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There Are a Welcome (Home) Signs in Reality | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zak Stein

There Are a Welcome (Home) Signs in Reality: There Are No Strangers: The Structure of the Intimate Universe

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 37

There Are a Welcome (Home) Signs in Reality: There Are No Strangers: The Structure of the Intimate Universe | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 37 | Dr. Marc Gafni

This short volume poses a fundamental question: Are we truly welcome in the Universe? The answer, resoundingly, is yes—we are always and already welcome. This realization—the sense that we are deeply needed and loved by Reality itself—forms the foundation for a new Story of Value and a new way of understanding the world. Dr. Marc Gafni (along with Dr. Zak Stein) invites readers to embrace the notion of “Outrageous Love” as a response to suffering. It argues that our shared existence is not a matter of mere survival, but of radical intimacy with the Cosmos—and each other.

Through poetic perception and spiritual insight, this series of “oral essays” weaves together the wisdom of both modern exterior science and ancient interior sciences, declaring that Value, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are all universal “welcome home” signs, ever-present but often forgotten. In these pages our hearts and minds are aroused to our irreducibly unique voice in Cosmos, ecstatically and soberly called to live as Homo amor—the new human and new humanity animated by Evolutionary Love.

Gafni and Stein articulate a vision of global coherence, rooted in First Principles and First Values embedded in a true Story of Value.

It is only when we have a direct realization that value is real—and that we incarnate unique value needed by All-That-Is—that we begin to feel truly welcome in the Universe.

Moreover, it is only the inherent intimacy and interconnectivity with all things within a shared Field of Value that is the ground from which we are able to creatively engage and heal the root causes of our global meta-crisis.Published by World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers. 

Book details:

Title: There Are a Welcome (Home) Signs in Reality: There Are No Strangers: The Structure of the Intimate Universe
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zak Stein
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 37
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340189
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    WELCOME HOME SIGNS IN THE COSMOS: INTIMACY IN THE EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR SCIENCES

  • The Most Important Question in a Perilous Time
  • Are We Actually Welcome?
  • The Direct Experience of Being Welcome
  • The Original Welcome Signs: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness
  • Follow the Signs Home to Feel Welcome
  • Anthro-Ontology: The Mysteries Are Within Us
  • Telling a New Story: From Rivalrous Conflict to Mutual Interdependence
  • Chaos Theory: The Mathematics of Intimacy
  • Thank You—You’re Welcome
  • There Are No Strangers in the Universe
  • The Intimacy Equation

CHAPTER 2    MOTHER: ANOTHER WORD FOR WELCOME

  • Outrageous (Maternal) Love
  • Mother Is the Infinite Intimate
  • The Only Response to Outrageous Pain Is Outrageous Love
  • Outrageous Love as Evolutionary Love
  • Introduction to Genesis 29: The Birth of Homo amor
  • We All Participate in the Messiah
  • Judah Becomes Leah’s “Welcome Home” Sign in Cosmos
  • The Mother Welcomes and Is Welcomed
  • The New Love Story

CHAPTER 3    ALWAYS ALREADY HOME, ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR HOME

  • Beyond Religious Delusion and Statistical Implausibility the Earth Makes Sense
  • False Story of Nature
  • Let’s Welcome Each Other
  • All Problems—and All Solutions—Are Interconnected

CHAPTER 4    EVOLUTION IS THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

  • How to Dance Beyond Polarization: A New Relation to Certainty
  • The Loss of Eros, and the Pseudo-eros of Polarized Identity
  • The Pseudo-eros of False Certainties
  • Welcome: The Field of Eros Is the Field of Value
  • Enlightenment: Intimacy with All Things
  • Being Welcome Is Being Needed, Uniquely
  • Welcome Home, Again
  • Re-Parenting Ourselves
  • Faces of the Self
  • You Are Welcome
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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…

Stein, Zachary - Club of Rome

Dr. Zak Stein is a philosopher of education working at the interface of psychology, metaphysics, and politics. He has published two books, including Education in Time Between Worlds, along with dozens of articles. This writing was done as he worked co-founding a non-profit and the Center for World Philosophy & Religion, as well as teaching graduate students at Harvard, and consulting with technology start-ups. Zak Stein is a long time meditator, musician and caregiver, which has shaped him more than any professional engagements.

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
There Are a Welcome (Home) Signs in Reality | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zak Stein2025-07-23T13:23:42-07:00

The Infinity of Intimacy | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni

The Infinity of Intimacy: From Biological Family to Evolutionary Family: Awakening to the Intimate Universe

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 19

The Infinity of Intimacy: From Biological Family to Evolutionary Family: Awakening to the Intimate Universe | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 19 | Dr. Marc Gafni

The Infinity of Intimacy explores “Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe,” which is understood as the evolution of intimacy itself. One example of this evolution of intimacy is the movement from biological family to a deeper, “evolutionary intimacy” that includes but also transcends traditional forms of relationships. Marc Gafni discloses how we can include and transcend the bonds of biology into a greater “evolutionary family”—a space where irreducible Unique Selves recognize one another as part of a larger, cosmic symphony. It is before your evolutionary family that you are called to confess your greatness and live out and into your “deepest heart’s desires.” These are not your ordinary or surface desires but your clarified desires, which by their very nature are your deepest heart’s desire.

