The Experimental Injunction of the Eye of Consciousness and Its Conclusion: Love Is Not Only Real, Love Is More Real Than Anything Else
Part 2 of a 5-Part Series of the Early Draft Essay "The Eye of Value"
Simply to locate ourselves, let’s remind ourselves once more that all of the Eyes generate what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls valid forms of knowledge, each with their own injunctions, and each with their own validity tests.
The Eye of the Senses generates sensory data. This data can classically only be accessed through the five senses and their various technologies of amplification.
The Eye of the Mind cannot classically access the data available to the Eye of the Senses. The Eye of the Mind generates mind data, or what is called mental data, that cannot be accessed by the Eye of the Senses.
The Eye of Consciousness [Eye of Contemplation, Eye of the Spirit, Eye of Value, Eye of the Heart] generates an entirely new quality of data that cannot be accessed by the other two. This is the data of value. The primary injunction of this Eye is consciousness accessed through contemplation itself.
The Injunction Opens the Field of Eros: Eros Generates Gnosis
Contemplation is the very opposite of dogma. For the Eye of Contemplation deploys all the three steps of empirical sensemaking.
First, there is an injunction—contemplation itself.
Second, the Eye of Contemplation yields data—a new illumination—insight. The data generated, however, are about the very quality of Self and Reality.
What the Eye of Contemplation yields about Reality, as described in different words and forms by countless practitioners of contemplative practices in different traditions throughout the ages, is that:
Love is Real—ontologically Real.
That Love, or Eros, is a Real Value—in other words, Love is infinitely valuable, even as it is priceless and immeasurable.
Meaning: Love, or Eros, is not a mere fiction, a figment of our imagination, or a social construction of Reality.
Rather, the ultimately Real Value of Love—Eros—is structural to Reality; in other words, Love—or Eros—is the directly felt and lived knowing of the Universe: A Love Story—the amorous Cosmos.
The human being participates in the Field of Eros—the human lives in the Field of Eros, and the Field of Eros lives in the human being.
At the most advanced level, the human being affects the Field of Eros.
As such, whoever has the capacity to perform the injunctions—the experiments of contemplation—over sufficient time with sufficient depth and commitment—who is not pre-conditioned to be blinded—will experience some level of direct access to the ultimate Reality of Love—Eros.
Quite literally, Reality is Eros.
All three dimensions necessary for valid knowing are present that we described above:
Injunction
Gnosis
Falsifiability
The injunction itself generates direct access to the Field of Eros.
The Field of Eros itself generates gnosis.
The gnosis, generated by the Field of Eros, is Eros itself.
Particularly, the injunction—in this case the practice of contemplation—yields gnosis. The gnosis that Reality is a Love Story, that Love, or Eros, is real, that Eros, or Love, is an ultimate value, and—again—that the human being participates and therefore affects—even shapes—the Field.
Or said somewhat differently: The Universe: A Love Story or Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe.
And, of course, but another word for Eros is Evolutionary Love.
Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
The Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story—The Eye of Contemplation
The section that we just concluded a few pages ago—the early ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story is not a recording of a religious dogma. Quite the opposite, it is an expression of the realization of the interior sciences. The realization that is demonstrated as threading its way through the esoteric interior sciences is precisely the Universe: A Love Story.
That realization is not a declaration, or a doctrine, or a dogma; rather, it is the illumination or insight born of the Eye of Contemplation.
However, this realization is not limited to one narrow group claiming that it is the chosen people of God, that God’s Love rests exclusively or primarily with them, and that they, therefore, have the right to act in ways which are the opposite of what their own ethos and law calls loving, to those outside their tribe or nation.
That is, in fact, how the realization of the Universe: A Love Story was hijacked by the dominant ethnocentric center of gravity of all of the great religions.
But beneath these public dogmas and doctrinal declarations, the surface structure of the religions, there is a set of depth structures, that are, in one way or another, shared by the esoteric interior sciences.[1]
Indeed, the greatest masters of all of the esoteric interior sciences, including Hebrew Wisdom, Indian, Sufi, Taoist, Christian, and multiple other interior science traditions, who were very possibly the most subtle, sensitive, speculative minds ever known to humankind, all activated—opened—the Eye of Contemplation.
None of them knew each other directly, and from a modern perspective, there was little indirect contact as well. To say that vast distances, danger, and primitive forms of travel, as well as ethnocentric hostilities, prevented the free flow of gnosis, would be to major in understatement. In each of these traditions, there was a group of esoteric masters who took to the mountains, the deserts, the caves, to be able to engage in the full intensification of experience required to open the Eye of Contemplation.
And, as noted above, they all came to the same conclusion. Let’s look briefly at three examples.
Because the central focus of our pointing towards the early ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story in the earlier conversation was the Hebrew tradition, let’s briefly turn our attention back to that tradition to see the result of the Eye of Contemplation. The Talmud tells of Shimon Bar Yochai and his son and primary student Elazar who spent twelve years in a cave:[2]
“They went into the field and hid themselves in a cave so no man knew what had become of them…They took off their clothes and sat up to their necks in sand. The whole day they studied torah. And when the time for prayer came, they put on their clothes and prayed…and then they put them off and again... dug themselves into the sand…thus they spent twelve years in the cave.”
The cave is clearly a place of intensified experience, where R. Shimon Bar Yochai and his Son Elazar are engaged in opening up the Eye of Contemplation to the nth degree, as they contemplate the nature of their own selves and Reality itself.[3] The same R. Shimon Bar Yochai [and his son Elazar] are the prime movers in the group of realizers who source one of the greatest interior science texts—recording the fruits of the Eye of Contemplation—ever written, the Zohar.
As scholar Yehuda Liebes points out in a seminal monograph, “Zohar and Eros” in Alpayim 9 (1994), the word Zohar, which might be formally translated to English as something like radiance, is actually much closer to Eros.
The Eye of Contemplation is opened in the esoteric band of realizers that are the backbone of the Hebrew interior sciences. What the Eye of Contemplation discloses is precisely and potently that Reality is Eros—a Field of Eros or Love—called in the texts a Field of Holy Apples, among other names, and that—stunningly—realized human beings have the capacity to participate and shape that Field of Eros through what we have called Conscious Evolution.
