First Principles and First Values | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

First Principles and First Values: From Existential Risk to Evolutionary Love: a New Story of Value for Humanity

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 25

First Principles and First Values: From Existential Risk to Evolutionary Love: a New Story of Value for Humanity | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 25 | Dr. Marc Gafni

We stand at a time between worlds, a time between stories-poised between dystopia and utopia. How we respond will have consequences and reverberations for many generations. First Principles and First Values offers both the most compelling diagnosis and the most effective and indeed joyful response to the looming threat of existential and catastrophic risk.

The core diagnosis is a “global intimacy disorder.” This intimacy disorder is generated by and expressed as the modern success story which is the dominant narrative in virtually all of worldwide culture. The success story pits us against each other in rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose dynamics. This in turn generates what systems theory refers to as complicated or fragile systems which are optimized for short-term profit and efficiency rather than long-term resilience and depth.

Intimacy-whether in a couple, a nation or in the earlier worlds of biology and molecular coherence-is only possible when there is a shared Story of Value. At the molecular level such a story is implicit in the scientific laws of Cosmos. At the human moral level, the shared story of value needs to be explicated and made conscious.

To respond to the meta crisis, we must be able not only to restore premodern ethnocentric intimacies rooted in premodern visions of shared value or even the early modern intimacies of democracies, markets and liberal culture, rooted in implicit modern assumptions of value.

Rather we need to evolve a new global intimacy rooted in First Principles and First Values which are the grammar for a shared language of value.

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

Book details:

Title: First Principles and First Values: From Existential Risk to Evolutionary Love: a New Story of Value for Humanity
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 25
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340523
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE    THERE IS NO RESPONSE TO EXISTENTIAL RISK WITHOUT FIRST PRINCIPLES

  • Love Is Real, and Love Evolves Reality
  • What’s Worse, the Jump to 99% Destruction or From 99 to 100%?
  • Option One for the Future: Peace
  • Which Is Worse, the Move From Option One to Two, Or Two to Three?
  • We Have Collective Responsibility towards Future Generations
  • The Rwanda Genocide Happened Because There Was No Nationalism
  • We Are the More God to Come
  • The New Story Has Not Yet Been Told
  • What Are First Principles?
  • The New Story Must Be Based on First Principles
  • Let’s Imagine a Different Scenario Together
  • As Evolutionary Activists and Mystics, We Are Articulating A Memory of the Future
  • Let’s Let Our Love Change the World
  • Lines of Development Throughout History: Technology and Interiors
  • The First Principle of Separate Self Leads to the Dignity of Modernity
  • Separate Self Became Alienated From the Larger Field
  • From Science to Scientism: From Differentiation to Dissociation From Spirit
  • The Top Half of Dualism Was Lopped Off and We Were Left With Dogmatic Materialism
  • The Return of Spirit in the Twentieth Century
  • We Reclaimed True Self and Left the Separate Self of the Enlightenment Behind
  • From Separate Self to True Self and Beyond
  • We Need to Disambiguate Between Separateness and Uniqueness
  • From Separate Self to True Self and Unique Self
  • From Unique Self to Evolutionary Unique Self
  • Evolutionary Unique Self Is a Unique Configuration of Outrageous Love
  • Evolutionary Unique Self Is Homo Amor
  • The Emergent Realization of Unique Self
  • Homo Amor Is the Fulfilment of the Narrative Arc of Cosmos
  • Matter Triumphs in the Form of Life
  • Homo Amor: In Response to Existential Risk
  • The Puzzle of Who Am I?
  • Who Are You?
  • Without Those First Principles We’ll Fail

CHAPTER TWO    THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF THE INNATE PLEASURE OF TRANSFORMATION

  • Ontologizing Love as an Evolution of Intimacy
  • Transformation Is the Nature of the Human Story
  • Reality Has a Narrative Arc of Intention
  • We Place Our Attention together
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Reality Is Motivated By Pleasure
  • Transformation Is the Highest Level of Pleasure
  • The God You Don’t Believe in Doesn’t Exist

CHAPTER THREE   FIRST PRINCIPLES & FIRST VALUES: THE URGENT & ECSTATIC MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME

  • Evolution From Separate Self Through True Self to Unique Self
  • Success Summit: Success 1.0, Success 2.0, Success 3.0
  • Evolutionary Unique Self: I Am a Unique Configuration of The Evolutionary Love That Animates All of Cosmos
  • The Crisis in Reality Today Is a Crisis of First Principles and First Values
  • Poised Between Utopia and Dystopia, the Way forward Is to Articulate a New Story Based on First Principles and First Values
  • First Principles and First Values Integrate Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Insights
  • We Need to Reweave the Information Ecology to Articulate an Evolving Set of First Principles and First Values
  • Prayer: I Want to Know What Love Is
  • The First Value of Cosmos: Love Is Real
  • The New Emergence: Unique Self Symphony

CHAPTER FOUR   EVOLVING THE SOURCE CODE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE

  • The Most Urgent Moral Imperative of Our Time Is the Articulation of First Principles and First Values
  • The Dignities and Disasters of Modernity
  • The First and Second Shocks of Existence Evoke New Gnosis
  • Win/Lose Success Story Leads to Dystopian Scenarios
  • At This Phase Shift in Human History, We Must Start the Reconstruction Project of Value
  • We Need a Set of First Principles and First Values Before We Can Articulate a Shared Global Story

CHAPTER FIVE   SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: “WE’RE GOING TO STEAL YOUR EXPERIENCE WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION”

  • First Principles and First Values Account for the Critiques of Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • Mistaken Assumptions of Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • Critiques by Postmodernity of Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • Postmodernity’s Critique of Perennialism and Natural Law Is True but Partial, and It Ignores Responsibility to Any Larger Grand Narrative—Except the Success Story
  • The Nervous System of the Planet Is the Web, the Worldwide Virtual World
  • Google’s Business Model Is Surveillance Capitalism
  • Facebook Hijacks Your Attention, Takes Your Information, and Targets You With Ads, Thereby Compromising the Free Movement of Economy and Governance
  • We Are Unaware of the Threat to Universal Human Rights
  • The Failure to Articulate the Case Against the Tech Plex Is Rooted in a Failure of First Principles and First Values
  • Surveillance Capitalism: We’re Going to Steal Your Experience Without Your Permission
  • The Six Declarations of Google
  • Instead of Solving Existential and Catastrophic Risk, Our Best Minds Are Caught in the Success Story
  • From Holdables to Wearables to Biometric Sensors
  • First Principles and First Values Refute Surveillance Capitalism
  • Exposing the Inner Structure in Which Human Experience Is Being Stolen
  • Activation: The Direct First-Person Experience of Reality Coming Alive in Me

