The official biography on the Marc Gafni website describes him as “a cutting edge spiritual teacher, author, television personality, mediator, corporate consultant, iconoclast, and gentle provocateur.” His most recent book, Your Unique Self (forthcoming), has been described by Ken Wilber as “Seminal … a radically exciting and groundbreaking book that will change forever not only how you think about enlightenment, but how you understand, from a post-metaphysical perspective, the very nature of human life itself.”
Context of the Marc Gafni controversy
In September 2011, Marc’s reputation took a blow when Tami Simon, president of Sounds True, gave a statement to Bill Harryman’s Integral Options Café blog which alleged that Marc had engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior with two women, was dishonest, and that he violated a promise to her which led her to lose her support as a spiritual teacher in the world. (The two women mentioned by Simon made no public allegations; one subsequently issued a statement portraying her relationship with Marc in a very favorable light.)
After Tami’s statement, this blog published Marc’s denial of having any recollection of making the promise Tami alleged that he broke. Moreover, the blog published evidence which I believe to cast doubt on some of her claims. Tami Simon declined an interview with me and, so far as I know, has not made any additional public statements on the matter. Therefore, lacking any evidence to the contrary, I wrote an Open Letter to Tami Simon in which I concluded:
I have learned that your [Tami's] statement selectively revealed damaging details about Marc’s personal life while omitting other details which show a man with a long public record of clear and subtle statements about sexual ethics who has, from what I’ve seen, lived in complete integrity with his public teachings. Furthermore, it appears that you approved a book for publication in which he again reaffirms the moral teachings with which he has lived in integrity.
I am still scratching my head, asking what this controversy is really about. Considering what I’ve learned, it seems the entire scandal really boils down to your statement, “I do not trust Marc Gafni.” In my experience, trust in interpersonal relationships is dependent upon an array of gross, subtle, and causal dimensions and is always a two-way, co-responsible affair (actually it’s a Four Quadrant affair, but I digress). And yet I have seen nothing from you to acknowledge your own responsibility for any aspect of the controversy…
I feel the public is owed a better understanding of the context in which you formed your judgment regarding Marc Gafni’s trustworthiness. I will say frankly that after talking with all the people that I have and reading what I have, I very much doubt a key element of your story, and the conclusion seems indisputable that your words were distorted by unacknowledged shadows that have not yet come into public light.
On Friday, October 7, Ken Wilber made a public statement inviting all to ”Honor all the parties and let them get on with their lives.” He also highlighted the presence of shadow which clouded the public discourse, saying “Shadow elements are very common—and as a proverb has it, ‘One dog barks at a shadow, and a thousand dogs take it for reality.’” What’s more, he said that information that might shed light on the situation would probably never become public.
The Marc Gafni interview
I interviewed Marc Gafni by phone on October 12 in order to get his side of the story and reaction to Tami Simon’s and Ken Wilber’s statements. He declined to discuss most of the details of Simon’s allegations, instead focusing on his willingness to take responsibility for having made some of the mistakes in the controversy’s “contribution system” of personal responsibility.
“I’ll certainly take my part in the contribution system and there’s lots of other things that have happened that would require other people to take their parts in the contribution system,” Marc said. “I don’t expect them to do that publicly in a phone call with you, Joe. But people need to do it internally. If we can’t do that, if we can’t do that, we can’t move. And we can all give up being right and move this to a higher level.”
Marc also addresses his positive vision of the future, saying: “One of the things that’s crystallized for me is that I’ve talked to many leaders in the Integral spiritual world, the evolutionary world … what’s the most important thing that I’d like to share, to gift into the world, is a library of books on what I call the Enlightenment of Fullness,” which he called a “new source code” for world spirituality.
The following blog contains a transcript of virtually the entire phone call. I may have more to say about my views on the controversy in the future. For now, here’s the interview, straight up.
