worst five days, these last five days. And you feel in your body what matters. At this point in the world, what matters is that as they put themselves on the line to challenge the culture of death, which is jihad, which is what they need to do.
We need to put ourselves on the line to create a culture of life.
Paradoxically, creating a culture of life has to include everyone and everything. It needs to include the spark of the sacred that’s trapped in broken vessels, which animates even Hamas.
When Sam Harris talks about the evil of Hamas, he’s absolutely right. The evils of rape, and sexual violence, and murder, and dismemberment are a horror — a horror beyond imagination. The boys who did that were jacked up on amphetamines, which depressed their empathy centers and up-leveled, up-regulated their centers of aggression — it was necessary because it violates the humaneness in these boys. It’s a horror. And Hamas needs to be taken down, and all the Arab leaders are calling Israel behind the scenes — and I have absolute information on that — and saying, you must take Hamas out because Hamas is holding the entire civilized world hostage.
That’s all true.
But here is what Sam doesn’t understand. For Sam, it’s hard to get, because he is a materialist. It’s hard for him to get that there is a spark of the sacred that animates Hamas — not the rapes, not the brutality, not the torture, not any of that. That’s all degraded human beings who have basically forfeited their core humanity. Of course, that’s off the table. That needs to be responded to.
But there is a spark of the sacred, in which Hamas and jihad is desperate to stand for meaning.
- There is a desperation for meaning.
- There is a realization that we sacrifice for a larger cause.
- There is a realization that we are something larger than just the individual moments of fun, or consumption, or mindless, banal, desiccated, reductive materialism.
There is a desperation for meaning that lives in jihad, that if we don’t address it — if we just dismiss it — we’re making a huge mistake. Sam is right about the brokenness deep in the very heart of Islam. That’s absolutely true. And there is also a sacred spark that needs to be liberated. Just like there is a sacred spark in Chinese communism that needs to be liberated from the Chinese Communist Party, which has become a band of thugs, a mafia-like band of thugs.
The act of the erotic mystic is to liberate the spark of the sacred in order to create a new coherent story.
We can only live outrageously. And to live outrageously means that I can’t live a banal, desiccated, surface, superficial life, and be whole or holy. I’ve got to stand for it all. I’ve got to stand for She. Hamas, as we said a couple of weeks ago, is a failed love story, and failed love stories destroy Reality.
OJ Simpson’s failed love story with Nicole caused him to murder her viciously and brutally. It’s always failed love stories. But in order to create a coherent new story, and a new intimacy, and a new narrative, we can’t just say, “Jihad is evil.”
We have to say, “Yeah, jihad is evil. It needs to be taken on full on. And we need to liberate the spark of the sacred.” We need to liberate the spark of the sacred, and that’s critical. That’s critical. It’s so gorgeous. It’s so deep. It’s so holy.
Everyone’s got to be at the table, because otherwise, we start othering the other in a way that doesn’t allow us to create a coherent world intimacy.
It’s so deep, it’s so beautiful.
Be careful of moral equivalence
You’ve got to be so careful of moral equivalence.
With all of her flaws, Israel is a pluralistic democracy —
- where women are honored,
- where there is a fifth of Arab population that serve in the armed forces in gorgeous ways,
- where you can walk into Hadassah Hospital, where Jewish doctors and Arab doctors work together to save lives, where the current head of Hamas who organized the massacre in Israeli jails was saved by Israeli doctors operating to heroically save his life.
Israel is doing the most complex experiment at pluralism that has ever been attempted.
- If you confuse a liberal democracy and jihad…
- If you don’t actually know the facts on the ground and make a broad-sweeping equation of any kind between a pluralistic liberal democracy and its values, with all of its mistakes, and Hamas, and what happened on October 7th — the dismemberment of children in front of their parents, and the rape of women on the bodies of other dead people, et cetera, et cetera —
— that’s absurd. That’s absurd. That’s absurd.