This realization is the pivotal transition that we have called the emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity—the evolutionary leap in intimacy into Evolutionary Intimacy itself—the ultimate pivot from Homo sapiens to Homo amor.
In, what many initiates and scholars consider to be the penultimate section of the Zohar, the Idra Rabba,[4] the same Shimon Bar Yochai and his son Elazar are the central figures. Here he shared the illumination born of the contemplation in the cave.
R. Shimon rejoiced, and said,
“I have heard your sound: I am afraid (Habakkuk 3:2). There it was fitting to be afraid; for us the matter depends on love, as it is written: Love your Neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:8), You shall love YHVH your God (Deuteronomy 6:5), and it is written I have loved you, says YHVH (Malachi 1:2).”[5]
In the old consciousness, it was fitting to be afraid. Fear, or better translated as, what Rudolf Otto called, creature consciousness, is central to spiritual realization.
This consciousness reflects the general theocentric character of virtually all of the world religions in their public teachings.
But Shimon Bar Yochai is here revealing the esoteric truth of the interior sciences emergent from the direct access to the Eye of Contemplation.
“For us,” who have experienced the inner nature of Self and Reality, “the matter depends on love.”
And for Shimon Bar Yochai and his successors, the nature of this Eros, that is the very superstructure of Reality and human identity, is the messianic realization, which ultimately cannot be limited to an elite band of realizers.[6] Rather, it is an enlightenment which must be democratized and ultimately universalized,[7] as the bedrock principle of all politics, economics, and governance.
Echoing Idra scholars Liebes and Hellner-Eshed, we can accurately recapitulate the essential realization of the Universe: A Love Story, disclosed—by Bar Yochai and his band of initiates—through the Eye of Contemplation, which is at the heart of the Idra.
Here, our language is love. We love each other. We love God. God loves us.
And that One Love, One Eros is the vessel to evolve the pattern of intimacy within the Divine. In essence, for the interior sciences, God, or Reality in its inter-included Infinite and finite expressions, is a configuration of intimacy. The deepening of that intimacy, or Eros, is the purpose of Reality.
The verses cited in the Zohar talk about love between people, love between the human and the Divine, and finally between the Divine and the human. The point of the Zohar, eminent interior scientist of the renaissance, Moshe Cordevero, Isaac Luria’s teacher for a time, notes in his explanation of the Zoharic passage, the reason that all the verses are cited, is to disclose that there is no ultimate distinction between these loves. They are not, in his language, separate matters, but rather are all part of the One Evolving Eros, which is the structure of Cosmos.[8]
The core of this realization is something like, Infinity needs the love of finitude in order to fulfill its essential nature.
Or said in more classically—and starkly—and shockingly—bold humanistic religious terms: God needs us. God needs our love. God needs our love between each other and our love of value—that is to say our love of Love itself.
Infinity participates in finitude—an expression of itself—which heals Infinity, which causes its evolution.
This is the great process of tikkun. Tikkun, in the Zohar, implies Eros, the erotic healing of Reality through Eros.
It is the Eye of Contemplation that opens the portal of Eros, which itself discloses this great gnosis, a Reality in which our stories—quietly literally our Love Stories—are chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story—Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe.
Worldwide Book Release: First Values & First Principles
Our book can be ordered from the US and Canada via Amplify.
From other countries, you can order the book now from your country's amazon.
It is available as Paperback, eBook, and audiobook.
First Values & First Principles
Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
by David J. Temple
AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.
Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.
“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary
David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.
The Eye of Contemplation in Vedanta
The Eye of Contemplation, as we already noted, appears in various forms in all of the mystery schools of the great traditions, which were the sources of their interior sciences. We referred earlier to the realization of the Universe: A Love Story in the Indian traditions.
Particularly, we referred to Kashmir Shaivism, which itself was one expression of the much larger interior science of the Indian Veda, which is often referred to as Vedanta. Here, like in what the Zohar calls the Chevraya, the band of companions that sources the Zohar,[9] the Eye of Contemplation is centered in a group of initiates, Brahman sages, to go to the forest. They go to contemplate the nature of Reality and produce the Upanishads, which are the core of the interior science of esoteric Vedanta. One of the core texts is the Bhagavad Gita, in which the central character is the Infinite disclosed into Reality as Krishna, who is the embodiment of the Universe: A Love Story.
The core data, disclosed by the contemplative empiricism of these masters, who spent their lifetimes enacting injunctions of practice—experiments of the interior sciences—to open the Eye of Contemplation, discloses Sat Chit Ananda. As we unpacked above, Sat means something like Being. Chit means something like the English word Consciousness. Ananda means something like how we are deploying the term Eros.
The essence: The inside of Sat is Chit, and the inside of Chit is Ananda.
Or:
The Inside of Being is Consciousness, and the inside of Consciousness is Eros.
In other words, the Inside of the Inside of Reality, which animates and drives Reality—the motive of Reality—is Eros.
This is the data disclosed by the Eye of Contemplation.
In the Hebrew wisdom tradition, for example, in the Zohar, the place where Eros is similarly disclosed to be the superstructure of Reality is the Holy of Holies—known precisely as the Inside of the Inside.[10]
The Eye of Contemplation and the Eye of Value in Zen: Zazen and Koan
The Eye of Contemplation and the Eye of Value appear in Zen in a somewhat different form. Both, however, yield the gnosis of Eros, of Love, as the way. The initiate has two major paths. The first is sitting in Zazen, classic sitting meditation, which is the classic meditative injunction to open the Eye of Contemplation. At this point, there is a cumulative weight of data that the Eye of Contemplation opens up the initiate to compassion, Eros, or Love, not just as a social construction of reality, but as the very nature of Reality. This is what Zen terms the Buddha Nature of Reality. Buddha Nature is Buddha Compassion.[11]
In this writing, however, we would like to briefly focus on the second form of this Eye in Buddhism—the Eye of Value—which is opened in Koan practice.