Transcript
Joe Perez:
I appreciate your time this morning as we set up for an interview for readers of my blog. And what I want to say to my readers is just a little about you, a little bit about the context of the call, some of the recent discussions going on in the blogosphere, and then just give you an opportunity to express what you’re feeling, what’s alive for you right now, and where to go from here. How does that sound?
Marc Gafni:
That sounds like a plan, a kind of positive future vision, a positive future present, holding all of the complexity that always exists in the field in all Four Quadrants is delightful. Let’s do it.
Joe:
Terrific. Now what I know about your background — and again I’m still getting to know you, we just really spoke for the first time just a couple of weeks ago — What I know of your biography is that you’re the author of quite a few books including a national bestseller, Soul Prints. You are Spiritual Director for the Center for World Spirituality. And of course you have been a leader in getting the Integral Spiritual Experience program off the ground in coordination with Integral Life. Doctorate from Oxford. Am I missing anything, Marc?
Marc:
That’s all fine. I was privileged to found the Center for World Spirituality together with Mariana Caplan. We founded it together and we have a wonderful group of people who are a kind of advisory board who are fantastic including Sally Kempton, Warren Farrell, Victoria, Shawn, Marcy, Raquel, Tom, Elizabeth, and ten more people. There are good people, there are 10 more I didn’t list. Those are just the names that came to mind. There are very many names on the advisory board that’s kind of in process. There’s been a number of other people involved in the formation of the Center for World Spirituality who have made wonderful contributions. My position in it is really the founder and teacher in residence, not really the spiritual director. I’m trying to be one of the stewards of the process. There are many many stars, a heaven on earth vision of world spirituality. It’s not centered around me, but a host of other people who are each making contributions.
“A virtual community is sometimes virtuous and sometimes not.”
Joe:
Thanks for that clarification. I want to be sure that readers who have just come across your name or started paying attention to your background in the last couple of weeks, I know some of them are concerned about some of the things that have been written about you recently. There are some things that frankly are attacks, anonymous postings, questionable postings on the Internet have been very vicious. I want to give you a chance to tell me a little bit about how you see what’s happened in the last couple of weeks and how it’s affected you.
Marc:
That’s actually a lot of questions, Joe, and each one would take us in a different direction. So let me try to very gently ferret them out a little bit. So within the “community,” I’m not sure what I’m referring to. There are many communities. There are evolutionary communities, integral communities, there are church communities that I have a deep involvement with. There are lots of different communities. One of the things in our kind of post-postmodern world, we’re not going to a building or church or synagogue or a spiritual center where we’re actually gathered together where we see each other face-to-face. So the nature of community itself is at question today. What is a community? Part of what stands in for a community is a virtual community which is sometimes virtuous and sometimes not.
That’s the nature of the blogosphere. The blogosphere has in it very positive dimensions. It offers a kind of democratization of information which is wonderful. We’re not in a place where there are five newspapers owned by the Hearst family that really controlled the flow of information. There’s an enormous plethora of information. It’s a wonderful move towards democratization.
At the same time, the Internet has as has been noticed by a number of very serious writers, Habermas included, has a great great shadow to it. That is, that much of the information is not reliable. Anyone can self-appoint and engage, and usually the people who have time to self-appoint and engage in a sort of vicious vigilantism which confuses fact with interpretation of fact, which misstates things left and right with just impunity.
The number of times I’ve seen written on the Internet, “Marc Gafni doesn’t have a doctorate from Oxford.” That’s just an example of one of thirty things. Of course, I received a doctorate from Oxford; I had a wonderful time doing it. I received it in 2008. It’s actually hanging in the basement of Diane Hamilton’s house. I just happened to speak to her this morning. … I was wondering where the diploma was. It’s verifiable through the Oxford library. And yet that’s just one example. That’s the nature of the Internet. The Internet has this shadow.
