Book Review “First Principles & First Values” by David Nicol

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David Nicol is an Australian native now living in North California. His book, Subtle Activism: The Inner Dimension of Social and Planetary Transformation (SUNY Press) was the first comprehensive study of the idea that focused collective intention can powerfully and measurably contribute to social change.

David writes a blog on Substack called Geistic Musings, offering his “reflections on the intersection of consciousness and culture.”

Book Review “First Principles & First Values”

A New Story of Value for Our Times

Today I want to share about (what I think is) a vitally important new book that offers profound context for why we need these novel forms of knowing to start to move into the center of culture as a matter of urgency in this time between worlds.

The book is First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on Cosmoerotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, by David J. Temple. David J. Temple is a pseudonym that represents a consortium of writers associated with the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein being the primary authors.

Because of the significance of the book’s thesis, I go into some detail below to convey the essential argument. I hope you will stay with me, because there is something deeply hopeful about these ideas for our future.

First Principles is an attempt to articulate the foundations of a new worldview that can guide humanity through the global metacrisis. We have become deeply conditioned by postmodernity to be cynical of intellectual efforts to create frameworks of universal value, but this is indeed at the heart of the authors’ thesis. Post-modernity’s deconstruction of old stories of value has overreached, resulting not only in a pervasive global mood of nihilism but also an inability to coordinate in any meaningful way at a time when the stakes could not be higher.

Into this void, First Principles offers a ‘New Story of Value’ that provides a context for integrating the best of premodern, modern, and postmodern thought. It does so by explicitly articulating a universal set of values that underlies reality all the way up and down the evolutionary chain, and is validated by both science and the wisdom traditions. Below I provide a specific example. (more…)

Book Review “First Principles & First Values” by David Nicol2024-08-31T11:13:59-07:00

On the Erotic and the Ethical

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The Temple of the ancient Israelites is the original Hebrew expression of pagan consciousness. Now—as we will see later in this essay—the difference between Temple and pagan consciousness is very crucial. But it is a difference that is only important because of their profound similarity. Both the Temple and the pagan cults shared an intoxication with the feminine Goddess, symbol of sacred eros.

The relationship with the Goddess was not a hobby for the Israelites like modern religious affiliation often tends to be. It was an all-consuming desire to be on the inside, to feel the infinite fullness of reality in every moment and in every encounter—it was an attempt to fully experience eros. Because the ancients were so aware of the depth of reality, to live without being able to access the infinite in this erotic way was enormously painful. (For an example, read the story of the idolatrous King Menashe, as retold in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 92A.)

The prophets of the Temple period opposed paganism with all of their ethical fire and passion. For them, it was inconceivable that the ecstatic and primal Temple experience, religiously powerful and important as it might be, should become primary. When eros overrode ethos, the prophet exploded in divine rage. In moments of clash, the prophet taught that the ethical always needed to trump the erotic.

Modern Judaism has developed from the ethical teachings of the prophets. In the process, however, we have overlooked the erotic, present in the pagan consciousness of the Temple service. We have forgotten the Goddess, a vital presence in the life of ancient Israel. Hebrew liturgy reflects the virtually inconsolable longing of the Hebrew spirit for the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. This longing is not a dream of proprietorship over this or that hill in Jerusalem. Indeed, ownership and holiness are mutually exclusive. Instead, it is a yearning to reclaim sacred eros as part of the fabric of our lives. And, in the way of the circle, our longing for eros is also a longing for ethos. All ethical breakdown emerges from a dearth of eros. When we are overwhelmed by an erotic vacuum, ethics collapse. (more…)

On the Erotic and the Ethical2024-10-02T03:05:47-07:00

Eros Is Ethics

Excerpt from The Mystery of Love by Dr. Marc Gafni

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Echoes of Emptiness—The Erotic and the Ethical

The arena where emptiness—nonerotic living—is most destructive is in the ethical. Every ethical failure comes from the absence of eros. It is their inability to stay in the experience of emptiness that moves people to violate their ethics. All crimes are in some sense crimes of passion. But this is actually a misnomer. What we mean is that all crimes are rooted in the fear of passion’s loss! We cannot imagine what life would be like without the eros that we stand to lose.

Joel finds out that his wife is having an affair. The betrayal opens up the void within. Afraid that if he confronts her she will leave, he slowly becomes a workaholic to dull the pain. Work for Joel has become pseudo eros.

Or take Susan, who was verbally and physically abused by her mother. Never able to claim the dignity of her anger, she became gradually disempowered as a person. As an adult, she is constantly furious at her children, often lashing out brutally at them. She seeks to assure herself that she is still alive and powerful. For Susan, her displaced anger at her children is pseudo eros.

Or more mundane examples. We cheat on income taxes because we think that the extra money will paper over some of the fear of life. Money becomes pseudo eros.

Or we exaggerate our accomplishments because we are afraid that our real story is insufficient to fill the void. Self-aggrandizement is pseudo eros.

All of our inappropriate behaviors that violate our values are really us crying out, “Pay attention to me—I exist!” All forms of acting out are pseudo eros.

Life is about walking through the void. Every time we walk through and not around the void we come out stronger. Every time we are seduced by pseudo eros, ethical breakdown is around the corner. There is no ethics without eros.

The biblical myth text describes the pit into which Joseph was thrown by his jealous brothers: “The pit was empty, it had not water,” reads the story. “But isn’t this redundant?” ask the students. “If it had no water, don’t we know that it was empty?” The master replies, “This was an emptiness which bred evil. Water it did not have, snakes and scorpions it did!” Emptiness always breeds in its wake ethical collapse.

Of course, the real pit at play in the biblical myth is not simply a pit in the earth. The pit is in Joseph’s brothers’ very ground of being. Their own gaping sense of emptiness makes them envy Joseph so. It is their inability to walk through their own pit (void) that moves them to project a pit in the world in which they would cast their brother. The snakes and scorpions come from the unacknowledged emptiness of the brothers.

No, Joseph is not perfect, but when we respond to a person viscerally, it virtually always tells us more about ourselves than about the person. The brothers’ own deeply felt emptiness—their pit—moved them to the murderous rage of attempted fratricide.

You see, until this point in the book of Genesis one son has always been chosen as the inheritor of blessing. Abel was chosen over Cain. Shem over Ham and Yefet. Isaac over Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau. The brothers were convinced that Jacob, their father, was going to likewise choose Joseph over them. Joseph’s existence called into question the integrity of their stories. When the value and dignity of our stories are called into question we brush up against the emptiness. The inability to walk through the emptiness to the fullness is the source of all ethical collapse.

Ethics without eros is doomed. Only from a place of fullness of being can we reach out in love to others. The first step to love is always self-love. If you don’t fill yourself up with love, then you have precious little to dole out. But as long as your love is not rooted in your erotic matrix—the inside of your fullness—it is doomed to fail. You will have to rely on an ethical source outside yourself, which will always make you view yourself as a sinner. No one is ever able to consistently follow external rules that seem to violate their inner desire.

However, if ethics well up from the inside, if you are at the center, then sin is not disobedience but the violation of human well-being. In the end all ethical failure is a violation of eros—your own or someone else’s.

God and Nature

We now come to the second great shadow of circle consciousness. The pagans insisted that divinity was in trees and in all of nature. But the essential biblical idea is that God is also beyond nature. God is the creator of nature and therefore not trapped within it. Biblical myth therefore opens with the Genesis story—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The powerful and revolutionary implication is that God is not nature. Unlike the Greek, Roman, pagan, or Buddhist pantheons, biblical myth insists on a God who is both within and infinitely beyond the circle, radically immanent as well as transcendent.

When we say that God is infinitely beyond trees, we are also saying that if you can connect to God he can free you from the ensnaring web of nature. The notion that a human being is created in the image of God means for the Hebrew mystic that a person has it within them to reach beyond the natural.

The reason this is so critical is because in biblical consciousness, the loving God’s primary demand is ethical behavior. The single most important expression of love is how we treat one another, not how we think about one another. Perhaps the most important principle of Hebrew ethics is that although thoughts count, actions are infinitely more important. Moreover, in the formulation of sixteenth-century master Aron of Barcelona—“A person is formed by their actions.” Treat a person lovingly, and you will love them in the end. Love a person passionately and treat them unethically, and you will be alienated from them in the end.

When anyone suggests that we need to act against our instinctive nature we get slightly uncomfortable. Isn’t the unnatural intrinsically a violation of the right? The best antidote to the superficial aggrandizement of all that is natural is to keep toilet training in mind. Probably everyone who reads this book relieves themselves someplace other than in their clothes. This is, of course, decidedly “unnatural.” Indeed as a kind of protest against the violation of the natural implicit in toilet training, the central ritual of one pagan religion—the cult of Peor—was that its adherents defecate on the Peor idol itself. Biblical myth explicitly sets itself up as the alternative to the Peor cult.

Ethical behavior always requires that we will be able to act against our primal instinctive natures. If we were only part of nature, then clearly we could not be expected ever to control our nature. We are both part of nature, and beyond nature. Only because of this paradox are we capable of self-control.

What this means is that values need to serve as a guide in training our natures. Biblical line consciousness insisted that the most important value was ethical behavior. To be ethical, one must be responsible. Response-able. Able to respond to the conflicting drives of nature and nurture by charting a course that reflects an ethical vision. One can only respond if one can step outside the circle. Responsibility stems from a person’s awareness of their ability to control or transcend their instinctive natures.

A contemporary example: A priest can decide not to abuse a young boy if he is at least potentially able to resist his nature and say no! But in the pagan cult, the homoerotic attraction between priest and young boy was made sacred by being made part of the temple cult. In the context of a circle ethos, not only sexual drives are considered uncheckable. There can also ultimately be no accountability for doing evil. Mother Teresa and Hitler are equally innocent and equally guilty. Since there is no real possibility of choosing other than what you chose, you cannot be expected to do anything other than what you did. All the forces of nature acted upon you and produced the only possible result: precisely what you did. It is therefore not surprising that paganism is laced with deterministic overtones. Biblical myth insists that after all of the influences have had their say, we have a divine core that is beyond nature and can therefore choose against nature.

Circle consciousness claims that people are naturally the best that they can be. But the most important act of love, according to the Hebrew gospel, is to develop a training system for goodness. The problem, argues the circle, is not goodness but alienation. The great evil for the circle is to be cut off, distant, disenchanted, out of the circle. Line consciousness disagrees with the circle and says that people are potentially good but not naturally good. In biblical myth people are born innocent, but they are not born good. Goodness must be learned and even cultivated. The great evil for the line is to do evil.

The commonplace phrase “a good baby” is actually a misnomer. Babies are not born evil, but they are not born good either. In fact, as infant psychologists have pointed out, babies are actually minidictators (albeit adorable dictators). The ethical hero in the mother-baby relationship is most certainly the mother and not the baby. The baby presents his parents with a list of incessant demands, which he expects to have met no matter what else might be going on. Whether his parents are in the middle of a financial crisis, a medical emergency, or simply want to make love is irrelevant to the baby. Having been a kid who was very much the school misfit, I can tell you that kids are also naturally cruel. As a matter of fact, the level of raw meanness and sadism that kids are capable of inflicting on other kids is simply incomprehensible … that is, if you believe people to be naturally good.

For biblical myth the belief that people are naturally the best that they can be is not only wrong but also destructive. If people are naturally good, then evil must be the result of some set of external forces. These external forces could be anything from social environment, economic circumstance, hand-guns, parents, television violence, government cutbacks, or the devil. The result of this approach is that an enormous amount of energy is spent trying to fix all sorts of outside stuff while almost no time at all is spent transmitting the values that might change or develop our internal natures. This kind of thinking is an extension of pagan thought, which held that the manipulation of external nature would bring the good. The Hebrew Bible, then as now, says no to this thinking. Hebrew gospel teaches that only the control and refinement of our internal nature can bring the good.

In the view of the Hebrew Bible, the essential demand of God was justice. It is Dostoyevsky who best captures the Hebrew God when he writes in The Brothers Karamazov, “Without God all is permitted.” God was experienced by the Hebrews as a parent who is truly happy only when his children treat one another well. For this reason biblical wisdom insisted that God was beyond nature and that human beings were homo imago dei—created in the image of God. The power of this idea gives birth to the best of Western civilization.

There is another critical reason why the line-driven ethical prophet does not experience God as being exclusively in nature. If God were in nature and not beyond nature, then nature would be our source of ethics. It is clear, though, that for all of her splendor in reflecting a pale cast of divine beauty, nature is amoral. The law of nature is nearly always that the strong kill the weak. Certainly the helpless and the infirm have little chance of survival in the natural order other than as a dinner for a stronger adversary. If we were to transpose natural law into the human world, we would certainly live the law of the jungle. Social services, hospitals, and help for the disabled are all pro-foundly “unnatural,” at least according to the law of nature in the nonhuman world. In fact, the hospital is a direct corollary of line and not circle consciousness. The morality of the line insists that those higher on the line—that is to say stronger and with more means—take care of those lower on the line. This is the faith and God experience of the prophets.

The Prophet and the Pagan

Let’s frame the clash between circle and line in the most striking possible terms.

The prophet, the hero of the Hebrew Bible, represents ethics—the line. The pagan, hero of the ancient world into which biblical thought was born, represents eros—the circle. The clash between the prophet and the pagan—the circle and the line—is in the end the clash between the erotic and the ethical.

Obviously the prophet is not devoid of eros and the pagan not entirely oblivious of ethics. Yet the goal is their full integration. The erotic and ethical must merge. This is the secret of the cherubs and the model of the sexual.

What the prophet and the pagan respectively incarnate, however, is made manifest when the erotic and the ethical clash. An oft-quoted line from Jung, heir to the pagan myth tradition, is the best summation I have ever heard of the pagan position: “I’d rather be whole than good.”

The importance of this maxim is evidenced by the many times one hears it cited by Jung’s students. Apparently the circle will always seem more whole than the line. Circle and Shechina are the experience of eros for which we all yearn. The pagan yearns to feel whole. Indeed for the pagan the alienation from divinity is so palpable and painful that it must be overcome at all costs, even if ethics are the price. This is where the balanced scales start precariously to slip. It was Jung who was sadly seduced by the pagan goddess Ashera into a flirtation with Nazism, that menacing shadow of eros which horrifically darkened our world just a few short decades ago.

The prophet always responds, “I’d like to be whole. But if I have to choose, I’d rather be good than whole.” This is why the prophet is the great critic of the Temple. The erotic fulfillment of the Temple experience was all too often a replacement for the kind of direct ethical action that could heal the world. It is the widow and the orphan, the vulnerable and the dispossessed, who must be the primary concern of the homo religious. This is the word of the prophets.

The prophets oppose paganism with all of their ethical fire and passion. Their opposition to paganism is based upon pagan cruelty and corruption.

Built into the pagan ritual are demands for parents to burn their children as a sacrifice to the gods. Hardly a mention of the pagan occurs in the Hebrew Bible without a reference to this practice. “They have set their pagan abominations in my house… to burn their sons and daughters in fire.” (Jeremiah 7:30, 31.) The burning of children was not the exception in pagan worship. Rather it was the model of the pagan idea that erotic abandonment to the god must, by its very definition, overrun all intuitive human ethical boundaries.

