From Polarization to Paradox | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

From Polarization to Paradox: Entering the Field of Value: Value Is Prior to Values, Meaning Is Prior to Meanings

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 33

From Polarization to Paradox: Entering the Field of Value: Value Is Prior to Values, Meaning Is Prior to Meanings | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 33 | Dr. Marc Gafni

We live in a world of outrageous pain, and the only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love. Somehow, we know inside that this is true. The deepest pleasure of being alive is to recognize that Reality is an Outrageous Love Story.

This book is about a Planetary Awakening in Love, the emergence from Homo sapiens to Homo amor. As humans we are here to articulate and enact a new story, to participate in the evolution of love itself. With practice we can learn to place our attention on the evolutionary impulse that is alive and awake in us, as us, and through us, and calling us forth to become Evolutionary Lovers.

In this book, we are reclaiming practices of prayer, intimacy, and the sacred as part of a new politics of Evolutionary Love. This is the only way for us to move beyond separation towards a planetary coherence of synergy and wholeness.

This book explores the essential question: Who are you? The response is both simple and complex: You are an irreducibly unique expression of the Evolutionary LoveIntelligence of Reality itself, and as such you have a unique gift to give to the world, that only you can give! Each of us is an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty of

All-That-Is, with a unique gift to give in the Unique Self Symphony. Through the lens of Evolutionary Spirituality, it becomes clear that the Universe is not a random accident. Not at all. It is an Evolutionary Love Story, moving towards ever greater intimacy and ever greater wholeness.

We are personally implicated in the great story of Reality, holding the power to transform crisis into possibility through the force of Outrageous Love. As we move into the fullness of our humanity, our personal story emerges as a chapter and verse in the Love Story of Reality itself.

Loneliness is a profound evolutionary driver, urging us to move beyond isolation into deeper connection and to say YES to the impulse of evolution within us. We are not meant to walk this path alone. The move from loneliness to loving takes us beyond the illusion of separation, and we find ourselves woven into the fabric of Unique Self Symphony.

Practice helps us to connect with the sacred at a higher level of consciousness, reclaiming devotion, evolutionary prayer, and the radical knowing that we are held by God as the Infinity of Intimacy.

Together we join genius in Unique Self Symphony—where each unique voice is radically needed, and each unique gift is desired by All-That-Is. We stand at the edge of history, as Evolutionary Lovers and co-creators of a new humanity. We learn to say Yes to the impulse of Evolutionary Love within us, to recognize that we are not separate but part of an interconnected field of intimacy, responsibility, and transformation.

Are you ready to step into this next great moment of human becoming? To say Yes to the evolutionary impulse within you? To respond to the crisis of our time with the only force great enough to meet it—Outrageous Love?

If your heart has brought you to explore this path, welcome to the Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies!

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

Book details:

Title: From Polarization to Paradox: Entering the Field of Value: Value Is Prior to Values, Meaning Is Prior to Meanings
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 33
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340912
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

Chapter 1   Heroes are the Early Adopters of Homo Amor: A Forever Commitment to Cosmos

  • Who We Are is Where We Place Our Attention
  • The World Needs Our Holy Audacity: It’s Time for a New Story
  • It’s a Wild CosmoErotic Universe, All the Way Up and All the Way Down
  • “Our Success Story is More Important than the Larger Good”
  • We Have a Broken System of Win/Lose Metrics Rooted in Separate Self and Materialist Assumption of Cosmos
  • What Does Reality Want from Me in the Next Moment?
  • We Live in a Magical Cosmos
  • Heroes are Early Adopters of Homo Amor
  • Every Moment is a New Invitation to the Evolution of Intimacy
  • Prayer as Protest: Hallelujah
  • In Relationship to God: I’m Staying Forever

Chapter 2   The Sensual Arousal of Sense-Making: Seducing Ourselves out of the Digital Trance into the Arms of Lady Justice

  • We are Here to Find a New Way of Being Human
  • A New Story of Value is the Minor Fluctuation Point That Jumps the System to a Higher Level of Order
  • We Have to Overthrow the Old Story of What It Means to be Human
  • We Have to Wake Up from the Pseudo-Ecstasies of the Digital World
  • A Sensual Arousal to Sense-making
  • To Seduce Yourself You Have to Have the Capacity for Sense-making
  • It Never Occurs to Us That We Need to Die to Birth Ourselves
  • The Hero is Willing to Die for a Higher Value
  • We Need to Stand in the Integrity of Information-gathering and Sense-making
  • From Salem Witch Trials to the Madness of Crowds on Twitter Threads
  • The Dream of America is That You Can Feel Safe and Held in the Arms of Lady Justice
  • The Destruction of the American Dream
  • McCarthyism is a Violation of the Goddess
  • Cultivating Discernment: We Need to Arouse Ourselves to Create a New Public Commons
  • The Murder of Eros
  • How Do We Discern?
  • A Prayer for Justice

Chapter 3   Eros and Existential Risk — 21 Steps to Homo Amor: My Transformation is the Transformation of the Whole

  • The Holy Band: A Vision of a Planetary Awakening in Unique Self Symphony
  • Eros Means the Unbearable Goodness of Being and the Unbearable Need for Me, for My Life, for Who I Am
  • Twenty-One Steps to Homo Amor
  • Ode to Joy: An Active Meditation
  • Witnessing the Exteriors
  • All of a Sudden, This Square is Transformed into Shimmering Joy
  • The Joy was Always There
  • It All Depends on Me, and It All Depends on You

Chapter 4   Roe vs. Wade — Evolutionary Sensemaking from Polarization to Paradox: Re-entering the Field of Value

  • The Breakdown of Story of Value is the Root Cause of Existential Risk
  • What is Outrageous Beauty?
  • The Only Response to Outrageous Pain is Outrageous Love
  • Roe vs. Wade: The Second You Demonize the Other Side, We Are Out of Beauty and We Are in Outrageous Pain
  • What is Happening in the Pro-life vs. Pro-choice Clash?
  • Each Side Caricatures the Other’s Position to Highlight the Absurdity of the Other’s Value
  • The Decontextualization of Value is Idolatry
  • The Only Response to Outrageous Pain is Outrageous Love
  • Both Pro-life and Pro-choice Stepped Out of the Field of Value
  • If Both Sides Step into the Field of Value, They Share the Field of Value Together
  • When We’ve Stepped Out of the Field of Value, There’s No Intimacy Between Values

Chapter 5   Two Evolutionary Practices of Homo Amor — Live Your Dream and Confess Your Greatness

  • Celebration in the Middle of Existential Risk
  • You Can’t Change the World Unless You Are Willing to Already Live in the World That’s Already Changed
  • We Are Going to Change the Source Code of Culture
  • Sabbath is the Technology of Living the Dream
  • Laughter Matters
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Confession of Greatness
  • Confession of Sin Became a Tool to Subjugate People into Servitude
  • The New Locus of Confession Has to Be Confession of Greatness
  • Confession of Greatness is Always Unique
  • 95% of the Game is the Willingness to Fail
  • When All of Reality Cheers Your Moment of Greatness

Chapter 6   Baseball Principles — A Home Run into the Heart of Homo Amor

  • The Meta-Crisis is a Risk to the Existence of the Future Itself — Yet We Are Filled with Hope!
  • Step Forward and Play
  • Evolutionary Love Code
  • The Era of Pax Americana is Ending
  • Baseball is a Place Holding a Mystery
  • Baseball in Response to the Meta-Crisis: Why is Baseball Magic?
  • New Grounding of the Common-Sense Sacred Axioms of Value
  • The Story of Field of Dreams: “If You Build It, They Will Come”
  • Fourteen Principles of Baseball
  • The Story of the Movie The Natural
  • A League of Their Own
  • Praying in the Field of Value

Chapter 7    To Respond to the Meta-Crisis, We Need to Re-Vision Who We Are

  • There is No Now Separate from the Past and the Future
  • “Social Self” is a Degraded View of Who We Are
  • Traditional View of the Self Generates Meta-Crisis
  • The Notion of Social Self Generates Soft Totalitarianism
  • Our Notion of Self Creates Our Society

Chapter 8   This Poignant Moment of Neuro-Cultural Plasticity — A Time Between Worlds and a Time Between Stories

  • The First Practice of Chant: We Are the Music
  • The Way of the Heart Includes the Mind and the Intellect
  • The Way of the Heart: Reality is Eros
  • We Live in a Time Between Stories
  • We Have the Capacity to Create a New Superstructure Worldview to Change the Vector of History
  • Value is Real, and Value Evolves
  • The Potential Future is Vast — There’s So Much More Value to Come
  • The Future Depends on What We Do Now
  • Neuro-Cultural Plasticity
  • Values Are Not Merely Pragmatic
  • In Response to Nihilism, You Get Closed Societies
  • The Current Trajectory is Toward the Death of Our Humanity
  • Up Till Now, We Have Not Presented a Coherent System of Value in the World
  • Placing Our Lives on the Altar of History
  • Turning to the Divine to Partner with Us

Chapter 9    Homo Amor — The Fulfillment of Homo Sapiens is Radically Present with the Past, Present and Future

  • Evolving Who We Are
  • The Fourth Big Bang in the Narrative Arc of Evolution
  • We Are the People We’ve Been Waiting For
  • Homo Amor Consciousness is: I Am Everyone, and Everyone is Me
  • Homo Amor Integrates All of the Past, Now, and All of the Future
  • God Plus Humanity Equals More God
  • The Civilization Will Crash Unless We Evolve the Source Code
  • A New Story of Value is Possible Because There is No Value Lock-in
  • We Need to Reanimate Open Societies
  • We Need to Weave Together the Unique Values of All Civilizations
  • This Can Be Done
  • We Are Speaking It into Existence
  • Is It Your Responsibility? Is It Yours to Do?
  • The Fourth Big Bang Needs to Happen Through Us
  • The New Name of God is the Infinite Intimate

Chapter 10   From Meta-Crisis to the Crossing — From Homo Sapiens to Homo Amor

  • Evolutionary Love Code
  • This Moment is Built into the Very Structure of Reality
  • Homo Sapiens Has Come to the End of Her Possibility
  • We Are Not Alone in Cosmos

Chapter 11   What We Need for the Attention Rebellion to Succeed

  • A New Story Generates New Reality
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Eros is the Placing of Attention
  • The Internet is Designed to Scatter Attention
  • A Brief History of Attention
  • When There is Nothing to Pay Attention To
  • To Be in Love is to Place Attention
  • Seeing with New Eyes is the Essential Quality of Erotic Universe
  • The Attention of the Infinite Differentiates Uniquely Through Me
  • Reclaiming Attention

Chapter 12     “America for Americans?” vs. “There Are No Strangers and No Immigrants in the Field of Value: There is Only Family”

  • You Cannot Talk About Immigration Without First Principles and First Values
  • What Are the Issues at Stake for the Host Country?
  • What Are the Immigrants’ Obligations to the Country?
  • There Are No Strangers in the Field of Value
  • The Immigration Fiasco is an Expression of the Global Intimacy Disorder
  • Invitation to Participate in the Field of Value
  • Four-Fold Song
  • Evolutionary Love Code
  • We Need to Participate in the Evolution of Love
  • In the Field of Value, the Immigration Issue Softens
  • Beneath Surface Values, There is Real Value
  • Local vs. Global: From Contradiction to Paradox

Chapter 13    USA Elections — What Does It Mean to Partner with God in This Moment?

