A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self

Marc Gafni

Dr. Marc Gafni is a cutting edge evolutionary visionary, a provocative spiritual artist and teacher, academic, public intellectual, author, social activist, and lover of people. He holds a doctorate, written on Nondual Humanism in Kabbalah taken at Oxford University under the co-supervision of Prof. Moshe Idel. He serves as the founding co-director of Integral Life Spiritual Center, the founding co-director and teacher in residence of iEvolve Global Practice Community. He is also the founding co-publisher of Incorrect Inc, scholar in residence at Pacific Coast Church, and lead teacher at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center Wisdom School.

In this dialogue, Reb Marc and Ken delve into the often-misunderstood relationship between individual existence and absolute Spirit. The great spiritual traditions have myriad ways of articulating this relationship. Particularly in the East, it is common to find expressions through which human and God are identified as one: Atman is Brahman; Thou art That; Form is not other than Emptiness, and Emptiness is not other than Form. This realization of divine unity is often called the Supreme Identity. This does not mean a particular human is God, but that each human's (indeed, each sentient being's) consciousness and Spirit's intersect at infinity.

The Judaeo-Christian traditions, on the other hand, have tended to keep human and God separate, at times even punishing anyone who crossed that transcendental (and political) line. Witness the case of Giordano Bruno—burned at the stake. If you weren't Jesus the Christ, then not only were you not allowed to be essentially (or in essence) one with God, but your only means to God was via the mediation of the Church, which was a legal not a transcendental identity.

Ken is quick to point out that this denial was not necessarily malevolent, but was often simply the result of a pre/trans or pre/post fallacy (namely, confusing pre-conventional moral development with post-conventional moral development simply because both of them are non-conventional). Organized religion, in both Judaism and Christianity, was often attempting to replace pre-conventional, egocentric, impulsive moral behavior with conventional moral commandments and rules, which was often a necessary social good. But it often confused post-conventional mysticism with pre-conventional consciousness, and in attempting to move beyond pre-rational awareness ended up suppressing trans-rational awareness, which was a spiritual catastrophe of the first magnitude.

A further complication arises from the fact that the state of mystical union is often characterized as beyond good and evil—in fact, beyond duality altogether—but that state of being beyond good and evil is most definitely post-conventional, not pre-conventional, which cannot distinguish good and evil in the first place and thus often arrives at Charles Manson's disastrous conclusion: "If all is one, nothing is wrong."

Marc and Ken frame their discussion within a very generalized three-level scheme of moral development where level 1 equals pre-ethical, egoic, unenlightened action; level 2 equals ethical, conformist, dualistic action; and level 3 equals trans-ethical, trans-egoic, enlightened action and being.

The problem arises when level 1 is confused with level 3. Level 2 has a legitimate interest in suppressing the horrors of level 1. But it is indeed a catastrophe when level 2 also tries to suppress level 3, which is none other than its very own highest, not-yet-realized Self.

The other unfortunately wide-spread trap is the New Age move, which takes level-1 pre-ethical action to be the equivalent of level-3 trans-ethical action, embracing egoic forms of impulsiveness as if they were truly spontaneous mystical states. But a true level-3 realization includes ethics as foundation, even while going beyond it. In other words, level 3 represents an integral embrace of the levels beneath it, without being limited to them.