worldphilosophyandreligion.org Open in urlscan Pro
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Submitted URL:
http://www.ievolve.org/
Effective URL:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/
Submission: On October 17 via api (October 17th 2024, 8:22:54 pm UTC) from US — Scanned from DE

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11 forms found in the DOM

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GET https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/

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The Center for World Philosophy & Religion – HomeThe
Editors2024-08-31T11:16:18-07:00
ARTICULATING A NEW WORLDVIEW IN RESPONSE TO EXISTENTIAL RISK:

FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO AMOR

THE GREAT LIBRARY OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM

Our Vision
CosmoErotic Humanism
Our Mission
Search for:

ARTICULATING A NEW WORLDVIEW IN RESPONSE TO EXISTENTIAL RISK:

FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO AMOR

THE GREAT LIBRARY OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM

Our Vision
CosmoErotic Humanism
Our Mission
Search for:

WORLDWIDE BOOK LAUNCH:

OUR NEW BOOK CAN NOW BE ORDERED FROM THE US AND CANADA VIA THE LINKS AND BUTTONS
BELOW. FROM EUROPE AND OTHER COUNTRIES, PLEASE ORDER FROM YOUR COUNTRY’S AMAZON.
THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE AS PAPERBACK, EBOOK, AND AUDIOBOOK.

FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES

FORTY-TWO PROPOSITIONS ON COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM, THE META-CRISIS, AND THE WORLD
TO COME

by David J. Temple

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

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

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“THE POSITION ARGUED FOR IN THIS BOOK IS OF VITAL IMPORTANCE . . . IT NEEDS
URGENTLY TO BE READ.”
IAIN MCGILCHRIST, AUTHOR OF THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative
authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading
international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by
articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global
coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic
Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and
spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc
Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as
part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr.
Stein.

Order Here

Download Chapter 1-5

Read a Book Review by David Nicol

UPCOMING COURSE IN SEPTEMBER

EYE OF VALUE: SAVING THE DAMSEL IN DISTRESS

A COURSE ABOUT THE ESSENCE OF A NEW STORY OF VALUE THAT CAN CHANGE THE VECTOR OF
CIVILIZATION.

> The Parallax Course: Value is Real Why Saying This Clearly May Save
> Civilization [and our Souls] – (with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein) takes place on
> Saturdays, September 7/14/21/28 – 2024. For more information:

DOCUMENTARY WITH DR. MARC GAFNI

IN COLLABORATION WITH AUBREY MARCUS AND THE UNIQUE SELF INSTITUTE

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

Who am I? and Who are we?

Where am I? and Where are we?

What ought I do? and What ought we do?

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

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

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EXPLORATIONS ORGANIZED BY TOPICS

* FIRST VALUES, FIRST PRINCIPLES

In Response to Existential Risk

* ANTHRO-ONTOLOGY

How We Know What We Know

* UNIVERSE STORY

The Universe Is a Love Story.

* UNIQUE SELF

True Self + Unique Perspective + Unique Configuration of Intimacy & Desire =
Unique Self

* THE NEW HUMAN: FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO AMOR

Homo amor is the fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

* POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Conscious Entrepreneurship, Integral Politics, Ecology, & Conscious Society

* EROS

The Sexual Models the Erotic. It Doesn't Exhaust the Erotic.

* EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

Creating Educational Environments & Evolving the Patterns that Connect

* WORLD RELIGION

World Religion as a shared grammar of value that serves as a context for our
diversity.

* FIRST VALUES, FIRST PRINCIPLES

In Response to Existential Risk

* ANTHRO-ONTOLOGY

How We Know What We Know

* UNIVERSE STORY

The Universe Is a Love Story.

* UNIQUE SELF

True Self + Unique Perspective + Unique Configuration of Intimacy & Desire =
Unique Self

* THE NEW HUMAN: FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO AMOR

Homo amor is the fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

* POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Conscious Entrepreneurship, Integral Politics, Ecology, & Conscious Society

* EROS

The Sexual Models the Erotic. It Doesn't Exhaust the Erotic.

* EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

Creating Educational Environments & Evolving the Patterns that Connect

* WORLD RELIGION

World Religion as a shared grammar of value that serves as a context for our
diversity.

OUR PARTNERS

About Dr. Marc Gafni

About Dr. Zak Stein

LATEST OUTPUTS ORGANIZED BY MEDIA TYPE

FOR THE SAME CONTENT ORGANIZED BY TOPICS, SEE ABOVE!

BOOKS

The Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism

WHITE PAPERS

Essays & Papers from Our Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism

VIDEO PODCASTS

Podcasts & Lectures on CosmoErotic Humanism

SELF-LEARNING ONLINE COURSES

The Most Powerful Transformative Online Resources

FEATURED BROADCAST & LIVE EVENTS

Join Us Live in Person or Online

AUDIO PODCASTS

Podcasts & Lectures on CosmoErotic Humanism

You Never Know

How can we redeem God from divine loneliness?

Marc Gafni
Oct 15
2

No “NEXUS” Without Shared Value: Response to Yuval Harari 417

Stories of value cohere — even when they are largely fictional from historical
perspective — because they contain the deeper truths people resonate with.

Marc Gafni
Oct 14

417—No “NEXUS” Without Shared Value: Response to Yuval Harari

Stories of value cohere — even when they are largely fictional from historical
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416 — From George Orwell to B.F.

416 — FROM GEORGE ORWELL TO B.F.

Henri Matisse. Dance.

THE POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION LEADS DIRECTLY TO THE DEATH OF OUR HUMANITY — THE
RISE OF TOTALITARIANISM, EITHER OF ORWELLIAN VARIETY OR THE MORE BENIGN
SKINNERIAN VARIETY.

Dr. Marc Gafni

Published in

Office for the Future

·
46 min read
·
Oct 4, 2024

Listen

This is Part 3 of a series critique of Yuval Harari. Read Part 1 HERE , Part 2
HERE

Summary: In this episode, we continue our engagement with the postmodern
position through in-depth conversation with Yuval Harari. We trace the
deconstruction of value, meaning, and stories of inherent value from George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four to B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and
Dignity to Yuval Harari’s books as an uncontaminated and honest expression of
postmodernism, and show that this deconstruction is the root cause of the
meta-crisis and existential risk we are living through. It leads directly to the
death of our humanity — the rise of totalitarianism, either of Orwellian variety
or the more benign Skinnerian variety.

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YUVAL HARARI IS UNIQUE IN THAT HE DOESN’T PULL THE PUNCH

There are two kinds of words —

* words that come from the silence,
* and words that cover up the silence.

But even words that come from the silence need to be open to the depth of the
Field of Value that lives in the silence.

> The silence is not the place of intelligence. It’s the place of consciousness.

What we are here to do, in these nine or ten weeks together, is not to engage
Yuval Harari’s thought. We are not interested in responding to Yuval Harari.
Yuval Harari is, I’m sure, a very nice man. As I’ve said from the beginning, I
am going to assume that he is operating in good faith. There is a bad faith
argument about Yuval out there, which has quite a lot of support for it. I am
not going to adopt that. I assume Yuval is a beautiful man operating in good
faith.

He is not a philosopher, and doesn’t set himself up as one. He is not a teacher
emerging from a lineage, or creating a new lineage. He is essentially a populist
historian, who took his world history course that he gave at Hebrew University,
and he turned it into a great course. He did a great job. It’s a populist
attempt to look at world history, and nicely done. It’s important.

It is appealing to people because he is attempting to tell a story that is
linked to different parts of Reality, instead of getting lost in professional
deformation, when you interpret all of Reality through your own narrow
discipline: if you’re a chemist, all of Reality is chemistry; if you’re a
physicist, all of Reality is physics; if you’re a mathematician, all of Reality
is math; if you’re a sociologist, then all of Reality is sociology, etcetera.
All of these are true. Each of them is looking at a different dimension of the
elephant and saying it’s the whole elephant. Yuval and I share the sense that we
need a whole. We need things to relate to each other in a fundamental way. In
order to make any sense of anything, we need to see how these things are
connected. And we need to bring all disciplines together.

We are not interested in having a conversation with Yuval per se (although I
look forward, Yuval, to actually talking, whenever we do, my friend), but Yuval
is what we called an uncontaminated representative of the postmodern Zeitgeist —
of what late modernity and postmodernity are saying. His list of endorsements
from legacy institutions and legacy figures all over the world, who I’ve
mentioned last week, is actually a little shocking.

Yuval is unique though. He is unique in that he doesn’t pull the punch. He says
it clearly.

There is an entire school of thinkers who pull the punch; they obfuscate. Yuval
doesn’t pull the punch. Steven Pinker at Harvard pulls the punch, generally.
Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote Surveillance Capitalism, pulls the punch. Nicholas
Carr, who critiques the tech plex, very severely and appropriately, in a book
that he wrote in 2011 called The Shallows and in four books afterwards (my
favorites are Utopia is Creepy (2015) and The Glass Cage) — he pulls the punch.
He is a postmodernist. He doesn’t think that meaning or value are real, but he
doesn’t want to acknowledge that. So, he pulls the punch.

POSTMODERNITY RIPPED OFF THE VENEER OF VALUE

There is an enormous amount of cryptonormativity. The cryptonormative position
is:

* We pretend as though value is real. We take out a loan from early modernity
or pre-modernity, we assume value is real, but then we tell you that it’s
not, for an entire series of reasons, but then we assume that it is anyways.

It’s this strange position that worked in modernity. You could get away with it
in modernity — expressing the notion that value is not real, like David Hume
did, for example, and then claiming value on the other side. I called this the
common sense sacred axioms of value that live in modernity.

You could say, Okay, value is not real, let me explain to you all the reasons
why it’s not, but then I am going to claim it anyways.

Thomas Jefferson did that, in the American constitution. Thomas Jefferson was
deeply influenced by Epicurus. Epicurus, the ancient Greek pre-Socratic, lived
in an age when it was just a given that value is real. It was a given that the
gods are real, even if you don’t believe in the gods. Epicurus, if you actually
follow his logic to its conclusion, is a materialist atheist. But you can’t be a
materialist atheist at the time, several hundred years before the common era —
and so, he pulls the punch. Epicurus himself probably wasn’t fully aware of the
extent he was pulling the punch.

Jefferson was a deist. A deist is a way of saying, well, everything is God, but
nothing is God. You talk about God all the time; God ‘wound up the watch’, but
he is not really present at the banquet anymore. Jefferson is one of the framers
of the Constitution, where they say, ‘we hold these truths (of value) to be
self-evident.’

When you claim truths to be self-evident, you mean they are blatantly obvious.
Well, if they are so blatantly obvious, and this is your founding document, why
don’t you tell us where they are from?

But you are actually not sure where they are from. You are not sure how to
articulate them. You are involved in this contradiction: you have deconstructed
value, yet you want to claim it — so, you make this move: we hold these truths
to be self-evident.

The common sense sacred axioms of value mean you can deconstruct value and yet
assume it. This lives deeply in modernity, but it explodes in postmodernity.

* In postmodernity, the mask is ripped off.
* In postmodernity, the veneer of value is ripped off.
* In postmodernity — when you read Derrida, for example — there is this
reduction of Reality to story, but the word just always modifies story. It’s
just a story, and most of the stories that define Reality are fictional
stories.

They are not stories that express true value, because true value doesn’t exist.
It’s not actually real.

That loan — the social capital of value that we borrowed from pre-modernity and
early modernity, and we held the loan quietly in late modernity — postmodernity
calls in that loan and explodes the hidden funding of culture that’s taking
place through this loan, and says, actually, value is not real (and value and
meaning are used interchangeably all the time). There is no ultimate inherent
intrinsic value/meaning in Reality.

Harari, in dozens of passages, makes this point. He says, if you think that
there is any meaning, it is a delusion. If you think there is a plotline to
Reality, it is a delusion. If you think that you have some role to play, it is a
delusion. (Delusion is his word.) If you think that any value is better than any
other value, not true — because it’s not real. It’s completely contrived. Any
thought like that you have is a figment of your imagination, and not in a good
way. It is a fiction or a mere social construct (his words).

Let’s not be afraid to call it for what it is. I appreciate Yuval because he’s
honest. He doesn’t pull the punch. That’s what’s unique about him. He is an
uncontaminated expression of this postmodern moment, and he doesn’t pull the
punch. He draws the conclusion.

Yuval is going to be our interlocutor. He’s going to be our foil to try and
establish the New Story of Value, and to understand what do we need to establish
in this New Story of Value, to actually be able to enact a story of value —

* in which we can be filled with joy,
* in which we can be filled with delight,
* in which we can respond to the meta-crisis,
* in which we can live our lives, and live a life well-lived,
* in which we can speak to our children, and tell our children, this is what’s
true and this is how we want to guide you and invite you into your life.

Because what we tell a child, when we look at a child in the eye, what we are
able to tell a child — honestly, and truly, and deeply — is what we know to be
true.

THE COLLAPSE OF VALUE IS ROOT CAUSE FOR THE META-CRISIS

Are there things that Yuval says that are great? First off, he is a great
writer. Two, he is intelligent. In general, of course, there is much that’s
persuasive and interesting in reading Yuval. There’s much that’s persuasive and
interesting in reading postmodernity. Three, as I said before, I am sure he is a
beautiful guy.

But four is even more important.

I have a longstanding argument with my colleague, Jordan Peterson.

Jordan basically says, postmodernity is idiocy. He traces postmodernity back to
Marxism, not completely incorrectly. There’s a lot of truth in that, because
Marx’s point was, it’s all about power, power is the only true reality, and
language and story are just covers for the drive for power. This is a
fundamental Marxist idea, which was picked up by postmodernity. Peterson says,
postmodernity is just bad news. That’s actually incorrect. Postmodernity is bad
news, it’s true. But it’s incorrect in the sense that it’s true, but partial.

Postmodernity wildly overreached, reduced everything to just stories that are
covers for power grabs.

But postmodernity also did some really, really important things. Maybe in the
last talk of this series, I’ll talk about the five or six postmodern insights
that are absolutely correct, and Yuval is a good expresser of those, but here is
just one of them.

> There are lots of stories that are bullshit.

There are lots of stories that are fictions, and those fictions destroyed
enormous amount of Reality. There were dimensions of religions and governments
that told stories that were complete fictions, stories that were power drives or
ways of imposing order. Those stories weren’t true, and those stories caused
enormous damage.

We need to be able to find Reality itself, and free ourselves — disentangle
ourselves — from false narratives and fictive stories that have dominated
Reality.

That was postmodernity’s point; that’s a brilliant postmodern point. That’s not
Yuval’s point. He repeats that point elegantly, but that’s one of the core
points of postmodernity. That’s what postmodernity is all about. That’s
absolutely true; it is a partial truth, but it’s true.

