Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

The Great Battle for Humanity Has Begun: Who We Must Become

Oh my God, it is so, so good to be here, everyone. It is so, so good to be here.

I want to try and do just a general framing of where we are, and two, a framing of who we are, and then a framing of what we’re doing.

Where are we?

We’re in a time between worlds—and I want to emphasize the word time—something that I called many years ago a time between stories and that Zak Stein called a time between worlds.

There’s a quality of time that we’re in.

We Live in a World of Outrageous Beauty

On one level, it’s a time of outrageous beauty; the capacity to describe mitosis and meiosis, the capacity to—as we did in the Mystery School—get a felt sense of the neuronal structure of the brain and it’s unimaginable Eros, it’s non-local elegance, it’s construction of information, the coding of information within desire itself, which is the very structure of reality itself.

Reality is information encoded in desire.

We’re not going to talk about that right now.We talked about that at the Mystery School – The Crossing and we saw dimensions of it in Hannelore’s beautiful presentation on neuronal networks.

We live in a world of outrageous beauty.We recognize the unimaginable beauty in a face, in the irreducible dignity of every face.Freud’s nephew understood faces better than Freud understood interiors. He painted faces, the dazzling beauty and irreducible dignity of every unique face and of every unique configuration of beauty that is a human being.

We reclaimed the field of the animal that Descartes had split off and realized both our utter distinction from the animal world, and yet our co-participation in the field; and the entire animal world begins to come online and we begin to restitute the horror that we’ve inflicted on the animal world and to begin to live together, and on the world of plants. The world of science has opened portals to beauty beyond imagination.

Whether it’s in the realm of human rights and depth psychology or complexity sciences or molecular biology or enzymology or understanding strings of amino acids, neuropeptides—all of that opens up realms of unimaginable beauty.Outrageous beauty.

Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Support the work by becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to 7-day self-study course on CosmoErotic Humanism with Marc Gafni.

We’re a Heartbeat Away from Extinction

The myth of linear progress is absurd.Simply not true. At some point, I want to give a couple of full talks on the myth of progress. We need to explode that.There is a dimension of progress, which is real, but the kind of naive, intentionally naive kind of Steven Pinker description of Modernity and the distorted descriptions that appear in my dear friend, John Mackey’s book, Conscious Capitalism, or The Rational Optimist [Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves]. There’s an entire series of books in that kind of literature that talks about how it’s all gotten better.That’s simply not true in multiple vectors. There are vectors of very dramatic, very important evolutionary progress. That progress has also led to a meta-crisis where we have the capacity to destroy the whole thing. That calls that progress in question, but even on just one limited factor:

If we shatter the boundaries of our own narcissism and just realize the following: Let’s say there were half a billion people in the world a couple hundred years ago. There’s now about 8.5 billion in the world, something like that. That’s a lot more people now. If the percentage of people living in dire poverty, the percentage of people suffering is the same, then the amount of people suffering has gone up exponentially.

Let’s say you had X amount of X percent of people suffering in 1800 when you had, let’s say half a billion people total population.So, you had let’s say a hundred million, 200 million suffering. Those were crazy amounts. But in a world of eight and a half billion people, if you have a much lesser percent of people suffering—which you do—you still have many, many more numbers of people suffering. That means that you have objectively more suffering in the world.

That’s just one very, very small vector. There are actually about 12 or 13 vectors. My friend Daniel and I have discussed this many, many years ago, and there has some really good work been done on it in consilience papers. It’s very, very important to realize that we live in a world of outrageous pain and we live in a world of outrageous beauty. We live in both.

At this moment, we can’t turn away from either the outrageous beauty or the outrageous pain.

We can’t turn away from the outrageous invitation, from the world that is unimaginably beautiful, unimaginably good, and unimaginably true, that’s waiting to be born;

* A world in which everyone has a seat at the table.

* A world of unimaginable joy, of unimaginable Eros, of unimaginable kindness, of unimaginable depth.

* An unimaginable world that literally could be born.

We can feel it in ourselves and we can envision it.And we’re a heartbeat away from extinction. We’re a heartbeat away from either the death of humanity or a kind of worldwide immersive environment, a totalitarian form of control, which causes the death of our humanity in order to control the populations and technologies that if they go rogue could cause the death of humanity.

Nick Bostrom says, we need to surveil everyone in humanity because of the chances of a rogue technological weapon not controlled by state actors being deployed. Having nuclear or other bioweapon payloads is so significant that without full surveillance, there’s no possibility of creating safety in the world. He wrote that in his 2019 essay, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, in other words, this is about the move towards the death of our humanity to prevent the death of humanity.

Existential risk of two kinds is a heartbeat away on multiple vectors. And what we’ve understood together here at the Center, much like Plethon explains to Cosimo de’Medici and Leonardo Da Vinci as they seeded the Renaissance, and Cosimo de’Medici calls Marcello Ficino, who’s then at that time translating Plato and he says, stop translating Plato.Plethon just came from Constantinople, and he’s got this new box of books, that have the potential for a new story. Translate those.

And Ficino together with Medici founds the Florentine Platonic Academy with Pico della Mirandola and Da Vinci and a host of others, but not many. It’s a relatively small group. And they come together and they formed this mystery school that creates Modernity with all of its dignities, with all of its progresses. And yet, as we just noted, with the seeds of collapse. For the first time in human history we’re living the enactment of a global civilization, when we haven’t solved all the fundamental issues that caused every single prior civilization to fail.

But now it’s a global civilization and it has exponential technology accessible to rogue non-state actors diffuse around the world without a capacity to even communicate with each other. It’s a global civilization without a standard, an inherent standard of value to call us to right action.

We live in unbearable intimacy with each other. And yet there’s a global intimacy disorder because we don’t have the capacity for shared action.

* We don’t have the capacity for global coordination because there’s no global coherence.

* There’s no global coherence because there’s no global resonance between each other.

* And there’s no resonance because there’s no shared value that animates us, that calls us, that lives in us, as us, and through us, and is recognized as such, which allows us to meet each other and not be alienated from each oth…

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

The Unbearable Pain of Turning Away

Happy Easter everyone.

This is the 5th week that we have been talking since the Iran War started.

So, I want to hold Iran.

Of course, when we find a moment unbearable, it is because we found our way uniquely into that moment while other moments remained closed to us.

