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Updates May/June 2024: The New Human and the New Humanity: Homo Amor

Below we link to everything that has been posted on this site in May and June 2024.

Featured Essay in May/June 2024

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 teshuka—desire.[2] Reality desires. (more…)

Read the Whole Essay

We Are Still Celebrating Our Worldwide Book Release

Our new book can be ordered worldwide from each country’s amazon and other bookstores. It is available as Paperback, eBook, and Audiobook.

From the US and Canada, it can also be ordered directly from the publisher HERE:

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

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. 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.

Order Here
Download the First Five Chapters HERE for Free

Read the Most Recent Essays on Substack

Follow Us on Substack
New Teachings Emerge from Our Weekly Sensemaking Sessions in One Mountain, Many Paths

New Podcasts in May/June 2024

Watch More
Listen More

In Case You Missed This Documentary with Dr. Marc Gafni

In collaboration with Aubrey Marcus and the Unique Self Institute

In Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein’s language: “We stand at a pivotal moment in history – a time between worlds and a time between stories  – poised between dystopia and utopia.” To bridge the gap between our external technologies and internal narratives of identity and purpose, every human and every epoch of humanity must evolve responses to three essential questions, what we refer to as the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism: “Who? Where? And What?”

  • Who am I? and Who are we?
  • Where am I? and Where are we?
  • What ought I do? and What ought we do?

In a profound analysis of our current meta-crisis and what he calls the “global intimacy disorder,” Dr. Marc Gafni draws from what he refers to as “the exterior and interior sciences” to deepen our responses to these three questions. The responses offer a new understanding of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and generate the beginning of “a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.” 

“A universal grammar of value is grounded in eternal yet evolving First Principles and First Values, which are inherent in the Intimate Universe, in which we all participate. A new grammar articulates a potent Story of intrinsic Value, with the poignancy and power to respond to the meta-crisis. At the core of this Story of Value, called CosmoErotic Humanism, is a new narrative of identity, both personal and collective. Principles of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony contribute to the shaping of a shared reality that is flawed and human, filled with holy and broken Hallelujahs. Yet, that Reality reaches insistently towards better tomorrows that are suffused with ever-deepening Eros and ethos, kindness, and creativity.”

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Dr. Marc Gafni: Our First Steps as “Homo amor” – FREE Abridged Course

This 27-Part Video series is part of the 7-week Online Video Course:

“Our First Steps as Homo Amor” – OUR FIRST STEPS AS “HOMO AMOR” BIRTHING THE NEW HUMAN AND THE NEW HUMANITY

A 7-Week Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

When looking at the state of the world today, if your head is not in the sand, you feel a sense of urgency. There is outrageous beauty and goodness. But there is also outrageous pain. But not of the ordinary kind. There is the pain of dislocation as we enter a phase shift in human history where all of the old narratives of identity are collapsing. In this 11th hour, as we are poised between utopia and dystopia, we have no authentic sense of who we are and what is our personal place in this pivotal moment in human history.

This playlist is a short introduction to the 7-week Online Video Course: “the First Steps as Homo Amor” with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Enjoy the FREE Series HERE:

For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded.
I Accept

We are at a pivotal moment – in the 11th hour poised between dystopia and utopia – between the capacity to create heaven on earth or unleash, especially for the most vulnerable two billion people on the planet, a hell of suffering and death. We are at a tipping point, where our next steps can either usher in heaven on earth or all hell break loose. We are faced with global challenges at an existential level – threats to our very existence.

Global challenges can only be met with concerted global action. But we suffer a global action paralysis or rampant global action confusion. The global action paralysis is rooted not merely in political struggle but in something far more fundamental. Our global action paralysis is rooted in a global intimacy disorder.

Therefore, in order to move towards collective mutual action that can take us to the next level, we need to heal the global intimacy disorder that is at the root of our crisis.

Intimacy disorders – personal and collective – are always rooted in one root cause: living in different stories of reality. Intimacy disorders are only healed when partners, beloveds, parents and children, or tribes and societies, experience themselves as living in a shared story, with a shared vision and values. Whenever there is alienation, it is because there is a breakdown in our own story.

The purpose of this offering is to locate you in the most accurate, good, true, and beautiful story of the universe and your personal life that is available at this moment in time. This is the great eternal, evolutionary story of cosmo-erotic humanism in which you are personally implicated. This is the most urgent question of your identity. Who Are You? The truth of your identity is that you are Homo amor.