This realization of postmodernity lives strongly at the leading edges of the
interior sciences. It lives throughout an entire series of sources. Abraham Kuk
is a very good example of an interior scientist who is deeply aware of that
postmodern sensibility. He is a mystic writer, scientist, literary figure,
political figure who died in 1938. But you see and feel realizations like that
all through the leading edges of the interior sciences. Postmodernity really
just picked up on that in a very big way, and brought them to the center, and
did an important job bringing this to the center.

We need, however, to be able to call out and utterly reject (to borrow Hegel’s
phrase, negate) — we have to negate the fundamental fallacies of postmodernity
(which Yuval expresses), because they are root cause for existential risk. They
are root cause for the meta-crisis. Paradoxically, what Yuval and I agree on is
the utter seriousness of the meta-crisis. Here, Yuval is unique and distinct.
Many postmodern writers ignore the meta-crisis. Yuval wants to deal with it. He
wants to engage it. I would actually view his work as an attempt to engage the
meta-crisis. I think that’s actually what he’s doing, in a real way. I think
that’s a great concern of his, and I share and feel him in that concern, and I
think he feels us in that concern.

In our book, First Principles and First Values, we’ve talked extensively about
why the fallacies of postmodernity are the root cause of the meta-crisis. There
is section in First Principles and First Values about the seven links between
existential risk and the collapse of a shared Field of Value (see also Love or
Die). I’m not going to go all the way into that right now, but just in a word:

* In order to respond to global challenges, we need global coordination.
* We can’t have global coordination without global coherence.
* Global coherence requires global resonance.
* Global resonance requires global intimacy.

But there’s a global intimacy disorder. Why?

> The source of the global intimacy disorder is the failure to recognize each
> other in the intimacy of a shared Field of Value.

If you have basically deconstructed a shared Field of Value and meaning —

* then there is no conversation;
* then you can’t create global intimacy,
* and you can’t create global resonance,
* and you can’t create global coherence,
* and you can’t create global coordination, because you can only globally
coordinate if you have shared ordinating values.

Therefore, you can’t respond to global challenges — and every dimension of the
meta-crisis is a global challenge. I’m not going to dedicate this week to that,
I want to focus on an entirely new set of points, but that’s in the backdrop.
There is a direct between the collapse of the Field of Value and the
meta-crisis. I am not going to debate it anew here, but I’m going to take that
as a given now. The collapse of value is root cause for the meta-crisis.

When postmodernity says that any sense you might think that meaning is real is a
delusion, when Harari deconstructs the notion that there is any story of
inherent value backed by the universe — that is exactly the cause for the
meta-crisis, because if we can’t create a shared story of value, how are we
going to cohere?

But Reality is not merely the movement from simplicity to complexity. Reality is
intimacy and evolution, or, more precisely, reality is the progressive deepening
of intimacies.

Reality is conversation; we live in a Conversational Cosmos. (This is a topic I
have discussed in depth with my dear friend and interlocutor, the philosopher of
science, Howard Bloom, who was the first to introduce this term in its formal
scientific context. Howard and I have evolved the term together in multiple
vectors.)

More precisely, Reality is the evolution of conversation. In the interior
sciences, the word for Messiah — a utopian term — is rooted in the word Siach
‘conversation.’ Reality is the evolution of conversation.

In that spirit, with great delight and honor, I invite Yuval to a public
conversation, where we can have go at this and work some of this out — in a
spirit of intimacy, and curiosity, and commitment to evolution. Perhaps together
we can step out of some of the outdated and tired postmodern tropes, which
appropriately deconstructed so much, but forgot the urgent need for a
reconstructive project. Perhaps we can, with humility and audacity — just
perhaps — evolve source code of culture and consciousness, which itself is the
evolution of love.

DIRECT LINE FROM NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR TO YUVAL HARARI

If you can’t have a story of value which is going to respond to the meta-crisis,
what do you do?

Here is the second thing that Yuval and I agree on:

> We agree that story is the most powerful force in Reality, and that if you
> want to evolve the way human beings cooperate or cohere, you have to tell a
> new story.

That is absolutely true. I’ve said it a thousand times. Yuval has said it a
thousand times. We agree on it absolutely. If you want to evolve the way Reality
coheres, you have to tell a new story, a better story.

If there is a crisis of coherence, how do you deal with it? Both Yuval and us —
Yuval and I, Yuval and our entire enterprise of CosmoErotic Humanism — we agree
that the way you deal with a crisis of coherence is you tell a New Story.

But here’s the rub:

For Yuval, that new story is made up. It has to be. It can’t be a story of
inherent value, because value is not real, because claiming that any meaning is
better than any other meaning is pure fiction. This is a point he makes not
once, not twice, not three times, not one text — in fifty texts! It’s a clear
position that goes all the way through, so he has no choice but to say that a
new story must be a made-up story, and the way we are going to cohere society is
with a made-up story.

This is a big deal, because this road leads to dictatorship.

There is a direct line — and I want to show this clearly — there is a direct
line between George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), and postmodernism. Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a book about totalitarian society. The phrase Orwellian (as in
Orwellian society) has come to mean a dictatorship of a totalitarian nature. At
the very, very core of Orwellian society is the utter deconstruction of story
and the engagement in doublethink, self-contradiction that happens consistently
all the time. That’s called doublethink in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell lived at the same time as B.F. Skinner, who wrote a book called Walden
Two, about what I would call soft totalitarianism. It’s about placing reality in
a hidden totalitarian box. Skinner called it an operant conditioning chamber,
but it was popularly called a Skinner’s box. Skinner was at Harvard for six
decades, and was the most prominent public culture figure.

Skinner got existential risk very clearly — very, very clearly. And Skinner’s
hidden students at the MIT Media Lab (started by Alex Pentland), they also get
existential risk very clearly.

Skinner is basically saying is, Wow, I don’t want to go down that Orwellian
road, the road of Orwellian totalitarianism. Skinner calls it negative
reinforcement — all sorts of forms of torture, and what’s called the Ministry of
Love in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t want to go down that road, he
says, I am going to go through positive reinforcement. I’m going to generate a
society in which we invisibly control everyone. It’s invisible totalitarianism.
At the end of his life, he viewed the worldwide web as the means for enacting an
invisible totalitarianism. There is a book called The Friendly Orange Glow, by
an independent scholar named Brian Dear, which is about the rise of the first
systems of the web; the entire first chapter is about B.F. Skinner.

Both Skinner and Orwell are depicting a reality in which value is not real, so
we can’t rely on value to cohere us. Skinner says, in his chapter on values in
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, value (or the good) is just positive reinforcement.
It doesn’t exist. He is very clear about it. Like Yuval, he doesn’t pull the
punch. But Yuval and Skinner completely agree on existential risk, and we agree
with them on that. We are aligned on that. That’s why it’s such an important
conversation.

Skinner, and Harari, and Pentland at the MIT Media Lab, and, paradoxically,
critics of the Techno-feudalism like Shoshanna Zuboff — they all agree, really
clearly, that there is no story of inherent value that’s real in the Cosmos.
It’s all “just stories”, or “social constructs”, or “fictions” or “figments of
our imagination”

Therefore, Skinner’s conclusion is: if I don’t want a top-down totalitarianism,
I’ve got to create a benign, invisible totalitarianism, where everyone is
controlled and manipulated (his word, manipulated), where their desires are
shaped by invisible levers — just like rats and pigeons are controlled in a
Skinner’s box. That’s the Skinnerian move. I believe that’s the move that Yuval
is moving towards, but Yuval is actually sourced first in Orwell.

What is Orwell saying? The way Orwell is portraying Reality is as follows:

In order to cohere Reality, Big Brother, or the brotherhood, or the party, or
the Ministry of Love (which is the public face of the party) are going to create
a story, which becomes the story. They are going to create a fictional story,
and that story will become the story.

Why is that true? Why does that story have to become the story?

Because there are no other stories of value. There is no story of value to
disclose — and so, the only way to control society is that the only people who
get to create the story are the party. Only the party creates the story. No one
else can create the story.

There is no other story.

And anyone who says that they are going to create a different story, even if
they just believe it in their hearts, has to be crushed.

LOVE STORY STANDS AGAINST TOTALITARIAN FICTITIOUS STORIES

What would stand against that? What would stand against the crushing power of
the totalitarian claim that all stories are fictions?

A love story.

When you are in a love story — whatever form it is, there are many varieties of
a love story — a love story stands against that. In a love story, you are in
your own story, and you are trusting your heart, and you are trusting your body.
You are trusting your allurement — your intellectual allurement, your embodied
allurement, your allurement to sense-making together, to talking to each other,
your allurement to sensuality together.

You trust your body. Your body becomes — in your heart — the field of feeling
between the two cherubs above the Ark of the Covenant — the two sexually
entwined cherubs, or the two sensually entwined cherubs, or the two
intellectually entwined cherubs above the Ark of the Covenant. In the classical
lineage tradition of Solomon —

* that’s where the word of God comes from;
* that’s where there is a sense of truth;
* that’s where there is a sense of a story that stands against totalitarianism.

That’s the story. It’s the love story.

What’s Nineteen Eighty-Four about?

It’s about a couple that has a love story, Winston and Julia, and they are madly
in love with each other. The entire point of the book is that the Ministry of
Love hijacks the love story. There are no love stories. Love stories don’t exist
independently of the Ministry of Love, because the love story is the one story
that could challenge the authoritarian claim —

* that we own stories,
* that all stories are fictional,
* and the only story that’s true is the story that we made up. No other stories
are true.

That’s the claim.

The love story stands against it.

In the love story, I trust my body. I trust my heart. I trust my feeling. I
trust my heartstrings. I clarify my feeling. I clarify my sensuality. I clarify
my sense-making in the space between us.

And so, the entire apparatus of the party, embodied by O’Brien, who’s the
interrogator in Nineteen Eighty-Four, has to crush the love story of Winston and
Julia.

The goal of the party is to ensure the betrayal of love, because that undermines
the status or authority of the only story that could stand against the Ministry
of Love. The Ministry of Love is hijacking all stories, including the love
stories.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there’s this incredible scene, where Winston and Julia
meet after they have betrayed each other:

> It was by chance that they had met. It was in the park on a vile, biting day
> in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there
> was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to
> be dismembered by the wind.

You get the description of the day? And then, they see each other.

> I betrayed you, she said baldly.
> I betrayed you, he said.
> She gave him another quick look of dislike.
> Sometimes, she said, they threaten you with something, something you can’t
> stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, don’t do it to me, do
> it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so. Do it to him. And perhaps you might
> pretend afterwards that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make
> them stop and didn’t really mean it, but that isn’t true. At the time when it
> happened, you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself
> and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the
> other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is
> yourself.
> All you care about is yourself, he echoed.
> And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer,
> she said.
> No, he said, you don’t feel the same.

That’s the goal of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Winston is not killed at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four. They talk about
killing, but what they mean is they killed the old Winston, and they set him
loose; they set him free because his love has been hijacked. He now loves only
Big Brother.

The love story itself has been hijacked. There is only the contrived story. No
other story exists.

That’s the great lie of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Actually, it’s not true. Actually, love is often as strong as death, as the Song
of Songs points out, as the Solomon tradition points out. Often, we stand for
love even in the face of enormous suffering, and we sacrifice for love. And even
when the physical body appears to force what appears to be betrayal, even then
love is not lost.

The assumption —

* that the human being is an empty mechanical vessel that can be molded, and
shaped, and controlled, and made to move through the motivational
architecture of a fictitious story, which is always, always more powerful
than anything else because there is no true love story —

— is a lie. That’s the great lie.

> Love is more powerful. The love story is more real.

But Winston and Julia are portrayed, in this story, as the betrayers. They
betray the love, and the party is victorious, because the party now owns the
apparatus of story.

The party sometimes wins victories in this lifetime. The Orwellian story is the
party claiming victory by persuading Julia and Winston that they have betrayed
love. But I would like to write a sequel to 1984, where Julia and Winston find
each other again — either in this world or in the continuity of consciousness
that, based on our best empirical information, extends beyond the borders of
death (for example, the Whiteheadian scholar David Jay Griffin offers rigorous
empirical analysis of this information).

Skinner doesn’t disagree with that portrayal of culture as depicted by Orwell —
that there is no story that’s real. But what Skinner says is: don’t use negative
reinforcement, which is what the Ministry of Love uses in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He says, use positive reinforcement (in forty different passages).

Positive reinforcement means: I’m going to invisibly control you by hijacking
love stories, and making them banal. Call it Valentine’s Day.

We’ll make love mean very little.

You’ll say, I love you, but it won’t really mean anything.
We’ll say, I love you, but we’ll lose connection to what it means.
We’ll hijack romantic love as a tool of subservience.

We’ll create a Skinner’s box in which everyone lives, and they respond to likes
and views on the web, and they are moved through this strange and superficial
motivational architecture, which is about the lowest common denominator of human
beings being moved around and manipulated.

Human beings become, in Skinner’s phrase, observable and manipulable through the
vehicles of the world wide web.

DOUBLETHINK: REPUDIATING MORALITY WHILE LAYING CLAIM TO IT

What does the party do in Nineteen Eight Four?

The party engages in doublethink. How does doublethink work? This is the
deconstruction of story.

Orwell has a bunch of descriptions of doublethink. I want to just read you two
of them:

> To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them…

And that’s often true about my friend, Yuval. He says things that are clearly
not the case. Claims, which, if he were just being honest (and he is
intelligent), he would realize, that’s not true; I just overreached, for
example, in my deployment of science. It’s not true.

> … to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes
> necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is
> needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
> account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.

Did that spin your mind? It should have. It spins your mind. Even to read about
doublethink spins your mind.

> To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while
> telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
> canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,
> to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it….
> and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the
> ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once
> again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
> Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

These are incredible texts; and you literally get that sense of Harari.

I’m just going to give you one simple example.

Yuval is writing about free will. He writes an article in The Guardian (2018)
about why the belief in free will is both an illusion and dangerous; free will
is absolutely not real in any sense at all. Or, if you open Yuval’s book, Homo
Deus, and you open it to the chapter called, The Time Bomb in the Laboratory.
(page 329):

> To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have
> divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for freedom.
> There is no free will. The sacred word freedom turns out to be, just like
> soul, a hollow term, empty of any discernible meaning. Free will exists only
> in the imaginary stories. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we
> human beings have made up.

That’s a big claim. Free will does not exist. That’s his consistent position.

On the other hand — and this is almost funny, if it weren’t tragic, and
confusing, and doublethink — Yuval wrote a whole bunch of articles about the war
in Ukraine, and the articles all began with, we have a choice here. Human beings
have choices to make. And in his new book, Nexus, all through the book, even on
the back of the book (where they summarize the book), it is all about the urgent
choices we now must make.