  • Evolutionary Love Code
  • A Vision for the Future is Everything
  • It is a Moment of Reckoning
  • Take It All Up in Your Painfully Expanded Soul
  • When Society Disintegrates, We Need Art
  • Outrageous Trust
  • The Project of the Great Library is a Political Project
  • Beauty Means Wholeness
  • Anything Great is Cumulative Over Decades
  • Great is Your Trust in Me, She
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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 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

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From Polarization to Paradox | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T15:47:58-07:00

From Conspiracy Theories to the Ultimate Conspiring of Reality | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

From Conspiracy Theories to the Ultimate Conspiring of Reality: How the Collapse of Story, Value, and Meaning Gives Rise to Pseudo-Eros: Evolutionary Sensemaking in a World of Broken Information Ecology

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 30

From Conspiracy Theories to the Ultimate Conspiring of Reality: How the Collapse of Story, Value, and Meaning Gives Rise to Pseudo-Eros: Evolutionary Sensemaking in a World of Broken Information Ecology | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 30 | Dr. Marc Gafni

This book explores the dangers of a broken sensemaking and information ecology in a time between worlds and time between stories. We are faced with two bad alternatives: to blindly dismiss all conspiracy theories or to blindly buy into all their claims. Both are wrong choices.

The proliferation of conspiracy theories themselves is rooted in the broken sensemaking and polluted information ecology that is one of the demarcating features of our time.

It’s in this fertile ground of void without value that the contrived versions of the conspiracy theories flourish.

The collapse of plotlines, the loss of true north, and the belief that value is a fiction leave a void of Eros, which is always covered over with pseudo-eros.

False conspiracy is a form of pseudo-eros that we use to fill the emptiness that comes when we are disconnected from the narrative arc of value and intimacy.

Our response must be to tell a new Story of Value based on valid First Principles and First Values, rooted in the scientific realization that the Universe is a Love Story. In a healthy sensemaking ecology, we must again find the real conspiracy—the great conspiring, the great breathing together, of Reality that happens at all levels, animated by Outrageous Love.

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

Book details:

Title: From Conspiracy Theories to the Ultimate Conspiring of Reality: How the Collapse of Story, Value, and Meaning Gives Rise to Pseudo-Eros: Evolutionary Sensemaking in a World of Broken Information Ecology
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 30
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340714
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE    CONSPIRACY THEORIES: AWAKENING AS OUTRAGEOUS LOVE BY CULTIVATING DISCERNMENT

  • We Feel a Shift in This Moment Towards a Quieter Desperation
  • The Four Insufficient Stories That We Tell
  • In Response to the Black Plague, the Renaissance Produced New Narratives
  • We Need to Change the Source Code Structures of Society if We Are to Prevent Catastrophic and Existential Risk
  • LoveIntelligence Is the Force of Allurement at All Levels of Cosmos
  • Reality Is Animated by Eros
  • New Pathology and New Promise
  • The New Story of Personal Identity: I Am a Unique Configuration of Outrageous Love
  • The New Story of Collective Identity: We Are a Unique Construct of the Evolving Intimacy of the Universe
  • What Does Reality Need From Me?
  • Sensemaking in the Context of the Intimate Universe
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Field of Intimacy and Desire Is Seamless But Not Featureless
  • What Do We Owe Each Other?
  • To Join the Field You Must Be Willing to Take Your Unique Risk
  • Love Is a Quality of the Cosmos Itself, and We Can’t Activate Love Without Trust
  • To Have an Intimate Universe We Need a Shared Story
  • Diagnosing and Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder
  • Navigating Between Truth and Conspiracy Theories
  • Partial Truths Mixed in With Magical Thinking
  • Pre/Trans Fallacy and Conspiracy Theories
  • Detecting False Flags
  • False Flags Throughout History
  • Democracy: The Power to Do Sensemaking as a Consumer and a Voter
  • Homo Amor Is Responsible For His Or Her Own Sensemaking

CHAPTER TWO    SENSEMAKING AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE INTIMATE UNIVERSE

  • We Must Walk Through the Void to Feel the Continuity of Consciousness
  • Every Life Has Irreducible Value
  • Our Failed Stories Have Led to a Fundamental Rupture of Intimacy
  • We Must Let Our Hearts Break… and From That Place Return to the Full Wonder of Joy and Creativity
  • We Bring Our Confusion into This Moment of Silence
  • Something Essential Is Changing, and Something New Has to Emerge
  • The Only Way to Walk Through This Crisis Is to Evolve the Source Code
  • The Practice: Holding Joy and Pain Together, Grieving
  • The Practice of Amor: We Are Ontologizing Love Which Is the Eros That Binds Reality in Every Second
  • We Close Our Hearts in That Gap Between Our Ability to Feel and Our Ability to Heal
  • Who Are You? Where Are You?
  • I Have Only One Question to Ask: What Does Reality Need From Me in the Next Moment?
  • Your Deepest Heart’s Desire Is the Outrageous Act of Love That Seeks to Emerge Through You in the Next Moment
  • You Are Powerful and Your Power Is to Respond to Reality’s Need
  • Joy Protests Against the Pain
  • Participating in the Pain of the Goddess in Exile
  • In the Post-Tragic I Feel the Pain and the Joy Together
  • The Blessing of the Father
  • To Heal the Crisis of Intimacy, We Need to Re-Imagine New Intimacies
  • As a Caterpillar Transforms into a Butterfly, So We Are the Imaginal Cells of the New World
  • Beware of Making Partial Truths into Whole Truths
  • Intimacy, Trust, and Communion in Sensemaking
  • We Must Maintain a Dialectical Dance Between Certainty and Uncertainty
  • We Can’t Do Sensemaking Without Dharma
  • We Need Intimacy and Perspective-Taking as Part of Sensemaking
  • Mutuality of Pathos Means I Feel You and You Feel Me
  • Intimacy Is Shared Identity in the Context of Relative Otherness With Mutuality of Recognition, Purpose, and Pathos

CHAPTER THREE    A GLOBAL ETHOS FOR A GLOBAL CIVILIZATION: PARTICIPATING IN THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION

  • The New Story Synthesizes the insights of Interior and Exterior Sciences Throughout History
  • Like Da Vinci We Understand: We Need a New Story
  • We Need to Ground the New Story in Fundamental Axioms Rooted in Interior and Exterior Sciences
  • In Our Global Civilization, Which Is Undergoing Crisis, We Need a New Story of Identity
  • Everybody Is One of Our Own
  • It’s Our Turn to Participate in the Evolution of Intimacy
  • We Expand Our Circles of Intimacy
  • The Truth About Every Human Being: Reality Needs and Desires You
  • To Make the Revolution We Need to Access What’s Real
  • The Three Faces of Spirit
  • Prayer: All the Magnificence of Spirit in the Third Person Is Desiring You
  • It’s in the Specificity That the Heart Breaks Open
  • The Search For Meaning Is Over
  • Disinformation Leads to Deformation of Our Intimacy With Reality
  • I Participate in the Universe, and the Universe Lives in Me
  • I Am Part of the Intimate Universe; Reality Lives in Me
  • In Reality, Information Is More Than Just Bits and Bytes
  • Information Is Meaning and Intimacy
  • Intimacy Is Continuous and Evolves Up the Cosmological Chain
  • Information at the Level of Matter
  • Information at the Level of Life
  • Information at the Level of Self-Reflective Mind
  • We Have the Power to Inform Reality Or to Dis-Inform Reality
  • We Must Configure New Intimacies in a World in Which We’re In-forming Reality, Not De-forming Reality
  • We’ve Got to Move From Profit to Prophet
  • Marketing Without Intimacy Or Eros Creates a Non-Intimate World
  • Unique Self Sensemaking
  • Information Is Based On the Receiver
  • To Do Sensemaking We Need Core Axioms
  • Reality Creates Through Second-Simplicity Principles

CHAPTER FOUR    SENSEMAKING BEYOND THE INFODEMIC: FIRST PRINCIPLES TOWARDS THE ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY OF REALITY

  • It’s Now Self-Evident: It’s Not Too Big to Fail
  • We’ve Stepped Out of the Story
  • Covid Is Accentuating the Broken System
  • When the Goddess Opens, You Can See the Field of Reality
  • We Invite the Mother into the Space
  • The Mother Is the We-Space of Relationship
  • The Need For Global Coherence Through a Shared Story
  • Dis-Informing Reality: Interpreting Reality in Line With My Separate Self Identity
  • Intimacy Means We Have a Shared Story
  • Mother Is the Infinity of Intimacy
  • To Do Sensemaking, We Step Out of the Matrix
  • Conspiracy theory and False Flags: 5G and Coronavirus
  • The Leap From Pointing Out False Flags to Doing Conspiracy Theory and Lizards
  • Placebos, Vitamin C, and Monetization
  • Fauci, Funds, China, Dangerous Research, and Lizards
  • Where Did the Virus Come From?
  • Scientology Discredited the Valid Critique of Psychiatric Medicines
  • When I’m Not in Eros, I Need Pseudo-Eros to Cover Up the Emptiness
  • Harari’s Books Are Popular Because they Tell a Story
  • Information Is Intimacy
  • Unique Self: All of the Information of Cosmos Configures Uniquely in Me
  • When We Get intentionally Dis-Informed, Our Sense of Intimacy Is Violated Because We Are Part of the Larger Field of Sense
  • Pseudo-Eros Has a Bad Aftertaste
  • False Flags Are a Structure of Reality
  • Five Characteristics of a False Flag
  • It’s Not Impossible That Coronavirus Was Part of China’s Hybrid Warfare against the United States
  • Certainty Always Has to Dance With Uncertainty
  • The Public Does Not Want to Go to War
  • We Need to Do Collective Sensemaking as a Unique Self Symphony
  • We Can’t Access Our Common Sensuality Unless We’re in the Field of Outrageous Love
  • The Bastille Has to Fall
  • What’s Happening Is Far More Perilous Than Bad Actors
  • Reality Today Is a Large, Complex Emergent Field, a Hyper-Object
  • The Field of Contraction Is Defined by Simple Rules: Rivalrous Conflict Governed by Win/Lose Metrics
  • Artificial Intelligence Is Starting to Do Our Sensemaking For Us
  • The Natural Movement of the Field of Contraction Creates a Race to the Bottom
  • The Field of Contraction Is Governed by Win/Lose Metrics
  • We Can Affect the Field by Introducing a Better Set of First Principles
  • Your Identity as a Unique Self Is a Simple Principle
  • New Simple Rules Create New Hyper-Objects
  • Once You Articulate the Simple Rules, People Will Recognize Them Because They Live in Everyone

CHAPTER FIVE    BEYOND DUALISM AND MATERIALISM: THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD

  • Evolution: We Disclose the Ever More Beautiful Inherent Value of Cosmos
  • We Are Living in a Breakdown
  • We Never Turn Away, Because It’s Ours to Transform
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Universe: A Love Story
  • The Greatest Activism on Behalf of the Evolution of Love Is to Tell the New Story
  • The Three Primordial Perspectives of Reality
  • Source Is Carrying Us in Every Second, in Our Joy and in Our Pain
  • In the Ultimate Place Beyond Opposites There Is No Split Between the Serious and the Playful
  • Beyond Dualism and Materialism
  • The Universe Feels, and the Universe Feels Love
  • I Want to Know What Love Is
  • We’re the Old People and We Screwed It Up
  • The Collapse of Education
  • Cut Flower Ethics: We’ve Lost Touch With the Larger Field of The Good, the True and the Beautiful
  • Regressive vs. Progressive Conspiracy Theories
  • Beware of Demonization
  • Local vs. Global Conspiracy Theories
  • The Broken Information Ecology Is a Violation of the Intimate Universe
  • The Greatest Story Ever Told
  • I Am Intended and Needed by Reality
  • Reality Has Direction, You Have Direction, and Your Choices Matter Ultimately
  • The Lack of a Shared Vision of Value Has Led to a Global Intimacy Disorder
  • Conspiracies Emerges as a Form of Pseudo-Eros When We Lose Touch With the Conspiring of Reality
  • Where Conspiracy Theories Go Wrong