As such, your personal love story is implicated in the evolutionary story. But for REAL. This course is about YOUR transfiguration into Homo amor, a term we use to describe the New Human and the New Humanity, that is the evolutionary fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

In this program, Dr. Marc Gafni will take you deep into a new vision that understands the progressive deepening of intimacies as the core evolutionary driver. You will begin to birth the new human in your own being.

This is a personal invitation. Your response to this invitation may well be pivotal in activating Homo amor.

Welcome to this extraordinary journey that will show you the way to activate your identity as Homo amor.

Read More About the Full Course HERE

Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)

CosmoErotic Humanism in Seven Chapters:

Chapter 1:  Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5:  The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6:  Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7:  Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?

Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey which is reality’s gift for you.

Learn More About the Course Here

Updates May/June 2024: The New Human and the New Humanity: Homo Amor2024-07-09T06:44:08-07:00

Updates April 2024: Featured Essay on “The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future” & So Much More

The Crossing Launched Successfully in April 2024

We are still bathing in the aftertaste of the first launch of “The Crossing” in Holland.

As one contributor wrote on Facebook (in Dutch – translated by us):

“When I cry the tears of the whole, it is already healed.” (Dr. Marc Gafni)

That was one of the sentences that immediately pierced my heart during “The Crossing” last weekend. With 150 pioneers we created the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo amor; the new human who cannot view the personal separate from the collective and who feels a deep connection with All-That-Is. From that perspective, “the world is no longer about matter but about ‘what matters’” (Dr. Marc Gafni), and my personal transformation is simultaneously the transformation of the Whole.

Deep bow for Dr. Marc Gafni and James Bampfield, who with so much strength, wisdom, and intelligence created a field, in which everyone was able to make “The Crossing.”  Thank you also to the fantastic core team and the ambassadors of The Crossing, whose support and  dedication were Homo amor in action right there!

We Are Still Celebrating Our Worldwide Book Release

Our new book can now be ordered worldwide from each country’s amazon and other bookstores. It is available as Paperback, eBook, and Audiobook.

From the US and Canada, it can also be ordered directly from the publisher HERE:

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

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. 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.

Order Here
Download the First Five Chapters HERE for Free

Below we link to everything that has been posted on this site in March 2024.

Featured Essay in April 2024

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…)

Read the Whole Essay

More Essays and White Papers Published on This Site in April 2024

Read the Most Recent Essays on Substack

Follow Us on Substack
New Teachings Emerge from Our Weekly Sensemaking Sessions in One Mountain, Many Paths

New Podcasts in April 2024

Watch More
Listen More

In Case You Missed This Documentary with Dr. Marc Gafni

In collaboration with Aubrey Marcus and the Unique Self Institute

In Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein’s language: “We stand at a pivotal moment in history – a time between worlds and a time between stories  – poised between dystopia and utopia.” To bridge the gap between our external technologies and internal narratives of identity and purpose, every human and every epoch of humanity must evolve responses to three essential questions, what we refer to as the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism: “Who? Where? And What?”

  • Who am I? and Who are we?
  • Where am I? and Where are we?
  • What ought I do? and What ought we do?

In a profound analysis of our current meta-crisis and what he calls the “global intimacy disorder,” Dr. Marc Gafni draws from what he refers to as “the exterior and interior sciences” to deepen our responses to these three questions. The responses offer a new understanding of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and generate the beginning of “a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.” 

“A universal grammar of value is grounded in eternal yet evolving First Principles and First Values, which are inherent in the Intimate Universe, in which we all participate. A new grammar articulates a potent Story of intrinsic Value, with the poignancy and power to respond to the meta-crisis. At the core of this Story of Value, called CosmoErotic Humanism, is a new narrative of identity, both personal and collective. Principles of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony contribute to the shaping of a shared reality that is flawed and human, filled with holy and broken Hallelujahs. Yet, that Reality reaches insistently towards better tomorrows that are suffused with ever-deepening Eros and ethos, kindness, and creativity.”