Listen to the ethical cry of Isaiah in chapter 1:

I do not want your multitude of sacrifices
I delight not in the blood of bullocks or goats or rams.
Do not come to seek my face…
as you trample my courts of justice…
your hands are full of blood…
wash yourselves, make yourselves clean…
cease your evil doings… seek fair judgment,
argue the case of the widow and the orphan…
Ƶion will be redeemed
by justice and… integrity.

The ecstatic service of the Jerusalem temple, religiously powerful and important as it might be, had become primary. The reaching for Shechina experience overrode all; eros overrode ethos, and the prophet exploded in divine rage.

Having said that, we want to make a radical claim—which, as is often the case, is patently obvious once you see it. On the essential interpretation of reality, the prophet was actually a circle and not a line. The difference was that the pagan was a first-stage circle archetype and the prophet a third-stage circle archetype.

The prophet’s line expression is a necessary corrective response to the pagan consciousness that dominated the world at the time. The prophet saw his role to overturn that pagan ethic, which was bound up with so much cruelty. Human sacrifice was but one of the outrages that prophecy sought to eliminate. The prophet was wildly successful and gave an ethical cast to the foundation stones of all Western civilization.

The Erotic and the Ethical

In the picture of the prophet as a social reformer, it is, however, too easy to lose sight that at his core, he was an erotic mystic.

Though the prophet insisted that nature was not all of God, he expert enced with all his being that God was all of nature. Even as he decried the pagan claim that identified God with the Ashera tree, he knew and rejoiced in the truth that God was fully present and accessible “on every hill and under every tree.” God was not only reflected in nature as the external creator but God was also fully present in nature. The later mystics used mamash, meaning literally “actually,” to describe that God was actually present in nature and not just as a metaphor or symbol. The words of later Hebrew mystics capture accurately prophetic consciousness. Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes that “trees and stones are mamash divine.” Nachman of Bratzlav told his disciples that “every blade of grass has its own (divine) song.”

The Temple in its ideal state was supposed to manifest the third-stage circle moment in Hebrew consciousness. What the prophet realized, however, was that the people had not incorporated second-stage line consciousness. The erotic was overrunning the ethical. In principle, however, the Temple was meant to be a balance between line and circle, erotic and ethical.

Only a short distance from the seat of eros, the Holy of Holies with her sexually intertwined cherubs, was the lishkat hagazit, the “room of hewn stone.” This was the Chamber of Justice, whose passionate concern was the ethical—the creation of a just society. On the face of it, its sensibilities seem so far removed from the erotic motifs of the sensual and the sacred that permeated the Temple’s aura. What, after all, do ethics and eros have to do with each other?

The answer is—everything. In the short run we can train people through behaviorist rituals, social engineering, and a good deal of guilt to behave ethically. However, in the final analysis, we also find that nonerotic ethics will always collapse under the weight of contracts and contacts it cannot fulfill. The room of hewn stone must necessarily be housed in the eroticized Temple in order for its ethics truly to thrive.

Picture a house that has three consecutive rooms. In the first room is Master Schneur Ƶalman of Liadi, founder of the mystical Hassidic court of Habad, the grandfather in our story. In the second room is his son and successor, known as the Middle Master. In the third room is a small baby who will ultimately succeed his father and grandfather as the third master of Habad.

Father and grandfather are lost in erotic mystical rapture. They have crossed over to the inside; suffused with yearning they have entered the fullness of being. Eros. Suddenly the baby cries. Grandfather rises from his ecstasy, goes to pick up the child and rock him to sleep. Afterward he is unable to recapture his ecstasy. He smiles and falls asleep.

Come morning, father and grandfather meet at morning meditation. “Did you not hear the baby crying?” inquires Schneur Zalman gently of his son.

“Why no, Father. I was so caught in rapture I could hear nothing but the singing of the angels,” the Middle Master replies, secretly hoping his father would be impressed, for it seemed that he exceeded even his father in the interiority of his en-trance-ment. “You have not understood, my son,” responded Schneur Ƶalman, a tear slowly wending its way down his cheek “Rapture that deafens you to the crying of a baby—such holiness is not kosher.”

Another image: Abraham sits at the en-trance to his tent, deep in meditation. God appears to him in the heat of the day. Celestial fires encircle him. The breath of the Divine caresses him. Abraham basks in perfect Presence.

Abraham opens his eyes and sees in the distance three strangers passing by. He jumps up to greet them. Perhaps they are thirsty from the desert sun or in need of lodging for the night. He races after them. “But wait!” cries out God. “Where are you going… one second… we were just about to—”

“Hold that thought, God. I’ll be right back.” And off Abraham runs.

“How could it be?” inquire the fourth-century Babylonian myth masters in radical amazement. “Is not rapture with the Divine the point of everything? How could Abraham just run off and leave God hanging?!”

They answer their own question with a gorgeous Hebrew koan: “Greater is the feeding of guests than the receiving of the face of the Shechina.” Face and Shechina are words that we recognize—virtual synonyms for the erotic. And yet the imperative is clear. In the clash between the erotic and the ethical, the ethical must take priority.

In order to foster a loving world we need to merge the masculine line with the feminine circle. Any attempt to maintain line or circle consciousness when they are independent of each other is doomed to failure. The deepest wisdom of Hebrew myth will require eros and ethics to interpenetrate. Prophet and pagan will need to merge into one.

When we unpack stage three we will see that the erotic is not opposed to the ethical. For the erotic to be full and life giving, the masculine and feminine must merge. Failing to effect this erotic merger, the Shechina remains in exile. The marriage of the masculine and feminine in the sexual models the merger of the circle and the line, the erotic and the ethical, in every facet of being. Whenever that marriage fails, there is a failure of love, and failures of love always produce evil.

Indeed, every ethical failure comes from the absence of eros. It is the painful experience of emptiness that moves people to ethical violation. The universe does not tolerate a vacuum. Ethics without eros is doomed. It is only from a place of fullness of being that we can reach out in love to the other. The first step to love is always self-love. If you don’t fill yourself up with love then you have precious little to dole out. As long as my love is not rooted in my erotic matrix—the inside of my fullness—it is fated to fail. I will have to rely on an ethical center outside myself in reference to which I must always be a sinner. If ethics well up from the inside, however, and if we are at that center, then sin is not disobedience but the violation of human well-being.

In the end the only ethical failure is a violation of eros—your own or someone else’s. The prophet in us needs to reclaim holy paganism. The pagan within must be open to hearing the call of the prophet. When the prophet and pagan meet, the Temple of the heart will be rebuilt.

I have long believed in my heart of hearts that ethics without eros cannot survive even on the ethical level. First, our erotic longing will not be assuaged by prophetic ethics. We can do the right thing our entire lives and still feel empty. The prophetic idea that God, and thus the God point within us, is beyond nature and can therefore act against nature is important. But it is only a stage in the unfolding ethical conscious of man. I was delighted many years back to happen across this passage from Abraham Kook, the greatest modern Hebrew mystic:

We are filled with the emotion of ethics;
we yearn toward a life that is pure
Our imagination excites the desire in our heart
With images of life that are most pure and most noble.

Yet this desire cannot be realized
except through inner and outer commitment
to the light of being the Light of God,
to erotic morality

Morality not guided by the sacred is not deep,
and does not enter into the inwardness of the soul;
and even though a person might be drawn to it for good reason
—for she recognizes the uprightness of logical things—
this kind of instruction does not have a lasting hold
in the face of. ..passions strongly aroused.
Such a weak morality
does not have the power to guide…
the polis, the human community,
to penetrate to the depth of the soul
and to transform the heart
of universal man and of individual man
from stone to flesh.

There is no alternative plan for humanity
other than that it be guided by the erotic morality.
And it is much better
that a person fall a number of times
on the journey
but establish his vision of world
and the morality of his life
according to that profundity of the erotic morality,
than if he has fewer failures
but lives a weakly spiritual life
at the hands of the superficial influence
of secular morality.

Ethics that are not rooted in eros ultimately fall apart. We yearn for eros. By exiling God from nature and secularizing the sexual, we condemn our-selves to emptiness and vacuity. For example, the company “line” ethic of the 1950s in America produced the “circle” yearning for communes and free love of the 1960s. This is the recurrent pattern of the human soul. Eros cannot be denied. Any ethical collapse is ultimately rooted in a failure of love, a lack of eros.

When we talk only about a God giving rules that run counter to our nature, the rules cannot hold. The eros of our nature will always overrun them. But if we come to understand that ethics is an erotic expression of our deeper divinity, we are truly moved to the ethical. For that is when we realize it is an expression of our deepest selves, a response to the call of our own voice. To be compelling and powerful, ethics must be an expression of your erotic divine nature and not a contradiction of it. So when the prophets insist that God, which is also the God within you, is beyond nature and can therefore act ethically against nature, they are referring only to your first nature, not to your deeper second nature. Your deeper nature is God. This is the secret whispering in the leaves of the Ashera tree and in the embrace of the cherubs.

Opposing the Temple Prostitute

Now this transmutation of the Ashera energy to the female cherub was not just a superficial “biblicizing” of a pagan notion. To read it this way would be to miss the whole point of the Hebrew myth revolution. It was rather one of the first moves toward union, the ultimate integration between masculine and feminine, the ethical and the erotic.

Ashera was represented in most temples by both male and female prostitutes. These temple prostitutes were either sacrificed to the Goddess or engaged sexually by the king or priests as incarnations of the goddess. To say that the prophets radically opposed human sacrifice is obvious. What is more revealing is that they opposed the entire institution of the temple prostitute.

Here again it is critical to understand the nuance of the argument between prophet and pagan. Both agreed that human sexual encounter could potentially reenact and even catalyze the cosmic divine sexual encounter between the God and Goddess. The Zohar is replete with imagery in which the priest plays an essential role in arousing the feminine waters of the Shechina so she will be ready to receive her divine partner. Close readings of such passages make it deliberately unclear if the human role is only to sexually arouse the Shechina or actually to merge with her in ecstatic sexual union.

Yet the prophet passionately opposed the temple prostitute. The reason is clear. The temple prostitute was the classic case of the erotic overriding the ethical. The entire human persona of the prostitute was effaced. The sexual became an expression of the cosmic, which absolutely overrode the personal face of sexuality. The prostitute in the temple, as in contemporary society, has no name. She serves a cosmic function that “defaces” her. The prophet opposes anonymous sex because in his ethical mission his essential goal is the personalizing of the sexual. The ethical moment in sexuality of commitment and personhood needs to be seen as primary, overriding even cosmic erotic needs.

The great biblical myth affirmation is that for sex to be sacred it must be personal. Personal means connected to a story. The prostitute whose name you do not know, to whose dreams and vulnerabilities you are impervious, is the archetype of the impersonal. Impersonal (as we will see) can also describe sex that is used to weave a false story. It refers to sex that is detached from the web of soul print passions and commitments that is your life. It refers as well to sex that we reach for compulsively to cover up—even from ourselves—the dull throb of emptiness.

It is not that the biblical myth masters did not recognize the power of the impersonal and even cosmic erotic. They did. Indeed, in the myth of Luria,.the world itself is re-created every moment. In every second and in every space, cosmic circles and lines erotically penetrate one another and existence is brought forth anew. Ecstasy, dance, music, prayer, study, and meditation were all part of the prophetic service. They were all practiced in a way that would allow the initiate to access the coursing eros of being as it washed and revitalized his soul. Impersonal cosmic eros was vitally important to the prophet. But not when it required the depersonalization of a human being, the temple prostitute. And yet we need to find ways to reclaim the power of impersonal eros in our personal lives and in the larger life of the polis. If we do not, the void will continue to be filled with abusive and degrading forms of pornography. We must find a way to reclaim the eros of the temple prostitute, cleansed of its shadow qualities, even as we affirm the centrality of sexuality rooted in personal commitment and shared dreams.

The Impersonal and the Transpersonal

The prostitute archetype manifests itself in two forms. The first is the classic prostitute with whom sex is nonintimate and impersonal. The second is the Temple prostitute, who expresses the sexual as transpersonal and cosmic. The Temple prostitute would engage in transpersonal sex both with worshippers and temple priests as part of the erotic service of the Goddess. What both share in common however is that the prostitute, whether man or woman, is not related to in personal terms. The prostitute is upgraded to a symbol. Once that happens degradation is sure to follow eventually.

For the slippery slope between the impersonal and the depersonalized is seductive and steep. Thus, as powerful and even necessary as a transpersonal erotic moment might be, the prophets disallowed the Temple prostitute. The prophet recognizes that the sexual model of the erotic courses with a powerful energy that is essential to human ful-fill-ment. However, they insisted on replacing the male and female Temple prostitutes with the male and female cherubs. This was their way of insuring that the transpersonal did not slip into the impersonal, which could slip into the nonpersonal, which could slip into the nonethical, which could slip into evil.

Remember, paganism allowed the mutilation and even slaughter and sacrifice of the prostitute as an integral and regular part of the pagan cult. Once the sacrifice of a human being who was seen only as a symbol occurred, all ethics broke down.

The prophets insist on the radical holiness of the individual. The individual is of infinite worth and dignity and can never be reduced to a symbol. It is this emphasis of infinite value—the personal story of every human being—that is the driving force of prophetic ethics. We see in our own culture just how insightful this prophetic intuition is. Everyday pornography and soft porn may play the role of the Temple prostitute and seem innocent enough to be on the counter of respectable newsstands or on the movie channel at the best and most established hotels. But the line—driven by profit and emptiness—between the impersonal and the depersonalized is very, very slippery. Eventually it may lead to the radical depersonalization that lies at the core of all evil. Pornography based on rape, abuse of minors, and even murder—“white snuff”—is now available all over the world.

Erotic and Ethical Entitlement

Personal eros comes from living your story. But though the prophet is fully identified with eros, he insists nevertheless on the merger of ethos and eros. Now what does it mean to be ethical? The answer: to behave in a way that supports a person’s ability to live their story.

What is an ethical violation? It is to behave in a way that undermines someone else’s ability to live their story. According to biblical myth, this could be an active violation—theft, deception, or violence. Or it could be a passive violation—failing to get involved in making the world a place where every human being has the opportunity to live their story. Since the primary ethical violation would be to violate someone’s story, the ethical and erotic merge, because the underlying principle of ethics is to affirm and support the erotic integrity of every human being’s story.

The only clash, then, between the erotic and the ethical is when my eros is at the expense of yours. Since biblical myth affirms that every human being is a homo imago dei, in Dante’s phrase, a divine miniature, then all human beings are equal in their erotic entitlement. Any violation of that equality would be an ethical—and an erotic—violation. So all ethical lapses are really violations of eros.

As we saw earlier, the inner impulse for all ethical violation is a lack of eros. When we human beings feel empty, exiled from our stories, we try to feed off other stories. That is the core of every ethical violation: when another person becomes not an end, a story unto themselves, but rather a means of fulfilling your own story.