CHAPTER SIX    FROM CONSPIRACY THEORIES TO THE GREAT CONSPIRING OF REALITY TOWARDS GOODNESS, TRUTH, AND BEAUTY

  • I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet
  • The First and Second Shocks of Existence
  • Our Intention Is to Engage in Sensemaking for the Sake of the Evolution of the Source Code
  • There Is No Ultimate Split Between Matter and Spirit
  • Our Intention Is to Play a Larger Game
  • Globally, the Two Most Basic Human Needs Are Not Being Met
  • Evolutionary Love Code: We Live in a Field of Contraction
  • Love Is the Possibility of Possibility
  • I Know the Way You Can Get When You Have Not Had a Drink of Love
  • Prayer: The Personhood of Reality Is Madly Loving You
  • God, Create for Me a Pure Heart
  • Conspiracy Theory Has Moved From the Periphery to the Center of Culture
  • Local Conspiracies: How Do We Engage the Facts of What Happened
  • False Flags and Local Conspiracies: Seeking Truth as Expressions of the Cosmos
  • Global Conspiracy Theories: The World Is Controlled by a Cabal
  • Regressive Conspiracy Theories Are Used to Fill in the Missing Plotline of Reality
  • The Correct Intuition of Conspiracy: There’s a Hidden Story to Reality
  • Eros Is the Inherent Movement of Reality Towards Ever Deeper Contact and Ever Greater Wholeness
  • The Field of Eros Lives and Moves in Me
  • We’ve Lost the Relationship to Premodern Story, Our Modern Stories Are insufficient, and Postmodernity Deconstructs Story Itself
  • When You Don’t Have the Great Conspiring of Reality, All You Have Left Is Pseudo-Eros
  • The Regressive Forms of Conspiracy Theory Are Forms of Pseudo-Eros
  • Information Is Codes of Intimacy and Meaning in Cosmos
  • Our Information Ecologies Have Broken Down
  • When Configurations of Intimacy Break Down There Is a Violation of Eros
  • When We Are Fed Misinformation, That Is a Violation of the Intimate Universe
  • The Conspiracy Theorists Correctly Intuit That There’s a Hidden Plotline to Reality
  • Conspiracy Theory’s Intuition: The Plotline of Reality Got Hijacked
  • Win/Lose Metrics Move the System All the Way Up and Down
  • Social Media Itself Drives Breakdown
  • Facebook Is a Superficial Win/Lose Metrics Game
  • Vast Systems Are Created by Simple First Principles Which Are Iterated Again and Again
  • Facebook: Developed and Driven by Internalized Win/Lose Metrics Story in Which the Field of Contraction Is The Plotline
  • The Same Win/Lose Metrics Are Driving Us Towards AI Biometric Sensors
  • We Need to Account For the Larger Field
  • First Principles Are the Evolving Certainties About the Nature of Reality
  • It’s Only a New Story, a New Configuration of Intimacy, Which Can Solve the Global Intimacy Disorder
  • There’s a Deeper Shared Story of Identity
  • Reality Is the Evolution of Love
  • Reality Is the Evolution of Intimacy
  • The Human Being Is a Unique Set of Allurements Expressing the Allurement of Reality
  • We Are Participating in the Evolution of Consciousness
  • We Have to Animate the Technological Matrix With First Principles
  • We Are the Possibility of Possibility

CHAPTER SEVEN    EVIL IS AVOIDING POWER TO AVOID TRANSFORMATION: CHOOSING INTEGRITY IN EVERY SECOND

  • We Are Witness to the Knee of Un-Love On the Neck of the Goddess
  • There Is No One Outside the Circle
  • Evolutionary Love Code: There Are Not Two Groups of People in the World
  • When Have We Choked the Tears of Those We’ve Placed Outside of the Circle?
  • It’s One Love, It’s One Heart, It’s One Eros, and It’s One World, Together
  • Where Is Your Unique Risk for Justice and Love?
  • And Then They Came for Me, and There Was No One Left to Speak Out for Me
  • We Take Risks to Love Each Other
  • We Know Justice Is Real Through a Deeper Sensory Capacity
  • Martin Luther King Passed the Baton to Us
  • How I Take My Unique Risk Is How I Work With Justice, Love, Power and Rage
  • Love Is Not Blind; Rage Is
  • Unique Risk: No One’s Going to Tell You You’ve Got to Do It
  • My Transformation Is the Transformation of the Whole
  • I Transform My Rage Into a New Love of Myself

CHAPTER EIGHT    FROM CONTRADICTION TO PARADOX: THE GREAT HOPE AND PROMISE OF THIS MOMENT

  • We Have to Get Out of Simulated Thinking and Feeling
  • Obama: Beyond Polarity: Your Lives Matter
  • We Don’t Homogenize People But Ultimately We Are All One
  • The Pandemic Was One Version of the Second Shock of Existence
  • The Only Response to the Second Shock of Existence Is to Realize That Which Unites Us Is So Much Greater Than That Which Divides Us
  • There Is No Way Through Without a New Story
  • We Can Feel Each Other, and We Can Feel Each Other’s Pain
  • We Are Filled With Hope
  • The Garden of Eden Is a Paradox: The Ability to Hold Everybody Inside the Circle
  • The Only Response to Outrageous Pain and Outrageous Beauty Is Outrageous Love
  • Part of Sensemaking Is to Recognize the Bad Actors Who Seek to Polarize
  • We Play Together in the Unique Self Symphony
  • Everyone Gets to Reclaim Their Second Innocence
  • Every Time We Pray, We Pray For All the Times That We’ve Never Prayed Before
  • Part Two: Sensemaking
  • From Egocentric Intimacy to Ethnocentric Intimacy
  • From Ethnocentric to Worldcentric Intimacy
  • There’s an Essential Humiliation That Takes Place in Getting My Needs Met
  • Our Humiliation Is Healed When Our Lover Says, Your Need Is My Allurement
  • From Worldcentric to Cosmocentric Intimacy
  • Black Lives Matter Includes All Lives Matter
  • There Is More Slavery Today Than Ever Before
  • The Police Officer Is Putting His Or Her Life On the Line
  • From Lockdown to Mass Protests
  • How Did We Get Here? There Is a Turning Away
  • The World Watched a Murder and Got Aroused to Justice
  • We Were Aroused to Our Desire For the Good, the True, and the Beautiful
  • There Is So Much Which Is Invisible to Us
  • What’s My Unique Risk Where I Stand in Devotion Against Injustice?
  • There Is a Structural Class Inequality
  • The Planet Is Drenched in Shame—and We Look Away
  • Holding the Paradox: Avoiding Collective Guilt and Keeping the Covenant Between the Generations
  • I Heal My Healthy Shame by Stepping in and Taking My Unique Risk
  • It’s My Obligation to Take My Unique Risk

CHAPTER NINE    MORAL CLARITY VS. MORAL COMPLEXITY: DO WE HAVE THE COURAGE TO STAY IN CONVERSATION?

  • We Hold Our Field of Attention Beyond Social Media Feeds
  • There Needs to Be a Shared Baseline of Facts Within a Conversation
  • When We Place Our Creative Attention There Is Opportunity for Evolution
  • America Is a Great Country
  • We Have to Hold Competing Perspectives and at the Same Time Not Make Them All Equal
  • We Need a Set of Shared First Principles Before We Can Bring All the Facts to the Table
  • We’re Not Doing Identity Politics; We’re Gathering Information and Challenging Ourselves
  • We Fill Up With Love and Joy and Stand Up For Justice Everyplace in the World
  • Prayer: The Realization That I’m always Witnessed; I’ve Never Been Alone
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Answer Is Always Yes
  • Our Choice: Do We Live From the Yes of Our Unique Self or From the No of the Ego?
  • The Answer on the Inside of the Inside Is Yes
  • Recovering the Dream, Returning to Yes

CHAPTER TEN    THE URGENT NEED FOR A NEW SENSEMAKING MODEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE HOMO AMOR METHOD

  • Sensemaking Practice: Stepping Into the Perspective of Another
  • We First Hold Moral Complexity Before We Can Get to Moral Clarity
  • Homo sapiens Needs to Be Recognized in a Social Media World, While Homo amor Feels the Attention of the Infinite on Him or Her in Every Moment
  • We Learn to Stay in Uncertainty, to Hold the Space in Between the Breaths and the Empty Space Between the Cherubs
  • In Postmodernity We’ve Lost the Notion of Obligation
  • Outrageous Love Code: More Than Confessing My Sins, I Have to Confess My Greatness
  • The Confession of Greatness Requires Confession of Vulnerability
  • It Is Only the Realization of Death That Presses Me into Service
  • I Can’t Own My Brokenness If There’s No Way to Make It Whole
  • In Prayer We Ask for Everything
  • A Rap on Race: Collective Guilt vs. Responsibility
  • “Race Has to Be Like Hair Color”—That’s True but Insufficient
  • Thesis and Antithesis Produce Synthesis
  • There Is a Covenant Between the Generations
  • Beyond Ethnocentricity: We Cannot Only Feel the Pain of Our Lineage
  • Sacred Ecstatic Urgency Is Urgency Beyond the Ego
  • We All Need the Blessing of the Father
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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
From Conspiracy Theories to the Ultimate Conspiring of Reality | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-18T16:50:29-07:00

Barbie, Hamas and Oppenheimer | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

Barbie, Hamas and Oppenheimer: Denied, Degraded and Distorted Versions of the Universe: a Love Story: the Denial of Ken and Barbie Is Direct Cause for Existential Risk

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 28

Barbie, Hamas and Oppenheimer: Denied, Degraded and Distorted Versions of the Universe: a Love Story: the Denial of Ken and Barbie Is Direct Cause for Existential Risk | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 28 | Dr. Marc Gafni

The book you are holding explores the key scenes and unspoken messages of two blockbuster films from the summer of 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie was widely hailed as an icon of feminism, yet its portrayal of relationship is utterly empty, for all genders. The point of the movie is that there is no “Barbie and Ken”-meaning that there is no inherent love story in Cosmos. Both movies unwittingly depict the destructive splits in relationship-one between the masculine and the feminine and one within the atom-that place human life at risk today.

Marc Gafni reads both movies as “texts of culture,” revealing a deeper story the filmmakers may not have realized they were telling. He introduces the Goddess as a narrator who speaks for Eros-the aliveness and radiance in relationship that drives a new Story of Value, moving culture toward wholeness.

Many viewers left these films with a sense of emptiness, asking, “Where do we go from here?” Gafni’s response offers a hopeful vision: The Universe: A Love Story.  The atrocities of Hamas that year demonstrated how the rejection of the Universe: A Love Story (in which we are all dignified and beloved actors) open the door for degraded love stories in which women are butchered for the love of Allah and patriarchy acts out its most debased impulse in the guise of Islamic fundamentalism.

