– Marc Gafni’s colleagues, friends and supporters speak out about being on the Marc Gafni Team, for the sake of restoring integrity. This response by Kerstin Tuschik, now Co-Executive Director of the Center for Integral Wisdom, was first posted as a comment to the CIW statement on centerforintegralwisdom.org. You can read the statement below or listen to the audio. –
Wow! So good to finally have this clear and simple statement published and to read these awesome comments. I am so touched by the beauty and depth of this community and proud and honored to call myself part of it.
Seeing all of us wrestling with this—without fighting back in the face of these attacks—but looking to understand what is going on, having compassion for all involved, and what Marc calls “loving the moment open” again and again, shows me that we are really fulfilling the purpose of CIW to “evolve the source code of culture,” not by merely talking about it, but by really embodying it.
If there is one place that needs to be transformed in culture in these days of global crises, it is the increasing polarization of US versus THEM thinking, not only here where it plays out big time, but in the world at large.
We need to stop expecting ourselves or others to be perfect. “We are all broken vessels for the light” as Marc so often reminds us. To love somebody also means to love their imperfections and brokenness. And we need to stop using these imperfections as an excuse for not giving our gifts or joining with each other.
We need to stop creating communities around scapegoating. That is exactly the pseudo-Eros of creating the illusion of being on the inside together by putting somebody else outside of the circle that Marc has taught about so often. That will never bring us home. Putting others outside of the circle has been at the root of so much evil in the world. The other is demonized, de-humanized, and therefore not worthy of human compassion and understanding anymore. All of the atrocities from the Third Reich to the crusades could not have happened without this element.
We are ALL in this together. There is no outside. As Zen Master Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, has put it “To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.”
Like all of us, Marc is a human being with imperfections and all. While he is a genius in some areas, he is not so strong in others,
There are many things that I love about Marc:
- his outrageous love for people even in the face of personal hurt
- the dharma he not only formulates so brilliantly in a ‘second simplicity’ way but also deeply embodies
- his devotion to the Goddess and his humility in front of HER (I have never seen anybody literally on his knees so often, bowing to HER both within people and without—and I want to point out that there is a difference between bowing and submitting to another person and bowing in devotion to the Goddess within them)
- his audacity to accept responsibility
- his seeking out and willingness to accept advice and guidance from others who are experts in their fields as well as good friends
- and his ability to create community and genuine collaboration around a shared purpose.
Besides dealing with the impact this whole organized campaign has had on myself and my life, I feel deeply hurt by seeing all of this so misrepresented and distorted.
Looking at the facts, trusting my own experience as well as the experience of trusted friends, and looking at how Marc and we as a community deal with this crisis, I can only come to one conclusion: that is to strengthen my commitment to our shared purpose to evolve the source code of culture and to collectively enact the Unique Self Symphony or what Barbara Marx Hubbard has called the Planetary Awakening, which I believe is the most urgent matter of our times. Whether we face evolution or devolution depends on us—and with US I don’t mean CIW versus the rest, but ALL OF US humans.
May outrageous love transform the world we know—including ourselves.
Kerstin Zohar Tuschik