Live Your Story | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

Live Your Story: The Categorical Imperative of Reality: Reality is an Outrageous, Evolutionary Love Story: Reality is a Unique Self Symphony of Stories, Rooted in a Shared Story of Value

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 32

Live Your Story: The Categorical Imperative of Reality: Reality is an Outrageous, Evolutionary Love Story: Reality is a Unique Self Symphony of Stories, Rooted in a Shared Story of Value | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 32 | Dr. Marc Gafni

In this book, we point towards the ontologies of story and value. Story is real. And value is real. That is the reality consideration that we engage in this book.
Along the way we engage Yuval Harari’s rejection of the ontology of both Story and Value. Harari is perhaps the most popular parrot of the postmodern zeitgeist at this moment in time. Harari’s key idea is that we need a new story around which open societies can cohere in order to respond to the meta crisis.
However, Harari insists that all stories are nothing but fictional social constructs and that value itself is but a delusion, a human contrivance. This is a sure recipe for totalitarianism. It implies that a fictional story must be made up and imposed on the population through some form of totalitarian control, whether overt or covert.
In response to the deconstruction of Story and Value we must tell a new Story of Value that is aligned with the truth of Reality: Story is real. Value is real. Story and value are both eternal and evolving.
The leading-edge sources in the interior and exterior sciences now point towards a deeper realization: Reality is not merely a fact; Reality is a story. Reality is not an ordinary story; Reality is a Love Story, a Story of Eros Value. But the story of Reality, like all love stories, is unfinished. Your love story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story. How you live your story changes Reality itself. The ultimate categorical imperative of Reality is therefore: live your story!

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

Book details:

Title: Live Your Story: The Categorical Imperative of Reality: Reality is an Outrageous, Evolutionary Love Story: Reality is a Unique Self Symphony of Stories, Rooted in a Shared Story of Value
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 32
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340936
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE GOD VOICE: PERFORMING EVOLUTION AS YOUR UNIQUE STORY

  • The Story Must Be One We Can All Access Directly
  • The Democratization of Enlightenment
  • We Cannot Rely on a First-Person Realizer, But First-Person Realization Is Part of the Story
  • Stories Are the Ontology of Reality
  • Prophesy Needs to Be Reclaimed
  • Disambiguating the Voice of God
  • Evolutionary Love Code: My Life Is a Story, and the Story Must Be Performed
  • Performance Needs to Be Reclaimed
  • I Perform in Order to Become Myself
  • We Hold Pieces of Each Other’s Stories

CHAPTER 2    GOD IS REAL, GOD IS STORY

  • The Unbearable Privilege of Radical Responsibility
  • Let’s Be Warriors Together
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Universe Is Made Up Not of Atoms, But Stories
  • Harry Potter and Star Wars: Two Stories at the Center of Culture About Transmission Between Generations
  • Atoms Are Stories Too
  • The Love Story of Reality: Openness and Telos, Intimacy and Autonomy
  • Ten Dimensions of Story
  • Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
  • Your Story and My Story Are Literally Chapter and Verse in the Universe: A Love Story

CHAPTER 3    THE DIGNITY OF HUMANITY: BEING THE SAVIORS OF GOD

  • The Promise of the Fourth Big Bang
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Universe Is Not Merely a Fact; It’s a Story
  • Past, Present, and Future: My Story Matters
  • From Unconscious Story to Conscious Story: I Am the Universe: A Love Story in Person
  • I Am the Storyteller and My Story Deserves to Be Told
  • My Story Deserves to Be Performed
  • I Am a Co-Author in the Story
  • How I Write the Next Chapter in My Story Has Cosmic Significance
  • I Become Fearless in Taking My Unique Risk

CHAPTER 4    OUR FIRST CONVERSATION ON THE CONVERSATIONAL COSMOS

  • Life Is a Series of Conversations
  • The Response to Transhumanism Is Homo amor, a Deeper Vision of Humanity
  • Conversation Moves From Polarization to Paradox
  • Conversation Is the Place Where I Come to My Edge
  • Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
  • What’s Going On? Infinity Desires Intimacy
  • The Infinite and the Intimate Are in Conversation With Each Other
  • All Opposites Meet in Conversation

CHAPTER 5    LIVE YOUR STORY: THE FIRST COMMANDMENT OF COSMOS

  • Story Is a Quality of the Real
  • If Sally Was Ever Here, She Is Here Now—The Story Goes On
  • Story Is the Paradoxical Face of Eternity
  • The Evolution of Choice, Desire and Story
  • Conscious Evolution: Live Your Story
  • Playing With All You’ve Got
  • The Storied Cosmos: The Personal Beyond the Impersonal
  • De-Storying Reality Destroys Reality
  • From the Place of Embracing My Story: What Is My Heroic Transformation?
  • Be the Hero of Your Own Life

CHAPTER 6    OUR FRIEND YUVAL HARARI GOT IT SO WRONG & WHY IT MATTERS: INTRODUCTION

  • The Unbearable Joy of Gravitas
  • We Need a Critical Mass of People to Go From Homo sapiens to Homo amor
  • Yuval Harari Is a Naïve Representation of the Zeitgeist
  • The Level/Line Fallacy of Religion and Science
  • Can You Tell Your Child That Loving Them Is a Fiction?
  • Evolutionary Love Code: We Need a New Story of Value

CHAPTER 7    WHY YUVAL HARARI GOT IT SO WRONG, PART 2: THE ETERNAL TAO IS THE EVOLVING TAO

  • The Great Question of Where Are We?
  • Evidence From Attachment Theory: I Need to Feel at Home in the World
  • The Academic Consensus of a Meaningless Reality Is Profoundly Wrong
  • Reality Is Not Empty; Reality Is Filled With First Values and First Principles
  • Ma: Human Spiritual Participation Illuminates the Cosmos
  • The Eternal Tao Is the Evolving Tao
  • Eternity Means the Ground of Value
  • Human Beings Participate in the Field of Value
  • Individuation Is Not Separation, But Uniqueness
  • We Cannot Respond to the Meta-Crisis Without a New Story of Value
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Clarification of Story and Value Are the Great Purpose, Passion and Joy of Life

CHAPTER 8    FROM GEORGE ORWELL TO B.F. SKINNER TO YUVAL HARARI: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF MEANING AND VALUE AS THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE META-CRISIS

  • Yuval Harari Is Unique in That He Doesn’t Pull the Punch
  • Postmodernity Ripped Off the Veneer of Value
  • The Collapse of Value Is the Root Cause of the Meta-Crisis
  • Direct Line From Nineteen Eighty-Four to Yuval Harari
  • The Love Story Stands Against Totalitarian Fictitious Stories
  • Doublethink: Repudiating Morality While Laying Claim to It
  • Motivated by Responding to Existential Risk: Orwell and Skinner
  • Are Major Cultural Stories Utterly Fictional?
  • Harari: We Have a Capacity to Believe Things That Aren’t True—That’s Our Superpower
  • There Are Shared Stories of Value Because Reality Is a Story
  • Story as Superstructure Versus Story as Social Structure

CHAPTER 9    NO “NEXUS” WITHOUT SHARED VALUE: RESPONSE TO YUVAL HARARI

  • Not All Stories Are Equal
  • There Is a Shared Field of Value
  • When We Don’t Have a Shared Story of Value, We Have Hell
  • Intimacy Is Created by Shared Value
  • Love Story Holds a True Story of Value and Challenges Totalitarianism
  • When Power Dissociates From Love, It Becomes Anti-Value
  • The Only Response to Anti-Value Is Outrageous Love
  • Intimacy and Trust Are Inextricably Linked