CHAPTER SIX   FIRST PRINCIPLES BEYOND RANDOMNESS

  • Beyond Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • First Principles and First Values
  • Certainty and Uncertainty
  • Qualities of the Third From Within Light and Darkness, Masculine and Feminine
  • Binary Pairs and Their Thirds Are a First Principle of Cosmos
  • She Comes in Threes: Beyond Randomness and Contingency
  • First Principles and First Values Are the Telos of Cosmos
  • Authentic Conversation Has Both Contingency and Design
  • Messiah: Conversation at a Higher Level of Freedom, Order, and Consciousness
  • We Live in a Conversational Cosmos Which Has Both Randomness and Contingency

CHAPTER SEVEN   FIRST PRINCIPLES RESPOND TO EVOLUTIONARY NEED

  • The First Value of Need
  • Need and Desire Are Intimately Related to Each Other
  • When I Pray, I Clarify My Needs
  • Evolution Desires, Evolution Yearns, Evolution Needs
  • First Value and First Principle of Uniqueness
  • Our Future Depends on Our Ability to Articulate a Shared Story Woven From First Values and First Principles

CHAPTER EIGHT   INTEGRATING OUR UNIQUE SELF BY RESPONDING TO THE CALL OF OUR PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE SELVES

  • Outrageous Love, the Most Powerful and Intelligent Force in Reality
  • From the Periphery, We Steadily Suffuse Culture With the New Story
  • It’s Crazy Good to Be Together in This Unique Moment in Time
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Past, Present, and Future Are First Principles and First Values of Reality
  • The Evolution of Homo amor
  • Shadow and Light Dimensions of Past, Present, and Future
  • Hearing the Call of the Present Moment
  • The Past as a Modality of Healing and Eros
  • The Power and Pitfalls of Psychological Science and Enlightenment Science
  • Evolutionary Science: Called Towards the Future
  • Hearing the Call of Your Future Self
  • Mark Twain’s Dream
  • Message From the Master of the Good Name
  • Feeling the Tug of the Future
  • Homo Prospectus
  • Can You Feel the Tug?

CHAPTER NINE   EMERGENCE: CALLED BY MY FUTURE SELF

  • Math and Science Live in Us as We Are Cosmic Humans
  • We Think and Feel in Stories
  • Stories Hold First Values and First Principles
  • Psychological Science Focuses on the Past; It’s Important But Insufficient
  • Unfinished Business
  • Enlightenment Science Focuses On the Fullness of the Present
  • Being Called by the Future: Emergence Science
  • Death Is Not the End Because We Experience the Urgent Need for a Future
  • The Four-Letter Name of God Is the Future That Lives in the Present
  • Practice One: Accessing the Feeling of Connection to the Call
  • Practice Two: Identifying My Unique Call
  • The Unique Self Expression of Individuals in the Nascent State of Israel
  • Practice Three: Love Letter to and From Your Future Self

CHAPTER TEN   BEING PERSONALLY CALLED

  • First Value and First Principle of Uniqueness
  • First Value and First Principle of Personhood
  • The Experience of Being Personally Addressed by Reality
  • Hearing the Call to Our Natural Human Grandeur

CHAPTER ELEVEN   LANGUAGE AS A PORTAL TO FIRST PRINCIPLES

  • The Experience of Being Personally Addressed by Reality
  • Eros Is a Meta-First Principle and First Value of Cosmos
  • These Principles Are Fundamental and Not Isomorphic
  • Each Fundamental Word Evokes a Different Quality
  • Stories Hold First Principles and First Values
  • Story and the Principle of Calling
  • One of the Principles of Calling Is That Calls Are Often in Disguise
  • Discerning Between Authentic Calls and Counterfeit Calls

CHAPTER TWELVE   DIAGNOSING THE TECH PLEX: FROM DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP TO DIGITAL INTIMACY, FROM SOCIAL SELF TO UNIQUE SELF, FROM SOCIAL HIVE TO UNIQUE SELF SYMPHONIES

  • The Articulation of Unique Self Consciousness Is the Overriding Moral Imperative of This Generation
  • Separate Self, Social Self, True Self, and Unique Self
  • Unique Self: I Am Irreducibly Valuable as a Unique Emergent of the Whole
  • Your Unique Self Is Your Unique Response-Ability to Reality
  • Your Unique Self Has Irreducible Value and Is Your Currency of Connection
  • B.F. Skinner: The Human Being Is a Social Self
  • B.F. Skinner: Let’s Nullify the Autonomous Man, the Inner Man
  • Skinner’s Approach—Nullifying the Autonomous Man—Is the Basis of Social Media
  • C.S. Lewis vs. B.F. Skinner: The Abolition of Man, the Abolition of Human Society
  • However Misguided, Skinner Is Responding to Existential Risk and Critiquing Separate Self as the Source of Human Dignity
  • Skinner Did Not Have the Tools to Develop Technologies of Human Behavior
  • Alex Pentland, One of the Architects of the Web, Is a Direct Continuation of Skinner
  • Pentland: Data Science Is the New Physics Which Will Allow Us to Enact a New Vision of Society
  • The Founders of the Tech Plex Adopt the Vision of Skinner and Pentland
  • Social Media Are Expressions of Skinner’s Walden Two
  • We Need to Replace the Understanding of Natural Law With Evolving Perennialism, an Evolving Set of First Values and First Principles
  • The Tech Plex: We Are Organizing Society as Social Selves
  • True Self and Unique Self Are Ignored by the Tech Plex
  • Unseen, Pentland, and Skinner Have Formed the Thinking of the Tech Plex, Which Arrogates to Itself the Right to Your Experience
  • Personal Data Is Currently Being Used by Machine Intelligence Algorithms to Compromise the Two Basic Identities of Democracy: The Voter and the Consumer
  • Under-The-Skin Surveillance Is the Next Step and Will Result in Digital Dictatorships
  • The Postmodern Deconstruction of Value together With Surveillance Capitalism Results in the “Conditioners” Predicted by C.S. Lewis
  • We Need to Respond to Social Self With Unique Self
  • Power and Profit Agenda, Together With Utopianism Sans First Principles and First Values
  • Imagine What Happens When a Dictatorship Owns Data
  • In the Absence of Unique Self, Social Self Became the Animating Energy of the Nervous System of the Planet
  • Our Job Is to Engage in a Reconstructive Project of Value So We Can Muster the Necessary Outrage Against the Tech Plex
Buy on Amazon

About the Authors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

Buy on Amazon

Explore more:

Explore the Great Library:
Center for World Philosophy & Religion – Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/books/