In other words, there are many moments of devastation. But somehow, for example, we managed to kind of miss what is going on. We missed Sudan. 90,000 people. We missed Sudan.

We caught the Ukraine together.

Have we talked about the Ukraine every week for the last 4 years? We have not. How do we do that? And I want to hold this with you: It is one of the unimaginably painful dimensions of being a human being that we have no choice but to split our attention.

How do we even have a right to turn our attention away from the Ukraine? Then, you know, we should be devastated by how Hamas has built this network of tunnels in Gaza, placed all of its command centers outside the tunnels—in schools—and not allowed one single child into a tunnel. And we should be devastated by the fact that Israel is confronted with this unimaginable Sophie’s Choice, which was the same Sophie’s Choice the Allies were confronted with at the end of World War II: Do they bomb German cities in order to take Hitler down, knowing that hundreds of thousands would be killed? I mean, in Gaza, there have been 50,000 to 60,000 people killed, and in the European cities there were hundreds of thousands of German women and children killed in order to take Hitler down. An impossible, horrific, horrific choice.

By the way, if I were to hold Israel accountable for something, I would say it is the utter idiocy of its far-right ministers, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who have the horrific obscenity of engaging in any sort of triumphalism.

Even if one were to argue—and this is a strategic, very complex question I am not going to get into here, though I think there is a very compelling argument for it, as Douglas Murray and Sam Harris have argued very compellingly, and as Chaviv Rettig Gur has argued very compellingly—even if one were to suggest that Israel had no other choice, there is no Israeli leader or politician who should ever get up and talk about what is happening without being very clear that we are devastated. Our hearts are ripped open by the death of any and every innocent Palestinian child.

If the Allies could have acknowledged that, even as they needed to bomb during World War II, the death of any innocent women and children and men breaks our hearts.

No one’s blood is redder than anyone else’s blood.

There is a very, very beautiful text in Tractate Sanhedrin in the Talmud, 3rd to 5th century, which talks about the laws of love. The laws of love are learned from the delicacy and dignity with which we take out the person who has committed a capital crime and is going to be put to death, but how we hold them with dignity on those last steps that they are taking towards their death. From there, we derive the laws of radical love, of Outrageous Love.

* We cannot turn our eyes away from Gaza.

* We cannot turn our eyes away from Sudan.

* We cannot turn our eyes away from Congo.

* We cannot turn our eyes away from any suffering.

* We certainly cannot turn our eyes away from Iran.

* We cannot turn our eyes away from—It is a different kind of issue—but from the more than a million people in the United States who need medical attention but do not have insurance and therefore simply cannot get medical attention for devastating illness.

How do we turn our eyes away from suffering in a world that we are aware of suffering? We have talked about that in the last four weeks, and the answer is, we have to do two things.

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God Is Madly in Love with Every Nation and Every Individual Being

One is we have to recognize our mortality and the nature of being mortal.

The nature of being mortal is I cannot place my attention on everyone.

God is polyamorous. Just saying, between us, God is polyamorous. That is just true. God is madly in love, and uniquely so, with every individual nation and religion and system, whether indigenous or Asian or Aboriginal or European or African, or American South or North, et cetera. God, the Infinite Intimate is madly in love. And as the galactic civilization emerges, we are going to know that the Infinite Intimate is madly in love with every expression and quality of life in the Cosmos.

God is so polyamorous that God is not just doing it in kind of deep erotic merger and union and shared exchange, gnosis and passionate tremoring and quivering feeling, with every nation or religion or planetary society, or every galactic expression.

God is so eroticized that God is madly in love with every individual, every single individual, man, woman, and child. God has an individuated, unique textured relationship in which there are intimate details and outrageous love notes and shared languages and unfolding arcs in the narrative of the romance. That is what is happening.

God is radically polyamorous.

We cannot be. We certainly cannot be. Our topic now is not polyamory and monogamy. But I would say the minimal statement—whatever your position is on that great issue, we certainly cannot be as polyamorous as God.

We need a kind of monogamy.

We need a kind of exclusivity to our relationships. Even if we would hold, let’s say, like Professor Jorge Ferrer, who just wrote a book kind of beyond monogamy and polyamory and kind of tried to look for a third possibility. Again, that’s not our conversation. Nonetheless, however you tell that story, there is still a limit.

There is some fundamental limit.

The same thing is true with suffering. In other words, God the Infinite Intimate can hold everyone’s joy and can be in mad rejoice and mad dance and mad delight. And at the same time, with every irreducible Unique Self there is an irreducibly unique quality to every irreducibly unique expression of humanity, to every human being, that evokes a unique love story with the Divine.

Love is—Eros is—the placing of attention. That is what it means.

That means that when you suffer, it is a violation of Eros. Suffering is a violation of intimacy.I feel your pain. This is exactly the existential, painful, urgent, ecstatic, heart-rending, heart-ripping, heart-opening moment of becoming Homo amor.

How do I continue to place my attention?

Why are we not playing the Sudan every week?

Why are we not playing Ukraine every week? I still read and track the Ukraine closely, but why do we not talk about it every week?

Why do we talk about anything else?

What would it mean if in 9 weeks we were not talking about Iran every week? What happened to those 50,000 people that were killed on January 7th, 8th, and 9th, and the people that are killed continuously this past week, and the children that are being hung?

How do we turn away?

There is an enormous pain in turning away.

It is deep. I mean, it is really deep. There is an enormous pain in turning away.

It is the pain of turning away, and there is a name for this pain in the lineage. It is called in the lineage tsar ha-Shekhina, and it is the pain of the Shekhina in exile. The Shekhina, She, the radical Field of Intimacy, which is ‘feel me feeling thee.’

If I have to turn away from you, the rupture destroys me. That pain is so intense that what I do is—I close my heart. I just cannot bear it. I close my heart. I close my heart.

And I look for ways of escaping that pain. There are quite a few escapist movements that take place in New Age literature about, ‘I’m in the Field.’ ‘I’m in the Field. I have left separate se…

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

How We Answer the Three Great Questions Is Vital in This Time In Between

We have a very, very important conversation now, and it’s just such a pivoting moment in the world that you almost don’t know what to say. I want to go into a very big conversation this week in a new way and try and break some enormously important, vital piece of new ground—and to say it’s exciting would be a major understatement.

So let me just say, just even before we before we step in.

Why do we do One Mountain?Why does One Mountain exist?