This book engages popular culture and world events with nuance and wisdom, opening a new path for our evolution.

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

Book details:

Title: Barbie, Hamas and Oppenheimer: Denied, Degraded and Distorted Versions of the Universe: a Love Story: the Denial of Ken and Barbie Is Direct Cause for Existential Risk
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 28
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340141
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    READING MOVIES AS A SACRED TEXT OF CULTURE

  • Stepping Into Culture in a Really Shocking Way
  • The Goddess Is Speaking Beyond the Intention of the Filmmakers
  • A Hint of Guardians of the Galaxy
  • Barbie: The Most Dangerous Movie Ever Made
  • The Point of Barbie Is That Love Is Not Real
  • A New World Order

CHAPTER 2    THE GENDER CRISIS IS PART OF THE META-CRISIS

  • Three Crises Happening at the Same Time
  • There Is No Barbie and Ken
  • We Think We Can Kill All the Gods Except for Aphrodite and She Will Survive, but She Will Not
  • Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story of Value

CHAPTER 3    CRISIS OF RELATIONSHIPS

  • The First Two Levels of Gender
  • Feminine and Masculine, Level-One: He Is in Charge
  • Feminine and Masculine, Level-Two: The Disappearance of Polarity
  • Two Levels of Relationship Applied to Barbie
  • “It’s Girls’ Night Every Night Forever!”
  • Barbie Stops at Level-Two: There Is No Barbie and Ken
  • Barbie Reclaims Her Sexuality Without Ken
  • Ken Is Desperate for Patriarchy
  • Level-Three Relationship: From Role Mate, to Soul Mate, to Whole Mate
  • Level-One: Role Mate Relationship
  • Level-Two: Soul Mate Relationship
  • Level-Three: Whole Mate Relationship
  • There Is Not One Drop of Feminine Empowerment in Barbie
  • Level-Three Relationships: Synergizing Lines and Circles
  • Lines and Circles in Ken and Barbie
  • A Taste of Level-Three Masculine and Feminine

CHAPTER 4    THE MOCKING OF THE HERO

  • The Old Relationship Style Has Been Demonized as Patriarchy
  • Ken in the World of Idealized Feminism
  • Barbie Liberated Herself From the Male Gaze of Ken
  • Barbie Dismisses the Ontology of Relationship
  • Ken’s Male Desire to Be a Hero Is Mocked
  • Lovers Want to Be Heroes
  • Soul Mates Outside the Field of Value
  • Ken + Barbie Is the Nature of Reality

CHAPTER 5    “THE UNIVERSE: A LOVE STORY” IN THE MOUTH OF PATRIARCHY

  • Barbie Land: We Have It All Worked Out
  • Lines And Circles—All The Way Up And Down The Evolutionary Chain
  • Ken Is Acting Out the Shadow of the Line Quality
  • “The Universe: A Love Story” in the Mouth of Patriarchy
  • The Universe: A Love Story in the New Physics
  • The Intimacy Equation Applied to Barbie and Ken
  • Reality Is the Evolution of Relationships
  • Kiss Is at the Very Heart of Reality—and the Hijacking of “Forever”
  • Barbie Cannot Say “I Love You”

CHAPTER 6    DENIAL OF THE AMOROUS COSMOS: FIVE KEY SCENES IN BARBIE SHOWING LOVE IS NOT REAL

  • Scene One: “I Only Exist in Your Gaze”
  • Ken Only Has a Great Day When Barbie Looks at Him
  • Scene Two: Ken’s Song “I Have Feelings I Can’t Explain”
  • Scene Three: “Why Would You Stay Over? It’s Girls Night Every Night!”
  • Scene Four: “You’re Just Ken”
  • Scene Five: Barbie Tells Ruth Handler, “I’m Not in love With Ken”

CHAPTER 7    THE EXILE OF THE LOVE STORY & THE DEMONIZATION OF LOVEDESIRE

  • Barbie in the Real World
  • The Goddess Appears, but Without Desire
  • “Me and Ken, We Have No Genitals”
  • Weird Barbie Loves “That Nude Blob Under His Pants”
  • Weird Barbie Understands What “I Love You” Means
  • The Mother-Daughter Love Story Is the Movie’s Only Real Love Story

CHAPTER 8    THE EVOLUTION OF LOVEDESIRE IN BARBIE SONGS BETWEEN 1997 AND 2023

  • Comparing Barbie in Two Songs
  • The 1997 Barbie Song
  • The 2023 Barbie Song

CHAPTER 9    DESIRE, DEATH AND VALUE / IT’S ONLY LIFE AFTER ALL

  • No Field of Value in “Closer to Fine”
  • The Relationship to Death
  • “It’s Only Life After All”: There Cannot Be Just One Lifetime
  • Postmodernity on Steroids

CHAPTER 10    ONLY A STORY BEYOND DEATH CAN STAND AGAINST EVIL

  • The Reality of Death in the Real World Means Love Must Be Something We’ve Made Up
  • The Desiccated Mother Speaks: “Humans Make Meaning Up and Then They Die”
  • Aphrodite Cannot Survive Without the Field of Value
  • When There Is No Field of Value, There Is No Distinction Between Right and Wrong
  • “What Was I Made For?”
  • The Holy Dance Between Revelation and Mystery
  • There’s a Unique Field of Desire in Which I Reincarnate

CHAPTER 11    OPPENHEIMER—THE SPLITTING OF THE ATOM AS A FAILED LOVE STORY

  • Mathematics Is the Fuck of Cosmos
  • The Splitting of the Atom
  • The First Goddess Figure: Jean Tatlock
  • “I Am Death, Destroyer of Worlds”
  • The Goddess Commits Suicide
  • The Second Goddess Figure: Oppenheimer’s Wife
  • The Relationship Between Oppenheimer and Barbie

CHAPTER 12    THE FAILED LOVE STORY AT THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL: A CONVERSATION WITH DR. MARC GAFNI AND AUBREY MARCUS

  • Aubrey Marcus: Introduction
  • Marc Gafni: Evil Equals Failed Love Stories: Failed Love Stories Create Evil
  • Barbie, Oppenheimer and Hamas Are at Their Core Failed Love Stories
  • So What Does “The Universe: A Love Story” Mean?
  • Aubrey: What We Mean By World Religion
  • Marc: A New World Religion Is a New Story of Value as a Context For Our Diversity
  • Aubrey: What if Your Life Hasn’t Been a Love Story
  • Marc: There’s a Spark of the Sacred in Every Broken Vessel
  • Aubrey: How Are We Going to Weave Barbie Into This Conversation?
  • Marc: Only a Deepening of the Love Story Responds to Evil
  • The Failed Love Story in Barbie: Recapitulation of Six Core Scenes
  • Aubrey: Empire Wants to Control Love
  • Marc: Love Is Revolutionary
  • Marc: Totalitarianism Seeks to Undermine LoveDesire
  • Aubrey: Empire’s Degradation of Love Awakens the Eros of the Warrior
  • Marc: The Fundamentalist Destruction of the Love Story
  • Barbie and Hamas Are Failed Love Stories That Generate Evil
  • Aubrey: The Fallen Angel Wants to Get Back to One Love Through Destruction
  • Marc: Evil Is the Anti-life Force
  • Aubrey: Artists Remind Us of the Nature of Cosmos
  • Marc: My Story Has to Become Part of the Love Story of the Whole
  • Aubrey: Wielding the Sword of Peace

CHAPTER 13    BARBIE, HAMAS & HOMO AMOR—FROM DEGRADED LOVE STORIES TO THE UNIVERSE: A LOVE STORY

  • Introduction
  • We Need to Find a Third Way
  • False Stories Confuse Us
  • A Failed Love Story on a Collective Level Results in Horror
  • Let’s Get Out of Superficial Distortions
  • Barbie as the First Failed Story of Desire
  • Hamas as the Second Failed Story of Desire: The Demonization and Degradation of Desire
  • The Third Response Is a New Story of Value

CHAPTER 14    THE STORY WE NEED TO TELL

  • To Noah and Greta: Let’s Make Movies Dripping With Eros
  • Your Need Is My Allurement
  • Outrageous Acts of Love
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/

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
Barbie, Hamas and Oppenheimer | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:30:28-07:00

A Dharmic Critique of the Movies Dune, Avatar and Don’t Look Up | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

A Dharmic Critique of the Movies Dune, Avatar and Don’t Look Up: The Spiritual Practice of Reading Movies as a Sacred Text of Culture: First Visions of Intergalactic Love Stories In Response to the Meta-crisis

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 27

A Dharmic Critique of the Movies Dune, Avatar and Don't Look Up: The Spiritual Practice of Reading Movies as a Sacred Text of Culture: First Visions of Intergalactic Love Stories in Response to the Meta-crisis | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 27 | Dr. Marc Gafni

In this time between worlds and time between stories, we stand poised between a potential dystopia and an unimaginably beautiful future. Only a new Story of Value as a context for our diversity can change the vector of history towards a possible utopia.

Movies are often the channel through which the voice of culture discloses itself. Hidden in the public texts of culture is a movement towards a new human and a new humanity. Reading the hidden text of She—woven into the fabric of our public stories—is a key part of this new Story of Value.

This volume explores three recent movies: Dune, Don’t Look Up, and Avatar.

In Dune we explore the necessity and dangers of charismatic spiritual and political leadership as well as the need for—and potential horror of—a new Messianic religion. The move is both a clarion call and a cautionary tale as we are in desperate need of Homo sapiens to triumph as Homo amor, the fulfilment of Homo sapiens.

Don’t Look Up vividly critiques our current society, including our dysfunctional media landscape—what Marc Gafni calls our broken information ecology. In order to survive and in order to address the meta-crisis, we must not be afraid to “look up”—as they spectacularly fail to do in the film.

In Avatar we depict the first expressions of Homo amor, the new human and the new humanity. Avatar reaches for the heavens in cosmocentric and even intergalactic levels of intimacy and consciousness. In our capacity to love beyond egocentric and ethnocentric boundaries, we directly participate in the evolution of love.

Cinema (and culture in general) has a beautiful and necessary role in transmitting and expressing this new story—both in what it portrays, and especially in the ways that it falls short. In these movies, we can hear the hidden whispers of culture showing us the ways that we are not living into the new Story of Value, rooted in First Principles that our civilization so desperately needs.