In the second form, the Eye of Value, the student responds to a Koan, a riddle-like question—which makes no apparent sense but is probing the student’s knowledge of the nature of Self and the nature of Reality. Sometimes, the teacher would present the student with a Koan question, and at other times, the teacher would answer a student’s inquiry with a Koan answer. The Koan opens the Eye of Value.
For example, a great teacher called Ummon.
Said Ummon to his disciples,
I do not ask you to say anything about before the fifteenth of the month but say something about after the fifteenth day of the month.
Because no monk could reply, Ummon modeled the correct answer to such a Koan and said,
Every day is a good day.
Ummon is not answering a question but responding as Value to the Koan. In this response, he opens the Eye of Value of the monks not cognitively but by being the good day, the value implicit in the good day, allowing the reality of goodness to be tasted directly, and realization is immediately achieved by the inquiring monk.
In a second Koan story about Ummon, the following is related.
Monk: What is the one road of Ummon?
Ummon: Personal Experience!
Monk: What is the way?
Ummon: Go!
Monk: What is the road? Where is the Way?
Ummon: Begin walking it.
Here again Ummon responses to the Koan are not answers to a question but immediately available lived realizations of the Eye of Value. Personal experience, Go, and Begin walking it are Value themselves. They are non-conceptual; they do not emerge out of the Eye of the Mind or the Eye of the Senses. They are the immediate insights of the Eye of Value.
The student is asking a question about the meaning of life? Or about the quality of or who to obtain Buddha Nature—enlightenment?
The masters answer not with a conceptual or cognitive frame or an intellectual discernment but rather, with an immediate embodiment of value.
In other words, Ummon is being his Buddha Nature in response to the Koan.
And when Ummon asks a Koan to his students, he wants a response in which the student demonstrates with direct simplicity their own Buddha Nature, meaning their own intrinsic Value.
This is a demonstration of the students’ incarnational experience of Buddha Nature. This is not the Eye of the Mind or the Eye of the Senses, in the sense of the cognition of separate self, but the Eye of Value, which is a direct, unmediated experiential expression of Buddhahood—Anthro-Ontology pure and simple.
To get this realization, the student must open the Eye of Consciousness—the Eye of Value, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of the Heart. Once the Eye of Consciousness, [Value, Contemplation, Heart, Spirit) is opened—the injunction—then, the knowledge it discloses—illumination—is self-evident, and falsifiable—i.e., it can be replicated by others who do the same injunction.
In the language of Zen, the illumination might be articulated,
The Flower is Red.
The Rain beats on the roof of the monastery.
Infinite intrinsic value is always already immediately present.
What Zen is not merely saying but anthro-ontologically being is a direct experience of value, opened up through the eye of Zazen, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit.
Although this is not the language of Zen, we might fairly say that the Koan discloses that Love is real.
Value and Love, in the Zen teaching, are virtually interchangeable.
There were, however, some Zen masters who spoke directly of Love in their Koan-like pronouncement.
Here is Ikkyu:
Rinzai’s disciples never got the Zen message.
But I, the blind donkey, know the truth.
Love play,
can make you immortal.
The autumn breeze of a single night of sexing
is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.
Or in another passage from Ikkyu:
I’m with a young beauty,
sporting in deep love play,
in the holy whorehouse.
We sit in the pavilion.
A pleasure girl and this Zen monk, enraptured by hugs and kisses.
I certainly don’t feel like I’m burning in hell.
Or Ikkyu again:
Enter the place of a courtesan of love
and great wisdom will explode upon you.
Manjushri should have let Ananda enjoy himself in the courtesan’s home
Now he will never know the joys or wisdom of elegant love play.
Ikkyu is, of course, not entirely dissimilar to the Song of Solomon from the Interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom:
Kiss me with the deep lustful kisses of your mouth,
For your mouth and its kiss is more delightful to me than the best of wine.
…Your breasts are like two fawns,
I yearn for them,
The twin fawns of a gazelle that plays among the lilies.
The Song of Songs, the most sacred book of the cannon, is the meditation which, as we saw in our earlier conversation, generates apotheosis—the realization that the human being is God—or said perhaps more clearly, that the human being participates in the Divine Field of Eros. The reason love play is chosen by the Zen Master and the ancient King Solomon[12] is because for both it is the place of Lishma—that which is done for its own sake—where the question of the meaning or value of life falls away, not because it has been answered but because it is self-evident.
The Eye of Contemplation Leads to the Revelation of the Universe: A Love Story
It is crucial to remember what we have already implied clearly that the Eye of Contemplation leads to the realization of Love—or what have been called Eros—as the foundational principle of Cosmos. Contemplation might happen through Zazen, Koan practices, Hebrew wisdom meditations, reading the Song of Songs,[13] or the classical practices of Vedanta, which describe what might be translated into English as a kind of Brahmic splendor.
Richard Maurice Bucke writes in third person as was typical of many 19th-century writers in these kinds of matters:
Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven.[14]
Here is the full citation from Cosmic Consciousness:
It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment.
[All of this can be taken as a form of the Eye of Contemplation, different from Zazen but not so different from the study of sacred text in the Batei Midrash, the study halls of Hebrew wisdom. The core is the next part of the piece.]
All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.
The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew, neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind. There was no return, that night or at any other time, of the experience. He subsequently wrote a book (28a.) in which he sought to embody the teaching of the illumination. Some who read it thought very highly of it, but (as was to be expected for many reasons) it had little circulation.
Bucke is, of course, not alone. If one reads carefully The Perennial Philosophy, whose focus was opening the Eye of Contemplation, one cannot help but notice, as indeed Aldous Huxley did in his book by that name, and in what he called his Minimum Working Hypothesis,[15] that the opening of the Eye of Contemplation always generates the gnosis that Love is real and that there is a Tao, an intrinsic way, that requires persons to care for and love each other, as an expression of that Tao, the intrinsic nature of Reality itself.
