375 Part 2 — Scripts of Desire: Writing Your Song of Songs: Outrageous Erotic Love Letters
In CosmoErotic Humanism we democratize great love by writing Outrageous Love Letters
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [December 17, 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: This is the last part of our conversation on scripts of desire. The heart of it is the realization that Reality itself is scripts of desire. Desire is the nature of Cosmos.
Beyond value, there is the sacred, the holy — value exponentialized, as when joy explodes into ecstasy and devotion. Philologically, the sacred means the ultimate intimate, and the Holy of Holies is the Song of Solomon — which is itself scripts of desire, a series of Outrageous Love Letters.
Every great tradition had this realization in its innermost, deepest strains of wisdom — that all objects in existence are wildly in love with one another, that Reality is a story of LoveDesire. In CosmoErotic Humanism, we democratize great love, and we do it by writing Outrageous Love Letters. This is the core practice that changes the fabric of reality.
We are blest by everything
There is an absolute joy that we get from living on the Inside of the Inside, from living in the God House, in the Goddess House — from living in the field.
And there is the willingness to make war for peace. We’ve got to do everything for peace.
I’ve got to engage in an internal jihad, in the great struggle between good and evil, which lives inside of me —
- to claim the good,
- and to know ultimately that it’s all part of the one love,
- and it’s actually going somewhere, and it’s going somewhere that’s good.
Even as I am just blown away by the mystery and by the tragedy, I somehow manage not to get lost in the tragedy, but I move from the tragic to the post-tragic, and I’m able to live in the joy — to feel the remorse and the pain, but not live only in it, to live in the mad joy.
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest,
writes the poet, Yeats.
When I cast out the depression, the remorse which paralyzes me, we cry out, ashrei, as David said to Solomon, ashrei yoshvei veitecha ‘mad joy to sit and to be at home.’ Od, yehalelucha, selah.
And there is more joy.
There is more joy to come.
And I am the more joy to come, and you are the more joy to come.
Desire is the nature of Cosmos
We have done three weeks in One Mountain talking about scripts of desire [Episodes 370, 371, 372]
There are broken scripts of desire.
There is a script of desire of the separate self who is healthy (so psychology would try and help me write a healthy script of desire), and then there are broken scripts of desire of the separate self.
There is a script of desire which might come from a false self, which is a more broken form of separate self.
And then, you go to True Self, and you’re part of the entire field of awareness. There is a dimension of awareness that’s beyond all desire, but you are also part of the field of desire. You are one with the general field of desire. It is not a specific desire, it’s just Reality desiring.
When I get to Unique Self, I begin to become a unique script of desire.
My Unique Self is my unique script of desire.
And then, Evolutionary Unique Self is the call of the future that lives in my desire. It wants to birth a new emergence, a unique gift that can only be given to Reality through my being, my unique configuration of desire, from my living my unique life, and ultimately giving my unique gift to the larger whole.
At every level —
- separate self/psychological self,
- True Self/mystical self,
- Unique Self/Evolutionary Unique Self/Future Self —
— there are scripts of desire.
The drama of it, and the beauty of it, and the why it’s so critical, is this realization that Reality is scripts of desire.
That’s what Reality is. Reality is not empty. Reality is not hollow. We are not, as T. S. Eliot wrote, the hollow men and the stuffed men, we are full.
We are filled with desire.
We are filled with our unique configuration of desire — but that’s what Reality is.
Desire is not an aberration. Desire is the nature of Cosmos.
The sexual models Eros in that the sexual is defined by, expressed by, and suffused with desire. The entire book A Return to Eros is about that topic. Eros is the larger field of desire, the field of creative emergence. It is Reality’s desire to generate ever deeper forms of the Good, the True, and the valuable, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful — ever deeper forms of value.
These sentences are huge.
They are deeply rooted in the interior and exterior sciences, but they change everything. What they say is that Reality at its very core is a story. It’s a love story, but it’s not just a love story. It’s a story of LoveDesire.
Reality is a story of LoveDesire.
That’s step one.
The sacred means ultimately intimate
This is the essence of the wisdom of Solomon, which lives at the center of culture as a mystery.
What is the wisdom of Solomon?
The wisdom of Solomon has a primary text. The primary text of the wisdom of Solomon is the Song of Solomon. It’s called the Song of Songs.
I want to recommend a book called A Return to Eros. Chapter 9 is called The Sexy Song of Solomon, where I try to unpack the Song of Solomon. The way the lineage says this is, all of the books of the sacred text are holy or sacred, but the Song of Songs is Holy of Holies. The Song of Songs is ultimately sacred. It’s the most sacred. It’s the highest.