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

Book details:

Title: A Dharmic Critique of the Movies Dune, Avatar and Don’t Look Up: The Spiritual Practice of Reading Movies as a Sacred Text of Culture: First Visions of Intergalactic Love Stories in Response to the Meta-crisis
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 27
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340691
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE    DECODING DUNE: A REVELATORY EXPLORATION—A DIALOGUE BETWEEN DR. MARC GAFNI AND AUBREY MARCUS

  • What Is This Tale of Dune? A Prescient Narrative Went Big In Culture
  • Psychedelics and a Weaving of Lineages That Generates
  • The Master Who Ends the Trance of Time
  • Omniscience, Prophecy, and Jihad
  • The Thanos Move: Jihad as the Only Path to Save Humanity
  • An Omniscient Position That Suspends First Principles and First Values
  • Dune Has No Clear First Principles and First Values
  • A Critique of Charismatic Leadership Dissociated From the Field of Value
  • A Prophetic Voice That Ends Conversation: Today’s Jihad
  • True Jihad Is the Wrestling of the Heart—With the Goddess, With Nature, With the Desert
  • The Bene Gesserit Have Taken Love Out of the Equation
  • Spice-Psychedelics Expand the Political
  • The Very Real Possibility of an Elite Enhanced Human: We Need Democratization
  • The Medicine Needs the Dharma, and the Dharma Needs Medicine
  • Can We Have a Medicine of the Heart to Avoid War (As Much As Possible)?
  • We Need to Stand for the Field of Value
  • We Need the Articulation of a New Story of Value
  • We Need a Democratization of Messiahs, Medicine, and Dharma
  • We Need to Trust in the Sincerity of Power
  • Power in Trinity With Love and Value, a Remedy to Tyranny
  • Love Is Power—Power Is Love
  • Power Is Noble and We Are Afraid of It
  • Love Is Potent and Fierce
  • A Beautiful Cosmoerotic Vision Is What We Need
  • Reality Needs a New Great House
  • Let’s Do It All Together and Honor Everyone at the Table

CHAPTER TWO    A DHARMIC CRITIQUE OF THE MOVIE DUNE, PART 1: SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF READING STORIES IN PUBLIC CULTURE

  • It’s Only a New Story That Changes the Vector of History
  • The Story of Dune as a Reflection of Culture
  • Evolutionary Love Code: We Need Dharma In Dialectical Relationship to Messiahs
  • Dune Is a Messiah Story
  • Dune Figures, Background, and Story
  • How to Read a Story of Culture: Setting the Context
  • Dune Themes Drawing From Christianity, Islam, and Judaism
  • Understanding Dune
  • Five Components of the New Story for the Evolution of the Source Code
  • Prayer: We All Participate Directly in the Stature of Messiah

CHAPTER THREE    A DHARMIC CRITIQUE OF THE MOVIE DUNE, PART TWO: THE SEVEN PILLARS OF CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH THE LENS OF DUNE—HOW TO CREATE A BETTER WORLD

  • Dharma for Dune
  • The Overwhelming Moral Imperative of This Moment Is to Articulate a New Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: A Community of Democratized Messiahs Animated by Authentic Leaders
  • Jesse/Jessica: Messianic Agitation to Birth the One
  • Dune Plotline
  • How Do We Create a Better World?
  • The Fourth Big Bang: Evolution of Homo Amor
  • Democratized Messianism Needs Powerful Leadership
  • 1 – We Need to Stop Crucifying Charismatic Leaders
  • 2 – The Leader Needs to Be Purified
  • 3 – There Are Moments of Opportunity for a Leader to Step Into His/Her Destiny
  • 4 – We Must Be Aware of the Potential Corruptions of Leadership
  • 5 – The Leader Is Always an Imperfect Vessel for the Light
  • 6 – Potential for Corruption in Leadership
  • 7 – Everyone’s Waiting for the Messiah
  • 8 – Political Leadership and Psychedelic Leadership Need to Come Together
  • 9 – Unique Self Symphony: Collective Messiahship
  • 10 – All That Exists in All Worlds Comes From You
  • Evolutionary Love Code: You Are the Freakin’ Messiah, And So Am I, and So Are We

CHAPTER FOUR    DON’T LOOK UP: WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT, WHAT THEY GOT WRONG, AND WHY IT MATTERS SO MUCH

  • Don’t Look Up: What They Got Right, What They Got Wrong
  • The Nature of Existential Risk
  • We Live Within the Internal Source Code of a Story
  • The Current Story: Rivalrous Conflict Governed by Win/Lose Metrics
  • The Postmodern Deconstruction of Value Leads to the Rejection of First Principles in Mathematics
  • Universal Grammar of Value Allows for Global Coordination
  • To Effectively Intervene in the Vector of Existential Risk, We Need The Resources to Tell the New Story of Homo Amor
  • To Become Homo Amor Is to Realize That It’s Our Collective Hero’s Journey
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Only First Principles and First Values Embedded In a Story of Value Have the Capacity to Respond To the Second Shock of Existence
  • The First Shock of Existence: It’s Only Death That Turns Life Into a Genuine Option
  • The Second Shock of Existence: The Death of Humanity
  • Fact Itself Is a Value, and If You Deconstruct Value, Then Facts Can’t Stand
  • It’s Only When I Realize Value That I’m Willing to Die for That I’m Actually Alive
  • Prayer: We Know We’re Not Alone

CHAPTER FIVE    DON’T LOOK UP: WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT, WHAT THEY GOT WRONG AND WHY IT MATTERS SO MUCH, PART TWO

  • For the First Time In History, the Fall of a Civilization Means Existential Risk
  • Two Forms of Existential Risk
  • The Death of Our Humanity: Undermining Free Will for Profit Through Peer-Group Profiling of Mined Personal Data
  • We Need a New Story of Value Rooted in First Principles and First Values
  • Evolving the Source Code to Enact a Memory of the Future
  • Texts of Culture Are Powerful
  • The Hidden Theme Behind “Free Snacks”
  • The Billions of Micro-Actions We Take Are Formed by the Story We’re Living In
  • In the Absence of First Principles and First Values, All That’s Left Is Power
  • We Need to Name First Values and First Principles
  • Articulating a New Vision of Value
  • Responsibility to the Future Is a First Principle and First Value
  • Unless We Understand There’s Meaning Beyond Death, We Won’t Be Responsible for the World Beyond Death
  • Meaning and Value Are Intrinsic to Cosmos

CHAPTER SIX    THE MOVIE AS AN ARTIFACT OF CULTURE: DON’T LOOK UP, PART THREE

  • Don’t Look Up Tells a Failed Story of Modernity and Postmodernity
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Only First Principles and First Values Embedded In a Story of Value Can Respond to Existential Risk
  • Mapping the Relationships Between Characters in the Movie
  • Desire in the Valley of the Shadow of Death
  • A New Narrative of Desire
  • Need, Desire and Rights
  • The Mother and the Child Theme In Don’t Look Up
  • Who Is the Mother?
  • The Current Story: Rivalrous Conflict Governed by Win/Lose Metrics
  • The Postmodern Deconstruction of Value Leads to the Rejection of First Principles in Mathematics
  • Universal Grammar of Value Allows for Global Coordination
  • To Effectively Intervene in the Vector of Existential Risk, We Need The Resources to Tell the New Story of Homo Amor
  • To Become Homo Amor Is to Realize That It’s Our Collective Hero’s Journey
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Only First Principles and First Values Embedded In a Story of Value Have the Capacity to Respond To the Second Shock of Existence
  • The First Shock of Existence: It’s Only Death That Turns Life Into a Genuine Option
  • The Second Shock of Existence: The Death of Humanity
  • Fact Itself Is a Value, and If You Deconstruct Value, Then Facts Can’t Stand
  • It’s Only When I Realize Value That I’m Willing to Die for That I’m Actually Alive
  • Prayer: We Know We’re Not Alone

CHAPTER SEVEN    “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE”: THE KEY SEVEN INNER KNOWINGS OF IMMORTALITY THAT ARE ESSENTIAL IN RESPONDING TO EXISTENTIAL RISK—DON’T LOOK UP, PART FOUR

  • Our Yes Echoes the Yes of the Big Bang
  • My Ecstatic Yes Recognizes the Intrinsic Value In Cosmos
  • Intrinsic Value Can’t Be Commodified
  • We Are Here to Tell the New Story of Value
  • Theme of Death in Don’t Look Up
  • At the Root of Our Fear of Nothingness Is the Realization of Our Immortality
  • At the Root of Our Fear of Accountability Is the Realization That We Matter
  • Empirical Evidence for Life After Death and a Philosophical Analysis of Dualism and Materialism
  • The Lived Realization of the Continuity of Consciousness
  • Justice and Fairness Are Not Worked Out Within the Context of One Lifetime
  • Accessing Eternity by Stepping Into the Fullness of Reality
  • When I Don’t Have an Experience of My Own Eternity, the Only Thing Left Is Win/Lose Metrics

CHAPTER EIGHT    DON’T LOOK UP, PART FIVE: DEATH STANDS BEFORE ETERNITY AND SAYS ONLY YES

  • Outrageous Love Is the Heart of Existence Itself
  • Our Intention Is to Respond to the Global Intimacy Disorder by Telling a New Story of Value
  • There’s Something Broken in the Essential Narrative of The World Today
  • How We Respond to Death Tells Us Who We Are
  • Don’t Look Up: The Realization of Death
  • Philip’s Response to Death: The Betrayal of Love
  • Life Without the Stress of Living
  • Technology Is No Longer a Tool—It Has Become an Environment
  • The Business Model of the Web Is to Sell Your Data to Manipulate You
  • The Power Is Not With the President—It’s With the Success Story
  • There’s Nothing More Dangerous Than Utopianism Without First Principles and First Values
  • The Human Being Has the Capacity to Exercise Free Will and to Transform
  • The Elite Walk Out on Planet Earth
  • “Tell Me I’m Going to Die”—Commodifying Existential Risk for the Purpose of Pseudo-Eros
  • Win-Lose Metrics Create the Conditions for Existential and Catastrophic Risk
  • “Angels Soar to the Heavens”
  • Why Did You Do That? I Liked You
  • “Let’s Go to Dinner”
  • The Sweetness Scenes
  • Three Levels of Consciousness: Submission, Separation, and Sweetening
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Universe Is Partial to Love
  • Flowers: The Seduction of Beauty for the Sake of Life
  • Our Sacred Creed Is What We Say at the Moment of Our Death
  • The Universe Is a Love Story

CHAPTER NINE    THE LAST SUPPER RESURRECTED—PRAYER RELOADED: DON’T LOOK UP, PART SIX

  • Gathering the Sparks of the Sacred From the Broken Vessels
  • It’s Our Job to Tell the New Story
  • A World Religion Means a Shared Universal Grammar of Intrinsic Value
  • It’s Only the Telling of a New Story That Changes the Vector of History
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Three Faces of God
  • Prayer: Reclaiming the Second Person of God
  • The First-Person Principle of Reality
  • First Person Never Lives Without Second Person
  • We Have All Been Crucified
  • Don’t Look Up: Four Clips On Prayer
  • When We Leave the Field of Value, Even the Mother-Son Relationship Is Broken
  • Every Prayer Matters

CHAPTER TEN    IS VALUE REAL? THE ORACLE OF OPEN AI, AVATAR AND THE FIELD OF VALUE: A MEMORY OF TWO FUTURES

  • We Need Global Resonance With Each Other
  • 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
  • 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 ELEVEN    VISIONS OF THE INTERGALACTIC HOMO AMOR: AVATAR AS AN INTERSPECIES LOVE STORY

  • Revolution: Reclaiming First Principles and First Values
  • The New Story of Value in Public Culture
  • AI Is Disconnected From the Field of Value Inherent in Cosmos
  • Avatar as an Alternative to AI
  • Our Love Story Has to Be an Intergalactic Love Story
  • Beyond the Fence of Being Human
  • Avatar Is a Cosmoerotic Love Story
  • The Temporary Defeat of Ethno-Humanism
  • The Emergence of the Ethno-Na’vi Moment
  • Spider Is the Embodiment of a New Possibility
  • An Intergalactic Homo Amor Needs to Emerge
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Universe Feels Love
  • Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Mosseini—We See You

CHAPTER TWELVE    LOVE IS A PERCEPTION—THE COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM OF AVATAR: I SEE YOU = I LOVE YOU