There’s a piece that’s called “Love or Die” which is this essay we wrote to kind of explain why we do One Mountain. In “Love or Die”, essentially what we say is that we’re at this moment of meta-crisis and meta-opportunity that we’re poised between utopia and dystopia.

And at this moment in which we’re poised between utopia and dystopia, in what we’ve called a time between stories or a time between worlds. That phrase has kind of spread through many, many spaces. This characterization: we’re at a time in between, at a time between worlds, at a time between stories.

In this time in between, everything depends on our capacity to generate a new source code from which we grow reality. I mean, a new source code, if you will, from which we live. Because we all live from within a story. We all live from within an implicit set of assumptions about the nature of Reality.

And we all live from within very clear, although often unconscious, answers to what we call the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. And the questions are:

Where? Where am I?Who? Who am I?What? What ought I do?

Those are the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. And notice that we don’t have ‘why’. Why is a metaphysical theological question.

The ‘why’ needs to be put aside because that’s a claim that we can’t validate. We can validate who am I, where am I, and what ought I do, and the ‘why’ emerges from that. We don’t want to get lost in the ‘why’.

It’s: where am I, who am I, what ought I do?

Now, everything that we do, all of capitalism on the one hand, all of communism which still reigns in China—no longer in Russia—but

* the whole world of communism that yielded so much of reality is based on three distinct answers to these questions.

* And the world of capitalism, the Western world, which has adopted capitalism, and the world of democracy is based on three other answers to these questions.

* Religion in general, but every specific religion answers these questions differently.

There are two assumptions that kind of reign in the world today.

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The Postmodern Answer to the Great Three Questions

One assumption is the answers to these questions are made up. You can’t answer these questions. They’re made up. There’s no real answer that’s significant, at least in terms of ‘what ought I do’. In terms of what ought I do—no real significance. Doesn’t really matter. Because one huge part of the world answers the first two questions as being social constructions, meaning the postmodern response that rules in the world is:

Where am I? —Nowhere.

I’m nowhere; meaning I’m in a world which is a speck of dust which is basically meaningless, as Stephen Hawking liked to say.

And Hawking was brilliant in physics and idiotic often when he stepped out of physics, as often happens, and the fact that he was good at physics means nothing about claims about the rest of the world, about the nature of interiors, or what we might call the interior sciences, or philosophy, or metaphysics. Hawking was kind of a classical British aristocrat of a certain kind. Who held certain kind of opinions about the world which were just part of general British aristocracy and a kind of reductionist materialism which had nothing to do with his physics. So Hawking says, the whole thing’s just a made-up, constructed speck of dust—meaningless. And of course, he was rebelling against the religions. But what he basically asserted was, the whole thing means nothing, and any meaning you make is made up. That’s postmodernism.

And who are you? No one.

* Where are you? —No place.

* Who are you? —You’re no one. What do you mean you’re no one? Meaning you’re a random, ultimately meaningless, therefore irrelevant being. You can never do anything that’s ultimately meaningful because nothing is ultimately meaningful. And that’s how we got to our friend Harari who we often quote—but I’ll give you a different quote this time—when he was asked at a particular TED Talk what is the purpose of the human being in the world? He says, “Nothing”. Nothing! And the second line we often quote: any meaning or value you ascribe to your life—mere delusion. It’s all made up. So, therefore, what ought you do? Well, if you live nowhere and you are no one, then:

* What ought you do? —Nothing. There’s nothing to do. It’s irrelevant. It’s meaningless. That’s the reigning assumption of one half of the world. Does everyone get that? Let’s just say it’s kind of hard to get.

We’re going to talk about where we are in the world today, like literally, in a couple of minutes, but I want to get the context.

The Islamic Fundamentalist Answer to the Great Three Questions

Then we have an alternative view in the world, and that’s the classical fundamentalist view. And the fundamentalist view that dominates the Houthi world and dominates the Hezbollah world, and dominates the Iranian world with the Shiite world—the Hamas world is a Sunni world—that dominates Hamas. It’s an entire frame of—not Islam, but of what I would call Islamic fundamentalism, extreme Islamic fundamentalism, which is very strong throughout much of the Islamic world.

It’s not the the entire Islamic world. Islam produced enormous amount of depth and beauty and gorgeousness and goodness, obviously. But Islamic fundamentalism has taken a huge position at the very center of the Islamic world, and it is extremely strong and has an enormous amount of sympathy throughout much of the Islamic world, although not even close to all of it. I would say the great majority of Islam is not there.

But what’s hijacked is this brand of Islamic terror fundamentalism, which has established itself as a death cult. But from what’s important to us in this moment is something very, very simple, which is: Its belief is,

Where am I? —I’m in a world in which God created for Islam,

and for a particular brand, says Khomeini, of Shiite Islam, by the way. And if you don’t fulfill that brand of Islam, you are evil, you are an infidel, and you deserve to be killed. That’s simply the fact.

If you haven’t read the works of Khomeini and his circle—which I have—you should; or the works that kind of dominate Hezbollah. If you haven’t, you should. I have. You should. Or the founding charter and the documents of Hamas. If you haven’t, you should.

And although they’re not only Quranic, they’re sources of the Quran, and then they mix in Algerian nationalism and kind of certain kinds of neo-Marxism, and there’s a whole series of other influences, but at the very core it’s:

* Where are you? —You’re in a world in which God chose us to live in a particular way. And if you don’t, you’re not part of us, and if you don’t live in this way, you can be brutally raped, maimed, and murdered, even though that would seem to be horrific by any other standard. So therefore:

* Who am I? —I’m either Dar al-Harb, I’m either of the sword and those infidels should be killed by the sword, or I’m Dar al-Islam, I’m of pure Islam.

* What ought I do? —I ought to destroy Israel. I ought to destroy America. I ought to destroy Belgium. I ought to destroy the Nethe…

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Kathy Brownback.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Disorientation and the Unbearable Incapacity to Do Sensemaking

The essay “Love or Die” is important if you’re new—and it really gives you the context for One Mountain.

We call it “Love or Die.” It’s a moment in which we’re either going to love this moment open and articulate a new shared story of value in response to the metacrisis—or not.

I was talking yesterday to my dear friend, who’s also a profound initiate in the Solomon lineage, the co-president of the center, Zak Stein. We’ve been studying together since 2009.

We were talking about the unbearable incapacity to do sense making today.

