Value is Real: Reclaiming the Field of Value in a Time Between Stories: Responding to the Call of the Future through the Evolution of Love

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 29

Value is Real: Reclaiming the Field of Value in a Time Between Stories: Responding to the Call of the Future through the Evolution of Love | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 29 | Dr. Marc Gafni

This book is a call to reclaim value as real—because the future of the world depends on it. We live in a time between worlds and a time between stories, as the very existence of humanity is threatened by a meta-crisis. The meta-crisis is a series of interlocking social, political, educational, climate and technological crises, that we can all see and feel in our lives.

So what do we do? First, we need clear sensemaking—we need to understand where this meta-crisis is coming from? In this series of oral essays, we diagnose the root cause: a global intimacy disorder resulting from our personal and collective alienation from the Field of Value.

Shared value is the ground of intimacy. Therefore, our dissociation from the Field of Value is direct cause for the meta crisis whose root is self-evidently a global intimacy disorder.

As such, we have lost touch with each other and with Reality itself; we are no longer intimate with ourselves, with each other or with the Cosmos; we are alienated from the Field of Value, which is all of Reality itself. This is what we term the global intimacy disorder.

Our only response to this critical moment is to listen for the call of the future. The new Story of Value is a memory of the future. We must weave together the leading edge validated insights from all of the premodern, modern, and postmodern streams of wisdom into a new story. In this new story, value is both eternal and evolving, for indeed opposites are joined at the hip in myriad ways at the very heart of Cosmos. We must tell a new Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values, and in doing so we create the very future which calls us forth.

Published by World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers. 

Book details:

Title: Value is Real: Reclaiming the Field of Value in a Time Between Stories: Responding to the Call of the Future through the Evolution of Love
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 29
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340677
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    RESPONDING TO THE META-CRISIS: RELOCATING HUMANITY IN THE FIELD OF VALUE

  • The Renaissance: The Beginning of a New Human and Humanity
  • Modernity Unmoors Value From the Infinite
  • The Tao That Can Be Commodified Is Not the Tao
  • We Are Lost in This Race for Self-Commodification
  • Machine Intelligence Arrayed Against Free Will and Personhood
  • We Cannot Solve the Meta-Crisis Through Social Structure or Infrastructure
  • The Only Voice of the Future Is Us
  • Evolutionary Impulse Is Alive in Us, As Us, and Through Us
  • Are We Out of Our Minds?
  • The Three Great Questions of CosmoErotic Humanism
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Three Great Questions
  • Finitude Partnering With Infinity

CHAPTER 2    IS VALUE REAL? THE ORACLE OF OPENAI, AVATAR AND THE FIELD OF VALUE: A MEMORY OF TWO FUTURES

  • Our Uniqueness Connects Us to the Whole
  • Open Your Hearts
  • Remembering David Ray Griffin
  • Reality Speaks in Stories
  • The Oracle of OpenAI
  • Asking AI: Is Value Real?
  • We Participate in an Objective Field of Value
  • But AI Is Telling Us That a Shared Story of Value Is Impossible
  • Ask AI: Is Love Real?
  • Avatar 1: Pandora Is Pandora’s Box and the Garden of Eden
  • The Feeling Tone of Reality
  • AI Needs the Field of First Principles and First Values

CHAPTER 3    FROM VALUES TO VALUE AND A STORY OF VALUE: FROM MY PRECIOUS AS ANTI-VALUE TO THE STORY OF VALUE IN THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

  • What Is Value?
  • We Don’t Need Shared Values, but a Shared Story of Value
  • The Fellowship of the Ring Is the Restoration of Value
  • Story Is the Very Structure of Reality Itself
  • The Ring Is the Modern Success Story
  • We Are All Royalty