The framework for the conversation is what Marc calls the New Universe Story of the Intimate Universe. Evolution here is understood not merely as the progression from simplicity to complexity, but as the progressive deepening of intimacies. The intensification of intimacy as it deepens, widens, and becomes more full is itself the journey from Homo sapiens to Homo amor, the birth of the possible new human and the new humanity. The notion of the Intimate Universe is part of a core dimension in the articulation of a new “Story of Value” for global culture, as a response to the meta-crisis.

The oral essays collected in The Infinity of Intimacy offer a radical reimagining of how we define our place in the evolving Cosmos. We directly experience our identity as unique participants in what Marc and Barbara call a “Planetary Awakening in Evolutionary Love Through Unique Self Symphonies.” It is an ecstatic invitation to fully live in the wonder of your Unique Self, in clarified devotion to the larger story of the creative Cosmos, grounded in eternal and evolving First Principles and First Values.

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

Book details:

Title: The Infinity of Intimacy: From Biological Family to Evolutionary Family: Awakening to the Intimate Universe
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 19
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340257
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    CO-CREATING A SYNERGISTIC DEMOCRACY: SYNERGY IS THE NEW INTIMACY OF COSMOS

  • Global Communion Towards a Pragmatic Politics of Love
  • The Holy Impulse of the Transgender Movement
  • Homo Amor: Unique Gender, My Unique Combination of Line and Circle Qualities
  • Unique Gender of Homo Amor
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Royal Road to World Transformation
  • Whenever There’s a Crisis in Evolution, It’s a Crisis of Intimacy
  • Intimate Communion Activates Unique Genius
  • Synergistic Democracy as a Unique Self Symphony

CHAPTER 2     EVOLUTIONARY CHURCH AS A MICROCOSM OF SYNERGISTIC DEMOCRACY: THE EVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE & I ARE ONE

  • Homo amor Lives as if This Were the Last Day of Our Lives
  • The Only Way to Create a Tomorrow Is to Transform the Essential Sense of Who We Are as Human Beings
  • Prayer: Turning to the Infinity of Intimacy That Knows My Name
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Evolution Is Intimacy in Action
  • Homo Amor Universalis as a Species
  • Intimacy Means: My Moral Community Is the Planet

CHAPTER 3    THE DIVINE YES OF INFINITE POSSIBILITY LIVES AND BREATHES IN US; WE ARE EVOLUTION AWAKENING TO ITSELF

  • Reclaiming Evolutionary Outrageous Love as Religion
  • Loving Your Way to Enlightenment: Prayer as Exponentialized Intimacy
  • Reclaiming Prayer: The Second-Person Face of the Infinity of Intimacy
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Infinity Screams an Ecstatic “Yes!”
  • My Yes Is an Incarnation of the Holy Yes of the Big Bang
  • Intimacy: Shared Identity and Mutuality
  • Affirming the Big Yes as the Impulse of Evolution

CHAPTER 4     EVOLUTIONARY FAMILIA: INTIMACY GENERATES EMERGENCE

  • We Are at a Pivoting Point in History
  • A New Universe Story Is a New Intimacy in Which the Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
  • The Gap Between Exterior and Interior Imagination
  • We Must Reclaim God
  • The Three Faces of God
  • Every Crisis at Its Core Is a Crisis of Intimacy
  • What’s Going to Make the Difference Is Intimacy
  • Evolutionary Love Code: God Is the Infinity of Intimacy; Intimacy Generates Emergence
  • Generating a Field of Intimacy
  • Intimacy Means It’s Not Mine—It’s Ours
  • The Power of Intimacy in Our Emergence
  • Becoming God’s Unique Intimacies

CHAPTER 5     OUR CRISIS IS A BIRTH: ALL CRISIS IS A CRISIS OF INTIMACY

  • We Live in an Intimate Universe
  • We Have the Ability to Tell a New Story: Humans Are Lovers
  • Prayer: Exponentializing the Passion and Tenderness of Our Most Intimate Experience
  • Prayer: Loving and Being Loved Madly
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Enlightenment Means Intimacy With All Persons and Things

CHAPTER 6     ENLIGHTENMENT IS INTIMACY WITH ALL PEOPLE AND ALL THINGS

  • If It’s Your Last Breath, My Love, Then It’s My Last Breath Too
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Crisis at Its Root Is a Crisis in Intimacy

CHAPTER 7    MY CRISIS IS MY BIRTH—REALITY DESIRES MY BIRTH

  • Mirari: Standing in Rapt Attention Before the Miracle
  • We’re Here to Tell and Be the New Universe Story
  • Its Insides Are Lined With Love
  • Prayer: We’re Individuated Expressions of—and Held by—the All-That-Is
  • The Evolutionary Testament of Creation: The Promise Will Be Kept
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Every Crisis Is a Birth

CHAPTER 8    INCLUDING AND TRANSCENDING: FROM BIOLOGICAL FAMILY TO EVOLUTIONARY FAMILY

  • Biological Family and Evolutionary Family
  • The Importance of Biological Family
  • We Are Not Defined by Our Biology
  • The Importance of Evolutionary Family
  • Evolutionary Family Furthers the Goal of Reality to Generate New Forms of Intimacy
  • The Law of Homo Amor Is That Giving and Receiving Are One

CHAPTER 9     INCLUDING AND TRANSCENDING: FROM BIOLOGICAL FAMILY TO SOUL ROOT EVOLUTIONARY FAMILY, PART 2

  • Joining Together the DNA of Our Unique Selves for the Sake of the Whole
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Soul Root Family, Transcending and Including Biological Family
  • Biological Family Is Wondrous
  • Soul Root Family: We’ve Been Together Before
  • Allurement of Cosmos Over Generations to Position You in Your Biological Family
  • I Am Not Willing to Be Written in the Book of Life Without You