I am a little confused, my friend. You just told us that choice doesn’t exist,
in The Guardian and in Homo Deus. But then, your next book is all about the
choices we need to make. And every article you write about key moments is about
the human capacity to make choices.

Hello!

Do you think we are idiots?

No, Yuval doesn’t think we’re idiots. But he is engaged in the doublespeak game,
described by Orwell,

repudiating morality while laying claim to it. This is the confusion here.
That’s why it’s confusing. That’s why you can go back and forth.

He seems to be standing for value in some way. But then he’s saying it’s not
real. That is how doublethink operates to repudiate morality while laying claim
to it.

One more example — and Yuval, this one is just for you. I don’t have time to
unpack it more fully in this talk, but you will understand exactly what I am
referring to as will the readers who are more familiar with your work.

In Homo Deus, you claim the authority of science for the claim that organism is
algorithm. This claim is clearly not true; it was refuted, for example, by a
leading scientist, Antonio Damasio. Stuart Kaufman’s thought may also be taken
as a devastating repudiation of this claim, which you assert as a scientific
given. But then, in your last book, Nexus, you spend the entire book implicitly
distinguishing between organism and algorithm, clearly rejecting the dogmatic
notion of Organism as algorithm. At the same time, organisms clearly have telos
(goals); and yet, you assert with absolutely certainty, which — again — you
attribute to science, that there are no inherent goals, no inherent telos, no
intrinsic goodness anywhere in reality. It is all just fictional stories, or
mythologies; it is all socially contrived and not backed by the universe.

Yuval, brother, you are super smart, and this is sounding like doublespeak.

ORWELL AND SKINNER

Yuval is an incredibly accurate representation of this exact experience of
doublethink, because Yuval recognizes — like we do, like the Orwellian Ministry
of Love did, like B.F. Skinner does — that we are facing existential risk in a
real way.

Shoshana Zuboff essentially mocks Skinner in her book, Surveillance Capitalism.
It’s a huge mistake. Skinner is not to be mocked. Jaron Lanier is a very good
writer on the tech plex (he’s not a cultural historian, he’s actually an
engineer) — he mocks Skinner, he just called Skinner creepy. Nicholas Carr in
his book, The Shallows, mocks Skinner.

No, no, no, Skinner is not to be mocked.

First off, he was a towering intellect, but he was also actually genuinely moved
by existential risk. If you read C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book, The Abolition of Man,
which is basically a critique of Skinner, although Skinner’s not mentioned by
name, Lewis takes Skinner seriously in a way that Zuboff didn’t, and all the
later writers haven’t. He understands that this is serious, and he gets
correctly that Skinner is deeply concerned with existential risk.

What are we going to do?

Basically, the Orwellian Ministry of Love is the form of totalitarianism that
says:

* no stories are real,
* therefore we have to take control of the narrative mechanism,
* utterly crush any illusion of a story that could stand against it,
* and we create the story,
* and then we organize Reality through our created story.

Skinner says:

* we organize Reality through invisible levers of control that create this
illusion of a lowest common denominator story that you live in, and
everybody’s happy.

When you read Walden Two, you get a little bit of a sense of The Stepford Wives.
In Walden Two — just like in Nineteen Eighty-Four — what is dismissed is Eros
and sexuality. Walden Two is essentially a sexless book. It’s a book devoid of
Eros as well. Sex models Eros, it doesn’t exhaust Eros. Eros existed for 12
billion years before sex. Eros is the force of ErosValue that coheres Cosmos,
and sex is one expression of it.

There is only one figure in Walden Two that’s sexual in any way, whose name is
Barbara. Barbara is the girlfriend of a guy named Rogers. Rogers is one of the
two students of a guy named Professor Burris, who comes to visit Walden Two. All
of Walden Two is a conversation between Frazier, who’s the founder of Walden Two
(who represents Skinner) and Burris. And Burris has these two students with
their girlfriends that come with them. One of them is Rogers, whose girlfriend
is Barbara. Barbara is sexual, and her sexuality is what, in the end, leads
Rogers away from Walden Two, prevents him from seeing the truth and sends him
back to the rat race of society.

So, sexuality is presented as a siren song, which is in the way. In general, in
Walden Two, teenage sex is strongly promoted, and having babies early — just to
get sex and babies out of the way. Let’s not get disturbed by that, so we get on
to the real business of being creative and happy in the world.

There is a complete sidelining and rejecting, throughout Skinner, of any sense
that sex, Eros, or love is real. Skinner says explicitly, in Walden Two, love is
but a positive reinforcer. Love is not real. So, just like the Ministry of Love,
Skinner in Walden Two rejects the love story.

Skinner was deeply aware of this parallel between him and Orwell. In 1984, he
writes a sequel to Walden Two called News from Nowhere, in which Orwell fakes
his death and comes to live in Walden Two under the name Blair. And there is a
whole set of conversations between Blair and Frazier, the Orwell figure and the
Skinner figure, and they both agree that love and Eros are not real.

There is a direct line between the Orwellian position and the Skinnerian
position, both based on doublethink. In Skinner, it’s not exactly doublethink,
it’s closer to euphemism.

One of the classical features of Skinner and of the tech plex is euphemism.

For example, we are not trying to addict people, that would be insane. Why would
we addict people to the web? That would be gross and repulsive. So, we never
talk about addicting people, but actually the goal of the web is addiction. Nir
Eyal, the kind of icon of Silicon Valley, wrote a book, early on (an
uncontaminated book as well), where he tips his hat, like Harari does in our
field, and the name of the book is Hooked. There is another book about how
addiction takes place through the web, which is called Fear No Evil, I believe.
Instead of calling it addiction, it’s called engagement. The idea is to engage
customers. There is this notion of engagement.

There are about twenty five major euphemisms that define the web and cover up
the move of control. For example, Pentland doesn’t talk about putting people in
a Skinner’s box, he talks about turning reality into living laboratories. That’s
his word for a Skinner’s box. It is not exactly doublethink, it’s Skinner’s form
of the degradation of language.

What both Orwell and Skinner share is the need to degrade language. It’s only
the degradation of language, which becomes the degradation of story as story of
value, that allows you to claim language and story as your own in order to
affect control.

That is what Yuval’s doing.

ARE MAJOR CULTURAL STORIES UTTERLY FICTIONAL?

Here is Harari’s book for children. It’s called, Unstoppable Us.

His question is, in this children’s book, how did humans take over the world?

He is consistent in his children’s book. I was hoping that in his children’s
book, he would pull the punch and tell children that, I don’t know, the good,
the true, and the beautiful are actually valid, and have value, and are
important. He doesn’t. Again, he is uncontaminated material. He is honest all
the way in a particular way, even as he is completely intellectually dishonest,
because that’s the nature of doublethink, but he is also honest. It’s
doublethink.

Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World is essentially a
restatement for children of what he says in Sapiens, Chapter two; and in the
chapter called Storytellers in Homo Deus, and the chapter in Homo Deus called
Human Spark; and in the last two chapters of a book called 21 Questions.

And it’s all doublethink.

For example, in 21 Questions, he talks about the three great stories of the 20th
century, whatever they are, and he says, none of those worked. He is correct
about that. That’s a good historical overview. Clearly, we need a new story.
That’s how he ends chapter one. It’s great.

Then, when he gets to the end of the book, his last two chapters are basically a
bad Buddhist Dharma talk. A vapid Vipassana Dharma talk. Sorry, Yuval. He
basically says, Why are you lost in story? Story is not real. Stories are
utterly, totally, and completely made up.

Do you remember the clip from his interview with Lex Fridman, where Fridman
asked, what’s the meaning of life? And Yuval said, the one thing it’s not is a
story. It’s not a story.

Yuval gets existential risk, yet there are no stories of value to fall back on —
so you have no choice but to make up a story. Yuval’s argument is that there are
two kinds of stories.

* There are a few stories that can actually convey truth. That’s obviously
true. There are stories that convey some degree of truth.
* But, he says, most stories in culture don’t. Most stories are utterly
fictional, completely made up.

He says that we believe the major stories in culture, even though they’re not
true. The fact that we believe a story doesn’t mean that it’s true. The story is
made up, and yet you can get people to believe them. Does that sound like
Nineteen Eighty-Four? It should. What’s his evidence for that? He quotes
evidence, and everyone assumes he is right. He makes what appears to be, on the
surface, a very powerful point, which is why Barack Obama, and Bill Gates, and
Jeff Bezos all endorse the book. This is the postmodern point.

He says, take the Catholic Church, or the Bible. Those are two examples he uses.

The Bible gets so many facts wrong. The Bible claims that human beings emerged
from Mesopotamia. But we know that humans came out of Africa, not Mesopotamia.
So, this is a fictional story. Or the Bible says, when you engage pestilence,
you’ve got to pray — but we don’t do prayer, we do penicillin, so, the Bible got
it completely wrong. Thus, the Bible is wrong. It’s a fictional story, and yet
everyone buys into it.

The second example he has is the Catholic Church. There are 1.4 billion people
who are members of the Catholic Church. And just between us, do you really
believe that she was a virgin? Mary? Or that Jesus was born of immaculate
conception? That there was virginity postpartum? That’s what they call it in the
formal doctrine. Do we really believe in virginity postpartum? There is a whole
list of things, which are clearly fictions that were presented by the Catholic
Church, and yet everybody, 1.4 billion people believe in some version of this.

He’s got lots of other examples. His point is, these are fictional stories, and
people will absolutely believe in a fictional story, which is, again, the claim
of the party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s a little chilling.

Is Yuval right?

He is not. He is not.

People don’t believe in these stories because they’re fictional. It’s dead
wrong. He just got it totally wrong.

STORIES AS A SUPERPOWER

Let me lay out the argument made by historians, which Yuval adopts well.

Here’s the first part of the argument.

There was a world filled with many genuses, many types of human beings. For
example, one of the types of human beings that lived 70,000 to 80,000 years ago
were Neanderthals. When we were kids, you would hear your mother say about
someone (or your father), he’s a Neanderthal, and that was not a compliment. The
assumption was that Neanderthals were somehow subhuman, as it were. We now
realize that wasn’t true. New anthropological evidence shows that the
Neanderthals had great art, and fascinating sexuality, and deep rituals, and all
that kind of good stuff.

So, why did the Neanderthals disappear? Why did the Sapiens become so much more
powerful than the Neanderthals? One possible answer is language. Homo sapiens
got language, and language allowed them to communicate in a new way. There is a
whole school of anthropology that says that language allowed them to hunt
better. They could talk to each other, and prepare for the hunt, and share the
different trails of the bison, and the antelope, and the deer. That’s possible,
and there are some schools of thought that adopt that. And there are more
powerful schools that reject that. Harari goes (correctly, I believe) with the
rejection of that; he says that language is not just about sharing,
communicating information about the hunt, which confers a survival advantage.
Harari says, no, it’s about something much deeper.

What is language doing?

> Language is giving us the capacity to tell a story.

Now, this is very important.

The argument is as follows. The reason the Neanderthals disappeared is because
Neanderthals only banded together in small groups of people, because they didn’t
have language with this storytelling capacity. Therefore, as the sociologist
Robin Dunbar pointed out, you can only be intimate with about 150 people (that’s
called Dunbar number). You can actually check that out yourself. It’s very hard
to know more than 150 people, and have a direct relationship with them, and feel
like you can trust them, that you know them, you can rely on their word — so
that you have enough intimacy to coordinate together, to cohere together, to
resonate together.

Neanderthals could only coordinate, cohere, resonate at the level of the Dunbar
number. But Sapiens — this is the argument of anthropology adopted by Harari —
could cohere through storytelling. They became cohered not through knowing each
other intimately; instead, coherence was generated because they all met in a
shared story. That’s his big move.

If you have a shared story, you could have not 150 Sapiens, you could have not
50 Sapiens (like you had Neanderthals, which were between 50 and 150 maximum) —
you could have 500 Sapiens humans, a thousand Sapiens humans, which meant that
you have 500 times the fire power, 500 times the innovation power, 500 times the
creativity power, 500 times the mind power. It’s a whole different world. Then
you have 1,000 Sapiens. And then, you have 10,000 Sapiens in the Savannah, which
are at different places, which all know each other. When there is a drought or a
famine, you’re connected to this larger Sapiens community, you don’t get wiped
out, you go and stay with your relatives as it were.

He is repeating this anthropological argument — he repeats it eloquently — that
the capacity of having a shared story creates the sense of family, the sense of
coherence, the sense of coordination that the Neanderthals didn’t have, even
though — here’s the big point — even though the stories are fiction.

That’s what he tells the kids in this book. The entire book is about this. I
stayed up a few nights ago reading this whole book. He tells the kids, even
though the stories aren’t true, nonetheless, our superpower is to tell stories.
Our superpower is to tell stories.

We have this capacity that animals don’t have, and shouldn’t have — we actually
have this weird capacity to believe things that aren’t true.

Why?

Because we want to cohere, so we are willing to believe this not true story, and
to get intimate with each other through the story, because it makes us more
powerful. Here, I am exploiting the part that Harari hides — that a story is an
instrument of power. It coheres us, and it makes us more powerful, even though
it’s a fictive story. That’s his point.

His point is, stories are not true. Most stories that cohere us are not true,
but stories don’t need to be true to cohere us. It’s this strange mechanical
blip in reality that stories have this cohering capacity.

Why?

Because we meet each other, and trust each other, know each other in the story —
just because. We all know the same story. We feel this common bond of story. We
have this shared family history, history as in his-story.

That’s his move.

That is categorically not the case. That’s not how story works.

What Harari misses is something essential about the nature of how intimacy is
created through story.

WHY STORIES COHERE US

Let’s take the Catholic church story, or let’s take the biblical story. Harari
says, well, these stories are fictions, and everybody is cohering and believing
them.

Not exactly.

Let’s start with the Catholic church.

Let’s be clear, I am not a big fan of the Catholic church.

The Catholic church is one of the most corrupt institutions that Reality has
ever created, and has a shocking level of decadence and corruption. And — part
of the story that the Catholic church is telling is freaking beautiful. It is
telling a story about virginity, and innocence, and our ability to re-virginate,
and to birth from this place of our innocence.

It’s telling a story —

* about this force in Reality that loves us so crazy much — so outrageously! —
* about some dimension of Reality, the ultimate source of Reality that holds us
in every moment,
* that is willing to die for us on the cross — to get nailed to the cross for
the sake of our liberation,
* that I am so radically loved and held,
* that there is some force in Reality that wants my liberation desperately.

Or the Sermon on the Mount — this stand for justice, and for the orphan and for
the widow, this story of true virtue, of true noble virtue.

The Catholic story is filled with gorgeous resonant truths — and a lot of
fiction. But the reason people resonate with the story is because we recognize
ourselves in the story. I respond to the story because I recognize myself — I
meet myself — in the story.