Our colleague Iain McGilchrist, writing from an entirely different set of sources, has a sense — and this is a distinction I’ve made for the last 30 years — that there are both value and the sacred. I was actually surprised to see that show up in Iain, but that’s true.
There is value, and then there is the sacred.
The sacred overlaps with value, but it’s like value exponentialized. It’s the ultimate good, it’s the Holy. It’s not just good, but it evokes a kind of awestruck rapture, devotion. I am in mad devotion to the Holy, my heart and mind are blown open by the Holy. The difference between value and the Holy is like the difference between joy and ecstasy. It’s this blowing open of joy into ecstasy. That’s what the Holy is — the blowing up of value into this ultimate exponential intimacy and goodness.
And if you read carefully, the term sacred in the sacred texts of the lineage of Solomon is very close to the word ultimate intimacy. The sacred means ultimately intimate. All of the songs, the lineage of Solomon writes, all of the songs are holy, all of the books are holy, all of the books of the sacred texts are holy, they are sacred, but ultimate sacred is Holy of Holies. And what’s Holy of Holies? The Song of Songs.
This Song of Solomon is the Holy of Holies, it’s the Song of Songs, it’s the Inside of the Inside, it’s everything. And what’s it about? It’s about desire. It’s a song about desire —
Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your Eros, your desire is better than wine.
That’s the feeling of the text. We try to do a good translation in Chapter 9 of A Return to Eros, but just so you can kind of feel a couple of the verses — it opens with kissing,
…let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for thy love is better than wine,
his mouth is most sweet, the roof of her mouth is like the best of wine.Kiss me, all over, all of me. Your lips cover me with kisses.
I have compared thee, oh my love, to a stallion harnessed to one of the great chariots, while the king was on my couch, my perfume gave forth its fragrance.
The fragrance of my tumescence allures the air.I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juices of my pomegranate.
His left hand is under my head. His right hand embraces me.
How beautiful you are, my beloved.
Your stature is like a palm tree. Your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold to its fruit.
Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine and the scent of your breath like apples and your mouth like the best wine.I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.
This is a text which is a script of desire. In this text, there is a description of Reality, and Reality is described as tocho ratzuf ahava ‘its insides are lined with love’, which means that all of Reality is script of desire.
The name of God is a script of desire
The four letter name of God in the wisdom of Solomon tradition is this is the basic structure of Reality.
For example, one erotic scientist, the interior scientist Nachmanides, writes, citing the sacred text, all of Reality is names of God.
That’s what Reality is. Reality is just different spellings of the name of God.
Now, what’s the name of God?
The name of God is — from right to left — the Yod enters Hei, it’s the act of the Yod making love to the Hei. Then the third letter is the Yod pulled down, both the Yod and Vav are phallic. The Vav is the third letter. And then — the last two letters — the Vav enters the Hei.
The Yod enters the Hei — that’s called Constant Eros.
The Vav enters the Hei — that’s called Aroused Eros.
When I say all of Reality is names of God, that sounds like a pious statement, right? But when we say all of Reality is names of God, what do we mean? We mean that all of Reality is scripts of desire.
The Song of Songs, the primary text of lineage is a love song, which is essentially a script of desire, which says, tocho ratzuf ahava ‘its insides are lined with Eros’. Reality is Eros. And another way of saying it would be, all of Reality is names of God.
The name of God is itself a script of desire, a story of desire.
Wow!
You begin to see that?
All objects in existence are wildly in love
This notion of Reality being scripts of desire — Reality is Eros, Reality is names of God — is the realization of both the interior and exterior sciences. It’s what systems theory and chaos theory and complexity theory are saying, it’s what geometries are pointing towards.
In essence, Reality is coded with patterns of intimacy. Reality is coded with patterns of relationship. That’s the nature of Reality. And you actually have, in the great traditions, schools that realize this. They stepped away from the exoteric public teachings of ritual, and they said, no, no, no, actually, the whole thing is scripts of desire.
I’ll just open, for example, Meister Eckhart. He says, Reality is always kissing, he describes Reality as they: they are always kissing, they cannot control themselves. It’s not possible that any creature can have greater instincts and perceptions than the depth of the human mind. God ripened me so I see it’s true.
All objects in existence are wildly in love.
That’s the realization. The realization, says Meister Eckhart, is that all objects in existence are wildly in love. Existence leans its mouth towards me, writes Meister Eckhart, because my love cares for it.
This sense lives across all traditions — every creature has a religion, every foot is a shrine, a secret candle burns, every cell in us worships God, every arrow is the bow of desire, which has rushed out in hope of nearing him.