Learn about the full Oral Essays series:
Complete Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/oral-essays-series-one-mountain-marc-gafni/

Dr. Marc Gafni Official Website: 
https://marcgafni.com/

Center for World Philosophy and Religion:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/

Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni:
https://www.onemountainmanypaths.org/

Join the community Who We Must Become: 
https://who-we-must-become-3166d4.circle.so/ 

Free Unique Self Mini Course:
https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/

Formal refutations on controversy: 
WhoIsMarcGafni.com

Social Media Dr. Marc Gafni: 

Substack: https://substack.com/@marcgafni
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcgafni/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcGafni
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrMarcGafni
Twitter:https://twitter.com/MarcGafni
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarcgafni/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drmarcgafni 

Buy on Amazon
First Principles and First Values | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-18T15:53:18-07:00

She Comes in Threes | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

She Comes in Threes: Reality’s Plotlines Are the Three Stations of Eros: Trialectics Are the Structure of Cosmos

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 24

She Comes in Threes: Reality's Plotlines Are the Three Stations of Eros: Trialectics Are the Structure of Cosmos | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 24 | Dr. Marc Gafni

Reality is not merely a fact; Reality is a story. Reality is not an ordinary story; Reality is a love story. Reality is not an ordinary love story; Reality is an Evolutionary Love story.
The plotline of the story is the Evolution of Love. This plotline follows a pattern. This pattern is not dialectical (two) but trialectical (three). The pattern is the Three Stations of Eros. The Three Stations of Eros is the core pattern of Reality.
In Solomon lineage of Hebrew mysticism these Three Stations are called submission, separation and sweetening. In developmental psychology, the same meta phenomenology is referred to as identification, dis-identification, and re-identification (integration). These are the mysterious triads of the evolution of love. They describe the three stations of consciousness which an awake person evolves through in virtually every sphere of life.

We all recognize this pattern as it appears in our own lives, for example, in reference to our direct experience of falling love.
Station one: We fall in love. Station two: We experience separation. We lose access to the feeling of being in love.
Station three: we find our way back—we fall in love again, this time with greater depth and wholeness. At this third station we are quite literally lived as love. The Three Stations of Eros apply not only to falling in love but to all domains of life.

The capacity to recognize the Three Stations—to stay in and to not get derailed at station two, but instead to deepen, ascend and transform into station three—is the single most important skill we need to live a great life, to be truly successful, or to put it more clearly, to be lived as great Love.

Each sequence of the Three Stations of Love is a unique vector in the evolution of love, the irreducibly unique journey of Eros which is the purpose of a unique human life. The particular tone and texture, the unique potency and exquisiteness in each unique human journey directly participates in the evolution of love in Cosmos.

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

Book details:

Title: She Comes in Threes: Reality’s Plotlines Are the Three Stations of Eros: Trialectics Are the Structure of Cosmos
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 24
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340738
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    SHE COMES IN THREES

  • The Whole World Is Submission, Separation and Sweetness
  • Station One/Submission: Falling in Love
  • Falling in Love Is One of the Structures of Cosmos
  • Station Two/Separation: I Step Out
  • Healthy Development Is to Transcend and Include
  • Station Three/Sweetening: Being Lived as Love
  • The Arc of the Three Stations Meanders
  • The Three Stations: Certainty and Uncertainty
  • Station Two—Separation: Uncertainty
  • Station Three—Sweetness: Certainty
  • Pre-Personal, Personal, and Transpersonal
  • Pre-Tragic, Tragic, and Post-Tragic
  • Station One: Pre-Tragic
  • Station Two: Tragic
  • Station Three: Post-Tragic
  • Simplicity, Complexity, Second Simplicity
  • For Successful Transmission to the World, Distinctions Matter
  • Greater Is the Wisdom That Comes From Folly
  • We Need a Reconstruction of the Best Qualities of the Previous Periods
  • Pre-Tragic, Tragic, and Post-Tragic: Revisited
  • Pre-Tragic, Tragic and Post-Tragic Sexuality
  • We Need a Post-Tragic Sexual Narrative
  • Distinctions: Knowings of the Body, Heart and Mind
  • Simplicity, Complexity, Second Simplicity
  • Separate Self, True Self, Unique Self
  • Station One: Western Enlightenment, Separate Self
  • Station Two: Mystical Enlightenment, True Self
  • Station Three: Unique Self
  • You Are an Irreducibly Unique Expression of True Self
  • We Need to Disambiguate Between Separateness and Uniqueness
  • Reality Is a Love Story
  • Towards a Post-Tragic, New Source Code of Meaning
  • Stations One and Three Look the Same on the Outside, but Their Interior Quality Is Completely Different

CHAPTER 2    LIVING BEYOND COMPLEXITY

  • Setting the Context: Theory Is a Form of Loving
  • Three Stations of Eros
  • Simplicity, Complexity and Second Simplicity
  • The First Station: Simplicity
  • The Second Station: Complexity
  • Station Three: Second Simplicity
  • Knowing, Not Knowing, Knowing
  • In Station Two of Complexity, We’ve Forgotten the Storyline
  • The Collapse of the Great Story of Premodernity
  • Station Two of Complexity: Other Than Classical Science, Ultimate Knowledge Is Not Available
  • Transcending Complexity and Reweaving a Higher Story
  • Reclaiming a Framework for Our Experience
  • Interpreting Our Experience Through Pre/Trans Distinctions
  • Application of First Simplicity, Complexity, Second Simplicity: The Tsunami in Japan
  • Station One Simplicity: Theodicy: Explanations for Suffering
  • Station Two Complexity: Rejection of First Simplicity
  • Station Three: Second Simplicity
  • Every Great Social Movement: I Incarnate Justice in the World

PART TWO: ONE MOUNTAIN, MANY PATHS

CHAPTER 3    LOVE OR DIE

  • Setting Our Intention
  • Overview: Eros Is No Longer a Luxury—It’s Love Or Die
  • What Is Eros?
  • Existential Risk: the Second Shock of Existence
  • Generator Functions for Existential Risk
  • The Deconstruction of Intrinsic Value
  • The Deconstruction of Value Is the Deconstruction of Intimacy
  • The Evolution of Love Is the Telling of a New Story