CHAPTER 10    THE BLESSING OF THE FATHER: THE PERSONAL, THE POLITICAL, THE COSMIC

  • The Chapter of the Father
  • The Deconstruction of Value Is Also the Deconstruction of the Father
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Blessing of the Father
  • Star Wars: A Son Who Doesn’t Know Who His Father Is
  • This Is Where I Leave You: The Father Is No Longer Speaking
  • Whale: The Daughter Liberates the Father
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Ultimate Postmodern Tragedy
  • Avatar: Killing of the Degraded Father
  • Avatar: The Way of Water: The Son Saves the Father
  • The Son Needs the Father, the Father Needs the Son

CHAPTER 11     THE INTIMACY CRISIS: WHY THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE GOT IT WRONG

  • Receive the Invitation of This Moment
  • It Takes a Thousand No’s to Say the Yes
  • Eros Is the Placing of Attention
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Unique Self Encounters
  • A Breakdown in Trust
  • You Cannot Create Intimacy Without a Shared Story of Value
  • My Life Is an Outrageous Love Story
  • We Are Holding Pieces of Each Other’s Stories
  • Are We Willing to Love Each Other Desperately?

CHAPTER 12     THE SACRED IS THE INTIMATE: RESPONDING TO THE META-CRISIS THROUGH THE EVOLUTION OF INTIMACY

  • To Be Sacred Is to Be Intimate
  • The Mystery of the Christ Is That God Is the Infinite Intimate
  • The Demonic Is the Failure of Intimacy
  • Let Us Be Intimate With the Christ
  • Evolutionary Love Code: From Biological to Evolutionary Family
  • There Is a Right to Intimacy
  • Intimacy Is Forever: Celebrating Barbara Marx Hubbard
  • Silent Night, Holy Night

CHAPTER 13     THE EVOLUTION OF THE STUDENT-TEACHER RELATIONSHIP

  • Evolving the Source Code of Consciousness and Culture
  • Social Synergy Is Not Enough
  • Outrageous Love and Unique Self Are Evolutionary Emergents
  • The Root Cause of Existential Risk Is the Global Intimacy Disorder
  • Teaching as Lovemaking
  • Teacher-Student Relationships and the Unique Self
  • Autonomy And Communion in Teacher-Student Relationship
  • From the Conventional to the Post-Conventional
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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
The Infinity of Intimacy | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni2025-07-20T17:25:47-07:00

The Next Step in Conscious Evolution | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard

The Next Step in Conscious Evolution: Beyond the Dark Shadows of Transhumanism Towards an Evolutionary Spirituality: a Tribute to Barbara Marx Hubbard

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 16

The Next Step in Conscious Evolution: Beyond the Dark Shadows of Transhumanism Towards an Evolutionary Spirituality: a Tribute to Barbara Marx Hubbard | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 16 | Dr. Marc Gafni

We live in an Amorous Cosmos and the Amorous Cosmos lives in us. It’s a Cosmos filled with desire and allurement.

This book is an homage to the deep love and Whole Mate relationship between Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni, with all its depth, beauty and challenges. It tells the story of how they both deepened their intimacy through sometimes fierce contestation while modelling how to have evolutionary conversations as Homo amor. They were allured to each other in their shared desire to tell a new Story of Value—the new story that had the depth and power to activate the emergence of a new human and new humanity with the capacity to respond to existential risk.

This shared desire gave rise to co-evolving many new emergent ideas as well as fiercely challenging and clarifying other issues like the potential—and danger—of transhumanism, which could become the seedbed of totalitarianism if these were divorced from a shared Story of inherent Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values.

In this volume we celebrate Barbara both on her birthday and on her day of passing into the next world. We are reminded that every death is a night between two days, the darkness before the next birth. We are reminded that the continuity of consciousness is real.

Experiencing the reality of death presses us into life: to be fully here, to be fully committed, to be the change, to be living in the world that is already perfected. We keep coming back to the core truth of the realization: Reality is an Outrageous Love Story. Your story, each of our stories, is a unique chapter and verse in the larger Universe Story.

This knowing is the ultimate dignity of every human life.

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

Book details:

Title: The Next Step in Conscious Evolution: Beyond the Dark Shadows of Transhumanism Towards an Evolutionary Spirituality: a Tribute to Barbara Marx Hubbard
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 16
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340950
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

Buy on Amazon

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    CELEBRATING BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: THE PROMISE WILL BE KEPT

  • Celebrating Barbara’s 91st Birthday
  • We’re in Celebration, and in Our Celebration Is All of The Pain and All of the Joy
  • We Need Line and Circle Qualities at Higher Levels of Consciousness
  • Evolutionary Love Code: You Are A Unique Set of Allurements
  • Success 1.0, Success 2.0, Success 3.0
  • Prayer Affirms the Personhood of Cosmos
  • The Wheel of Co-Creation 1.0
  • The Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0
  • Evolutionary Intelligence Equals Desire
  • Deepest Heart’s Desire and the DNA of an Emerging Culture
  • I Don’t Grow Older, I Grow Newer
  • Barbara Ran for Evolution