For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded.
I Accept

Dr. Marc Gafni: Our First Steps as “Homo amor” – FREE Abridged Course

This 27-Part Video series is part of the 7-week Online Video Course:

“Our First Steps as Homo Amor” – OUR FIRST STEPS AS “HOMO AMOR” BIRTHING THE NEW HUMAN AND THE NEW HUMANITY

A 7-Week Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

When looking at the state of the world today, if your head is not in the sand, you feel a sense of urgency. There is outrageous beauty and goodness. But there is also outrageous pain. But not of the ordinary kind. There is the pain of dislocation as we enter a phase shift in human history where all of the old narratives of identity are collapsing. In this 11th hour, as we are poised between utopia and dystopia, we have no authentic sense of who we are and what is our personal place in this pivotal moment in human history.

This playlist is a short introduction to the 7-week Online Video Course: “the First Steps as Homo Amor” with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Enjoy the FREE Series HERE:

For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded.
I Accept

We are at a pivotal moment – in the 11th hour poised between dystopia and utopia – between the capacity to create heaven on earth or unleash, especially for the most vulnerable two billion people on the planet, a hell of suffering and death. We are at a tipping point, where our next steps can either usher in heaven on earth or all hell break loose. We are faced with global challenges at an existential level – threats to our very existence.

Global challenges can only be met with concerted global action. But we suffer a global action paralysis or rampant global action confusion. The global action paralysis is rooted not merely in political struggle but in something far more fundamental. Our global action paralysis is rooted in a global intimacy disorder.

Therefore, in order to move towards collective mutual action that can take us to the next level, we need to heal the global intimacy disorder that is at the root of our crisis.

Intimacy disorders – personal and collective – are always rooted in one root cause: living in different stories of reality. Intimacy disorders are only healed when partners, beloveds, parents and children, or tribes and societies, experience themselves as living in a shared story, with a shared vision and values. Whenever there is alienation, it is because there is a breakdown in our own story.

The purpose of this offering is to locate you in the most accurate, good, true, and beautiful story of the universe and your personal life that is available at this moment in time. This is the great eternal, evolutionary story of cosmo-erotic humanism in which you are personally implicated. This is the most urgent question of your identity. Who Are You? The truth of your identity is that you are Homo amor.

As such, your personal love story is implicated in the evolutionary story. But for REAL. This course is about YOUR transfiguration into Homo amor, a term we use to describe the New Human and the New Humanity, that is the evolutionary fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

In this program, Dr. Marc Gafni will take you deep into a new vision that understands the progressive deepening of intimacies as the core evolutionary driver. You will begin to birth the new human in your own being.

This is a personal invitation. Your response to this invitation may well be pivotal in activating Homo amor.

Welcome to this extraordinary journey that will show you the way to activate your identity as Homo amor.

Read More About the Full Course HERE

Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)

CosmoErotic Humanism in Seven Chapters:

Chapter 1:  Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5:  The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6:  Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7:  Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?

Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey which is reality’s gift for you.

Learn More About the Course Here

Updates April 2024: Featured Essay on “The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future” & So Much More2024-05-02T05:49:02-07:00

Updates March 2024: Featured Essay on “Story as a First Principle and First Value of Reality”

Opening the Eye of Value During the Meta-Crisis

The New Parallax Course on the First Principles Book Starts April 6, 2024!

The 4-week course on the new book First Principles and First Values. Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, starts this week!

This 4-week course is offered by philosopher and co-author Zak Stein in collaboration with Parallax.

In the first week Dr. Marc Gafni will join Zak Stein in discussing the major themes of CosmoErotic Humanism.

Learn More and Register for This Course

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.

Learn More and Register for This Course

Book Release Worldwide

Our new book can now be ordered worldwide from each country’s amazon and other bookstores. It is available as Paperback, eBook, and Audiobook.

From the US and Canada, it can also be ordered directly from the publisher HERE:

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

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. 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.

Order Here
Download the First Five Chapters HERE for Free

Below we link to everything that has been posted on this site in March 2024.

Featured Essay in March 2024

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 What—What 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 Where—Where 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…)

Read the Whole Essay

More Essays and White Papers Published on This Site in March 2024

Read the Most Recent Essays on Substack

Follow Us on Substack
New Teachings Emerge from Our Weekly Sensemaking Sessions in One Mountain, Many Paths

New Podcasts in March 2024

Watch More
Listen More

In Case You Missed This Documentary with Dr. Marc Gafni

In collaboration with Aubrey Marcus and the Unique Self Institute

In Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein’s language: “We stand at a pivotal moment in history – a time between worlds and a time between stories  – poised between dystopia and utopia.” To bridge the gap between our external technologies and internal narratives of identity and purpose, every human and every epoch of humanity must evolve responses to three essential questions, what we refer to as the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism: “Who? Where? And What?”

