Dr. Marc Gafni: Interiors, Face, and the Reconstruction of Eros

By Dr. Marc Gafni

Summary: The four faces of eros, described by Marc Gafni in this excerpt from Mystery of Love (2003), are 1.) being on the inside, 2.) fullness of presence, 3.) desire, and 4.) interconnectivity of being.  As Marc describes, with its mystical role in these four expressions, the face itself is the truest reflection of the erotic.  In the flow of eros, we access the experience of being on the inside of God’s face, which Marc explores here through the Temple mystery of the sexually entwined cherubs atop the Ark who are positioned face to face; the Hebrew word “panim,” which means “inside, face, and before;” and the erotic experience of having a true face-to-face conversation. This significant passage from Mystery of Love invites you to embody the erotic which is modeled but not exhausted by the sexual more deeply in your own life.

Eros has many expressions. Each expression is hinted at in the temple mysteries.  There are four faces of eros which, when taken together, form the essence of the Shechina experience. In this essay, we will explore the erotic understanding which forms the matrix of the secret of the cherubs and informs every arena of our existence. As we shall see, at the very heart of Hebrew tantra was a very precise and provocative understanding of the relationship between love, sex, and eros. This will open us up to a whole new understanding of our sexuality and will show us the way to erotically reweave the very fabric of our lives in more vivid patterns, sensual textures, and brilliant hues.

The First Face of Eros: On the Inside

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The cherubs in the magical mystery of Temple myth were not stationary fixtures. No, these statues were expressive, emotive. They moved. When integrity and goodness ruled the land, the cherubs were face to face. In these times, the focal point of Shechina energy rested erotically, ecstatically, between the cherubs. When discord and evil held sway in the kingdom, the cherubs turned from each other, appearing back to back instead of face to face.1  Back to back, the world was amiss, alienated, ruptured. Face to face, the world was harmonized, hopeful, embraced. Thus, face to face in biblical myth2 is the most highly desirable state. It is the gem stone state of being, the jeweled summit of all creation.  Face to face, to be fully explicit, is a state of eros.

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Dr. Marc Gafni: Interiors, Face, and the Reconstruction of Eros2023-12-21T13:56:19-08:00

Daily Wisdom: I Can’t Do It Without You

The Kabbalists takes the mandate of love–implicit in self perception–one step further. I need to understand that not only am I a part of God but I am  also a partner to God.

Renaissance mystic Judah Loew of Prague writes that the litmus test of true love is mutuality. For him, this means that you love the person whom you complete and who completes you. Remember Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece” where a packman shaped circle roams the world in search of that singular pie sliver piece which will complete him?

We are all on that epic quest for our missing piece. Lovers fill each other up. For the Kabbalists, this concept became the springboard for what is perhaps the most radical idea in biblical mysticism.  God the lover needs us just as we need God. We are God’s missing piece. The call of love is an expression of this missing piece need. God says, “I can’t do it without you. Come be my partner!”

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni


For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: I Can’t Do It Without You2022-08-02T08:23:18-07:00

Daily Wisdom: Identity

The unfolding of the universe entails full divine loving presence. The divine perspective changes to include human beings. It is an intimate relation of shared identity. We participate in God and God participates in us. The great mystery of reality is the mystery of intimacy. God is both erotically within me and beyond me at the selfsame moment. Touching and not touching. The intimacy of shared identity without losing the integrity of individuality. Two solitudes that share in a sublime moment of Sameness.

This is the first intimation of union and the beginning of all self-love.  This is the great audacious mystical certainty that underlies every great religion, even if its contemporary leaders have long forgotten its wisdom. The world is not a dead end material universe, where separate entities constantly collide and explode, where all is  accident and chance fated for meaningless destruction. It is not, in Shakespeare’s pathos-filled phrase, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Instead, it is an infinitely conscious, integrated whole, whose underlying fabric is love.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni


For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: Identity2022-08-02T08:23:18-07:00

Daily Wisdom: Void and Eros

The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being – the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The move between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”

The truly great dancer – like all lovers – flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow.

The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina.

To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives – beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is.  It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety.