CHAPTER 2    THE CONTINUITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: DEATH IS NOT THE END OF THE STORY

  • We Respond to the First and Second Shocks of Existence
  • Barbara Is With Us in the Continuity of Consciousness
  • The Movement to Resurrection
  • After the Crucifixion, There’s Always Resurrection
  • No Matter What Is Going on in My Life, I Trust With Complete Trust
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Death and Resurrection Are Natural Expressions of the Intimate Pattern of Reality
  • That’s Us, on the Road to the Planetary Awakening in Love
  • This Is the Real Thing—We Live Beyond Death
  • Eight Doors of Understanding to the Continuity of Consciousness
  • Door One: The Door of Longing
  • Door Two: The Fear of Nothingness Is That Which Is Beyond Nothingness
  • Door Three: The Eternal Quality of Timeless Time and Placeless Place
  • Door Four: Intuition of Justice and Fairness
  • Door Five: The Knowing of the Hero
  • Door Six: The Experience of Unique Self
  • Door Seven: Either Everything’s Meaningful Or Nothing’s Meaningful
  • Door Eight: The Experience of Loving Is the Experience Of Eternity

CHAPTER 3    WHY LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS MATTER: THE GREAT STORY OF EVOLUTIONARY DEVOTION

  • The New Story of Value Is Our New Home
  • Every Human Being Has the Right to Desire and to Be Desired
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up
  • The Field of Intelligence Hears You Talking
  • The Purpose of Reality Is to Wake Up and to Grow Up
  • Wake Up States Are Not Enough
  • Developmental Levels of Clare Graves
  • The Experience of Commitment at Different Levels of Consciousness
  • “Become A Member” Means Something Different at Each Level of Consciousness
  • From Tier One to Tier Two
  • The Jump From First Tier to Second Tier

CHAPTER 4    CELEBRATING THE COURAGE TO EVOLVE: BEYOND THE DARK SHADOWS OF TRANSHUMANISM AND EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY

  • Celebrating Barbara Marx Hubbard: the Ability to Keep Evolving and Transforming
  • Celebrating 300 Weeks of One Mountain, Many Paths: Humans Are Wildly Good, True and Beautiful
  • To Give Up Being Right Is Being Homo Amor
  • The Evolution of Love Says No to Eugenics
  • The Techno-Utopian Vision Needs to Be Grounded in Unique Self
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Moving Beyond Demonization
  • Incarnating the Impulse of Evolution: Barbara’s First Sermon in Evolutionary Church
  • Evolutionary Chakra Meditation
  • Leaving the Personal Behind Leads to Totalitarianism
  • Story as Prayer: Authentic Mystical Ecstasy Never Ignores the Hunger of Even One Individual

CHAPTER 5    CELEBRATING THE COURAGE TO EVOLVE: BEYOND THE DARK SHADOWS OF TRANSHUMANISM AND EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY, PART 2

  • Joining of Genius
  • The Second Shock of Existence: the Death of Our Humanity
  • Conscious Evolution and the Wheel of Co-Creation
  • The Shadow of Evolutionary Spirituality and Transhumanism
  • Without Articulating First Principles and First Values, You Cannot Arouse Outrage
  • Modeling Evolutionary Conversations
  • Subtle Mccarthyism and Fear on the Internet
  • The Irreducible Infinite Value of Unique Personhood
  • Conversation Absent First Principles and First Values Is Impossible
  • Tech Plex Creativity Needs to Participate in the New Story Of Value

CHAPTER 6    BARBARA MARX HUBBARD’S BIRTHDAY: THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

  • Are You Ready to Awaken as Conscious Evolution?
  • We Need Infrastructure to Articulate the New World Philosophy and Religion
  • Barbara Marx Hubbard Engaged Life With Full Passion Every Day
  • Integrating Barbara’s Legacy Into the New Story of Value
  • Conscious Evolution 1.0
  • Conscious Evolution 2.0: I Am Conscious Evolution in Person
  • Next Steps Towards Conscious Evolution 2.0

CHAPTER 7    THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION: CELEBRATING BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, MY EVOLUTIONARY WHOLE MATE

  • Re-Visioning Conscious Evolution
  • Evolution Is the Synergy of Radical Telos and Complete Freedom
  • Plotlines of Evolution Awakening in Us
  • The Way We Meet Barbara Is by Showing Up in Our Full Selves
Buy on Amazon

About the Authors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more… 

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.

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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The Next Step in Conscious Evolution | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard2025-07-17T15:08:28-07:00

Conscious Evolution | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard

Conscious Evolution: A Love Story: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder by Joining Genius: Honoring the Life of Barbara Marx Hubbard

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 14

Conscious Evolution: A Love Story: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder by Joining Genius: Honoring the Life of Barbara Marx Hubbard | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 14 | Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard

This volume captures the transformative vision of a new humanity emerging through the evolution of love. Beginning with a memorial to Barbara Marx Hubbard, co-founder with Marc Gafni of Evolutionary Church, it honors her profound teaching that “I am evolution in person” and her pioneering work on conscious evolution. At its heart is a radical proposition: evolution itself is the evolution of intimacy. Marc Gafni and Barbara articulate a new story of Reality as a love story-not ordinary romantic love, but Outrageous Love capable of meeting our global crisis.

The authors introduce Homo amor universalis-humanity’s next evolutionary stage-as our only response to what they call the “second shock of existence”: the potential extinction of our species. This emerging human reunites love and knowledge, joining genius (rather than merely genes) to create new possibilities for wholeness and intimacy.