CHAPTER 4    SHE COMES IN THREES: THE HOLY, THE BROKEN, AND THE HALLELUJAH

  • The Power of Love Must Claim Its Love Of Power
  • To Challenge Surveillance Capitalism We Need First Principles And First Values
  • In the Absence of a Shared Story, Win-Lose Metrics Prevail
  • Heroes Are the Early Adopters of Homo Amor
  • Evolutionary Love Code: She Comes in Threes
  • Tripleness: From Contradiction to Paradox
  • A New Emergence From Autonomy and Communion
  • A New Emergence From Beauty and Ugliness
  • Hallelujah: Pristine Praise Together With Drunken Intoxication
  • The Koan Is Resolved in the Third Possibility
  • A New Emergence From Certainty and Uncertainty
  • A Shared Narrative Has to Be From Tripleness
  • Prayer to the Infinity of Power and the Infinity of Intimacy

CHAPTER 5    OUR HIGHEST PURPOSE IS NO PURPOSE

  • The Fundamental Breakdowns Are Based On A Collapse of Value
  • We Tremble Before Evolution to Manifest a New Expression Of Intimacy
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Our Highest Purpose Is No Purpose
  • Opening Up Makes Transformation Possible
  • I Am Opening Up in Sweet Surrender to the Luminous Love Light of the One
  • Continuity and Discontinuity in the Evolutionary Chain
  • Love Is Both Purposeful and No-Purpose
  • The Glory of No-Purpose

CHAPTER 6    ODE TO EVOLUTIONARY JOY: THE HIGHER UNION OF A BROKEN HEART AND RADICAL ALIVENESS

  • We Need First Principles and First Values to Orient Ourselves At This Time Between Worlds
  • We Are Here to Tell a New Story Ontologizing Love
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Joy Is a First Principle of Cosmos
  • A Prerequisite to Joy Is to Understand That Life Is Not Over When It’s Over
  • The Intimate Universe Knows Your Name
  • Prayer: We Turn to the Infinite Intimate, the Ultimate Personhood of Reality
  • Joy Is a First Principle of Cosmos
  • Joy Is the Natural Byproduct of Living My Unique Self
  • There’s No Contradiction Between a Broken Heart and Radical Joy
  • Ode to Joy
  • Joy Breaks Through All Gates
  • Your Joy Births Reality

CHAPTER 7    ODE TO EVOLUTIONARY JOY: THE NEXT STEP

  • Our Intention Is to Articulate the New Story Based on the Best Information We Have in Cosmos Today
  • Poised Between Utopia and Dystopia, We Must Access Evolutionary Love and Redirect the Course of History
  • Evolutionary Love Code: the First Principle of Joy
  • The God You Don’t Believe in Doesn’t Exist
  • Reality Seeks Ever Greater Intimacies
  • In Prayer We Turn to the Infinity of Intimacy Who Knows Our Name
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The First Principle of Joy
  • The Joy Equation
  • Aliveness Is When You’re Far From Equilibrium and Receiving Inputs All the Time
  • We Need to Be Able to Stay Open to Receive New Inputs Of Joy
  • When I’m in My Utter Uniqueness I Become a Puzzle Piece That Is Joined With Everyone Else
  • Even a Minor Fluctuation Point Jumps All of Reality to a Higher Level of Consciousness
  • Joy Is a Byproduct of Living My Unique Self
  • The Deeper That Sorrow Carves Into Your Being, the More Joy You Can Contain

CHAPTER 8    THE QUALITY AND FEELING OF HOMO AMOR: INCARNATING THE THIRD BEYOND POLARITIES

  • We Move From Homo Sapiens to Homo Amor
  • Homo Amor Is the Unique Expression of Eros and Evolution Awakened to Itself
  • A Planetary Awakening in Love Through Unique Self Symphonies
  • Our Intention Is to Evolve a New Story, Woven From First Principles and First Values
  • The Interior of Consciousness Is Outrageous Love
  • Outrageous Love Code: the Quality of the Outrageous Lover Is the Third Beyond Paradox
  • Personhood Is a Core Quality of Cosmos
  • Why Did the One Manifest the Many? To Bring Forth New Dimensions of the One
  • We Are the Liberators of Divinity
  • The Infinity of Intimacy Turns to Us and Says: I Need You Desperately
  • Homo Amor: Beyond the Paradox

CHAPTER 9    THE RESPONSE TO PERSONAL CRISIS AND META-CRISIS IS THE EVOLUTION OF RELATIONSHIP AND THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE: THE RISE OF WHOLE MATE RELATIONSHIPS

  • God Loves Stories
  • Choosing to Tell the Most Accurate Story
  • A New Chapter in the New Story: Whole mate Relationships
  • Evolutionary Love Code: We Are Confronted by Crisis
  • Every Crisis Is Solved by a New Structure of Intimacy
  • The Evolution of Relationship
  • From Role mate to Soul mate
  • Soul-mate Contract Without a Role-mate Dimension Doesn’t Work
  • From Soul mate to Whole mate
  • The Meta-Crisis Begins to Be Resolved by a New Form Of Relationship

CHAPTER 10    THE URGENT NEED FOR WHOLE MATE RELATIONSHIPS, PART 2

  • Outside the Field of Value, No One Is Human Anymore
  • There Is a Straight Line From Postmodernism to School Shootings
  • We Desperately Need to Reconstruct the Field of Value
  • Evolutionary Love Code: From Role mate to Soul mate to Whole mate
  • The Tragedy of Soul mates
  • I Love You Means I Choose to Need You
  • Reconfiguring Reality by Reconfiguring Humanity

PART THREE: FORMAL WRITINGS

CHAPTER 11    THE THREE STATIONS OF EROS MODEL

  • Station One: Submission Or Identification
  • Station Two: Separation Or Dis-Identification
  • Station Three: Sweetness Or Re-Integration
  • Station Three Is an Entirely Different Quality From Station One
  • An Example of Station One/ Station Three Fallacy: Eros, Ethics, Eros

CHAPTER 12    THE THREE STATIONS OF EROS MODEL IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

  • Station One of Eros: Identification
  • How It Applies to Love: Station One: Falling in Love
  • Station Two of Eros: Dis-Identification/ Individuation
  • How It Applies to Love: Station Two of Eros: Falling Out of Love
  • Station Three of Eros: Re-Integration
  • How It Applies to Love: Station Three—Falling in Love Again, Being Lived as Love

CHAPTER 13    STATION THREE OF EROS: THE AWAKENING OF THE OUTRAGEOUS LOVER

  • Station Three of Eros: I’m Your Man
  • Station Three of Eros: Where Giving and Receiving Merge
  • Station Three of Eros: Being Lived as Outrageous Love
  • The Three Stations of Eros: Poems of Hafiz
  • Station Two of Eros: Falling Out of Love: Two Poems by Hafiz
  • Station Three of Eros: Lived as Love: A Poem by Hafiz

