– Marc Gafni’s friends, collaborators, and supporters speak out for the sake of restoring integrity. This statement by Jeff Hilliard on the Power of Marc Gafni’s Teachings was first posted as a comment to the Center for Integral Wisdom statement on centerforintegralwisdom.org. You can read the statement below or listen to the audio. –

Through seven years of knowing Marc Gafni as a brilliant, driven, principled, bold and generous man, my understanding of reality is now seeded with truth-markers, gifts of his teaching, that orient me in my commitments to love, as full-out as I can, the people and the communities with whom I have the privilege of being intimate.

Many of us long to know our true nature and to get it—body, mind, heart—that we are personally loved by the cosmos and arising from that love, uniquely obligated to meet the needs of our world. This is what Marc teaches, and I know no one who greets the task with greater stamina, clarity, and devotion.

I lead group process based in Marc’s Unique Self teachings. A core practice is love as perception. A just society is advanced when we hone our ability and willingness to perceive a fellow human being with the eyes of love, to see him or her as a full, complex Self, to meet that person’s wounds and failings with compassion and proper weighting, and to recognize each other as active expressions of the divine love, in irreducibly unique form, and to lock onto that fundamental goodness as each person’s true identity. Marc likes to lean into Abraham Kook, the early 20th century Kabbalist, who said, “The truth of your essence reveals itself in the moment(s) of your greatness.”

I stand in my direct experience of the power of Marc’s teachings to open hearts, build recognition of what is most holy and most needed in us, and ignite passion in people to wake up to what Love calls us all, uniquely, to do in the world. The dharma of Unique Self is a broadly accessible and highly efficient path to experience the larger dignity and profound purpose of being a human being.

In the midst of the assault on Marc and the Center for Integral Wisdom, an attack which is directed at a Marc Gafni that I have not met, I stand with my heart’s eye aimed by these Dharmic truths:

  1. We are all imperfect vessels for the Light.
  2. Faith is living with fidelity to those moments when we authentically realize the true nature of our selves and the universe.
  3. Love is always the right and necessary response to both the pain and beauty of life.

So I stand with all people who are doing their conscious best to increase the potency and the presence of what is good and true and beautiful. I know that the Center for Integral Wisdom is full of people asking, with rigor and humility, the question that promotes a vibrant, just, integrated and free future for all of us: How do I—how do we—increase the amount of love in the moment, the room, the relationship; in the community, the conflicted space, the world? And as the answers are revealed, moment to moment, we act.

– Jeff Hilliard