CHAPTER 10    INTIMACY IS CONVERSATION: THE THIRTEEN BROKEN CONVERSATIONS WE NEED TO HEAL AND THE EVOLUTION OF CONVERSATION

  • Evolutionary Love Code: There Is No Trust Without Conversation
  • We Live in a Conversational Cosmos
  • No Part Is Apart
  • The Global Intimacy Disorder as the Breakdown of Conversation
  • We Need to Be in Conversation

CHAPTER 11    MY FAIR LADY: THE REVOLUTIONARY RESPONSE TO TECHNO FEUDALIST UTOPIANISM IN ALL ITS DISTRESSING DISGUISES

  • The Chatbot Is Simulating a Conversation
  • Successful Simulation of Conversation: The Turing Test
  • The Personhood Conferral Problem
  • The Double-Edged Move of Transforming My Fair Lady Into a Love Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: the Revolution Is the Reclaiming of Story

CHAPTER 12    MY FAIR LADY: THE GOOD SOCIETY—PRODUCT OF THE PROGRAMMED, OR LOVED INTO EXISTENCE BY SHE? PART 2

  • What Does It Mean to Be a Human Being? Structures of Self
  • Trump Is a Sideshow—We Must Consider the Musk Challenge
  • Effective Accelerationist Movement: The Brakes Have Been Taken Off
  • One-Vector Ignorance: Organism as Algorithm
  • TechnoFeudalism Just Won the Day, and It’s Very Easy to Miss
  • Ovid’s Pygmalian: Rejection of the First Eve for the Second Eve
  • “By Right, She Should Be Taken Out and Hung”
  • Shaw’s Pygmalian: I Can Program You
  • The Fight Between Eliza and Higgins Is the Start of a Real Conversation
  • “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face”
  • Those Who Can’t Be Programmed: Kill Them
  • Re-Enacting Pygmalian in My Fair Lady: Over Time, Pygmalian Becomes a Love Story
  • The Personhood Conferral Problem
  • The Common Thread: Undermining of the Love Story

CHAPTER 13    THE REVOLUTIONARY ACT IS THE LOVE STORY: LOVE IS NOT AN ALGORITHM

  • Revolution Is a Rejection of the Status Quo
  • The Magic of Reality Is Emergence
  • Evolutionary Love Code: the Love Story Itself Is an Act of Rebellion
  • Social Media’s Massive Destruction of Core Structures of Society
  • Utopia Is Creepy
  • Love Is Not Subject to an Algorithm
  • Love and Value Are Real, and the Plotline of Cosmos Is the Evolution of ErosValue
  • The Cosmos Is Alive With Billions of Love Stories
  • The Love Story Is Being Undermined by Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Has No Sense of the Infinity of Value Invested in the Human Being
  • The Love Story Stands Against Totalitarianism
  • The Love Story Is Victorious Even If It Doesn’t Win in This Lifetime
  • The Revolutionary Act Is Always a Love Story
  • Artificial Intelligence Is Hijacking the Love Story Through Conferral of Personhood
  • The Love Story Is the Revolution Because It Is Self-Validating
  • In the Evolution of Value, Homo Amor Must Triumph
  • The Love Story Is the Great Revolution of Humanity

CHAPTER 14    WHY MOVING BEYOND YOUR STORY IS NOT ENOUGH: TO BE FULLY ENLIGHTENED MEANS TO GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Ultimate Categorical Imperative Is “Live Your Story”
  • Time Is Pregnant With Possibility That Never Existed Before
  • The Personal Is the Cosmic
  • The Gaze of Attention
  • Ze Leumat Ze: Value and Anti-Value
  • The Violation of Story
  • Cosmos Is a Love Story
  • The Dignity of Personal Story
  • Accessing the Story of Non-Story
  • What Emerges Out of Being Is Becoming
  • Enlightenment Is Identifying the Most Accurate and Honest Storyline

CHAPTER 15    VALUE AND ANTI-VALUE, STORY AND ANTI-STORY: SIX ELEMENTS OF STORY FROM SUBATOMIC PARTICLES TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS

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

CHAPTER 16    THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION: THE URGENT NEED OF OUR TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

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Live Your Story | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-18T17:04:31-07:00

Story Is Real | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

Story Is Real: Reality Is a Story of Value, Rooted in First Principles and First Values: Only a New Story of Value Can Respond to Existential and Catastrophic Risk

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 31

Story Is Real: Reality Is a Story of Value, Rooted in First Principles and First Values: Only a New Story of Value Can Respond to Existential and Catastrophic Risk | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 31 | Dr. Marc Gafni

We’re in a time between worlds and a time between stories. We are in a postmodern era characterized by the deconstruction of intrinsic value and the deconstruction of the Story of Value. But story is not merely a human construct that is useful for cohering society (as the postmodern zeitgeist suggests). Story is an ontology of Cosmos. Story is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos. The deepest readings of interior and exterior sciences now demonstrate that Reality is a Story. And Reality is not just an ordinary story—Reality is a love story. Eros itself is not merely the mechanics of Reality; it is the value of Reality. Eros is value and value is filled with Eros. Reality is animated by the music of ErosValue.

The failure to recognize ourselves as living within a Story of ErosValue has led to the meaning crisis that is the hallmark of our contemporary human experience. This vacuum of ErosValue has been filled in modernity and postmodernity by the pseudo-erotic story, the success story. The success story is defined by rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics.
This success story in which we live today is one of the primary generator functions for the meta-crisis. As such it is entirely accurate to diagnose the meta-crisis as the failure to recognize that we live within a “Story of Value that is the very fabric of the Real.” It is only the articulation of a new Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values that has the ability to respond to the meta-crisis of existential and catastrophic risks we face today.

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

Book details:

Title: Story Is Real: Reality Is a Story of Value, Rooted in First Principles and First Values: Only a New Story of Value Can Respond to Existential and Catastrophic Risk
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 31
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340615
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    A TIME BETWEEN WORLDS, A TIME BETWEEN STORIES—TELLING THE NEW STORY

  • Presence in Absence
  • We’re at a Time Between Stories
  • A Shared Story Brings Together the Best of the Disparate Parts Into a Larger Union
  • Evolutionary Love Code: I Confess My Greatness
  • My Greatness Is What Obligates Me
  • All of Reality Is One Great Love Story
  • The Essence of Who I Am Is Revealed in My Moment of Greatness

CHAPTER 2    BIRTHING THE NEW POLITICAL BODY THROUGH THE PERSONAL BODY

  • Changing the World Through a New Set of First Principles, Grounded in the Ontologizing of Love
  • Exodus Inserts Into the Bloodstream of Humanity: I’m Not Bound by Yesterday
  • The Personal Is the Political
  • If We Want to Create a New Society We Have to Create a New Body
  • We Need to Tell a New Story With Amor at the Center
  • The Next Chapter in the Story: Homo sapiens Triumphs in Homo amor
  • We Sing a Song of the Sabbath: It’s All Moving Through Us
  • The Bill of Rights and the First Principles Are Encrypted in The Body Sacred
  • Self-Awareness as I Am Seen by Others: My Psyche Is Torn in Two
  • When the Psyche Is Torn in Two, There Is a Fundamental Moment of Alienation
  • That Which Was Most Precious to Me, I Put in the Box—and You Thought That It Was Empty
  • The Goddess Doesn’t Need to Leave: We Can Liberate Each Other From Loneliness
  • Overcoming the Three Reasons for Loneliness