CHAPTER 14    LOVE IS IN THE DETAILS

  • She Comes in Threes Is Not the Three Persons Or the Three Faces of Love
  • Hegel’s Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis: an Expression Of Trialectics
  • Example One: Religion, Absolute Freedom, Self-Evident Shared Values
  • Example Two: Ecstasy, Pain, Transcendence
  • Trialectics in Chinese Philosophy: Beyond Yin and Yang
  • From Contradiction to Paradox: From Binary to Trialectics
  • Station Three: Hamtakah in the Lineage of Solomon: Beyond the Conventional Structures of Right and Wrong
  • The Micro-Vectors of Reality Are the Three Stations of Eros

CHAPTER 15    EXPRESSIONS OF THE THREE STATIONS OF EROS

  • Unique Sequences Disclose Unique Elements of Reality
  • Certainty, Uncertainty, Certainty
  • Sub-Sequence: Value Is Real, Value Is Not Real, Value Is Real
  • Uncertainty, Certainty, Uncertainty
  • Eros, Ethics, Eros
  • Goodness, Wholeness, Goodness
  • Wholeness, Goodness, Wholeness
  • Pre-Personal, Personal and Transpersonal
  • Story, Non-Story, Story
  • Separate Self, True Self, Evolutionary Unique Self
  • No Choice, Choice, Choiceless
  • Light, Darkness, Light
  • Wisdom, Foolishness, Wisdom
  • Laughter, Gravitas, Laughter
  • Innocence, Guilt, Second Innocence
  • Open, Closed, Open
  • Simplicity, Complexity, Second Simplicity
  • Binary Gender, Non Binary Gender, Unique Gender
  • No Purpose, Purpose, No Purpose; Being Becoming, Being
  • Autonomy and Communion: The Ever Deepening Spiral of the Evolution of Love

CHAPTER 16    PRE-TRAGIC, TRAGIC AND POST-TRAGIC LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  • Towards a Post-Tragic Level of Consciousness

CHAPTER 17    THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE: FROM ROLE MATE TO SOUL MATE TO WHOLE MATE

  • Role mates: Submission of the Partners to Their Roles
  • Soul mates: Station Two of Relationship: Separation, Dis-Identification
  • Soul mate Relationship: From I Need You to I Choose You
  • Whole Mates: From Ordinary Love to Outrageous Love
  • The Next Step in the Evolution of Love
  • Role mate, Soul mate and Whole Mate Relationships With Life

CHAPTER 18    SHE COMES IN THREES: THE PRE-TRAGIC, TRAGIC, AND POST-TRAGIC IN ROLE MATE, SOUL MATE, AND WHOLE MATE

  • Whole-Mate Relationships Are Post-Tragic
  • Wholeness Becoming More Whole

PART FOUR: APPENDIX

  • UNCERTAINTY, CERTAINTY, HIGHER UNCERTAINTY
  • On the Relationship Between Questions and Answers in Religious and Secular Society
  • There is Heresy Which is Faith, and Faith Which is Heresy
  • In Response to Evil and Suffering
  • Holding Both Meanings of Torah in Response to Suffering: “Instructions for Living” and “To Search”
  • In the Face of Suffering: an Intimate Inquisition
  • The Wicked and the Wise and the One Who Does Not Know How to Question
  • The Covenantal Partnership Between the Human Being and God
  • Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: Heresy That is Faith
  • In the Depth of Uncertainty Is Certainty
  • The Certainty of Rage
  • Biblical Ayeh Stories: Grappling With God
  • Uncertainty, Certainty, Higher Uncertainty
  • Question, Answer, Higher Question
  • The Core Certainty of Self Allows Us to Hold Radical Uncertainty
Buy on Amazon

About the Authors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

Buy on Amazon

Explore more:

Explore the Great Library:
Center for World Philosophy & Religion – Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/books/

Learn about the full Oral Essays series:
Complete Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/oral-essays-series-one-mountain-marc-gafni/

Dr. Marc Gafni Official Website: 
https://marcgafni.com/

Center for World Philosophy and Religion:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/

Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni:
https://www.onemountainmanypaths.org/

Join the community Who We Must Become: 
https://who-we-must-become-3166d4.circle.so/ 

Free Unique Self Mini Course:
https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/

Formal refutations on controversy: 
WhoIsMarcGafni.com

Social Media Dr. Marc Gafni: 

Substack: https://substack.com/@marcgafni
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcgafni/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcGafni
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrMarcGafni
Twitter:https://twitter.com/MarcGafni
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarcgafni/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drmarcgafni 

Buy on Amazon
She Comes in Threes | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-18T15:42:52-07:00

The Infinite Intimate: Cosmic Eros, Sacred Story, and the Anthro Ontology of Value

On the footnotes2plato podcast, Host Matt Segall Dialogues About CosmoErotic Humanism with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein

Join Matt Segall in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein:

In Matt’s voice:

In this conversation with Marc Gafni  and Zak Stein, I began by asking about philosophy’s relevance in our current moment of crisis:

What role can philosophy play? 

As philosophers, we like to engage in dialogue, but our present world seems very far from dialogue being what guides the decisions that are shaping the immediate future. I invited us to consider how we can feel like what we’re doing here is meaningful when we’re facing this type of rivalrous, revenge-based antagonism.

Regarding my use of “as if” language in my review of First Principles and First Values that Marc questioned, I explained that the “as if” is an invitation to my readers rather than a direct statement of my own position. It is intended as a bridge to the dominant culture, as a pragmatic invitation to see how people’s lives might change if they took these ideas seriously. I shared my grounding in process philosophy and particularly C. S. Peirce’s pragmaticist approach to theologizing: When I use terms like “as if,” it’s really just my way of signaling the participatory nature of truth and the reality of value. It’s not just waiting out there for us to find it. We have to become worthy of it. I emphasized that we need to imaginally body forth truth, goodness, and beauty to maintain them as realities. That’s our crucial role as human beings.

I asked whether consciousness being fundamental implies that the human being is not just the product of an evolutionary process but something more like the very medium of evolution’s expression. I brought in Schelling’s insight that “the human soul is conscientious of creation”—that we’re tapping into our own memory when doing evolutionary cosmology, not just abstractly reconstructing the universe’s exterior development. The intimacy paradigm Marc and Zak are proposing is something like a poetic proof of the existence of God as that than which nothing more intimate can be felt, a phenomenological proof of the existence of the divine ground within and between us. This divine ground, ultimately, is relational, and thus personal.

Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis

by Dr. Marc Gafni (Author), Dr. Zak Stein(Contributor), Elena Maslova Levin (Contributor)

Story is the source code of culture and consciousness and of all Reality-all the way up and down the evolutionary chain. Story is the attempt to gather information about the nature of Reality and translate it into narrative frameworks bounded by Value.
Stories that organize culture are “Stories of Value, backed by the Universe”.

