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

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
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 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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