  • Who am I? and Who are we?
  • Where am I? and Where are we?
  • What ought I do? and What ought we do?

In a profound analysis of our current meta-crisis and what he calls the “global intimacy disorder,” Dr. Marc Gafni draws from what he refers to as “the exterior and interior sciences” to deepen our responses to these three questions. The responses offer a new understanding of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and generate the beginning of “a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.” 

“A universal grammar of value is grounded in eternal yet evolving First Principles and First Values, which are inherent in the Intimate Universe, in which we all participate. A new grammar articulates a potent Story of intrinsic Value, with the poignancy and power to respond to the meta-crisis. At the core of this Story of Value, called CosmoErotic Humanism, is a new narrative of identity, both personal and collective. Principles of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony contribute to the shaping of a shared reality that is flawed and human, filled with holy and broken Hallelujahs. Yet, that Reality reaches insistently towards better tomorrows that are suffused with ever-deepening Eros and ethos, kindness, and creativity.”

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Dr. Marc Gafni: Our First Steps as “Homo amor” – FREE Abridged Course

This 27-Part Video series is part of the 7-week Online Video Course:

“Our First Steps as Homo Amor” – OUR FIRST STEPS AS “HOMO AMOR” BIRTHING THE NEW HUMAN AND THE NEW HUMANITY

A 7-Week Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

When looking at the state of the world today, if your head is not in the sand, you feel a sense of urgency. There is outrageous beauty and goodness. But there is also outrageous pain. But not of the ordinary kind. There is the pain of dislocation as we enter a phase shift in human history where all of the old narratives of identity are collapsing. In this 11th hour, as we are poised between utopia and dystopia, we have no authentic sense of who we are and what is our personal place in this pivotal moment in human history.

This playlist is a short introduction to the 7-week Online Video Course: “the First Steps as Homo Amor” with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Enjoy the FREE Series HERE:

For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded.
I Accept

We are at a pivotal moment – in the 11th hour poised between dystopia and utopia – between the capacity to create heaven on earth or unleash, especially for the most vulnerable two billion people on the planet, a hell of suffering and death. We are at a tipping point, where our next steps can either usher in heaven on earth or all hell break loose. We are faced with global challenges at an existential level – threats to our very existence.

Global challenges can only be met with concerted global action. But we suffer a global action paralysis or rampant global action confusion. The global action paralysis is rooted not merely in political struggle but in something far more fundamental. Our global action paralysis is rooted in a global intimacy disorder.

Therefore, in order to move towards collective mutual action that can take us to the next level, we need to heal the global intimacy disorder that is at the root of our crisis.

Intimacy disorders – personal and collective – are always rooted in one root cause: living in different stories of reality. Intimacy disorders are only healed when partners, beloveds, parents and children, or tribes and societies, experience themselves as living in a shared story, with a shared vision and values. Whenever there is alienation, it is because there is a breakdown in our own story.

The purpose of this offering is to locate you in the most accurate, good, true, and beautiful story of the universe and your personal life that is available at this moment in time. This is the great eternal, evolutionary story of cosmo-erotic humanism in which you are personally implicated. This is the most urgent question of your identity. Who Are You? The truth of your identity is that you are Homo amor.

As such, your personal love story is implicated in the evolutionary story. But for REAL. This course is about YOUR transfiguration into Homo amor, a term we use to describe the New Human and the New Humanity, that is the evolutionary fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

In this program, Dr. Marc Gafni will take you deep into a new vision that understands the progressive deepening of intimacies as the core evolutionary driver. You will begin to birth the new human in your own being.

This is a personal invitation. Your response to this invitation may well be pivotal in activating Homo amor.

Welcome to this extraordinary journey that will show you the way to activate your identity as Homo amor.

Read More About the Full Course HERE

Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)

CosmoErotic Humanism in Seven Chapters:

Chapter 1:  Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5:  The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6:  Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7:  Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?

Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey which is reality’s gift for you.