Moving one step beyond what we saw in our discussion in chapter 8, it now becomes clear that there is no possible distinction between the erotic and the ethical. In fact, the word ethics comes from the Greek ethos, meaning “the special nature of a person or group”—to be precise, their story, which is also the source of the most powerful erotic fulfillment.

The prophet insists that the erotic sexual affirm the stories of both partners in the relationship. To de-story the sexual destroys intimacy, which leads to the prostitute archetype, the exile of the Shechina, and the destruction of the Temple.

Sex models eros in that it must always emerge from deep within our story line. When it does, then we can embrace the full erotic nature of the sexual as the guiding spiritual model for all of the nonsexual dimensions of our lives.

Epilogue

Union is the ultimate erotic state. Interconnectivity, the fullness of presence, the inside of God’s face, the yearning force of being, they all characterize our experience of Union. This is enlightenment. Yet for the Hebrew mystic if Union does not lead us to compassion and great love then we have missed the point. The medieval intellectual mystic Maimonides wrote a great book of mystical philosophy, Guide for the Perplexed. In the last sentences, after the book reaches its erotic crescendo (Cheshek, meaning “raw sensual passion” is the Hebrew translation of the Arabic term employed by Maimonides), he appends an implicit postscript. Paraphrasing: If all this doesn’t make you a better lover of people then you are no lover of God and certainly no lover of your self. Eros must always lead to ethics.

The human being begins her journey as part of the circle of nature. In the creation story of Genesis 1, man and woman are created as part of the natural order. Ancient myth reflected this circle of being, in which mortals and immortals, humans and Gods, and all of nature participated together. This is the circle of eros.

Biblical consciousness injected the line of duality and ethics in the circle. Compassion must always override eros. Mysticism—in every major system of thought—protested that this line view of reality was in itself distorted and called us back to the unity consciousness of circle. This return to eros how-ever is not at the expense of ethics; much to the contrary it becomes the most powerful motive and force for loving in the world.

Isaac Luria explains that rules and ethical obligation can never be sufficient motive for compassion. It is only when I realize that both my neighbor and I are part of the Shechina that true ethics begins. When a guilty person is punished the Shechina cries out, “My head aches, my arms are in pain.” To slap another human being is to slap the Shechina. When you are kind to a fellow human being you are befriending the Shechina. In Hebrew mysticism the Shechina is em-bodied in us.

This is the deep understanding of the most famous of all biblical maxims: Love your neighbor as yourself. The ultimate source of loving is knowing your neighbor as yourself. The ultimate source of loving is knowing that your neighbor is part of yourself. Both of you are woven in the seamless cloak of the universe.

When the Baal Shem Tov would engage in the spiritual practice of ascensions of the soul his wife would sometimes become very frightened. He would become totally inert, and she was sometimes unable to waken him from his trance. On one such day she had become quite desperate, not knowing how to return him to this world. As she paced to and fro his baby son pulled on his beard Immediately he came to and gently asked his son, “What do you need, my son.” To attend to a person in need, taught Master Israel, is deeper than even the deepest mystical communion. It is said that the Baal Shem Tov, while listening to the language of the birds and eavesdropping on the music of the spheres, could also hear the cries of all the tormented souls in the world. All of his work was for their healing.

The body leads to the soul, and the soul leads back to the body. “When I look at the I of my body I find the I of my soul. When I look at the I of my soul I find the I of God.” The Sufis have a wonderful saying—“Say your praise to Allah and tie your camel to a post.” What this really means is, touch the fullness of God and let that inspire even the simplest service.

Dropping and Carrying Your Burden

My favorite Zen story is the one about the old Zen monk who has spent many years in meditation. He had attained deep levels of peace but had never achieved that moment of enlightenment when the I and the other collapse into one. So he asked his master, “Please grant me permission to leave the monastery and go practice on the great mountain by myself. There is nothing I want more than to realize the true nature of my non-dual self”

The master, sensing that his student’s time has come, granted permission. Well, our old monk took his begging bowl and few meager possessions in hand and began the journey to the mountains. It took a while, but he finally left the last village behind and began his ascent of the great mountain. Just then he saw coming toward him, down the mountain, an old man with a very large bundle on his back. The old man of course was none other that Manjushri—who, according to some Buddhist traditions, appears to aspirants to give them their last nudge toward enlightenment.

So said the old man going down to the old man going up, “Friend, tell me where you are going.” Well there was something about his voice that was kind, so the old monk told of his woe at being unable to cut through illusion and achieve illumination. “I’ve practiced for so many years…” His voice trailed away, and his eyes lowered. Suddenly however he raised his eyes and looked at the old man going down the great mountain. His face was shining and seemed so full of infinite compassion. “Tell me,” he entreated, “might you know something of enlightenment?” At this point the old man with the shiningface abruptly let go of his bundle. It crashed to the ground… and the old monk instantly achieved enlightenment.

It would seem to be all about dropping the bundle that we carry with us—past, future, needs, obligations, fears, and even hopes. At this point the newly enlightened monk looks at the wise old man and asks a bit sheepishly. “Now what?” The old man smiles, picks up the bundle, and walks down the mountain.

The difference is true compassion. It is not that one hand is good to the other hand because there is a moral obligation. How silly. They are of the same body. Unity consciousness. Eros. Ethics. Healing. Tikkun. So it is with us. We need to let our bundles fall. Only to then pick them up again and walk down the mountain.

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FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come

by David J. Temple

AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.

First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.

Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.


“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary

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Eros Is Ethics2024-08-30T08:46:03-07:00

The “Intimate Universe,” the “Evolution of Intimacy,” & “Evolutionary Intimacy”

Twenty Cross-Platform Applications of the Intimacy Equation

This early draft of an essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 3 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni with Dr. Zachary Stein & Barbara Marx Hubbard. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Download a PDF of This Early Draft Essay

Understanding that the evolution of love equals the evolution of intimacy liberates intimacy from its narrow anthropocentric predicament. There are three core meanings to intimacy, two of which we have already begun to unfold in the previous volumes of this series. We now move to a deeper take on both of these dimensions, even as we add a third element to the core structure of intimacy. We might also refer to this perception as the holy trinity or the three-core definition of intimacy. Each meaning or definition adds something fundamental. These definitions apply to more than human intimacy.

Remember that evolution is the evolution of intimacy. Intimacy begins in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang and moves through every level of Reality, including the world of matter, the world of life, and the human world of culture. These three lifeworlds are birthed in—what we have already referred to as—three progressive Big Bangs.[i]

The process starts with the First Big Bang, which births the physiosphere. The physiosphere includes everything from the Big Bang to the macromolecules that make up the first cell.

Then, in a momentous leap of emergence—the Second Big Bang—the biosphere is birthed. Animate conscious life gradually leaps forth from the apparently inanimate world of atoms, molecules, stars, and planets. The biosphere includes everything from the first cell until the first hominids walk on the African savannah.

Finally, the Third Big Bang births the noosphere. The noosphere includes everything from the emergence of self-reflective cognition and emotion—that is, art, language, and trade—beginning from the first human being through all the distinct stages of human cultural development until modernity and postmodernity.

We refer to these processes as cosmological evolution, biological evolution, and cultural evolution. All through the entire evolutionary process, the same core definition of intimacy is at play, driving and moving Reality. The trajectory of evolution is the evolution of intimacy. What we are describing in this writing is the emergence of what might be called the Fourth Big Bang, the emergence of Homo amor, the New Human and the New Humanity.

The Intimacy Equation

By now, it is clear that we are talking about intimacy as the very structure of Reality’s being and becoming. Intimacy is the inner nature and the inherent telos of the Universe: A Love Story. (more…)

The “Intimate Universe,” the “Evolution of Intimacy,” & “Evolutionary Intimacy”2024-07-02T09:04:07-07:00

The New Human and the New Humanity: Homo amor

Download a PDF of the Essay

This early draft of an essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 2 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni with Dr. Zachary Stein & Barbara Marx Hubbard. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

As we begin to live the new Story of Value, a New Human and a New Humanity begin to emerge. We have called the New Human and the New Humanity by the term Homo amor. Homo amor is the fulfillment of Homo sapiens. The shift to this new consciousness is fundamental. It is in many ways parallel to, and as momentous as, the early evolutionary transition from single-celled to multicellular life.

As the consciousness of Homo amor becomes available, more and more lives will be not only a love story but also a triumphant love story. Indeed, we are convinced that telling the new Story—articulating the new narrative of Homo amor, the Intimate Universe, and the Universe: A Love Story—is the most potent response to suffering that we have at this moment in our history.

Just as the new story of modernity generated innovations in exteriors that birthed the great dignities of modernity, it is the new Story of Homo amor that—at this pivotal eleventh-hour moment in the short span of human history—needs to generate innovation in interiors. This, in turn, will generate the coherence necessary to transform mass tragedy and devolution into mass triumph and evolution.

The Trajectory of Evolution: Promise and Peril

This view is not pollyannaish in any sense of the term. It in no way ignores evil or suffering. Quite the contrary.

First, it needs to be stated clearly that evolution is not a direct linear progression toward ever-deeper love and intimacy. Evolution meanders.

And yet, second, evolution does progress. Evolution is the movement toward Love by Love’s own inexorable and incessant persuasions: Persuasions that are both gentle and fierce in their quality and character.

A Note on Desire

Alfred North Whitehead was not wrong when, echoing the leading edges of the interior sciences in Hebrew wisdom, he pointed toward the inherent purpose of evolution as the movement toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Or, stated somewhat differently, if we are to deploy the term that we pointed towards above—the term appetite that Whitehead chose—Reality is hungry. Reality is hungry for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, all of which are expressions of a more primal hunger, the hunger for more Love, for more Eros, for more Divinity, disclosed in human form. Reality is lined with appetite all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. In the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, the appetite of Cosmos is the Eros of evolution that itself evolves.[1] [i] What Whitehead calls appetite, the interior science call by many other names including teshukadesire.[2] Reality desires. (more…)

The New Human and the New Humanity: Homo amor2024-09-05T06:19:17-07:00

ErosValue: Early Thoughts – Dr. Marc Gafni

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The core Value of Cosmos is Eros. Indeed, the words cannot be fruitfully split.

Eros IS ethos.[1] Or said slightly differently, Eros is Value exponentialized as the Infinite Value, which suffuses Reality. Nothing exists outside of the circle of Eros as Value and Value as Eros. Eros IS ethos, and ethos, or Value, is the Ought implicit in Reality, which suffuses all of Cosmos. This is what we refer to in CosmoErotic Humanism as ErosValue.

Eros is life.

Eros generates new life.

Eros is a First Principle and First Value of Reality itself.

Eros is Value.

And Value is Eros.

Indeed, it is for that reason that we coined a new term in CosmoErotic Humanism:

ErosValue.

ErosValue generates the Value of Life.

In its creative movement, ErosValue generates ever-greater life through ever-deeper contact. It is the movement of Cosmos that brings together separate parts into larger wholes. The greater wholes have ever-more value. At every greater level of value, the emergent whole has greater depth, consciousness, and capacity.

A subatomic particle has a certain level of depth, consciousness, and capacity—all expressions of Value.

An atom—which contains, within it, subatomic particles that have come together to form a larger whole—has more depth, more consciousness, and more value.

The notion that there is already proto consciousness at the level of atoms is found across the interior sciences and is now appearing in multiple forms across the leading edges of the exterior sciences. The premise, which explains empirical reality far better than the other stunted hypothesis, is what we call pan-interiority. Reality is neither material nor spirit [value]. Rather, Reality is interiors and exteriors all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russel, called this proto interiority at the atomic level prehension.

Atoms come together to form larger wholes, molecules, which have more depth, capacity, and consciousness—more value.

Molecules form a larger whole, macromolecules, which have more depth, capacity, and consciousness—more value.

Macromolecules come together, intensifying their intimacy, aggregating, alluring separate parts into a larger whole with greater depth, capacity, and consciousness—more value—emerging as cells.

Matter has become life. The physiosphere has morphed into the biosphere. This is the inherent process of Eros—animating the processes of classical science and mathematics, as well as the interior sciences—which drives life all the way up the evolutionary chain. At ever-higher levels of emergence, there is more depth, capacity, consciousness, and hence more value. But while there are self-evident gradients of values, all of Reality has inherent Value. Value lives all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Eros is value generating ever-more value.

Ethos and Eros Are One: Eros Is ErosValue

Not only, however, is Eros virtually identical with ethos. Ethos is identical with Eros. In other words, there is a feeling to the ethos-suffused movement towards wholeness. That feeling is Eros. The Universe feels, and the Universe feels Eros. For the feeling of ethos is Eros. (more…)

ErosValue: Early Thoughts – Dr. Marc Gafni2024-04-09T06:55:22-07:00

Resources for the Parallax Course “Opening the Eye of Value during the Meta-Crisis”

The Eye of Value: Early Draft Essay

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2020

Read “The Eye of Value”

On the Erotic and the Ethical

Dr. Marc Gafni, Tikkun, 2003

Read “On the Erotic and the Ethical”

NonDual Humanism

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2006

Read “NonDual Humanism”

The Wisdom of Solomon

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2006

Read “The Wisdom of Solomon”

The CosmoErotic Universe

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2017

Read “The CosmoErotic Universe”

Eros as Value Perception

An Excerpt from Your Unique Self

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2011

Read “Eros as Value Perception”

Eros and Ethics

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2017

Read “Eros and Ethics”

ErosValue: First Thoughts

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2023

Read “ErosValue: First Thoughts”

Value: For Its Own Sake

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2017

Read “Value: For Its Own Sake”
Resources for the Parallax Course “Opening the Eye of Value during the Meta-Crisis”2024-04-09T04:09:02-07:00

The Eye of Value: Early Draft Essay – Dr. Marc Gafni, 2018

Four Prisms of the Eye of Consciousness: The Eye of Value, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of the Heart

The Eye of Value is a term coined and shared by Dr. Gafni in multiple oral teaching over many years and in this more formal essay from 2018. This early draft was drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis by Dr. Marc Gafni. A more expanded version will also appear in forthcoming work by Gafni, Stein, and Wilber under the moniker of David J. Temple.

The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Download a PDF of the Essay

The Empiricism of Love: The Three Eyes of Knowing—The Three Eyes of Eros—The Three Forms of Gnosis—The Three Eyes That Are One

How do we know that Love is Real?

Not because of faith or dogma.

Rather, we know Love is real because the depth of our direct felt experience of Love tells us it is so. Our experience of Eros generates gnosis. That Love is real, and not a social construction, a fiction, or a figment of our imagination, is, like all good science, an empirical truth. This is, in fact, how all true knowledge in every field of inquiry is obtained.

Knowing through experience, however, is precisely the opposite of dogma. Knowing through experience is what we call empiricism. And knowing that Love is real—in fact more real than anything else, as the intrinsic value of Cosmos it is—is what William James correctly called Radical Empiricism.

Indeed, all of science, as opposed to organized religion, is based on the authority of direct validated experience. This is true both in the exterior science and what we have called the interior sciences. Indeed, in exterior and interior sciences, there are three ways to unfurnish our eyes—or what have been called the Three Eyes of Knowing. In fact, these Three Eyes are three distinct forms of the Anthro-Ontological Method.