Postmodernity argues that Reality is just a story, and that all stories are created equal (equally meaningless of inherent value) because value itself is not real. And therefore, all stories of value are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.

The postmodernists are wrong.

Story is real. And not all stories are equal. There are better and worse stories. A better story is an eternal and evolving story of Value. Evolving Value backed by the Universe.

A worse story-one with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines of distorted value, like the story we’ve lived in the West for the better part of the last century-can, and will, bring us to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it.

Value is both real, backed by the Universe, and like everything in the Universe, value evolves. The evolution of value itself is the evolution of love, as Eros and evolution themselves, are inherent plotlines of value in the great story of Cosmos.

The goal of The Evolution of Love, and its companion volume Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, is to provide a first articulation of a new, better story of Value in the domain of relationship. At the core of this New Story of Value are a new Universe Story and a new narrative of identity, which we have called CosmoErotic Humanism and Homo amor.

If we fail to articulate this New Story of Value, the results will be excruciating for billions of human beings and for the entire life system–as for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.

All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.
All of the present depends on us to live.
All of the future depends on us to be born.

Order Here

The Infinite Intimate: Cosmic Eros, Sacred Story, and the Anthro Ontology of Value2025-07-03T05:14:23-07:00

Yuval Harari Gets DISMANTLED – Marc Gafni Exposes The Faults In His Logic

On the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, join Dr. Marc Gafni as he critically examines the fundamental errors in Yuval Noah Harari’s assertions that stories, human rights, and human purpose are mere fictions, figments of our imagination.

In this enlightening discussion, Dr, Marc Gafni—in a fierce and funny tour de force—dismantles the grim assumptions presented in both Harari’s adult and children’s literature, aiming to set the record straight and introduce a new Story of Value. In Marc’s words, “ Value is Real, and, Value is Not Hard to Find, Value is Impossible to Avoid”. Embark on this profound exploration of both Gafni and Harari’s works like never before. This conversation is a game-changer, illuminating the fundamental principles and values that govern the cosmos and our personal lives.

  • In **Part 1**, Marc clarifies the concepts of meaning and value.
  • In **Part 2**, he exposes Harari’s perspective on human rights, artificial intelligence, and his claims regarding the authority of science.
  • In **Part 3**, Marc imparts the powerful insight that there are stories of value that are real, and that the most important one is a love story, and that reality itself is—at its core —a love story.

* 0:00:00 Introduction

00:00:43 The Chilling Effect of Yuval Harari

00:03:20 – A New Model to have a Conversation

00:06:30 – Totalitarianism and Freedom

00:18:18 – Part I – Meaning and Value

00:27:11 – A New Story of Value

00:33:53 – Meaning and Value are not Mass Delusion

00:39:54 – Why this Matters

00:55:14 – Premodern, Modern and Postmodern Value

01:00:49 – Evolution of Value

01:07:31 – Harari’s Hijacking Science

01:09:41 – Part II – Science, Rights and Artificial Intelligence

01:10:10 – Ten Dogmas of Modern Science

01:14:17 – Human Rights are Real

01:23:40 – Artificial Intelligence

01:35:19 – Napoleon’s Five Goals

01:37:07 – Part III – Reality is a Love Story

01:41:57 – Telling Children Life has No Inherent Value

01:55:17 – Evolution is the Progressive Deepening of Intimacies

01:56:21 – The Intimate Universe

02:01:26 – Metacrisis and a New Story of Value

02:06:28 – Value is Real, Eternal and Evolving

02:07:32 – Interior Science Intimacy Equation of CosmoErotic Humanism

02:16:04 – Love Story Stands Against Totalitarianism

02:21:02 – Trust is Based on Shared Value

02:27:58 – We Need to Tell a New Story of Value

02:28:47 – Our Imagination is a Figment of God

02:32:19 – Credits

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

Order Here

Yuval Harari Gets DISMANTLED – Marc Gafni Exposes The Faults In His Logic2025-03-07T01:34:18-08:00

CosmoErotic Humanism: Unveiling the Blueprint for Humanity’s Next Evolution w/ Ariana Sommer

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Superhumanize Podcast.

CosmoErotic Humanism: Unveiling the Blueprint for Humanity’s Next Evolution

ABOUT: 

Welcome to Superhumanize, where we explore the frontiers of human potential and the complex tapestry of consciousness. Today, we have an extraordinary guest—one of the most controversial and transformative thinkers of our time, Dr. Marc Gafni. Marc is not just a philosopher; he’s a revolutionary mind, a master teacher, and a provocateur who challenges us to rethink the very fabric of our reality.

Marc Gafni is known for his groundbreaking ‘source code teachings’ that delve into the profound depths of spirituality, ethics, and human connection. His theories, such as the Unique Self, CosmoErotic Humanism, and the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo amor, are not just philosophical musings; they are calls to action for a global reawakening—a radical shift in how we view ourselves and our collective story.

In this episode, we talk about Marc’s latest work, ‘First Principles & First Values,’ where he collaborates with other visionary thinkers like Ken Wilber and Zak Stein to chart a path through the meta-crisis facing our civilization. This book is a manifesto for the future of humanity, where love, value, and the essence of what it means to be human are redefined in the most fundamental ways.

We’ll explore some of the most pressing questions of our time: How do we confront the root cause of evil, what does it mean to reclaim our collective narrative as a love story? And how do we ensure that emerging technologies serve to enhance, rather than undermine, our journey toward becoming Homo amor?

Marc’s insights are intellectually stimulating and they challenge us to integrate spiritual enlightenment, ethical living, and the art of meaningful relationships into our everyday lives. This is a conversation that promises to push boundaries and invites you into a new way of seeing the world.

Episode highlights:

01:09 Exploring First Principles and First Values

03:08 The Think Tank and Metacrisis

05:08 The Shocks of Existence

06:23 Existential Risks and AI

09:13 The Death of Our Humanity

10:41 The Techplex and Skinner’s Box

22:48 Creating a New Story of Value

47:29 Exploring Eros and Intimacy

48:03 The Principle of Continuity and Discontinuity

49:44 A Story of Timeless Love

51:57 The Evolution of Intimacy and Freedom

54:29 The Debate on Free Will

57:48 The Impact of Technology on Freedom

01:02:09 Understanding Intrinsic Value

01:04:34 The Field of Value and Shared Stories

01:19:47 The Democratization of Heroism

01:21:01 Concluding Thoughts and Reflections

CosmoErotic Humanism: Unveiling the Blueprint for Humanity’s Next Evolution w/ Ariana Sommer2024-11-06T07:39:23-08:00

Story, Risk, and Trust | Marc Gafni in dialogue with Tim Adalin

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on the Voicecraft Podcast with Tim Adalin

Join Tim Adalin in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Show Notes:

Why do we value stories, and how do stories transmit value? Marc Gafni joins Tim Adalin for a dialogue on the philosophy of story, risk, and trust in the context of personal and cultural transformation. Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker and social activist, holding a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.