Even in the more formal precincts of transcendental meditation, studied by tools of modern science, the Eye of Contemplation opens up what has been called a fourth state of consciousness, which is, in effect, the realization of the Universe: A Love Story and our participation in the drama.
One of the very first studies of this nature was published by R. K. Wallace, followed by dozens more,[16] which pointed towards meditation as being a fourth state of consciousness. Like the other classic states of consciousness already deeply recognized in Vedantic literature—waking, dreaming, and sleeping—this fourth state was found to have unique signature patterns in terms of what we might call the configurations of intimacy that appear in science as brain waves. As the leading integral theorist summarized Wallace’s results, “an expanded sense of self, consciousness, compassion, love, care, responsibility, and concern”[17] are the demarcating characteristics of this fourth state of consciousness.
The same results, integrating the data from forty more years of careful experimentation and tracing, are collected by Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman in their Altered Traits.[18] Their specific focus is to point out that the new forms of connectivity, kindness, and love that are generated by the Eye of Contemplation, like Wallace initially surmised, show up in highly visible form in the neural circuitries of the brain.[19]
In effect, the increases in love, intimacy, and empathy reconfigure the patterns of intimacy, empathy, and love in the neural circuits and brainwaves themselves. Exteriors and interiors mirror each other in Reality—all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain in the manifest world.
The Experimental Injunction of the Eye of the Heart [The Eye of Contemplation, Value, Spirit] in Sufism and Hebrew Wisdom and Its Conclusion: Love Is Not Only Real: Love Is More Real than Anything Else: Loving Our Way to Realization
The Eye of the Heart, as is self-evident in our somewhat long heading for this section, is a particular face of the Eye of Consciousness—as is the Eye of Value, the Eye of Contemplation, and the Eye of the Spirit. The Eye of the Heart,[20] a term that is central to Sufism, expresses itself in two major ways.
First, the classic practices of contemplation yield the knowing of the Universe: A Love Story. That dimension of the Eye of the Heart we have already adduced or alluded to above, both in the Hebrew wisdom literature [Shimon Bar Yochai in the cave with his son buried in sand up to their necks for twelve years, for example], as well as in Vedanta, mystical Christianity,[21] Zen, and neuroscience literature.
But there is a second form of the Eye of the Heart, and this is the one that we want to briefly point towards in this short section. There is an early set of talks on CosmoErotic Humanism which is titled Loving Your Way to Enlightenment.[22] The implication of the title is that the injunction in deploying the Eye of the Heart is different than the injunction in deploying the Eye of Contemplation—even though they are fundamentally the same Eye.
This is a somewhat similar but not redundant distinction to the one that we made above regarding the Eye of Value. The core point there is that the injunction in Koan practice is not contemplation. Rather, the injunction is the direct—immediate—anthro-ontological realization of value. That is what we called the Eye of Value.
In a similar fashion, the Eye of the Heart invokes a different injunction than the Eye of Contemplation. [Again, all of the four names of this third Eye—the Eye of Consciousness in its four expressions—the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of the Heart—are difference facets and forms of this third Eye, without which, as we will see, the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind go partially blind.]
The injunction is no longer to contemplate. The injunction is Love itself. It is in the very practice of Love that the Eye of the Heart is opened; the initiate realizes that Love is real—and not only real—Love, or Eros, is the foundational Reality, which animates, suffuses, and drives everything and everyone.
When I first met our dear friend Ken Wilber, somewhere in 2002, the occasion of our meeting was a cover essay I had written at the time for Tikkun Magazine, entitled “On the Erotic and the Ethical.”[23] The point of the article is that the experience of Eros, as it is structural to Cosmos, itself generates love.
Ken and I spoke, in a beautiful conversation, for quite some hours, with Ken’s focus being the efficacy of Zen practice—and particularly the classical forms of Zen—the Eye of Contemplation—as being generative of enlightenment and ethics, with which I of course concurred.
I also gently shared something of my grandmother, who was without a doubt intimate with the Divine, in a direct and clear way—in a way that might be associated with enlightenment. The Reality of Spirit was absolutely clear to her as was the interconnectivity of the All with the All. But, as I mentioned half-jokingly to Ken, my grandmother has not only never meditated in Zazen or any other form, she had never heard of meditation, would not understand it, or really any other form of the Eye of Contemplation.
My grandmother, who came to Canarsie after the horrors of the holocaust and spoke mostly Yiddish or Polish, did not practice the injunction of contemplation. She practiced—without ever self-consciously calling it that—the injunction of Love, or Eros. You would walk into my grandmother’s apartment, and from the second you walked in, she was utterly in devotion to you. Often, that devotion expressed itself in food, every form of unimaginably great Food that you could possibly imagine.
A thousand restaurants later, I have still to find food that tasted, like Bubbe’s,[24] of the Garden of Eden. For Bubbe, preparing food was a great act of devotional love. Indeed, the primary ingredient of every recipe was Eros itself. I can still see her in the kitchen today, standing over the stove, preparing food for me, my father, my aunt, or my cousins. Her movement in the condition of, what today we would call, flow, where she lived—in the devotional currents of Eros—gave life self-evident value. It was, of course, clear to her—although she would never have said it that way—that Love was the foundational structure of Cosmos. Her practice was Eros, which yielded for her the self-evident gnosis that Eros—Love itself—is an intrinsic and foundational value of Cosmos, in which human beings participate.
The injection—or practice—for Bubbe—was not the Eye of Contemplation but the Eye of the Heart.
That was the Bhakti Yoga of an old Yiddish-speaking Jewish woman in Brooklyn, whose face shone with subtle light, who knew that her story was a love story and that her story was chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story.
Love’s knowledge, disclosed by the Eye of the Heart, is that Love is real and a foundational value of Cosmos. The experience of Eros itself leads to gnosis. The anthro-ontological realization that Love is a foundational structure of Cosmos is disclosed in the human sense of only being fully at home in the experience of Being in Love.
The nature of that Love changes through history. In certain cultures, it is love of God, in others, love of country, in others, love of knowledge, in still others, love of family, and in still others, love of the personal beloved. And of course, in particular cultural contexts, some combinations of the above are in various configurations of complementary or dialectical play.
