Participate in Evolutionary Church Every Saturday 9-10 am PT Online!
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The Radical Democratization of Enlightenment
Participate in Evolutionary Church Every Saturday 9-10 am PT Online!
Listen to our latest recordings here:
This weekly series of dharma video clips inquires deeply into the reality of the Self, the nature of Love, and the Eros of Evolution. Enjoy the Series!
This is a playlist. You can skip a video by clicking the little arrow on the video:
Let’s talk about the core teaching of Unique Self. Unique Self is the understanding that you are at the level of essence – not merely at the level of social, psychological, and cultural conditioning – you are ultimately unique, you are an infinitely unique expression of All-That-Is, an expression that never was, is, or will be ever again. That uniqueness of essence is your Unique Self.
13.7 billion years of evolution conspired in an infinite number of configurations to yield the precision, the gorgeousness, the grandeur of your Unique Self. And Unique Self lives at every level. Check your biology: the unique cellular signature. Take a picture of your immune system. You think that you’re standing next to someone and think that you’re only different in your exterior, but actually your immune system and entire biological signature is a wild ecstatic expression of uniqueness. Uniqueness lives at the biological, uniqueness lives absolutely at the social, cultural, and psychological levels – how you relate to the world at large, what we call the world of form – but Unique Self is more than that: Unique Self is your unique expression of your essence, it’s your unique perspective of your enlightenment.
What does it mean to answer the call?
To answer the call is to respond to the call that lives in you, as you, and through you, of your Unique Self. The unique individualized expression of essence that is you calls you, invites you to find your vocation—the claiming of your unique voice in the world. To find a voice that is yours, not imitative, you have to inhabit your Unique Perspective.
Your Unique Perspective is your particularized way of looking at the world, the angle at which you look at reality that opens a space of insight open only to you alone. There are shared spaces of insight; we can all look at the same book or bush, but ultimately we are all looking at it from a different angle. We have a common language. Your perspective is inescapable; it is the prism through which you experience reality.
What emerges from your Unique Self / Unique Perspective is a set of pleasures, unique skills that you have in the world, unique proclivities, capacities, all of which come together to reveal Your Unique Gift. It is available to the world through no one else but you. To know that you have a Unique Gift which is desperately needed by All That Is. No one else has the capacity to give that gift. This is a realization that changes everything.
What does it mean to answer the call?
To answer the call is to live a values-driven life, a purpose-driven life. It’s to incarnate the values of your life in the unique and gorgeous way that you are able to, that only you are able to do. To do so is to fulfill your Unique Obligation.
When we hear the word “obligation” in our post-postmodern context, we cringe. It makes us contract. We feel like we spent so many years in therapy getting beyond the obligations that violated us. But actually the only genuine freedom is the freedom to fulfill your Unique Self. Anything else is a form of slavery.
To actually fulfill your Unique Self—which is to meet the unique obligation of your life—that’s what it means to be free.
There’s a five-fold doctrine of Unique Self obligation.
Imagine you’re shipwrecked with Mother Teresa alone on an island. Mother Teresa was a great woman, and she was tough, an inordinately difficult woman. She’s completely impossible. She drives you nuts. You know you’re not going to be rescued. It’s just you and her on this island for the rest of eternity.
She goes scuba diving and breaks both her arms, and she can’t eat. Do you or don’t you have an obligation to feed her? I’ve asked this question the world over and 99.9999% of the people say yes…even though if you let her die you will never be found out and it will not affect the world. Why?
When these five obligations are met, you create obligation at a higher level of consciousness—what we sometimes call second-tier consciousness. When all these things are in play, you have fulfilled your Unique Self obligation and you are at ease. You have a right relationship to the world. You are fully inhabiting your story.
Imagine if you were able to live in the world with that experience…at every moment in your life. There’s a song you can sing, a way of being and becoming, that is yours alone. That profound realization, that awakening to your Unique Self, creates in every moment of every day a profound sense of obligation that enlivens you and transforms your life to one filled with a plentitude of meaning, sensual Eros, as you live a life of enlivened play in the world giving your Unique Gift.