Of course an individual has the right to say, “I don’t want vengeance.” For example, someone can say, “I don’t want vengeance in the name of my children.” Of course, we don’t want vengeance in the name of their children. What Israel is doing has nothing to do with vengeance. What Israel’s doing is what every Arab leader has called Israel privately and said must be done, because Hamas is holding the world hostage. It has nothing to do with vengeance at all. That’s not the issue.
Does vengeance live in the human heart? Of course it does.
But that’s not what Israel’s policy is about. Israel’s policy is about something entirely different. I’m not going to have that conversation now, but that distinction is fundamental. And I mean this tenderly, but fiercely. It is an outrage to compare Netanyahu to Hamas and a liberal pluralistic democracy to October 7th, which was probably one of the worst expressions of human atrocity in human history, intentionally inflicted, with brutal sadism — as opposed to Israel, which loses dozens and dozens of soldiers because they’re trying to make 10,000 phone calls to let people know that you’ve got to get out, and they’re doing their absolute best. I would say it is probably the most moral army in the world ever, as many people have noted, in attempting to avoid civilian casualties.
If you can’t get that distinction, that’s a big deal.
The shattering of the vessels
Let’s go back to the idea of liberating the spark. What does it mean that we’ve got to liberate the spark? How do you liberate the spark? This is so deep, and let’s do this really carefully.
What is the image? First, I want to just stay with the image.
Here is the image of the interior sciences as expressed by Isaac Luria in the 16th century. In Luria’s vision of Reality, there is a realization that Leit Atar Panui Minay —
- It’s all Divinity.
- It’s all pure being.
- It’s all pure, alive Eros.
- There is no room for anything but the Divine.
Then, there is this divine recoil, this divine withdrawal — in words that are closer to Jesuit traditions, divine kenosis — this divine emptying out, called in Lurianic thought, Tzimtzum. Contraction, withdrawal.
Habermas, for example — probably the greatest living philosopher in Germany — was deeply influenced by Tzimtzum in his thought (as was Schelling, as was Hegel, as was Fichte). All the Renaissance was defined, subliminally and directly, by this idea — that Divinity doesn’t thrust forward to create, but the Infinite steps back. The Infinite steps back in order to be intimate, which is why in CosmoErotic Humanism, this New Story of Value that we’re telling, we call God the Infinite Intimate. The name of God we use is the Infinite Intimate.
There’s this sense that All is God and God is All — and then there is the stepping back. In this stepping back, there is room — this halal panui, this empty space for Reality to emerge.
If you have this circle of empty space in your imagination, then this circle of empty space is bisected by a shaft, by a thrusting shaft. It’s this circle-line imagery, which impregnates Reality.
Reality then organizes itself in patterns. It’s a pattern of ten luminations — this pattern of ten Sefirot, ten divine stories, ten luminations, ten patterns of reality, ten patterns of intimacy. They’re called keilim, and keilim means vessels: ten vessels, ten containers, ten patterns.
The nature of a pattern is that a pattern excludes everything else. It’s a particular structure. Ten structures, ten vessels.
The infinite light is so intense in each of those ten vessels, and each vessel is trying to be its own structure, its own independent expression of The Divine.
The Infinite enters those ten structures, those ten vessels, and they shatter.
They break apart.
They are broken. It’s a broken Hallelujah.
That’s called the shattering of the vessels.
The vessels then spread through all of Reality. Imagine a Reality of broken vessels, and broken stories, and broken hearts, and broken Hallelujahs, and broken promises, and broken potencies, and broken dreams, and broken bodies. It’s a world of shattered vessels, and broken ideologies, and broken scripts of desire.
Liberating the spark of the sacred
And then, the job of the tzadik — the righteous one — is to liberate the spark. To descend into the broken vessel and liberate the spark of light that still lives in the broken vessel.
The vessel is shattered. The vessel is broken. And yet, in that broken vessel, there is still a spark of light.