But however we tell the story, our anthro-ontological gnosis gives us a sense of being at home in Cosmos only when we are in love. It is only some form of this Love—in any of these forms—that liberates the contraction of ego.
It is for the same reasons that virtually all songs are love songs, whether that love is about some version of a personal beloved or any of the variants of the beloved that we just adduced.
Naturally, as we have already pointed out above, waking up—or what we might call opening up to the reality of Love as the superstructure of Cosmos—is mediated through one’s level of consciousness, psychological maturity, and political, economic, and social circumstances. It is a given that there are clarified and degraded forms of all of these forms of love.
But the underlying truth is that the Eye of the Heart opens—much more widely than the Eye of Contemplation—the possibility of what we have called the Democratization of Enlightenment. Eros is the ground for a new emergent order of value that can uplevel humanity from Homo sapiens to Homo amor.
It is the practice of Love—the practice of Eros—that opens the Eye of the Heart and leads to a liberation of the contracted ego-self, the beginning of an omni-considerate relation to some larger whole, and the first glimmering of the New Human and the New Humanity.
The Eye of the Heart: The Injunction Is Love—The Realization Is the Universe: A Love Story—The Band of Outrageous Lovers
This practice of Love being the injunction that leads to the illumination of the Universe: A Love Story is core to the interior sciences of the Wisdom of Solomon in the Hebrew wisdom lineages which we invoked above.
The key phrase on which all else flows is:
For Us the Matter Depends on Love.
As we have already noted, by Love, the text does not mean love in the ordinary sense but rather what we have termed Eros—not Love as a mere human sentiment but the Heart of Existence itself.
Another term, almost synonymous with Eros but not redundant, that we have cited above and deployed on other writings on CosmoErotic Humanism, is Outrageous Love.
Outrageous Love has the sense of being outrageous, the sense of an extraordinary state that is not quite of this world, rooted in the Infinite, boundary-breaking in its most sacred and deeply personal forms, while Eros, when taken by itself, sometimes tends towards its third-person sense. In the title of this subsection, we intentionally deployed the term Outrageous Love instead of Eros [Band of Outrageous Lovers] to indicate precisely this Infinitely Personal quality. It is precisely not personal in the limited ego-self or separate-self sense. Rather, it is Infinitely Personal—in the sense of human personhood participating in the Personhood of Cosmos.
Returning to our original phrase above, Outrageous Love is not mere human sentiment but the Heart of Existence itself.
This does not mean, for Shimon Bar Yochai and his companions, and the Solomon lineage they represent, that Eros, in its Outrageous Love sense, does not appear in human form. Quite the opposite.
Rather, this formulation means that Love at the human level needs to be not merely human sentiment—meaning a social construction of reality—or a psychological fiction we call love—but rather, the Heart of Existence itself.
In other words, the Eros—the Outrageous Love—that courses through Cosmos is the very Eros—the very Outrageous Love—that must animate the human experience of loving.
It is precisely in this way that Shimon Bar Yochai interprets the phrase: For us, the matter depends on love.
The Zohar, as elegantly unfolded in the Scholarship of Yehuda Liebes, is sourced not in one person, the historical mythical Shimon Bar Yochai, but rather, as described in the Zohar itself, in the Chevraya—the companions—literally the friends—the small band of masters, including his son, who surround and accompany Shimon Bar Yochai in the great mystical journey.
Liebes describes this Chevraya Kadisha, this holy band of companions as described in the Zohar, as mirrored in the 13th-century kabbalists who collectively authored the Zohar.[25]
This is highly significant. What Shimon Bar Yochai is saying—as we will unfold in a moment[26]—is that to affect the great Tikkun, the great fixing, in which human beings realize their true nature, in which a New Human and a New Humanity emerge, the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind, which we unpacked earlier are woefully insufficient. But so is the Eye of Contemplation or the Eye of the Spirit by itself. Rather, the Eye of Contemplation must be merged with its other forms, the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of the Heart.
It is a two-step process.
The first step: The companions must first know that love is the ultimate real value of the Cosmos—meaning, Eros, Outrageous Love, is the ultimate Reality.
The second step: Shimon Bar Yochai says to the companions, to invoke the New Human, they must become the New Human. And that demands the Eye of the Heart. The injunction that yields the illumination is not meditative contemplation by itself but rather Love. But not Love in an abstract or third-person sense. But rather, Outrageous Love for each other.
The companions are to become Outrageous Lovers of each other. The messianic sense of the Idra Rabba—the great gathering—is clear in the text and has been elegantly unpacked by Liebes. The Idra intends a full Tikkun of Arich Anpin—the Infinitely Patient One—which is a particular expression of Partzuf—literally, a Face of the Divine, in Lurianic parlance.
Simply put that means a tikkun—an evolutionary fixing of the entire Cosmos. Tikkun is a key structure of Luria’s Kabbalah, which is generally translated as healing or fixing and is, as we noted earlier, more accurately understood as evolving.[27]
The Fixing of God is not only the Healing of the Divine but the Evolution of God.
The Evolution of God, which in the language of the lineage can barely be spoken, means that there is more God to come. And more God to come comes in human form. The companions of the Zohar become a holy Band of Outrageous Lovers and effectively affect the great tikkun by loving each other outrageously.
For the Zohar, the evolution of the New Human means—the matter depends on Love—the companions loving each other with the Eros that animated and moves all of Cosmos.
The awakening of this new quality of Divine Love—Eros—identified, in the Idra, also with Chesed—one of the ten Sefirot—the ten Lumanations of the Divine—is the quality of the Messianic Consciousness, as the verse cited in the Idra alludes,
Do not awaken or arouse full love until there is full desire.
The fixing, or what we call, in CosmoErotic Humanism, the emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity—Homo sapiens becoming Homo amor—the Universe: A Love Story in person—happens primarily through the formation of a Band of Outrageous Lovers who love each other—madly—outrageously.
Here are three texts from the Zohar, allusively in this regard.