Learn More About the Course Here

Updates March 2024: Featured Essay on “Story as a First Principle and First Value of Reality”2024-04-03T10:05:01-07:00

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

New Documentary with Dr. Marc Gafni

In collaboration with Aubrey Marcus and the Unique Self Institute

In Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein’s language: “We stand at a pivotal moment in history – a time between worlds and a time between stories  – poised between dystopia and utopia.” To bridge the gap between our external technologies and internal narratives of identity and purpose, every human and every epoch of humanity must evolve responses to three essential questions, what we refer to as the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism: “Who? Where? And What?”

  • Who am I? and Who are we?
  • Where am I? and Where are we?
  • What ought I do? and What ought we do?

In a profound analysis of our current meta-crisis and what he calls the “global intimacy disorder,” Dr. Marc Gafni draws from what he refers to as “the exterior and interior sciences” to deepen our responses to these three questions. The responses offer a new understanding of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and generate the beginning of “a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.” 

“A universal grammar of value is grounded in eternal yet evolving First Principles and First Values, which are inherent in the Intimate Universe, in which we all participate. A new grammar articulates a potent Story of intrinsic Value, with the poignancy and power to respond to the meta-crisis. At the core of this Story of Value, called CosmoErotic Humanism, is a new narrative of identity, both personal and collective. Principles of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony contribute to the shaping of a shared reality that is flawed and human, filled with holy and broken Hallelujahs. Yet, that Reality reaches insistently towards better tomorrows that are suffused with ever-deepening Eros and ethos, kindness, and creativity.”

For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded.
I Accept

New Book Release

Our new book can be ordered from the US and Canada.

From Europe and other countries, it can be pre-ordered from each country’s amazon.

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

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. 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.

Order Here
Download the First Five Chapters HERE

New Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)

CosmoErotic Humanism in Seven Chapters:

Chapter 1:  Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5:  The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6:  Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7:  Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?

Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey which is reality’s gift for you.

Learn More About the Course Here

This page provides links to everything that has been posted on this site in February 2024.

Featured Essay in February 2024

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.

Download the Essay as PDF

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…)

Read the Whole Essay

More Essays and White Papers Published on This Site in February 2024

Dr. Marc Gafni: Our First Steps as “Homo amor” – FREE Abridged Course

This 27-Part Video series is part of the 7-week Online Video Course:

“Our First Steps as Homo Amor” – OUR FIRST STEPS AS “HOMO AMOR” BIRTHING THE NEW HUMAN AND THE NEW HUMANITY

A 7-Week Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

When looking at the state of the world today, if your head is not in the sand, you feel a sense of urgency. There is outrageous beauty and goodness. But there is also outrageous pain. But not of the ordinary kind. There is the pain of dislocation as we enter a phase shift in human history where all of the old narratives of identity are collapsing. In this 11th hour, as we are poised between utopia and dystopia, we have no authentic sense of who we are and what is our personal place in this pivotal moment in human history.

This playlist is a short introduction to the 7-week Online Video Course: “the First Steps as Homo Amor” with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Enjoy the FREE Series HERE:

For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded.
I Accept

We are at a pivotal moment – in the 11th hour poised between dystopia and utopia – between the capacity to create heaven on earth or unleash, especially for the most vulnerable two billion people on the planet, a hell of suffering and death. We are at a tipping point, where our next steps can either usher in heaven on earth or all hell break loose. We are faced with global challenges at an existential level – threats to our very existence.

Global challenges can only be met with concerted global action. But we suffer a global action paralysis or rampant global action confusion. The global action paralysis is rooted not merely in political struggle but in something far more fundamental. Our global action paralysis is rooted in a global intimacy disorder.

Therefore, in order to move towards collective mutual action that can take us to the next level, we need to heal the global intimacy disorder that is at the root of our crisis.

Intimacy disorders – personal and collective – are always rooted in one root cause: living in different stories of reality. Intimacy disorders are only healed when partners, beloveds, parents and children, or tribes and societies, experience themselves as living in a shared story, with a shared vision and values. Whenever there is alienation, it is because there is a breakdown in our own story.

The purpose of this offering is to locate you in the most accurate, good, true, and beautiful story of the universe and your personal life that is available at this moment in time. This is the great eternal, evolutionary story of cosmo-erotic humanism in which you are personally implicated. This is the most urgent question of your identity. Who Are You? The truth of your identity is that you are Homo amor.