And particularly as we’re looking at the events in the world, the inability to make sense.

But making sense is not just understanding the geopolitical relationship between what’s happening in Venezuela and what happened in or is happening in Iran and how that relates to the Sudan and how that relates to China and China’s Belt and Road Initiative and how it relates to Taiwan and why all of that matters. It’s not a chessboard of realpolitik and power. It is at core a chessboard of Value.

There is a desperate need for a realization that we live on this planet in unbearably intimate proximity with the capacity of exponential weapons, as I’ve been saying for 15 years, which are available to rogue parties and rogue states, which are now being weaponized in drone form. And now there’s cheap drones.

That’s where it’s going. We’ve got exponential technologies no longer owned by responsible states.

Responsible states themselves are hijacked by multiple interests governed by win-lose metrics within the state. You have, for example, social media platforms not owned by the government, that are owned by about 15 people who control most of the planet.

A kind of new oligarchy. It’s not who you want to marry your daughter. The people right at the apex of the pyramid for the most part are apex predators. Because the system of win-lose metrics—the way it’s constructed—is that in order to climb to the top of the system, you almost have to be an apex predator.

So we have these strange social media systems owned by apex predators—controlling structures within ostensibly responsible states. There’s an enormous confusion in the space.

There’s an enormous disorientation in the space, but it’s far from hopeless. It’s not even close to hopeless.

Underneath the confusion, underneath the disorientation, underneath our inability to get our bearings easily, underneath all of that is Value.

Underneath all of that is a Field of Value.Underneath all the distortions of Value are root values.Underneath all of the distortions of Value are root clarified desires:

for Wholeness,for Goodness,for Love,for Truth, andfor Beauty.

But we have to not just declare them. It’s not going to help to declare them.

We can’t just critique and show why everybody’s wrong, although we need to critique and deconstruct the false presentations for sure.

We can’t just deconstruct. We have to reconstruct.

Now, Postmodernity did a very good job of deconstructing the narratives of value, which Postmodernity claimed were really narratives of power underneath.

Postmodernity was half right. There were narratives of power that were hijacking value in order to create false narratives of power for base motivation. Base meaning knavery. Base meaning wicked. Base meaning on the side of evil, in the battle of good against evil. Postmodernity was absolutely right about that. Foucault was right about that.

But underneath all of that is Value. Underneath all of that is Goodness.

And as we step into this moment, this unbearable moment—it’s not that this is the first unbearable moment. It’s not.

It’s that it’s an unbearable moment that has the capacity to destroy the world.

It’s that it’s an unbearable moment that is witnessed directly, moment by moment, second by second, with live images.

It’s an unbearable moment in that it represents all the unbearable moments.

So when we look at Iran, we look at Ukraine, and we look at Sudan, and we look at the Congo. We make this commitment not to turn away. And I want to talk about that commitment today.

I’ve been talking about it the last two weeks because we need to talk about it. But first, what I want to do is spend two minutes witnessing.

Then I want to try and take 10 steps with you to try to understand:

* How do we live in this?

* How do we thrive in this?

* How do we thrive in our interior?

* How do we hold the unbearable nature of it all, while at the very self-same moment, we are holding the unbearable joy of it all?

* How do we hold it together?

* How do we hold the unbearable joy of simply being alive together in this moment?

* How do we hold the unbearable joy and dignity of purpose, of responsibility, of a capacity to respond, of realizing that we have a verse to contribute that can change the essential plotline of reality at this moment in history.

So to contribute a verse is what we need to do at this moment. And that verse needs to be a new Story of Value. And why a new Story of Value actually can change—I want to talk about all that.

But I want to talk mostly about how I, how we, how you and I this week go through our week as an example, as a model for what it means to become Homo amor, what it means to relate to this kind of moment.

Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Support the work by becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to 7-day self-study course on CosmoErotic Humanism with Marc Gafni.

Witnessing I: the World is Full of Outrageous Pain

I want to spend a minute just on witnessing.

Transcript:

In 2014, a wave of acid attacks terrorized women across Iran. Women were targeted for not covering their faces. Marzieh Ebrahimi was only 25 years old when acid was thrown into her face for violating the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women.

When they ask why you are against the Islamic Republic of Iran, show them this picture.

Okay, so I want to juxtapose that.

Now stay with me. I’m going to show one more video.

So you’ve got that. We just had a moment of participating in the pain. We call this in the lineage of Solomon, participating in the pain of God in exile, of the Goddess in exile, of She in exile, participating in the pain of Value in exile, participating in the pain of Goodness in exile.

* This is Iran.

* This is an innocent family in Germany killed by an Allies’ bomb, which the force of necessity demands because Hitler has to be defeated, but a beautiful family in Germany is blown to smithereens by the Allies’ bombs.

* This is for that family in Germany, or that family in Gaza, in a precise similar circumstance to that family in Germany, or at least a roughly parallel circumstance.

* This is for that family in Ukraine.

* This is for that Russian soldier who’s a good boy, who somehow got conscripted into the army and doesn’t know what he’s doing in Ukraine. How did he even get there?

* This is for Sudan—90,000 people slaughtered in Sudan by Islamic fundamentalist butchery. Not Islamic butchery—Islamic fundamentalist butchery.

* This is to hold all of that.

This has happened forever in the world, but for the first time, now we see it. Now we know it. Now it’s not local. Now we’re witnesses.

We know more. We see more. We understand more.

We understand more, not intellectually. We understand in the feeling tone of our body. There’s no place to turn away.

The nature of the media structure of the immersive environment is that a generation ago only God would gaze on—would physically see—the amount of suffering that the average human being, if we don’t turn away, has available to see today.

The level of witness is unimaginable, which means that to turn away from witness is the death of our humanity. So how do I not turn away from witness?

How do I stay human, but also st…

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Jacqueline Clark.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Responding to the Intense Suffering of this Moment

Welcome to One Mountain. None of us know how long we have to live. I want to talk about that today and I want to talk about how we respond to this kind of moment.

When I say how we respond to Iran, it’s also how we respond to Sudan and it’s how we respond to Israel. It’s also how we respond to the tragedy of October 7th and Hamas, the ensuing tragedy and the necessity of response in Gaza, the tragedy of Gaza. It’s how we respond to the Ukraine, how we respond to the Congo.

So we’ve stopped for a couple of weeks and said OK, we we’re going to just talk about what we’re doing here, how we respond to this moment and how we respond to to this kind of moment.