Why does Unique Self matter so much?
At the most basic level, Unique Self matters because without it, life for the individual becomes virtually irrelevant.
About a year ago, I was giving a TEDx talk in Las Vegas and met a man who has since become a close friend, Eben Pagan. I met him and his delightful partner, and it was a Unique Self encounter. There was a flash of recognition.
At some point, Wyatt Woodsmall—one of the great inventors of NLP—and Dave Logan, who is a wonderful professor at USC, wrote a fantastic book called Tribal Leadership joined the conversation. The four of us had one of those delightful Plato conversations— egoless, where nobody is jousting or jockeying, but they are doing a deep reality consideration. It is one of the most delightful engagements you can have. We found ourselves in the lobby of this gaudy Las Vegas hotel for what must have been several hours.
We each talked about what we are doing in the world, and I brought Unique Self to the table. Dave says, “How does this address somebody’s worst nightmare? If it doesn’t address people’s worst nightmare it’s not useful.”
I said to Dave, Unique Self is the single response to a person’s worst nightmare. A person’s worst nightmare is to be irrelevant, an extra on the set of life, to be quickly forgotten, and ultimately know that they were not necessary.
Personal meaning is the understanding that I have a unique contribution to make to All That Is, and that’s not merely being a cog in a machine.
Communism affirmed the meaning of life, but it said that no unique individual is ultimately significant for that meaning, which ultimately makes them cogs in a larger process. That doesn’t give personal meaning.
But we know in our first-person perspective that our lives are meaningful; not to be able to identify that sense of personal relevance makes me feel insane, meaningless, ultimately not important. That is the most destructive, corrosive, and false experience of a human being.
There is only one great heresy in post-postmodernity: the belief that you are irrelevant. No one can play your part. You have a Unique Gift to give. The world is waiting, needing your Unique Gift. The Divine Force, God (and the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist)—God as the personal face of essence, God as the Tao, the love-intelligence and love-beauty of All That Is…is seeking a voice.
Who I really am: I am unique. I am a unique expression of the All just like you are. It doesn’t mean I’m more special than you. Unique Self matters for a thousand different reasons, but the first one is that it is the only way to address the fundamental human nightmare of being irrelevant.
Unique Self actually changes everything in almost every field, discipline, endeavor, and arena of human experience.
For example:
1. If you want to identify your vocation, if you identify it from a Unique Self place, it’s entirely different than simply asking, “What am I good at?” You begin to approach the vocation issue in a different way. You’re not hunting for a job. You’re finding your way of bringing your Unique Gifts into the world.
2. Relationships. Who do I want to be involved with? I want to be with someone with whom my Unique Self shows up. If I’m with someone who evokes something false or counterfeit in me, or excessive identification with ego in me, that which is ultimately not authentic to my essence, then that’s not who I want to be with. I want someone who can partner with me in giving my Unique Gifts by seeing me in my fullness and supporting the unfolding of my Unique Gifts in the world, and with whom I can support and partner in giving and enacting their Unique Gifts in the world. When I approach relationship from a Unique Self perspective, my search for partnership changes.
3. Love changes. When you realize that Love is a Unique Self perception, your whole understanding of Love shifts.
4. Sexuality. We think of sex as one thing, but actually there are many types of sexing. Sexing is a verb. To be able to outline the six or seven types of sexing changes my whole understanding of sexuality.
5. Shadow. Doing shadow work—integrating the shadow—when you understand that shadow is not generic (contra what most Jungians attest), it’s not all of those shadow qualities. At its core, shadow is your unlived life, your distorted Unique Self. Shadow actually has the same DNA property as your Unique Self, so your entire understanding of shadow work changes.
6. Parenting. What’s the role of a parent? Not to ensure your child is happy. Parenting is to enact a space which allows for the Unique Self emergence of a child.