In CosmoErotic Humanism, we refer to them as the Eye of the Senses, the Eye of the Mind, and the Eye of Consciousness.

The Eye of Consciousness is also known by at least four other names: the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, or the Eye of Contemplation.

It is this last set of eyes, by all of their names, which discloses Love’s Ultimate Reality, which is Love’s Knowledge, which is Love’s Value.

But we will see, as consciousness evolves, these very distinct eyes begin to come together, and we realize that, at the higher levels of consciousness, they inseparably inter-animate each other.

Each of these eyes illuminates a different dimension of Reality.

Each one is the province of particular dimensions of knowledge.

At higher levels of consciousness—what is sometimes called, in the interior sciences, nondual realization—the different dimensions, perceived by the different eyes inter-animate, pointing towards a larger Seamless Field of Eros.

Each of the Three Eyes goes by different names.

The Three Eyes Are:

The Eye of the Senses or the Eye of the Flesh.

The Eye of the Mind or the Eye of Reason.

The Eye of Consciousness, alternatively known as the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, or the Eye of Contemplation. [These names, however, are not quite synonyms. Rather, each implicitly implies a different quality of the Eye of Value. As such, we will occasionally use all of the names together with the lead name(s) being written first and the other names in brackets next to it.]

The Eye of the Senses [Eye of the Flesh] is generally referred to as empiricism. This eye is what is classically called empirical knowledge. But, as we shall see, it is referring to a very narrow strain of empiricism.

The Eye of the Mind [Eye of Reason] is generally known as rationalism, while the Eye of Consciousness [alternatively the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Heart, or the Eye of Value] is generally known as mysticism.

But it would be more accurate to say that all of the eyes are forms of science, what we refer to, in CosmoErotic Humanism, as exterior and interior sciences. All Three Eyes are forms of empiricism. (more…)

The Eye of Value: Early Draft Essay – Dr. Marc Gafni, 20182024-05-21T08:24:09-07:00

The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future

An Essay by Dr. Marc Gafni

This is an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of The Phenomenology of Eros: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire by Dr. Marc Gafni with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Dr. Kristina Kincaid. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Download a PDF of the Essay

Desire: The Heart of Reality

We will start with just a couple of sentences recapitulating what we have discussed in depth elsewhere.[1]

We live in a CosmoErotic Universe. Reality itself is animated and driven by Eros.[2] That is one of the tenets of what we have called CosmoErotic Humanism.[3] The core understanding, drawn from an extensive integration of a broad range of exterior and interior sciences, is that the human participates directly and uniquely in the larger Field of Value, which is Cosmic Eros.

The human being is the CosmoErotic Universe in person. And by CosmoErotic Universe we do not imply merely the physical structure of matter, but rather the entire Universe in all of its interiors and exteriors. The realization that the CosmoErotic Universe distinctly incarnates in every human being is the core of CosmoErotic Humanism.

An essential quality of Eros is desire. Throughout traditional, modern, and postmodern societies, the surface chatter of human culture has tended to identify desire with sex. The two words are virtually synonyms. But deeper levels of realization in all three time periods inform us that desire is not in any sense reducible to the sexual; indeed, sexual desire participates in the larger Desire of Reality—a Desire that powers Reality.

When I am on the inside, when I am fully intimate with myself, I am able to access desire, the most wanton and poignant quality of the erotic experience. Desire is an essential expression of Love and Eros. But when I am on the outside, a stranger to myself, I am alienated from my deepest desires. I cannot access my yearning, though longing and desire are vital strands in the textured fabric of Eros.

It was Rilke, rebelling against the old religious dogmas, who wrote of the shivering blaze that is Reality’s Desire as it awakens in human consciousness:

You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything

The darkness that comes with every infinite fall

And the shivering blaze of every step up

So many live on and want nothing

But what you love to see are faces

That do work and feel thirst.[4]

Desire is a quality of Cosmos itself. To place desire only in the realm of the sexual is to exile the erotic to the sexual[5]—but we must remember that twelve billion years of Cosmic Eros existed before sex disclosed itself.

(more…)

The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future2024-05-27T05:59:13-07:00

Story as a First Principle and First Value of Reality

By Dr. Marc Gafni

 This is an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume Two of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein with Barbara Marx Hubbard. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Download a PDF of this Essay

We often speak of three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism.

The first is Who—as in Who am I? Who are You? Who are We? This is the great question of identity.

The second question is WhatWhat do I really want? What is my deepest heart desire? These inquiries are closely linked to the great question of normativity. What is there for me to do? What is there for you to do? What is there for us to do? What ought I do? What ought we do?

The third question, the one which we want to focus on here is WhereWhere am I? Where are You? Where are We? This is the question of Universe Story. In CosmoErotic Humanism, we respond to the Where question with the following series of brief, precisely formulated sentences:

Reality is not merely a fact.

Reality is also a story.

Reality is not an ordinary story.

Reality is a love story.

Reality is not an ordinary love story.

Reality is an Outrageous Love Story, or what we might also call an Evolutionary Love Story.

An Outrageous Love Story is not a pollyannish love story. Rather, an Outrageous Love Story embraces the full ecstasy and agony of life.

“Reality is a Love Story” applies to the narrative arc of the Whole—all of Reality, in its sequenced movement, contingency, and freedom in the context of telos and plotline.

YOUR love story is chapter and verse of the Universe: A Love Story.

Your Unique Self intimately participates in the Love Story of Reality.

One of the key purposes of the writings of CosmoErotic Humanism is to validate every phrase in these sentences, based on the validated insights at the frontiers of human gnosis as found in the exterior and interior sciences across space and time. More specifically, we are engaged in synergizing traditional (premodern), modern, and postmodern Principles and Stories of Value into a new grammar and Story of Value that is greater than the sum of all previous stories or plotlines.

Here we will focus particularly on the elements and dimensions of Story. The series of sentences featured above points towards what we are calling the narrative arc of Reality.

Our point is that Story is not a mere human contrivance that developed and survived because of its adaptive power. Rather, the adaptive power of Story is rooted in its fundamental, ontological status. Reality itself is stories all the way down the evolutionary chain. Said differently, Story is a First Principle and First Value of Reality. Human beings think and feel in stories because this first Value of Reality lives in us, as us, and through us. And here we are referring to the anthro-ontological Principle that lies at the very heart of the epistemological method of CosmoErotic Humanism.

The First Principle and First Value of Story is implicit in both the interior and the exterior sciences. To approach this First Principle, we need to pause and briefly unpack four implicit elements that apply to every manner of Story all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain, through all levels of matter, life, and the depths of the self-reflective human mind. It will then become apparent that these core elements of Story are at play throughout all of Reality, across space and time.

The Four Elements of Story

The first element of Story is a thread of action, in which events and dynamics are causally connected to each other. (more…)

Story as a First Principle and First Value of Reality2024-03-27T07:03:03-07:00

Introduction from the New Book on “First Principles & First Values”

Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come by David J. Temple

CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. This movement emerges in response to the meta-crisis, understanding existential and catastrophic risks as rooted not only in failures of economics, politics, and technology, but in failed worldviews. The core of CosmoErotic Humanism is a system of First Principles and First Values that recasts cosmic evolution as a Story of Value in which humanity plays a unique role. These First Principles and First Values ground a comprehensive set of theories, including self and psychology, epistemology, scientific metaphysics, education, theology, mysticism, sexuality, and value.

CosmoErotic Humanism thereby responds to the three great questions: Where? Who? and What? It offers a new Universe Story (Where am I?), a new narrative of identity (Who am I?), and new vision of ethics (What ought I/we do?). These are some of the first words on the possibilities of a world philosophy adequate to our time of civilization transformation. What is offered by CosmoErotic Humanism is a new Story of—eternal yet evolving—Value that can serve as a context for our diversity, finally allowing us to speak of humanity as part of a shared Story of evolving Cosmic Value.

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To the Reader

The propositions collected here unpack the urgent moral need to articulate a new vision and theory of value. Simply put, humanity must redefine what it understands to be valuable if it is going to survive. Humans must understand the importance of what they value in the Cosmos—the reality of value itself—beyond the notion that what they value is, for example, simply an arbitrary price that can be fixed to a commodity. The idea that a tree is only as valuable as what it can be sold for is absurd. The idea that a person is only as valuable as what they can contribute to society is also absurd. In fact, both incarnate a dimension of value that is immeasurable and fundamentally irreducible to its commodified form. Yet just this kind of absurdity has been driving global culture for centuries.

There has been great confusion in value theory over the last two hundred years. On the one hand, conservatives have attempted to simplify the discussion to a single list of preordained and eternal values, which must be protected, and to which all people must pledge allegiance. At the same time, driven by a reductive materialism, scientific communities largely claim that only what is described by physics is real and that therefore nothing ultimately has intrinsic value. Given this metaphysical assumption, contemporary value theory has stridently argued that value is but a contrived human invention. The rise of postmodernity has only exacerbated this trend, labelling all values “social constructs,” “fictions,” or “figment of our imaginations.” This claim has now entered mainstream culture. To cite but one example, two extremely popular books by Yuval Harari, Sapiens and Homo Deus, present these kinds of dogmatic postmodern claims as taken-for-granted assumptions. Harari’s books have received enthusiastic endorsements from popular cultural luminaries, including prime ministers, presidents, corporate leaders, and myriad literary, spiritual, and religious figures.

Value, however, is not merely instrumental or economic. It is not a social construction or cultural contrivance—not a mere fiction covering over a truly valueless and therefore ultimately meaningless world. The propositions here begin to demonstrate that value is intrinsic to Cosmos, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. Value is foundational and evolving. It is not that human beings contrive value; rather, value precedes life. Life is an inherent expression of value. Life is contrived in pursuit of Cosmic Value. Cosmic Value in this way generates life, as life emerges in pursuit of value. We live inside of value even as value lives inside of us. Reality is value. But this is all ahead of the story.

The material collected here from the internal writings of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The Center is co-founded and led by Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. Together with Ken Wilber—also a cofounder of the Center—and an international team, they execute the Center’s mission: to evolve culture as needed in response to the looming threat of existential and catastrophic risk. This movement in culture has become referred to as CosmoErotic Humanism. Future volumes will include many colleagues who have been in leadership positions or dialogue with the Center for World Philosophy and Religion over the years—including Barbara Marx Hubbard, Lori Galperin, John P. Mackey, Howard Bloom, Ervin László, Sally Kempton, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and others. In each volume, as appropriate, we will recognize any particular partners who played a key co-authorship role in that particular work.

Taking the form of forty-two telegraphic propositions, this extended monograph provides a brief unpacking of CosmoErotic Humanism’s First Principles and First Values. We are not making our full arguments here; these will appear in longer forthcoming volumes. Please read through the propositions themselves, skipping ahead to those most interesting to you, those that elicit the most desire. Also review the list of First Principles and First Values (see pages 168–170) and try to hold the whole picture before beginning to read through them in sequence. Here we are putting it all on the table, as it were, so that, as we begin to publish more and elaborate on these themes, there is no confusion as to where we stand.

David Judah Temple
October 2023
Vermont, USA

Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

The following is the Introduction from our new book “First Values & First Principles” by David J. Temple.

Download Chapters 1-5 of the Book HERE
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David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary world philosopher and futurist, one of the leading formulators of world spirituality and religion of our time, and a beloved teacher and public intellectual with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University. He has more than twenty books to his name, including Your Unique SelfA Return to Eros, and three volumes of Radical Kabbalah.

Dr. Zak Stein is an educator, groundbreaking educational theorist, and futurist who specializes in developmental theory and metrics with a doctorate in the philosophy of education from Harvard University. He is the author of Education in a Time Between Worlds, among many other publications.

Ken Wilber is the creator of Integral Theory, with over twenty-five books to his name. He is one of the most influential philosophers of our time.

Introduction: On Redefining “Value” & Realizing Intimacy with All Things During the Meta-Crisis

The world is not what it was when the great wisdom traditions first began to (re)connect (“religion” is from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or tie) the human to the Cosmos through the identification of a Field of Value in which all life participates. The last century has seen more change in the conditions of human existence than any other period in known history. Technologies and societal evolutions have moved the center of culture outside the Field of Value. Humanity has become untethered from Reality, and more specifically: divorced from the Reality of Value. And so there is an urgent need for new forms of religion, philosophy, and culture that reconstruct value and reconnect humanity with nature and Reality.

Concern for the legacy of the great traditions is what unites the writing collected here to the modern tradition of perennial philosophy. This tradition suggests that a common core of truths can be found within all the best works of humanity’s religious imagination and interior sciences of contemplation. We propose here an Evolving Perennialism in which universal and eternal truths can be identified without becoming fixed. Eternal values evolve. As explained below, this is one of the ways beyond the devastating criticisms of accepted forms of value that modernity and postmodernity have rightfully offered. The failures of prior traditions that enthroned value do not put an end to value; in our hands, these critiques serve to evolve value. (more…)

Introduction from the New Book on “First Principles & First Values”2024-03-12T08:34:49-07:00

The Narrative Thread of Cosmos: The Evolution of Intimacy Through the Four Big Bangs

By Dr. Marc Gafni

This is an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 2 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein with Barbara Marx Hubbard. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

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It is the new information of the sciences that opens us to the most profound realization that the essential nature of Cosmos itself is Story. This narrative view of Cosmos informs what we briefly termed above as cosmological, biological, and cultural evolution. It is only now that the leading edges of modern science are beginning to realize that there is a direct throughline, a narrative thread, if you will, beginning with this current Universe at the Big Bang and moving all the way from matter (chemistry, physics, and cosmological evolution) to life (biology and biological evolution), to mind (spirituality, psychology, and cultural evolution).

Before we turn to the Four Big Bangs, which we will unfold as the narrative arc of Cosmos, the core of the Universe Story, and particularly of Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, some crucial contextual notes are in order.

Evolution as Crisis and Invitation: The Context for the Four Big Bangs

In other writings on CosmoErotic Humanism, we will unfold six plotlines of the Intimate Universe. To simply state them here, evolution evolves to more and more Eros. The plotlines of Cosmic Eros include

more and more complexity,

more and more uniqueness,

more and more consciousness,

more and more creativity,

more and more care and concern,

more and more intimacy, and

more and more story.

For the sake of this writing, however, let’s just focus on the evolution of intimacy as the overarching vector of evolution’s progression. Eros and intimacy evolve within a narrative arc. The narrative arc of the evolutionary plotline—the evolution of Eros and intimacy—is what we have termed the Four Big Bangs. They form the crux of the narrative thread of Cosmos. Central to the emergence of Conscious Evolution is our very recent ability to discern precisely this narrative thread.

To grasp the narrative arc of Cosmos more fully, we need to place our discussion of the Four Big Bangs in a larger context. One common feature of all evolutionary theories is the idea that evolution is hard, painful, crisis-prone, and existential—a matter of life and death. It is clear that, at key moments, evolutionary crises occur—cataclysmic events that bring into the Universe something that is totally new and truly unprecedented.