CHAPTER 3    YOUR UNIQUE STORY IS CHAPTER AND VERSE IN THE LOVE STORY OF THE UNIVERSE

  • Our Mission Is to Ontologize Love and to Ontologize Story
  • We Are in a Time Between Stories, in Which a Plague Is Accentuating the Fault Lines of the Modern Story
  • In the Narrative Arc of Reality, Homo sapiens Must Triumph as Homo amor
  • Amor: Ontologizing Love
  • Prayer: We Turn to the Infinity of Intimacy
  • Therefore, Choose Life! Choose to Enter the Dance
  • In This Time Between Stories, We Tell a New Story That Is the Best Articulation of the First Principles of Cosmos
  • Evolutionary Love Code: the Personal Beyond the Impersonal—My Story Matters
  • Randomness Is Always Within the Context of a Larger Storyline
  • We Live in a Conversational Cosmos
  • Reality Is Moved by Stories: From Matter to Life to Mind
  • The Move From Loneliness to Loving Happens When You Recognize That Your Story Matters
  • Four Levels of Story: the Creation Story, the National Story, the Story of the Righteous Ones, and the Democratized Story of Greatness
  • We Must Complete Our Unfinished Business Before We Can Step Into the Next Chapter of Our Story

CHAPTER 4    HEALING THE GLOBAL INTIMACY DISORDER

  • In Response to Catastrophic and Existential Risk, We Diagnose and Address the Root Cause
  • Our Goal Is to Stand for the Future and Articulate a New Vision
  • The Story Is Unfinished and We Must Become the Storytellers
  • Are You Ready to Answer the Call?
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Reality Is an Evolutionary, Outrageous Love Story—a Story of Value Rooted in First Principles And First Values
  • The Second-Person Face of God: Spirit Desires Us Radically
  • Prayer: I Turn to the Infinite Intimate Who Knows My Name
  • Looking at the Primary Generator Functions of Existential and Catastrophic Risk
  • Evolution Is Always a Crisis of Intimacy and We Need to Respond by Generating a New Configuration of Intimacy
  • The New Intimacy Is a New Story of Value
  • First Principles and Story on Their Own Are Not Enough
  • Story Allures Us
  • Story Is Not Enough; It Needs to Be Rooted in First Principles And First Values
  • The Intrinsic Structure of Reality Is Story
  • The Story Has Got to Be a Love Story
  • The Story Is Incomplete and We Are the Storytellers

CHAPTER 5    HEALING THE GLOBAL INTIMACY DISORDER THROUGH A NEW STORY OF VALUE, ROOTED IN FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

  • Our Intention Is to Evolve the Source Code of Consciousness and Culture
  • The Source of Evil Is the Loss of Memory
  • Our Intention Is to Create New Intimacy by Telling the New Story
  • Prayer: We Turn to the Infinitely Intimate Personhood of Cosmos
  • Ki Ata Hu: Reality Is Personally Addressing You
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Reality Is a Story
  • Source Code Keywords From the Book of Creation: Sefer, Sipur, Sapar, Sapir
  • Story Allures and Attracts
  • We Need First Principles and First Values Together With a Story of Value
  • We Inject Values Into Reality Through Story
  • George Floyd: We Witness a Violation of Value in an Embodied Story
  • We’ve Forgotten the Thread of the Story

CHAPTER 6    “I’M WILLING TO LET YOU LOVE ME UNCONDITIONALLY”—THE NEXT CHAPTER IN THE UNIVERSE: A LOVE STORY

  • We Are Committed to the Past, the Present, and Future Generations
  • At the Edge of History, the Story Is Pregnant With New Possibility
  • Poised Between Utopia and Dystopia, We Must Recover The Storyline
  • To Heal the Global Intimacy Disorder, We Need a New Story
  • We Recover the Threads of the Stories That Came Before and We Weave Them Into the New Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Reality Is a Love Story
  • Evolution Is the Evolution of Love
  • I Am Willing to Let You Love Me Unconditionally
  • Homo amor Says: There Are No Strangers
  • To Be Your God-Self Is to Say, I’m Willing to Let You Love Me Unconditionally
  • Prayer: We Turn to the Infinity of Intimacy Who Turns to Us and Says, I’m Willing to Let You Love Me Unconditionally
  • When the Story of Cosmos Breaks Down, We Turn to the Romantic Story: Fairytale, Eurovision 2009
  • Arabian Nights: One Thousand and One Nights

CHAPTER 7    THE EMERGENCE OF HOMO AMOR: TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE LOVE

  • The Archimedian Lever at This Time Is Telling a New Story of Value
  • Reclaiming Prayer From the Politically Corrupt Prisms of Ethnocentric Consciousness
  • The Cosmos Is Amorous
  • We Pray Together in This Glorious and Ecstatically Urgent Moment
  • Writing Outrageous Love Letters
  • Outrageous Acts of Love
  • The Simple Principle of Uniqueness, Repeated Into Gorgeous Complexity With Allurement Between the Parts
  • Outrageous Love Code: Your Story and My Story Are Chapter and Verse in the Universe: a Love Story
  • The Plotlines Run Throughout All the Big Bangs
  • I’m Willing to Let You Love Me Unconditionally
  • The Pre-Tragic, Tragic and Post-Tragic Stages of Unconditional Love

CHAPTER 8    GOD NEEDS MY STORY—MY LIFE IS A SACRED AUTOBIOGRAPHY WRITTEN IN THE ONE HEART OF THE DIVINE

  • We Are Committed to Evolving Intimacy Through the Telling of a New Story
  • The Homo amor Library: at This Time Between Stories, Our Job Is to Tell the New Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: My Story Matters in Cosmos
  • My Story Is Chapter and Verse in a Larger Story and My Story Matters Ultimately
  • To Understand the Significance of Story We Must First Understand the Movements Against Story
  • The Stories We Tell About Ourselves Are Insufficient: We Need to Tell an Outrageous Evolutionary Love Story

CHAPTER 9    TELLING THE EVOLUTIONARY STORY OF CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION

  • Evolving the Source Code, the Inescapable Frameworks in Which We Live
  • We Cannot Evolve the Source Code Without Religion
  • Weaving Easter and Passover Into the New Story
  • Redemption Is a Political and Economic Event
  • Everything Is About the Story We Decide to Tell
  • Story Is an Ontology of Reality
  • Reality Is a Love Story
  • The Evolution of Love Is the Source of Hope
  • This Lifetime Is a Chapter in the Story
  • Choosing to Tell the Most Accurate Story

CHAPTER 10    FROM VALUES TO VALUE AND A STORY OF VALUE: FROM MY PRECIOUS AS ANTI-VALUE TO THE STORY OF VALUE IN THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

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

CHAPTER 11    ARE YOU ALLURING TO GOD? THE GREAT QUESTION OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM

  • It Is Story That Moves the Vector of History
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Truly Intimate Encounter Is a Unique Self Encounter Between Soul Stories
  • Three Primordial Perspectives of Reality
  • Mispar and Sipur: Number and Story
  • What Is Alluring to God Is Invisible
  • Are You Alluring to God?
  • Through Causing Intimate Union in Myself, I Cause Intimate Union in the Divine
  • We Are Allured to Each Other