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Love Is a Perception
  • See What They See
  • I See You Means “I Love You”
  • When the Enemy Is No Longer the Enemy: Spider Sees Miles Quaritch
  • Lo’ak, the Renegade Son: Seeing Through the Otherness
  • The Cosmos: A Love Story
  • Cleansing the Doors of Perception
  • To Be Loved By a Human Being Is to Have Your True Nature Seen
  • To Love God Is to Let God See With Your Eyes

CHAPTER THIRTEEN    STANDING FOR VALUE: AVATAR AS AN INTERGALACTIC LOVE STORY POINTING TOWARDS HOMO AMOR CONSCIOUSNESS

  • Symphony of the Revolution
  • Love Is a Perception
  • The Need to Stand for Value Is an Essential Human Need
  • Evolution of Value Is Evolution of Love
  • Premodern Value: Value Is Real, but Whose Value?
  • Modern Value: The Source of Value Is No Longer Clear, but Value Evolves Nonetheless
  • Postmodern Value: Value Is Deconstructed, but All the Excluded Are Included
  • Postmodernity Against Modernity
  • We Need to Realize That Everyone’s Got a Seat at the Table
  • We Need to Articulate an Intergalactic Consciousness of Homo Amor
  • The Structure of Cosmos Is Eros and Intimacy
  • Avatar Transcends the Postmodern Understanding and Stands for a Cosmocentric Vision of Homo Amor
  • Homo Amor Love Song
  • Egocentric Intimacy
  • Ethnocentric Intimacy
  • Worldcentric Intimacy
  • Cosmocentric Intimacy
  • Every Song Has a Place In the Unique Self Symphony
  • The Human Being Becomes Divine When No One Is Left Out of My Love Story
  • No One Is a Stranger to the Divine
  • Are We Willing to Cross to the Other Side?
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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:
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Formal refutations on controversy: 
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A Dharmic Critique of the Movies Dune, Avatar and Don’t Look Up | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:30:05-07:00

Corona: A Crisis of Intimacy | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

Corona: A Crisis of Intimacy: We Are One World, One Virus, One Breath, and One Love: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder Through the Evolution of Intimacy

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 26

Corona: A Crisis of Intimacy: We Are One World, One Virus, One Breath, and One Love: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder Through the Evolution of Intimacy | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 26 | 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: Corona: A Crisis of Intimacy: We Are One World, One Virus, One Breath, and One Love: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder Through the Evolution of Intimacy
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 26
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340530
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1  THERE ARE NO FOREIGN VIRUSES: GO VIRAL WITH OUTRAGEOUS LOVE

  • Corona: The Failure of the Contagion of Love
  • Corona Reminds Us of No-Boundary Consciousness
  • We Are Outrageous Love
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder Through the Evolution of Intimacy
  • No-Boundary Consciousness
  • There Are No Foreign Viruses
  • Are You Ready to Be Affected by the Moment?
  • Natural Selection of Evolutionary Love in Which No One Is Left Out of the Circle
  • Wuhan Marketplace Clip: Outrageous Pain When I Place Someone Outside of the Circle
  • The Evolution of Love: No One Is Left Outside of the Circle
  • Unique Self Symphony With a Shared Score

CHAPTER 2  GLOBAL ACTIVISM NEEDS A GLOBAL STORY: WHO ARE WE IN THIS VIRUS MOMENT & BEYOND

  • How Do We Be in This Time?
  • The Germ Is Real—and It’s Not Punishment for Sin
  • New Age Thought: You Created Your Suffering
  • We Don’t Thank the Coronavirus
  • The Fact Pattern That Created the Epidemic Is a Failure of Intimacy
  • ‘Thank You Coronavirus’ Is Also a Failure of Intimacy
  • Let’s Hold Suffering in Our Arms
  • I Will Not Participate in Your Divine Plan, Even if It’s to Make Things Better
  • We Never Look Away
  • In Our One World, There Is No More Locality
  • The Spiritual Practice of Not Looking Away
  • Crisis Is an Evolutionary Driver
  • A Global Response Only Comes From a Shared Story
  • Who Am I When I’m Not Producing?
  • The Four Stories We Tell Ourselves Which Don’t Work
  • We Need a Shared Story Which Is an Evolution of Intimacy
  • Outrageous Love Drives Reality to Create More Intimacy
  • The New Story Lives in Us
  • At a Time of Catastrophe We Need to Avoid the Temptation to Move Towards Authoritarianism
  • Who Are You?
  • The Cracks in the Storyline of Modernity Created Our Present Crises
  • What’s My Outrageous Act of Love?
  • New Forms of Collective Intelligence: Either Dystopian or a Unique Self Symphony

CHAPTER 3  BEYOND THE FEAR OF DEATH: SEVEN STEPS FROM FEAR TO OUTRAGEOUS LOVE

  • Corona—Coronation, Karuna
  • Hallelujah: Praise, Hallelujah: Brokenness
  • Go to the Limits of Your Longing
  • Are We Ready to Feel All the Pain and All the Joy and Not Look Away?
  • Our Responsibility Is for Personal and Collective Sensemaking
  • Am I Alone or Am I Being Held?
  • We Offer Our Sensemaking for the Sake of the Whole
  • We Just Learned How to Stop Splitting Off the Suffering of Others
  • The Fear at Play Here Is the Fear of Death
  • The Narcissist Exercise
  • Understanding Our Fear of Death
  • Death Is a Night Between Two Days
  • Ethos Only Makes Sense If There Is Accountability Beyond Death
  • Crimes and Misdemeanors: It Doesn’t All Work Out in One Lifetime
  • Handling Unfinished Business So We Are Not Afraid of Accountability
  • Befriending the Fear of Our Bodies Aging and Decaying
  • Accountability: We Want to Know That We Count
  • The First Shock of Existence: The Death of the Individual
  • Addressing the Fear of Death: I Count
  • My Deepest Heart’s Desire Is the Desire of the Evolutionary Impulse in Me
  • Reality Invites You into Outrageous Love
  • In the Absence of Pseudo-Eros, We Face Our Fear and Loneliness
  • I Participate in Divinity as a Unique Expression of Outrageous Love
  • My Deepest Heart’s Desire Is to Create Worlds
  • Our Heart Breaks Open When We Step into Our Significance
  • Loneliness Kills, When One Is Not Seen
  • The Second Shock of Existence Is the Fear of Death of Humanity
  • Humanity’s Response to the Second Shock of Existence Must Be to Become a Unique Self Symphony
  • Let’s Imagine a New World
  • Are You Ready to Play a Larger Game? Are You Ready to Be God?
  • The Experience of Homo amor: Your Next Action Changes Everything

CHAPTER 4  BETWEEN DYSTOPIA AND HOMO AMOR: ONE BREATH, RE-STORYING REALITY

  • In This Moment We Bring in Every Person Who’s Suffering
  • Let’s Hold All the People Who Can’t Breathe, and Let’s Breathe Together
  • Hallelujah: Hallel and Yah
  • The Sabbath, a Day of Breath
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Crisis Is a Birth
  • The First Shock of Existence Is the Death of the Individual
  • Your Unique Self Holds Immortality
  • Facing Corona Without a Story of Meaning
  • In Response to the Deconstruction of Our Stories, We Need to Re-Story Reality
  • We Respond to the First Shock of Existence by Living Fully
  • The Second Shock of Existence Is the Potential Death of Humanity
  • The Story of Win/Lose Metrics Causes Fundamental Structural Problems in the System
  • We Enact the Revolution by Starting With a New Story of Identity

CHAPTER 5  THERE’S NO NEW POLICY WITHOUT A NEW STORY

  • We Have the Capacity to Generate a Universe of More Value Than at Any Other Time in History
  • Reality Is Moving
  • Outrageous Love Drives Reality
  • Reality Reaches for More Intimacy
  • The Human Being Is a Unique Configuration of Intimacy
  • The Greatest Moral Imperative of This Time Is to Tell a New Story
  • When Our Information Ecologies Are Broken, There Is a Failure of Intimacy
  • We Are All Shamed in Some Way in Getting Our Basic Needs Met
  • The Failure of Global Public Goods Causes a Global Experience of Shame
  • The New Statement on a Global Level: Your Need Is My Allurement
  • Let Us Be Prophets Together

CHAPTER 6  ON THE REVOLUTIONARY NEED FOR AN EVOLUTIONARY CHURCH

  • The Need for a New Story
  • A New Politics of Pleasure
  • Evolutionary Prayer: Invocation of the Infinite Intimate
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Only a Politics of Pleasure Can Move Us Beyond a Pandemic
  • The First Principle and First Value of Pleasure
  • When You Experience a Value, Life Has Self-Evident Meaning
  • The Goodness of Reality Incarnates as Pleasure
  • Cultivating Discernment Around Pleasure
  • When I’m in My Pleasure, I Deeply Desire to Pleasure You

CHAPTER 7  THE DEATH OF HUMANITY IS NOT A GREATER TRAGEDY THAN THE UNJUST DEATH OF A SINGLE HUMAN BEING

  • Polarization Is Rooted in the Rejection of Other Worldviews
  • Should I Forgive the Destroyer? And What Does Forgiveness Mean?
  • We Synergize the Values of Premodernity, Modernity and Post-Modernity
  • To Be an Outrageous Lover, We Need to Forgive
  • Working Our Way to Forgiveness
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Forgiveness Is the Fragrance the Violet Sheds on the Heel That Has Crushed It
  • The Energy of Evolution Lives in Us
  • We Can’t Speak About Death Without Holding a Wider Frame
  • There’s a Larger Play Beyond This Lifetime and This Dimension
  • Forgiveness Is Possible When You Hold the Larger Frame
  • Accountability Doesn’t Include Demonization
  • Feeling into the Experience of Another Person, Even Someone Who Behaves Heinously
  • To Forgive You Must Feel the Humanity of the Other and Find the Root of the Pathology in Yourself
  • The Practice: I Love You, I Forgive You, I Am Free

CHAPTER 8  THE DEATH OF HUMANITY IS NOT A GREATER TRAGEDY THAN THE UNJUST DEATH OF A SINGLE HUMAN BEING—PART 2

  • Facing the Doomer Camp: Understanding Emergence and Continuity of Consciousness
  • The Anthro-Ontological Realization of the Continuity of Consciousness
  • Fairness Is Not Worked Out in One Lifetime
  • Forgiveness: Feeling Beyond This Dimension
  • Barbara Is With Us in the Continuity of Consciousness
  • We Can Never Let Enlightened Knowing Deaden Our Sensitivity to Pain
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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 

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Corona: A Crisis of Intimacy | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:29:43-07:00

The Evolution of Intimacy | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard

The Evolution of Intimacy: Towards a New Politics of Love: Your Unique Clarified Desire Is the Desire of Reality Itself

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 11

The Evolution of Intimacy: Towards a New Politics of Love: Your Unique Clarified Desire Is the Desire of Reality Itself | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 11 | Dr. Marc Gafni

We live in a time of crisis-“a time between worlds and a time between stories.” Only profound evolution-transformation-will tip the scale away from catastrophic devolution. Barbara and Marc, rooted in a profound read of contemporary reality, locate the core of the crisis in a global intimacy disorder. The core crisis is no less than a crisis of intimacy.

Our crisis is a birth. To heal the intimacy crisis, all that has been split off-personally and culturally and cosmically-must be welcomed back into the circle.