Diagnosing our time as suffering from a “global intimacy disorder,” they offer practical guidance for becoming “the leading edge of evolution.” Readers are invited to discover their unique gifts and ask, “What does evolution need from me in this moment?” Through prayer, chant, and song, the book reveals that love isn’t merely an emotion but a perception-a way of seeing with “God’s eyes” that recognizes the Infinity of Intimacy carrying us in every second, ultimately leading toward a Planetary Awakening in Love.

These oral essays are edited talks delivered by Dr. Marc Gafni between April and June 2019.

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

Book details:

Title: Conscious Evolution: A Love Story: Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder by Joining Genius: Honoring the Life of Barbara Marx Hubbard
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 14
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340790
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1    BARBARA’S MEMORIAL IN EVOLUTIONARY CHURCH

  • Beloved Barbara
  • Before Prayer
  • Eulogy for Barbara
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Love Is a Perception
  • Barbara Was the Good News
  • I Am Evolution in Person
  • I Am Getting Newer
  • If You Want to Know the Essence of Barbara
  • She Charmed Us
  • Joining Genes to Joining Genius
  • There May Be a Time, but This Is Not That Day
  • We Go to Prayer

CHAPTER 2    RESURRECTION AND RENEWAL: RECLAIMING LOVE IN EVOLUTIONARY CHURCH

  • Barbara, You Are Alive Here in Church With Us
  • Not Just Tat Tvam Asi or the Infinity of Power, God Is Also the Infinity of Intimacy
  • The Infinity of Intimacy Carries Us in Every Second
  • Evolutionary Love Code: There Is No Eros Without Gnosis
  • Reality Moves Towards Resurrection
  • We Are Homo Amor Moving Towards Resurrection

CHAPTER 3    MORE THAN CONFESSING YOUR SINS, YOU MUST CONFESS YOUR GREATNESS

  • Reality Is a Set of Habits
  • Our Intention Is to Participate in the Evolution of Love
  • The World Needs a Story About the Evolutionary Love That Animates Everything
  • God Is the Infinity of Intimacy Into Whose Arms I Fall in Every Moment
  • Barbara Marx Hubbard Is With Us in the Continuity of Consciousness
  • Evolutionary Love Code: To Love God Is to Know God
  • Our Clarified Heart’s Desire Becomes Part of the Field of Desire

CHAPTER 4    AWAKENING HOMO AMOR: PARTICIPATING IN THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

  • Welcoming Barbara
  • The Global Intimacy Disorder: We Don’t Have a Shared Story
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Your Deepest Heart’s Desire Is the Source of Great Joy
  • What Is Homo Amor?
  • Who Is Homo Amor Universalis?
  • Homo Amor Universalis: A New Understanding of All Our Dimensions
  • Homo Amor Is Our Response to the Second Shock of Existence
  • The Inner Experience of Homo Amor Universalis Is That Reality Is Literally 50/50
  • What Does Evolution Need From Me in This Next Moment?

CHAPTER 5    A CRISIS OF TOUCH: BECOMING THE MOTHER TO EACH OTHER

  • God in First Person, Second Person, and Third Person
  • All the Rivers Flow Back to the Sea
  • The Sacred Technology of Chant
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Evolution Is the Evolution of Intimacy
  • Our Intention Is to Tell the New Story
  • The One Church Is the Shared Music of All the Great Religions
  • Crisis in the World: We’ve Forgotten What It Means to Touch Each Other
  • The Allurement to Touch Each Other Is Fundamental to Cosmos
  • The Four-Fold Exile of Touch
  • We Have to Heal the Hug

CHAPTER 6    RECLAIMING & EVOLVING INTIMACY: EVERYONE’S IN THE CIRCLE

  • I Am Ready to Play a Larger Game, to Participate in the Evolution of Love
  • Homo Amor Reunites Love and Knowledge
  • We Pray to the Intimate Face of the Evolutionary Impulse
  • Avengers Endgame: We All Have a Unique Self Superpower
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Birthing New Structures of Intimacy
  • We Unleash New Synergies in the World
  • Avengers Endgame: I’m Not Separate From the Larger Whole

CHAPTER 7    OUR TOUCH QUIVERS REALITY TO NEW IDENTITY; GOD ASKS EVERYTHING OF ME

  • Living My Life to the Fullest, Chapter and Verse in the Universe: A Love Story
  • Prayer: Every Place You Fall, You Fall Into Her Arms
  • Evolutionary Love Code: There Are No Externalities

CHAPTER 8    THERE ARE NO DEPLORABLES: EVERYBODY IS INSIDE THE CIRCLE

  • Radical Surprise and Amazement: We Get to Participate in the Evolution of Love!
  • There’s An Ontological Pluralism in a Perennial Context
  • The New Story Is the New Physics of Reality
  • The Infinity of Power Is Also the Infinity of Intimacy
  • How Do You Practically Locate Intimacy in Your Life?
  • Opening the Circle and Letting Everyone In
  • Loving Our Way to Enlightenment

CHAPTER 9    OPENING YOUR HEART IS NOT ENOUGH; NO PART OF YOU SHOULD BE LEFT OUT

  • We Become the Leading Edge of Evolution
  • Prayer: Reclaiming the God That Knows Me
  • Exponentialized Desire and Exponentialized Tenderness
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Enlightenment Means There Are No Externalities
  • Who Have I Left Out of My Heart?
  • You Can’t Love a Person If You’ve Left Other People Out of Your Heart
  • When You’re in Crisis, What’s New About You Is Often Left Out
  • We Are the People Telling the New Story

CHAPTER 10    CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION: A LOVE STORY

  • Poised at the Abyss, We Are Called to Evolution
  • We’re Bringing the New Good News
  • Evolution Is the Evolution of Intimacy
  • What’s the Source of All This? Where Does This Drive for Intimacy Come From?
  • I See You With God’s Eyes
  • When I See With God’s Eyes, I Can See the Next Step in the Evolution of Love
  • God’s Perspective of Us at This Moment of Evolution
  • Find the Form of Joining Genius
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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.