You can find versions of this literally in every single great tradition. That’s essentially what Sufis are talking about.
He desired me, so I came close.
No one can near God unless he’s prepared a bed for you first.
A thousand souls is called here every second.
But most everyone then looks in their life’s mirror and says, I’m not worthy to leave the sadness.
When I first heard his courting song, I too looked at all I had done in my life and said,
how can I gaze into his beautiful eyes?I spoke those words with all my heart, but then She sang again a song even sweeter,
and when I tried to shame myself once more from Her presence,
she showed me Her compassion and spoke Her truth.Come close, for I desire you.
The one I just read you is Saint Teresa of Ávila, living at the same time as, John, the man of the Cross.
It’s always the same story. It’s always the sense of this radical Eros, this radical love. It’s one of my favorite poems. I’ll give you a couple of versions of them, so you can get it in a deep way.
Sing my tongue, sing my hands, sing my feet, my knee, my loins, my whole body, indeed I am His choir.
Or:
There are so many positions of love,
each curve on a branch, the thousand ways your eyes can hold us,
the infinite shapes each mind can draw,
the spring orchestra of fragrance and sound wafting through the air,
the revolution of the Earth’s skirt, whose fold contains all worlds.The currents of light exploding like passionate lips.
If God invited you to a party and said, everyone in the ballroom tonight will be my special guest,
how would you then treat them when you arrived? Indeed, indeed.
And Hafiz knows that there is no one in this world who is not standing on Her jeweled dance floor.
I’ve come into this world to see this, the sword drop from men’s hand, even at the height of their anger.
Indeed, we have finally realized that there’s just one flesh to wound, and it is His, the Christ’s, our beloveds.
I’ve come into this world to see this, all creatures hold hands as we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way.
Ecstatic light forever entwined and at play with Him.
Every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in the divine womb and began spinning from His wish, all of it, a love song.
And it goes on and on and on.
Know the true nature of your beloved, in her loving eyes your every thought, word, and movement is always, always already beautiful.
I’ll finish with this one. This is about the secret of the kiss written by a group of Sufi interior scientists, writers. One writes, one regret that I am determined not to have when I’m lying upon my deathbed is that we did not kiss enough.
And then finally, this is about a courtesan:
Quietly her fame spread, the courtesan who few had heard of a year ago.
Shy men could do with her what they could do with no one else,
and women too sought her breasts and came to know how wonderful touch could be.
And she wrote poems, and left her eyes there for they were what loved the most.
And this is the last one I want to read, because this is going to take us to the next step. And she wrote poems and left her eyes there, meaning she left her eyes in the poem, for they were what loved the most.
This sense of she wrote poems — these are all forms of the Song of Songs. These are forms of the Song of Solomon.
We’ve given a name to this in CosmoErotic Humanism. We’ve called these poems, Outrageous Love Letters.
In this new story of value called CosmoErotic Humanism, we have to democratize great love.
You begin to see that’s what Homo Amor is. Homo Amor is the democratization of great love.
I don’t leave it to Rumi,
- I don’t leave it to Hafiz,
- I don’t leave it to Rabia,
- I don’t leave it to Saint John of the Cross,
- I don’t leave it to Teresa of Ávila.
I become Outrageous Love.
Write Outrageous Love Letters!
By Outrageous Love, we mean something very precise. By Outrageous Love, we mean not love as a social construction — but that Reality is a love story all the way up and all the way down.
I am a unique script of desire in that Reality, and I have the capacity to be a mad lover.
This is why, as we’re trying to come together and to form this intimate communion, which then forms this revolution to tell this new story of value, we cannot come together as a structured think tank, where everyone has a particular job and think they’re going to functionally do this. We have to come together as Outrageous Lovers. We have to come together as a Chevreya Kadisha, a band of the sacred — but the sacred means ultimate intimacy.
And I mean that philologically. Philologically, the sacred means ultimate intimacy.
There is a man named Eliezer Berkovits. When he died, his son gave me the key to his apartment, and I went through all his books. He had a book that he had published in Wayne State University Press which is a book where he did a philological examination of the term the sacred. And he really understood it correctly, and I came to the same conclusion he did, and I was ecstatic to read him. I don’t know if this essay is republished anywhere, but he understood that the sacred means ultimate intimacy. That’s what the sacred means. The intimate and the sacred are the same.
The Song of Songs is Holy of Holies, it’s intimate of intimate. It’s a love story.
If I democratize enlightenment, I’ve got to democratize great love.
In a book called, Radical Kabbalah, I was privileged, many years ago, to talk about the democratization of enlightenment. This means that all of us should have an experience of True Self, where I experience myself as part of the enlightened field, not separate from the field. That’s the first step. And in a Unique Self, the book in 2011, we talked about the democratization of enlightenment.