CHAPTER 4    THE DEGRADATION OF DESIRE—DISCERNING ISRAEL & HAMAS CONFLICT: EVOLVING THE BATTLE OF GOOD & EVIL TO A HIGHER LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  • How Do You Begin a Conversation?
  • Eros and Ethics Are the Same Thing
  • In the Field of ErosValue
  • Every Religion Must Evolve
  • This Is Not a Story of Moral Equivalence
  • The Deconstruction of Value Arouses Hamas
  • At the Core of the Hamas Narrative Is a Degradation of Desire
  • We Need to Articulate a New Ground of Desire
  • Shocks of Existence Press Us Into Gnosis and New Emergence
  • A New Culture of Eros: The Democratization of Hieros Gamos
  • The Battle Between Good and Evil Exists in Every Human Being
  • Pseudo-Eros Exponentialized Becomes the Ring of Sauron
  • Greater Is the Light That Comes From the Darkness

CHAPTER 5    WHAT WOULD HOMO AMOR DO IN RESPONSE TO HAMAS? MORAL COMPLEXITY IS A SIGN OF HOMO AMOR, MORAL EQUIVALENCE IS THE FAILURE OF HOMO AMOR

  • Certainties Amidst Uncertainty
  • We Need to Distinguish Between Waking Up and Growing Up
  • There Is No One Outside the Circle
  • To Do Sensemaking Is to Follow a Storyline
  • Islam Needs to Participate in the Evolution of Love
  • There Is No International Body to Step In
  • The Voice of Abraham: Will the Judge of the Whole World Not Do Justice?
  • There Is No Place for Moral Equivalence: Two Thought Experiments
  • We Have to Scream Truth, and We Have to Whisper Truth
  • There Is No Moral Equivalence
  • Hamas Is a Degraded Ethnocentric Horror
  • There Are Two Competing Claims on the Same Land
  • Let’s Split the Land: First Attempts at a Two-State Solution
  • Land for Peace: Five Rejected Possibilities of a Palestinian State
  • The Horror and the Impossibility
  • There Is Only One People, and One Breath, and One Humanity

CHAPTER 6    HAMAS IS NOT THE PALESTINIANS—HAMAS IS A JIHADI CULTURE OF DEATH: HOMO AMOR STANDS ON THE SIDE OF LIFE

  • How We Have a Conversation Is Everything
  • Moral Complexity Is the Sign of Homo Amor
  • Everyone Is in the Circle—There Are No Orcs in the Story
  • The Need of Love Sometimes Requires the Use of Force
  • We Have to Take Responsibility for the Present and for the Future
  • Morality Is Not Based on Body Count
  • It’s Not About Terrorism—It’s About Jihad
  • We Have to Stand for Life
  • You Have to Take the Jihadist Seriously
  • Where Are You Going to Take Your Children to Live?
  • We Can’t Just Stand Against—We Have to Stand For

CHAPTER 7    TOWARDS THE POST-TRAGIC HERO, PART ONE

  • I Cannot Be Welcome in the Universe Unless I Am a Hero
  • Democratization of the Hero
  • The Glimmerings of the Hero
  • Baraye—For the Sake of the Whole
  • When I Am Aroused, I Am the Hero: Reality Is Making Love
  • You Know and I Know That You Are a Hero

CHAPTER 8    CLARIFIED FIRST VALUES AND FIRST PRINCIPLES GENERATE RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Clarified First Principles and First Values Generate Rights and Responsibilities
  • Clarified Desire Is Precisely the Same as Need
  • The Name of God Is Desire Reaching for the Future
  • Clarified Desire and Need Are Completely Isomorphic
  • My Clarified Need Is Always for Value
  • We Need to Ground Rights in First Principles and First Values
  • Bilateral Rights to Desire—and Their Responsibilities
  • Formulating Rights and Grounding Them in a Field of Value
  • Desire and Need Activate the Eye of Value
  • Human Interiors Participate in the Interior Face of Cosmos
  • Intimacy, Desire, and Attention: Rights and Responsibilities
  • Rights and Values Are Both Eternal and Evolving, and We Clarify Them by Clarifying Our Own Interiors

CHAPTER 9    FROM VALUES TO RIGHTS

  • The Most Momentous Leap in the Evolution of Human Consciousness: Universal Human Rights
  • If We Cannot Understand Where Rights Come From, We Will Lose Them
  • Rights Come From Clarified Need and Desire
  • Value Creates Rights
  • Every Right Is Also a Responsibility
  • The Field of Value Is Universal
  • Activating the Eye of Value to Articulate First Principles and First Values
  • How Do We Enact Rights?