7. Death. The way I approach death changes. The question at the end of life is: Have I lived my Unique Self? When you understand that is the question, it changes your relationship to living and dying. An understanding of Unique Self shifts dramatically and profoundly that arena.
Once that insight is there—like Integral thought—it becomes startlingly obvious. And it is psychoactive: it moves in you, changing virtually everything, creating community (an evolutionary We-space).
Community completely changes when you understand it through the prism of Unique Self. It’s not just an idea or concept. It’s an expression of the essence of being and becoming. When you let it move into you, when you awaken into it…you can’t awaken to it merely by hearing about it—but by deeply entering into Unique Self space (that’s what we’ll be doing in the Unique Self Course). …
Unique Self is the core technology in creating an evolutionary We-space, a space beyond any individual.
There are always two views of community. From the Western tradition, basically we are all separate selves. We can’t really come together, but we can give up some of our rights to be protected by the central government. No authentic communication is possible. Or—emerging out of a more continental philosophical tradition—is that the primary unit of reality is the community.
Neither of those positions in the world create a genuine We-space of collective intelligence. Separate selves can’t create a genuine new intelligence, so there won’t be a new intelligence.
True Selves—in the sense of classical enlightenment where we are one with the All—there is only one. The total number of True Selves in the world is one. That’s not a We-space, which has dynamic tension and creativity as a result of people who are different.
How do you create a We-space?
Unique Self is your puzzle-piece nature that naturally connects you to another even as you both realize you’re both part of the larger seamless coat of the universe. We are both part of the larger One, but both stunning expressions of that One.
Unique Self becomes, therefore, the essential and only technology that can create evolutionary We-space.
What’s the difference between Unique Self and soul?
Soul means different things in the different traditions. In some of the texts and traditions, it means the spiritual quality of your separate self. As long as it means this, it is limited in time, place, and duration—so it is subject ultimately to death. It lacks the quality of the infinite. It is special, beautiful, holy, and sacred—it’s your soul—but ultimately it is an expression of separateness and subject to the contraction of the separate self.
Soul in this understanding is the spiritual nature of your separate manifest self.
Unique Self speaks to a different manifest reality. It says that both your manifest and unmanifest reality are unique. Your True Self is also unique – because you have a Unique Perspective. It’s the perspective of your True Self. True Self always sees through a unique set of eyes which is your Unique Self.
Unique Self (unlike soul) lives at the level of manifest and unmanifest, the level of Spirit itself.
It’s important to say that in some traditions the soul doesn’t refer to the spiritual quality of separate self, but refers to something much closer to Unique Self. But because it can be confused, we have gone through pains to differentiate the two. Unique Self is the unique expression of your essence.
Unique Self is the essential portal for the democratization of enlightenment. It’s a term I first began deploying in my doctoral studies at Oxford almost a decade ago, and it has become an essential dimension to World Spirituality teaching.
Democratization of enlightenment doesn’t mean everyone is enlightened in an equal way. It means that the possibility of enlightenment is what William James called a genuine option for every human being who aspires to it. Enlightenment is not only the province of the elite. It can expand beyond the narrow sectors of the meditation hall in Nepal or Brooklyn, or the back streets of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods where the pious Kabbalists sit and chant. Enlightenment becomes part of the fabric of every awakened life. That’s a big deal.
Where we are in the world today is a place where there is such a crisis of resources, meaning, direction, hunger, imagination. It threatens the survival of the planet Earth, this epoch of humanity as we know it. It is oft said that a set of problems created at one level of consciousness can only be solved at a higher level of consciousness.
Generally, we understand that is true of the individual. The individual creates a set of problems at one level of consciousness, then has to evolve to a higher level to solve those problems. But it’s also true of the community, the public culture, the We-space.
Planet Earth has become a We-space. You go on to Google Earth and there’s no place you can’t see today. It’s getting smaller. We affect each other. We’re completely interpenetrated. The old teaching of the enlightenment teachers of the interconnectivity of the All with the All is no longer something you realize in meditation or chant; it’s actually an obvious truth of reality.