The first:
When the companions came before R. Shimon, he saw a sign in their faces [that there was love among them], and he said: Come my holy children, come beloved of the King, come my cherished who love one another. For as R. Abba once said: All those companions who do not love one another pass from the world before their time. All the companions in the days of R. Shimon loved one another in soul and spirit. That is why [the secrets of the Torah] were disclosed in R. Shimon’s generation’s period. As R. Shimon was wont to say, all the companions who do not love one another divert from the straight path, and cause blemish to the Torah, for the Torah is love, brotherhood and truth. Abraham loves Isaac and Isaac loves Abraham, and they embrace one another - and they hold Jacob in love and brotherhood, giving their spirit to one another [i.e., via kiss]. The companions must follow this example and not blemish [the Torah].[28]
Especially important, writes Hayyim Vital, was…
...the love of companions who study Torah together; each of them must regard himself as though he were one part of the body of the group of his companions, especially if he has the knowledge and the understanding to know his fellow’s soul… And my teacher cautioned me greatly about the need for love to prevail among the companions in our group...[29]
For each are the “the bodily parts of the matron.”[30]
Each is part of the Divine Body of Eros.
For the Zohar, Reality is Eros,[31] and the Eros—the Outrageous Love between the holy Band of Outrageous Lovers—is what both sustains and, most significantly, evolves Cosmos.
The core expression of that evolution is the Evolution of Love which evokes the New Human and the New Humanity—the Universe: A Love Story in person.
In the Zohar’s reading, “God’s love of human beings and the human love of God are derived from the first love”—Outrageous Love between human beings. The phrase derived is not homiletic but scholarly.[32]
This is precisely the mystery of Homo amor. In this very precise sense, it is the evolution of new qualities of Love—the move from ordinary love to Outrageous Love—expressed emergently between human beings—in other words, the emergence of Homo amor—messianic consciousness—which then evolves Divine Love itself. This is the evolution described in the earlier passage in the Zohar we adduced above—which describes and cites texts for three forms of Love[33]—where the new form of human Love between the Band of Outrageous Lovers evolves all other forms of Love—Infinity’s Love of finitude and finitude’s Love of the Infinite.[34]
A third source:[35]
And you companions that are here, as you have loved before, do not part yourselves from one another from now on until the Holy One, blessed be He, be glad with you and call peace upon you, and may there be peace in the world on your account, as it is written, “For my brethren and companions’ sake, I will now say peace be with you.”[36]
Sufi Evocations of the Eye of the Heart as Personal Love
In a distinct but not entirely dissimilar fashion, the interior scientists of Persia enthrall the west today because they speak of opening the Eye of the Heart through the injunction of loving.
We turn for a moment to some brief passages from Rumi[37] and Hafiz.[38]
Rumi:
The light which shines in the eye is really the light of the heart. The light which fills the heart is the light of God, which is pure and separate from the light of intellect and sense.
Or:
Close your eyes, fall in Love, stay there.
Or:
Look at Love with the eyes of your Heart.
Or:
I am bewildered by the magnificence of your beauty; and wish to see you with a hundred eyes . . . I am in the house of mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer.
Or the poems of Sufi interior scientist of Eros, Hafiz.
With That Moon Language[39]
Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to
them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise,
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, This great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full
moon in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language, what every other
eye in the world is dying to hear?
Or a second poem from Hafiz, also translated by Daniel Ladinsky:
What happens when your soul
Begins to awaken
Your eyes and your heart
And the cells of your body
To the great Journey of Love?
First there is wonderful laughter
And probably precious tears
And a hundred sweet promises
And those heroic vows no one can ever keep.
But still God is delighted and amused
You once tried to be a saint.
What happens when your soul
Begins to awake
To our deep need to love
And serve the Friend?
O the Beloved will send you
One of His wonderful, wild companions
Like Hafiz.
In this relatively random collection of Rumi and Hafiz material, we see both elements at play. First, we see the Eye of the Heart in bold form, and second, we see that the act of loving itself, but not just ordinary love of family members and the like, but Outrageous Love, opens the Eye of the Heart.
As in the sages of the Idra, holders of the Wisdom of Solomon, Eros opens the portal of Eros, the Eye of the Heart, which generates enlightenment—illumination—and new gnosis that animates the New Human and the New Humanity.[40] This is the core of the Wisdom of Solomon.
The text that describes the Divine Granting of wisdom to Solomon—God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight—is followed, as we have noted,[41] by the story of the two harlots who each claim to be the mother of the same baby.
As we noted,[42] this is a legal question in a system in which law and its formal procedures and precedents is the key container of the Divine Will. But Solomon ignores these structures of evidence and precedents and instead evokes the love of the mother as the guiding principle. Solomon declares, if the reader remembers the story, let the baby be cut in half and each woman will receive half… The real mother immediately screams and protests and says, rather give the baby to her. This disclosure of love forms the law.
This is the essence of the Wisdom of Solomon.
This Eros, or Outrageous Love, by its very nature sweeps aside what we have called rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics—which itself is a primary generator function of existential risk—as the core story in which humanity lives. This is the story of Homo sapiens.
Solomon is the early ontology of the emergence of Homo amor. This is precisely not our current success story—rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics—in which all is measured based on who wins and who loses.
Rather, the Eye of the Heart discloses the immeasurable, and rivalrous conflict as the core structure of Reality dissolves in the larger intimacies of the amorous Cosmos, which are now—with the emergence of Homo amor—the governing principles of the New Human and the New Humanity.
This is part 2 of an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
»Click here to read Part 1 of this Essay«
Next week, we are going to dive into critiques of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind.