But now we need to go the next step.
The next step is the democratization of flaming great love.
We need to become Outrageous Lovers.
We need to become evolutionary lovers.
I am great love. And I am great love means I don’t leave it to Rumi.
When we want to send someone a love note, we send them some words written by a dead Persian. With all due respect to Persians, not a good idea.
I am Rumi, I am Solomon, I am Meister Eckhart.
Most of us have written love poems at one point in our lives. And then we stop, because they are a little stilted, and they are a little convoluted, and they take a little time, and they make us feel a little funny. And then we quit, and we sent people Rumi poems.
Don’t do that!
Write Outrageous Love Letters!
The idea of writing Outrageous Love Letters is the practice of the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is literally a series of Outrageous Love notes between a lover and a beloved.
If you all follow the exegesis on the Song of Songs, and you read the Song of Songs carefully, you realize these are love notes between a lover and a beloved.
There is a whole strain in scholarship which says, well, this book is not sacred, this is just a bunch of tavern songs, love notes. Sometimes, scholarship can be excessive in its idiocy. Of course, it’s tavern songs. That’s the point.
The point is, that’s what they know in the tavern. What they understand in the tavern is that it’s all a love song. My life is destitute, and I’m wrecked, and I’m poor, but oh my God, in the love song, it all stops for a moment, and it’s good. I can feel the gorgeous delightful pleasure of Reality, alive and awake and enflaming, and I don’t wait for someone else to do it.
I don’t want to read Rumi, I want to be Rumi.
I don’t want to read the Song of Songs (although it’s a great idea), I want to be the Song of Songs.
But I can’t just be the Song of Songs, I’ve got to be love in action. I am evolutionary desire, I am evolutionary love desire, and evolution is love in action that lives uniquely in me, which is my unique script of desire.
But there is a practice, just like there is a practice of prayer, there is a practice of study, the intellectual embrace of the Divine (Chaim of Volozhin talks about it in a book called The Soul of Life, section four is about this intellectual embrace of the Divine. It’s a stunning book.)
There is an intellectual embrace of Divine, there is praxis, there is prayer, there is study, there is meditation. In classical meditation, I try and access and locate myself in the field of True Self, the field of awareness, but there is a new practice. And the new practice is the new practice of Homo Amor. It is the practice of writing Outrageous Love Letters.
I pick up a pen and I say, dear ex, fill in the blank, and I write an Outrageous Love letter.
When you wildly exaggerate, you become accurate
Now, when I write an Outrageous Love Letter, how do I do it?
Let’s get real for a second, okay? Let’s get real.
The way you write an Outrageous Love letter is:
You have to first bracket your ego, because your ego is hearing what you write, and it wants to remain socially acceptable, and proper, and appropriate. Even though you’re writing it yourself, you are afraid that somebody is going to read it someplace, some imaginary person in your early life is going to read this, and you’re like, oh my God, I can’t have somebody read this, maybe it’s going to be discovered.
But it’s not a real worry, it’s like this inner voice. You have to bracket the voice of the ego.
You have to access the fullness of the field running through you.
And then, you’ve got to wildly exaggerate until you’re accurate. That’s how you become accurate. When you wildly exaggerate, you become accurate.
That’s an Outrageous Love Letter.
You’ve got to write Outrageous Love Letters every day. It’s got to be part of my fabric: just like I breathe, I write Outrageous Love Letters.
I can write them to myself, I can write them to a friend, I can write them to a beloved, I can write them to a cab driver that I met.
Outrageous Love Letters is the democratization of great love.
The democratization of great love means two things:
- I am a great lover, I am a unique script of LoveDesire,
- and I am writing Outrageous Love Letters.
Outrageous Love Letters are the new Song of Songs. We’re literally writing sacred texts. They’re the new Song of Songs.
There is always the Goddess
There are two forms of Outrageous Love Letters.
There are Outrageous Love Letters, and then there are Outrageous Erotic Love Letters. Outrageous Erotic Love Letters are the same as Outrageous Love Letters, but they translate into Eros.
To write an Outrageous Erotic Love Letter is to write to a beloved of your beauty.
What is the Song of Solomon? It’s not an Outrageous Love Letter, it’s an Outrageous Erotic Love Letter.
There is a point that Warren Farrell has made in his writing: when parents walk through, and they see their kids watching an excessively violent film, people are killing each other, smashing each other, they walk by, ah, kids are occupied, good, it’s all good. But if you walk through and, I mean, God forbid, there is some breast showing, oh my God, what are you watching? It’s terrible.