As we have already discussed in Volume One of this series, there is little doubt in the minds of those thinking seriously about evolution that we are in the midst of an evolutionary meta-crisis. This is the first totalizing crisis of the Anthropocene, as humanity and the planet itself are forced into what we have termed a reconfiguration of intimacies toward higher-order evolutionary emergence.[1] This is a moment of crisis, and yet, such a crisis is perfectly in sync with the narrative structure of Reality. Everything we know about evolution suggests that, precisely at such a moment of breakdown, we are poised for breakthrough.

But our choices matter. That is exactly what Conscious Evolution means. It is the movement to the pivotal role of conscious human choice—evolution in person as us—in both ensuring that there will be a future and in designing the quality of that future. Our choices are the leading edge of evolution itself. We are the verbs in the arc of evolution. This narrative arc will become clearer, as we outline the Four Big Bangs below.

This meta-crisis must shift not only our physical systems and exteriors (infrastructure and social structure), but also our interiors—our consciousness—or Eros itself (superstructure). And this evolutionary leap will be catalyzed by the meta-crisis that we are in the midst of, right now. This crisis has not only to do with the geo-history of technology and the limits of the biosphere. It is not just about the complexity of the planetary stack. It is, more fundamentally, a crisis of self-understanding. Or, as we frame it in our writings, virtually every crisis, at its core, is a crisis of intimacy. We are not intimate with ourselves, and our world, and as such, we are not in love with ourselves, or our world.

But the two are related. We need to be in love with our world, our planet, and with our Cosmos. It is because we are not, that we are naturally not intimate and in love with each other or ourselves. Or said slightly differently, we need a Universe Story, in which we can locate ourselves. We need a Universe Story that meets the depth of our longing and the depth of our knowing—the truth of the interior and exterior sciences.

One of the core sentences of CosmoErotic Humanism is:

Evolution is Love responding to need.

It is the depth of this need, emergent from the meta-crisis of this moment that can generate such a new Universe Story. Our CosmoErotic Humanism is one model of precisely such a new Universe Story. Only from the depth of such a new Universe Story can we articulate a narrative of identity, in which are literally in love, in which we participate in the very fabric of Reality’s Eros.

We are in the midst of an unprecedented species-wide identity and relationship crisis (and this is happening during the very decades when the self-inflicted extinction of our species has become a potential reality for the first time). Our Universe Story and its derivative narratives of identity, power, desire, and community have collapsed on themselves, no longer able to claim alignment with any genuine features of Reality beyond the surface structures of what postmodernity calls social construction. We no longer know what it means to be human.[2] And for the first time we are aware of this ignorance, collectively.[3] Dogmatic materialism coupled with postmodernism and superficial evolutionary psychology, the conventional narratives of the age, have de-story-ed Reality. Together, they reject the notion that we have any intrinsic purpose on the planet.

And yet, at the very same time, the leading edges of post-dogmatic and post-conventional thinking in the sciences, both interior and exterior, have begun to tell a new Story. At the leading edge of thought, there is a growing understanding that consciousness, and the Eros that animates it, as well as our own core self-understanding, are not epiphenomena. Eros and consciousness are not side effects in our lives. They are the main event. Eros, consciousness, our Universe Story, and narrative of identity are not merely supervening or reacting to a more basic bio-technological base. Rather, human Eros or its lack and its desire for greater intimacies, consciousness, and self-identity (or their lack) are at the core of everything. It is because of Eros’s fundamental and central nature that failures of Eros are driving the global crisis on all levels. We cannot live without Eros, for it is our fundamental nature and the nature of Cosmos. Reality is Eros.

As we point toward in other writings of CosmoErotic Humanism,[4] when Eros breaks down, pseudo-eros in the form of every kind of substitute gratification seeks to fill the void. Pseudo-eros is the direct cause for the collapse of ethos. Formalized succinctly, we can say: All failures of Eros lead directly to a breakdown of identity, which in turn engenders a collapse of ethics.

Our generation is in an unprecedented position to take responsibility for participating in profoundly generative and destructive evolutionary crises. The question is: Can we understand our crises in a Cosmic Context, as opportunities for the emergence of the unprecedented, and as invitations into a higher form of life?

The only effective response to the meta-crisis is, in fact, the movement from unconscious to Conscious Evolution. And Conscious Evolution means, as we noted at the outset, not only the structural realization that we are a direct emergent of and expression of evolution. It is not enough to know that evolution lives in us and that the evolutionary impulse beats in our hearts. Conscious Evolution means that we have gathered new information from the sciences, integrating its interior and exterior disciplines. In doing so, we have realized that evolution itself is love in action. And as Conscious Evolution, we are, quietly and literally, evolution as love in action in person. Indeed, this is the impulse that moves the project of CosmoErotic Humanism itself and all likeminded meta-projects.

What moves us to gather all the fragments of information—myriad separate parts—into a new larger whole, weaving strands from all the diverse disciplines into a larger embrace, is none other than the same Love that moves the Sun and other stars: Evolutionary Eros itself. And the primary action of Evolutionary Love is the evolution of love itself.

That evolution has now awakened to itself inside of our own identities. That is what we refer to as Conscious Evolution. We now realize that we are personal incarnations of the Force of Evolutionary Love pulsing fiercely and tenderly in us and as us. So, it is Conscious Evolution from here on out: We are able to know and do too much to pretend otherwise; we must consciously orchestrate the future of the planet and the biosphere. And as we have begun to unpack above, the next step in Conscious Evolution is the realization of the Universe: A Love Story.

The interior sciences remind us that the inside of consciousness is Love, or what we are calling Eros, which is defined by an incessant drive for ever-deepening intimacy and creativity. And, as we have begun to point towards,[5] and will deepen future writings, intimacy and creativity are the same movement of Cosmos.

As we began to unpack earlier, new intimacy is created by fostering ever wider and deeper shared identities in the context of (relative) otherness. Separate parts allured together to foster new wholes is the essential movement of both intimacy and creativity. It is the movement of becoming, which characterizes the Story of the Intimate Universe.  (more…)

The Narrative Thread of Cosmos: The Evolution of Intimacy Through the Four Big Bangs2024-02-28T07:51:55-08:00

The Evolutionary Love Creed by Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein

The following creed was written in 2017 and signed by Dr. Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Dr. Zachary Stein. It emerges from some of the core tenets of CosmoErotic Humanism.

THIS SHORT PROLOGUE MUST BE READ AS PART OF CREED:

The Evolutionary Love Creed is not merely poetry or metaphor. It is the most accurate take on Reality that we have today, based on the deepest integrated insights from all the premodern, modern, and postmodern sciences – and from both, what we call the interior and the exterior sciences – woven together in a higher evolutionary embrace. Elaborating the tenets of this creed in practice and theory constitutes the combined work of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.

The Evolutionary Love Creed

We seek to live according to a new Story of Self and Cosmos. We believe that the human being and the Universe are both expressions of an evolving LoveIntelligence. Therefore, the nature of the human is to embody and express the evolution of love itself.

The Universe is not simply a fact or event; it is a story. It is not an arbitrary or meaningless story. It is a love story. It has direction and is driven by an underlying force. The Universe is a Story about the evolution of love. It is a Story in which love emerges into ever-new and higher forms.

Reality at all levels is animated and driven by a Force that can be called Evolutionary Love, or Eros. This Force moves all of Reality towards ever-greater contact and wholeness. Reality evolves toward ever-higher and more complex forms of interconnectivity. The interior experience of this interconnectivity is intimacy. The true nature of Reality is thus a profound and growing intimacy among all beings.

The Evolutionary Love Story that is Reality – like all love stories – includes mystery, agony, and ecstasy. All unfolds within the arch of ever-deeper configurations of intimacy. Humanity is a key player in the CosmoErotic drama that is the evolution of love.

Thus the human must always inquire:
Who am I?
Who are You?
Who are We?

Every human is an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire that is the initiating and animating Eros and energy of the Universe. Evolutionary Love is that which lives in you, as you, and through you.

As such, you have an irreducibly unique perspective and an irreducibly unique taste, like none other in the Universe. You incarnate an irreducibly unique quality and place within a Cosmic Web of configurations of intimacy. Your unique quality of intimacy and your unique perspective come together to form your Unique Self.

You are (every human is) a Unique Self participating in the evolution of love.

We, the species Homo sapiens, are evolving into Homo amor. We are becoming the self-conscious stewards of evolutionary love on a planetary scale.

The fullest expression of humanity as Homo amor occurs when each and every Unique Self is able to give its unique gift of Evolutionary Love. Every human (and all other beings) emanates a quality of unique being and doing whose enactment is the intention and purpose of their life.

Every Unique Self lives in the context of evolving configurations of intimacy. We are all part of a larger Evolutionary We-Space. The evolution of love in and through humanity reaches beyond individual Unique Selves to form Unique Self Synergies.

Unique Selves can unite (beyond ego) in cooperation to create symphonic harmonies of collective LoveIntelligence. These Unique Self Symphonies are unions that emerge as a natural outcome of human diversity.

Thus does the Love Story of the Universe manifest through humanity in the form of a Unique Self Symphony – a jazz symphony in which every Unique Self improvises their own irreducibly unique part in complex and intimate harmonies with all others.

It is in these crescendos of interconnectivity and love that humanity gives birth to Homo amor. We are becoming a new species that is conscious of its role in the Love Story of the Universe. Homo amor will remake the Earth and explore the galaxy in the pursuit of advancing the evolution of love.

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The Evolutionary Love Creed by Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein2024-03-05T07:27:51-08:00

Early Ontologies of Both—The Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—in the Interior Sciences

An Early Draft of an Excerpt from Volume Two of

The Universe: A Love Story

First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism

in Response to the Meta-Crisis

The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 2 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard with Dr. Zachary Stein. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

Download a Preview Draft of the Essay
For Related Video Teachings by Dr. Marc Gafni Click Here

We now turn to early ontologies of both, the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, in the interior sciences of the great traditions. By this we mean both realizations of the Cosmos as animated and driven by Eros, as well as a sense of Eros as the animating and motive force of the Evolutionary Story.

We alluded to Charles Darwin in passing above. But before we turn again to Darwin himself, more ancient sources for the ontologizing[1] of love—the realization of Love as an organizing Cosmic Principle in the interior sciences—are important sources which require at least some prior mention. By ontology we of course mean to refer to Eros, not as a materialist social construction of reality but as an intrinsic meaning structure of value of Cosmos.

Early sources for this understanding of Love as a basic ontology of Cosmos—as the animating energy of Reality, and particularly as the Creative Process—appear as an esoteric thread that runs through key texts of the interior sciences. We speak not of a premodern dogma claiming a central place for love as the motive force of Reality but of the contemplative realizations of the great traditions. These sets of common realizations derive from the cross-cultural interior investigation and experimentation conducted by some of the greatest hearts, minds, and spirits in known human history.

The writings of the interior sciences on the motive force of Eros deserve at the very least their own volume. Indeed, each of the interior science traditions deserves its own volume, with a second volume integrating their shared perennial features. But since that is beyond our purview here, we must at least mention them as part of the larger source context for the ontology of Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, the Universe: A Love Story, and the Intimate Universe that we are presenting here. After we adduce below at least the fragrance of these important ontologizers of Eros as the motive force of Reality, we also need to briefly explain why these sources have been largely ignored—with some notable exceptions—in the contemporary evolutionary conversation.

One great tradition that has a profoundly historical, even proto-evolutionary character is that of Hebrew mysticism. Here, Eros is often portrayed as the central animating force of both Reality itself and what would come to be called the evolutionary process. I (Marc) have written an entire volume on this realization of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe within the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom. That volume is entitled: The Wisdom-of-Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom.[2] The next section will naturally not cover all of the material but will at least evoke some of the parameters of this crucial lineage in the interior sciences.

I first described these sources in 2003, in a work called The Mystery of Love, later expanded under the title A Return to Eros.[3] In the early work, there are thirty pages of primary sources, drawn from two millennia of texts, supporting the above claim.

The premise of that heavily footnoted work, The Mystery of Love, and its later recension, without the explicit footnotes and in a more evolutionary context, as A Return to Eros, is that we live in a CosmoErotic Universe—and that the CosmoErotic Universe lives in us—and that Reality is incepted, animated, and driven by Eros all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. (more…)

Early Ontologies of Both—The Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—in the Interior Sciences2024-01-26T06:54:38-08:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Anthro-Ontology and the Three Eyes

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This is an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism—in contradistinction for example to the Kingship model of God that dominates much of classical organized religion, or the flatland reductionism not of authentic empirical science but, rather, of the dogmas of scientistic materialism—is the realization that Reality is Eros. Eros, as we have noted, is not a one-dimensional force of allurement. If it was, Cosmos would disappear in a split-second. Rather, Eros is the precise balance between allurement and autonomy—attraction and repulsion—fusion and fission.

It is this kind of First Value and First Principle that animates our words when we write, we live in an Intimate Universe—or what we sometimes refer to as a CosmoErotic Universe. Eros seeks intimacy. Indeed, the plotline of Reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies. Evolution is the Love Story of the Universe—The Universe: A Love Story.

This gnosis of First Principles and First Values, however, is disclosed to us not through natural law, which would then be subject to the naturalistic fallacy,[1] nor through what is classically termed a supernatural intervention of revelation. We do not turn first to nature. Nor do we turn to the caricature of a small local God, owned by one nation or religion.

Rather, we turn inward. And here, we invoke the Anthro-Ontological Method. At the core of Anthro-Ontology is the realization that not only do we live in Reality, but Reality lives in us. We not only live in an Intimate Universe, but the Intimate Universe lives in us.

The far-reaching implication of this realization is that our own clarified interiors—as humans (= anthropos)—disclose a deeper truth (ontology) about the nature and structure of Reality itself. That means that the Eros—or Love—that throbs at the core of our being is not isolated or local. Rather, the qualities of clarified Eros that live inside us participate in the largest qualities of Evolutionary Love, as intrinsic to Cosmos.

These First Principles and First Values of evolution are both the ground and the telos of Cosmos.

It is within the context of this telos—these evolving First Values and First Principles—that the Reality of Cosmos unfolds.

In this context, there is no contradiction between freedom and necessity, or between contingency and elegant order and design. Eros is full suffusion and presence, and full freedom—living in dialectical relationship—which is the core nature of the Eros that animates Cosmos. Radical presence, which animates, suffuses, seduces, invites, and even subtly directs us, lives dialectically with contingency, freedom, and surprise—with the possibility of possibilities inherent in every moment.

As our close colleague, the philosopher and scientist Howard Bloom, expresses it, from the perspective of exterior science, opposites are joined at the hip.

Indeed, this notion of paradox—opposites joined at the hip—has been articulated by us, together with Howard, as itself being one of the First Principles and First Values of Cosmos. In the Eros of Cosmos, we directly experience ostensibly designed, elegant order and telos—dancing with contingency and freedom.

You can access this quality—anthro-ontologically—directly in your own experience.

Consider a truly great conversation between close friends, unfolding over many years, which is almost a sacred process.