To borrow the example of a far more well-known person who has great great accomplishment to his credit: Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is a complex figure. 30 percent of America hated Bill Clinton, it was kind of tragic. There were the most vicious, vicious posts in the blogosphere about Bill Clinton being responsible for murder, killing Vince Foster … in the Rush Limbah blogosphere world … people repeated this with complete authority … “I’m a therapist and I have analyzed Bill Clinton and he is a pathological murdering narcissist, etc.” And this is all very credible in much of the world. We have to be careful about it, really discerning about how we create our community. Any figure that is of a particular nature will arouse a certain amount of hopefully wonderful positivity, wonderful loving, wonderful relationship, wonderful deep open heart … and … some figures, I’m probably in that category, also have a certain percent of people that polarize to them for lots of reasons.
We have a number of leading figures in the Integral/Evolutionary spiritual community who are somewhat polarized. There are a strong group of people for them, and a strong group of people against them. Myself, other people. Blogs written against them. Some people even have books written against them. In other words, that’s just in the nature of things.
What one really has to do is really be discerning. First off, really get the feel. Feel your way into when you read something. How does it feel? Does it feel honest, holy, and sacred? Or does it feel vile, vicious, and attacking … In your subtle body, you can feel it immediately. I’ve gotten so many letters of support from so many people who just felt it in their body. We have to be really careful not to let the more really malevolent parts of the blogosphere to hijack our discourse. That’s just super important.
If I could just say one more thing Joe and then back to you. In my particular regard, there’s really a number of people I’m close to, who I work with who are discerning, wonderfully supporting, intelligent, who have reviewed carefully sets of issues and come to very positive conclusions based on an enormous amount of knowledge and checking. There’s a number of people who are supportive intuitively. These are two big groups of people. And there’s a third group of people who are in the middle — in this blogosphere situation — who are just confused. They are busy. They don’t have time to discern, so they bracket and suspend judgment. There are people who have legitimate critiques which are always important, probably not accounted for in the blogosphere.
There’s also in the blogosphere driven by a group of people I know. I know exactly who they are. You talk about the anonymous postings. Almost all of them come from one or two people and there are a number of people who have gathered to each other over the years in a kind of group-think who are malevolent, that’s the only word I can use. And in all Four Quadrants we have to account for malice. I’m just using Clinton by analogy, not in a self-aggrandizing way. You’ll see the next blog post — “Gafni compares himself to Clinton!” — I’m just using it by way of structural analogy. For whatever reason, a particular figure attracts a kind of projection which is very painful.
So for me, in terms of how I live with it, I live in loving people, I live in holding complexity. I live in a big and large vision of the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of love. There is no figure … Reich wrote a book called The Murder of Christ. (Again, the misinterpretation will be — “Gafni said he was Christ!”) Reich is actually making a metaphorical point about the move to murder life force. It’s painful. From where I’m sitting,
1) Where do I take responsibility? What’s my self-responsibility? Where do I take 100% responsibility for whatever my percent is in the contribution system that’s around? There’s always a contribution system. No one’s ever excluded from the contribution system. I want to take 100% responsibility for my appropriate part in the contribution system for this blogosphere explosion that arose and was motivated in all four quadrants. That’s #1.
2) Support and love each other, create genuine constructive discourse …
3) Not myself internally, not to actually narcissistically focus and be kind of devastated by the price of public service which is the kind of tabloid vileness that exists in the shadow parts of the blogosphere. That’s really been a sort of spiritual practice, to live with that. As you may know Joe, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. People ask me, why don’t you sue one of those people? Of course you can’t do that. Once you’re a public figure there’s really nothing you can do. You have to focus on the positive, you really hold your heart open, and the most important thing is to love open through the pain and focus all of our energy to positive, creative, loving movement. That’s a longer answer than you anticipated so I apologize for that. I really wanted not to evade your question, but take it head on.
“All relationships have complexity, and all relationships have hurt in them.”