We have forgotten, or perhaps never really known, that not only live in the Intimate Universe; the Intimate Universe lives in us. Each of us is a unique configuration of intimacy-intended, recognized, desired, acknowledged, chosen, loved, adored, and needed by all of Reality to enact transformation through deepening intimacy.

Evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies. My transformation is the transformation of the whole. That is what it means to be intimate with the whole.

Intimacy is not generic. Intimacy is always unique. We are unique incarnations of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty of All-That-Is, living in us, as us, and through us. We need to become intimate with our Unique Selves. For the essence of the new human-her creative and transformative power-derives only from the deepest depth of intimacy with one’s own self. We need to become intimate with our own power.

This is the journey from Homo armor to Homo amor. It marks the emergence of the new human and the new humanity. The temple of intimacy is built when we stay in and go all the way in this lifetime.

These oral essays are edited talks delivered by Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard between September and November 2018.

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

Book details:

Title:The Evolution of Intimacy: Towards a New Politics of Love: Your Unique Clarified Desire Is the Desire of Reality Itself
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 11
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340479
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE   TRANSFORMATION HAPPENS AT THE EDGE

  • Evolutionary Love Code: I Am a Unique Configuration of Desire
  • I Cannot Be Intimate Without You
  • Symphony Means Feeling the Field
  • The Ritual of Prayer Unites Us in the Field
  • We Celebrate the Evolution of Culture in All Fields
  • One Hundred and One Is the Pathway to the Other Side

CHAPTER TWO   BEYOND MASLOW: EVOLUTIONARY PRAYER AND THE SIX CORE HUMAN NEEDS

  • Evolutionary Love Code: I Am a Unique Feature of the Field Of Intimacy
  • We Resonate and Recapitulate to Evolve the Source Code
  • The Larger Field of Intelligence Can Hear Me Talking
  • Evolutionary Meditations for Praying to God in the First, Second, and Third Person
  • Realizing I Am God in Evolution at the Jump Point
  • Beyond Maslow: The Vision of Six Core Human Needs That Changes Everything

CHAPTER THREE   MY UNIQUE DESIRE IS GOD’S DESIRE: HEALING THE CRISIS OF DESIRE

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Field of Desire
  • Prayer Means That the Process Is Personal
  • Our Collective Desire Is for Evolutionary Love
  • I Heal God’s Broken Heart By Accessing My Deepest Heart’s Desire
  • My Unique Desire Is God’s Desire

CHAPTER FOUR   HEALING THE CRISIS OF INTIMACY: FALLING MADLY IN LOVE WITH OURSELVES AS UNIQUE CONFIGURATIONS OF DESIRE AND INTIMACY

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Crisis Is a Crisis of Intimacy
  • Increasing Intimacy Means Bringing in What Is Left Out of The Circle
  • A Simple Practice of Unclenching and Opening the Heart
  • The Self-Organizing Universe Desires More Intimacy
  • Self-Love Is the Key to Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder

CHAPTER FIVE   CRISIS IS AN EVOLUTIONARY DRIVER: OUR COLLECTIVE AWAKENING TO REALITY MADLY IN LOVE WITH US

  • Evolutionary Love Code: New Configurations of Intimacy
  • Reality Is Madly in Love With Me
  • A Practice for Entering on the Inside
  • The Climate Crisis Is an Evolutionary Driver
  • The Solution to Every Great Crisis Is New and Deeper Intimacy

CHAPTER SIX   RESTORE INTIMACY AND BRING POWER BACK INTO THE CIRCLE

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Crisis Is an Evolutionary Driver
  • To Be Madly in Love With Myself Is to Know I Matter Infinitely
  • To Become Like God: Love More
  • Exercise to Open Our Arms and Let Them All In
  • Saturday Church Is the Church of the Metamorphosis
  • It Is Time to Reclaim Our Unique Power

CHAPTER SEVEN   RECLAIMING AND EVOLVING SACRED TEXTS

  • Evolutionary Love Code: What Is Being Left Out of the Circle?
  • We Want a Politics of Love and a Love of Politics
  • The Democratization of Prayer Breakfasts
  • The Evolutionary Testament: A Template for the Future Human
  • Integrating the Depth Structures of Every Great Tradition
  • We Are the Ones to Write the New Sacred Texts

CHAPTER EIGHT   I AM LOVE IN ACTION: INTIMACY, CREATIVITY, AND THE NEW HUMAN

  • Evolutionary Love Code: Each Crisis of Intimacy Is a Birth
  • The Only Decision Is to Open My Heart
  • Genuine Creativity Comes From Intimacy With Myself
  • What Is Being Left Out Is Our Newness
  • I Am Love in Action

CHAPTER NINE   TRANSFORMATION THROUGH EVOLVING THE CAPACITY FOR INTIMACY

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Highest Transformation
  • When I Open My Heart, I Open the Heart of Reality
  • The Power of Deepest Heart’s Desire Groups
  • Feel Into the Ever Deepening Loops of Intimacy
  • The Most Profound Pleasure Is the Pleasure of Transformation
  • Transformation Is Always to Evolve My Capacity for Intimacy

CHAPTER TEN   FROM HOMO ARMOR TO HOMO AMOR: RADICAL CURIOSITY AND PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Highest Pleasure Is Transformation
  • Love and Curiosity Go Together
  • Greatness Means to Make New Mistakes
  • Go the Whole Way in Your Radical Transformation
  • From Homo Armor to Homo Amor
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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… 

Barbara Marx HubbardBarbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx; December 22, 1929–April 10, 2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with the Wheel of Co-Creation and together with Dr. Gafni, the Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0, as well as the concepts of the Synergy Engine and the “birthing” of humanity.

As co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and the chair, for the last five years of her life, of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, she posited that humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises.

She was the author of seven books on social and planetary evolution. In conjunction with the Shift Network, she co-produced the worldwide “Birth 2012” multimedia event. She was also the subject of a biography by author Neale Donald Walsch, The Mother of Invention: The Legacy of Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the Future of “YOU”. Deepak Chopra called her “the voice for conscious evolution.”

In 1984, she was symbolically nominated for the vice presidency of the United States. She also co-chaired a number of Soviet-American Citizen Summits, introducing a new concept called SYNCON, to foster synergistic convergence with opposing groups. In addition, she co-founded the World Future Society and the Association for Global New Thought.

Gafni is a leading public intellectual impacting the source code of global culture. He is also a forger of new trails in the evolution of intimacy and love. In his own self-description, “Like all of us I am a flawed human being, an imperfect vessel for the light, radically committed to constant healing, transformation, and the evolution of love.” He has led international spiritual movements and learning communities, as well as created and hosted for several seasons a popular national Israeli television program on culture, meaning, and spirit on Israel’s leading network. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed educational programs, papers and content rooted in traditional wisdom and yet fully adapted to the needs of the contemporary world.

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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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The Evolution of Intimacy | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard2025-07-17T14:09:58-07:00

The Persian/Hebrew Axis | Alexander Bard, Marc Gafni, and Zak Stein

Alexander Bard of Parallax in a provacative discussion with Dr. Marc Gafni and Zak Stein.

Enjoy this Parallax Dialogue:

A rich and provocative conversation at the crossroads of philosophy, education, and technology, and a bold defense of religion in the modern age. Three intellectual titans — Alexander Bard, Marc Gafni, and Zak Stein — come together in this deep-dive dialogue, discovering surprising points of unity across their metaphysical differences.

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

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

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

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

The postmodernists are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Order Here

The Persian/Hebrew Axis | Alexander Bard, Marc Gafni, and Zak Stein2025-07-02T05:12:14-07:00

The TRUE Story In The Guardians Of The Galaxy Trilogy w/ Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Aubrey Marcus’ Podcast

Aubrey Marcus: “If you have watched the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, this podcast will blow your mind. Because hidden within these fictional films, are true stories of value and reality drawn forth into existence by a force even greater than the writers themselves. So what deep mythic wisdom can we find hiding in the Guardians Of The Galaxy story? You’ll have to join Dr. Marc Gafni and I to find out. SPOILER ALERT! 

For more on the wisdom from the Soloman lineage, and a deeper understanding of the cosmo-erotic universe, check out the book: ⁠⁠A Return to Eros by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid.”

Covered in this podcast:

  • Cast Of Characters | A New Vision of Heroes & Trauma
  • A New Vision Of Family
  • Who is the enemy?
  • Field Of Value
  • The Role Of Dance & Expanding Circles Of Intimacy
  • The Blessing Of the Father
  • Themes Recap & 1 Disappointment
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The TRUE Story In The Guardians Of The Galaxy Trilogy w/ Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus2024-09-04T05:09:07-07:00

Decoding Lord Of The Rings: A Revelatory Exploration w/ Dr. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Aubrey Marcus’ Podcast

Introduction by Aubrey Marcus:

“Was Lord of the Rings just a story or was it a prophesy? What does it have to tell us about our current time and the struggles we face? What is the meaning of the two towers, and the ring of power? I sit down with master teacher and religious scholar Dr. Marc Gafni to decode the hidden meaning in this timeless tale.”

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Decoding Lord Of The Rings: A Revelatory Exploration w/ Dr. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus2024-08-30T08:57:43-07:00

Decoding Dune: A Revelatory Exploration w/ Dr. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on Aubrey Marcus’ Podcast

Spoiler Alert! This episode is for people familiar with the Dune series, and want to explore the complicated themes of this iconic sci-fi masterpiece. Like a message that is echoing from the past, what is particularly relevant about Dune now?

In this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni, we go on a journey to uncover the hidden lessons and timeless wisdom woven into the fabric of this incredible series. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus discuss the multifaceted realms of power, politics, psychedelics, prophets, and the nuances of messianic leadership. We also explore the notion of destiny and the complexities of free will. Whether you’re a passionate aficionado or a curious soul, prepare to be enlightened as we meticulously decode the philosophical intricacies of Dune, offering fresh insights and revelations.

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Decoding Dune: A Revelatory Exploration w/ Dr. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus2024-08-30T08:49:07-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni & Layman Pascal: Public Shadow in the Planetary Age

Enjoy this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni featured on The Integral Stage Podcast. 

“Public shadow in the planetary age”

This is the first episode of a new series exploring the subtle dynamics of collective shadow, narrative making & our responses to how we are perceived. In the digital epoch, it is unlikely that anyone will escape confrontation with a negative image of themselves existing in the minds of others. Do we learn from it? Fight it? Absorb it? Ignore it? And how do we evaluate anything when information itself becomes dubious?

Layman is joined this time by Dr. Marc Gafni — the world philosopher of “cosmo-erotic humanism” together with Dr. Zak Stein. Gafni is the co-president with Stein of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, founded with Ken Wilber in 2010, where they are articulating a “new meta theory story of value in response to the meta crisis”, even as Gafni lives as a character, both beloved and controversial, in the public mind.

Our task in this episode, and in this series, is not to demonize or exonerate. We encourage people to do their own research if they are interested. Facts matter. So do feelings. But that is not our topic in this series where we are focused on something more specific. We are not exploring the content of the narratives but rather how they emerge, how they are perceived by the people inside them, how those people respond under the conditions of the emerging digital, planetary age & what they have concluded about their responses.

We are not exploring content of the narratives but rather how they emerge, how they are perceived by the people inside them, how those people respond under the conditions of the emerging digital-planetary age & what they have concluded about their responses.