The nature of such conversations is never pre-planned. There is no formal itinerary, no designated or designed program. They are filled with radical surprise. They are defined by contingency.

At the same time, they are not in any sense random or arbitrary. Indeed, they are filled with elegant order and inherent design. Pieces, strands of conversation, and themes weave themselves together into a larger whole that would have taken months of painstaking planning had they been pre-ordained or written out as a script. And it is doubtful that such pre-design could yield that level of elegance, nuance, and depth. Such conversations are ultimately meaningful and often disclose depth and originality in an always surprising and often shockingly beautiful fashion.

In the Eros of the conversation, the apparent contradiction between elegant design and contingent surprise disappears.

That is the nature of a genuine sacred conversation.

Conversation itself is the erotic structure of Cosmos. Conversations—exchanges of inherent design, proto-interiority, and freedom—define Cosmos from its inception.

It is in this sense that, as noted above, we join Howard Bloom in referring to Reality as the conversational Cosmos. All the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain, within the conversational Cosmos, randomness and contingency are paradoxically seamless with elegant order and telos.

(more…)

Dr. Marc Gafni: Anthro-Ontology and the Three Eyes2023-12-06T05:10:18-08:00

Is Religion for the Happy-Minded? A Response to Harold Kushner

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Written and published by Marc Gafni in 1986 for Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Vol. 22, No. 3 (FALL 1986), pp. 54-65.

In a very profound way, Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Avon Books, 1981) and the themes it treats evoke in the reader feelings of warmth, compassion, and drawing one closer to all who suffer in this world. The tragic story of Aaron Kushner (the author’s son) and the very real depth with which his parents experienced suffering cannot but make one feel like reaching out in love and respect to the author. Yet, at the same time, I found the underlying premises of the book deeply troubling. Its message, meant to be comforting, is, in fact, nothing short of terrifying.

Kushner, claiming to speak for Judaism, asserts that God is, in his term, “powerless” (pp. 42-44). “God does not, and cannot, intervene in human affairs to avert tragedy and suffering. At most, He offers us His divine comfort, and expresses His divine anger that such horrible things happen to people. God, in the face of tragedy, is impotent. The most God can do,” Kushner eloquently proclaims, “is to stand on the side of the victim; not the executioner.”

That God gives free reign to an executioner is a common Jewish position, classical, medieval and modern. “Once permission is given for the destroyer to destroy, no distinction is made between the righteous and the wicked.” (Rashi Exodus 12:22).

While Judaism certainly maintains that God, in His divine empathy, stands on the side of the victim, no classical Jewish position has ever maintained that God is incapable of controlling the executioner.

Kushner uses the book of Job to lend the weight of religious authority to his position. Merely to point out the obvious-that Kushner’s interpretation of the book of Job, for instance, has little or nothing to do with the Biblical book by that name-fails to undermine the popular appeal that has propelled Kushner’s book to the bestseller lists. In fact, Kushner feels quite comfortable admitting to intellectual dishonesty. In an interview with Moment magazine (November 1981), he was asked: “You argue that it is simply wrong to blame God for the bad luck, for the nastiness, for the evil; and yet you are perfectly prepared to praise God for the good, to thank God. How do you reconcile that?” To which he carefully replied: “Walter Kaufman calls it ‘religious gerrymandering’.’ That is you draw the lines for your definition of God to include certain things and exclude others.”

While I certainly believe that profound suffering moved Kushner to take up his pen, that still cannot justify intellectual gerrymandering.

The heart of Kushner’s position is the claim that traditional beliefs about God’s relationship to the universe, and to man, are wrong, and that his own account is right.

Kushner’s basic method of argumentation is anecdotal. He cites particular cases of suffering and then a,· mpts to demonstrate the inadequacy of various theodicies as applied to those cases. But the best theodicy is still a human, all too human, theodicy. No theodicy can give pat answers for every circumstance of suffering. Theological reflection can deepen our appreciation of the problem and provide frames of reference with which to approach the experience of suffering. However, from no single set of theological premises can an all-embracing solution be expected. God, we believe, knows the results of all good and evil, past, present, and future, and measures the diverse values (spiritual; intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, hedonic, etc.) which the universe displays, and with which man is confronted. Man does not. Therefore, we must beware of “refuting” theological reflection by showing that it has difficulty fulfilling claims that it has never made.

II

It is instructive to examine Kushner’s position on his own terms. This section of the essay will comment on six of the life cases which Kushner cites to support his general conception of religion, his rejection of classic theodicy and his central claim: that God cannot control what happens in our world.

The Case of Bob (pp. 94-96)

Bob has just made the difficult decision to place his mother in a nursing home. Although his mother is “basically alert and healthy and does not require medical care” she can no longer live alone. After a brief attempt, Bob and his family decide that “they are not prepared to make the sacrifice of time and lifestyle which caring for a sick, old woman requires.” That weekend, Bob, who did not usually go to synagogue, went to services hoping they would give him “the tranquility and peace of mind he needed.” As luck would have it, the sermon that morning was on the fifth commandment. The clergyman spoke of the sacrifices parents make in raising children and the reluctance of children to make sacrifices for older parents in return. He asked: “Why is it one mother can care for six children, but six children can’t care for one mother?” It bothers Kushner that Bob was made to leave the service feeling “hurt and angry.” Bob feels that religion has told him that he is a “selfish and uncaring person.” He is haunted by the idea that if she dies soon he will never be able to live with himself “for having made her last years miserable because of his selfishness.” And Kushner, too, is upset with religion because “the purpose of religion should be to make us feel good about ourselves” after making difficult decisions. (more…)

Is Religion for the Happy-Minded? A Response to Harold Kushner2023-11-01T04:56:14-07:00

A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis

Download a Preview Draft of the Essay

Excerpt from the Pre-Version of the Book

The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships

The Evolution of Relationships

In Response to the Meta-Crisis

By Dr. Marc Gafni

&

Barbara Marx Hubbard

Decades of research and study have led us to the conclusion, as we will briefly unpack below, that only a New Story of Value can avert unimaginable suffering or worse and change the vector of history towards ever-deepening expressions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As perceptive historians point out, history changes when a compelling New Story [hi-story] emerges that changes the vector of cultural evolution.

Indeed, it is only a New Story that has the capacity to change the course of history. Technology matters. But the story we tell about technology matters as well. Exponential technology matters. But the story we tell about exponential technology matters exponentially more.

Without such a new, shared, evolving Story of Value, our capacity to escape unbearable suffering and, based on hardheaded analysis, even extinction seems, from a human perspective, unlikely. The results of not being able to articulate a New Story of Value are excruciating, both in the level of suffering for billions of human beings, as well as the entire life system—and, more than even all that, 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. 

This essay is also part of a whole volume, The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships: The Evolution of Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis. The purpose of that volume and its companion volume The Future of Relationships: On the Evolution of Love is to provide a first articulation of this New Story of Value in the domain of relationship, which, as we will see below, is the core structure of Reality itself.

The Ontology of Story: Story Is the Structure of the Real

Postmodernity argues that Reality is merely a story, that no story is better or worse than any other story, and that stories are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.[1]

But of course, postmodernity is not only deconstructing the ontology, or Reality, of Story, but also the ontology, or Real Nature of Value.[2]

These deconstructions of Story and Value are true but partial. It is true that there is a plentitude of stories we tell about Reality, and that Story is the underling unit that constitutes Reality. But it is not true that Story is mere fiction. There is a plentitude of stories, not because there is no Real Value or Meaning, but rather because there is a plentitude of Value and Meaning.

Story is the structure of the Real. This is what we have referred to, in other contexts, as the Ontology of Story. Story itself is the source code, not only of culture and consciousness, but of all of Reality all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.[3] It is for that reason that to evolve the Story is to evolve the source code.

Emergent from the recognition of the Ontology of Story is the recognition that we live in inescapable narrative frameworks—Stories of Value—which define the nature and quality of both our personal and collective human lives.

Stories are not merely randomly contrived conjectures. Rather, stories are attempts to gather information, interior and exterior information about the nature of Reality, and translate it into a coherent Story of Value.

Not all stories are equal. There is a hierarchy of stories. In other words, there are better and worse stories.

A better story takes deeper account of more meaning or information, exterior and interior, and weaves that meaning and information together in the most elegant, good, true, and beautiful fashion.

A better story is aligned with more and wider Fields of Value, even as it integrates more contradictions into greater wholes.

A better story weaves a narrative thread that articulates the most coherent and compelling framework that embraces, honors, and uplifts the most-possible people.

A better story must be not only an eternal story—aligned with eternal structures of value—but also an evolving story, aligned with the evolution of value—the evolution of love—the evolution of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

A better story is an eternal and evolving story.

We cannot trust stories that claim to be only eternal stories, or that claim to be ever-evolving stories with no ground in Eternity—in the Real, which is not dependent on the changing mores of time. The more deeply we investigate Cosmos, both in its exterior and interior faces, deploying the interior and exterior sciences, the more accurate—and the better, truer, and more beautiful—story we can tell.[4]

A story with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines can bring us—and indeed has brought us—to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it. To respond to this meta-crisis, we need to evolve the story, which is to evolve the source code of culture itself.

What Is the Meta-Crisis?

A simple image:

Let’s turn to a cultural artifact, the Death Star in that cinematic classic of the late twentieth, early twenty-first, century—Star Wars.

The Death Star is a battleship armed so intensely that it poses an existential risk—that means that it has the destructive capacity not just to attack and damage but to destroy a planet. (more…)

A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis2023-12-26T09:17:44-08:00

About Dr. Marc Gafni

A Few Links Before We Get Started

Dr. Marc Gafni’s Bibliography
First Principles & First Values
Essays on Substack
One Mountain, Many Paths

Note to reader: we gently recommend that you track the provided links, which supply in-depth information and context to this bio-page.

Dr. Marc Gafni has been described as a world philosopher — a kind of galaxy heart brain — integrating wisdom from across multiple disciplines into what he has called a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis.

One cultural critic described Gafni as a cross between Einstein, Da Vinci, and Rumi, with a dash of Robin Williams working at the cutting edge of the new narrative, collaborating with a team of leading-edge thinkers articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

Another wrote, “Gafni thinks in terms of panoramic vision but with an attention to intricate nuance and detail, which together generate a level of beauty and truth that, as Michael Murphy wrote, changes the game. And yet, he has the capacity to speak to virtually any audience with a direct sincerity, passion, and simple precision that melts hearts and blows open minds.”

The renowned feminist theorist, cultural critic, and spiritual teacher Sally Kempton described Gafni as one of the great heart masters of this generation.

Gafni is playing a pivotal role in evolving a new dharma or meta-theory of meaning overflowing with heart — a new set of distinctions that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in global consciousness and culture.

Gafni’s doctorate is from Oxford University with a masters degree from Bar Ilan University. He holds an orthodox rabbinic certification from the Chief Rabbinate in Israel and non-denominational rabbinic ordination.

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

The Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism

In 2010, Gafni co-initiated the Center for World Spirituality with his close friend, leading Integral philosopher Ken Wilber. [Read Wilber about Gafni here.] The Center, which changed its name in 2023 to Center for World Philosophy and Religion, has evolved over the last twelve years into one of the most creative and audacious voices on the world scene. The mission of the Center is to articulate a download into the source code of culture and consciousness, what Gafni, together with the Center’s co-president Dr. Zachary Stein, has called a shared grammar of value — a New Story of Valuein response to existential risk. The name that they have given this New Story of Value is CosmoErotic Humanism.

Aubrey Marcus, the new board chair of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, has called his encounter with Gafni and CosmoErotic Humanism “the most paradigm shifting podcast I have ever recorded.”

Marcus, Gafni, Stein, the board of directors of the Center, and its leadership teams have founded the World Spirituality and Religion Press, which will be the primary publisher of the New Story of Value, with a commitment to deliver the New Story into the very heart of culture.

His present writing is fully focused on the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism, which focuses on the emergence of a new human civilization in response to the meta-crisis. His core writing and intellectual partner in these books is Dr. Zachary Stein. Marc works closely as well in this regard and others with Editorial Director and research associate Kerstin Tuschik. A second key project is the Phenomenology of Eros, together with Stephanie Valcke and Aubrey Marcus. The project director is Dr. Kristina Kincaid.

Marc, in visionary partnership with Aubrey Marcus, is preparing key popular, co-authored presentations of CosmoErotic Humanism for the mainstream public. Marcus is also the founding publisher and co-initiator of World Philosophy and Religion Press.

All four of the aforementioned interlocutors are dear friends and have engaged in extensive private study with Gafni, which is referred to as Holy of Holies study, generally for over ten years and minimally for hundreds of sessions. Holy of Holies is a sacred term, drawn from the Solomon Temple tradition, referring to the direct experience and study of the interior sciences. This is true of many of Gafni’s collaborators, who are both partners, close friends, and have also participated in Holy of Holies study in great depth. We mention this only to indicate the depth of the shared effort and collaborations, which is not project-based but rather emerges from a far deeper partnership, practice, study, commitment, and vision.

The core writings of CosmoErotic Humanism emerge from Gafni’s earlier work.  These volumes are described as the first six stages in Gafni’s work on his author page on the Integral Publisher website.They include the Hebrew volumes, Reclaiming Certainty (The Certain Spirit), Reclaiming Uncertainty as a Spiritual Value (The Uncertain Spirit), Soul Prints, The Mystery of Love, The Erotic and the Holy, Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion, and Rosh Hashanah, and the two volumes of Radical Kabbalah. The books were widely recognized as seminal. Radical Kabbalah is introduced with a letter by the leading Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel, who was Gafni’s doctoral supervisor at Oxford University, and was described by Dr. Zak Stein as “Works like this come along once in a generation.

These earlier writings and their relationship to CosmoErotic Humanism are currently being discussed in a dialogue series with Layman Pascal.

At present, some of Gafni’s key books are published by the prestigious Integral Publishers and other titles by Simon and Schuster. Future volumes are slated for publication with World Philosophy and Religion Press.

The Three Great Questions of CosmoErotic Humanism

At the core of the New Story of Value are what Gafni and Stein call the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism.

The first question is Where are we? This is the great question of the Universe Story.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling The Universe: A Love Story.  [See also a second contextual essay on the Universe: A Love Story and how that includes and transcends the classical religious and scientific Universe Stories.]

The second question is Who are you? This is the great question of personal identity.

The Your Unique Self, and Unique Self Theory, is CosmoErotic Humanism’s response to this question. Here is a link to Marc Gafni discussing Unique Self Theory with Ken Wilber and, in a more popular context, with Aubrey Marcus (Who are you? Part 1  and Who are you? Part 2).

The third great question of CosmoErotic Humanism is What is there to do? Or said differently: What is our deepest desire and deepest need? (see also Who are you? Part 1  and Who are you? Part 2)

The responses to these three questions are the ground for the emergence of a New Story of Value that has the capacity to generate a New Human and a New Humanity in response to the meta-crisis. 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 in response to the meta-crisis.

We Live in a Time Between Stories

The key argument of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion is that we live — like in the Renaissance — in a time between worlds and a time between stories.