CHAPTER 10    WHY FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES SHOULD MATTER SO MUCH

  • Evolving the Source Code of Culture and Consciousness
  • Reality Is Eros
  • The Plotline of Evolution Is the Evolution of Love
  • How Do We Participate in the Evolution of Love?
  • Evolutionary Love Code: A New Story of Value

CHAPTER 11    WHY DOES VALUE MATTER? PART 1

  • When You Deconstruct the Field of Value, Suicide Becomes a Legitimate Option
  • Value Is Backed By the Universe

CHAPTER 12    BAD NEIGHBOR OR DOG: WHO DO YOU SAVE? THE COSMOEROTIC PRINCIPLE OF CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY

  • The Past Weaves Into the Present and Creates the Future
  • Holding the Paradox of Continuities and Discontinuities
  • Don’t Translate New Emergents Into Old Ideas
  • Eternal Doesn’t Mean Unchanging
  • Milk and Honey on the Other Side

CHAPTER 13    IS THERE A BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL?

  • Everything Is Not Fine
  • There Is a Battle Between Good and Evil, but They Are Not Equal
  • The Eros of Reality Is Transformation
  • My Transformation Is the Transformation of the Whole
  • My Transformation Is My Unique Role in the Battle of Good and Evil
  • Becoming a New Quality of Intimacy

CHAPTER 14    COSMOS IS HUNGRY FOR VALUE—AND YOU ARE TOO: WHY THAT MATTERS MORE THAN ANYTHING

  • Our Stories Are Too Small
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Value Is Real
  • A Direct Prism Into the Zeitgeist
  • Yuval Harari Is Reflecting a Hidden, Deep Consensus
  • Value Is the Irreducible Rightness That Lives in Cosmos for Its Own Sake
  • Value Is Both Being and Becoming
  • There Are Common Patterns of Value in the Worlds of Matter, Life, and Human Mind
  • Values Create Rights
  • We Have to Ground Cosmos in the Field of Value

CHAPTER 15    STORY AND ANTI-STORY, VALUE AND ANTI-VALUE, PART 1 OF 5: WHY MOVING BEYOND YOUR STORY IS NOT ENOUGH—TO BE FULLY ENLIGHTENED MEANS TO GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT

  • To Be Surprised by That Which I Already Know
  • The Personal Is the Cosmic
  • Value and Anti-Value
  • To Destroy Is to De-Story
  • When a Story Is Violated
  • Cosmos Is a Love Story
  • Dignity of Personal Story
  • Accessing the Story of Non-Story
  • What Emerges Out of Being Is Becoming
  • Enlightenment Is the Most Accurate and Honest Storyline

CHAPTER 16    ANTI-EROS, ANTI-STORY AND ANTI-VALUE THREATEN TO DESTROY US ALL AND CALL ON US TO MAKE THE DAVID MOVE

  • Telling a Revolutionary New Story
  • The Broken Plotlines of Modernity Led Us to Create TechnoFeudalist Technologies Threatening Us Today
  • The Cultural Inclination to “Move Beyond Your Story” Is Flawed
  • The Move Towards Evolutionary Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony
  • Pseudo-Eros Covers Up; Anti-Eros Destroys
  • Pseudo-Value Imitates Value; Anti-Value Destroys Value
  • Unique Self Story, Pseudo-Story, and Anti-Story
  • What Makes the Pornographic Problematic Is That There Is No Story
  • Anti-Story Breaks Down the Human Spirit
  • We Need to Take a Stand and Be David

CHAPTER 17    VALUE AND ANTI VALUE, STORY AND ANTI STORY, PART 3 OF 5: SIX ELEMENTS OF STORY FROM SUBATOMIC PARTICLES TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS

  • The Garments of Value Have Been Torn Apart
  • Reality Is Both Being and Becoming
  • Anti-Value Is Part of the Value Story
  • Reality Is a Love Story
  • Universal Elements of Story
  • Threaded Causal Action and the Dignity of Finitude
  • The Dignity of Desire
  • Telos: The Desire Is a Desire for Value
  • Universal Elements of Story in The Lord of the Rings
  • The Great Story of Reality

CHAPTER 18    VALUE AND ANTI-VALUE, STORY AND ANTI-STORY, PART 4 OF 5: A BUDDHIST TEACHER ON HARARI—BUDDHISM WITHOUT ETHICS CREATES MONSTERS

  • The Limits of Language: Why Words Fall Short (Marc)
  • From the Tragic to the Post-Tragic: Evolution, Crisis, and the Leap Forward (Marc)
  • A New Conversation Emerges: Soryu and the Response to The Meta-Crisis
  • The Essential Need for a New Story of Value
  • Buddhism, the Meta-Crisis, and the Responsibility to Engage (Soryu)
  • The Buddha’s Engagement With Worldly Issues (Soryu)
  • Right View and the Distortion of Buddhism in the West (Soryu)
  • The Buddha’s Rejection of Fatalism and Illusionism (Soryu)
  • The Reality of Love and Spiritual Transmission (Soryu)
  • The Shift in Buddhism and the Impact of Colonialism (Soryu)
  • The Trauma of Colonialism and Buddhism’s Adaptation (Soryu)
  • Buddhism’s Role in the Formation of Modern Psychology (Soryu)
  • The Evolution of Zen and the One-Week Retreat (Soryu)
  • S.N. Goenka and the Modernization of Meditation (Soryu)
  • The Success—And the Danger—Of Modern Meditation (Soryu)
  • The Loss of True Practice (Soryu)
  • The True Meaning of Wisdom (Soryu)
  • The Risk of Compromise in Spiritual Traditions (Soryu)
  • The Sacred and the Path to True Realization (Soryu)
  • The Different Paths of Buddhism (Soryu)
  • The Radical Vision of Navayana Buddhism and a Heroic Path Forward (Soryu)
  • Wielding Manjushri’s Sword and Correcting the Field (Marc)
  • The Sacred Is Not a Borrowed Concept (Marc)
  • The Postmodern Rejection of the Hero (Marc)

CHAPTER 19    THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION: THE URGENT NEED OF OUR TIME

  • Symphonic Musical Unique Self Symphony
  • Let’s Re-Articulate the Story That We’re Living In
  • We Are Not Accidental Tourists
  • There Is Ultimate Significance
  • Practice Blooms Reality
  • Attention Allows Me to Practice
  • The Four Meanings for the Word Torah
  • Religion at Its Best Is Wildly Important
  • We Are Divine Artists, and We Are Practicing Our Divinity
  • Value Is Both Eternal and Evolving
  • We Need to Evolve Religion, Just Like We Evolve Science
  • Meditation Discloses the Field of Value
  • We Need to Evolve Religion and We Need to Evolve Science
  • Don’t “Believe” in God; Know God
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About the Author:

Dr. Marc GafniDr. Marc Gafni is a leading public intellectual and teacher impacting the source code of global culture.

Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings”, including Unique Self theory and the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy.

He is author of twenty five books, of which the first ten have been published, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment.

He holds his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.

He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy in the West, helping to evolve a new ‘dharma’ or meta-theory of Integral meaning that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in global consciousness and culture, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values’, Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value”.

This is the ground of a new shared universe story and a new narrative of identity for the new human and the new humanity. This is what they are calling the emergence from Homo sapiens to Homo Amor.

This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.

Gafni is considered by many to be a kind of Einstein of Philosophy who is leading a team of thinkers articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder together with Ken Wilber and Sally Kempton of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion where he serves as its co-president. Together with Dr. Zak Stein, they are co-leading a team of thinkers, articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

In 2014 Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Outrageous Love.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed evolutionary and activist programs rooted in his commitment to what he has termed “participating in the evolution of love.” Together with author and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, he is working on a series of new works revolving around Evolutionary Spirituality.

Read more… 

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