Footnotes
[1] It is, of course, true that the surface structures and depth structures got confused in each of the religions. The California transpersonal community, for example, is famous for its postmodern arrogance—which always cites this confusion in the religions to then dismiss all universal trends that emerge out of the shared realizations that bind all the great traditions. But even these ostensible postmodernists, who seem to dismiss all universals, virtually always have a hidden set of universals that they endorse—what Habermas called cryptonormative judgment, e.g., in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 284. We discuss this key issue in our complete book on Anthro-Ontology and value. Marc Gafni & Zachary Stein with Ken Wilber, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism: Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. There, I (Marc) share a wonderful correspondence with my friend and colleague Jorge Ferrer. Jorge has set himself up in multiple writings as a fierce demolisher of perennial trends towards discerning universals between the religions. However, as I shared with Jorge, in a letter, that a careful reading of his own writings reveals a distinct set of universals, which paradoxically reveal Jorge, the great scavenger of universal Perennialism, to be a crypto-perennialist, which Jorge graciously acknowledged.
[2] Babylonian Talmud Tractate Shabbat, 33a. The prose English translation is adduced by Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, Published August 17th, 2005, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1951), p. 36.
[3] For readers familiar with this passage: The larger context of the passage in terms of the struggle with Rome, in which Bar Yochai was involved, and the fiery interaction between the Shimon Bar Yochai and Elazar, and between them and the world, upon leaving the cave is crucially important but beyond the scope of this conversation.
[4] On Idra Rabba, see the scholarship of Yehuda Liebes, particularly Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993, and in that volume, “The Messiah of the Zohar: On R. Simeon bar Yohai as a Messianic Figure.” Really, however, all of Liebes’s work is seminal in this regard. Liebes is followed by his student Melila Hellner-Eshed, who writes a volume on Idra Rabba itself. Melila Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar, Stanford University Press 2021.
[5] Zohar 3:128, trans. Matt, volume 8:323, quoted from Melila Hellner-Eshed, who writes a volume on Idra Rabba itself. Melila Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar, Stanford University Press 2021, p. 142 and 164.
[6] See Gafni, “Three Steps Towards the Democratization of Enlightenment,” . See also Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, pp. 152-154, “The Democratization of Enlightenment.” See also Gafni, Your Unique Self, on the same, pp. 21-22, 176-178, 366-367, 379, 387. See also Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, Yale University Press, 2000, who, although he does not deploy our term Democratization of Enlightenment, describes well the Hasidic sources that view each person as participating in Komat Mashiach, the stature of the Messiah, pp. 221-223. See also dialogue between Moshe Idel, Marc Gafni, and Ken Wilber, where Gafni introduced to Idel and Wilber the term Democratization of Enlightenment, which both Idel and Gafni saw as central to the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom.
[7] The need to adopt core categories of the interior sciences and apply them universally beyond their limited ethnocentric context is a core theme of CosmoErotic Humanism. On universalism and particularism in Kabbalistic thought, see, for example, scholars Elliot Wolfson (see, e.g., the essay “Secrecy, Apophasis, and Atheistic Faith in the Teachings of Rav Kook” in Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, Indiana University Press (2017), pp. 131-160) and Moshe Halamish.
[8] Moshe Cordevero, Or Yakar, The Precious Light, 3:254.
[9] See Liebes, “How the Zohar was Written” in Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993.
[10] See for example, Zohar Vol. 3, pp. 296a. This section, known as the Idra Zuta, is an intense description of the Holy of Holies as the locus of the erotic union—which is aroused by human Eros—that takes places in every dimension of Reality—all of Reality being conceived as intra-Divine exciting within the Field of Divine Eros. The Holy of Holies was literally the Inside of the Inside of the Jerusalem Temple. There was an outer courtyard, the inner courtyard called the holy, and the innermost sanctum of the holy—the inside of the inside—was called Holy of Holies. But this sense of being, the lefeni u-lefneim, the Inside of the Inside, refers not primarily to the spatial but to the ontological. The word panim—inside—in Hebrew also means face. The Inside of the Inside is the inner Face of the Divine—of Reality—the Divine Face. On face and the penultimate goal of being face to face, see Marc Gafni, “The Journey Towards Face: From Losing Face to Revealing Face—Being Face to Face with God and Self,” https://www.academia.edu/93811360/The_Journey_Towards_Face_From_Losing_Face_to_Revealing_Face_Being_Face_to_Face_with_God_and_Self. See Melila Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar, Stanford University Press 2021, particularly pp. 30-61. In the language of the Zohar itself, “...there is no healing in the world until we are gazing face to face.” Zohar Volume 3: 292b in the Idra Zuta.
[11] This realization is fundamental to Zen and requires little citation. But we cite one modern work as but an example of this axiom of the Zen Interior sciences: Shamar Rinpoche, Buddha Nature: Our Potential for Wisdom, Compassion, and Happiness, Bird of Paradise Press (2019).
[12] The authorship of the book is subject to debate in both classical and modern scholarly sources. The book is either by Solomon or, in the lineage of Solomon, written by interior scientists who, in their text, overcame the split between science and the mythopoetic, in a deeper ontology that includes both. All true science is poetry, and all true poetry grounds in science.
[13] See for example, Zohar, volume One pp. 98a, which talks of the practice of reading the Songs of Songs as generating radical illumination. For a discussion of this text, see Marc Gafni, “The Law of Tears: Early Ontologies of Non-Dual Humanism: Apotheosis, Value, Love, Tears, Human Autonomy, and the Ontic Identity of Human and Divine Will.” This essay is published in Gafni, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[14] See R. M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, first published in 1901, 2006, Cosimo, Inc., p. 10. This text was highly influential and was cited in a somewhat different version by William James, the following year in his epic Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, pp. 302-303, The University of Adelaide Library, 2009, following, as James says, “the privately printed pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text of the latter.”
[15] See Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper & Brothers, 1945, and Huxley’s 1944 essay “The Minimum Working Hypothesis,” published in Vedanta and the West. There, he describes the basic outline of the Perennial Philosophy found in all the mystic branches of the religions of the world, as something like this:
“That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation.
That the Ground is transcendent and immanent.
That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identified with the Ground.
That to achieve this unitive knowledge, to realize this supreme identity, is the final end and purpose of human existence.
That there is a Law or Dharma, which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way, which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end.”