As the world broke down around them, Da Vinci and a small band in the Renaissance told a New Story of Value. That new story — to the extent that its plotlines were accurate, good, true, and beautiful, and firmly rooted in both the interior and exterior sciences — raised all boats and birthed all the great dignities of modernity. To the extent, however, that they ignored key plotlines in the Universe Story, for example, the articulation of a universal shared grammar of value, they seeded what have now become the disasters of modernity — which are the root causes for the meta-crisis of existential risk. [See Aubrey Marcus’ podcast featuring Marc Gafni on Responding to the Meta-Crisis.]

In this new time between worlds and time between stories, where the challenges and risks, as well as the potentials, are exponentially greater than those of the Renaissance, the only response that will change the vector of history is the one that lifted humanity out of the dark ages into the Renaissance: To tell a New Story of Value. It is only a New Story of Value that has the power to change the vector of history.

And this time, we must integrate the best of all the new stories and not leave any core plotlines out. We need interior sciences and wisdom teachings as well exterior sciences, merged together into a larger whole, to be the ground of our shared grammar of value.

The core mission of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion is the research, articulation, and writing of the Great Library, which tells this New Story of Value. The Great Library is a collection of books and media projects to function as a strange attractor toward our memory of the future.

The Great Library is made up of two kinds of books — foundational books and impact books. The synergistic introduction of these books into public culture is aimed directly at catalyzing a crucial, pivotal evolution of today’s consciousness and culture. At this phase-shift inflection in human history, without this conscious evolving of the source code of consciousness and culture, humanity will likely not survive the existential risks now threatening our civilization.

The Great Library is an expression of our mission at the Center to evolve the source code of culture and to participate in the evolution of love. ​Through writing and publishing, we create what we are calling the Great Library, a body of work written as our response to the question: What do we need to give our children, so they can prosper and grow into their highest potential — even though we don’t know what kind of challenges they will face in their lives?

​That Great Library provides us with a shared language, a framework, or a context, from which we can co-create together a world that works for everyone. To have shared values, a shared framework, or what we call shared memetic structures, is one of these conditions.

Key to the entire project of the New Story of Value, as articulated in the Great Library, is what Gafni and Stein call Anthro-Ontology. Anthro-Ontology answers the question of: How do we know what we know?

Citation from Gafni: Love or Die

To get a sense of Gafni’s and the work of the Center at this stage, the following slightly extended citation from a recent essay might be helpful.

However, feel free to also skip down below if you are interested in immediately following the thread of vision, books, projects, and colleagues that we will briefly unfold below.

Citation from Gafni:

Eros is life. The failure of Eros destroys life. Our lack of Eros is poised to destroy the world. We call this existential risk, or the second shock of existence.

The first shock of existence is the realization — at the dawn of human existence — that the skull grins at the banquet. Life, before it continues, is first confronted by death. The first shock of existence is the death of the individual human being.

The second shock of existence is the death of humanity, or in a second form, the death of our humanity.

All civilizations have fallen because the stories that they lived in were, in some sense, stories based on rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics. Every civilization was weakened by interior polarization caused by the lack of a shared story of value.

We now have a global civilization, but we haven’t created a shared story of value. We haven’t solved the generator functions that caused all civilizations to fall. Our global civilization has exponential technologies and extraction models depleting the earth of resources that it took billions of years to create, which is going to lead to a civilizational collapse.

Existential risk: risk to our very existence.

The choice is clear: love or die.

It is that simple. Eros is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet.

In the last half a century modern psychology has documented an age old truth: a fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personal and global — even with all the resources of intelligence and technology at our disposal — will die without being held in love. In the embrace of Eros.

We must embrace a personal path of love and a global politics of love.

Not ordinary love. Not love which is mere human sentiment — but Eros, or what we sometimes call Outrageous Love, which is the heart of existence itself.

We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.

We stand in this moment poised between utopia and dystopia. We are at a time between worlds and a time between stories. We need a New Story of Value, eternal yet evolving, rooted in First Principles and First Values, which would become a universal grammar of value, a context for our diversity.

This is exactly what the Renaissance was — it was a time between worlds and a time between stories. In the Renaissance, we were swept with and challenged by the Black Death, a pandemic that swept Europe. The Black Death destroyed between a third to half of Europe and a huge part of Asia. It killed everyone. People died horrifically, brutally, in the streets. They had no idea how to meet this challenge, and so, in response to the Black Death, da Vinci and Ficino and their cohorts understood that they have to tell a new story of value — and that story was the story of modernity.

Did they get the story right? They got part of it right, and this birthed, to use Jürgen Habermas’ phrase, the dignities of modernity, the new way of information-gathering and universal human rights — but they deconstructed the source of value.

They lost the basis for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The basis used to be divine revelation: God told us. But it was owned by every religion, and every religion had overreached and over-claimed. The revelation was often mediated through cultural categories and wasn’t fully accurate — so modernity threw out revelation, but was unable able to establish a new basis for value. Value was just assumed to be real; as it says in the founding document of American revolution, we hold these truths to be self-evident — that is, we don’t really have a basis for value, but we just take that as a given. In other words, modernity took out a loan of social capital from the traditional world.

The source of value has never been worked out, and then, gradually, value began to collapse. The Universe story began to collapse. The belief that the good, the true, and the beautiful are real began to collapse. The belief that love is real began to collapse. As Bertrand Russell is reported to have said,

“I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I do not like it.”

What do you do if you grew up in a world in which value is not real? A world without a source of value, without a Universe story, without a story of human identity, without a story of desire, without a narrative of power? In the words of W.B.Yeats, the center does not hold. We become the hollow men and the stuffed men, gesture without form. You have a collapse at the very center of society, because you no longer have Eros. You no longer have a reality in which value is real — and so you have this lingering sense of emptiness. You have a complete collapse at the very center — and that’s the source of existential risk.

We are faced with global challenges. The only way we can meet them is through genuine global coordination.

  • Global coordination requires shared global will — political will and moral will.
  • We cannot arouse global will without global resonance — we need to resonate with each other like instruments resonate in the symphony.
  • We cannot have global resonance without global coherence.
  • We cannot have global coherence without global intimacy — but we are confronted with a global intimacy disorder.

We define intimacy as shared identity in the context of relative otherness. This is expressed in what we call the Intimacy equation:

Intimacy = shared identity in the context of [relative] otherness x mutuality of recognition x mutuality of pathos x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose.

The global intimacy disorder is the root cause for existential risk, underlying its core generator functions. The global intimacy disorder is rooted in the failure to experience ourselves in a field of shared intrinsic value, which derives from the deconstruction of value.

Indeed, it is wholly accurate to say that the root cause of the two generator functions of existential risk is the failed story of intrinsic value, or what we might also call the breakdown of Eros.

    • The first generator function is the success story. Our modern success story is rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metics, which violates all the terms of the Intimacy equation: there is no shared identity and no mutuality of recognition, feeling, value or purpose, and instead of relative otherness, there is alienated otherness. Such a story generates complicated fragile systems with no allurement or intimacy between the parts, systems which optimize for efficiency (as an expression of win-lose metric) and not for resiliency and life.
    • The second generator function is the deconstruction of intrinsic value The deconstruction of value means that human value does not participate in any sense in the intrinsic value of the real, for the real is dogmatically declared to have no intrinsic value. Thus, there is no shared identity between the interior of the human being and reality. There is no common participation in a field of shared intrinsic value. Instead of intimacy with value we are alienated from value — and only intrinsic value can arouse will — political, moral, and social will.

To sum up, without a shared grammar of value there is no global intimacy, and therefore no global coherence, and no global coordination in response to catastrophic and existential risk, which means — put simply — there will be, quite literally, no future.

If the global intimacy disorder is the root cause of the generator functions of existential risk then the root cause of the global intimacy disorder is the collapse of First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value.

To solve Russell’s challenge, the apparent argument for the subjectivity of ethical values, we have to reground value theory in eternal yet evolving First Principles and First Values, and articulate a New Story of Value as a context of our diversity, which we call CosmoErotic Humanism.

A New Story doesn’t mean a made-up story. It means doing the hard work of integrating the validated insights of the traditional world, the modern world, and the postmodern world. This is the intention at the heart of CosmoErotic Humanism. CosmoErotic Humanism, together with other emergent strands, needs to become the ground of a world religion as a context for our diversity. We need religion even as we need science to articulate a shared global grammar of value.

At the core of this New Story of Value is what we term the interior sciences, which engage Value as Eros, or what we term ErosValue, as the primary structure of Reality and form the ground for CosmoErotic Humanism, the New Story of Value, and the shared grammar of evolving value as a context for our diversity.

Now we return to our thread from above.

Organizations that Partner with the Center for World Philosophy and Religion

Homo Amor Project

The science-based vision of Homo amor takes issue with the dogmatic materialism that lies at the core of the popular vision of the human being presented in works like Sapiens and Homo Deus. It offers a coherent vision of humanitya new science-based story grounded in First Principles — which rejects the dogmas of both religious and scientific fundamentalism. Homo amor is a new set of evolutionary frameworks that offer an evolving new-story vision of identity, the Universe, community, and power, without which we cannot successfully confront the magnitude of risks with which we are confronted.

David J. Temple

David J. Temple is a fictional personality created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific additional luminary writers may be named as part of the collaboration.

Great works that change the course of history are rarely attributed to a sole author, think the Upanishads, the Zohar, of the Bible. Or they are attributed to a single author as a fictional figure who holds the energy of that transmission into culture, think the Zohar or, according to many scholars, William Shakespeare. Such an authorship allows the writing to transcend the rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose dynamic that often drives writing projects and is itself one of the primary generator functions of the meta-crisis.

Such authorship also grounds the writing to be rooted in a broader community of leading thinkers and teachers who come together to evolve culture as a collective, what we refer to at the Center as a Unique Self Symphony.

The foundational Homo amor books — eight in total — will be authored by David J. Temple. Other key works in CosmoErotic Humanism will be authored by Marc and Zak, including key works around the Universe: A Love Story, metapsychology, personal myth, and more.

The Eros Project | Phenomenology of Eros Books

The Eros Project is researching and writing an opus-magnum, game-changing, twelve-volume New Phenomenology of Eros. The director of the project is Dr. Kristina Kincaid. The premise of the Eros Project is the reclaiming of a scientific vision of Eros and its First Principles as the animating lifeforce and information that is the source code for the self-actualizing Cosmos as well as the ethical driver of our lives. Eros, scientifically understood as the animating energy of evolution living uniquely in each of us, is an indispensable building block in the articulation of shared global ethos for a global civilization.

One Mountain, Many Paths

Together with the late Barbara Marx Hubbard, Gafni co-founded One Mountain, Many Paths. The group gathers weekly every Sunday as a Global Communion of Pioneering Souls committed to articulating First Principles and First Values and a New Story for a New Humanity. Or, as Marc and Barbara said together, a Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies. One Mountain is held by an excellent leadership team, constantly innovating and upleveling the vision and its delivery.

Unique Self Institute

Gafni is co-founder of the Unique Self Institute with Claire Molinard. The Unique Self Institute, directed by Claire Molinard, is committed to answering the questions of Who am I and Who Are You? — and in doing so, to articulate a shared narrative of identity that transforms both our experience of ourselves and of each other in a fundamental way. Claire is joined by David Cicerchii at the helm of Unique Self Institute. Claire and David have been deep in study of CosmoErotic Humanism and Unique Self Theory with Gafni for over ten years. This new theory of self is core to the way we do education, politics, relationships, economics, psychology, and everything else.

Outrageous Love Project

Gafni is co-founder of the Integral Evolutionary Tantra Institute and the Outrageous Love Project with his evolutionary partner Dr. Kristina Kincaid.

Foundation for Conscious Evolution

Dr. Gafni is the Evolutionary Scholar in Residence and — since Barbara’s Marx Hubbard’s passing — the Director at the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.

The Foundation for Conscious Evolution was founded by Barbara Marx Hubbard and continued by Dr. Marc Gafni. The purpose of the books and activist projects of this division is to articulate the momentous idea of Conscious Evolution: that Conscious Evolution is rooted in the tradition of Evolutionary Spirituality, itself sources in crystallizations of the interior sciences that appeared in the renaissance.

Together with author and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, Dr. Marc Gafni has been working on a series of new works revolving around Evolutionary Spirituality.

In parallel, Marc Gafni and Andrew Cohen are actively dialoguing to establish the parameters of an emergent Evolutionary World Spirituality.

Eros Mystery School

Creating Evolutionary We-Space to practice Outrageous Love in community remains one of our core missions at the Eros Mystery School. Krista Steenbergen is the Co-Director of the Eros Mystery School, together with Dr. Marc Gafni. The Mystery School is an evolutionary educational platform that acts as a source of both renewal and inspiration, as we combine our individual transformation with taking an active stand in the world, for the healing and transformation of the collective whole.

It is intellectually challenging and spiritually incorrect. It stands out from the spiritual clichés and speaks truth to power with laughter, delight, integrity, and “Outrageous Love”, a core term in Unique Self theory and in Cosmo Erotic Humanism as developed by Marc Gafni.

For a taste of Eros Mystery School, read this beautiful poem.

The Crossing

A three-day journey that transforms you and society. From Homo sapiens to Homo Amor. There is outrageous pain in the world… this is an invitation to outrageous love and courageous action. You will learn to love in a way you have never loved before, you will find a resolve for a better world you didn’t know you had. You will undergo an identity shift that brings a new sense of meaning and purpose to your life.

The Crossing is our response to the meta-crisis looming over us, our children, and our children’s children. Our goal is to create a new cultural meme which can spread round the globe.

The Symposium Series

The Center for World Philosophy and Religion has recently initiated a symposium series in conjunction with the Monastic Academy.

This is how it has been described: Motive is to create an intensification of Spirit adequate to the historical moment. The goal is to work towards resolving the meta-crisis at the level of superstructure — to collaborate in the shaping and telling of a new World Philosophy.

In the context of planetary meta-crisis, we will convene a select group to work at the level of worldview foundations. We have an interest in articulating a philosophical and religious vision adequate to our times.

This symposium series focuses on the system of First Principles and First Values that are at the core of this work. The frameworks and distinctions offered weave together a Story of Value capable of reviving our faltering civilization, and thus offer a vision of the future beyond the metacrisis.

The Leadership of the Center

There are different groups of individuals who provide leadership or vision for the organization in different capacities.

The Center for World Philosophy and Religion and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution each has a distinct legal board which makes its decisions. All the decisions are made collectively by the appropriate board and board leadership. This listing includes present and former board members, advisory board members, research fellows, faculty, and officers of the organizations. The leadership group gathered around the Office for the Future brings together a leading group of committed thought leaders, civic and business leaders and activists.

Former Board Chairs include in order of their service:

  • Lori Galperin
  • Barbara Marx Hubbard
  • John P. Mackey of Whole Foods
  • Kate Maloney
  • Carrie Kish
  • Adam Bellow
  • Shareef Malnik
  • Gabrielle Anwar.

Our current Board Chair is Aubrey Marcus.