Joe:
I think that was an analysis that fits with the impressions that I’ve been forming over the last few weeks, especially the different groups and levels ranging from people … (inaudible) … who have read your original emails from years ago and came to some very positive conclusions and who trust you all the way to the other side where things have been repeated that are simply distorted. In the middle there are people with some legitimate critiques. And I think a lot of people might say Tami Simon would be one of these people. She wrote a statement for a blog called the Integral Options Café. And she describes certain events in the letter: two relationships you had with women, and dishonesty, and concluded that she didn’t trust you and she … was cancelling your book. I know she was a friend of yours, maybe she still is, I’m not sure. I’m wondering if you could discuss the events that she describes in the letters and give my readers and listeners your point of view?
Marc:
I’m actually not going to do that, Joe. I appreciate the invitation on two levels. One is, you’ve written, which I’ve read, a powerful critique of part of Tami’s expression in that blog post which I think was called “Sounds False.” I’m not going to review all that material. It was a long nuanced blog post. It would require a lot of time to review. There were about 10 other important points that weren’t made there.
I would say as follows. Tami Simon is running a company, Sounds True. Much much blessing to it, it’s done much good in the world. I’ve had many deep and profound and wonderful conversations with Tami over the last couple of years. Something happened. At a certain point, I went out and was … engaged with two powerful adult women and that’s all what it is. Both of those relationships were held privately by mutual agreement. One at the particular request of one of the people who has actually published a powerful positive vision of what our relationship was. The second person has taken a private route, and I honor both of those routes.
All relationships have complexity, and all relationships have hurt in them. That’s just the nature of them. When hurt emerges and complexity emerges we should work with it. Essentially what happened in this particular case is when Tami heard about the relationships in a particular way it caused an explosion. Tami was in deep conversation at the time with other people who … are deep in the malice camp, a kind of poisonous hermeneutic which stems from many many many years ago. I think that had a lot of impact on Tami. I’m not going to talk any more about it. I’m going to send Tami a lot of love.
At some point I think we will resume our friendship. I don’t think the place for this kind of conversation is in the blogosphere. Obviously I think Tami made a mistake in giving that particular blog commentary. I would imagine that Tami probably has some internal conversation within herself about whether it was the right thing to do or not the right thing to do. But it happened. But here’s the important thing. It’s to hold complexity and not to demonize. I have no demonization of Tami Simon. I love Tami. I hold all the moments of friendship that we have. And I have actually deep love and honor for all the people who’ve been involved. I’m not going to demonize anyone, I’m not going to throw anyone under the bus. I’m not going to stop loving. I’ve borne enormous pain over the last eight or nine weeks. I’m just not going to let that pain actually close my heart. I’m not going to stop loving the people involved. I’m going to do whatever I can to love open through the pain. I hope that at the right time Tami and I will sit away from the madding crowd the way face-to-face colleagues and friends do we’ll be able to talk to each other, move beyond it, and create transformation.
I think we have an obligation to do that. Because if Tami Simon and Marc Gafni — Marc Gafni is involved in spiritual artistry, and trying to share Dharma, love, and teaching, Unique Self and world spirituality in the world … and Tami Simon who is deeply committed both as a teacher and Sounds True president and founder to bringing spiritual transformational teachings into the world which are about healing which are about each side owning their own part in contribution systems … and doing it differently. If we can’t sit together and bring it to a higher level, then who can, Joe? Then all of the tapes that are being put out, and all the books and all my teaching … it’s a little bit of a sham. We’re telling everyone else to do it. But we run into a difficult patch. And it wasn’t even that difficult. Yes, a book was cancelled. There was a lot of pain on all sides and an explosion on a couple of blogs. But that’s the extent of it. I’ve lost an enormous amount personally, and we’re all still standing. We’re all still standing. And if we can’t at this level, if we are so involved in our own hurt and own pain, if we are so narcissistically attached to our positions that Tami and Marc can’t sit together and bring this to a higher level, then what’s our whole community about? By our community, I mean the Integral, Sounds True, the human potential community, the New Age community… if we can’t up-level our consciousness and evolve it, and all of us own our piece of it and not demonize each other, then what are we teaching? I believe we are teaching something real.