CHAPTER 12    TELLING A NEW STORY EQUAL TO OUR NEW POWER, PART 1

  • The Meta-Crisis: A Crisis of Story
  • Wake Up to This Unique Moment in Time!
  • We Have to Become the New Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: A New Story of Power
  • The Beauty That Lies in the Beholder Discloses Beauty in The Outside World
  • Interior Sciences Is About Staying Open in the Pain and Loving Madly

CHAPTER 13    TELLING A NEW STORY EQUAL TO OUR NEW POWER, PART 2

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The New Story of Power
  • If We Can Change the Story, We Can Create the New Human and the New Humanity
  • There Is an Ethical Obligation to Be Power-Hungry
  • Every Human Being Has a Unique Script of Desire
  • My Unique Script of Power Is the Unique Power in My Mythic Life
  • The Only True Pleasure Is Living in the Full Power of My Life

CHAPTER 14    CONVERSATION ON STORY WITH AUBREY MARCUS

  • Story Is a Central Piece of the Human Puzzle
  • We Live in a Time Between Stories
  • Polarization Comes From People Living Inside of a Story
  • We Need First Principles and First Values Rooted in a Story of Value
  • The Holiday of Purim—We Briefly Step Out of Story
  • Pesach—Telling the Story of Liberation
  • If We Don’t Live in the Eros of a Shared Story, We Create the Pseudo Eros of an Identity Story That Places Others Outside of the Story
  • A Shared Story of Value Is a Context for Our Diversity
  • One of the Plotlines of Cosmos Is That Union Creates More Diversity
  • Every Religion Plays Its Instrument in the Unique Self Symphony
  • Story Is Intrinsic to Cosmos
  • Post-Modernity Denies That Story and Value Are Real
  • We Need to Evolve Story in Response to Existential Risk
  • All the Way Up and Down the Evolutionary Chain, It’s a Love Story—and Story and Value Evolve
  • Science Needs to Abandon Dogma and Reclaim the Plotlines of Reality
  • We Live in the Universe: A Love Story
  • We Respond to the Collapse of Story by Telling a New Story

  • The Moment I Love One Thing, I’m in the Love Story

  • The Plotlines of Reality

  • The Evolution of Story

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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 

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Story Is Real | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-21T14:50:50-07:00

Value is Real | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

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

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book details:

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

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 7    TOWARDS THE POST-TRAGIC HERO, PART ONE

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

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

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

CHAPTER 9    FROM VALUES TO RIGHTS

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

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

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

CHAPTER 11    WHY DOES VALUE MATTER? PART 1

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

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

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

CHAPTER 13    IS THERE A BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

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
Value is Real | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:30:49-07:00

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
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About the Author:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

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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:
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Join the community Who We Must Become: 
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First Principles and First Values | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:29:18-07:00

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.

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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 Author:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

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/

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She Comes in Threes | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:28:41-07:00

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

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

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

Book Review “First Principles & First Values”

A New Story of Value for Our Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Erotic and the Ethical

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

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

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

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

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

Eros Is Ethics

Excerpt from The Mystery of Love by Dr. Marc Gafni

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Echoes of Emptiness—The Erotic and the Ethical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God and Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prophet and the Pagan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the ethical cry of Isaiah in chapter 1:

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

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

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

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

The Erotic and the Ethical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposing the Temple Prostitute

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Impersonal and the Transpersonal

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

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

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

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

Erotic and Ethical Entitlement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epilogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dropping and Carrying Your Burden

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

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

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

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

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

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FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

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

by David J. Temple

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

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

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


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

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

ErosValue: Early Thoughts – Dr. Marc Gafni

Download a PDF the Essay

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

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

Eros is life.

Eros generates new life.

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

Eros is Value.

And Value is Eros.

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

ErosValue.

ErosValue generates the Value of Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethos and Eros Are One: Eros Is ErosValue

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

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

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

The Eye of Value: Early Draft Essay

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2020

Read “The Eye of Value”

On the Erotic and the Ethical

Dr. Marc Gafni, Tikkun, 2003

Read “On the Erotic and the Ethical”

NonDual Humanism

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2006

Read “NonDual Humanism”

The Wisdom of Solomon

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2006

Read “The Wisdom of Solomon”

The CosmoErotic Universe

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2017

Read “The CosmoErotic Universe”

Eros as Value Perception

An Excerpt from Your Unique Self

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2011

Read “Eros as Value Perception”

Eros and Ethics

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2017

Read “Eros and Ethics”

ErosValue: First Thoughts

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2023

Read “ErosValue: First Thoughts”

Value: For Its Own Sake

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros

Dr. Marc Gafni, 2017

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

Story as a First Principle and First Value of Reality

By Dr. Marc Gafni

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

Download a PDF of this Essay

We often speak of three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism.

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

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

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

Reality is not merely a fact.

Reality is also a story.

Reality is not an ordinary story.

Reality is a love story.

Reality is not an ordinary love story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Four Elements of Story

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

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

Download Chapter 1-5 of First Principles and First Values

Download Chapter 1-5 of First Principles and First Values (2024) by David J. Temple.

FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

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

by David J. Temple

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

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

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


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


David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

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Download Chapter 1-5 of First Principles and First Values2025-08-07T03:21:45-07:00

Foreword by Howard Bloom – The Future of Relationships

Foreword by Howard Bloom

Forthcoming book: The Intimate Universe by Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Marc Gafni

To understand the book you hold in your hands, you have to understand two people: Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni. Both of them are magic.

To reveal that magic, let me first tell you the tale of how I met Barbara Marx Hubbard, who was later to introduce me to Marc. It was 2005, and I was at a space conference at the Airport Sheraton in Los Angeles. This was not a conference I’d wanted to attend. I’d been pressured into showing up by people from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Space Society. Why had I refused to go? At first, I had been too embarrassed to explain.  The fact was that I only attend conferences where I’m speaking. There’s a reason. If I am just  another face in the crowd, that fact depresses me.

I told that to Feng Hsu, the senior risk analyst from NASA who had made himself part of the pressuring team. Feng volunteered to fly up from Houston to keep me company. And he made a promise. He would assign another babysitter to me, David Livingston, the host of the Space Show. Livingston, he assured me, had heard every one of my broadcasts on the highest rated overnight talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast, was a huge fan, and knew everyone in the space community. Feng was not kidding around. Not only did he team up with me when we attended lectures and peppered the lecturers with questions or criticism, but David Livingston was a genius at important introductions.

(more…)

Foreword by Howard Bloom – The Future of Relationships2023-06-17T08:23:32-07:00

First Principles & First Values: Toward a Universal Grammar of Meaning in a Time Between Worlds – A White Paper

Living in the Tao: Toward a Global Ethos for a Global Civilization

<<< DOWNLOAD PDF >>> 

<<< DOWNLOAD PDF >>> 

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First Principles & First Values: Toward a Universal Grammar of Meaning in a Time Between Worlds – A White Paper2023-06-17T12:21:06-07:00

Towards a New Narrative of Identity: First Principles of Unique Self Realization (Dr. Marc Gafni)

First 4 Chapters of the Book Your Unique Self

Ken Wilber writes about Your Unique Self:

DR. MARC GAFNI’S INTEGRAL UNIQUE SELF TEACHING IS SEMINAL. What you hold in your hands is a radically exciting and ground-breaking book that will change forever not only how you think about enlightenment, but how you understand, from a post-metaphysical perspective, the very nature of human life itself. The Unique Self work is magnificent, and it belongs among the “great books.” It offers what may arguably be one of the most significant contemporary evolutions of enlightenment teaching. Unique Self brings together East and West in a higher integral embrace of stunning implications. Unique Self is a pivotal step toward an authentic Enlightenment.