Now, I want to give an example. This is going to take us home.

So, what happened here? Why did everyone believe the music?

You’ve got this square. Everyone is having their ordinary, somewhat dull day,
filled with the normal pettiness, and contraction, and argument. And everyone’s
doing what they do.

And then, this music starts to gradually fill everything up.

And what happens? Everyone is blown away. Everyone is blown out of their minds.
Everyone responds to the music. Why?

Because the musical value — the cadence of the music, the tempo of the music,
the stops and the starts, the pattern of intimacy that’s created by music, which
is part of the manifest universe — lives inside of us. Music is one of the
features of the manifest, it is the interior mathematics of intimacy of Cosmos
within the world of time. We participate in that music, so we don’t need someone
to explain the truth of that music. The music lives in us.

The reason that music changes us, and moves us, and shapes us is because we are
resonant with the music. That’s why music is a form of in-formation. It in-forms
us.

Story is an information technology because story, like music, capacitates us to
as it were march in unison. We get to march together because we recognize, we
cohere to the musical value. There are values in music. There is musical value.
It’s a particular quality, and we resonate with that quality.

Just like there is musical value and mathematical value, there is ErosValue —
moral value.

When we tell the story of Christmas, we are not cohering around a fictional
story like a bunch of idiots, because maybe Santa’s not true. (I think Santa is
true, just for the record. Just saying. I met Santa once actually, just between
us.) We are cohering because we resonate with Christmas. I was raised as an
Orthodox rabbi, and I love Christmas. I resonate with Christmas. I resonate as a
Catholic with the Catholic church — and not because I am an idiot who believes
in these dogmas, which are fictional, not just because there is this mechanical
thing that we all meet in the story.

No, we are intimate in the story because we are having a shared
Anthro-Ontological experience.

We are having a shared experience of resonance.

We look at each other, and we realize, oh my God, we are resonating together.

It’s like when a family gets together, and nothing holds them together but the
old jokes. And then, they find each other in the old jokes, they resonate
through the old jokes. No, we resonate through shared feeling.

There is this scene in the movie Pretty Woman (Richard Gere, Julia Roberts), and
she is a courtesan, and he falls in love with her. It’s a love story, just like
Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He is not sure if she is sophisticated enough for him, but he loves her. And
they go to this very, very, very beautiful, subtle opera symphony. And he is
crying, and he looks over, and she gets it even more deeply, there is a tear
running down her cheek. As he looks at her, he realizes, oh my God, she’s having
the same feeling that I’m having — and they are intimate because they are
participating in the same feeling.

We resonate in a shared story not because there is a blip of a materialist
Cosmos, which causes this mechanical mis-function (or function), which causes
people world over to cohere around in-formation, to inform ourselves to
resonate, to cohere through story. There is an enormous amount of evidence of
that, and Harari is aware of the evidence. He cites some of it. The reason that
we cohere through story is because in story we are intimate with each other
because we are having a shared experience of value.

Intimacy is based on shared value.

We are having a shared experience of value. We are having a shared experience of
ErosValue. Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are watching the opera, and the tear
is rolling down her cheek, and he realizes she’s feeling what he is feeling.

That’s why sensuality is so powerful.

That’s why making love together is so powerful.

That’s why sometimes couples have this weird idolatry (weird, but rooted in
something beautiful: when they’re involved in sexing, they have this desire to
explode at the same time. Why? Because we want the intimacy of shared feeling.
It’s not about orgasm. The sexual models Eros. You can have sex your whole life
and never be intimate, and never have sex and be totally intimate.

The point is that in the shared explosion, or the shared tear, we meet in the
depth of a shared intimacy.

That’s one major reason why stories cohere us. Stories cohere us because we
actually participate together in shared value. And it’s the same reason the
Bible coheres people.

The Bible doesn’t cohere people because it’s a fictional story that got some
anthropological or medical facts wrong. The Bible coheres people because it
speaks a language of prophetic justice. It speaks a language of beauty. It
speaks a language of family, and family conflict, and resolution, and
vulnerability, and agony, and ecstasy. We recognize ourselves. We locate
ourselves. We participate in the story. We recognize each other because we
understand that we’re actually participating in the same story.

This is true even if the story is in part fictional. The story may be, from a
historical perspective, or even from an ethical perspective, a broken vessel (as
the interior sciences call it). And naturally, there are varying degrees of
brokenness. But there are also sparks of light to be liberated from the broken
vessels. A story that becomes a great myth is not simply fictional, but also
profoundly true as it liberates the sparks of Ethos and Eros from the shattered
vessel.

But there is also a second reason why stories cohere. Stories cohere not only
around value but around anti-value. The orcs in The Lord of the Rings or the
Nazis are not gathering around value, but around anti-value. This is a very
subtle and essential topic that needs to be addressed deeply, but that is a the
topic of a different conversation.

THERE ARE SHARED STORIES OF VALUE BECAUSE REALITY IS A STORY

Returning to our thread:

Now, everything we are doing becomes clearer.

What are we saying?

We are saying, in our work in the Centre:

* There is a crisis of coherence. The meta-crisis of existential risk is a
crisis of coherence.
* We are calling it a global intimacy disorder.
* We are saying that this global intimacy disorder is based on a failure to
articulate a shared story of value and meaning, and we point toward seven
distinct links between the failure to articulate a shared story of value
meaning and existential risk. In our book First Principles and First values,
we talk about seven distinct links between the perceived collapse of the
field of intrinsic value and the global intimacy disorder, alongside thirteen
expression of the global intimacy disorder for which they are at least
partially responsible.

In the same book, we also engage the critiques of value that were well
articulated by modernity and postmodernity and respond to them, articulating a
key next step (what Derek Parfit was reaching for, but could not quite get
there). At the very core of this step is the recognition that we live in an
intimate universe.

Let’s recap one of our key threads (we spoke about it in depth last week):

> There is a Tao. It is an eternal Tao which is an evolving Tao; a ground of
> being and becoming which is itself a field of Value, prior to all becoming; an
> evolving eternity that generates evolution animated by eternity.

This is but a fragrance of this reality realization and value theory; a fuller
engagement with it is sadly beyond the scope of this conversation right now

What we are saying is that value/meaning is real. And value is evolving. Yes,
there are fictional stories that became tools of domination and abusive power,
which need to be exploded. The postmodern explosion of power motives, and
dominance motives, and false stories is good. We receive and integrate that
postmodern insight. Both Yuval and ourselves shared that with postmodernity.

But underneath all that, there are shared stories of value because Reality is a
story.

In other words, Yuval, you forget, my friend, to answer the following question:

* Why is it true that story coheres us?
* What is it about story that coheres us?

Why don’t we have, I don’t know, why don’t we have jumping jacks? Why don’t we
get coherent by riding bikes together?

I know these are bad examples, but the point is, why does story cohere us?

Is it purely because we accrue more power as postmodernity implies?

Or is there a profound shared intimacy as we recognize each other —
anthro-ontologically — within the resonant field of value that is the story?

Story is clearly rooted in great part at least in this second possibility.

> Story coheres us because the value of story — both the values that story holds
> and the value of story itself — live inside us.

We’ll talk about this more next week, but Reality is a story. Reality has a
narrative arc. Reality is a story of value, and that story of value lives inside
of me. The value that story is telling lives inside of me, just like the musical
value or the mathematical value does.

When there is a crisis of coherence, it is not enough to create a new
infrastructure (for example, new tech to find bioweapons in waste water), and it
is not enough to do new social structure (for example, new regulations). In some
sense, Skinner and Pentland are all about new infrastructure and social
structure. That’s the only thing that’s going to change us, they assert. They
get existential risk and they say, we’re going to solve it through new
infrastructure and social structure. But they’ve got no other move.

Why?

Because they are saying that there is no real story of value, so that’s not
going to work. A true story of inherent value, with its capacity to arouse
political and moral will, is what intrinsically evolves and coheres us at a new
level — but it is simply not on the table for them, so they are left only with
the totalitarian option, whether of the benign Skinnerian or more overt
Orwellian variety, to make up and impose a fictional story.

We are saying, there is value that is real — inherent to Cosmos. Value is
evolving, and it is backed by the universe. As such, there is a New Story of
Value that is real and aligned with Reality — because value is real, and one of
the values of reality is evolution so the story; the story of value evolves.

Let me give an example.

Let’s say you have an intimacy disorder between a couple.

* They’ve got to go back to their story of value, and, first, recreate their
story of value. What’s the story of value between us?
* And then, they might realize, oh, there is part of me that has been split
off. There is part of value that has been split off. We need to deepen our
story of value.
* Maybe there is a dimension of my creativity that was split off, which is part
of the value of who I am that hasn’t been on the table and hasn’t been
recognized. Let’s bring that into the story.
* Or maybe there are some really important fears of mine that haven’t been
honored, and holding them in vulnerability and authenticity is a huge value
that’s been split off. Let’s make that part of our story.

I deepen my story of intimacy by expanding the full range and depth of value
that makes up the story. And then, we tell this New Story of Value together, and
so we create a new coherence in the couple.

This is true for a couple, personally, but it is no less true collectively, for
community and society. There is always something split off.

The New Story of Value of modernity said, oh, wow, we have split off empirical
methods of information gathering, and the scientific method itself got split
off, and new ways of doing art got split off, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve got to
bring that value into the New Story. Let’s tell a New Story of Value, which is
going to create greater coherence, and new laws of science. And this story
created all of the dignities of modernity.

When we are facing a meta-crisis, at a time between stories, we need to tell a
New Story of Value because a story of value generates new coherence.

Why? Because a story of value is always a story of ErosValue.

We agree with Yuval on the need for a new story — and that a new story can
re-cohere reality. But not a fictional totalitarian propaganda story, which is
Yuval’s only choice because he had declared value and meaning to be but
delusions. We need a real story of real value backed by the universe, which is a
story of ErosValue. And Eros is always desiring deeper contact and greater
wholeness — that is to say, greater coherence. Thus, a new story of ErosValue is
naturally the inherent mechanism of the living mystery to generate new coherence
at a pivotal moment of unprecedented existential crisis.

STORY AS SUPERSTRUCTURE VERSUS STORY AS SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Now, let’s deepen it; let’s take one more step.

What is Eros? There is the interior science equation of Eros in the First
Principles and First Values book, which is core to CosmoErotic Humanism:

> Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact
> and ever greater wholeness.

What is that? Coherence. In other words, the Eros equation is an equation that
demonstrates that Reality is always seeking greater ErosValue, which means
greater coherence, deeper contact and greater wholeness.

Greater wholeness means the split off parts are now included in the story of
value, so this New Story of Value creates more coherence.

For example, la story of value in the medieval period was ethnocentric: I only
love me and my tribe. Too much is split off. I’ve got to expand to
world-centric, and then I’ve got to expand to cosmocentric and include the
animals.

Whenever something is split off, we get lost.

Or let’s say, we are so “evolutionary” that we think we are always progressing,
and we forget the very important deep value that the ancients have, and we split
that off. No, we need to include that.

Nothing can be left off the table. No one and nothing is outside of the story.
We’ve got to deepen our story of value, but it’s a story of real inherent value.

> One of the things that gets split off is in the postmodern story is the
> inherent value itself.

It is split off because the academic world and its pallid versions of value
theory dogmatically rejected the inherent nature of value, and sadly, this world
is often fearful to challenge its own anti-empirical reductive materialist
dogmas.

The reality of value is split off. It becomes just a story — not a story of
value — because value itself is seen as contrived. And if you believe there is
any meaning to your life, Harari says, it’s a delusion. If you think
value/meaning is real, it’s a fiction, it’s an imagined Reality. It’s a social
construct. You’ve split off inherent value itself from the story of value.

If you split off value itself, then it’s all just a fictional story. That’s
postmodernity’s position, well represented by Harari. That’s the position of
Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s why there is so much doublethink in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, and that’s why there is so much doublethink in Harari — because
value has been split off, so it’s just a story; and the story is fiction.

That’s the position of B.F. Skinner in Walden Two, and later in his Beyond
Freedom and Dignity, and his even later News From Nowhere, where he fictively
meets Orwell.

And that’s the position of the MIT media lab and its founder Alex Pentland, as
articulated in dozens of articles and his classic book Social Physics.

And Harari is directly in this line. He says, it’s okay, because fictional
stories will cohere reality. Fictional stories will cohere reality even if there
is nothing true in them. That is a recipe for dictatorship. That’s frightening.

That’s why there are people who are afraid that Yuval is aligning with the less
noble impulses of, let’s say, the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab, who
speak in the language of turning reality into a Skinner’s box. Yuval becomes a
little bit of their spokesperson, and people are disturbed, even if they can’t
quite work it out.

No, Yuval, you’re doing a little doublethink here. You’re telling us it’s all
about story. You’re telling us value/meaning is not real; you are echoing
postmodernity.

And then, you are saying, hey, but here is the superpower. What’s our
superpower? Our superpower is that we can cohere reality by fictional stories,
or what you are also refer to as “nonsense” stories.

And if there is a problem in Reality — he says this in all of his books — here’s
the human superpower: We can just tell a new fictional story of value and
meaning, and that story which will generate new cooperation.

The human superpower is: people need stories, even if they’re fictional stories,
in order to cooperate. But they can change the way they cooperate by changing
the stories they believe. That’s why we are far more powerful than ants. We can
change our fictional story, and impose it on Reality, and cohere Reality through
a new fictional story.

Welcome to Orwellian totalitarianism, or Skinnerian totalitarianism — you
choose!

This is tragic. Indeed it is this emptying the world of a field of value which
has the genuine capacity to cohere us through the context of a shared story of
shared inherent value. This emptying out is underneath all of the more surface
generator functions of the existential risk; it is is the root cause for risk to
our very humanity, the death of our humanity — the failure to enact a world in
which human freedom, and human choice, and human dignity are protected.

For Yuval, a new story is actually not a New Story of Value, not a new
superstructure (Harris’s terms from Cultural Materialism). It’s a new
infrastructure, a new social structure. We are saying, no, story is a form of
superstructure . It’s a strange attractor. Because real value allures in a way
that nothing else does.

It is the playing of a beautiful symphony in a square in Italy, in which
everyone begins to resonate with the music because the musical value lives in
us. The story is not just a story, it’s a story of value. It’s a new
superstructure. When there is a crisis of coherence, we need to tell a New Story
of Value, which by its very nature is a story of ErosValue, and ErosValue
generates new coherence.

But for Yuval, for Skinner, for Orwell, there is no ErosValue. It doesn’t exist.
For them, the story is not a story of value, but a cynical manipulative
structure of a domination, that imposes a fictional story in order to create
coherence, taking advantage of this weird fluke of evolution that people weirdly
cohere around fictional stories.

That’s a recipe for the death of our humanity.