— Access the shownotes & learn more about Voicecraft podcasts, events, courses and membership network @ https://www.voicecraft.io/content/e11…

— Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings,” including Unique Self theory, the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy. He is author of over twenty-five books, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination. He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy and spirit in the West, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values,’ Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value.” This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.

About Dr Marc Gafni: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.or…

First Principles and First Values (book): https://www.amazon.com/First-Principl…

Keywords

storytelling, poetics, noetics, trust, unique self, intimacy, meta crisis, education, value, humanism

00:00 – Introduction

00:20 – The Essence of Storytelling

11:37 – The Interplay of Poetics and Noetics

19:56 – Trust and the Sharing of Stories

39:19 – Unique Risks and the Pursuit of Wholeness

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

Order Here

Story, Risk, and Trust | Marc Gafni in dialogue with Tim Adalin2025-04-02T00:27:17-07:00

The Integral Stage Podcast: First Principles and First Values, Part 3 (Interview with David J. Temple)

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein featured on the Integral Stage Podcast with Layman Pascal

Join Layman Pascal in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein

The Integral Stage

In this third and final episode in this series, which is cross-posted to both the Cosmo-Erotic Humanism and Authors Series playlists, Layman sits down again with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein to talk further about their jointly authored book, First Principles and First Values, this time focusing on some of the core philosophical arguments.

They are publishing the book pseudonymously under the name, David J. Temple.

First Principles and First Values https://www.amazon.com/First-Principl…

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

Order Here

The Integral Stage Podcast: First Principles and First Values, Part 3 (Interview with David J. Temple)2024-10-02T03:19:54-07:00

The Integral Stage Podcast: First Principles and First Values, Part 2 (Interview with David J. Temple)

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein featured on the Integral Stage Podcast with Layman Pascal

Join Allana Pratt in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni.

In this episode, which is cross-posted to both the Cosmo-Erotic Humanism and Authors Series playlists, Layman sits down again with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein to talk further about their jointly authored book, First Principles and First Values, this time focusing on some of the core philosophical arguments.

They are publishing the book pseudonymously under the name, David J. Temple.

First Principles and First Values https://www.amazon.com/First-Principl…

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

Order Here

The Integral Stage Podcast: First Principles and First Values, Part 2 (Interview with David J. Temple)2024-09-22T21:05:39-07:00

Metamodern Spirituality | Reconstructing Value (w/ Zak Stein)

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Zak Stein featured on the Brendon Graham Dempsey Podcast

Join Brendan Graham Dempsey in conversation with Dr. Zak Stein.

Philosopher Zak Stein joins me to discuss the “the great post-postmodern project, the reconstruction of value itself,” and get into the nuances of what his framework looks like as presented in his new co-authored book First Principles & First Values.

What does it mean to say that value is both fundamental and relational?

How does a metaphysics of value avoid premodern pitfalls (e.g., the myth of the given, a God’s-eye view/view from nowhere, etc.)? What are the challenges posed by language when trying to track value across discontinuities in the complexity stack?

Here we compare notes on our respective projects and try to clarify key points.

  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 1:58 Summary Overview of First Principles & First Values
  • 7:35 The Project: A Post-Postmodern Reconstruction of Value
  • 12:44 Is Positing Value as Fundamental a Premodern Move?
  • 32:24 “Value”: Avoiding Reification
  • 39:11 Languaging the Reconstruction: Difficulties and Diversity
  • 48:29 The Challenge and Importance of Modern Critique of Value
  • 52:39 “Intimacy” or “Complexity”? Seeking Normative Terminology without Anthropomorphizing
  • 1:03:07 Shifting the Paradigm: Translation or Equivocation?
  • 1:06:25 Panpsychist vs. Emergentist Framings
  • 1:10:26 Shifting Telos across Scales: E.g., Dissipative Structures
  • 1:17:56 Value and Anti-Value
  • 1:22:04 New God: Moving towards the Infinite Intimate
  • 1:27:21 Building the Cathedral/Temple: Living with Sacred Purpose

Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/First-Principl…

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

Order Here

Metamodern Spirituality | Reconstructing Value (w/ Zak Stein)2024-09-22T20:41:34-07:00

Value in the Metacrisis with Zak Stein

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Zak Stein featured on the Life from Plato’s Cave podcast. 

Dr. Zachary Stein is the co-president of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He was trained at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and education, and now works in fields related to the mitigation of global catastrophic risk. He is a widely sought after and award winning speaker, and a leading authority on the future of education and contemporary issues in human development. Zak is the author of several books, such as Education in a Time Between Worlds. In this conversation we primarily discuss the new book he contributed to, together with Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber. It’s called First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come.

Value in the Metacrisis with Zak Stein2024-08-31T09:48:58-07:00

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

Read on Substack

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

Download a PDF of the Essay

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

Download a PDF of the Essay

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.

Download a PDF of the Essay
Get the Whole Book on Amazon

Our book can now be ordered from the US and Canada via the links and buttons below. From Europe and other countries, please order from your country’s amazon. The book is available as Paperback, eBook, and Audiobook.

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

Order Here

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

Eros, Unique Self, & a New Story of Value | w/ Marc Gafni

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Back to the Present Podcast with Mithchell Bastock

I don’t know about you, but being a human is pretty cool. All of us almost always take it for granted. It’s so easy getting caught in what’s going on in our our lives that we forget about the bigger picture.
Marc paints this picture. We are at a bit of a crossroad it seems on this planet right now. I don’t believe anyone really knows which way things will go, though I’m 101% confident us humans need to change the way we do things if we want our descendants to enjoy this amazing planet the way we can.
The work Marc and his colleagues are doing provides the tools and stimuli for those of us courageous enough to fight for everlasting love.

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

Order Here

Eros, Unique Self, & a New Story of Value | w/ Marc Gafni2024-07-09T06:42:31-07:00

#353 First Principles and First Values (Book Release) w/ Dr. Marc Gafni aka David J. Temple

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Kyle Kingsbury Podcast.