Those of us who are coming together to tell this New Story of Value in this time between worlds and time between stories, we need not destroy the broken vessels — although sometimes we have no choice but to respond to a broken vessel, and to destroy some dimension of its ability to affect evil in the world.
Sometimes we have no choice but to respond to Nazism. We have to respond to Nazism. We can’t just say, “Nazism is a broken vessel. We’re just going to let it rule Europe.” Can’t do that.
Sometimes we have to respond and shut down the capacity for the broken vessel to affect evil.
And sometimes that means bombing.
And sometimes that means, tragically, innocent deaths.
That’s sometimes the case.
You would need to be a commander on the ground — an extremely moral, beautiful, deep commander — to know how to respond. It’s very easy to respond from a chat box. But it is hard to actually take responsibility yourself, to be the person in charge — not someone on the side who’s just blabbing. That’s a different discretion, and that’s not our conversation here.
Our conversation here is something else, which is: even then I still have to find, for example in jihad, the spark.
How do I liberate the spark of the broken vessel?
That’s deep. That’s so deep.
The beginning of liberating the spark is understanding that there is a spark.
Just understanding that I might have to have a paradoxical relationship to Reality.
I may need to respond, for example, to Nazism, and do everything I can to take it down in complete entirety. As the Dalai Lama and I said, the notion that all killing is wrong is a naive and ultimately immoral position. It is just not true in this world. That’s simply not true morally. I certainly don’t think so. The great interior scientists didn’t think so. The Dalai Lama doesn’t think so. There are some people who think that pacifism is the right position. I don’t. I think pacifism is an immoral position on multiple grounds. But that’s a different conversation. I’m going to stay close to the spark.
So what does it mean to liberate the spark?
To liberate the spark means that I’m able to hold this impossible paradox.
The impossible paradox that I’m holding is: I can actually respond as necessary — whatever necessary means, and yet, realize that there is a holy spark that needs to be integrated into the New Story.
I realize that jihad is holding something. It’s beautiful. I realize actually there’s something I have to learn even from jihad. There is something that jihad is standing for.
It’s wrong, categorically wrong. October 7th, evil.
And there’s something to liberate. There is a spark of the sacred in the broken vessel of jihad.
Wow! Like, wow! Did you get how hard that is to say, my friends?
There is a spark of the sacred in the broken vessel of jihad.
Truth is always in paradox
This is why it’s so hard to talk about things in little sound bites on CNN or in the legacy media. It’s very deep. The Garden of Eden is not paradise, the Garden of Eden is paradox. And the farther you get away from paradox, the farther you’re getting away from truth.
Truth is always in paradox. It’s always the ability to hold paradox. In order to do sensemaking, I need to be able to hold paradox.
There is a deep, deep need to liberate the spark of the sacred from the broken vessel of jihad, without which we won’t be able to create a New Universe Story — a coherent narrative, a coherent love story, because we’ll have split off jihad.
There is a way in which jihad can be and needs to be the spark of the sacred integrated and honored. Because there are actually truths in jihad. The truth in jihad is —
- There is a realization of this divine force in the world. It’s true.
- There is a realization that we need to be responsible to, and to partner with, that divine force. It’s true.
- We need to act as and for that divine force. That’s true.
- We sometimes need to sacrifice for that divine force. That’s true.
Wow!
Jihad, in its beauty, should be the jihad that happens within each individual soul, which is how millions of Muslims interpret jihad beautifully around the world. But it’s very, very easy for jihad to get corrupted, and to devolve to the literal readings of the Quran, which are brutally violent in so many places. That’s actually what we’re seeing happening in the world.
- It’s very easy for jihad to lose its way.
- It’s very easy to stand for a false cause.
- It’s very easy for a sacred cause to become a false cause, and it’s very easy to die for a false cause.
- It’s very easy for jihad to become pseudo-jihad.
That’s all true.
We need to liberate the spark of the sacred in jihad, and to weave that spark of the sacred into the New Story of Value.
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