Stories are real. And value is real. And stories of value are real. Indeed,
evolving stories of value are the ontological structure of an evolving reality.
We have talked about this ontology of stories in some depth in prior
conversations here in One Mountain.

Stories generate coherence because God loves stories. When I say God loves
stories, I mean stories are the nature of Reality. Reality is not merely its. It
is bits of value, and particularly bits of storied value, all the way down the
evolutionary chain, that generate its. Reality is stories. And it’s all story,
all the way up and all the way down. That’s what we’re going to talk about next
week.

This is Part 3 of a series critique of Yuval Harari. Read Part 1 HERE , Part 2
HERE

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415 — Why Yuval Harari Got it So Wrong, Part 2: The Eternal Tao is the Evolving
Tao

415 — WHY YUVAL HARARI GOT IT SO WRONG, PART 2: THE ETERNAL TAO IS THE EVOLVING
TAO

Elena Maslova-Levin. Shakespeare Sonnet 59: If there be nothing new…

CENTRAL TO THE NEW STORY OF VALUE IS THE REALIZATION THAT THE ETERNAL TAO IS THE
EVOLVING TAO, ETERNITY AND EVOLUTION ARE NOT IN CONTRADICTION.

Dr. Marc Gafni

Published in

Office for the Future

·
32 min read
·
Sep 27, 2024

Listen

Summary: As we continue this series of talks about the postmodern position
expressed by Yuval Harari, this episode focuses on the question of Where: What
is the nature of the Universe we live in? And, as a subset of the question,
Where are we in the story?

Marc Gafni and Yuval Harari agree on the latter question (we are at a moment of
meta-crisis and existential risk to the species), but fundamentally disagree on
the former. Harari’s claim that we live in a Universe devoid of meaning and
value deceptively hijacks the authority of science, even though there is no
empirical evidence supporting this claim (in fact, science doesn’t even address
this question). As such, it is a dogmatic, fundamentalist claim, in
contradiction with actual empirical evidence (some of which is briefly discussed
in the episode). More than that, this dogmatic position undermines our ability
to respond to the meta-crisis, which is impossible without a new story of value.

Central to the new story of value is the realization that the eternal Tao is the
evolving Tao, that is, eternity and evolution are not in contradiction; indeed,
eternity discloses itself as a field of evolution. As an example of the real,
deep, non-dogmatic conversation that needs to happen for any meaningful response
to the existential risk to be possible, Marc Gafni explores a recent book by
Baoshan Ma, a major Taoist scholar, and shows how the seeming contradiction
between the Field and the individuated self (central to the surface conflict
between the East and the West) is resolved in the concept of Uniqueness and the
realization of Unique Self.

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THE GREAT QUESTION OF WHERE

We said last week that, in some sense, we are claiming importance (something
you’re not allowed to do in the postmodern world).

We are saying, this matters — this coming together every week in One Mountain,
Many Paths to recognize where we are in Reality in this moment, to be real, to
get real about Reality.

* Where are we?
* What’s the nature of the world we live in?
* What are the ground rules of the world, or does the world have ground rules?

Based on a very deep reading of science, we affirm that

> the world has a set of First Principles and First Values; and that those First
> Principles and First Values are structural to Reality.

They are plotlines of Cosmos. That’s a very big deal.

As a subset of this question of Where, we ask,

* Where are we along the way? Where are we in the story?

Paradoxically, what Yuval Harari and I agree on deeply is that we are facing
existential risk — that we are facing a meta-crisis. At least in terms of some
major issues like artificial intelligence, we are reading some of the same
sources. We are talking to some of the same people. And we agree that there is a
meta-crisis, which emerges from the exponentialized and widely distributed
nature of technologies. From my perspective, that’s one major vector, perhaps
the primary one. Yuval and I probably agree that that’s the primary one, which
challenges Reality with collapse.

It’s a big deal. That’s a big agreement. We agree on the subset question of
where.

But we differ on something unimaginably profound; and the difference between us
is that I am right and he is wrong. This is not a place for multiple
perspectives, which are all equal. They are not. Yuval is wrong.

Now, along the way to being wrong, he says lots of right things, but ultimately,
his position is wrong because it is a dogmatic religious fundamentalist
position. Yuval adopts a dogmatic religious fundamentalist position that there
is no value in the world. His answer to the primary question of Where? is:

* We live in a world where, as far as we can tell, human life has absolutely no
meaning.

We saw it last week, we listened to a quote from Sapiens (one of Yuval’s early
books), in which he said it quite clearly. Humans are the outcome of blind
evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not
part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow,
the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we
can tell, human subjectivity — meaning love, loyalty, value, all of it —
wouldn’t be missed. It doesn’t matter. Hence, any meaning that people ascribe to
their lives is an illusion.

That’s his answer to the question of Where.

That’s a dogma. That is a religious fundamentalist dogma.

He uses the word “scientific,” but there is no scientific evidence which points
in that direction.

Science doesn’t actually address this question of interior meaning, which Yuval
knows very well. He is making what Walter Kaufmann calls a gerrymandering move.
Gerrymandering in politics is when you redraw the lines of a political district
in order to ensure a particular outcome in elections. Walter Kaufmann, the great
scholar of existential thought at Columbia, talks about religious gerrymandering
or philosophical gerrymandering. It is when you inappropriately borrow or redraw
lines of conversation to come to a particular conclusion, or you draw authority
illegitimately, in a deceptive way.

In the paragraph I just referred to, Yuval slips in the words surreptitiously.
He slips in the words, ‘as far as we can tell’, ‘from a purely scientific
viewpoint.’ But it’s the most deceptive thing you could possibly write. From a
purely scientific viewpoint, Reality has no meaning — but science is not
addressing meaning! Science is not addressing the immeasurable, the priceless —
the inherent meaning structures of Reality.

Science is addressing the measurable.

Science is addressing the world of physics, and then the life world, the
biosphere. But even in the biosphere, science is not addressing meaning. And in
the world of physics, science is not addressing interiors. Science would just
talk about interiors as attraction, but science doesn’t address that issue
(which is why, for example, Yuval’s book, Sapiens, has just two paragraphs on
the world of matter and life).

And, of course, science has no way to address the world of the interior human
mind. Science is quantifying. Science moved, around the time of the Renaissance,
from the time of Aristotle, when science classified, to the modern world of
Kepler and Galileo — from classification to measurement. But value is about the
immeasurable, so to say at the beginning of this paragraph ‘from a purely
scientific viewpoint’ is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst.

And Yuval, my brother, you know that.

We completely agree with our brother Yuval that we are facing existential risk.
In terms of where we are in the story — the subset of the great Where? question
— we are facing a genuine existential risk threat to our species.

For the first time, we have a global civilization, but:

1. All local civilizations have fallen, but we haven’t solved any of their
challenges.
2. We have exponential technologies.
3. These technologies are being weaponized.
4. We have no coherent way to address those challenges, because we have no
global coordination and no global coherence.
5. Those exponential technologies are available to widely distributed sets of
actors, which was never true before.

I’ll stop at five. I could go to twenty, and I have before, we’ve talked about
this before. But you get the idea. We completely agree on that. We agree on the
where in the subset question, but not on the where in the primary question — the
Universe story.

SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR THE REALNESS OF LOVE

I want to make it very clear that Yuval’s position is dogmatic. It’s a dogmatic
fundamentalist position. Let’s call out dogmatic fundamentalism for what it is.
It needs to be done.

It is a dogmatic claim.

This claim —

* that the world is essentially valueless,
* that meaning doesn’t matter,
* that human subjectivity (a.k.a. love), is utterly contrived,
* that it would not be missed in the universe, has no meaning, has no value —

is not a claim you could seriously make looking a child in the eye, and you
never would.

You would actually know in your interior that you are doing something
fundamentally destructive. You would feel the cruelty of making that claim to a
child. You would feel that cruelty because you would understand, you would know
that this is going to violate something in the child.

What attachment theory tells us is that the experience of a world in which I am
loved is essential, and it’s my early caretakers who hold that experience for
me. If I don’t get that experience from early caretakers, then I can get it
later in life. I have to recover that experience or discover it. If I can’t
recover it by going back and revisioning my relationship with my parents and
finding the love that was hidden (maybe the love wasn’t there), then I can
discover it later in life and in other forms of relationship.

The experience of being loved can be felt in other forms of relationship, and in
other qualities of being in Reality.

* I can feel loved by Reality through beauty.
* And I can feel loved by Reality through goodness.
* And I can feel loved by Reality through truth.
* And I can feel loved by Reality in the dance of sexing at its best, when I’m
licked, and sucked, and held, and caressed in such a way that I actually
experience that my need is my beloved’s allurement.

Just like a baby experiences him or herself in relationship to the mother in the
best possible circumstances — my need is your allurement. When the mother looks
at the child and says, your need is my allurement (or the father says it in a
different way, or the caretaker), and they hold the child and they look in the
child’s eyes, the child feels welcome in the world.

I remember when my son, Zion, was born. Zion is my son and Mariana Caplan’s son,
beautiful boy. And as Zion was born, he went almost immediately to me, a few
seconds later. And I spent the first hour chanting to him, singing to him. And
then, I recorded all of the chants a little later and sent them the chants, so
he could remember those moments when he was welcomed in Reality.

Attachment theory is essentially a scientific documenting of the fact that if a
child doesn’t experience that love — what Yuval dismisses as meaningless human
subjectivity — if a child doesn’t experience that love, the child’s life falls
apart. It has been shown through longitudinal studies of the last 50 years,
which began with Bowlby’s epic monumental Separation and Loss, which he wrote
after World War II, and continued into Mary Ainsworth’s work, and then others,
Kohat, Fairburn, Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, et cetera.

When the child is not held in the arms of welcoming love, even if the child has
all of their survival needs met — they have food and clothing, and they are in a
warm place, and they are getting right linguistic training — but they are not
experiencing the fragrance of love, their life collapses, psychologically and
physically. Rates of suicide go way up. Rates of addiction go way up. Rates of
abuse go way up. Rates of loneliness go way up. Rates of mental collapse go way
up in a plethora of studies.

Now, why would that be true?

If the world is merely a survival world, and survival is understood to be simply
mechanical (which it’s not; survival itself is a value, it’s the value of life),
there would be no need for that, would there? If the Universe wasn’t a love
story, there would be no need to be embraced by my caretaker in mad love — and
there would be no empirical evidence that my life breaks down if that doesn’t
happen.

The only reason that I need that so desperately is because I need to feel at
home in the world. Because the world is a CosmoErotic Universe, because the
Universe is a Love Story, because Reality is Eros — and my early caretaker
represents the Universe to me. If my early caretaker is not attuned to me, if I
can use the classical word, and doesn’t know how to soothe me, doesn’t know how
to hold me in a place where I feel welcome in the universe, then my entire
interior collapses.

Yuval’s assertion that human subjectivity, a.k.a. love, is blind, and that the
universe is blind and empty, violates our actual scientific, empirical knowledge
of the universe —

* One, the evidence from attachment theory, which is one of the most important
advances in science.
* Secondly, it also violates the entire inherent sense of evolutionary forces,
which have a dimension of freedom and a dimension of randomness in them, but
their randomness exists in the context of a larger movement, which goes from
quarks to culture, from mud to Mozart, from bacteria to Bach, from dirt to
Dostoevsky, from slime to Shakespeare. It’s a very, very coherent, profoundly
coherent, intimate movement. It’s the progressive deepening of intimacies
within this dimension of Reality.

Of course, there is also an enormous amount of information that points to this
dimension of Reality not being the entire Reality, but just one dimension in a
multidimensional Reality; but let’s put that aside.

I just want to understand with you that this claim that Yuval is making, falsely
hijacking science as evidence, is demagoguery. It’s pure demagoguery. It’s pure
religious fundamentalism.

THE ACADEMIC CONSENSUS OF MEANINGLESS REALITY IS PROFOUNDLY WRONG

As I said last week, and I affirm it, I look forward to having dinner with
Yuval. I am not demonizing Yuval. People ask, is Yuval operating in bad faith? I
have no idea what faith Yuval is operating in, but I assume it’s good faith. I
assume he is a good man.

I am not interested in Yuval Harari as a philosopher because he is not a
philosopher. Yuval is a historian. His early work is on a very narrow, but
fascinating history, Renaissance Military Memoirs and Special Operations in the
Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550. I think he did a fantastic job on this. When, Yuval,
you go from being a particular historian to a generalist historian, that’s also
okay. But not it’s not okay when you go from there to making incredibly shoddy
philosophical claims.

Yes, I understand they represent the consensus of the legacy academic
institutions, and you are voicing that consensus — but that consensus is
fundamentally incorrect. It’s a dogmatic, fundamentalist, reductive materialism,
which was in vogue for a period of time, but shouldn’t be anymore. It was in
vogue because it was a rebellion against the overreaches of the broken stories
of the classical religious fundamentalisms. We both understand that together,
Yuval.

But that story is ultimately inaccurate. You can’t look at a child and say, Love
is not real, because it violates the child’s essence. And you know that. You can
feel that in your body. You don’t look at your beloved and say, I’m loving you,
but love is not real. Now, you might be able to get away with it with your
beloved when you are 50 or 40 or 30, because there is some kind of existential
play in it. I get that — but you can’t say it to a child. That’s what the
attachment theory is saying.

All I have been talking about is in response to the question of Where?

Where are we?

Yuval says we are in an empty, reductive, materialist, meaningless world in
which human subjectivity — love — matters not one iota. It’s all made up. There
is no meaning.

No, no, no. That’s a dogmatic, fundamentalist, religious claim, which virtually
every system of interior science that’s ever been developed disagrees with and
counters, based on an enormous amount of empirical information.

Now, Yuval would say that many of those systems and their exterior expressions
violated what we think is good today. Well, that’s true — but that means that
you’re affirming there is something that’s good.

Yes, the religions overreached. They told stories that were often fictitious in
their exteriors. The surface structures of the religion were often fictitious
stories, which, at particular moments in time, wrought enormous destruction.
Just like the scientific stories of the 20th century created the technologies
and the philosophies that led to more people killed in the 20th century than in
any other human century, and to higher levels of abject human brutality.

Both science and religion have enormous shadows.

But clearly, Reality is trying to get someplace. Clearly, there is an evolution
of love. Clearly, love is not static.

This notion —

* that Reality is Value,
* that we live in a universe overflowing with meaning;
* that we live in a world overflowing with beauty;
* that we live in a world that’s overflowing with goodness;
* that we live in a world that’s overflowing with truth;
* that there is a plentitude of Eros — Reality is Eros all the way up and all
the way down —

evokes the question: Why, then, is there suffering and pain in the world?

In about six-seven weeks, we are going to spend a couple of weeks talking about
suffering and pain. That’s going to be a critically important conversation. But
just to say one sentence:

* If Reality were not Eros,
* if Reality were not an Intimate Universe,
* if Reality were, as Yuval suggests, completely empty and meaninglessness —

then there would be no reason to be outraged by suffering and pain, because why
would Reality be any different?