As such, your personal love story is implicated in the evolutionary story. But for REAL. This course is about YOUR transfiguration into Homo amor, a term we use to describe the New Human and the New Humanity, that is the evolutionary fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

In this program, Dr. Marc Gafni will take you deep into a new vision that understands the progressive deepening of intimacies as the core evolutionary driver. You will begin to birth the new human in your own being.

This is a personal invitation. Your response to this invitation may well be pivotal in activating Homo amor.

Welcome to this extraordinary journey that will show you the way to activate your identity as Homo amor.

Read More About the Full Course HERE

Most Recent Podcasts, Videos, and Audios

Watch
Listen

Read the Most Recent Essays on Substack

Follow Us on Substack

February Updates: The Narrative Thread of Cosmos—The Evolution of Intimacy Through the Four Big Bangs2024-02-28T07:45:46-08:00

January Updates: Early Ontologies in the Interior Sciences Point Toward the Universe: A Love Story

New Book Release

Our new book can be ordered from the US and Canada. We are working on creating direct ordering from Europe and other countries – please stand by!

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

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. 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.

Order Here

New Online Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni

CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)

CosmoErotic Humanism in Seven Chapters:

Chapter 1:  Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5:  The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6:  Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7:  Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?

Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey which is reality’s gift for you.

Learn More About the Course Here

This page provides links to everything that has been posted on this site in January 2024.

Featured Essay in January 2024

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…)

Read the Whole Essay

Podcasts, Videos, and Audios Published on This Site in January 2024

Read the Most Recent Essays on Substack

Follow Us on Substack

January Updates: Early Ontologies in the Interior Sciences Point Toward the Universe: A Love Story2024-01-31T09:24:21-08:00

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

Our new book can be pre-ordered from the US and Canada (we are working on creating direct ordering from Europe and other countries – please stand by!):

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

Pre-Order Here

This page provides links to everything that has been posted on this site in December 2023.

Featured Essay in December 2023

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…)

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Love or Die: White Paper by Dr. Marc Gafni

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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…)

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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.

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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…)

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On November 5th, We had Episode VI of the Podcast:

Love or Die 

Next Episode Coming Up December 3rd

11 am PDT • 2 pm EDT • 7 pm UK • 8 pm CET

We are super excited to announce a new episode in the interview series with Dr. Marc Gafni at Parallax, hosted by Andrew Sweeny, from Parallax — a wonderful center of culture and creative debate, aligned with our vision at the Center for Integral Wisdom and Unique Self Institute.

Welcome to this series of dialogues, hosted by Parallax in partnership with the Unique Self Institute:

Homo Amor, Unique Self, and Unique Self Symphony: The Holy Trinity of CosmoErotic Humanism

If you register, you will receive your personal Zoom link that you can use for all calls. After registration, you will have an option to save all dates in your calendar with your personal Zoom link. If you lose it, you can always sign up again.

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Watch and Listen to the Previous Episodes

On Thursday November 2nd, we had a live dialogue with Dr. Marc Gafni & Andrew Cohen:

Evolutionary Spirituality: Towards an Engaged Evolutionary Mysticism Episode VII

Topic: The articulation of an Evolutionary Spirituality as an overriding moral imperative in response to the meta-crisis

Evolutionary Spirituality: Towards an Engaged Evolutionary Mysticism

The topic of this dialogue with my (Marc’s) friend Andrew Cohen was:​

What is Evolutionary Spirituality and why does it matter so much in response to the meta crisis? 

Allow me to try and explain why this feels so beyond vital. 

There can be no intelligent and transformative understanding of any crisis in the world, including the devastating targeted massacres of civilians that we just witnessed in Israel these days, without the articulation of a compelling Evolutionary Spirituality. 

Evolutionary Spirituality brings together two distinct fields:

  • The first is that of spirituality.

  • The second is that of evolution or evolutionary studies.

The general assumption in culture has been, that these two fields are fundamentally distinct and even opposed to one another. Evolution as a theory was thought to replace spirituality. Evolution was the rejection of spirituality as an explanation of reality — replaced by an evolutionary explanation. Evolution was though to be about the emergent and the Avant Garde, while spirituality seems stuck in the moray of tired and discredited lineages.

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September/October 2023: News from the Center for World Philosophy and Religion2023-11-09T07:53:12-08:00
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