The esoteric truth of the interconnectivity of the All with the All a thousand years ago has become the obvious truth of interconnectivity in our lives. To solve the radical problems of today, we need to up-level our consciousness as a community. We need to up-level the consciousness of our We-space. And we can only do that in an Internet, intertwined world where billions of people affect the We-space; this is to begin to enact the possibility of the democratization of enlightenment.
To make enlightenment in the public culture and social mind a genuine psychological / spiritual possibility…Again, that doesn’t mean everyone is enlightened at the same level. It means the possibility of enlightenment awakens.
Unique Self is the ultimate democratic principle. Our Unqiue Selves are all different. Everyone’s got one. Just like “one person, one vote”—one person, one potentially enacted Unique Self. That calls a person in a different way. When I am called to my Unique Self enlightenment, which is to awaken to my Unique Self, I begin to become awakened, alive, and aware in an entirely different way than if I am called to experience myself as pure consciousness. The old enlightenment doesn’t address most of humanity. Most of humanity is looking intuitively and correctly at how can I enact the unique meaning of my life.
If I do that in a narcissistic way, then I’m lost in ego and separate self. I’m alienated. But if I do that in a healthy, awake, alive, aware way, then I want to be part of All That Is, and thereby to express all my unique gifts. So uniqueness opens the portal of enlightenment to the larger population because uniqueness is a democratized concept.
As long as you’re talking about a narrow True Self enlightenment, most people feel excluded from it. When you begin to talk about a Unique Self enlightenment, people awaken to the conversation and it becomes interesting and then it attracts attention. Once it grasps the heart, you can explain it in a new way that if you want to awaken your Unique Self, you must evolve beyond exclusive identification with ego because ego distorts your Unique Self.
Ego seeks to satisfy itself, so it might choose shortcut paths to fulfillment that don’t really do the work of identifying, living, and giving your Unique Gifts. Moving beyond ego is not only an invitation to awaken to pure consciousness, but to an awakening of your Unique Self, the great desire to move beyond ego, to identify with True Self, essence, and to enact and awaken further with my awakened Unique Self, which gives its gifts as part of a larger evolutionary context.
Unique Self and the democratization of enlightenment are inextricably linked. They are part of a larger cluster which is essential to an emergent World Spirituality.
You’re invited to join us on Saturday mornings from 9:00-10:00am PT, beginning this Saturday October 29th for Evolutionary Church: A communion between new humans participating in the evolution of culture and consciousness.
Evolutionary Church is where we gather to articulate, discover and experience the living memetic codes within our very being that are guiding us towards a positive future and evolving public culture.
>> Attend Evolutionary Church This Saturday At 9am PT <<
Together, we will:
What To Expect:
Evolutionary Church is an interactive, live-streamed event during which Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni will usher us into a resonant field of allurement and love that serves as a potent catalyst in revealing the direction of our personal and collective evolution.
Each week Barbara and Marc will introduce an evolutionary theme and articulate a message based that theme. Then YOU will be invited to speak your voice, as part of the Unique Self Symphony, into what Teillard De Chardin called the Noosphere, the evolving consciousness of reality – enabling it to get it’s collective eyes.
Evolutionary Church is more than hearing a sunday sermon–it is a living transmission that nurtures and amplifies the evolutionary impulse within you, activating the emergence of
>> Join Us This Saturday at 9am PT/ 12pm ET for Evolutionary Church <<
We hope you’ll be able to join us!
Continued from part 30.
The next step is to wake up. Wake up to your true nature as an irreducibly unique expression of outrageous love. Who are you? You are an outrageous lover. What does an outrageous lover do? An outrageous lover commits outrageous acts of love. Which outrageous acts of love does an outrageous lover commit? Those that are a function of your Unique Self. It is only your outrageous acts of love emergent from your Unique Self which come together with other outrageous lovers committing their unique outrageous acts of love that have the capacity to heal the entire story.