All the people are good people. There are some mistakes that were made. I think I made a couple of them. I think I created a situation that was too complex. I asked people to hold complexity that wasn’t possible. I created more relationship than I was able to sustain in a way that felt good for everyone … In the end, it was hurtful. I’ve learned an enormous amount from this about what’s possible and what’s not possible. When you hold privacy by definition you not always tell the truth because you’re holding a container. If somebody asks you about it, you say no, and that’s not true. That’s what privacy requires. So I’ve had to go in and think a lot about what’s possible and what’s not possible and what’s good for people and what’s not good for people, what’s hurtful and what’s growthful. That’s all real. There’s a lot that I’ve learned that I didn’t deeply understand 8 or 9 weeks ago …
I’ll certainly take my part in the contribution system and there’s lots of other things that have happened that would require other people to take their parts in the contribution system. I don’t expect them to do that publicly in a phone call with you, Joe. But people need to do it internally. If we can’t do that, if we can’t do that, we can’t move. And we can all give up being right and move this to a higher level.
This could be the seed of an enormous growth, the seed of an enormous transformation. I’m not talking particularly about the public realm, but each person’s private life and the inner fabric of the community. Imagine that we are able to move through this. Wow, what a teaching that is to ourselves and to all of us … Wow, this explosion happened and we didn’t get sucked in. We didn’t get drawn in, we didn’t get seduced by the demonizing and more over-the-top dimensions, the negative dimensions of the blogosphere. We found our way to the healthiest places … we stood together with full humility and open hearts, we re-embraced each other and created something deeper, more powerful, more beautiful.
What was Christ talking about, what was Buddha talking about, what was Moses talking about? This. That we actually don’t crucify each other. That it’s time for the resurrection. That it’s time that we all find a way to hold each other in our complexity and to love each other not in a saccharine New Age way. But love as a Unique Self perception. Love as beautiful, holy, and gorgeous. And from that place, that’s what we mean being held by the divine feminine, when someone sees me in my beauty, from that place I can hold everything else and integrate it. That’s what love means. It’s holding that powerful center. There’s a real invitation here. I pray that in the private realm, and ultimately it should spill over at the right time. There’s no rush. There’s nothing we need to rush to do frantically now. So that’s my sense of things.
“The Enlightenment of Fullness is about mapping fullness with the same precision that the mystics mapped the enlightenment of emptiness.”
Joe:
Yeah. And as we said, it’s time to move on. Last Friday, Ken Wilber put out a statement on his Integral Life blog. He said hoped everybody would honor all the parties, from you, to the two women involved, Tami, that’s what I read into it, and just let them get back to their lives. So with that in mind, what are you getting back to? What are your important priorities right now? What’s next for Marc Gafni?
Marc:
Well, there’s really two levels of it. One that’s an important priority for me is just personal relationship. I just want to tend to, and be loving to, all the people I’m in close contact with now that have been support. No one is thrown under a bus. Everyone’s okay. That we really all take care of each other. I feel a deep in my private world to hold everyone in the best way I can, be loving in the best way that I can, and be with an open heart in the best way that I can. Even as I ask people to hold me. That’s what we do. We all have to hold each other. That’s what life is about. There’s a deep private level here. There’s no one in the story who needs to be asked to leave or go home. Everyone gets held. That’s one.
Two. In terms of Center for World Spirituality, in terms of Unique Self, lots of things have crystallized in very very deep ways. One of the things that’s crystallized for me is that I’ve talked to many leaders in the Integral spiritual world, the evolutionary world … what’s most important thing that I’d like to share, to gift into the world, is a library of books on what I call the Enlightenment of Fullness. The Enlightenment of Fullness is core to what I’ve termed World Spirituality.