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
Conscious Evolution | One Mountain Oral Essays | Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard2025-07-17T14:49:56-07:00

The Sacred Power of Story | Marc Gafni & Iain McGilchrist Moderated by Zak Stein

Parallax media hosts this discussion between Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Marc Gafni, moderated by Zak Stein, on the Sacred Power of Story.

Zak Stein moderates an intense and wide-ranging conversation between Dr. Iain McGilchrist. and Dr. Marc Gafni and the dialogue spans the sacred nature of story, the loss of value and eros, the nature of evil, and the deep structures shaping culture today.

Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, literary scholar, and one of the most important philosophical voices of our time. He is best known for The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, where he argues that the left and right hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, with massive consequences for civilization. His work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, art, and depth psychology, offering a vision of human consciousness grounded in attention, embodiment, and reverence.

Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary philosopher, spiritual teacher, and social theorist. A former Orthodox rabbi with a doctorate from Oxford University, he is the co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion and a leading voice in the articulation of “cosmo-erotic humanism.” His books include Your Unique Self, A Return to Eros, and Radical Kabbalah. Gafni’s work fuses Jewish mysticism, integral theory, and Western philosophy to explore the nature of self, eros, and value at the evolutionary edge of human identity and spirituality.

Zak Stein is a Harvard-trained education and transformation philosopher known for his work on developmental ethics, meta-crisis, and the future of human learning.

(more…)

The Sacred Power of Story | Marc Gafni & Iain McGilchrist Moderated by Zak Stein2025-07-02T06:53:03-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni in Audio Conversation with Devin Bailey: The Universe Is a Love Story

As Above, So Below.

Dr. Marc Gafni in Audio Conversation with Devin Bailey: The Universe Is a Love Story2024-12-04T03:33:54-08:00

From Crisis to Crossing: A New Story For A New Humanity ft. Marc Gafni

Enjoy this documentary with Dr. Marc Gafni created in collaboration with Aubrey Marcus and the Unique Self Institute

Documentary with Dr. Marc Gafni

In collaboration with Aubrey Marcus and the Unique Self Institute

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

Who am I? and Who are we?

Where am I? and Where are we?

What ought I do? and What ought we do?

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

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

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FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

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

by David J. Temple

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

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

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

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

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From Crisis to Crossing: A New Story For A New Humanity ft. Marc Gafni2024-08-30T09:32:04-07:00

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

By Dr. Marc Gafni

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

Download the Essay as PDF

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

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

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

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

more and more complexity,

more and more uniqueness,

more and more consciousness,

more and more creativity,

more and more care and concern,

more and more intimacy, and

more and more story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the core sentences of CosmoErotic Humanism is:

Evolution is Love responding to need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Early Draft of an Excerpt from Volume Two of

The Universe: A Love Story

First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism

in Response to the Meta-Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redignifying Human Need | Dr. Marc Gafni at Ari in the Air

This is what Ari says about this episode:

In this episode, we get into his work with Ken Wilber and Zak Stein on CosmoErotic Humanism – a meta story of the universe that places humans in a meaningful existence. It’s a deep and huge topic, and this is just the first of many conversations with Marc.

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Redignifying Human Need | Dr. Marc Gafni at Ari in the Air2023-11-01T04:55:49-07:00

Toward a New Story: Mini-Series with Aubrey Marcus & Dr. Marc Gafni

We are at a time in our world, where we need to birth a new story, and there is nobody that I know who has felt and thought through what this new story might look like, more than Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni.

How do we respond to the meta crisis of compounding existential threats? The answer that Dr. Marc Gafni PHD gives is that the root cause of the meta-crisis is a global intimacy disorder.

As he puts it:

Global Challenges require global coordination which in turn requires global resonance, which in turn requires global intimacy, which can only be sourced in a shared global story of value.

For this very reason, we must articulate a shared global story of value.

This story, according to a set of compelling teachings by Dr. Gafni and his colleague Dr. Zak Stein, is the evolutionary love story of the intimate universe. This claim is not casual, but rather based on a profound integration of myriad wisdom streams in what they call the interior and exterior sciences across space and time.

But, and this is Gafni’s core point, not only must we be tellers of the new story, but we must also actually be the story. We must know that our personal story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story. And that story is a story of transformation.

And that therefore,

Y/our transformation is the transformation of the whole.

In other words, the change you are seeking in the world begins with changing the way you see yourself and your place in the world. You literally become the New Story.

You cross to the other side, awakening as the new human and the humanity.

This series of podcasts under the title “Toward a New Story” is about building what Gafni and Stein call CosmoErotic Humanism, a shared story of value as a context to celebrate our diversity.

While Dr. Gafni began his path as an ordained Rabbi intimately versed in the ancient Aramaic texts, we recognize together, that this new story must include and transcend the validated insights from all the great religions, philosophies, and cultures from premodern, modern, and postmodern times.

This is a historic moment, and for people who want to claim their seat at the table of history, this podcast is a resplendent invitation.