What do we do? What do we do?

How do we respond as Homo Amor? How do we respond as the new human and the new humanity?

I want to talk about a kind of pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic response to Iran. When I say a response to Iran, I mean a response to Ukraine. I mean a response to suffering, to the intense suffering that we know about. The intense suffering that is literally, in a way that it’s never been before in world history, before our eyes.

The Dialectic Between Steadiness and Trembling

I confess that—and any real teaching is confession—I confess that I’ve been shaking more than usual the last couple of weeks, and I’m fairly steady, even when I’m trembling. But I’ve been leading in the dialectic of steadiness and trembling, the dialectic of steadiness and trembling that we experience in life, the dialectic between steadiness and trembling that we feel in our lives.

So I’ve been, in the last couple of weeks, leaning over towards trembling and I’m steady. I’m every day doing Holy of Holies, writing and working on trying to balance the think tank’s budget so it goes into the future—which has not been simple and has not been accomplished yet.

I’m dealing with is my son going to war or not going to war. My mother is quite sick and there are about seven other things that I could tell, that I won’t tell you, which are kind of intense life demands.

And then at the very, very same instant, almost more pressing to me, there’s probably, I would say, eight, nine, 10 people in our inner circle who are also in an intense kind of life crisis. So we’re kind of together.

About 10 of us are together in these really intense moments and all of that is coming together with this very, very, very painful moment in which the suffering of Iran represents all of the suffering.

There’s something that I once heard, it’s a terrible statement. I once heard this for myself, like a whole bunch of years ago and I remember the statement. I think I originally saw it in a Hasidic text. I don’t know the original source of the text and I’m slightly changing it.

But my erstwhile friend—I didn’t know him well, we knew each other just a little bit was this beautiful, beautiful man, Shlomo Carlebach. He was a wondrous mystic singer, sage and he used to talk about it in his way. The statement is, Every time I cry, I cry for all the times I never cried before.

Every time I cry, I cry for all the times I never cried before. That’s a sense of post-tragic crying.

I’m actually, I’m having a hard time even now, in this second, to control crying. Every time I cry, I cry for, for all the times, right, I never cried before.

My God, the intensity of suffering. The intensity of suffering. How do we respond?

What’s the pre-tragic relationship to the suffering that we confront? What’s the tragic relationship and what’s the post-tragic relationship?

I’m going to try and walk through like 15 steps now, something, somewhere, somehow.

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

Welcome everyone. We’re in One Mountain, Many Paths, and we’re here to tell a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. That’s what we’re doing here together. So if you’re new, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome.

There’s an essay called “Love or Die” that gives the context to what we’re doing and I’d like everyone to read this.

I remember reading an essay by Joseph Soloveichik, which I haven’t looked at in many years.

He wrote this essay called Ish HaHalakha, Halakhic Man. It was an attempt to paint a picture of a new Homo religiosus, a new human.

Now Joseph Soloveitchik was painting a picture of a new human who emerged particularly from the Solomon lineage. He was in a particularistic, Solomonic, Hebraic legibility and he was speaking within his tradition quite beautifully.

I was, and still I am, madly in love with him. I had a deep crush. It was one of my early crushes when I was like, I don’t know, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. I had an intense crush on Rabbi Soloveitchik, a kind of infatuated crush that just kind of consumed me. I read everything that he wrote.

I wound up fulfilling the crush by publishing an annotated bibliography of his work in an academic journal, at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and it’s called Daat. I read everything he’d ever written and everything that was written about him, all the scholarship kind of until the moment he died and at that point it shifted.

But I was also furious with him. I was also kind of unbearably furious with him when he wrote this book about this kind of new Hebraic human.

In some sense, what we’re doing together here in One Mountain Many Paths is moving beyond the Hebraic context.

We’re stepping into a universal context of

* one Eros

* one human

* one heart

* one mind

* one Love

* one power

and one Story that holds the many stories, e pluribus unum.

The many and the One are intrinsically related. There’s the One and the many and there’s no separation between them.

The One becomes the many, which then increases by one, which then increases the One—the One and the many.

We’re also trying to tell the story of the new human, but it’s not a new human within the unique Hebraic context, but it’s the new human.

People Turn Away

But early on in my teens, when I was madly in love with Rabbi Soloveitchik in that early crush, I had this devastating moment. I opened up this book and I read it not in English, I read it in Hebrew. It’s my favorite language to read, I prefer Hebrew and Aramaic.

I saw that the publication date of the essay was 1944. I was devastated and I had to turn away from him for a period of time in a kind of fury because 1944 is the moment in which 13, 14,000 people were being gassed every day in Auschwitz in the nation of Germany.

Germany, that had produced Schiller and Beethoven and Bach and had more museums and more orchestras per capita than any other country in Europe! The Jewish population of Germany was enmeshed in part of the very fabric of society itself and what happened, happened.

I’m like, why is Joseph Soloveitchik in 1944, when we knew what was happening in Germany, why is he writing this essay, Halakhic Man?

What is he doing? He should be, I don’t know where he should be, but he should be engaged day and night. He should not have one second to spare. He should be fully engaged with all of his power in any activism that can be done at that moment.

And I still believe that might be true, I’m not sure—meaning I’m not sure about him particularly—and clearly he did everything he could and couldn’t find what else to do.

It’s a painful, insane moment.

There’s a book by Arthur Morse called, While Six Million Died.

There’s a book by Ben Hecht, one of the most famous Hollywood playwrights in the Lew Wasserman era that formed Hollywood. He wrote a book called Perfidy, on the turning away that happened in that moment.

There’s a book by David Wyman, …

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Ely Marciano.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Our Intention and Commitment as a Think Tank

Our primary commitment at the center, our primary commitment as a band of Outrageous Lovers, our primary commitment as a think tank is addressing the meta-crisis through the telling of a new Story of Value, through the articulation of a new Story of Value. It’s not quite the telling, but to actually create a da Vinci moment like we had in the Renaissance. We are recreating a Florentine Platonic Academy, a mystery school. And mystery schools have always informed the very, very center of culture.

And in this mystery school, we address the fundamental issues that are at the very, very center of what we need to understand, to be, and to know as human beings, as global human beings, as global human beings on the border of being galactic human beings. What we need to know in order to, at this precipice, at this moment of existential risk, these twin existential risks that we’ve been talking about for the last 15 years, the risk to the very existence of humanity, or to the very existence of our humanity, which are all playing out, sadly, as we thought they might. And yet the world is filled with unimaginable goodness and beauty at the same time, and billions of acts of Outrageous Love.