I’ve been privileged to the Center for World Spirituality as a private think tank. And its precise constellation is not yet clear. It could go in a couple very different directions and we’ll see in the fullness of time. Together with friends and colleagues and supporters. But the core of it is, whatever the vision is, is to put out a library of books that I’d like to really participate in and authoring a good number of them on the Enlightenment. The first is Your Unique Self, and then there’s five or six different books at play in different stages. There’s a book on World Spirituality based on Integral Principles, a book on God. There’s a broader book that’s a bigger vision. There’s a book on the masculine and feminine. A book on Eros. But each of these books is — its intention, its audacious and humble intention — is to be source code changing. They’re books that change the source code of things, books that are rooted deeply in the integral matrix that actually move into and create the next stage in integral evolutionary spirit thinking … which is this thing I’m calling the Enlightenment of Fullness … it’s about mapping it with the same precision that the mystics mapped the enlightenment of emptiness. And to really feel into the fullness that incorporates the emptiness … I mean the Ground of Being, Being itself. We need to move into Becoming, what Whitehead called Becoming … We need to learn how to identify how only with the eternity within us but with the evolutionary imperative that lives in us, and we need to talk about… the different levels of awakening.
I gave a talk last night in a tele-course about the five great Integral awakenings, what the five awakenings are so to unfold new maps … not just mind maps, but heart maps that map the territory of the heart that give us this vision of the Enlightenment of Fullness. So the Center for World Spirituality is the key lode stone which is core to world spirituality. The experience of waking up, growing up, lightening up. The holy trinity of World Spirituality. Wake up to your highest state of consciousness, grow up to your highest possible level of consciousness, and lighten up — meaning take your shadow and integrate it into the light.
Those three cores are the holy trinity of world spirituality. They incorporate everything: Unique Self, classical Enlightenment which is True Self. That’s our holy trinity: wake up, grow up, and lighten up. And by the way I want to credit John Wellwood who first used those terms, wake up and grow up, that we’ve incorporated in different usages. The Enlightenment of Fullness, a body of books and teachings. When I say books I mean books, PDF files, courses, where we really gift this to the source code of consciousness.
That’s a big project. It’s a twenty year project, a thirty year project. No one person can do it. Just like Ken couldn’t do the Integral project himself although he made this stunning, gorgeous, monumental pandit contribution. There’s no way that Gafni can do World Spirituality. We need many many many people. There are many stars in the heaven, we need many unique stars, many voices. And those many voices come together in a kind of collective consciousness that is gorgeous. It’s not that … I’m not going to do everything I’m going to do. I’m going to do everything I can do to offer this great teaching. At the same time, the next … Buddha is both a Buddha and a sangha. Meaning the community doesn’t efface the individual teachers, but it’s got to be a larger collective, a larger vision of us moving forward as a kind of school of thought, a school of consciousness, a wave of consciousness that no individual hijacks or brands. It can’t be branded. It’s not a Gafni brand. It’s not any one brand. It’s a unique meme. Unique Self represents a new meme of consciousness. World Spirituality is a new meme of consciousness that we need to download into the world and let grace hold it and carry it. That’s just a little bit of a vision, Joe. I hope that was helpful.
Joe:
It is, and I really appreciate your time today. I have a feeling we’re going to be coming back to these topics again and again in the months and years to come.
Tami Simon declined a request for an interview for this article.
Related posts on Awake, Alive & Aware
- Ken Wilber on the Marc Gafni controversy: “Honor all the parties and let them get on with their lives.” (10/7/2011)
- Sounds True or Sounds False? An Open Letter to Tami Simon on the Marc Gafni Controversy (10/3/2011)
- UNIQUE LEAK: Ken Wilber to Address Marc Gafni Controversy (9/29/2011)
- Ongoing questions in the Marc Gafni controversy (9/28/2011)
- On the Marc Gafni controversy: Don’t assume you know more than you do! (9/25/2011)
- Exposed! On Bill Harryman’s exposé on Marc Gafni’s personal relationships (9/20/2011)
About Joe Perez