That’s the paradox.

The paradox is: if we live in a meaningless void, well, why shouldn’t three
million people be killed on the border of what is today Pakistan and India? Why
shouldn’t children have their heads bashed into walls by fanatic human beings
driven to the edge of their frenzies?

Why shouldn’t that happen?

Of course that happens. Human beings sometimes get caught in bad stories, they
are reduced to their basest instincts, just like chimps do on a bad day, and
babies’ heads are smashed open.

Why is that a problem?

And it is a problem. We are outraged by it. It’s a violation of everything we,
in our deepest interior, hold dear.

Why? Why?

Because we hold this deep understanding that Reality is meaningful, and fairness
is a quality of Reality, and justice needs to emerge, and goodness, truth, and
beauty are the nature of Reality, and we live in an Intimate Universe, and evil
is a violation of intimacy.

The point I’ve been slowly weaving our way to is that Reality is filled with
First Principles and First Values, that Reality is not empty. This notion is
actually a universal notion, and if we don’t approach the world through that
understanding, we can’t even begin to create a universal grammar of value. And
if we can’t create a universal grammar of value, then we can’t have global
coordination in response to the global challenges of existential risk. We’ll
return to this point next week.

HUMAN INTENTIONS COULD BE COSMOLOGICAL

There is a book written by Xi’s brother-in-law. Xi is the head of China, one of
the smartest and one of the greatest violators of human rights in the world
today. And yet, the way to approach him — and we haven’t gotten there yet,
because that conversation hasn’t happened — is to invite him into a universal
grammar of value which holds him accountable. And that has to happen through his
own sources.

His brother-in-law, Ma, Baoshan Ma, wrote a book, one of many that he has
written, called Cosmology and Logic in the Dao of Changes, which I’m reading
now. He is talking about Taoism. I am going to read you something which is going
to blow your mind. When you read this, you’ll think, huh, that is exactly what
we’re saying in First Principles and First Values. He is not arguing Yuval’s
position (= Reality is empty and meaningless), and yet, the bridge hasn’t yet
been drawn to his brother-in-law. How to draw that bridge is a very important
question, but I want to bracket it for now.

But let us hear his answer to the question of Where, Taoism’s answer to the
question of Where, at least based on a set of texts interpreted by the leader of
China’s brother-in-law, who is a major Taoist scholar.

This is written by an essayist who is the translator, and he is summarizing some
of what Ma says in the book. He writes about Ma’s insistence on the continuity
of mind and events.

What he means by the continuity of mind and events is exactly what we call the
continuity of value in the Cosmos —

* my mind is not separate from the Cosmos;
* my mind participates in the Cosmos;
* my mind participates in the Field of Cosmos.

My mind is in continuous participation with Reality and with events in Reality.

It’s not the old fundamentalist creation story of a creator God who is out of
Cosmos, who is making shit up, and is creating me in order for me to be obedient
to him or her, for some odd reason that we can’t quite figure out, and God is in
need of deep therapy, and so are we all, because we live in an irrational,
slightly sadistic, and sinister Cosmos. No, no, no. Actually, we are
co-extensive with Cosmos. We are participatory in Cosmos. It is a participatory
Universe.

That’s exactly the way Ma is reading Taoism. Ma insists on the continuity of
mind and events, and this is the continuity of heaven in human beings.

Just listen to this next sentence:

> Human intentions could be cosmological once they understand the continuity of
> mind and events, which is counter to the common Western belief that humans
> could be the master or conqueror of nature. The Chinese ancient wisdom of the
> continuity of humans and Cosmos is a perspective describing the real existence
> of humans in the Cosmos.

What he is saying is the exact same thing that the Solomon wisdom says. Taoism
is saying that if I set my intention, my intention participates, changes, and
shapes Cosmos.

Wow!

We call that, in the Solomon wisdom, LeShem Yichud ‘for the sake of intimate
communion.’ For every action I do, I have an intention. My intention is LeShem
Yichud, for the sake of the union, of the erotic union, Kudsha BerichHu
U-She-Chin-Tei, the two unique qualities of masculine and feminine that exist in
Cosmos. This doesn’t mean masculine and feminine in a gendered sense. It’s what
Luria calls lines and circles, which begin from the first nanoseconds after the
Big Bang. Human beings participate in the Field of Cosmos. The human intention
could be cosmological. We can engage, we participate in Cosmos.

Now, does Taoism have an idea we can actually change? I think that idea is
implicit in Taoism, but I am not going to have a Taoist scholarly conversation
now.

THE BEGINNING OF A UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR OF VALUE

Yuval, get over your knee jerk rebellion against the Israeli religious
establishment. It is a little bit of a mess, I understand. I lived there for 20
years. I was in that system. I understand that you have a legitimate and
important critique, which I spent two decades expressing. We share that
critique.

Yes, you and I both understand, Yuval, that Voltaire, bringing modernity into
existence, cried out, Remember the cruelties! Yes, we understand the overreaches
and the tragedies wrought by religion, but those are equally wrought by science.
Don’t have your conclusion be this unimaginably superficial dogmatic
fundamentalist thinking about meaning in the world, which is but an echo of
classical postmodernism meeting Buddhism in a particular way.

That meeting between postmodernism and Buddhism happens all the time. You are
reflecting a common position, which is superficial in an unimaginable way. The
opposite of the holy is not the profane. The opposite of the holy is the
superficial. So, brother, we can do better than this.

This notion that Reality is a Field of Value in which we participate is not some
old religious position you need to rebel against. This is the basic structural
understanding of Reality held by the Solomon wisdom at its best, and held by
Taoism at its best.

We can do better, brother.

Let me keep reading:

> In this perspective of the continuity of mind and events, this would be very
> helpful in assisting, writes Ma, the Western understanding of traditional
> Chinese wisdom.
>
> Human spiritual participation illuminates the Cosmos. And it’s only through
> the minute changes of human intentions that the benevolent and creative nature
> of the Cosmos can reveal itself to human beings. Accordingly, human beings
> celebrate being the co-participants flourishing in the living spiritual and
> mystical Cosmos.

I’ve been saying this, in one way or the other, reflecting the Solomon
tradition, for the last 25 years. I had no idea that Xi’s brother-in-law, Ma,
was reading Taoism in the same way. And he is a very, very good reader of
Taoism.

You begin to see what we are calling a Universal Grammar of Value.

So, Yuval, when you assert in your book, deceptively hijacking the authority of
science, that the human world is empty and meaningless, devoid of any fullness,
you are actually going against the subtlest and most discerning minds in every
generation in history.

And you are saying it as though it were obvious. Wow! What a dogmatic and
arrogant claim! Don’t parrot, man! You’re smart. You’re deep. You’re beautiful.
Give us your best. Give us your deepest thinking.

Here is the next paragraph (Ma is asking, why does this matter?)

> As for the application of this revival of ancient Chinese wisdom in modern
> ordinary lives, the Chinese social pattern should follow the Tao of heaven.
> The structure of society comes after following the eternal patterns of the
> Cosmos.

Wow! He understands that politics and metaphysics need to be linked. But, of
course, that position requires another deeper structure. He could very easily
fall into the Aquinas trap, which is: politics has to follow the eternal
structure of Cosmos — objective and unchanging; but this actually violates the
structure of Cosmos, which is evolving.

In other words, the danger here is to adopt Taoism as a religious fig leaf for a
particular Chinese political position, which claims the authority of eternity
but freezes value at a particular moment in time, and doesn’t not allow it to
follow its own inherent Eros, which is to evolve.

THE ETERNAL TAO IS THE EVOLVING TAO

When we wrote (when David J. Temple wrote) in First Principles and First Values,
that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao (p. 159), I was responding to my
readings of Taoism.

Ma has to be careful not to fall into a position that the 10,000 things emerging
from the Tao (= the structure of society) should be subordinate to a dogmatic
interpretation of the eternal Tao, which ignores and rejects evolution. The
eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, and the relationship between eternity and
evolution is critical.

The reason postmodernism says that it’s all made up and there is no real value
is because they are rebelling against all the religions, which said that value
is eternal and unchanging.

That’s what Aquinas said: Value is eternal and unchanging.

That’s not true. Value is eternal, but eternal doesn’t mean everlasting and
unchanging. Eternal doesn’t mean everlasting time.

Eternity is that which is beneath time and space.
Eternity is the sunyata, the deep ground, or the Tao, or the Field of Value,
which incepts Cosmos. It’s the inherent structure of value, which is beneath
time and space.

This is why, when Cosmos appears, it has an entire Field of Value already in
place, which expresses itself

* as mathematical value,
* as subatomic value,
* as musical value,
* and as the nascent forms of moral value.

When separate parts come together to form a larger whole, to create new
intimacies, while respecting the integrity of the individual parts, it means you
have a Field of Value in place. And this is exactly how subatomic particles come
together to form an atom.

Value means there is a particular quality which Cosmos desires, which is an
Ought of Cosmos, something that’s a good result, a result that affirms life.
That’s why protons and neutrons come together with electrons. Those are unique
values. They come together, they form a unique whole, which is a new unique
value, which then generates ever more wholeness, ever more value.

That’s in the structure of Cosmos itself.

But this structure of Cosmos, this eternal structure, is not eternal as in
‘unchanging.’ Reality doesn’t stop at hydrogen. If Cosmos was an unchanging
Cosmos, there would be no manifestation, there would be no, as Aristotle would
say, sub-lunar sphere. Said simply, you and I wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be
changing, we wouldn’t be growing, we wouldn’t be transforming, we wouldn’t be
challenged.

The reality is that Infinity desires finitude — that Infinite Eternal actually
desired to manifest finitude.

Divinity didn’t stop being eternal because Divinity manifested the world. The
world is a change, the world is something new. No, eternity means the Ground of
Value, the Ground of Infinite Intimacy.

The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. The God that Yuval rejects, I
reject. We both reject the God that tells people what kind of fashion to wear,
or the God that says only this people is chosen, and those people should be
killed. Yuval, we both reject the same God.

But the God who is the Infinite Intimate, the Infinity desiring Intimacy, the
Infinity desiring more value, the God that manifests Cosmos, this Ground of
Value — this eternal God is not eternal in the sense of being everlasting and
unchanging. It is the ground underneath spacetime. It is ever always already
present, and it infuses all spacetime. That’s eternity.

Eternity evolves.
Huh! How do you know? Well, here we are.

Eternity discloses itself as a Field of Evolution.

It’s beautiful.

THE SPARKS OF LIGHT IN THE BROKEN VESSELS

Let’s go back to Ma:

> As for the application of this revival of ancient Chinese wisdom to modern
> ordinary lives in China, the Chinese social pattern should follow the Tao of
> heaven, and the structure of society comes after following the eternal
> patterns of Cosmos.

The ancient Chinese wisdom is that there is a Tao, that there is — in my reading
of the Tao — the Field of Value. It’s a very precise read. Those eternal
patterns of Cosmos, my friend Ma, are eternal and evolving. And you cannot, my
friend Ma and your brother-in-law Xi, you cannot freeze-frame eternity at a
particular historical time and claim, Oh, okay, we’re done. End of story, and
then use that as a cover for brutal totalitarianism that violates human rights,
and human dignity, and love.

You’ve got to be aware: Just like Christendom can make that move, Taoism can
make that move. Just like Shiite Islam or degraded versions of Sunni Islam —
Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis in Yemen — can make that move, so Taoism can. Taoism
can make that move as well.

Having said that, the realization — this move by China and by Xi’s
brother-in-law to try and ground China in the Field of Value — is enormously
important because once we are in the Field of Value, now we are in a
conversation.

Now, let’s talk about eternity that’s evolving Tao.
Now, let’s look at Taoist texts.
Now, we can begin to articulate together a grammar of value.

Ma says,

> .. the current westernization of Chinese society seems to have changed the
> societal structure away from the non-individuated person.

What he’s saying is: The Tao is about the Field, and it stands against
individuation; it stands against the individual. Now, that’s a particular
reading of the Tao, and there is some truth in some dimensions of that reading,
but of course there are other texts that go the other way.

What he is trying to do is adopt the Tao as support for the non-individuated
person. And he says, it’s not appropriate culturally to strengthen the unique
individual. He is standing against uniqueness. He is standing against the
dignity of the individual in a particular way. Instead, he says, Chinese society
should strengthen the traditional value system, which can be traced back to its
ancient cosmological roots as the Tao of heaven.

Great. So, here we’ve got a Field of Value. Exactly the opposite, Yuval, of what
you’re saying. And we can critique this vision of eternity, because eternity
doesn’t mean unchanging.

Yuval, whenever you read eternity, you actually caricature eternity, as though
it means unchanging, and you contrast it with evolution. That’s a mistake.
Actually, the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao. We can have eternity and
evolution that live together. Eternity means the ground of value.

We need to go back and liberate the sparks from the broken vessels.

Religion created vessels for value. Premodernity was filled with vessels for
value called religions. All those vessels competed with each other. They each
thought they had an exclusive claim to truth. Along came the new revelations of
the sciences and shattered the vessels. That’s what happened in the Renaissance
and post-Renaissance. The vessels shattered. The vessels broke. Religion
collapsed. The center of society collapsed. The old structures collapsed.

They collapsed legitimately. They collapsed just like in the great cosmological
vision of the Solomon wisdom, in which the vessels shatter. They collapsed
because of the intensity of light — new scientific knowledge, new understandings
of human rights, new understandings of third-person perspective.

The light shatters the vessels, but then you have these broken vessels, in the
cosmological image of the Solomon wisdom, and in each one of the broken vessels,
there is a spark of light. Each one of the great traditions is a broken vessel,
and the spark of light is the realization of the inherent value structure of
Cosmos. Those sparks of light need to be liberated. What the master — the
prophetic voice — has to do is — and we need to be that prophetic voice
together, we need to be David J. Temple together — we need to liberate the
sparks from the broken vessels.

To say it in a different version of the vernacular, we shouldn’t throw out the
baby with the bathwater. The dirty bathwater, throw out, but don’t throw out the
baby, which is the Field of Value itself. And for that, we need to realize that
the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao.

HUMAN BEINGS PARTICIPATE IN THE FIELD OF VALUE

The translator, this essayist I’m reading, says, Ma’s contribution is returning
China to the cosmology of the Tao of changes, which is the return to the
original ontological thinking of Chinese philosophy.

Ma’s understanding of Qi, the vital force which I would call Eros, is more
relevant to pre-heaven existence, which is pure and pristine. When Qi manifests
with a normal phenomenon, when Eros enters into the world, and diverse phenomena
and events come into being, then what emerges are Ma’s five onto-generative
beings. Ma describes a Field of onto-generative beings.

