Prayer as Protest
The ultimate liberation of loneliness. For both human and God.
Join prayer twice every week, live with Dr. Marc Gafni, inside Who We Must Become, the Mystery School for the New Humanity.
You cannot transcend loneliness without prayer.
It cannot be done.
Not the ordinary loneliness of an empty evening — the deeper one: alienation, drift, the vortexes of depression and petty contraction, the slow loss of your fundamental aliveness and desire for life. This is the disease beneath most of what we call breakdown, and no better relationship, better job, or bigger house resolves it.
Here is why: there are six Unique Self needs that are the foundation for thriving in life.
Without these needs being met, the fabric of reality itself feels meaningless.
Most of us try to get all of these needs met by one person. “You will intend me. You will recognize me. You will choose me, adore me, desire me, need me. And if you stop for a second, I will not survive it.”
No human being can hold that. This is why marriage and friendships break down. Not from a lack of love, but from an impossible job description.
Prayer is the liberation from that. Prayer is the daily lived realization that there is a greater field that loves you.
Step into a profound sense of wonder and connection twice a week with Dr. Marc Gafni.
Prayer is among the most misunderstood ideas in the world.
The misunderstanding is not harmless. Two thirds of the world prays. If we get prayer wrong, we lead the world wrong.
Prayer is not
- A cosmic vending machine. You do not insert a coin and receive a car.
- A diluted law of attraction.
- An emasculated human being entreating a Santa Claus god in the sky.
- A dogma.
- A clever liberal rewriting that removes the offense and leaves nothing behind.
Prayer is
- The realization that reality has a personal face.
- Intimate communion between the intimacy of infinity and the intimacy of finitude.
- The felt sense that every place you fall, you fall into Goddess’s hands.
- An embodied realization.
- The deepest esoteric understanding of what Reality is.
God is not just an impersonal intelligence.
The greatest mystical traditions from all around the world use different words to speak of the field of intelligence that generates Reality. That field is real.
But a field is not enough. Try to marry a field of love. Try to make love with a field of love. Try to bring your loneliness to a field of love. The field in the third person is true, and it is also how we avoid the encounter.
The true core is that life is made of a lover and a beloved. This is the second person of the Divine: not a man in the sky, but the personhood of Cosmos. More personal than personhood.
Not only is God the Infinity of Power that animates all of Cosmos, but God is the Infinity of Intimacy. The Infinite Intimate, who knows your name.
You are intended by reality. You are not a random accident. You were intended before you were born.
You are recognized. Directly, by Reality itself.
You are chosen. Irreducibly and uniquely chosen, which means your story matters infinitely.
You are adored by reality.
You are desired by reality.
You are needed by reality.
This is the purpose of prayer: not to inform God of your preferences, but to return you to your own true nature, which is that you are already held, needed, and intended in life.
This realization changes who you are at your core. It takes devotion, and steady practice, which is why Dr. Marc Gafni offers guided prayer twice a week in our online school Who We Must Become.
Prayer is how we access our deepest potency.
Prayer is not a tepid activity performed by impotent people before an all-powerful God. The opposite is true.
Prayer affirms the dignity of human need. It clarifies what you most deeply desire, and returns you to a state of focus and yearning for a better world.
There are two great conversations in Reality, prayer and prophecy:
Prophecy
God initiates.
Prayer
We initiate.
Prayer and prophecy are how we stay in the conversation with reality. Which is why real prayer includes protest.
In genuine intimacy there is always protest. Abraham protests. Moses protests. When we rage at the brokenness of the world, the rage is holy, and the voice of protest is the voice of the Divine speaking through us.
Prayer offers no escape from the world's brokenness. It demands its transformation. We pray with our feet. We pray with our bodies. We pray with our activism.
We say to the Infinite Intimate: I am willing to be your partner in making this world what it desperately yearns to be. And even as we say it, we are always already surrendered.
Potency and surrender dance together. Neither is left behind. This is why we call it Evolutionary Prayer. In prayer we participate in the Field of Value, and we live in the Field even as the Field lives in us.
If we cannot enter the field of prayer, we have no chance of healing the source code.
Join Dr. Marc Gafni twice a week for prayer and reclaim your potency.
Dr. Marc Gafni
Head Teacher, Who We Must Become
Marc is one of the lead voices articulating CosmoErotic Humanism, the New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values, written in response to existential risk and the metacrisis of our moment. He is the author of Reclaiming Prayer: The Eros of Intimate Communion with the Divine.
Prayer has been the ground of his life for decades. He is a lineage holder in the Solomon Lineage, trained where prayer is seen as a technology, and he carries that lineage forward undiluted.
What happens in these sessions has no equivalent. Marc weaves the liturgical and the improvisation: chant carrying centuries of transmission, held together with live intentions on prayer that open the gates of realization as we go. There is nothing like these intentions anywhere. It is a whole revisioning of prayer, drawn from the deepest current of what it means to pray.
Direct, twice weekly access to a thinker of his stature is virtually unheard of. It is the heart of what makes this school what it is.
Prayer alone is not enough, just as philosophy alone is not enough.
To get prayer right you have to have an accurate world philosophy that it is grounded in. That is what this school does. When you join Who We Must Become, you receive:
Evolutionary Prayer with Dr. Marc Gafni
Twice a week, live. Deepen your relationship to the Infinite Intimate.
Whole Body Gospel with Dr. Kristina Kincaid
Ongoing embodiment, energy, and group processing. The transfiguration from Homo Armor to Homo Amor.
Live Teachings at the Cutting Edge of the New Story of Value
Unique Self Theory and CosmoErotic Humanism with Marc, as the Dharma unfolds.
Sacred Text Study Circle
The foundational texts, read with students from around the world.
Outrageous Acts of Love Challenge
Monthly. The Dharma made tangible in how you live your day.
The Mystery School Vault
10+ self-study courses and hundreds of hours of video with Dr. Marc Gafni and other leading thinkers of CosmoErotic Humanism.
$100
per month
No contract. Cancel any time.
100% of your membership goes towards the production and marketing of the New Story of Value, helping us write the Great Library and reach millions around the globe. You receive profound transformation. The world receives the work that makes a livable future possible.
We pray in the broken places.
We pray when there is no crowd. We pray when there is no one around. We pray when it feels like there is no one left to hold us. And the whole realization of prayer is that every place you fall, you fall into Her hands.
You are intended. You are recognized. You are chosen. You are adored. You are desired. You are needed.
Twice a week, we are here.