Touching the Face of Tomorrow

Michael Beckwith

Dr. Beckwith is the founder and spiritual director of the Agape International Spiritual Center—one of the most rapidly expanding transdenominational spiritual communities with a membership 9,000 strong and 35,000 friends worldwide-his goal remains the same: to build community, locally and globally.

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 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.

Written by Colin Bigelow

The dialogue begins with a discussion of the relationship of ministering and administering, and how it's simply not necessary to put up a wall between interior visioning and exterior organizing. As Rev. Michael comments, "When you're folding up paper, you’re folding it for God. You don’t go unconscious folding the paper or paying the bills." But as Ken notes, that's often exactly what happens, and sometimes spiritual communities can actually foster the development of a less-than-conscious split between interior insights and the means to make them manifest.

Gafni, Rev. Michael, and Ken go on to discuss their personal practices for engaging the frothy edge of Spirit's creative unfolding. Gafni shares his three-part process for working with sacred texts, Rev. Michael shares his practice of "locking himself up in a room" for as long as it takes for an insight to yield, and Ken comments that he once locked himself up in a house for three years—"You know, I'm a bit slow," he laughs.

Ken expands on the topic by explaining that the great traditions outline many different ways to achieve various kinds of higher wholeness. Devotion, work-in-the-world, intellectual study, meditation, and the manipulation of felt energies (among many other practices) can all lead to genuine experiences of spiritual states. Each of those practices engage different lines of development, but "you can follow each one straight to God," passing through pre-personal to personal to trans-personal levels of development.

To round out the conversation, Rev. Michael, Marc Gafni, and Ken discuss the importance of discriminating awareness in understanding and manifesting spiritual revelations, and how both compassion and forgiveness actually rely on one's ability to make appropriate distinctions (judgments) about what is most needed in any given situation. As they discuss, "there is no love without discernment," because even if all things are equal expressions of timeless Spirit, any specific "act of love" needs to be evaluated in terms of its actual effect in all four quadrants (e.g. generally speaking, giving an alcoholic a bottle of liquor would not be considered a compassionate or loving act).

As the saying goes, "three's a crowd," but this is definitely a crowd worth having. We hope you enjoy this lighthearted, savvy trialogue with Rev. Michael, Marc Gafni, and Ken Wilber....

Image: I by Mark Henson