What is ‘onto-generative being’? Value.

Onto-generative-beings are First Principles and First Values.

Ma’s five onto-generative-beings become different forms within the evolution of
Qi.

All of a sudden, we see that Ma, who seemed to be talking about unchanging
eternal, is beginning to talk about the evolution of Qi. He is beginning to move
towards this notion that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, but he would say,
the eternal Qi is the evolving Qi. The eternal Eros is the evolving Eros.

Ma’s five onto-generative beings become different forms within the evolution of
Qi, or Eros, which is alive with cosmological consciousness within which human
beings participate.

This is the Eros of the Divine, in a somewhat different form. But it’s not
describing an empty universe. Now listen to this sentence:

> It’s the evolution of Qi which is alive with cosmological consciousness,
> within which humans can participate and complete as part of cosmological human
> continuum.

There is this notion that the present moment is eternity, which is absolutely
true. That’s absolutely right. There is an experience, in the present moment, of
full eternity, and anyone who has done real practice has experienced that. There
is an eternity that resides in the moment. In the Tree of Life in the Solomon
wisdom, it’s called netzach.

Remember the song, anyone, If I Could Put Time in a Bottle? There is an eternity
that resides in the moment. It’s beyond time and beyond space, it’s eternal.
There is an eternity like that. That is the ground, that’s the Tao which is
beneath the spacetime continuum.

And then, that eternity discloses itself, paradoxically, in evolution.

If I didn’t say that evolution flows from eternity, I would be a complete
dualist. I would be saying that —

* there is a world of divine sacred eternity,
* and then there is a world without divine sacred eternity, a world that’s
actually empty of divine sacred eternity, which is exactly what Harari is
saying, that the world is empty.

But there is this realization of the Ground of Value, this eternal Field of
Value; and we know this eternal Field of Value because it lives in us.

We just mentioned the attachment theory earlier in our conversation. We said,
can you look in a baby’s eye, can you look in a three-year-old’s eye and say,

* I love you, I love you, I love you, I’m holding you. You’re welcome. But that
welcome is just a story, just so you know. And it’s not real. It’s not really
real.
* Why are you telling me that, mother? Why are you telling me that?

It destroys the child because the child participates in the Field of Value —
that’s exactly what Ma, citing Buddhism, is saying. But it’s also the
fundamental realization of the the Solomon wisdom, which says that every human
being is Chelek Eloha Mi’ma’al mamash, an ontogenetic participatory expression
of eternal value. Literally, ontologically, I participate in the Field.

Now, Ma says, it’s all about the Field and not about the individual. And to
participate in the Field, I’ve got to give up my individuality, or at least
large parts of it, which is very close to classical Theravada, and Mahayana
Buddhism, and to a lot of Vajrayana.

That’s a huge mistake.

The mistake of the Eastern traditions, and of certain Western Hasidic and
mystical Christian traditions as well, is that they got the Reality of the Field
of Value and they thought that you need to stand against separation. They were
right about it. You’ve got to stand against separation. Therefore, they would
say things like Ma says in this book, which is the goal is the non-individuated
person. The goal is the anti-individual because your individuality is your
separation. It separates you from the Field.

It’s not actually right. It’s not right empirically. It’s not right
scientifically in terms of evolutionary science; it’s also not right in terms of
interior science.

What I am trying to do is, what we are trying to do, what David J Temple is
trying to do, what we are trying to do together is to crack open the Field and
to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture. We are going to make
that move right now.

INDIVIDUATION IS NOT SEPARATION, BUT UNIQUENESS

In the next evolution of the source code, we understand that we need to stand
against separation.

Ma is correct in his reading of Taoism. We need to stand against separation, but
that doesn’t mean that we get to this place of what he calls the
non-individuated being. That’s not correct. That is a wrong conclusion.

What we actually get to is higher individuation beyond ego.

* We stand against separateness that says I am merely a separate self.
* We realize that I am part of the Tao. I am part of the Field. We call that
True Self. True Self is the Tao, the Field or the Field of Value.
* And then, I realize that I am Unique Self. I am an irreducibly unique
expression of the onto-generative being-ness that lives in me, uniquely in
me, as me and through me that never was, is, or will be other than through
me, ever in history.

My uniqueness doesn’t separate me from the Field. It doesn’t make me separate —
and in that sense, selfish, and in that sense, degraded. No, my uniqueness is
the currency of connection.

Ma is correct in the way he portrays Western thought. He is counterposing Taoism
to it, as standing for communion and non-individuated being as a value. He makes
communion the value, but he ignores the value of uniqueness, because he mistakes
uniqueness for separateness. In other words, he is affirming the value of
communion, which is the non-individuated being in the Tao. He rejects the
Western position — correctly, because he understands the Western position (and
he is right) as affirming separateness, which is the Western mistake. It’s not
about separateness. It’s about uniqueness.

Just notice this. It’s so insanely gorgeous when you get it. This is the
evolution of the source code itself. This is, Yuval, what we need to be doing
together.

The East — Ma — makes a mistake, and he says, the value is communion, the Field,
and therefore we need non-individuated beings. He rejects individuation because
he says that individuation is separateness.

No, no, no, individuation doesn’t need to be separateness. It can be uniqueness.
I am part of the Field, but I am a unique expression of the Field. That’s the
next evolution of consciousness. That’s the next evolution of love. My Unique
Self is not just mechanical function, it’s the unique expression of the
onto-generative being, which is the Eros of Cosmos, the Qi of Cosmos living
uniquely in me, as me, and through me.

The West makes a mistake, because the West ignores communion for the sake of
autonomy and individuation. It views communion as being somehow dominating.
Communion means my value comes from the whole, which meant, in the pre-modern
world, the state, the religion, the King, et cetera. So, the Western Renaissance
said, no, no, no, forget about this communion thing. I exist. I have irreducible
dignity in and of myself.

The West said, it’s all about autonomy, which is my separate self; it’s not
about the Field.

But the West made the same mistake that Ma made. The West said, it’s all about
individuation, and individuation means separate self, separateness.

No, individuation means Unique Self. I move beyond my separate self, I recognize
that I am in the Tao, and that I am a unique discretion of the onto-generative
Field of being called the Tao. And onto-generative being, in Ma’s reading of
Taoism, means First Principle and First Value.

WE CANNOT RESPOND TO THE META-CRISIS WITHOUT A NEW STORY OF VALUE

We just brought together the two Fields of Value in the world.

We realized that there is eternal and evolving value.

We realized that the Western Renaissance, which birthed science and birthed the
individual, got something enormously right. It evolved our understanding of the
individual in the Tao. It moves us beyond a non-individuated being to the
possibility of individuation — not against the Tao, but as an expression of the
Tao.

It actually evolved Taoism’s understanding, and allowed Taoism to embrace the
empirical Reality of uniqueness. Uniqueness is what Ma would call an
onto-generative being. Ma, if you are listening, brother, your onto-generative
beings have to include uniqueness if you are taking the Qi of Reality seriously,
because Reality is the emergence of ever greater and deeper levels of
uniqueness. This is why Herbert Spencer, in his book, First Principles, in
chapter 15, talks about differentiation and integration.

Reality differentiates, it becomes unique, then uniqueness becomes the currency
of new union, the currency of connection. If you take onto-generative beings
seriously, you have to include uniqueness. If you include uniqueness, then you
have a structure to evolve Chinese society from within.

On the one hand, you hold the value of the Field, which is the Field of the Tao,
and you can hold that traditional Taoist value in a strong and beautiful sense.
And yet, as you yourself say, these onto-generative beings evolve, the Qi
evolves, and you can embrace uniqueness, not separateness. You need to turn to
the West, Ma, and say, you got lost in separateness — and yet, embrace
uniqueness.

And as you embrace uniqueness, the West has to embrace the Field.

Once we do that, this entire ridiculous, absurd Chinese-American juggernaut
race, which at this moment has the potential to destroy the world, will be over.

Yuval, my friend, this is what we need to be doing. When you just declare a
meaningless world, you are not helping the story. Let’s actually get involved in
a real conversation.

I want to invite everyone to read a book called Unique Self, which talks about
this. Yuval, I know you like scholarly publications, so, I am going to invite
you and everyone else to read the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice,
Volume 6:1, where we wrote some five or six articles on some of these
distinctions. They are really important. We’re going to be starting a course (I
think, in November). We’re going to be talking about some of these distinctions
out of the Unique Self Institute.

Okay, we have answered the question of Where.

I have tried to show two things:

* Where are we right now in the plotline of the world story? Existential risk,
meta-crisis. I agree completely with Yuval on that.
* But the deeper question is how we respond to that meta-crisis. We can only
begin that conversation by first establishing the deeper Where, the
ontological question of Where am I? What’s the nature of the Universe story?

We are inviting Yuval to move beyond the blind echo of postmodern reductionism,
which flies against the subtlest and deepest wisdom of all lineages — their
depth structures, not their surface structures, not the bad stories, not the
fictitious stories. They disagree with each other on major issues, but there is
a shared realization of a Tao, of a Field of Value. We saw it both in the
Solomon wisdom and in Taoism — in this notion of an evolving Qi, an evolving
Field of Value, an evolving Eros.

This changes everything. Our swords are out, my friends. Our swords are out. We
have to be ontological warriors, ontological activists for the sake of the
whole.

You might think, this is so irrelevant. It’s not. It’s only when we can do the
deep work to change the very source code of the story in a way that Ma and I can
come together, Solomon wisdom and Taoism can come together, and Yuval can lend
his appropriate critiques of the surface structures of the old religions — only
then can we respond to the meta-crisis.

We can’t respond to the meta-crisis without a new story of value. It can’t be
done.

We’ll talk next week about why that is true.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Value is real.
Value can be distorted.
Clarification of value is the great purpose, passion, and joy of life.
Story is real.
Story can be distorted.
Clarification of story is the great purpose, passion, and joy of life.
All stories are stories of value. Only a new story of value will
protect the trillions of unborn lives and loves that will
otherwise be lost to existential risk. So, it really matters.
And just to be clear, the claim that there is no value, that value
is not real, that all stories of value are fictions, is probably the
most dogmatic possible story of value in the history of the
world.

JOIN WEEKLY EVOLUTIONARY SENSEMAKING WITH DR. MARC GAFNI

LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online:

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Love Or Die: White Paper by Dr. Marc Gafni

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414 — Our Friend Yuval Harari Got It So Wrong & Why It Matters: Introduction

414 — OUR FRIEND YUVAL HARARI GOT IT SO WRONG & WHY IT MATTERS: INTRODUCTION

Vincent Van Gogh. Country lane with two figures. 1885.

THE POSTMODERN STORY — IF NOT REPLACED BY A NEW STORY OF VALUE — WILL BE THE
SOURCE OF OUR DEMISE.

Dr. Marc Gafni

Published in

Office for the Future

·
17 min read
·
Sep 20, 2024

Listen

Summary: This episode is an introduction to a series of talks engaging Yuval
Harari’s ideas. It is incredibly important, because his position is not just
his; his books are a pure expression of the postmodern Zeitgeist, and that’s why
they are very popular. These ideas claim to be grounded in science, but they
simply hijack the authority from mathematical equations that work to support a
made-up Universe story based on faulty assumptions. More than that, these ideas
are the sprouting seed of the meta-crisis. The postmodern story — if not
replaced by a New Story of Value — will be the source of our demise.

JOIN WEEKLY EVOLUTIONARY SENSEMAKING WITH DR. MARC GAFNI

LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online:

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THE UNBEARABLE JOY OF GRAVITAS

It sounds pretentious nowadays to say that anything is important.

In the old world, we claimed importance for so much that wasn’t important. And
one of the insidious influences of the wry skepticism of late modernity and
postmodernity (which often becomes cynicism) is that claiming anything is
important is suspect.

There is something wrong with you if you are claiming that something is
important. It’s some kind of inflation, and probably you should go back, and do
some early attachment work, and figure out what compensation you’re doing. We
have lost a sense of our own importance.

Importance means gravitas.

Gravitas means gravity.
Gravity means it’s heavy. It has weight. It’s heavy, and it matters.

There is a tragedy to heaviness, but the tragedy only comes from the fact that
life matters.

Heaviness stands against what Milan Kundera calls, famously, the unbearable
lightness of being.

There is a beautiful Hebrew word, kal. Kal means lightness. But in the sense of
kal, it’s superficial. It refuses to go deep. It’s lazy.

What prevents me from depth is usually laziness. And lazy doesn’t mean you don’t
work; you can be a workaholic and be lazy. Lazy means: I am not willing to
challenge the givens that I’ve established, which allow me to comfortably
navigate my life. I am in my comfort zone. I won’t challenge that comfort zone.
I’ve become comfortably numb (Pink Floyd), so I never let go of the old
structures.

* I never shatter the icons.
* I never become an iconoclast.
* I never become Abraham. I never set out (Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus) on
the journey to the promised land because I am trapped in my yesterdays.
* I am trapped in my winning formulas that have allowed me to get through life.
* I am trapped in my old scripts of desire that have allowed me to somehow
navigate and cover the pain and the emptiness.

I need to be able to cut through that. I need to get to depth. I need to get to
gravitas.

In gravitas, there is joy. There is great joy in gravitas: I get to the depth of
things, and it’s important.

What we are doing here is important. It really matters. It matters ultimately.
It has ultimate significance.

It would have ultimate significance even if we failed — if we were tilting at a
windmill like Don Quixote, and we failed, and we were unable to accomplish the
goal of One Mountain —

* We were not able to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture.
* We were not able to articulate the New Story, and make it part of the fabric
of the next stage of humanity.
* We were not able to birth the New Human and the New Humanity.
* We were not able, as Barbara Marx Hubbard would say, to become personal
expressions of Conscious Evolution, and therefore cause an evolutionary shift
and up-leveling, which would respond to the meta-crisis and enable us to
create not just a better tomorrow, but a tomorrow. A tomorrow where there are
human beings, who are actually being human in the best, and most beautiful,
and most subtle, and most profound sense of the word.

Even if we failed at all of that, the attempt would be unbearably significant,
and filled with joy, and celebratory. We are celebrating even as we are
ecstatically trembling. We would make the attempt with full power, with
everything.

But I think we actually can succeed. I think we have a really good shot at this.

And what are we trying to do?

The framework for One Mountain, just in a word, is Love or Die. That’s the
framework.

It is the realization that —

* either we participate in the evolution of Love, and tell a New Story of
Value, and up-level what it means to be a human being,
* or we will, quite literally, die. We will experience the second shock of
existence — the realization of the potential death of humanity, or the death
of our humanity.

It is the realization that only a New Story of Value, a new vision of what it
means to a human being, can respond to the meta-crisis and change the vector of
history. The only way history actually changes is when a new story generates new
interior technologies, new ways of being — when our current ways of being are
about to destroy us (see What is One Mountain? What we are doing here, Part 1 &
Part 2).