As Aubrey Marcus puts it:

I cannot imagine inviting you to a more important, heart opening, mind bending, and exciting journey than the conversations we are having in this podcast series.

Volume 1: A New Human for a New Humanity in Response to the Meta-Crisis

Volume 2: LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, & LoveDesire of All-That-Is

In Volume 2 of the series, we tackle the most fundamental question of our existence.

Who Am I?

Volume 3: The Path to Enlightenment Is Through Your Uniqueness

In Volume 3 of the series Toward A New Story with Dr. Marc Gafni PHD we continue with part 2 of the most fundamental question of our existence.

Who Am I?

Toward a New Story: Mini-Series with Aubrey Marcus & Dr. Marc Gafni2023-11-01T04:55:32-07:00

The Universe Is a Love Story: Marc Gafni on Daniel Kazandjian’s Podcast

Watch and listen to this beautiful conversation:

The Universe Is a Love Story: Marc Gafni on Daniel Kazandjian’s Podcast2024-04-03T09:16:36-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus in a Video Dialogue: Secrets of the CosmoErotic Universe

Aubrey Marcus:

“When it was recommended that I do a podcast with Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni, I knew nothing about him. I dove straight into his body of work and my life will never be the same. This is perhaps the most paradigm shifting podcast I have ever recorded. It tells the tale of the greatest love story of all–the story of the cosmo-erotic universe Herself. In this paradigm shifting masterclass, we learn how a force he calls Eros is the fundamental substrate of creation all the way down to the first principles of subatomic matter. Gafni’s wisdom stretches back deep into the secrets of the Temple of Solomon and the mystic Kabbalist tradition. Our conversation touches a wide range of topics, including the nature of the Goddess, the democratization of enlightenment, and rewriting our sexual narratives.”

Dr. Marc Gafni and Aubrey Marcus in a Video Dialogue: Secrets of the CosmoErotic Universe2023-06-17T07:31:26-07:00

Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein: CosmoErotic Humanism – Philosophy in a Time Between Worlds

Download the PDF Version of the Paper

This brief paper (2020) represents an overview of the project of CosmoErotic Humanism, which is a philosophical orientation conceived here as an emergent aspect of the historical moment. We view this moment as a kind of Da Vinci moment, when new syntheses and sciences become possible, when new worldviews can emerge. We are poised between potential dystopia and utopia, a position rooted in global intimacy disorder (who are we?) and a consequent global action paralysis or confusion (what should we do?), which itself is sourced in a foundational collapse of narrative frameworks including a shared universe story and its derivative narratives of identity, community, sexuality, purpose, and power (what is the nature of reality?).

When looking at the world situation, our first reaction is to ask about what, who, and how? What has happened? Who has gotten our civilization into this? How can it be helped or changed for the better? These questions are essential, and we encourage people to ask them. However, there is a more important question that is asked less often, which is: when is it? Which is to say: when are we? Or more basically: what time is it?

It is time for a change. We live in a time between worlds; a time of almost unbearable intensity, potential, and change.

Figure: Timeline displaying secular cycles of world hegemonic organization during seven centuries of the capitalist world system (based on Arrighi; Wallerstein), as nested within dynamics of media and cultural evolution (based on McLuhan; Gebser). Two epochs represent a convergence of metahistorical trends marking major transformations and can thus be characterized as “time between worlds”.

(more…)

Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein: CosmoErotic Humanism – Philosophy in a Time Between Worlds2024-07-03T12:24:03-07:00

Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, & Barbara Marx Hubbard: On the Moral Phenomenology of Participating in the Evolution of the Kosmos

Social Justice and Superorganisms

A contribution for the roundtable discussion of David Sloan Wilson’s, Does Altruism Exist. Summer, 2015.

Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard

The Center for Integral Wisdom & The Foundation for Conscious Evolution

Abstract:

The New Paradigm Is Old Hat

Heterodox evolutionary discourse has long entertained the emergence of what Wilson calls superorganisms. These are emergent phenomena that functionally integrate lower-order organisms as parts, lessening within group selection pressure, making the many into one, and thus fostering the evolution of a new organismic totality. Over the years this idea led many to suggest the (inevitable?) emergence of some kind of new evolutionary event—a superorganism of humans. Wilson is interested to argue that, now, with new evidence, we finally really know that, for example, cooperation can have an impact on evolution via group selection, even as it seems counter intuitive to cooperate at the level of individual selection. Moreover, the dynamic systems and evo-devo researchers have been on to something: emergence often works via symbioses and “cooperation,” especially at the cellular and ecosystem levels. This provides a new and better platform for understanding human ethical and moral action in evolutionary terms.

We strongly support these directions and expansions in mainstream evolutionary science. We would only like to note here that heterodox evolutionists have already spilled a lot of ink about the role of morality, self-consciousness, and group-consciousness as a factor in evolution. This tradition has spent more time looking into the implications of evolutionary thinking for the self-understanding of the species, and less time working with models of mechanisms and exteriorities. So the question of whether altruism exists has not been as important as questions about the many forms of selfless behavior, as well as the higher levels of moral development individuals can attain while “becoming a part of something larger than themselves.”

In particular, the focus has been on this question: What would it really mean for our humanity if we become swept up into a superorganism, as if becoming cells organized for the benefit of some larger organelle?  This is a profoundly important ethical question, and it tends to evoke, when asked, a religious or spiritual state of mind.