The worlds of music, dance, and, most of all, orgasm, allow us glimpses of our higher reality. Here again the sexual models the erotic. The erotic being the experience on the inside of reality, where all of being yearns for connection and every living thing knows that it has a patch called home, which is part of the great quilt of the universe. Love is the Eros of connection – the underlying interdependence of things, the bond between all living things, the emotional ether in which we all live.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni


For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: Void and Eros2022-08-02T08:23:18-07:00

Daily Wisdom: Perception as Creation

The language of God is man. We are not just God’s messengers, we are God’s language and voice, the means by which she shares her message. This idea becomes a little easier to access in light of quantum physics. One of the essential mind-bending breakthroughs in quantum physics is that the observer is part of the experiment. That is to say, the perceiver influences the outcome of the experiment. Said more broadly, perception not only observes reality, it creates reality. To say that love is perception  is therefore to say that love–far more than a mere emotion–is  the erotic creative force which in-forms all of being.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni


For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: Perception as Creation2022-08-02T08:23:19-07:00

Daily Wisdom: YES!

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes”

– Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It was to this that Emerson referred when he said, “Love is the affirmative of the affirmatives.” Love is the universe shouting out a joyful yes when our names our called.

In Hebrew the word yes – Kein – means integrity. Yes is the ultimate affirmation of our integrity. The question of your existence is whether you can say yes to the adventure that is your life. That is self-love!  When you wake up to a beautiful day which is simply divine – when you eat a piece of carrot cake which is just out of this world then you experience the universe embracing your with a resounding YES.

e. e. cummings always succeeds in capturing life’s little quintessential affirmations. I quote:

I thank you God for this amazing
Day: for the leaping greenly spirit of trees
And a blue dream of sky; and for everything
Which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: YES!2022-08-02T08:23:19-07:00

Daily Wisdom: I Yearn Therefore I Am

It is said that the Great Maggid would convene his inner circle  every night to teach them the sacred texts. All of his greatest students would gather. The Maggid would begin to speak, “And God said” and Reb Zushya would leap up, overwhelmed with desire. He would yell out, “And God said! God said!” He would spin around and around like a leaf in the wind, and then faint, unconscious for the rest of the teaching. Every night it was the same thing. The other disciples would tease him, “Zushya, you’re missing all the holy teachings!”

This teasing went on for days and days until finally the Master said, “Leave him alone; he’s the only one who gets it.”

For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred.  Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn therefore I am.  To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: I Yearn Therefore I Am2022-08-02T08:23:19-07:00

Daily Wisdom: You are beautiful!

The most important thing we can ever tell someone else is, “You are beautiful.” We were all made conveniently equipped with built-in mirrors – our eyes. They are the reflecting pool in which the person before us beholds herself. It is up to us to choose what she will see reflected there. To be a lover is to  make sure that whoever looks into your mirroring eyes will feel the embracing energy of  “You are beautiful”.

What a wonderful way to live! Spiritual tradition reminds us of what we often forget in the doldrums and tensions of the day-to-day. That is, that everyone is beautiful, and furthermore, that everyone is uniquely beautiful. Every human being on the face of the planet holds in his or her essence an utterly unique reflection of the infinite beauty of God.

We can respond to the biblical invitation to  “love everyone” by perceiving and honoring this light in all who cross our path. Lovers see infinity dancing in the looking glass of each other’s eyes. We need to become lovers again. It will make it all so different. And we want to. We all love being lovers. We have simply forgotten to look. We have forgotten to perceive that we are all stepping gently through God’s magnificent museum. Each soul we behold – a perfect masterpiece.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

Daily Wisdom: You are beautiful!2022-08-02T08:23:19-07:00

The Democratization of Enlightenment (Part 11): How to Accomplish the Democratization of Enlightenment

The Democratization of Enlightenment (Part 11): How to Accomplish the Democratization of Enlightenment2023-06-22T08:08:14-07:00

The Democratization of Enlightenment (Part 9): Integral Embrace of Eastern and Western Enlightenment

The Democratization of Enlightenment (Part 9): Integral Embrace of Eastern and Western Enlightenment2023-06-22T08:08:14-07:00

The Democratization of Enlightenment (Part 7): The Fallacy in the Traditional Enlightenment Teaching

The Democratization of Enlightenment (Part 7): The Fallacy in the Traditional Enlightenment Teaching2023-06-22T08:08:14-07:00

Daily Wisdom: Desire

Eros is to be on the inside, including the inside of your desire. What being on the inside does is invite a person to clarify his desires, yet not transcend them. True desire is attained through the deep meditation in which you access the internal witness. From this place of detachment, you survey with penetrating but loving eyes all of your desires. This place of internal witness allows you to move beyond an addictive attachment to any particular one. At that point the person engaged in Birur– clarification – does not abandon desire. Rather she moves to connect to those desires which were truest to her deepest and most authentic self. It is in the empty space between the spasm and the desire that the person is born.

The Erotic and the Holy
Marc Gafni

For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@ievolve.org

Daily Wisdom: Desire2022-08-02T08:23:19-07:00
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