Listen to this Dialogue and/or Read the Transcript Below
Here is the transcript of this dialogue between Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Tom Ronen Goddard.
Marc: Let’s talk about this new word in the Dharma, which is a word that appeared maybe a year ago, which is this word ErosValue. That’s our topic for the next few minutes. And in some sense, as you know, my love, we didn’t start talking about First Values and First Principles. The first time I ever mentioned that term, it was probably 2018. I mean, in other words, we talked about the Dharma until then. And at a certain point, I realized that’s the wrong word for lots of different reasons. And so we moved to First Values and First Principles that’s turned out to be extremely rich and necessary. The topic of the first book we’re putting out with World Philosophy and Religion Press is called First Values and First Principles, and according to, whatever the subtitles are, David J. Temple book. I should introduce you to him.
Tom: No, I met him in Vermont.
Marc: Yeah, that’s right. He did stop by for a second, didn’t he?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely.
Marc: He was there. That’s true.
Tom: I’ve got some of his writing right over there.
Marc: Wow! Wow! That’s awesome. That is awesome. That is awesome. Yeah, that is awesome. So it’s very, very, very big deal to put those words together as one word, And we started doing something like this when we started talking about maybe five, six, seven years ago, eight years ago. We started talking about maybe a decade ago. We even started talking about LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty. And then I added LoveDesire, LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty and LoveDesire.
We realized that in those words that we had to construct new language. Because if language is this building block of reality, and if we want to evolve reality, we have to evolve language. And Elena actually just wrote me a 10,000-word paper on the nature of language because she’s a linguist and how that fits into the intimacy formula. So language is its own gorgeous world. So ErosValue, what does that mean? What does the ErosValue means? What does it mean to you? Let’s just talk about it. This is not a dial-a-lecture. This is not dial-a-dharma Let’s study it together. What’s Eros?
Tom: What first occurs to me is bidirectional. I mean, Eros generates value, but there’s also Eros as a value.
Marc: Right. So on the one hand, so I started saying it as Eros, we made a list of First Principles and First Values. We could only do like deep in Holy of Holies. So we made a list of First Principles and First Values, and there’s 18 of them, and that shows up in the new book. And okay, so what’s the primary values? The primary value is Eros, and it’s all of them in a certain sense emerge from Eros, But it’s also true that when I say that there’s intrinsic value in the cosmos, what I mean is that value is erotic. What that means is that value is alluring. My value is alluring. I’m allured to value. It’s not a dry category. It’s not a desiccated category. It’s wet. It’s too messy. It’s pulsing. It’s alive, which is why value arouses will.
Let’s go really slow here because we get to like breathe here and go slow, not like quick in a one minute. So what’s will? Let’s see if we fill in the pieces of it. It’s very exciting and it keeps me up at night in a good way. So will as we know is ratzon, R-A-T-Z-O-N.
Tom: Right, I remember that, yeah.
Marc: Ratzon. Ratzon, always as well. That’s the word. So in radical Kabbalah, for example, there’s an entire extremely important chapter. And again, if you can, as we start Holy of Holies again, there’s like the Sixth, Seventh core books, like have them accessible so you can find this stuff, because it’s…
Tom: Right over there. Radical Kabbalah right over there.
Marc: Right over there. So there’s a section on ratzon. So ratzon is literally Ratzon Hashem, the Will of God, or Hashem, H-A-S-H-E-M, the Will of the Name.
Now let’s go slow. So will is my will. But where does my will come from? So free will. So I’m looking at this book. It’s popular these days. It’s a very bad book, but everyone thinks it’s brilliant, by Sapolsky basically saying determined life without free, becoming the du jour position these days. Lots of reasons. So bracket that for a second. So ratzon is will. So we’ve got the sense of will.
Okay. So where does my will come from? So if we look at the Song of Solomon and we opened the Song of Solomon, and let’s just read it together, let’s just open it together. Maybe open it up. Read us the first four verses. You give us the first four verses. Give us a slow, dramatic Ronen reading of the first four verses of the Song of Solomon.
Tom: Oh, I need a bookmark in that. Here we go. The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. Oh, that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth for your love is better than wine. Your anointing oils are fragrant. Your name is oil poured out. Therefore, the maidens love you. Draw me after you. Let me make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exult and rejoice in you. We will extol your love more than wine; rightly do they love you.
Marc: So let’s do that last verse. Okay? So draw me after, read that one again. Mashcheni Acharecha Narutzah.
Tom: Draw me after you. Let me make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exalt and rejoice in you. We will extol your love more than wine; rightly do they love you.
Marc: So this is a major text. So let’s look at the whole thing, we could, but let’s just go for that verse. Mashcheni Acharecha, draw me after you, Mashcheni Acharecha [Hebrew] Narutzah, and I will ruts, I will run after you, but run doesn’t make haste loses the sense of it, is the sense of ruts is to run. And in the account of the chariot, the Maaseh Merkabah, in Ezekiel and Isaiah, [Hebrew], the animals, the wild animals, but also the [Hebrew], that’s how the lineage reads it, [Hebrew] is the aliveness, [Hebrew], the aliveness, ratzo, ruts, ratzo, runs towards, expands, explodes, Ronen explodes. [Hebrew] and then comes back and rests.
So the movement of cosmos, the movement of She, the movement of divinity in Maaseh Merkabah, in the account of the chariot, which is the locus classicus of divine science in the Western world, has this word as its major word, the explosion, the ecstatic explosion is ratzo, to run towards. Make haste is like boring. No, no, it’s like Mashcheni Acharecha, draw me after you, [Hebrew] Narutzah, and I will run towards you.
Tom: Right.
Marc: [Hebrew], the king has brought me into his inner chambers, Nagila V’nismecha Bach, let us rejoice ecstatically in you, Ki Tovim Dodecha Meyayin, et cetera. Okay, this is a very, very, very important word. So ruts, Ratzon Hashem, very beautiful brother, at the will of God, means this moment in Eros where the first stages, and you wouldn’t know anything about this, but you may have friends.
Tom: I’ve read books too. Yeah.
Marc: Books.
Tom: Yeah.
Marc: Sketches. So Mashcheni Acharecha is the seduction. It’s like, “Draw me after you.” And the word meshiha in Hebrew means literally to draw towards or meshiha in Hebrew, you would say, [Hebrew], are you drawn to her? So meshiha means attraction, literally. So Mashcheni Acharecha, allure me to you, so that’s the first stages of allurement. Then there’s a certain moment at which I’m in. You cross that line. There’s a certain line, it’s an invisible line in the sand. Up to the moment of that line, there’s choice. The second you cross that line, choice disappears.
Now in bad literature of sexual harassment, “Oh, I was so and I felt coerced,” we’re talking about the exact opposite. We don’t go choice downward, we go choice upward. So from choice to choicelessness, which is the word that we use in radical Kabbalah in Part 7, Volume 1. So I’m now so in that I’ve crossed the line, I’ve given up my sense of choice, and that’s ruts. That’s running towards, which is will.
So you see something very subtle and very beautiful. We get to slow down and breathe in Holy of Holies, it’s like, “Oh, so will is the place where choice is given up.” That’s the ultimate paradox. Meaning I give up all of the senses of rational choosing, or of what we call in the Zohar ratzon tachton, lower will, and I moved to ratzon elyon, to higher will, which is the place of choicelessness,
So why am I connected to Tom Ronen Goddard? Just because higher will, choicelessness. You might go back and say, “No, no, no, we made a series of choices.” We had Shalom [Mountain Wisdom School] and we had that conversation behind the house. Of course, we chose. There were lots of other people around. There were lots of students. There were lots of teachers. Not that we were stuck and had no choice. True and not true at all. Choicelessness.
Tom: I can actually think of the moment I crossed the line with you. I was in the middle of that wisdom school and was like, “Oh, well that’s obvious.”
Marc: That’s what this verse is describing.
Tom: Beautiful.
Marc: Ain’t that gorgeous?
Tom: Oh, gorgeous.
Marc: Crazy gorgeous. It’s exactly describing that. So that’s where will, paradoxically, comes online. We would think in kind of classical materialist western culture, “Oh, that’s where will disappeared.” No, that’s where the obfuscations in the impediments to will disappeared, what seems to construe itself as will disappeared, and now we cross that line. At the moment we cross that line, you’re in, like, boom! So in a certain sense, everything that led up, we were in Don Manor. In other words, that’s all part of Mashcheni Acharecha, draw me after you. But then there’s a moment where we cross over. And that moment is will. That’s ratzon.
Tom: Yeah.
Marc: Very, very, very beautiful. Let’s find this first segment. So ratzon, will, is an erotic word. That’s so interesting. That word is tumescent with Eros in its very linguistic structure, not as a kind of later overlay. No, no, no, that’s the point. So it’s through my will that I choose value, but my will is Eros. It starts to get really beautiful, starts to get really beautiful. And what’s happening is, love, just to speak into this little pocket of Tom’s frustration, I’m trying to say big things like this in a minute in One Mountain, which you can’t quite do rely because there’s not enough. It’s why we talked about needing a wisdom school again. You got to go slow. And that’s what I do myself all the time. Everyone thinks I think fast and I don’t. I think very slowly. I read very slowly. And I got to step. Okay. No, no, no. Did I understand that or did I not?
Now I try and find it in my body. What is that? Because it’s in my body, [Hebrew]. To my body, I vision God. That’s the core of our lineage. So if I can’t locate it here, it’s not true. So we can locate it. We could locate it in our erotic union. We could locate it with Jubi, and you could locate it again and again. You can actually find it. The sexual models of the erotic, it doesn’t exhaust the erotic. And the Song of Solomon is, all of the Field of Eros, incarnate in the field of the embodied somatic, sexual, physical. And so we’ve got this notion of will is what chooses value.
And of course, the problem with this book is that it’s frightening. And this is becoming the du jour understanding. Frans De Waal, the [INAUDIBLE 00:15:41] dude. He writes in his usual frank and amusing style. Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. His stance is both hard to accept and hard to deny, an utterly fascinating topic with mind bobbling implications for human morality. Thank you, motherfucker. It’s intense. We’re saying something else. We’re saying that actually… it’s only my will that can choose great value. There’s no free will. There’s no point in talking about goodness. Conversation’s over. You can’t speak in terms of value unless there’s an ought in Cosmos. There’s only an ought in Cosmos if there’s a will in Cosmos. And that will has to reside in me and it has to have a dimension of freedom.
Otherwise, Cosmos is a mechanical manual. It’s not actually a sacred text. It’s actually a tech manual. I mean, it’s a very beautiful way to say it. Cosmos becomes a tech manual, if you don’t have that notion. And that notion of will which chooses value is Eros. It’s not you’ve mean to see it, and this hit me like a year ago. It’s not that Eros is a value or that value exudes and is suffused with Eros, although those are both true. But no, Eros and value are literally the same thing. And you’re like, “Oh, oh, ErosValue, one word, capital E, capital V, all the way up and all the way down.”
And let’s say we were doing wisdom school, by the way. What would we do? We’d spend an entire weekend on this term. That’s what we developed the Dharma. This is not a plug for doing wisdom school. Although in a non-Holy of Holies conversation, if we don’t do it at psalm, which my guess is we’re not moving that direction, we should do it. It isn’t necessary. I’m going to do a large wisdom school with Aubrey, but that’s a show. That’s a performance. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the way we did it.
Tom: Study hall.
Marc: That’s right. What we did at Shalom birthed Dharma.
Tom: Yeah.
Marc: And it’s desperately missing in the system. We don’t have it. We just do an entire weekend and adjust on ErosValue, which we do practices on ErosValue. We do texts at ErosValue. But you can see it now. And as I’ve mentioned ErosValue in One Mountain, probably 15 times in the last six months that you’ve been there for, but it didn’t because it can’t land. It’s too subtle. It’s an actual realization in your body. Every decision Tom makes is ErosValue.
Now here’s where it gets really crazy. Is he choosing or isn’t he? Well, draw me after you, and I will run towards you. And so on the one hand, there’s this sense of, “Oh, reality, goddess, the awake fabric of cosmos, is drawing me towards. And in that drawing me towards, I have an actual experience of choosing,” which is real. “And then I step over a certain line and then she’s living me. I’m being lived as love.” She’s living me. But it’s not that it’s before choice, it’s beyond choice. It’s not that I’m less than choosing. It’s not that there’s no moral force in cosmos. It’s that I am the moral force of cosmos.
Now you might say, “Okay, Sapolsky would say you’re not choosing even in that first stage.” And so that is a mistake because it assumes that all of cosmos is measurable and quantifiable. And therefore, all reducible to antecedent causation. But actually there was a black box in cosmos. The black box is irreducible, it’s non-quantifiable, it’s non-commodifiable, and it’s directly available to you through a disclosure of the deepest anthro-ontological knowing. So there’s an ontological knowing, which is not breakable, downable, it’s not quantifiable, it’s not reducible. But it’s not an ontological knowing only. An ontological knowing means direct access, direct realization, direct experience. It’s an anthro-ontological knowing, which is our new word for the last three years. Because Tom cannot make sense of his experience without saying that on some level he chose Jubi, and on some level he didn’t. But Tom cannot feel, “Oh, I had to do this Holy of Holies with Marc.” It actually takes away some of his joy.