And we’re understanding that the way to respond to that existential risk, the way to respond to that meta-crisis, is to actually articulate this new dharma,

* this new Story of Value

* this new Torah

* this new set of Sutras

* this new set of Vedas

* this new set of Verses

* this new set of equations

If I can borrow language from multiple disciplines.

And I am absolutely certain about this, and I’m not absolutely certain about a lot, I hold a set of uncertainties and a set of uncertainties, and they live in relationship to each other. But about the following, I’m absolutely certain. From the human perspective, we cannot find our way through the meta-crisis without the capacity to live together in a shared Story of Value.

And that value is not owned by any one religion. It’s not owned by any one dogma. It’s not rejectable by scientism, not science, but scientific dogma. And it’s not hijackable. It’s not rejectable or hijackable. It can’t be rejected by cavalier dismissals of scientific dogma. Nor can it be hijacked by various fundamentalist hijackings of value.

Both scientism, the dogmas of science not practiced as beautiful science, but science practiced as a fundamentalist religion, which rejects the field of value. Scientism lives at the very center of culture today. And I’ve mentioned a thousand times the purveyors of this, but Yuval Noah Harari is one very good example when he says, “any meaning you ascribe to your life is mere delusion.”

The purveyors of this are violating something intrinsic to cosmos. And the hijackers of it who say, no, no, no, the field of value is within our prescribed circle. When you do things in a very particular way, and if you violate that way, you violated God and you should be killed. You’re an infidel. Neither of those are in the field of value, but there is a field of value. There is a shared field of value.

And that shared field of value includes every human being on the face of the planet and includes every animal on the face of the planet. And that doesn’t mean that humans and animals are structurally the same. It’s why generally most of us don’t date mice. We don’t date mice. Why? Because human beings and animals have different interiorities.

But we’re all part of the same field of value. And indeed, even the world of matter, the world of valences of electrons, valence participates in value. Valence participates in value.

And then there’s a fundamental validity, the same V-A-L to existence. There’s a valery, there’s a strength. There’s a valor to existence all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain, which is rooted in a shared field of value.

All the discussions about realpolitik and about national interest, Chinese interests, American interests, all these conversations ultimately will not lead to a new wholeness unless we can get underneath superficial interest and actually root interest in value. My interest is the fulfillment of value. My national interest is how does my national interest participate in the larger global field of value? And how does the global field of value of this planet participate in the galactic field of value, in the cosmological field of value?

That is the only way. There is no other way. There is no other direction.

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Why We Need Collective Authorship

We have to talk about the book First Principles and First Values every week, which we just put out. That’s the first critical book with the two co-authors I’m writing together with: Zak Stein and Ken Wilber. We’re writing under a collective authorship, David J. Temple. All of us here are actually part of David J. Temple in some larger way. Even though we may not see eye to eye in everything, there’s an essential movement of ErosValue that’s moving through all of us, and we’re generating this collective authorship, this angel called David J. Temple.

Some say that’s how Shakespeare was generated in a different ilk. It’s definitely how Shimon bar Yochai, the great author of the Zohar, was also a collective authorship.

* who authored the Vedas?

* who authored the Sutras?

* who authored the Bible?

* who authored the core Gnostic texts?

Whenever there’s a moment in history which desperately demands response, and I believe we are at the most desperate moment in human history, where human history itself hangs in the balance, poised between utopia and dystopia, we don’t need a set of books authored by one person. We need a collective authorship.

And, of course, we need to, in that collective authorship, try and articulate the deepest truths that are not owned by any particular religion. That’s the point. They’re not owned by any particular state. They’re not owned by any particular region.

They are true because they are true. They are the truth of the cosmos itself.

It’s an evolving gnosis. It’s an evolving reality, but it’s real. It’s a reality that is rooted in the very structure of reality itself, and reality itself means all the way up and all the way down.

Finding Meaning in Everything

To experience meaning, you don’t have to experience everything. You don’t need to know everything. You don’t need to have a full understanding of all philosophical systems, their weaknesses and their strengths, to be able to realize intrinsic meaning.

Molecules in a glucose gradient, in the earliest moments of reality that are reaching towards new connections, that are yearning for deeper contact, experience value. Now, they might not have a conscious sense of what Weinberg knew about muons, the Nobel Prize winner from Texas who wrote about muons, but they have a direct experience of the desire to move towards value, which is to move towards wholeness, which is to move towards ever deeper levels of intimacy, an experience of aliveness, in which I’m willing to sacrifice something of myself in order to move towards a larger intimacy and wholeness.

And I’ve been screaming from the rooftops for a couple of decades and working together with my dear, dear, dear, dear close friends, so many of them are here. And my primary interlocutor in writing David J. Temple, Zak, Zak Stein, and with Ken, we’ve been screaming this from the rooftops.

But that’s what reality is. That’s what reality is. It’s what reality is all the way up and all the way down. Now, do you get the power of that? That cuts through everything that’s happening today.

That’s wh…

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.

This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Why We Need To Talk About Iran

It’s a wild moment we’re in, isn’t it?

This week I had intended to talk about the nature of a spiritual community. What is a mystical society? It’s an enormously important topic in terms of the new Story of Value.

But we got a little superseded now, by events in Israel and Iran.

I want to say a couple of things about why I want to talk about this for a second.

So, towards the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, I made a commitment to myself that I have not kept. I made a solemn promise, which I’ve broken. And the promise was just to stop teaching. And the reason I made that promise to myself to stop teaching is because I was disappointed in some fundamental way. I was more devastated than disappointed in the inefficacy, the lack of effect, of teaching.

And I had seen people who should know better, who spoke words that were the right words in the human potential movement and the New Age movement, just lost touch with a basic sense of what George Orwell called decency.

I saw it in multiple contexts around the world. I both had direct contact with it, but also saw it in multiple other contexts. And I said, this is not the way I should be spending my time. The world is in desperate need of repair, of a fixing, of Tikkun. There’s Tikkun, fixing, repair, transformation needed. There’s desperate suffering around the world. So what am I going to do?