That, my friends, is the basis for a radical hope. It’s the basis for a realistic but radical optimism. For it is the natural expression of human nature and evolution itself. The sacred technology of evolutionary intimacy–another way of saying outrageous love—has the potential to create heaven on earth. I have spent the last several decades intensely searching and studying everything I could lay my hands on, reading tens and tens of thousands of pages in every tradition, pre-modern, modern, and postmodern. This is I know, way and above, the most realistic and hopeful vision of the evolution of love that we have today. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. Let’s awaken together and transform our world.
Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.
To start from the beginning go here and then follow the To Be Continued links.
Continued from part 29.
Everywhere one looks there is outrageous pain. There is public pain and private pain. Seventeen million slaves exist in the world today—that’s more than there were at the height of the slave trade in the US two hundred years ago. Today 17,000 children die every day from starvation and twenty million children die of starvation every year. Billions of people are brutalized by loneliness and alienation. The list of public outrageous pain goes on and on.
Then there is the private outrageous pain. This is the stuff from your personal life that hurts so badly. It may be something that was done to you or that you did. It might be the pain of betrayal, where you were either the betrayed or the betrayer. Or both. It might be the pain of a part of your life that is unlived or unloved. When you really face the pain, it is excruciating. So your turn your face away and get busy. We’re so frightened by outrageous pain that we’ve completely shut down. We close off our hearts because ordinary love cannot hold the pain.
The problem is, that we only have one heart. We cannot consistently shut down our heart and still remain openhearted. We think that we can selectively open our heart only to the channels of life whose programming appeals to us. That, however, is not the way the heart is designed. When you shut down you lose the signal and nothing comes. The result of repeatedly closing our hearts in face of the pain is loss of aliveness, depression, addiction and an unrelenting yearning for more.
The first step on the journey to awakening as an outrageous lover is to not hide from the pain. As a first step we need not to solve it, but turn our face towards it. Not all the time, but for only five minutes a day. The evolutionary mystics called this, “participating in the pain of love in exile.”
To carry out this practice, ordinary love is not strong enough to allow us to hold the pain. We need a larger love, wider and deeper love. That is outrageous love. But for now just locate outrageous love. Take a brief moment to think back on the largest love you have ever felt. Remember how in the embrace of that love there was room for everything? Now step into that love and double it. Triple it. Quadruple it. That is enough to locate the feeling tone of outrageous love. You can only respond to outrageous pain with outrageous love.
Now, from that place of outrageous love, think of a pain you are avoiding. Turn into the pain and stare directly at it for two or three minutes. Do not turn your thoughts away. Do not avert your gaze. Hold the outrageous pain in outrageous love. That’s it. You have already done it. This is the first step to awakening that most people never take. Congratulations!
Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.
Continued from part 28.
One of the laws of reality with which we began was, “we live in an intimate universe.” To be intimate meant to be both witnessed, recognized, seen and addressed. But it also meant mutuality. Both mutuality of action and mutuality of identity. Evolutionary intimacy is realized through the symphony of evolutionary Unique Selves each committing outrageous acts of love. In this, the human becomes God’s partner and a mutuality of partnerships is formed. Deeper still when the human being awakens as Evolutionary Unique Self realizing that he or she is an irreducibly unique expression of the love intelligence and love beauty of all that is – with unique outrageous acts of love to commit – the mutuality of identity between the human being and God is achieved. The human being becomes God’s verb.
You are an Outrageous Love Letter. The actual process of writing can help, but you are a LOVE Letter. Your life is a love letter. Your everyday actions are a love letter. Your energetic vibration in the world becomes a love letter.
In this vision personal love and intimacy and activism are seamlessly merged which is the critical need and invitation of our generation. The natures of the challenges that confront us are insoluble in the old top down model of government and the ruling elites. It is only a bottom up model of a self-organizing universe rooted in the Unique Self principle of Outrageous Love that shows us a profoundly hopeful path forward.
Taken from a first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid, this series elaborates on a critical advancement of the Unique Self Dharma that Dr. Marc has developed after Your Unique Self was published.
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