A NEW NARRATIVE OF IDENTITY
Since 2012 the Unique Self Theory has been evolved by Gafni and colleagues as the most accurate narrative of contemporary identity which integrates the best of premodern modern and postmodern thought. Somewhere around 2016 Unique Self theory was planted squarely at the center of an emergent World Spirituality world view [much like existentialism or romanticism was a worldview] articulated by Marc Gafni, Zak Stein, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and colleagues, which they refer to as “Cosmo Erotic Humanism. At the center of Cosmo Erotic Humanism is a view of the new human and the new humanity, termed by Gafni, Stein, Hubbard, and colleagues as Homo Amor, the fulfillment of Homo Sapiens. Unique Self theory in its latest iteration is the crucial linchpin at the heart of Homo Amor.
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2014 — The Center for World Spirituality changes its name to the Center for Integral Wisdom. The name change was discussed in some depth with Dave Logan, Roger Walsh, and Ken Wilber. Ken was particularly supportive of the name change, feeling it was important to locate the Unique Self teaching and Radical Kabbalah within the context of Integral Wisdom.
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2014 — The Center for Integral Wisdom together with its co-chair John P Mackey of Whole Foods launched the success 3.0 summit. The success 3.0 summit articulates a model co-developed by Dr. Gafni and John Mackey of three stages of success, in which the third stage of success emerges directly out of the Unique Self theory, and particularly locate success as a person playing their unique instrument in the larger, Unique Self symphony. This summit also published a new edition of the Unique Self book, by Marc Gafni and Kate Maloney, which is a condensed and updated version of the basic Unique Self material.
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2014 — Dr. Gafni and D.r Kristina Kincaid initiated the Outrageous Love project and the Eros Project. This collaboration was critical in evolving the Unique Self teachings into the Homo Amor teachings. The first bridge from Unique to Eros was in the Unique Self and Eros chapter in the 2012 Unique Self book. The second bridge was the rooting of the Unique Self teaching in the collaboration between Dr. Gafni and Dr. Kincaid in the outrageous love teaching.
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A first draft [unpublished] of the outrageous love book was prepared by Gafni and Kincaid in 2014. A short version of the book [ unpublished] was also prepared at that time. Unique Self is a central theme in those drafts.
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Gafni and Kincaid will later birth – in 2019 – the phenomenology of Eros project and Outrageous love project in a later iteration, in partnership between themselves and Stephanie and Ivan, two leading European entrepreneurs, with whom Dr. Gafni, Dr. Stein, and the CIW team are also launching the Office for the Future.
- 2014 — Barbara Alexander and Claire Molinard run a first pilot training course, for their 9-month Unique Self Coaching intensive with 9 handpicked participants. Barbara and Claire ran several cohorts in the US and in Europe and trained a few dozen Unique Self coaches between 2014 and 2018 when they concluded their collaboration. The training courses met with wonderful response and success in their transformational goals.
- A key Unique Self text that remains to be written by Claire and Dr. Gafni is the Unique Self coaching workbook for the nine months Unique Self Emergence coaching process.
- 2015 — Dr. Gafni turns to Tom Goddard, Adael Helen Bullock, Jeff Hilliard, and Shelly Reichenbach, all members of the Wisdom School that Dr. Gafni founded at Shalom mountain, and members of the Center for Integral Wisdom board, and asked them to work with him in developing a Unique Self retreat as part of the Shalom mountain curriculum. To develop that retreat, four meetings were held, and a beautiful Unique Self retreat was co-created. That retreat was delivered multiple times and remains part of the Shalom Mountain curriculum.
- That Unique Self retreat was then written up by Tom Goddard in a forthcoming 20,000 words book, entitled the Unique Self Shalom Mountain retreat, by Tom Goddard and Dr. Marc Gafni.
- 2015— Dr. Gafni and leading-edge therapist Lori Galperin more formally initiate the Unique Self recovery book, which merges clinical practices conducted by Lori Galperin and Dr. Mark Schwartz, together with the Unique Self model. The project is a new clinical modality, which has been tested at Ms. Galperin’s clinic for many years
- 2015 — During the third Summer Festival of Love (*) retreat, Dr. Gafni taught an intensive which expanded two key dimensions of the Unique Self theory. The first was a deep dive into the future of relationships, and particularly the evolution from role mate, to soul mate, to whole mate relationships. Whole mate relationship in particular is based on mutual recognition of each other’s Unique Self and the formation of a unique We in a Unique Self Symphony, made up of both partners in the relationship, in service of a larger whole. In the forthcoming book titled “The future of relationships from role mates to soul mates, to whole mates” by Dr. Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard, the core teachings of Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self are significantly reformulated and updated. Particularly the new formulation of Unique Self emerged in this writing. A second name used to describe whole mate relationships was evolutionary relationships. Marc concluded this book with Barbara Marx Hubbard, in 2015 but because of other writing projects and life challenges, the publication of the book was delayed. The goal is to publish this book by the end of 2021.
(*) The Summer festival of love was founded in 2012 by Dr. Gafni and Chahat Corten, later joined by Claire Molinard (in 2015). It is an annual dharma intensive, in which key dimensions of the emerging dharma are articulated in a seven-day practice retreat setting.
- The second dimension of Unique Self theory articulated at this intensive was Unique Gender, which focused on a new conversation around gender, which stated that the progressive gender conversation was asking all the right questions but giving very few of the best answers. And we discussed the movement from classical gender to unique gender. Gafni understood unique gender, as being the unique combination of line qualities and circle qualities, that exist in every unique person. At that seminar, we articulated 10 core qualities of line energy and 10 core qualities of circle energy. We particularly used the terms line and circle energy to indicate core qualities of cosmos that are prior and not dependent on man/woman, or even on the classical frames of masculine and feminine. At this event, Dr. Gafni presented a metric tool for understanding one’s Unique Gender.