[16] See, for example, R. K. Wallace, “Physiological effects of transcendental meditation,” Science, 1970 Vol 167, Issue 3926, pp. 1751-1754, DOI: 10.1126/science.167.3926.1751. See also, R. K. Wallace, The physiological effects of Transcendental Meditation. Los Angeles: Maharishi International University Press, 1970. See also, WALLACE, R. K. TM: Meditation or sleep. Science, 1976, 193, 719-720. See also, Wallace, R. K., & Benson, H. The physiology of meditation. Scientific American, 1972, 226, 84-90.
[17] See Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, 1998, pp. 198-9.
[18] Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, Avery Publishing, 2017.
[19] Also see, for example, “Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise”, Antoine Lutz, Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, Tom Johnstone, Richard J. Davidson, 2008, Journal PloS one.
[20] See Yaşar Nuri Öztürk, The Eye of the Heart: An Introduction to Sufism and the Major Tariqats of Anatolia and the Balkans, Redhouse Press, Istanbul First Edition 1988, [Translated by Richard Blakney].
[21] For a view of the Eye of the Heart through the prism of western Christian practice, see our colleague Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, Shambala, 2020. In 2011, I [Marc] shared with Cynthia some of the core constructions of this this writing, and particularly the realization of the Divine not merely as the Infinity of Power but as the Infinity of Intimacy, and she lovingly penned a generous approbation to my early work, Your Unique Self, The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with Introduction and Afterword by Ken Wilber, Integral Publishers, 2012., where the realization of the Infinity of Intimacy was shared.
[22] The title emerged out of a dialogue between myself [Marc] and two highly practiced teachers of Vedantic meditation, Sally Kempton, formerly Swami Durgananda, and Lama Surya Das. Both of them are highly practiced in the Eye of Contemplation.
[23] Gafni, Marc, “On the Erotic and the Ethical,” Tikkun Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 2, March/April 2003.
[24] Bubbe is a Yiddish word for grandmother.
[25] See Liebes, “How the Zohar Was Written,” pp. 85 -138, in Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993.
[26] See ibid, for a more extensive unfolding of this strain in the Zohar.
[27] See our earlier endnote on tikkun.
[28] Zohar, volume two, pp. 190b, in the section known as Idra Rabba. Quoted from Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993, pp. 37-38.
[29] Quoted from Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993, pp. 40-41.
[30] Zohar, volume three, p. 231b. Quoted from Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993, p. 41.
[31] See Liebes, Yehuda, “Zohar and Eros” Alpayim 9 (1994).
[32] This formulation derives from Liebes reading of the Zohar, which parallels my own, and is graciously formulated as such by his student Melila Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar, Stanford University Press 2021, p. 167. Thus, the earlier passage in the Zohar, which we cited above, which adduces three texts—in regard to Divine Love for humanity, human Love for God, and Love between humans—is understood in the Idra to audaciously suggest that human Love is the source of both God’s Love for humanity and humanity’s Love for God.
[33] See the passage of the Zohar cited in the section “The Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story—The Eye of Contemplation” above, talking about love between people, love between the human and the Divine, and finally between the Divine and the human.
[34] With some hesitancy about what should be concealed and what should be revealed, I (Marc) pen this footnote. This notion of a Band of Outrageous Lovers who love each other and evolve a new consciousness, Homo amor, through the quality of Love in the Band, together with the language of Homo amor and Outrageous Love, are all part of what we have called CosmoErotic Humanism. All of this emerged in me, in various forms of what the lineage might call Divine Whisper. I was wholly unaware of these text and sources, as they are unpacked by Liebes. When I encountered these texts, the level of shock, recognition, and almost unbearably poignant joy was and is beyond words.
[35] Zohar, volume three; p. 95. Quoted from Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993, p. 42.
[36] See Psalms, chapter 22, verse 8. Quoted from Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli, Suny Press, 1993, p. 42.
[37] Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) descended from a lineage of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics. When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, the spiritual learning community. In 1244, he met Shams Tabriz, who had taken a vow of poverty. Rumi considered their meeting a central event in his life and believed his real poetry began after he had met Shams. In 1248, Shams disappeared. He was either driven away or killed. Rumi's mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses. The resulting work, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Persian literature. From 1262 till the end of his life in 1273, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi: Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Spiritual Verses), which is considered Rumi's most personal work of spiritual teaching.
[38] Ḥafiẓ, also spelled Ḥafeẓ, or in full, Shams al-Din Muḥammad Ḥafiẓ, (~1325-1389), is considered one of the finest lyric poets of Persia. He received a classical religious education, lectured on Quranic and other theological subjects (Ḥafeẓ means one who has learned the Quran by heart), and wrote commentaries on religious classics. He was also a court poet who, for some time, enjoyed the patronage of some of the rulers. One of the guiding principles of his life was Sufism, the Islamic mystical movement demanding complete devotion to the pursuit of union with the ultimate Reality. His principal verse form—that he brought to a perfection never achieved before or since—was the ghazal, a lyric poem of 6 to 15 couplets linked by unity of subject and symbolism rather than by a logical sequence of ideas. Traditionally, the ghazal had dealt with love and wine. Hafiz used these motifs, associated with ecstasy and freedom from restraint, to express some of the Sufi ideas, giving these subjects a truly new freshness and subtlety. His poetry is characterized by his love for humanity and his ability to universalize his everyday experience and to relate it to the mystic’s unending search for union with God. Ḥafiẓ is most famous for his Divan; partially translated into English by Gertrude Bell, H. Wilberforce Clarke, and others.
[39] “With That Moon Language” is reprinted from Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, by Daniel Ladinsky. Copyright © 2002 by Daniel Ladinsky. Scholars and critics have pointed out that Ladinsky's poems not translations or interpretations of Hafiz but originals.
[40] Of course, the ancient mystics don’t refer to it as the New Human and the New Humanity or as Homo amor. Rather, they talk about Messiah or Metatron, as we have briefly pointed to in this Monograph, in the section called “Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—The Evolution of Intimacy: Evolutionary Intimacy” in Nr. “11. Now We Must Think Together: Messiah, Armageddon, Existential Risk, and Homo Amor.”
[41] See Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[42] Ibid.