You have to understand, that actually goes into the child. It’s actually a traumatization.
I’m not saying that you should have displays of private intimacies on public networks. That’s not my point. My point is the trauma that we feel around it. That’s a different conversation, but the trauma we feel around it actually pours into the child. It feels like something’s wrong here.
There is a book called Mary’s Mosaic. It’s an incredible book. Mary’s Mosaic is about a woman who had an affair with J. F. K., and she was killed several months after he was killed. The Central Intelligence Agency, they were the masters of the universe. It’s fairly apparent that they were — and this is not a conspiracy theory, there is an enormous amount of documentation that whatever happened with John F. Kennedy’s assassination certainly wasn’t a lone gunman. That’s for sure. There’s an enormous amount of information on that. That’s not our topic.
Very, very early on, Mary, who had this significant affair with Kennedy, starts saying they killed him. Her husband was one of the senior guys at the CIA. She was killed jogging several months later, however that happened. A friend of her son’s wrote this book about her, Mary’s Mosaic. It’s a book about that era and that story, and it’s kind of an unknown book, it’s quite good. If you want to capture something of America of that era, something of its Eros, it’s a fascinating book.
There is one scene where this friend of her son’s came to their house. She is the wife of a major CIA executive, so they’re living in a sprawling Washington, Virginia home, and he comes, and his friend doesn’t realize he’s coming over. He comes to the backyard, and he sees her bathing naked in the back.
He tells this beautiful story where she sees him, he sees her, and she looks up at him and she just smiles, this gentle, profound, beautiful purity — smile. She didn’t go like, ah! She just smiled, like the Goddess smiled, and just nodded. And the kid says, he nodded. And he respectfully turned around and went the other way. He said, in that moment, he knew what purity meant, he knew what Goodness meant.
That’s the Goddess. She knows the truth.
There’s always the Goddess. Sometimes the Goddess is the mother, and sometimes the Goddess is the courtesan as we just read in Hafiz, and sometimes the Goddess is the sister, sometimes the Goddess is the beloved.
Outrageous Love Letters is the structure of Reality
Over the last, I would say, fourteen years between all of us, we must have written I don’t know, 30,000 Outrageous Love Letters. That’s some insane amount. All of us together.
What are we doing?
If you really want to understand the think tank, it is not decipherable without Outrageous Love Letters. The fabric of the think tank is a set of texts, and those texts are Outrageous Love Letters. And they maybe Outrageous Erotic Love Letters depending on who’s writing to who, and what the context is. It’s people writing to each other, but there’s an invisible text of the think tank.
I always say, somewhat jokingly, that you write Outrageous Love Letters to young, old, men, women, all gender fluid in between, and small mammals. But the point is Outrageous Love Letters, it’s the structure of Reality.
Reality is scripts of desire.
The Song of Songs is an expression of Reality script of desire.
The democratization of the Song of Songs is — I become Solomon, I become Rumi. And when I become Rumi and I become Solomon, I write Outrageous Love Letters.
By the way, my detractors, of which there are a number in the world (I haven’t met most of them, probably 99%, they don’t bother meeting or talking to me), but the way they would tell the story is, oh, my, this is just an excuse to be sexual, which is, of course, ridiculous.
First off, it demonizes sexuality, as if that was bad. That’s problem one.
But problem two is that’s not the point, the whole thing’s about Eros. When you don’t actually have an experience of God, and you’re a scholar for example, you say that God is a construct created as a human crutch, because you have no experience of it.
But if you have no experience of Outrageous Love, the only way you could interpret someone writing Outrageous Love Letters is: it must be some sort of fiendish maneuver for some sort of totalitarian control of a sinister kind, because you’ve never experienced it in your body, in your heart, in your soul. There is nothing more awake and more alive than writing an Outrageous Erotic Love Letter, or an Outrageous Love Letter. When you’re writing an Outrageous Love Letter, you don’t say to yourself, what’s the meaning of existence? I wonder. Huh, not sure.
We write to each other, men and men, women and women, and there are different moments, but we are all holding this together.
There is one beautiful couple who went out for a while in the Center, and they stopped going out, and he said to her, I want to write you Outrageous Love Letters for six months after we’re not going out anymore. What a beautiful thing to do, right? Instead of love being this kind of egoic structure, and if we’re not going out in that formal way, we’ve got to change the locks and demonize each other — no, no, we were together for a period of time and it was very beautiful, and now, in our separation, we’re going to love each other in a new way. We are going to write Outrageous Love Letters.
It would be a different world if people separated and for six months wrote each other Outrageous Love Letters as part of the separation. We would be living in a different universe.
That’s Outrageous Love.
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