ABOUT: 

The dear Dr. Gafni is back in a different capacity than he has been lately. We’re taking a short hiatus from learning the Faces of Eros to discuss a work he has most recently collaborated on with Zach Stein and Ken Wilber under the pseudonym “David J. Temple”. The book is First Principles and First Values and it is the basis for much of his views on the CosmoErotic Universe. Please go get the book, work through it at a manageable pace, and let’s create this more beautiful world fam!

Marc’s Books:

NEW BOOK: First Principles and First Values – David J. Temple

A Return to Eros (paperback)

A Return to Eros (audiobook)

The Erotic and the Holy

Your Unique Self

Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment

Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism

Listen to this podcast:

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

Order Here

#353 First Principles and First Values (Book Release) w/ Dr. Marc Gafni aka David J. Temple2024-07-09T06:42:46-07:00

DR. MARC GAFNI: Changing the Story of Humanity at a Pivotal Time in History // EP. 246 Video

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on the The Medicin Podcast with Mimi and Chase Lindquist

About:

In Dr. Gafni and his colleague, 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 the new book, “First Principles and First Values,” written under the pseudonym David J. Temple, a roadmap for humanity is laid before the reader answering the common question, “What can we do to shift the future of humanity towards higher consciousness and shared common goals?” We discuss the roadmap in this episode.

GET THE BOOK HERE // Download first 5 chapters FREE

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

Order Here

DR. MARC GAFNI: Changing the Story of Humanity at a Pivotal Time in History // EP. 246 Video2024-07-09T06:46:43-07:00

DR. MARC GAFNI: Changing the Story of Humanity at a Pivotal Time in History // EP. 246 Audio

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on The Medicin Podcast with Mimi Lindquist.

ABOUT: 

In Dr. Gafni and his colleague, 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 the new book, “First Principles and First Values,” written under the pseudonym David J. Temple, a roadmap for humanity is laid before the reader answering the common question, “What can we do to shift the future of humanity towards higher consciousness and shared common goals?” We discuss the roadmap in this episode.

GET THE BOOK HERE // Download first 5 chapters FREE

Listen to this podcast:

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

Order Here

DR. MARC GAFNI: Changing the Story of Humanity at a Pivotal Time in History // EP. 246 Audio2024-07-09T06:46:29-07:00

Intimate Conversations: A New Story of Value for Humanity with Dr. Marc Gafni Pt. 2 – Allana Pratt

Enjoy Part 2 of this podcast, “A New Story of Value for Humanity with Dr. Marc Gafni” featured on the Intimate Conversations Podcast with Allana Pratt

Join Allana Pratt in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni.

In Allana’s voice:

I’m always left spellbound by the breathtaking honor of connecting with Dr. Marc Gafni.

When he speaks every cell of my body comes alive, my soul feels ignited, I’m able to literally feel Eros in, as and through me. It brought me to tears. ‪@MarcGafni

We spoke of his new book that I invite you to purchase, First Principles and First Values. Not only did we speak of Eros and Pseudo Eros, but a new word, Erosvalue in response to the meta-crisis. And yet what does this mean to your life and intimate relationships? In this inspiring conversation you will discover…

  • The importance of being able to feel the whole of life, not to bypass the hurt or disassociate …but to feel it all, move beyond identity and embrace unique values to experience a never known before possibility.
  • How First Principles and First Values allow us to tell a new Story of Value… And how we need to stay in the field of value to create synergies and end the meta-crisis.
  • How indeed we live in an intimate universe and yet the intimate universe also lives in us, thus intimacy is literally what we need to survive and embody thriving.
  • How we can evolve the story that animates society when we support our evolution reading this book of first principles and first values, a shared grammar… so we are no longer lonely, non intimate, cut off from the interior of each other, isolated in surface existence.
  • How, quoting the book, we can create a new story with a plot line that plays out desire that moves toward intrinsic values where we have will, choice, possibilities and freedom, dealing with the crisis of value, (a birth) and a resolution of a new structure of value.

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

Order Here

Intimate Conversations: A New Story of Value for Humanity with Dr. Marc Gafni Pt. 2 – Allana Pratt2024-07-25T06:48:00-07:00

Intimate Conversations: A New Story of Value for Humanity with Dr. Marc Gafni Pt. 1 – Allana Pratt

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on the Intimate Conversations Podcast with Allana Pratt

Join Allana Pratt in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni.

In Allana’s voice:

I’m always left spellbound by the breathtaking honor of connecting with Dr. Marc Gafni.

When he speaks every cell of my body comes alive, my soul feels ignited, I’m able to literally feel Eros in, as and through me. It brought me to tears. ‪@MarcGafni

We spoke of his new book that I invite you to purchase, First Principles and First Values. Not only did we speak of Eros and Pseudo Eros, but a new word, Erosvalue in response to the meta-crisis. And yet what does this mean to your life and intimate relationships? In this inspiring conversation you will discover…

  • The importance of being able to feel the whole of life, not to bypass the hurt or disassociate …but to feel it all, move beyond identity and embrace unique values to experience a never known before possibility.
  • How First Principles and First Values allow us to tell a new Story of Value… And how we need to stay in the field of value to create synergies and end the meta-crisis.
  • How indeed we live in an intimate universe and yet the intimate universe also lives in us, thus intimacy is literally what we need to survive and embody thriving.
  • How we can evolve the story that animates society when we support our evolution reading this book of first principles and first values, a shared grammar… so we are no longer lonely, non intimate, cut off from the interior of each other, isolated in surface existence.
  • How, quoting the book, we can create a new story with a plot line that plays out desire that moves toward intrinsic values where we have will, choice, possibilities and freedom, dealing with the crisis of value, (a birth) and a resolution of a new structure of value.

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

Order Here

Intimate Conversations: A New Story of Value for Humanity with Dr. Marc Gafni Pt. 1 – Allana Pratt2024-07-09T06:47:09-07:00

First Principles and First Values with Dr. Marc Gafni and Sasha Lipskala

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on the Be Brave Podcast with Sasha Lipskala

Join Sasha Lipskaia in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Marc Gafni is one of the most inspiring and powerful spiritual teachers I know. — Sasha Lipskaia

In this podcast episode they dive deep into the nature of our humanity and the crisis we are in, as we are facing the existential risk of not only the potential death of humanity but also the potential death of our humanity. How we can respond to the meta-crisis and reclaim our hearts? Participate in this deep contemplation on what we must do to cross over to the other side, the side of Love, the side of the Goddess.

Enjoy this meaningful dialogue and reflection. Tune in to gain insights that have the power to completely reshape the understanding of our world and our unique role within it.

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

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

Order Here

First Principles and First Values with Dr. Marc Gafni and Sasha Lipskala2024-08-30T08:47:51-07:00
Go to Top