- In 2015 James Bampfield a Belgian facilitator and one of the founders of the Europe-based Organizations of the Future, adopted the Unique Gender, lines circle framework and the unique gender metrics tool [ under the title yin and yang] and applied it to organizations and leadership as the theme for the annual organizations for the future conference.
- Dr. Gafni began a book which he titled “Beyond Venus and Mars” in collaboration with John Gray and Warren Farrell. All three were excited to publish the book. In the end, life challenges intervened and the book was published by John under the same title with a chapter entitled Unique Self. Here John introduced in his style the very early iteration of some of these ideas.
- A first book based on an integration of these teachings is being prepared by Claire Molinard in the Summer of 2021 together with Dr. Gafni and they are scheduled to publish it together, in the fall of 2021. The early title of the book is Unique Gender; subtitle: Beyond He and She; reading line: Lines and Circles All the Way Up and Down.
- A more completely researched tome by this title – Beyond He and She; reading line: Lines and Circles All the Way Up and Down is slated by Dr. Gafni and Claire Molinard in the future. This volume will be published by Gafni, Molinard, Kincaid, and Anwar as a volume in the Complete Phenomenology of Eros. John Gray is slated to write the introduction for this book.
- The third articulation of this retreat was a deeper and more expanded understanding of Unique Self symphonies (**). A short adoption of those talks on Unique Self symphony is being prepared in book form by Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and Claire Molinard.
(**) The notion of Unique Self symphony was first articulated by Dr. Gafni in week ten of the original Unique Self course in 2013. The idea was gradually elaborated over the next decade. It formed a major topic in virtually every teaching for several years. It was included in writing in the Outrageous Love Book by Dr. Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid – [ whose first draft was completed in 2015 and is slated for publication in 2022. It was also a major topic in the Politics of Evolutionary Love, On Unique Self and Unique Self Symphonies, by Dr. Gafni and Dr. Zachary Stein. This book was completed in 2015 but was also not published by Stein and Gafni at the time as they were still thinking through some of its core tenets and are slated for publication in late 2021. Gafni also placed the Unique Self Symphony vision at the center of his shared teaching with Barbara Marx Hubbard between 2014 and 2019.
- End of 2015— Dr. Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard completed a major book whose original title was Evolutionary Relationships. The book was completed in two versions, a short and long version. The book remained unpublished at the time and is now slated for publication in 2022. In 2017 another writer Patricia Albere published a book called Evolutionary Relationships and to distinguish the works, Marc and Barbara renamed this book The Future of Relationships, From Role Mate to Soul Mate to Whole Mate. Three major sections define Whole Mate or Evolutionary Relationships in this book. One section rearticulates and evolves the Unique Self teaching, a second section does the same for the Evolutionary Unique Self teaching and the third section integrates Unique Self and evolutionary Unique Self with the outrageous love teaching.
- 2015— Professor Elliot Ingersoll, serves as a scholar at the CIW, co-authors with Dr. Marc a book integrating Unique Self, Outrageous Love and Psychotherapeutic practice, entitled Healing the Unique Trauma of Your Life by Awakening to the Unique Quality and Invitation of Your Outrageous Love – The Eleven Steps. The book is forthcoming.
- Unique Shadow: Elliot Ingersoll, also does two key dialogues with Dr. Gafni on Unique Self theory of shadow and Ingersoll asserts that from a psychological perspective, which is his field of expertise, the notion of shadow expressed in Unique Self theory is, in his mind, the best understanding of shadow that we have.
- Dr. Gafni and Claire Molinard – [ possibly in conjunction with a third author], will publish a separate book entitled Unique Self and Unique shadow. The core unique shadow material presently lives in a hundred-page section of the Unique Self book, in the fifty cd of the soul prints course by Dr. Gafni, in part two of radical kabbalah volume one and many oral teachings especially at the summer festival of 2019, day six on shadow.
- 2016— Barbara Marx Hubbard becomes the co-chair of the Center for Integral Wisdom. She and Dr. Marc articulated the vision of “a planetary awakening and evolutionary love through Unique Self symphonies”.
- One Mountain Many Paths: 2016 In October 2016 Dr. Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard founded the online evolutionary church later to be renamed One Mountain Many Paths. Unique Self Symphony became the animating vision of the One mountain, many paths community, an online community, and a weekly broadcast that Dr. Marc and Barbara Marx Hubbard co-founded. The core vision of the One Mountain became “A Planetary Awakening in Love, through Unique Self Symphonies”.
- 2016— A Return to Eros was published with a major section on Uniqueness as one of the twelve faces of Eros. The focus of the chapter on Uniqueness – face five of the twelve faces of Eros, is Unique Self fully integrated into the Eros teaching as it was formulated in A Return to Eros. The first formulation of Unique Gender appears in writing in this same book.
Your Unique Self and your Unique Shadow are a double helix of light and dark coiled into the patterns of becoming.
TIMELINE NAVIGATION
“Not only do you have a fingerprint, but you also have a soul print.” In the soul prints book, Gafni explicitly coined the term Unique Self and talks about Soul Print not as a typology of ego, but as an expression of clarified [ enlightened ] essence.
Numerous dialog partners have contributed to the unfolding of the Integral phase of Unique Self of which Ken Wilber, Sally Kempton and Diane Hamilton were the primary. In 2011 Ken Wilber called Gafni’s Unique Self a “new chapter in Integral theory”.