Some us who have been actively asking such questions have also sought to refine the phenomenology of moral consciousness associated with evolutionary emergence in human groups. The key focus is how to strike a balance between what Wilson calls (unfortunately) “selfishness” and “altruism.” We call them autonomy and communion. Too much of either and any group is pathological. Too much communion and you get a kind of totalitarianism or coercive fascism. Too much autonomy and you get narcissists and rouges, lawlessness and violence (like the wolves of Wall Street Wilson laments). These are the kind of phenomena studied in the field of conscious evolution, where the evolution of human consciousness itself is taken as both object and subject.

Social Justice and Superorganisms
Read the Paper HERE
Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, & Barbara Marx Hubbard: On the Moral Phenomenology of Participating in the Evolution of the Kosmos2023-06-17T14:25:27-07:00

The Greatest Story Ever Told: Audio Series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni

The Greatest Story Ever Told

with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni

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Listen to the Audio Series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni above.

Or listen to and read the transcripts of the twenty Audio Sessions in this Series!

In the words of Dr. Marc Gafni:

We are gathered around the campfire of culture in order to unpack the new universe story: The new vision of the patterns that connect… the inescapable framework, in which we live, which tells us about who we are… why we’re here… where we came from, and where we’re going…

There’s no human being who doesn’t live in a framework. And having the best framework, having the most accurate framework, most accurate worldview, the prism through which we see, is what lets us out of prison. It’s only a new worldview that changes the story… that changes reality.

…

We’re here to tell the story that is the best understanding we have, integrating the best wisdom of all the traditional period of the entire modern period and the entire postmodern period. Integrating all that wisdom into one narrative stream.

What is the best universe story available to us today?

Why does that matter? It matters because we live inside of our story, but our story’s not just a creation, it’s a discovery. It’s a revelation of the best wisdom we have about the nature of reality, and what our place is in that story.

We’re interested not just in a theoretical universe story, but how are we personally implicated in that story? Knowing the story that I live in tells me why I’m alive.

…

Who are you? You are an irreducible, unique expression of the love, intelligence and love beauty, that is the animating and initiating eros of all that is, that lives in you, as you and through you. That never was, is or will be ever again other than through you lady Barbara. As such, Barbara has and Marc has and… Every single person listening, each of us has an irreducibly unique perspective, and we have an irreducibly unique taste which is our unique quality of intimacy. That irreducibly unique perspective and taste and quality of intimacy manifests our unique capacity to give our unique gift, and our unique gift addresses a unique need. A unique need in us and a unique need in our circle of intimacy and influence that can be addressed by us and us alone, by no one else that ever was, is or will be, ever in history of reality.

Giving that unique gift and being that unique self, right, it’s about the giving of the gift and it’s the being, the incarnating of our unique quality of intimacy, that is the eros and telos of our lives, it’s the kilos and the eros of our lives. To live a telerotic life is to be incarnating your unique self but with one more step. As part of the unique self symphony, as part of the larger context, right, the great unique self symphony which is the basic structure of a new politics of evolutionary love.

 

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Every Sunday 10-11 am Pacific Time Online
Sign up HERE:

 

The Greatest Story Ever Told: Audio Series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni2023-06-17T14:37:54-07:00

The Universe: A Love Story (Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard)

We are storytellers, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and scientists of the new universe story. We trace the new universe story, integrating for the first time diverse elements from all the leading sources of authoritative wisdom available today on the cutting edge of thought. The result is the greatest love story ever told. Recently someone came to us seeking advice. He was in a very scared, paralyzed state. We said to him, “If we lived inside of your consciousness we could be sacred and paralyzed too…” To up-level, our consciousness is to evolve our worldview.

Read More & Download the PDF Version of the Paper
The Universe: A Love Story (Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard)2023-06-17T14:39:26-07:00

The Cosmo-Erotic Universe: Excerpt from A Return to Eros

An Excerpt from A Return to Eros by Dr. Marc Gafni.

We live in a cosmos driven by Eros. The universe is a perfect, interconnected whole that at the same time seeks greater wholeness. The universe is radically alive, infused with presence and infinite vitality, even as it is infinitely intimate and whole. Everything rests in the beingness of spacious perfection.

And yet the universe is driven by evolutionary Eros. The cosmos is not only being but also becoming. Whereas being is characterized by harmony and equilibrium, becoming is characterized by a kind of ecstatic urgency and disequilibrium. Evolutionary Eros is constant becoming. It is the inherent, ceaseless desire for more and more contact and creativity. Consciousness yearns for contact. More contact always births new creativity. New creativity creates new babies of all kinds, or what science calls new evolutionary emergents. This is not an accident but the essential, sacred nature of an erotic universe. This is the lure of becoming that animates and drives all existence.

>>> Read the paper HERE <<<

“A Return to Eros is a tour de force of the kind that comes along once in a generation. The way this volume brings Eros to consciousness as the fundamental force, direction, and “purpose” of reality on all levels and all quadrants, really is the discovery that now underlies, directs, and “explains” the sacred purpose of cosmogenesis, the birth narrative of the New Human. It’s the second coming of humanity for the first time in history incarnate as a fully embodied sacred sexual being. It’s the early stages of next evolutionary unfolding. A Return to Eros forms the basis of evolutionary spirituality. It captures the glory of its conscious experience from the inside out in the sexuality and Eros of the evolutionary unique self.”

– Barbara Marx Hubbard

The Cosmo-Erotic Universe: Excerpt from A Return to Eros2023-06-17T15:04:31-07:00
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