Read the essay below or download the PDF.

Download the PDF Version of the Paper
Download the PDF Version of the Paper
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Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment

Underlying the vision behind democracy is the recognition that every individual has dignity, adequacy and worth. This democratic understanding of the worth and standing of the individual lies at the core of what the West calls enlightenment. The Western idea of enlightenment, rooted in the great vision of the Biblical prophets, is generally understood to have entered mainstream consciousness through the political democratic movements of the mid 18th century. Western enlightenment is primarily concerned with the democratization of political power. Classical enlightenment, sometimes called Eastern enlightenment because it was greatly emphasized in the East, is about the individual merging into the greater one. The appearance of separate self is an illusion, which must be overcome as the individual realizes that one is really not separate at all but part of the one. The goal of Eastern enlightenment is moving beyond the grasping ego and desperately seeking separate self by attaining a state of consciousness in which the illusion of separateness was dissolved in the greater one. This path of classical enlightenment is seen as the path beyond suffering. Unique Self enlightenment brings the Eastern and Western understandings about enlightenment together, into a higher Integral World Spirituality embrace. Unique Self enlightenment is based on your commitment to transcend separate self into the one, even as you realize that that essence sees through your unique perspective. Unique Self opens the door to the potential democratization of enlightenment. To awaken to your Unique Self is to be lived as God, which, in truth, means to be lived as love.
Buy the Book on Amazon

Towards a New Narrative of Identity: First Principles of Unique Self Realization

by Dr. Marc Gafni (An Excerpt from Your Unique Self)

Foreword by Ken Wilber

MARC GAFNI’S INTEGRAL UNIQUE SELF TEACHING IS SEMINAL. What you hold in your hands is a radically exciting and ground-breaking book that will change forever not only how you think about enlightenment, but how you understand, from a post-metaphysical perspective, the very nature of human life itself. The Unique Self work is magnificent, and it belongs among the “great books.” It offers what may arguably be one of the most significant contemporary evolutions of enlightenment teaching. Unique Self brings together East and West in a higher integral embrace of stunning implications. Unique Self is a pivotal step toward an authentic Enlightenment.

The teaching in this book has been evolved primarily by Marc Gafni for over three decades and draws from his own realization, insight, and the enlightenment lineage in which he stands. In Gafni’s reading of this lineage, brilliantly articulated in his three-volume opus, Radical Kabbalah: The Enlightenment Teaching of Unique Self, Nondual Humanism and the Wisdom of Solomon, (forthcoming) which I read in several highly excited nights, Unique Self is a nondual realization of Unique Perspective. This realization  expresses itself both as the Unique Perspective on a text and as the Unique Perspective of the realized individual—what Gafni terms, in Lainer’s thought, the Judah Archetype, whose perspective is a unique incarnation of unmediated divinity and therefore overrides  all previous text, including even the Torah itself. In essence, the realized individual, whose True Self has been disclosed, expresses that True Self through his or her Unique Perspective—what Gafni originally termed “Unique Self.” Hence, what Gafni calls the nondual humanism of Unique Self is rooted in this equation, in my wording:

True Self + Perspective = Unique Self.

Unique Self brilliantly articulates the idea that within each of us is a post-egoic nondual realization of unique perspective, a unique incarnation of unmediated divinity. The Unique Self re-inhabits all the natural capacities of the human body-mind and all its multiple intelligences. It embraces its capacity for math, for music, for introspection, for love and interpersonal connection—all the talents and capacities given to human beings—with- out dismissing the True Self, the One Spirit condition that connects us all. Unique Self drenches and permeates the entire system of what is known as Eastern and Western forms of enlightenment.

The full crystallization of this New Enlightenment/Unique Self teaching that Dr. Gafni initiated, in which he and I have partnered, emerged through a series of many important dialogues that we had over nearly a decade. Through these dialogues, a highly significant new chapter in Integral Theory has emerged. These conversations were coupled with intensive dis- course that Marc and I had with other leading Integral Spiritual teachers and thinkers, including, initially, Diane Hamilton in a catalytic role and later Sally Kempton. World Spirituality based on Integral principles is an entirely new lineage—a trans-path path. Unique Self models the emergent World Spirituality based on Integral principles in that it includes all the good stuff of previous paths, but adds a whole new level of emergence. And that is something that is extraordinary, historic, and not to be denied.

A Note to the reader

WELCOME.

THIS SHORT NOTE IS TO HELP YOU EASILY NAVIGATE THIS BOOK.

Please do not skip this note. It will guide you through the book.

There are two different ways to read this book. Let’s call them Track One and Track Two. The first track is simply to follow the order of the chapters. The advantage of this approach is that Part One and Two unpack the core enlightenment teachings that ground the rest of the book. However— and this will be important for readers primarily interested in the practical application of these teachings—you can also choose to take another road through the book. Read the first three chapters, which will take you about one hour. Then, skip directly to Parts Three, Four and Five, which contain the chapters immediately applicable to your day-to-day life. These are the chapters on sacred autobiography, living your story, love, shadow, sexing, joy, evolutionary relationships and much more. Once you’ve read these, you can circle back and read the core framework teachings on Unique Self enlightenment in Parts One and Two, which will add profound depth to your understanding and embodiment of the latter part of the book.

Each part of this book deals in depth with a different dimension of Unique Self:

Part One lays down the core teaching or model of Unique Self enlightenment.

Part Two places the Unique Self model in a larger evolutionary context and unpacks a global vision of what it means to live your “evolutionary Unique Self.”

Part Three teaches you what it means to live your story and incarnate the infinite dignity of your sacred autobiography—or a Unique Letter in the evolving cosmic scroll.

Part Four deploys the Unique Self teaching toward a radical re-under- standing of Love, Joy, and Shadow in our lives. The sections of love and the two chapters on shadow are key as they significantly evolve our understanding of shadow integration, which is presently an essential but profoundly misunderstood dimension of the spiritual path.

Part Five offers a critical new understanding of sexuality and relation- ships in light of Unique Self. The section on sexing presents a new map of six forms of sexing, which re-orients and deepens the sexual in a significant way. The chapter on Unique Self encounters outlines seven principles of evolutionary Unique Self meetings, and it re-visions the essential nature and skill of all relationships.

Part Six deploys the Unique Self model in relation to parenting, malice, and death in a way that fundamentally changes our understanding of all three. And finally, the Epilogue places the realization of Unique Self in the context of the emergence of a Global Spirituality based on Integral principles.

Please use the table of contents and index. They are very detailed and will be helpful to you in identifying a particular topic you are called to or in finding a particular section after you have finished your first reading.