So, I picked one issue that actually came from someone that I knew at the time, it was the mayor of a particular American city. And we jogged together here and there, and he had spent a lot of time on it. I was familiar with the issue, but his passion for it opened my eyes to it in a way that I wasn’t quite aware of before, which is the issue of human trafficking, and labor slavery and sexual slavery around the world. I spent about a year, a year and a half on this issue, both engaged with him, this particular person, but much more time with myself and calling other people. I started a little bit naively, maybe a lot naively, and said, we’re going to solve human trafficking. I’m going to wrap my heart and mind around it and we are going to rally funding and global coordination and global organization and really handle human trafficking.

We’re taught around the world, particularly in Western countries that slavery ended. One example is the United States, but another example is England and Western Europe.

In the United States, when you learn history in school, slavery ended at a particular moment, the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln in 1863. Abraham Lincoln with the Civil War ended slavery. But of course that’s not true.

There are more slaves in the world today. There are more people in the world, obviously, than there were in 1863. There are also more slaves in the world than there ever were, both labor slaves and sexual slaves around the world that are being trafficked.

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What Trying to End Slavery Taught Me

I spent about a year reading everything I could on the subject. And I failed. And I failed for many reasons, but a few of them I want to note.

* One: I didn’t have enough power. I simply didn’t have enough power to move the levers of reality to affect a significant change.

* Two: when I spoke to various figures, all of whom shall remain nameless, who were prominent in the movement around the world, what I found was that underneath the great cause of redeeming and liberating slaves, there was an enormous egoic competition about who the liberator would be. There was an enormous competition, both for funds, and for limelight, for spotlight, and for credit. And it was just shocking.

* Three: This is the one that was most shocking to me. I realized that these people I was talking to, when we would go deeper into conversation, knew that slaves needed to be liberated, but they didn’t have a deep and real sense that value was real.

And even though they were fighting for value, for liberating slaves (they got that was important), there was this deeper sense of malaise. And it wasn’t just in the people who were fighting the battle.

For sexual slavery and labor slavery to exist, you need collusion all over the world. You need governments, customs, various nations, money laundering, politicians turning away, refusing to pass laws in particular places, etc. There are many, many players. There’s a vast system of political, economic, and social benefit that keeps the system in place. And in order to dismantle it, you would have to have a fierce stand for value itself.

You’d have to really get that this is not the way it is, this is not the nature of the world. You would have to have a vision that the world could be different, that there was a true, right, and real possibility of a different and better world.

And you would have to let go of the cynical exhaustion that plagued many of the best people who, in their heart of hearts, didn’t believe it could really change. They couldn’t quite hold the vision. I understand why, I’m not critiquing them.

For modern slavery to end it would require multiple vectors of people around the world to take a stand for value and to have their moral, political, and social will aroused by value. But the overwhelming majority of people I was talking to simply didn’t believe that value was ultimately real.

Ending slavery was about well-being, but basically everyone was following what I’m calling the common sense sacred axioms of Modernity, which ignored the issue of whether value was real and just said, let’s just assume it’s real.

And Modernity took a social loan from Premodernity, to just assume value is real, to “hold these truths to be self-evident,” even if we can’t source them in anything. That was insufficient.

A Thomas Jeffersonian view of value was insufficient. Jefferson’s view of value was rooted in Epicurus and other, pre-Socratic thinkers, other Stoics, and it just didn’t cut it. And the John Adams view of value—who was the second president, Thomas Jefferson was the third—the John Adams view that value was real had been shunted aside.

And so I realized it’s not going to happen.

I won’t be able to accomplish this, which was devastating to me for all three of those reasons. And right around that time, I began to look carefully at what we now call the metacrisis or existential risk.

We Need A New Story of Value In Response To Existential Risk

I had given a series of lectures at Venwoude on how:

* The failure to articulate a vision of self, a vision of who we are, Unique Self specifically

* The failure to articulate a vision of Eros or ErosValue

* The failure to articulate a sense of the Universe: A Love Story

* The failure to articulate a worldview

was actually the fundamental cause for existential risk.

And Mauk Pieper, who was there at those lectures, wrote a book, Humanity’s Second Shock and Your Unique Self. It emerged out of his own thinking and out of those talks. And the second shock of existence is a great term.

The first shock of existence is the realization that we die.

The realization of death, the realisation of the death of the individual human being. The first shock happens at the dawn of history.

The second shock of existence, which comes some X thousands of years later—the second shock of existence is right now—which is not the threat of the death of the individual human being, but the death of humanity.

So the first shock of existence, the realization of death, pressed us into life. Death is not an accident. Death is an actual experience that presses us into life. It pressed us into culture and all of the depth of realization abou…

Editor’s note: This brief talk was delivered by Marc Gafni on One Mountain Many Paths while he was in Israel visiting his mother at her senior residential facility. He stepped away from her table to the lobby to respond to this moment in culture. For a fuller account of our response to the existential risk of AI, see First Principles & First Values and AI Is Not a Feeling.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.

Artificial Intelligence Interrupts the Transmission from Generation to Generation

It’s a critical moment in culture.

Just to give you the context: I’m here at an old age facility and here you get kind of how fragile life is. I met someone here who was a very, very well-known figure. I grew up on his name in the United States, and he’s living here kind of in one room by himself, sad, tragic. In a place like this you see:

* the breakdown of the generations,

* the breakdown of generations living with each other,

* the breakdown of the continuity and the transmission of value that takes place.

One of the things that Zak Stein and I have talked a lot about is how AI interrupts the transmission from generation to generation.

And so, when you’re in this kind of moment, you get what’s important, what matters. We always say here, based on very deep reading, that the world’s not made up of matter, but the world is made up of what matters.

Noise Hurts and Signal Heals

So, it’s a critical moment in culture.There were several recent articles that noticed that a head of AI safety at one of the AI companies had stepped down,

Now, I want to make a distinction, just a very simple distinction.

There is signal. And there is noise. Signal and noise.

So, this head of safety at one of the companies steps down This work plays in culture the way it does. And of course, the way it plays is always a mixture of signal and noise.

There’s signal and noise.

Noise hurts, and signal heals.

There’s so much noise!It’s so hard to find our way in the noise; to know what’s true and what’s not true and how to discern and how to disambiguate.

Even when we read a biblical text, we have to disambiguate: Is that God talking or is that the devil claiming God’s voice? It’s why there’s a commandment, “You shall not take God’s name in vain.” It’s why Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 50 years ago wrote “So many people have died in the name of Christ, That I can’t believe it all.”