The Holding Container for All the Projects: The Office for the Future

The holding ground for the entire vision and all of the aforementioned entities and projects is the Office for the Future.

All of these initiatives function under the larger umbrella of the Office for the Future, co-founded by Barbara Marx Hubbard, Marc Gafni, Zachary Stein, and chaired by Stephanie Valcke, with Wouter Torfs and Mathi Gijbels as co-chairs.

Earlier Contexts:

Biographical Context of Gafni’s Work

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.

He is a Rabbinic lineage holder in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah, as well as a close reader and student of world philosophies. In the latter context, he has served as guest editor of the academic Journal of Integral Theory and Practice on issues of Integral spirituality and a faculty member of J.F.K. University.

Gafni self-describes as a citizen of both the new lineage of World Spirituality even as he continues to practice in the classical first practices of the Hebrew wisdom Solomon lineage. Gafni has initiated multiple leading-edge visionary programs including writing and hosting a leading National Television show on a major network in the Middle East on Ethics and Spirit.

Gafni also initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and movie with John Mackey and Kate Maloney, whose method and movement was 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 Evolutionary Love.

Addendum

It is historically true that many of the great figures of history were profoundly attacked in their days. The attack almost always critiqued not only their philosophical or scientific positions or their political leadership, but always went to defame and demean their character.

One such figure is Dr. Marc Gafni. He is, according to all reports, friend and foe alike, one of the most brilliant thinkers on the scene today, with a contribution to make that, according to his friends and supporters, is critically important at this particular juncture in our political and social history. Gafni and his partner Dr. Kristina Kincaid recently met to discuss the context and the experience of public attack with Aubrey Marcus in a moving interview. A full refutation of any false claims made over the years appears at WhoIsMarcGafni.com.

Learn more about Dr. Gafni’s teaching at:

www.officeforthefuture.com

www.centerforintegralwisdom.org

www.marcgafni.com

www.WhoIsMarcGafni.com

PRAISE FOR RADICAL KABBALAH

Ken Wilber, Integral Philosopher

“A work of inspired, audacious scholarship. The breadth, depth and the sheer importance of this work moved me.

I immediately recognized it as a seminal work, identifying a critical lineage of enlightenment from the tradition of Kabbalah, which needed to be incorporated into the Integral model.

All this will inform the emergence of a genuine framework for a world spirituality based on Integral principles — a critical need at this moment in time.”

Zachary Stein, Integral Scholar, Metrics Theorist, Harvard University

“Gafni’s books are unrivaled in their provision of a profoundly new language of liberation. These are teachings for our time — a time to practice spirituality in the world, fearlessly, with eyes open, and to participate in a planet needing to be transformed by the power of justice and love.

Read these books. You will be compelled by the rigor and depth of the scholarship while swooning from the depth and beauty of the ideas. Works like this come once in a generation.”

Sally Kempton, Author of Meditation for the Love of It

“Marc Gafni has written a magisterial work. Like Gafni himself, it combines depth of intellect with integrity of heart and has much to teach us, both from a scholarly perspective and as a contemporary transmission of what Gafni calls Evolutionary Kabbalah.

In short, the book provides an spiritual, intellectual and existential matrix for Gafni’s teaching on Unique Self as an enlightened individual expression of the divine. This is one of Lainer’s most important and radical ideas, and it has, as Gafni describes it here, profound implications for the understanding of enlightenment in the post-traditional American spiritual community.”

Prof. Richard Mann, University of Michigan, Editor, Transpersonal Series, Suny Press

“This work by Dr. Marc Gafni makes a landmark contribution to a number of fields. I am reminded in reading of the legitimate excitement that was generated by Elaine Pagels and others as they opened up the parallel tradition of the Gnostic gospels that had been expunged from the Church’s teaching.

I expect Gafni to gradually emerge as one of the significant intellectual figures of our time, making a substantive contribution to the evolution of consciousness.”

PRAISE FOR A RETURN TO EROS

“Marc and Kristina are going where few dare to go. They are showing us what it means to live a fully erotic life.”

—John  Gray,  bestselling  author  of  Men  Are  from  Mars,  Women Are  from  Venus

A Return to Eros is the map for the new human. Read it and be forever enlivened and transformed! I believe this is the most compelling invita-tion ever written to live the Erotic Life. It changed my life.”

—Kristen  Ulmer,  former  professional  extreme  skier  and  author of  The  Art  of  Fear

“Surrender to this book. Erudite, provocative, and filled with lively insights, there is much to be learned from it about the sexual confusion of our times.”

—Adam  Bellow,  author  of  In  Praise  of  Nepotism:  A  History  of Family  Enterprise  from  King  David  to  George  W.  Bush

A Return to Eros is a book written with no hang-ups, no compromises, and no holds barred. It rocks!”

—Jonny  Podell,  iconic  American  rock  ’n’  roll  music  agent  at the  Podell  Talent  Agency

“I’ve known Kristina for many decades . . . great to see she is sharing her life work with the world . . . Join the outrageous love train!”

—Shep  Gordon,  legendary  rock  ’n’  roll  manager  and  New  York Times  bestselling  author  of  They  Call  Me  Supermensch

A Return to Eros evolves our understanding of love, and does it in a way that will transform your own experience of love and Eros. It is a radi-cally inspiring and important book that can help all of us recognize more deeply how love’s energy literally drives reality.”

Sally  Kempton,  author  of  Awakening  Shakti

A Return to Eros should be placed on the shelf next to the great works on emotional and sexual emancipation, including Marcuse’s Eros and Civi-lization and O Brown’s Life Against Death. Gafni and Kincaid remind us that eros and ethics are inseparable, that we must free the erotic from the ghetto of the merely sexual, and in so doing awaken our passion for truth and justice. There may be no more urgent lesson for our culture, which now stands on the brink of another descent into barbarism, that it is through and from love that true power flows.”

—Zak Stein, EdD (Harvard), Co-President of the Center for for World Philosophy and Religion, co-founder of Lectica, Inc.

PRAISE FOR MARC GAFNI’S YOUR UNIQUE SELF

“It is very rare that one comes across a teacher or a book that is ‘changing the game.’ My friend, Dr. Marc Gafni, is such a teacher. He is a rare com-bination of brilliance, depth, and heart. Marc’s teaching on the Unique Self in an evolutionary context is ‘changing the game.’”

—Michael  Murphy,  founder  of  Esalen  Institute  and  author  of Golf  in  the  Kingdom

Your Unique Self could only have been written by someone who pas-sionately lives his own uniqueness. Marc Gafni is a brilliant teacher and heart master with a rare capacity for empathy and a gift for creating com-munity. This book contains the essence of his teaching on what it means to live from an enlightened life from a ground of one’s own personal uniqueness. This is a book that deserves to become a classic.”

—Sally  Kempton,  author  of  Meditation  for  the  Love  of  It

“Dr. Marc Gafni’s Unique Self teaching is seminal. What you hold in your hands is a radically exciting and groundbreaking book that will change forever not only how you think about enlightenment, but how you understand, from a post-metaphysical perspective, the very nature of human life itself. The Unique Self work is magnificent, and it belongs among the ‘great books.’

—Ken  Wilber,  author  of  A  Brief  History  of  Everything

“At last—a safe, precise, and potent infusion—Unique Self ! Not so much a book, as an antidote, Unique Self stands with spiritual teacher, scholar, and master, Marc Gafni’s Soulprints and Mystery of Love as a trilogy of love and healing for humanity. Read and be restored.”

—Lori  Halperin,  leading  clinician  and  theorist  in  fields  of marital  and  sexual  dysfunction

“With exceptional brilliance and an awakened heart, Dr. Marc Gafni speaks to all of us who are interested in the evolution of consciousness.

His teachings on the Unique Self enlightenment are essential for the next stage in our evolution. They have emerged from his direct experience, and I highly recommend them.”

—Michael  Bernard  Beckwith,  author  of  Spiritual  Liberation: Fulfilling  Your  Soul’s  Potential

“Marc, a fellow drinker at the holy taverns has written a fine, fine book. Kabbalists say a Day of Tikkun (evolution, soul-repair) is coming. There are great stories here from the Hasidic masters and from Marc’s own life, honoring the unique soulmaking that has brought you to this moment. This book will deepen that astonishing mystery and awaken you to the individual beauty of your path.”

—Coleman  Barks,  author  of  Rumi:  The  Big  Red  Book

“Marc Gafni’s overflowing heart and transmission of the Unique Self teaching profoundly moves me. Dr. Marc holds the lineage energy of the great Hasidic masters of Kabbalah, which he brings with him into the visionary initiative of Center for Integral Wisdom. There is little doubt in my mind that Your Unique Self: The Future of Enlightenment will become one of the classic texts that forms the World Spirit vision that our world needs so deeply.”

—Lama  Surya  Das,  author  of  Awakening  the  Buddha  Within: Tibetan  Wisdom  for  the  Western  World  and  founder  of  the Dzogchen  Meditation  Centers

“At this historic moment, our human mind is passing the border toward a new consciousness. Marc Gafni is far enough ahead of most of us to articulate insights he gained beyond that borderline. Yet, like all great teachers, the author becomes transparent. Here is an invitation and a great opportunity to listen—not to Marc Gafni, but to your Unique Self. Thus this book becomes an indispensable travel guide into the realm of a vast new consciousness.”

—Brother  David  Steindl-Rast,  Benedictine  monk  and  author  of The  Spirit  of  Practice

About Dr. Marc Gafni2024-09-09T10:57:31-07:00

Love or Die: White Paper by Dr. Marc Gafni

Download the PDF of this White Paper

Introduction

Eros is life. The failure of Eros destroys life. Our lack of Eros is poised to destroy the world. We call this existential risk, or the second shock of existence.

The first shock of existence is the realization — at the dawn of human existence — that the skull grins at the banquet. Life, before it continues, is first confronted by death. The first shock of existence is the death of the individual human being.

The second shock of existence is the death of humanity, or in a second form, the death of our humanity.

All civilizations have fallen because the stories that they lived in were, in some sense, stories based on rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. Every civilization was weakened by interior polarization caused by the lack of a shared story of value.

We now have a global civilization, but we haven’t created a shared story of value. We haven’t solved the generator functions that caused all civilizations to fall. Our global civilization has exponential technologies and extraction models depleting the earth of resources that it took billions of years to create, which is going to lead to a civilizational collapse.

Existential risk: risk to our very existence.

The choice is clear: love or die.

(more…)

Love or Die: White Paper by Dr. Marc Gafni2023-12-06T05:10:39-08:00

Three Universe Stories: Beyond Creationism and Scientism: CosmoErotic Humanism

An Early Version of a White Paper by Dr. Marc Gafni in Conversation with Dr. Zachary Stein and Barbara Marx Hubbard

This is an early draft of an essay written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a later, more advanced version of this essay that will be published in due time.

Download the PDF of this White Paper

The Evolution of Conscious Evolution

CosmoErotic Humanism, as we are describing it here and in other writings, is the next step after what has been described as Conscious Evolution. My (Marc’s) dear friend and evolutionary partner (and co-author of this short book), Barbara Marx Hubbard, has been called the mother of Conscious Evolution.

In our collaboration, she shared so much that was of value and wonder, and we were also able to evolve together the presentation of Conscious Evolution. In the old presentation, as Barbara articulated it over the years, unconscious evolution meant two things:

First, evolution until now has been unaware of itself.

And second, evolution until now has been a primarily random process, or what Barbara called evolution by chance.

In this early articulation, these two points reverse themselves in Conscious Evolution:

First, evolution has only now become conscious of itself through human awareness of evolutionary processes.

And second, we can now move from what Barbara called, evolution by chance to evolution by choice.

This early understanding is important, inspiring in certain ways, and true, but, as we together realized over many conversations, only partial.

So, we must evolve our understanding of Conscious Evolution.

In our new understanding, by Conscious Evolution we do not mean that evolution becomes conscious of itself for the first time through us.

Rather, the new vision expresses itself in at least five distinct ways:

First, from the beginning, evolution possesses its own intrinsic consciousness. In other words, evolution is inherently—at some level of depth—intelligent or conscious.

Second, the consciousness that inheres in evolution is itself evolving. This process has evolved through several stages:

from matter

to life

to mind

—and through each of their sub-stages—

e.g., within matter, the evolution

from elementary particles

to atoms

to molecules.

At each state, as Reality dances into novel becoming, consciousness itself is clearly evolving.

This does not mean that evolution is a linear movement of ever-greater consciousness in all regards, in which the earlier is always lower and the latter always higher.[1] According to a vast literature based on empirical observation, various forms such as bacteria, anthills, and beehives seem to have depths of superorganism consciousness that human beings have not (yet) cultivated.

Indeed, the simple exercise of epistemic humility[2] reminds us that we do not have interior access to the quality of consciousness of any dimension of Reality other than our own.

At the same time, there are dimensions of consciousness that most definitely seem to evolve in some genuine fashion.

For example, there seems to be a clear evolution of the potential for ever-deeper goodness, truth, and beauty. To the best of our knowledge, there are no hospitals caring for the vulnerable animals in the wild, nor is there a general felt sense of kindness, care, or sacrifice for the sake of a stranger who is not of one’s kind.[3]

Moreover, in the worlds of matter and life, there do not seem to be creations of art, drama, music, literature, or the like, as we know them in the human world of value, including the classic triad of goodness, truth, and beauty. There also does not seem to be a process that transmits and evolves truth through bodies of knowledge, like science or moral philosophy.

It is therefore fair to say that not only does evolution possess innate consciousness at the cellular level,[4] but there is also an evolution of consciousness. These first two features significantly evolve the original version of Conscious Evolution, which suggested that evolution suddenly awakens only through human consciousness.

Third, in the evolutionary process, human beings eventually emerge. In specific ways,[5] we are more evolved or advanced expressions of consciousness than anything preceding. As such, we have the capacity to become aware of the entire evolutionary process. Significantly and beautifully, the human being is now, for the first time in history, aware of the entire evolutionary story, with the capacity to tell that great story. Humans are awakening to the realization that we are Conscious Evolution in person. Evolution may have always been intelligent or conscious, but until now, we had no sense that the evolutionary story was being told.[6]

Fourth, as part of that process, human beings have become self-aware to the extent that we consciously realize that we are part of the process. Humans at the leading edge of consciousness self-identify as evolution. And more particularly, as we examine in other writings on CosmoErotic Humanism, we each realize individually that I am an irreducibly unique expression of evolutionary intelligence, desire, and intimacy. In other words, I am not just evolution generically; rather, I am the personal face of the evolutionary impulse.

Fifth, all these uniquely human qualities have together generated the Anthropocene, a global civilization with exponential technologies, in which human choice has virtually unlimited impact on the course of evolution. And humans are becoming increasingly conscious of the power of choice.

This is clearly a new level of Conscious Evolution that is just coming alive in this period of human history. In that sense, it is accurate to say that evolution is becoming aware of itself in what may be a qualitatively different way than ever before.[7] (more…)

Three Universe Stories: Beyond Creationism and Scientism: CosmoErotic Humanism2023-11-28T08:27:32-08:00
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