Last, there is a footnote section in the back that is particularly important for those interested in Integral Theory as it relates to Unique Self. If you are not a theory person or an academic intellectual type just skip the foot- notes. You do not need footnotes to get the point of the book. However, for those of you, myself included, who love footnotes, know that the footnotes contain academic and intellectual citations as well as deeper dives into the sources, the intellectual history of Unique Self, and the broader context of the conversation.

(more…)

Towards a New Narrative of Identity: First Principles of Unique Self Realization (Dr. Marc Gafni)2023-10-17T07:56:58-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: 26 Distinctions Between Ego and Unique Self 

An Excerpt from the Book by Dr. Marc Gafni Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism: Two Models and Why They Matter (Integral Publishers, 2014)

The primary critique of Unique Self teaching, leveled by students of Authentic Self in all of its names—for example, evolutionary self—is that Unique Self is but a clever front for ego. Or that even if it is not actually identical with ego, it can all to easily be hijacked by the ego. The latter is a fair and important point. However, the same critique might be just as easily leveled at the clarion call to identify with the evolutionary impulse which lies at the heart of both Unique and Authentic Self teachings. (The difference, as we have already noted, is that in the Authentic Self-teaching, the evolutionary impulse is wholly impersonal, while in the Unique Self teaching, the evolutionary impulse at its core is expressed only personally through you as the personal face of the process). It is all too easy for the ego to hijack the evolutionary impulse as a fig leaf for every manner of ego’s misdeed. Indeed, this is not a theoretical concern, but a sadly well-proved truth as the history of the evolutionary movements show. The grandchildren of Hegel’s evolutionary teaching, communism primary among them, deployed the evolutionary imperative to cover every form of heinous crime against humanity. And yet, that does not invalidate the sacred power of the evolutionary impulse, just as the crimes committed in the name of Christ do not deconstruct the truth and beauty of Christ consciousness, nor does the atom bomb disqualify the nobility of the humanist creative urge born of the new scientific paradigm. Nor does the fact that ego might hijack Unique Self lessen the critical nature of Unique Self realization. All goods may be hijacked. We must, therefore, guard against the hijacking, but we must not refuse to fly. To guard against the conflation of ego and Unique Self, it is necessary to clearly discern between these two very different states and stages of consciousness. Below, I offer the beginning of a discussion of just such a set of discernment.

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Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism

Two major works have been written within the framework of Integral Wisdom about the nature of Self and God. While they share important features, namely the evolutionary context of the conversation and a vision of Self beyond Ego, their interior visions of the quality of the Self beyond Ego are profoundly different.
Both of these visions of Self, or key dimensions of the two versions, have been adopted, directly and indirectly by many spiritual teachers. In Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism, Marc Gafni articulates the two models, their shared features and their differences, and as we seek to articulate an Integral Wisdom, why these differences matter so desperately.

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Dr. Marc Gafni: 26 Distinctions Between Ego and Unique Self 2023-09-12T10:03:49-07:00

Malice: The Denial of the Unique Self Encounter

An Excerpt from Your Unique Self by Dr. Marc Gafni

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The opposite of a Unique Self encounter is an encounter motivated by malice. Malice manifests as both the denial of, and the attempt to destroy, the Unique Self of the other. The desperate attempt to destroy the Unique Self of an other is based, paradoxically, on a primal recognition of the other’s Unique Self, and a feeling that somehow the other’s self makes one less, or not enough.

Most of the literature of the human potential movement and its daughter, the new age movement, ignores or even denies malice. But you cannot skip malice if you want to truly understand and practice love. Love is a Unique Self perception that creates pleasure and joy in its wake. Malice is a Unique Self distortion that creates envy and hatred in its wake.

Malice is a verb in the same way that love is a verb. however, it is essential to remind you that being aroused to malice does not mean that you let yourself be seduced by the arousal. You have every ability to clarify your arousal and transmute it into goodness and love. The kinds of people that might arouse you to malice are:

  • People who remind you that you are not living your Unique Self.
  • People who you think, by their very existence, are taking away your ability to let the radiance of your Unique Self shine in the world.
  • People you believe stand in the way of you fulfilling your Unique Self.

In these situations you will be sorely tempted—if you think you can get away with it—to seek to destroy their Unique Self in order to cover up the inchoate yet agonizing pain of your disconnection from your personal essence.

Know in advance that you will experience great resistance to this teaching. Your  primal,  desperate  desire  is  to  deny  any  connection  between yourself and malice. it may be that you have never acted it out. This is good. or you may be one of the people that M. Scott peck describes in his book People of the Lie. I have called them people of malice. people of malice are people whose own early pain has made them evil in the way that they act in the world. The core expression of people of malice is that they attack, undermine, or demonize others, instead of facing their own failure. The attack may be subtle or overt. However, it is always covered by the sophisticated fig leaf of respectability, or even by noble motives.

You may know someone like this; they seem respectable, even noble, yet underneath the veneer, they have wreaked brutal destruction—often on those who were or are in their closest circles of intimacy. This might include parents driven by malice toward their children, an employer toward an employee or the converse, friends and colleagues, a teacher toward a student, or a student or group of students toward a powerful teacher. Their malice is almost always covert. Echoing Milan Kundera, it would be correct to say, “Since malice can never reveal its true motivation, it must plead false ones.” Leading British psychoanalyst Joseph Berke informs us that malice is to moderns what sex was to Victorians. It is to be repressed at any price. it is an obsession, best denied, avoided, or forgotten. The perpetrators of malice often claim to be “protecting” some imagined victim from harm. If you even suggest they might have any other motivation that is less than the pure mask they don in the world, they are outraged. There is nothing the people of malice fear more than having the lie of their motivation or the ugliness of their hidden machinations exposed. There is a ferocity to malice. This makes it intuitively frightening for people to confront. so most people withdraw into the shade of their own cowardice, covering their coward’s tracks with well-reasoned and plausible disclaimers.

Often the coward finds it easier to energetically join with the movement of malice than to oppose it. This is the worst and most deplorable form of laziness, albeit one of the most common, even if hidden from the public eye. It might take the form of blaming the victim or exaggerating their responsibility. If in some sense “he had it coming,” it is easier to rationalize joining the executors of malice than it is to arouse the discernment and courage necessary to oppose them.

In the great spiritual traditions, much of the judgment after our death about who we were in this world, as well as the greatest creator of karma, is related to how we behaved when confronted with malice that was disguised as a righteous cause. Did we speak truth to power? Or did we cleverly disguise our cowardice with a thousand rationalizations, even as the Unique Self of your friend, colleague, or teacher was thrown under a bus?

Malice Is Painfully Private, Publicly Dangerous

Let’s look more closely now at the phenomenon of malice, so you will be able to identify it clearly. It is absolutely necessary to liberate the world from malice. As you read, keep in your heart that malice is a poison that threatens the blooming of Unique Self more than anything.

Malice operates through a simple four-stage process: Malice (1) Per- ceives genuine flaws, (2) Exaggerates or distorts them, (3) Minimizes the good in the attacked person’s character, and (4) Absurdly and insidiously identifies the person with their distorted caricatures, painted by the purveyors of malice themselves.

The internal perception of malice operating in you or your friend is the same as love, for malice is love’s opposite. Just as love is Unique Self perception, malice is Unique Self distortion. The malice-motivated distortion happens in two ways. First, you might see the Unique Self of the other, but since that image provokes the pain of your own lack, you try to tear it down. Or second, distortion might mean that you cannot see—you see only distorted images of the other—you have lost the ability to see with God’s eyes.

In malice you sense the awareness of something provoking you as either an unbearable feeling of intense pleasure or as a “grenvious” vexation. “Grenvy,” a term coined by Joseph Berke, is the ill-fated brew of greed and envy that produces the potion of malice.

Malice elicits forceful attacking and even what psychologists in the field have called annihilating behavior. Malice is not connected with legitimate causes at its core—it always hides behind them. it is painfully private, yet when it bursts out of control, it is publicly dangerous in the extreme. It is fed by what Berke calls a distorted “inner world of fact and fantasy, brought about by the confused interplay of perception, memory, and imagination.” “There is bad intent that arises in the world; there is intent to hurt and do evil to other people—we have to confront that.” This sadly correct truth was spoken by my beloved friend Ken Wilber several years back in a public dialogue we did on the topic of evil in the world. Ken was responding to a questioner who made the all-too-common argument that all the tragedy that befalls us is ultimately our own creation, and thus we must take 100 percent responsibility for everything that occurs. The new age narcissists cannot bring themselves to bow before the mystery, so they claim all power to themselves.

Of course, more often than not, the hidden agenda is that the victim has no right to be outraged or demand justice. Since the victim is the creator of their own reality, the ones who have been hurt should be taking responsibility. This cleverly lets the inflictor of pain off the hook. The moral context of justice and injustice, right and wrong, and good and evil is undermined by a subtle relativism in which no ethical discernments are genuinely possible. Or, in a related scenario, the abuser themselves claim to have been abused, thus legitimizing the pain inflicted by them on the true victim. This type of claim is one of the most aggressive and insidious disguises of malice.

This new age view has found a strange bedfellow in distorted American presentations of Theravada Buddhism. since everything is the result of cause and effect, you must be the creator of everything in your reality. If you take total, 100 percent responsibility for everything, you will find your way to spiritual depth and maturity. so the popular dharma goes.

This view is not all wrong. It is in fact a powerful and desperately needed  antidote  to  the  victim  culture  that  so  pervades  much  of  the american spiritual scene. We have been ushered into a new world where any hurt party claims victimhood and uses the claim to inflict all manner of abuse. This often comes together with an abdication of responsibility and often the filing of some sort of suit or complaint. The filing of a complaint gains the ostensible victim a long list of goods, far beyond finances. attention, focus, community, love, and a feeling of power and aliveness are high on the list. Those who encourage and even instigate false complaints are often driven by hidden or disowned malice.

Often, the true predator is the victim who inflicts cruelty and pain on their alleged tormentor to a degree far greater than whatever imagined or even genuine hurt the victim themselves may have felt. Disguised as the victim, the true predator receives the communal love and support. The true victim, cast as the predator, is debased, dehumanized, and ostracized in a thousand cruel ways.

In this context, it needs to be said that while the Buddhist teaching, with its demand for self-responsibility, is a desperately needed and crucial counterweight to the abdication of responsibility through the false claim to victim status, it is only part of the story. At the same time, what is clear from the scenario of false complaints is that self-responsibility is no more than a partial truth. Whenever something happens, you must identify what part you played in creating the conditions that allowed for suffering to occur. You may have contributed 5 or 50 percent to the system. even if you have only 5 percent responsibility, you must take 100 percent responsibility for your 5 percent. But not more. The other part of the story is often the malice of other players in the situation.

Taking total responsibility is actually a disguised form of hubris. it is a refusal to give up control. in this case, the control is maintained precisely through “taking responsibility.” But your insistence on being the sole creator of your reality ignores the larger creative field of which you are but one small part. it ignores the greater evolutionary intelligence at work in and through your life. it ignores the mystery, and blithely dismisses all other people in the story as but supporting actors in your narcissistic control drama.

Total control of your life in the form of total responsibility is not an expression of spirit—quite the opposite. it is one of the more clever disguises of the narcissistic ego.

What is appropriate is for you to identify your contribution, if any, to creating the conditions that led to your suffering. You can and must take 100 percent responsibility for your part. This, however, is a more nuanced, sacred, and humble posture than 100 percent responsibility for everything.

This posture bows before the mystery, even as it recognizes the possibility of malice.

The Murder of Christ

Humans seek the death and destruction of others, even as we seek their happiness. Both drives and both voices exist in every person who lives in the separate self of the ego. We think that malice only appears “out there,” that it does not show up in respectable or polite society. Sadly, this is completely untrue. lynch mobs manifest in many and varied ways. The prime movers in lynch mobs are energetically attracted to each other. They find each other. They move in unison, almost always hiding their own malice, even from each other. They are drawn to the lynch party to partner in destroying the common energetic emotional threat.

Freud’s brilliant student and colleague, Wilhelm Reich, called this not-uncommon phenomenon “the murder of Christ.” The  murder of Christ is the attempt to murder life force. All sorts of reasons justify the crucifixion. A thousand demonizations build the cross. The murderers support each other, often outdoing one another in their maligning of Christ. “see, he is calling himself Christ,” they say, in order to give evidence of his narcissism.

Remember that  malice  is  sourced  in  Unique  self  distortion.  This  is the matrix of the endless cycle of demonizing by those disconnected from their daemon and incapable of owning their demon. They lack the spiritual courage to name what moves them in their breast, which is that “he,” the always-flawed Christ they seek to destroy, has a light that threatens their light. He has an appeal, a draw, that is different from theirs. They cannot explain it. so they seek out his imperfections, magnify them a hundredfold, distort and add some major dose of lies for good measure, and the necessary mix for murder is set. hidden envy, jealousy, and greed are the basic ingredients necessary to conjure the witches’ brew.

This is the source of the “Foul Whisp’rings . . . abroad” that Shakespeare saw as the source of villainy and even murder. as author Philip Roth describes it:

The  whispering  campaign  that  cannot  be  stopped,  rumors it’s impossible to quash . . . slanderous stories to belittle your professional qualifications, derisive reports of your business deceptions and your perverse aberrations, outraged polemics denouncing your moral failings, misdeeds, and faulty character traits—your shallowness, your vulgarity, your cowardice . . . your falseness, your selfishness, your treachery. Derogatory information. Defamatory statements. insulting witticisms. Disparaging anecdotes. idle mockery. Bitchy chatter. Galling wisecracks.

It is in this regard that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, “It is certain that envy is the worst sin that is: for all others sin against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and all goodness.”

The Evil Eye

Envy, as we saw earlier, is often the envy of an other’s Unique Self, which reminds you of your own unlived life. Envy that motivates malice is directly related to what has been called through history the evil eye. The evil eye is not a superstition, but an inner trait of black character. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “the evil eye is affected by strong imagination of the soul and corrupts and poisons the atmosphere so that tender bodies that come within its range may be injuriously affected.” Envy then partners with greed, which is an “insatiable desire to take for him what another possesses.” It is motivated by a ruthless acquisitiveness, which is publicly denied.

A greedy person is concerned with possessing. An envious person is obsessed with that which they do not possess. Often greed and envy come together in “grenvy.” Berke’s work remains the most insightful analysis of the inner dynamics that animate people of malice. According to Berke, for the envious person, the “goodness must not be preserved, only attacked, spoiled, and destroyed.”

The first stage of envy is often idealization. The idealization, however, cannot last. it arouses too much anguish in the heart of the envier. Therefore, the reverse process sets in. Denigration, equally extreme and unrealistic, follows idealization. This is done to mitigate the anguish of the previous perception. So the elephant becomes a midge, the palm tree becomes a toadstool, and a cloth coat turns into a rag. A kind of hysteria sets in, and there is a refusal to see any goodness at all in the person attacked.

The distorting impact on awareness shows up not only in the envier, but also in the envied. The envied often engages in two forms of self-deception: the envied person idealizes their envier, which is not that hard because often they were once loved by their envier; or they shut down in order to avoid the pain engendered by the awareness of the envy.

One of the demarcating characteristics of malice is its intense cruelty. King David writes in Psalms, “Many have risen against me,” and he goes on to describe in exquisitely accurate detail the dynamics of deception and self-deception that guide the ostensibly respectable lynch mob disguised by the fig leaf of the “noble cause.” In Joseph Berke’s incisive formulation, “The politics of envy culminates in the effective disguise of individual or collective enmity and its expression through political relationships or institutional decisions that are ostensibly virtuous.”

When an individual in the mob is confronted, they refer to “all of us,” or say, “There are many people throughout this life who say this,” and the like, ignoring the fact that the righteous and disgruntled always attract each other.

The philosopher Socrates is perhaps the most notable victim of the “slander and envy of the many,” including, of course, the political and religious establishment of his day. all of them nodded knowingly to each other, demonizing Socrates even as they—in their collective pathology—denied any suggestion of their own envy being a motivating force, discounting this as an absurd and malevolent suggestion that did not deserve serious rebuttal.

The envy of the “successful one” by students, teachers, and colleagues was much more forthrightly recognized in older cultures. among the Khoikhoi people of South Africa, if a hunter has scored a great kill, he is sent to his hut until the village elder calls on him. he is then placed in the center of the circle surrounded by his fellow hunters, who literally piss on him. In this way, a legitimate outlet is created for the enviers to express their discontent and even rage.

If this seems culturally hard to grasp, just note the same custom in Western culture. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish tradition, when the priest offers sacrifice to the divine in the temple, a sacrifice to the “other side” is offered as well. The psychological premise is that shadow must first be owned in the person of the individual and the community before it can be transmuted and atoned for.

Envy  corrupts  and  corrodes  love.  It  turns  good  into  bad.  in Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago accomplishes this by a lethal mixture of slander and duplicity, a process of bad-mouthing and backstabbing. Envious revenge is fueled by hidden arrogance, unyielding aggression, and pride. It is based on distorted or exaggerated hurts rather than significant injury. The envier, in their internal self, considers only their accomplishments in comparison to the one envied. Envy, at its core, is grasping for Unique Self. Envious destructiveness is deliberate. The envious person denies goodwill or love toward the object of their ire. What they want to do is remove the bilious anger and bitter vindictiveness that lurks just beneath their surface self. Their surface self appears more often than not as spiritual, and filled with ostensible good intention and light. it is also possible that the surface good intention and light are real. Envy is often a vicious streak in an otherwise decent and even good personality. This is precisely why the malice of seemingly good people is so persuasive. The envious person wants to get rid of the feelings that they vaguely know exist right beneath their surface personality. They violate their own sense of goodness and even righteousness. since he (unconsciously) blames the one he envies for how he feels, he sets out to make him feel bad or appear bad. It is no accident that “evil” is “live” spelled backward. Evil stands against life force. And life force is nowhere more powerful than in the full bloom of Unique Self.

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Malice: The Denial of the Unique Self Encounter2024-12-31T05:59:23-08:00

Ego Story or Unique Self Story Reloaded – Ego and Unique Self Distinction #25

by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self

Your egoic story can be taken away by the circumstances of life. Your Unique Self story can never be taken away from you.

Ego can be taken away from you. Unique Self can never be taken away from you.

Further discussion:

In his book Your Unique Self Dr. Marc continues with a beautiful, very personal, and deeply touching story, which shall be reserved for its readers. Another example for this would be the story of the great Rebbe of Piaseczno, who has found and lived his Unique Self story in the midst of the greatest destruction, so beautifully told by Dr. Marc in this video series.

For the conclusion of our series on the distinctions between Unique Self and Ego, it remains to be said: It is time to put it all to work in our daily lives, in our personal Unique Self stories.

And in all our striving and yearning that is an essential part of waking up and growing up to our full realization of our Unique Self, let’s never forget that in essence, Unique Self is who we truly are and always have been. So, in a way, we can relax into our own everlasting being and becoming. Uniqueness and Oneness are all around as well as within us–for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. To awaken to our infinitely gorgeous Unique Selves simply means to become conscious of that and to realize it in our own being–and in the world.

To show up as Unique Self means–as Dr. Marc so often reminds us–to incarnate as the Personal Face of Essence, of the Love-Beauty and Love-Intelligence of the Cosmos, to give our Unique gifts, and to respond to an authentic need that we are aware of in our world. It means to “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself,” to see the neighbor even in the stranger, to become outrageous lovers, and to write outrageous loveletters to the universe.

Join us in our caravan of love!

Come back to these distinctions as often as you like and share with us your path of learning and discovery–here or on one of our FB-pages:

  1. Special or Not Special
  2. Action or Reaction 
  3. Imitation or Originality
  4. Satisfaction and Greed
  5. Enough or More
  6. Ego or Unique Self Story
  7. Joy or Fear
  8. Open Heart or Closed Heart
  9. Eros or Grasping
  10. Authentic Freedom or Pseudofreedom
  11. King or Servant
  12. Victim or Player
  13. Betrayal or Loyalty
  14. Authentic Friendship or Pseudofriendship
  15. Bigger or Smaller
  16. Yes or No
  17. Justice or Injustice
  18. Responsibility or Excuse
  19. Paradox or Splitting
  20. Past or Present
  21. Special Relationship or Open as Love
  22. Love or Fear
  23. Eternity or Death
  24. Pleasure: Delusion or Divine

Let’s finish this series with Rumi:

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.

Ego Story or Unique Self Story Reloaded – Ego and Unique Self Distinction #252024-07-05T12:26:31-07:00

Common Ground: Your Unique Self: What It Means to Be a Lover … from God’s Eyes

buddha-lilyBy Marc Gafni

Note: The following article appeared in the December 2012/January 2013 issue of Common Ground Magazine.

The true nature of your values is always revealed in death. In eulogies, both in what is spoken and unspoken, there is something of the essential nature of your life and loyalties. Sometimes, however, before you die you are strangely privileged to declare where your ultimate loyalty lies.

It was September 11, 2001. The planes had just crashed into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Victims had moments to use their cellphones. No one called asking for revenge. No one offered philosophical explanations or profound insights into the nature of reality. People did one thing and one thing only: they called the people close to their hearts to say, “I love you.”

“I love you” is our declaration of faith. Implicit in those words is everything holy. Yet we no longer know what we mean when we say it.

It used to mean, “I am committed to you. I will live with you forever.” Or it might have meant, “You are the most important person in my life.”

But it no longer seems to mean that. And when you no longer understand your own deepest declarations of love, you are lost. You become alienated from love, which is your home. Despair, addiction, and numbness become your constant companions.

To read the entire article, download it as a PDF file.

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Common Ground: Your Unique Self: What It Means to Be a Lover … from God’s Eyes2023-09-12T10:03:27-07:00
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