Parallax media hosts this discussion between Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Marc Gafni, moderated by Zak Stein, on the Sacred Power of Story.
Zak Stein moderates an intense and wide-ranging conversation between Dr. Iain McGilchrist. and Dr. Marc Gafni and the dialogue spans the sacred nature of story, the loss of value and eros, the nature of evil, and the deep structures shaping culture today.
Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, literary scholar, and one of the most important philosophical voices of our time. He is best known for The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, where he argues that the left and right hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, with massive consequences for civilization. His work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, art, and depth psychology, offering a vision of human consciousness grounded in attention, embodiment, and reverence.
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary philosopher, spiritual teacher, and social theorist. A former Orthodox rabbi with a doctorate from Oxford University, he is the co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion and a leading voice in the articulation of “cosmo-erotic humanism.” His books include Your Unique Self, A Return to Eros, and Radical Kabbalah. Gafni’s work fuses Jewish mysticism, integral theory, and Western philosophy to explore the nature of self, eros, and value at the evolutionary edge of human identity and spirituality.
Zak Stein is a Harvard-trained education and transformation philosopher known for his work on developmental ethics, meta-crisis, and the future of human learning.
Story is the source code of culture and consciousness and of all Reality-all the way up and down the evolutionary chain. Story is the attempt to gather information about the nature of Reality and translate it into narrative frameworks bounded by Value.
Stories that organize culture are “Stories of Value, backed by the Universe”.
Postmodernity argues that Reality is just a story, and that all stories are created equal (equally meaningless of inherent value) because value itself is not real. And therefore, all stories of value are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.
The postmodernists are wrong.
Story is real. And not all stories are equal. There are better and worse stories. A better story is an eternal and evolving story of Value. Evolving Value backed by the Universe.
A worse story-one with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines of distorted value, like the story we’ve lived in the West for the better part of the last century-can, and will, bring us to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it.
Value is both real, backed by the Universe, and like everything in the Universe, value evolves. The evolution of value itself is the evolution of love, as Eros and evolution themselves, are inherent plotlines of value in the great story of Cosmos.
The goal of The Evolution of Love, and its companion volume Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, is to provide a first articulation of a new, better story of Value in the domain of relationship. At the core of this New Story of Value are a new Universe Story and a new narrative of identity, which we have called CosmoErotic Humanism and Homo amor.
If we fail to articulate this New Story of Value, the results will be excruciating for billions of human beings and for the entire life system–as for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.
All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.
All of the present depends on us to live.
All of the future depends on us to be born.