Dr. Marc Gafni & Layman Pascal: Public Shadow in the Planetary Age2024-08-30T08:51:28-07:00

From Barbie to Hamas: The Failed Love Story at the Root of All Evil w/ Aubrey Marcus & Dr. Marc Gafni

We are absolutely delighted to share with you this new, incredible podcast with Aubrey Marcus and Dr. Marc Gafni, in which they talk about one of the most complex issues in philosophy and religion: the root cause of evil.

The thesis that Dr. Marc and Aubrey present is that the evil we see in the world is rooted in failed love stories. Our own love stories—personally and collectively—are, in Marc’s words, “chapter and verse in the Universe: a Love Story.” Evil therefore—the opposite of “live”—is at its root the failure of the love story, which is the very plot line of the real.

Marc and Aubrey unpack the potent and poignant realization, that when you lose the plot line of the real you act against Reality. This sacred hermeneutic—lense of sensemaking—allows us to begin to approach so much of what we see in the world today.

The fundamentalist distortions of Jihad, the hidden power agenda’s of military industrial complexes, and the AI driven “digital dictatorships in the making”, all share a common root: their dissociation from the plot line of “Reality is a love story.”

This frame will help bring understanding to much of what we are seeing in today’s culture, from AI to the war in the Middle East.

The surprise reveal is how the box office hit Barbie, actually points to the reality of our failed love story in Western culture.

We encourage you to slowly listen to every sentence of this deep and nuanced podcast. Marc and Aubrey speak with broken hearts, with clarity, but always in the unknowing. Always in devotion to the Mystery. Yet every sentence and literally every phrase in every sentence, offers new insight and whispers love in every distinction, opening hearts and minds with every breath.

This stunning conversation is not an ordinary podcast. It can’t just be listened to—it must be studied, meditated on and engaged deeply.

It is only that level of deep listening that both allows us to integrate the new Gnosis, even as it generates our own unique contribution, addition and even challenge to this new Dharma.

So that we can together birth “the new human and the new humanity.”

It is our prayer that this deep conversation begins to evoke what we call “a new story of value” that has the power and poignancy to respond to the meta-crisis.

From Barbie to Hamas: The Failed Love Story at the Root of All Evil w/ Aubrey Marcus & Dr. Marc Gafni2024-08-30T09:05:15-07:00

Barbie, Hamas, & Homo Amor: From Degraded Love Stories to “The Universe: A Love Story”

Looking at two seemingly unconnected events — the Barbie movie and the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023 — helps us clarify our perception and articulate a third possibility. Although there is zero moral equivalence between Barbie and Hamas, both are degraded love stories.

That’s what makes them so dangerous.

  • Hamas is a wildly destructive expression of fundamentalism; it degrades and demonizes the body and desire itself. Desire, perceived as evil, is projected outwards, onto ‘infidels,’ and then brutally destroyed.
  • Barbie is an expression of postmodernism: it disqualifies love, value, and desire as non-real, as mere social constructs.

In absence of real value, we lose capacity for moral distinctions; that’s why Hamas atrocities were celebrated on university campuses across the Western world. Postmodernism and fundamentalism are swelling movements in today’s world, and both will destroy us.

Our only chance is the third way, the third possibility — articulating a shared story of value rooted in the clarified realization that the Universe is a love story, Reality is desire, and no one is excluded from the love story.

This series below is from One Mountain, Many Paths, a weekly live broadcast of Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni. Click here to register to participate live every Sunday at 10 am PT.

(more…)

Barbie, Hamas, & Homo Amor: From Degraded Love Stories to “The Universe: A Love Story”2024-06-05T09:57:45-07:00

Israel-Hamas: The Impossible Questions – Podcast Aubrey Marcus with Dr. Marc Gafni

Note to Listener from Aubrey Marcus and Dr. Marc Gafni:

We are at a time between worlds, at a time between stories.

We live in a world of outrageous pain. We live in a world of outrageous beauty. We live in a world of outrageous love.

In this time between stories, we step beyond the old stories of good and evil in its primitive forms. But that does not mean that we are moral relativists or that value is not real. Indeed all of reality, all of life is Value. We can feel the truth of this in our bodies. We may not be able to explain it perfectly, but when we feel we know. And this is what gives us courage to stand on the side of Life.

And to stand on the side of Life is to take a side. A stand for Life, is by nature a stand against anti-Life, or anti-Value. What that means about what should be done is a question of impossible complexity, pain and uncertainty.

We stand for a culture of Eros against a culture of death. We stand for intimacy against alienation. This requires us to be both tender and fierce, to stand for Life against the forces of anti-life.

It is not that there is no value in the universe and therefore naturally no battle between value and anti-value. Value is real. Good and Evil are real. But good and evil are not split along racial or national, or ethnic or religious grounds. This is a seductively simple conception, that in and of itself is the cause of so much horror.

In our formulation, Good and Evil is discerned simply: To be Good is to be ALL IN FOR ALL LIFE.

No one is outside of the circle of Life. To be All in for All Life requires the cultivation of radical discernment within a broken information ecology, and full blown 5th generational warfare in the form of attention hijacking and propaganda. To stand for Life means to make love to the tender sensuality of sensemaking.

Feeling our way slowly and carefully, but not with timidity masking as humility.

Evil is evil.

As much as we might be tempted, we cannot be afraid to call it what it is. Within that is a rejection of universal moral relativism. It is a solemn vow to protect the innocent, all of the innocent, and to protect the world from being held hostage by the forces of anti-life – wherever they are found.

We speak with broken hearts, with clarity, but always in the unknowing. Always in devotion to the Mystery, while always whispering love in every distinction with every breath. It is our prayer that this inspires a story that is unifying rather than dividing. Clarifying rather than confusing. It is a prayer for all Life. Comments will be off on this video, so that everyone can watch it and feel with their own hearts and minds.

Israel-Hamas: The Impossible Questions – Podcast Aubrey Marcus with Dr. Marc Gafni2023-11-01T05:05:16-07:00

Healing the Wounds of Culture: Aubrey Marcus, Dr. Marc Gafni, and Dr. Kristina Kincaid

In this powerfully vulnerable podcast with host Aubrey Marcus, and Dr. Marc Gafni and his partner Dr. Kristina Kincaid as guests, they discuss the wounds of culture – meaning, the myriad wounds that culture can inflict – and their personal process of healing and resolution.

Healing the Wounds of Culture: Aubrey Marcus, Dr. Marc Gafni, and Dr. Kristina Kincaid2023-11-01T04:55:32-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Evolutionary Sensemaking Video Series

Enjoy this FREE Series (and Come Back as We Are Adding More Clips)

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Dr. Marc Gafni: Evolutionary Sensemaking Video Series2023-06-20T09:44:24-07:00

Evolving Public Culture

How We Respond to Post Truth And Fake News Matters

We stand at a moment in time when the weaponizing of sex and the manufacturing of scandals is used to undermine leaders and manipulate politics, religion and culture via digital communications at a faster rate than any other time in history. The recent emergents of a post-truth society and fake or distorted news now generate more engagement than truth on social media and are having an enormous impact on the shaping people’s viewpoints and beliefs.

If you use the internet for any form of communication including…

  • Writing emails
  • Posting and commenting on social media
  • Sharing articles and blog posts
  • Creating or viewing videos
  • Participating in live broadcasts (FB Live, Google Hangouts etc..)
  • Reading the news

…then you are participating in digital culture.

The question is, does your participation contribute to the awakening and evolution of culture, or does your participation contribute to the perpetuation of false negative memes and distortions of the truth?

It’s not an easy question to answer, because most of us believe that our actions are well intentioned…. for instance:

  • You share an article with friends because you think it’s about an important topic and worthwhile read but you have not taken the time to see if the information in it is verified…
  • You make a critical comment on a social media post because you want to engage in a conversation that’s meaningful to you but you have made assumptions about what’s true in the story you are commenting on…
  • You sign a petition to take a stand against something such as sexual abuse, but are unaware that your own confirmation bias has lead you to believe the information being shared is fact…
  • You write a blog post or article about a cause or topic that you’re passionate about but you haven’t verified the information from both sides of the story before publishing it…

You see, if you don’t understand the basic tenets for discerning whether or not a post or an article is fact or simply opinion, stated as fact…and if you don’t take the time to weigh your opinions with basic moral and ethical standards before you press ‘publish’ or ‘post’, then you unconsciously become an instrument for the advancement of a post-truth society. In a post-truth America, justice, integrity, and basic goodness are sacrificed on the altar of click bait, political smear campaigns and corrupt grasping for profit or power.

Our response to post-truth and fake news was to create a series of blog-posts dedicated to restoring the fundamental principles of human dignity, fair process and integrity in the digital age. It’s called Evolving Public Culture.

The invitation of Evolving Public Culture is to become an activist for a planetary awakening by contributing to the conversation and choosing to take a bold stand for truth, integrity and justice.

Read some of our blog-posts below:

Evolving Public Culture2023-06-17T08:02:16-07:00

On the New Politics of Eros: Six Key Dimensions Broken in Democracy with Marc Gafni & Layman Pascal

Dialogue with Dr. Marc Gafni in “The Integral Stage” with Layman Pascal

Layman Pascal is joined by Dr. Marc Gafni, the co-founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom and the author of multiple books and essays on integrative spirituality and spiritual activism.
Marc presents his vision of what a planetary politics could and should be, and together they explore the question of AI and the enormous challenges manipulative algorithms pose not only to informed voting, but to sensemaking in general; the emergence of techno-feudalism; the problems with voting protocols rooted in rivalrous dynamics, and the possibilities for liquid democracy or a synergistic democracy; the viability and role of nation states in a globally interconnected and interdependent society; the dynamics of intimacy, and the importance of shared first principles and a shared story; and much more.

Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, passionate philosopher, and author of ten books. He is the co-founder of The Center for Integral Wisdom, and a rabbinic lineage holder in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. He self-describes as a “citizen” of both Integral World Spirituality and classical Hebrew practice. He has been an editor of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice on issues of Integral spirituality and a faculty member of J.F.K. University. In 2014, Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, with John Mackey and Kate Maloney 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 Evolutionary Love.

On the New Politics of Eros: Six Key Dimensions Broken in Democracy with Marc Gafni & Layman Pascal2023-06-17T07:44:21-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Video Series on Responding to Public Culture

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Dr. Marc Gafni: Video Series on Responding to Public Culture2023-06-17T08:04:21-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni: Video Series on Diagnosing the Techplex: From Digital Dictatorship to Digital Intimacy

From Social Self to Unique Self, From Social Hives to Unique Self Symphonies

“First Principles express the underlying – eternal yet evolving – universal principles of value that need to be the rudder of civilization’s next stage. First Principles are urgently needed – personally and collectively – to respond to the catastrophic and even existential risk that challenges us, invites us, and demands our response at this moment in time. First Principles are ancient, time-honored, and venerable, even as they are evolutionary, emergent, and new. First Principles are a weaving together of the most crucial validated truths from all the wisdom streams – premodern, modern, and postmodern – into a new whole greater than the sum of its parts. First Principles are what we have referred to as the New Story, or a New Dharma, or a Global Ethos for a Global Civilization. First Principles are implicitly shared by all the Many Paths. They are the foundation of the One Mountain itself.” – Dr. Marc Gafni

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Dr. Marc Gafni: Video Series on Diagnosing the Techplex: From Digital Dictatorship to Digital Intimacy2023-06-17T12:16:49-07:00
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