A Return to Eros Quotes

“THE PLOTLINE OF REALITY What evolution teaches us is that reality is not a fact, but a story. A story has a beginning. It has a plotline. The action has direction”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

“The erotic life is purposeful even as it is powerful and poignant. But Eros is also potent in that it is always potentiating new possibility. As the great philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead reminds us, the constant emergence of novelty is the very nature of Eros. In the fullness of erotic living you are literally a virgin, always touching for the very first time.”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

“When we are together with the intention of restoring wholeness in a world of broken hearts, then we are living the erotic life. Eros is the very aliveness of the cosmos expressed in all of its potency. When that potency awakens in you, your life becomes naturally good, true, and beautiful, and you become appropriately powerful beyond imagination. This is not a surface power that you wield against others, but a depth of power that allures others into the noble grace of your own full potency. When you awaken to the fullness of your own sexual power, you have the ability through your own erotic life to participate in the healing and transformation of all that is.”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

“In the very next verse, however, the shift begins. Individual names blur into anonymous pronouns. The text begins to swell with”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

“When we stay open in love we are pulsing alive in the flow of life. We then have the capacity to love the moment open. When the moment is opened, new life is created. If the moment remains closed, the potential new life is stillborn. It is therefore a simple evolutionary truth that to open or to close is no less than to love or to die. Those are the two evolutionary choices available in every moment. The reason that in every moment you must decide whether to be open or closed is because every moment is new. In every new moment you either love the moment open or you let the moment love you open. To love the moment open is to penetrate the moment. To be loved open by the moment is to let the moment penetrate you. That is what it means to be open and alive. The alternative is to be closed and dead.”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

“In the language of the erotic mystics of the secret temple lineage, the return to Eros transforms reality and liberates the Goddess. Eros is outrageous love, the love that is the essence of all reality. The return to Eros happens when outrageous love becomes alive in our lives. Eros is what we are talking about when we say God is love. God is not ordinary love, a strategy of the ego. When we live in the lap of Eros, we are able to keep our hearts open in all situations. Eros does not bypass the hurt; rather, it fills it with aliveness and love. Eros is not tepid and polite; Eros is dynamic and outrageous. The credo of Eros is simple: we live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. Outrageous love is Eros.”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive

“When we live from the lap of Eros we stop searching for the answer to the question of the meaning of life. The meaning of life becomes self-evident. The split between the ordinary and the extraordinary disappears. It is not that we come up with a great answer. The question simply falls away... An autotelic person means one who is so fully immersed in the current of life that every activity is not merely a means to an end but an end in itself. For such a person, every activity is an expression of the fullness of life rather than a grasping for happiness or achievement.”
― Marc Gafni, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive