A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis

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The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships

The Evolution of Relationships

In Response to the Meta-Crisis

By Dr. Marc Gafni

&

Barbara Marx Hubbard

Decades of research and study have led us to the conclusion, as we will briefly unpack below, that only a New Story of Value can avert unimaginable suffering or worse and change the vector of history towards ever-deepening expressions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As perceptive historians point out, history changes when a compelling New Story [hi-story] emerges that changes the vector of cultural evolution.

Indeed, it is only a New Story that has the capacity to change the course of history. Technology matters. But the story we tell about technology matters as well. Exponential technology matters. But the story we tell about exponential technology matters exponentially more.

Without such a new, shared, evolving Story of Value, our capacity to escape unbearable suffering and, based on hardheaded analysis, even extinction seems, from a human perspective, unlikely. The results of not being able to articulate a New Story of Value are excruciating, both in the level of suffering for billions of human beings, as well as the entire life system—and, more than even all that, for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.

All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.

All of the present depends on us to live.

All of the future depends on us to be born. 

This essay is also part of a whole volume, The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships: The Evolution of Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis. The purpose of that volume and its companion volume The Future of Relationships: On the Evolution of Love is to provide a first articulation of this New Story of Value in the domain of relationship, which, as we will see below, is the core structure of Reality itself.

The Ontology of Story: Story Is the Structure of the Real

Postmodernity argues that Reality is merely a story, that no story is better or worse than any other story, and that stories are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.[1]

But of course, postmodernity is not only deconstructing the ontology, or Reality, of Story, but also the ontology, or Real Nature of Value.[2]

These deconstructions of Story and Value are true but partial. It is true that there is a plentitude of stories we tell about Reality, and that Story is the underling unit that constitutes Reality. But it is not true that Story is mere fiction. There is a plentitude of stories, not because there is no Real Value or Meaning, but rather because there is a plentitude of Value and Meaning.

Story is the structure of the Real. This is what we have referred to, in other contexts, as the Ontology of Story. Story itself is the source code, not only of culture and consciousness, but of all of Reality all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.[3] It is for that reason that to evolve the Story is to evolve the source code.

Emergent from the recognition of the Ontology of Story is the recognition that we live in inescapable narrative frameworks—Stories of Value—which define the nature and quality of both our personal and collective human lives.

Stories are not merely randomly contrived conjectures. Rather, stories are attempts to gather information, interior and exterior information about the nature of Reality, and translate it into a coherent Story of Value.

Not all stories are equal. There is a hierarchy of stories. In other words, there are better and worse stories.

A better story takes deeper account of more meaning or information, exterior and interior, and weaves that meaning and information together in the most elegant, good, true, and beautiful fashion.

A better story is aligned with more and wider Fields of Value, even as it integrates more contradictions into greater wholes.

A better story weaves a narrative thread that articulates the most coherent and compelling framework that embraces, honors, and uplifts the most-possible people.

A better story must be not only an eternal story—aligned with eternal structures of value—but also an evolving story, aligned with the evolution of value—the evolution of love—the evolution of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

A better story is an eternal and evolving story.

We cannot trust stories that claim to be only eternal stories, or that claim to be ever-evolving stories with no ground in Eternity—in the Real, which is not dependent on the changing mores of time. The more deeply we investigate Cosmos, both in its exterior and interior faces, deploying the interior and exterior sciences, the more accurate—and the better, truer, and more beautiful—story we can tell.[4]

A story with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines can bring us—and indeed has brought us—to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it. To respond to this meta-crisis, we need to evolve the story, which is to evolve the source code of culture itself.

What Is the Meta-Crisis?

A simple image:

Let’s turn to a cultural artifact, the Death Star in that cinematic classic of the late twentieth, early twenty-first, century—Star Wars.

The Death Star is a battleship armed so intensely that it poses an existential risk—that means that it has the destructive capacity not just to attack and damage but to destroy a planet. (more…)

A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis2023-12-26T09:17:44-08:00

Marc Gafni’s Eulogy to Barbara Marx Hubbard

Marc Gafni’s Eulogy to Barbara Marx Hubbard2023-06-22T08:06:04-07:00

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

Honoring Barbara Marx Hubbard: Join Us for Our First Memorial Service

Join Us In Celebrating the Life, Work and Legacy of Our Beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard

Tomorrow, April 13th at 9am PT / Noon ET on Zoom

Dear Beloved Friends,

This is an event of a life time. Our Beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard has passed to the next world. In the days immediately after a great person’s passing, there is an opening… a moment of irreplaceable, unique revelation…

You are invited and you are needed!

Tomorrow at 9:00am PT we are going to, with Barbara’s ecstatic permission, lift her consciousness as a prayer to the sky, into the highest heavens and beyond.

In our 131st week of the Evolutionary One World Church we are holding a celebration memorial service for our Beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard.

Barbara’s has promised to join us. Her consciousness is alive and will be present with us.

Experience the radical joy that is One World Church of Evolutionary Love.

Learn what it means to know your clarified “hearts desire” as the divine desire that drives all of reality.

Let’s come together for this momentous celebration honoring Barbara and telling the hidden outrageous love story of her life.

Let’s Love it all open to God!

If you are a Church member, simply use the same link we use every week to join church. If you are not a church member, register for free to get the link here.

We also invite you to read Marc’s prayer for Barbara and to leave your own prayers and a word or two about how Barbara impacted you in the comments on Barbara’s Facebook page and please share it with your friends!

Barbara loved parties, and we want to make this the greatest one ever… we hope to see you there!

With Love,
Marc, Lisa and Kerstin and the CIW Team

Join Us

Saturday, April 13th 2019

9 am PT – Noon ET – 6 pm CET

>>> Enjoy this Essay on Evolutionary Love that was the first piece that Barbara read before she actually met Marc <<<

Dr. Marc’s Earlier Letter

Dearest Beloved Friends,

It is with great personal sadness that I share with you that our beloved Barbara has passed into the next world.

Barbara you were a blazing light in this world. The Wild Stallions that moved you were yoked to the evolutionary impulse itself.

Evolution was awake as you in Person. Reality delighted in having a Barbara experience.

You felt the ecstatic urgency of the evolutionary impulse moving through you all the time.

You took the pain of depression and turned it into the joy of evolutionary activism.

(more…)

Honoring Barbara Marx Hubbard: Join Us for Our First Memorial Service2023-06-17T14:32:11-07:00

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.

 

Participate in One Mountain, Many Paths

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

Video: A Tale of Two Futures

Video: A Tale of Two Futures2023-06-22T07:52:36-07:00

Evolutionary Meditation with Barbara Marx Hubbard

A Guided Meditation with Barbara Marx Hubbard

Follow along with this evolutionary meditation below:

Read Along with Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Evolutionary Meditation

Let’s take a meditative moment now. You can do this anytime, every day. Just place your attention at the origin of creation, in the mind of the divine, in the infinite, and just breathe up the core of that spiral of evolution. Universe, up through all the billions of galaxies. The planet Earth. The coming forth of life on earth, animal life of human life.

Now place that core of the spiral in your lowest Chakra, and let it be the source of security, the process of evolution within you. Now breathe the core of the spiral up through your generative organs. And realize, invite the core of the spiral to shift those cells within you from degeneration toward regeneration. Since you are a future human with evermore to express.

Now, bring that core of the spiral up into your solar plexus. Feel the yearning to empower, to give forth your power in all its fullest, holding that core of the spiral within it, and then let it go out and express the full radiance of your being.

Now let’s bring the core of the spiral up into your heart and feel within yourself the love of the process of creation itself, of the divine intention, of the impulse of evolution in your heart. And breathing it in for a moment, feel a person that you deeply love, and allow that impulse to go into the heart of that person. And then ask that person to let that impulse go into the people they love. And then, allow them to express that impulse to the people they love.

And allow the impulsive of love to spread further and further into the world. Each of us is only six degrees of separation from anyone in the world. And in this meditation let’s allow the impulse of creation to reach through our hearts, to those we love, to those they love, to all love one another.

And infuse the noosphere, the thinking layer of earth, with that energy that will bring our entire planetary consciousness alive, awake and aware of the emerging humanity that we are becoming.

And then, now just come back to center. Feeling yourself to be a member of a planetary communion, of pioneering souls everywhere on earth, arising, awakening, and feeling their connectivity throughout the planet. For this is actually the truth. It is happening now. Thank you.

This is an excerpt from the online course “Becoming a Future Human.”

Becoming a Future Human, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Marc Gafni, Daniel SchmachtenbergerWho do we need to become in order for humanity to make it though its current dangerous technological adolescence and to create a world that is truly commensurate with our full human, scientific, social, spiritual, and technological capabilities? If you are here to embody your unique gift fully for the benefit of all life and play your role as a steward of the cosmos and the birth of a new humanity, then welcome! This course is for everyone that knows humanity is at the brink of an epochal shift, that believes we can create the world the great sages knew was possible, and that wants to be a part of co-creating that world together.

>>> Learn more about the course here <<<

Evolutionary Meditation with Barbara Marx Hubbard2023-09-22T07:23:58-07:00

Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni in Video Dialogue: Becoming the New Human by Joining Genius as Unique Selves

Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni in Dialogue during her Evolutionary Testament Webinar

We are excited to share with you the recording of this exciting webinar from Barbara Marx Hubbard’s online course about her newest book The Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation: The Promise Will Be Kept. CIW-Founder Marc Gafni was invited as a guest speaker.

In this webinar, you will learn:

  • Why God is not only the infinity of power but also the infinity of intimacy
  • How YOU are God’s or evolution’s unique intimacy
  • Why God (or reality or the universe) needs YOUR service
  • How evolution creates newness through joining separate parts into a larger whole
  • Why your birthday is the day when God decided that She couldn’t do without you
  • How to Become the New Human by joining genius as Unique Selves
  • What happens in the “tomb of metamorphosis”
  • How Sacred Text Study can be recovered as an essential part of our Evolutionary Spirituality Practices

Within a lively Question and Answer section, Barbara and Marc express their desire to work together more deeply for the sake of the Planetary Awakening and the Unique Self Symphony coming alive.

Watch and listen to the webinar here:

The Three Levels of Sacred Text Study

  1. Hach’na’ah = Submission: A total surrender to the text, where we read the text as if it was written directly by God to us. This is the way fundamentalists read sacred text as the only valid way. In Evolutionary Spirituality we recover Stage 1 as an important but not exclusive practice.
  2. Havdalah = Separation: Here we take a step back and separate from the text to analyze it. We look at the historic context. We compare it to other pieces. We ask ourselves: “What might that mean?” This level is the scientific way of reading the text.
  3. Hamtaka = Sweetness: This level transcends and includes the first two. The reader penetrates the text while simultaneously fully receiving the text. In the non-dual merger between the reader and text, new revelation is born. This is the way of the evolutionary mystic.

Read more about Sacred Text Study here.

Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni in Video Dialogue: Becoming the New Human by Joining Genius as Unique Selves2023-06-19T10:10:32-07:00

Conscious Evolution Meets Integral Unique Self & the Evolution of Love

When Barbara Marx Hubbard, the Grande Dame of Conscious Evolution, and Marc Gafni met, it was truly a meeting of hearts, minds, souls, and Evolutionary Unique Selves.

Since then Barbara has joined the executive board of the center and Marc, Barbara, and Daniel Schmachtenberger have joined forces to work on a ground breaking new book The Conscious Universe: Participating in the Evolution of Love. You can track their collaboration in our new CIW Portal on the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.

“The next stage in evolution is ‘Unique Selves’ joining Genius.”

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Enjoy the dialogue here:

Conscious Evolution Meets Integral Unique Self & the Evolution of Love2023-09-12T09:57:47-07:00
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