Marc says, “God, someone put a gun to my head,” or Cosmos, it had to be with Tom. No. No. It’s actually this free delight arose in me, which I got to reach out to, let’s meet once a quarter. And Tom said, “Yeah, let’s meet once a quarter.” And those two freedoms met and danced and created joy. And we have a direct access to that. Now could you then measure and go backwards and say, “Well, that which led to that moment, I’ll give you the entire trail of antecedent causation”? Legitimate? It doesn’t matter. But in that moment, something emerges from that moment, which is new.
Now how do I know that new things emerge from moments? That’s called emergence, what happens all the fucking time. So in other words, if antecedent causation ruled the universe, how would you have emergence? But you can only know it in the first person experience of will. And if you can’t know it, ratzon, you can’t know it in mind, and only known in a first person experience. And what I’d like to suggest is that the next time we have Holy of Holies in three months from now, I will bring a set of texts that we’ve never looked at in Kook, never been translated, which are on this notion of will, which are basically unreadable texts, sacred texts. We’re going to read them for the first time. We’ve never read them in our circles either. And this notion of ratzon and tzorekh means necessity. Couldn’t be any different. Living the relationship between those two is where realization lives.
So ErosValue says, on the one hand, value is free will. So subtle. Look how deep it is. It can make you shiver. It’s so beautiful. Value is like, “We choose.” Value means there’s free will. Eros means Mashcheni Acharecha, draw me after you. Narutzah, let us run. No free will. That old nursery rules disappeared. I’ve crossed the line, and we’re in. There’s no backing out without someone shooting you because you’re in, because there’s a higher will that’s living you.
ErosValue, actually, we now begin to see this very subtle, beautiful thing, which is that Eros is choicelessness and value is choice. Shit, is it beautiful. And now I’m going to tell you something that’s going to flip you out. It’s going to flip you the fuck out, which is really beautiful. The depth of our love and our relationship significantly clarified this to me, myself, as I transmitted it to you. That’s what Holy of Holies does. So I know this and understand this better than I did 20 minutes ago. That’s what Holy of Holies is. It’s not just that I shared information, and it’s your depth of presence, and all of our years and all of our trust, all of our love, that actually allowed this to emerge. That’s the space between the cherubs. That’s why we do this. What else is there to say?
Tom: It’s gorgeous.
Marc: It’s gorgeous. It’s crazy.
Tom: Bring on the unread Kook. Let’s do this. I may not be able to wait three months. How I might be tugging on Suzanne’s coat?
Marc: It’s gorgeous, right?
Tom: Yeah, it’s beautiful.
Marc: Gorgeous. Wow! Wow!
Tom: Oh wow!
Marc: We had no idea Ronen what would happen in this Holy of Holies. And it was up to her to either [Hebrew] place her scarf on her Holy of Holies, or to not. It’s hers. And she did. There’s no bone in my body that takes that for granted. She just opened the door and she confirmed us and in this huge and gorgeous and tender and beautiful way.
Tom: I’m inspired to add just one recollection of that beautiful sit down you had with Jerry*** and there were like probably a half a dozen of us in the room, Sean and Victoria and Adele, and we’re kind of surrounding you at the table view with your wine and Jerry with his two little glasses of carrot juice, as I recall. The question was, “Is it urgent or is it not urgent?” What just came to me is that the urgency feels like this, I will run after you, ratzon.
Marc: That’s exactly right. No, that’s beautiful. That’s very brave and that’s exactly right. We should find, let’s ask. So I believe we should have that someplace.
Tom: You know, Sean has that. He sent it to me about three times. So I have it.
Marc: Let’s find it and let’s post it. And my thought is, like a crazy idea, we could even post this and that together. Let’s clarify the Dharma.
Tom: Beautiful. Beautiful.
Marc: Isn’t that gorgeous?
Tom: Gorgeous!
Marc: It’s crazy good to us. I love you beyond mad, my friend. I’m grateful.
Tom: I love you. I’m in tears.
Marc: I’m in tears too. Yeah.
Tom: I miss you.
Marc: All the way. All the way.
Tom: I run after you.
Marc: I run after you, my love. Together. No words.
***See this beautiful dialogue between Dr. Marc Gafni and Jerry Judd, the founder of Shalom Mountain.