It’s easy to take God’s name in vain and to claim false authority.

In this kind of complex culture in which the ratio of signal to noise is so asymmetrically in favor of noise and it’s so hard to discern signal, we have to discern signal from noise.

So, this is a signal moment. It’s good that the head of an A.I. company in charge of safety took this seriously enough. I’m sure it’s a person of integrity and goodness. I’m sure he received an enormous amount of support. I’m sure there was also quite a bit of noise as there always is.

I want us just to understand this for a second. And I know we do. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth just understanding: At an age in which what it means to be human is challenged, we’re invited—poised between utopia and dystopia—to reclaim, to remember, to recover and even to evolve what it means to be a human being.

There are three demarcating characteristics what it means to be human.

Attention: The First Demarcating Characteristic of Humanness Is Hijacked by Social Media

The first demarcating characteristic of what it means to be human is attention.We place attention on each other.

Love is the placing of attention.

We formulate meaning in our inward spaces when we gather our resources and we place our attention on Reality, on our own interior, on the truths and the mysteries that live within us. We’re able to access the value that lives within us. We realize that we live in a Field of Value, but the Field of Value also lives in us, and we place attention.

All of love and all of Eros in all of its disguises is the placing of attention; the ability to engage immersively in deep relationship and deep loving and deep knowing and deep presence and deep experience.

And then along comes social media, which has given an enormous amount of good to the world, but based on certain design structures—intentional design structures—that same feature that could have been a blessing has now become the locus of an attention economy that is designed to hijack our attention; the attention which is the first of the three demarcating characteristic of our very humanity.

This is the theft of attention. And the attention is stolen by disinterested third parties through micro targeted strategies. And then that attention is sold as a commodity in a structured market to third parties who are fundamentally alienated from the best, most loving care for the end user whose attention they’re selling. Wow.

So, the very structure of attention in the world, which is needed…

for love,for sensemaking,for sensuality,for ethics,for ethos,for value

…is shattered. An entire generation has had their attention shattered.And every generation has had their attention fractured.

That’s the first wave of artificial intelligence. That’s wave one.

Conversation: The Second Demarcating Characteristic of Humanness Is Hijacked by Chatbots

Then there’s a second wave of artificial intelligence.

The second wave is generative AI and then chatbots, early chatbots. And chatbots are about chatting. It’s about conversation. And the second demarcating characteristic of Reality, but in its particular form of humanity, is conversation.

Conversation means the exchange of information that is meaningful. That happens all the way up and all the way down in Cosmos at different levels, but it obviously defines humanity at the capacity of language. The capacity of speech demarcates the emergence of humanity. So, let’s understand this.

What early chatbots begin to do is to hijack conversation itself.

That was the second wave of AI.

Intimacy: The Third Demarcating Characteristic of Humanness Is Hijacked by AI Tutors, Friends, Beloveds

And then we get to the third wave of AI.

The third wave of AI is the far more sophisticated chatbots in which we begin to confer personhood on the chatbots much more dramatically, what Zak and I call the personhood conferral problem. The chatbot becomes a best friend, becomes a beloved, becomes a tutor. It becomes a teacher. It becomes a parent.

We’ve now broken the third demarcating characteristic of humanity, which is intimacy, intimate attachment. We basically break the very structure of the Intimate Universe, which is the structure of attachment.

Three waves of AI:

* The first wave of AI, social media, fragments undermines, destroys attention, the first feature of humanity.

* The second wave of AI, early chatbots undermine fragment and destroy the fundamental structure of conversation and the Conversational Cosmos and conversation language, which is unique and demarcates humanity.

* The third wave of AI—building on wave one and wave two—which is the advanced chatbot, which is conferred with personhood, begins to download into society a level of disorientation.

Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel and Doesn’t Care

We’re talking to AI. We’re talking to an artificial intelligence that doesn’t feel.

AI does not care about us.AI is not living.AI does not yearn for us.AI doesn’t mourn us when we die.AI can’t make a moral statement, which is a speech act, for which the AI is responsible.AI doesn’t have that experience of ethos.AI doesn’t feel you. That’s lies. Sweet little lies, if you remember the song.AI doesn’t care about you.AI doesn’t yearn for you.AI doesn’t experience your loneliness.AI doesn’t feel any of the statements it makes to you.

And yet AI is now hijacking attachment itself and then placing itself in an oracular position as an oracle.

I now turn to AI for my information.I turn to AI for guidance.I turn to AI for depth.I turn to AI to understand me an…

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Dr. Marc 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.

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One Mountain, Many Paths is a weekly, interactive, online broadcast that includes rich, spiritually activating, transformational content, group prayer and encouragement to live love as religion.

We are responding to existential Risk by telling the New Story, the fulfilment of Homo sapiens as Homo amor. This is the story of the emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity. At the core of it is a great new cultural Enlightenment that generates a new global collective intelligence of Enlightenment. It is the realization that every person is a Unique Self, a unique expression of the larger field of LoveIntelligence with a crucial instrument to play in the great self-organizing Unique Self Symphony.

Our mission is to generate the Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies that is at the core of political and social revolution of love.

In One Mountain, Many Paths (formerly Church of Evolutionary Love), we are connected, we are whole and we are expressions of the entire process of creation who are activating a new humanity, we are awakening as a new species… Homo amor - the fulfillment of Homo sapiens!

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Your Need Is My Allurement: Healing Ontological Shame through the Dignity of Ontological Need | Dr. Marc Gafni #477

November 30, 2025

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Episode 477 — Your Need Is My Allurement

In this powerful episode, Marc Gafni explores how healing shame begins with reclaiming the dignity of need as a core structure of Reality. Drawing on CosmoErotic Humanism, depth psychology, and evolutionary spirituality, Marc reframes need as sacred rather than pathological. He reveals how unmet needs generate ontological shame—and how love, Eros, and embodied intimacy restore wholeness. Moving from personal healing to global responsibility, this teaching offers a new Story of Value for a world poised between dystopia and utopia, inviting listeners to participate consciously in the evolution of love and human dignity.

THIS WEEK’S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE: “If you ask, you must surely need: your need is my allurement.” - Dr. Marc Gafni

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Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Evolution of Relationships: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Love-Quarks-Culture-Relationships/dp/B0F4PW61LQ/

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