* We need new ways of being.
* We need a New Story of Value from which to generate Reality.
* We need new structures of consciousness.
* We need, quite literally, to evolve the source code of culture and
consciousness.

You might think that’s ridiculous and absurd, but actually it happens at key
junctures in history (which is why we often talk about the Renaissance).

It is daunting, but it’s doable.
It’s doable if we step up and we say, “I’m going to play. I’m going to play.”

WE NEED A CRITICAL MASS OF PEOPLE TO GO FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO AMOR

By the way, if there were no meta-crisis, we would be doing the same thing.
Because we would need to live as full human beings and be in our story of
transformation, and be in our story of full realization, full potency, and full
joy, and full ethos, and full Eros.

We would be doing the same set of studies in order to live lives that were
worthy, and gorgeous, and beautiful, and not dead, and empty, and desiccated,
and broken. We would have to do that for our own personal and communal lives. We
would be writing the same Story of Value if there was no meta-crisis. The only
thing is that with the meta-crisis, this is the last chance — at least within
this iteration of the world story, within this dimension of Reality.

There are other dimensions of Reality. There is no question about that in my
heart, mind, body. But within this dimension of Reality, at this moment in
history —

* The human story will either deepen, and transform, and bloom, and we will
create the most good, true and beautiful world that we can. (We already know
that those worlds live. We can feel them in our bodies. We yearn for them
because we imagine them, and our imagination is real.)
* Or we will be lost in our myopic, business as usual, narrow lives, each of us
trying to work our lives — some of us doing New Age transformations, and
others ayahuasca journeys, and another this, and another that. And other
people will be deep in their win/lose metrics, more public prism, but
basically everyone is going to be in their own very narrow circle. We won’t
become Homo amor.

We won’t be able to have a critical mass of people that emerged as Homo amor,
like it happened in the beginning of modernity, when a critical mass of people
went from egocentric consciousness to world-centric consciousness. Now, we need
a critical mass of people to go from homo sapiens to Homo amor. If we don’t have
a critical mass of people who become Homo amor, and this doesn’t become part of
the new source code of Reality, if we don’t evolve the source code itself, we
will go down. I am quite sure of that. So, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.

This is not a dire warning, and yet it is.

We said last year, we’re not doomers. We have mad hope for the future. Hope is a
memory of the future. We are articulating a memory of the future, but we are not
deniers.

We’re not doomers. We’re not deniers. We’re talking about the dawn of a new era,
of a new story of human desire, and human possibility, and human potency. That’s
what this is about.

YUVAL HARARI IS A PURE EXPRESSION OF THE ZEITGEIST

I want to give you the context for what we are going to do in the next bunch of
weeks.

Once in a while, a person comes along who is an expression of the Zeitgeist.

They are not sharing new philosophy; they are not philosophers per se. They’re
not sharing a new set of ideas. They’re not evolving the source code. (And of
course, most people don’t evolve the source code. That’s not a critique. That’s
totally fine.)

But they become a mouthpiece, an uncontaminated reflection of what the Zeitgeist
is about.

A figure like that who has emerged over the last fifteen years is a gentleman
named Yuval Harari.

Now, Yuval and I don’t know each other. I’ve discovered recently we have a bunch
of mutual friends. My son actually took his course at Hebrew University and said
he was completely lovely. He probably watched my television show in the Middle
East when I was in the Middle East, and probably was aware of that, although I’m
not sure.

When Yuval published his first book, Sapiens, in which he is unconsciously
reflecting the late modern and postmodern Zeitgeist, he has emerged as a kind of
modern sage, which is exactly what’s so problematic. He’s an unconscious
mouthpiece of that Zeitgeist. He brings together a form of secularized Buddhism
and an extreme form of reductive scientism.

I want to really engage with you, Yuval, my friend, in the next three weeks or
so.

To begin with, I know there is an entire set of demonizing threads about Yuval
online. There is a whole thread about Yuval being an agent of the World Economic
Forum (which is portrayed as per se evil; I don’t think the World Economic Forum
is per se evil, although I think it’s extremely problematic). But Yuval is
depicted — and I understand why — as an agent of ‘the forces of Empire.’ Yuval
is identified with the legacy institutions of the world today, with Silicon
Valley and with the classical legacy structures of Western society.

In some sense, he is their myth bearer. Although he didn’t create any of the
myths, he was raised on them. They are not his field of expertise. He is not a
philosopher, but he is a very good popularizer. He is a pithy popularizer.

He was at Hebrew University. His specialty is a very narrow discipline, the art
of warfare. I’ve read about half of his doctorate, and it’s actually great. And
then, he came to teach at the university and they said, “Hey, you got to teach
the general course, the world history course,” which of course no one wants to
teach in university, because you don’t get any credit for it or you can’t really
publish from it. But Yuval is by nature more of a generalist, which is
beautiful. (I am too.) He kept doing research. He gave this very popular, and
beautiful, and great course. And his husband, Itzik Yahav, said to him, “Let’s
publish these notes.” And they did — first in Hebrew, and then it got published
in a bunch of languages, and it became a sensation in the world. And then he
published another book called Homo Deus, and another book called 21 Lessons. And
he has a book out now called Nexus.

I don’t want to fault him for the work. He is expressing the classical
assumptions of postmodernity. But I think that his assumptions — the assumptions
of postmodernity, as he articulates them — are the single most damaging,
destructive, undermining causes of future human suffering. Suffering at a level
that the suffering caused by religion, which Yuval so readily mocks, will seem
minuscule, simply because of the new technological capacities.

I want to say it clearly: all of this is not to demonize Yuval. On the web, he
gets demonized as this conspiratorial agent for world domination, who is
operating in terrible bad faith.

I don’t believe Yuval is operating in bad faith. I don’t know him in that sense.
But the issue is far more insidious if he’s not operating in bad faith, that is,
if he believes it. And his beliefs, again, are not just his — but rather what
Professor Haim Soloveitchik, who’s a great medievalist, calls uncontaminated
material. He is a naive representation of a certain current of thought, which he
doesn’t try to hide in any way, because he assumes that it’s a given, that it’s
true. So why would you hide it?

And so, it is disclosed. It is out in the open.

It is not by accident that Barack Obama says, “Wow, this is a great book.” And
Bill Gates says, “Wow, this is the big book.” And Jeff Bezos, Amazon, “This is
the big book.” And I could go on and on, and list forty or fifty major
formulators, much more than influencers, but the key pivot figures. Because he
is articulating cogently what they are already thinking.

THE POSTMODERN IDEAS ARE THE SEED OF THE META-CRISIS

Now, Yuval is dead wrong.

He is dead wrong pretty much at every level, but he is also half right.

That is to say, everything he says is exactly half right. It represents a deep
position that actually exists in the interior sciences. He would make a point
that’s half right, but then the second half imbibes the postmodern Kool-Aid, and
articulates sets of ideas that undermine the very ground that we walk on.

> These ideas are the seed, the sprouting, blooming seed of the meta-crisis.

This particular class of thinkers and popularizers are interfacing with all the
leading echelons in the world today, and policies are being formed based on
that. And these policies will, I believe, lead directly to either the death of
humanity or to the death of our humanity. Paradoxically, Yuval himself is aware
of existential risk, but doesn’t see any relationship between the postmodern
discourse that he is articulating and the existential risk.

> Yuval is telling exactly the story that will be the story that sources our
> demise.

The reason Yuval is telling the story is because he is rejecting the old
religions. There is a lot of legitimacy in that.

He is caricaturing the old religions, in part correctly, but only in part. There
are deeper strains in the old great wisdom traditions that need to be liberated
and woven together. He is also caricaturing science. He is framing the old
religions in their most shadowed, broken, destructive form — and then he is
caricaturing science in its most exalted, noble, integrity form. He is comparing
the highest vision of science with the lowest vision of religion.

There are two lines of development, religion and science; within each line,
there are different levels. What he is doing is a level/line fallacy. There are
different levels of religion — there are primitive religions, there are broken
forms of religion, there is a more exalted, nobler, deeper religion. The
different levels of religion roughly correspond to different structure stages of
consciousness and developmental thought.

But there are also different levels of science —

* the medieval science, which comes from a certain structure, which did
information gathering in a particular way;
* the beginning of modern science;
* the science of late modernity and postmodernity.

There are also different levels of honesty and integrity in science. You have
scientific studies that are honest and real, but some are funded by corrupt
institutions that are seeking to commodify science for its ends. There is cherry
picking that happens in scientific studies all the time. There is distortion of
data that happens all the time. Anyone who lives in science knows that. But
science in general is making this claim of pristine objectivity, while religion
is darkened, medieval, regressive blackness.

Religion has low levels and high levels, and science has low levels and high
levels. But Harari is comparing the highest level of one line (science) to the
lowest level of the other (religion). That’s a level/line fallacy.

Yuval might say, if he was here now, “Well, what do you mean? Religion has
caused all of this damage. Religion is a disaster, it’s caused all these
terrible religious wars. It’s a horror.”

Okay, that’s true. Religion has caused many, many religious wars. Whether they
were caused by religion, or religion was a guise for ethnocentric nationalism is
unclear. Did Genghis Khan kill 50 million people for religious reasons? But
sometimes religion was not just a fig leaf, but the motivational architecture of
some wars. That’s absolutely true.

Yuval might say, “Well, science has brought us all these good things, and
religion has done this terrible thing.”

I don’t think that’s true. All of the wars of the 20th century, for example,
required the internal-combustion engine. All the wars of the 20th century were
fought on the platform of new technologies. We were not fighting with the
muskets of the Civil War. We certainly weren’t fighting with the weaponry of the
famous thirty years war centuries ago in Europe. We weren’t fighting with the
weaponry of the opium wars in China. We were fighting with an entirely different
level of weaponry. We were fighting with the weaponry developed by a morally
neutral modern science. New kinds of weaponry of every kind, which ultimately
climax in nuclear weaponry, in 1945. And the level of death, and destruction,
and mangled bodies, and generations destroyed by these modern technologies
exponentially dwarfs all of the deaths in all the previous generations.

That’s just true. That’s science. The amount of people in the world today is
directly due to science, but you also have objectively more suffering in the
world. It’s definitely not fair to say, “Oh, religion did bad stuff, and science
is doing good stuff.” That’s ridiculous.

The line/level fallacy is just one of the fundamental fallacies in the way Yuval
impacts the world. And again, this is not about Yuval per se, so Yuval, brother,
if you’re watching, sweetness, big hug. But when you are speaking to the world,
and you are participating in forming the fabric of culture, you can’t say a lot
of things that you say. Not because they are true but shouldn’t be said, but
because they are wrong. They are based on sloppy and shoddy thinking of an
unforgivable kind. And when I say unforgivable, I don’t mean that in a harsh
way. But hey, we got to do better, my friend.

CAN YOU TELL YOUR CHILD THAT LOVING THEM IS A FICTION?

I am deeply aware this is all very abstract, so I want to play three clips.
It’ll take about six or seven minutes. I want to just open up the space, and
we’ll pick up next week, but I want you to get a sense of the problems first. We
just listen deeply, and we’ll start looking at them again next week.

One more. This is not a clip. This is a very short, just one paragraph from
Yuval’s book, Sapiens.

Why is everybody buying it?
Why is that compelling?
Why has this dude sold 20 million books?

He is talking about the nature of epistemology itself. He is talking about the
nature of the real.

He has done his best. He was a wise, well-read generalist. He’s trying to gather
knowledge from every place in the world, and he basically says, “Okay, human
rights are not real.”

He is talking about the nature of Reality:

* Biological reality is real.
* Human rights are not real.

That’s a big claim. That’s a very big claim to make.
That claim is absurd. It is the sloppiest, most shoddy, bad thinking you can
imagine.

And yet, Barack Obama is saying, “Great book, everybody! Great book! This is
awesome!” Bill Gates, “Great book. I’m going to build my Gates Foundation based
on this.” Mark Zuckerberg, “This is great.” Wow!

Can you imagine if a hundred years ago a writer wrote a book that would say,
“Human rights are a fiction”?

He says, there is no meaning whatsoever to human life. It doesn’t exist. If
human subjectivity were to disappear, it would not be missed. Love. Commitment.
Loyalty. Integrity. Eros. Poignancy — all of that is essentially irrelevant.
There is no meaning to it whatsoever, and if you think your love has any meaning
at all, it’s a delusion.

It’s a great thing to tell your kids, don’t you think?

If you can’t tell this to your kids, it’s a lie. Anything that an educator can’t
share directly with children, and have it bloom the lives of children, is a lie.

We don’t need to bloom the lives of children with propaganda.
We bloom the lives of children with depth of truth.

You can’t look your children in the eye and say, me loving you is a lie, it’s a
delusion. And your living with integrity doesn’t matter. It won’t be missed one
way or the other. It’s irrelevant in the universe. If you can’t look at your
child and say that, then why are you saying it to the world so it should be
repeated to everyone?

And now you’re running a bunch of children’s books. You’re actually making an
educational move. You cannot claim, “Oh, I’m an ivory tower philosopher. I’m not
an education guy.” No, you are writing a series of children’s books; yo are
encoding this in children’s books.

What are you thinking, my friend? You want to save children from the blighted
dogmas of an ignoble religion? Well, that’s a good idea, I am with you on that,
man.

But can you look a child in the eye and tell them love is all a lie? And if you
can’t, why are you telling the world that?

YUVAL IS REFLECTING THE MAINSTREAM DOGMAS OF SCIENCE

I am going to stop here. We’re going to continue next week.

It’s not just a Hebrew University issue. Hebrew University, where Yuval teaches,
is the Israeli reflection. He is reflecting the Zeitgeist at Hebrew University.
But Hebrew University is just the Israeli subset of this culture all over the
world. The point is that this position is a universal position. This is not
Yuval’s idea. This is Yuval reflecting where the world is.

Yuval is assuming that science’s story is accurate. All the stories are not
accurate, but science’s is — because of course what he is claiming is that
science is not telling a story; it is just giving you facts.

That’s not true. That’s a lie.
Science is, on multiple levels, telling a story.

The reason why science was effective was because science made things that
worked. Mathematical equations put people on the moon. Oh, that works, so it
must be true.

Well, that tells you that the mathematical equations were saying something true,
in the sense that it was an accurate reflection of some dimension of Reality.
That’s absolutely correct.

But what science did was much more than that. Science didn’t just work out
mathematical equations. It also tells a story about the nature of Reality, and
deceptively hijacks authority from the mathematical equations that worked in
order to validate the story it is telling. For example, when science assumes
that Reality is only matter, that matter is the core of Reality and that
consciousness is just a byproduct of matter — that’s a story; it’s a made-up
story.

Yuval is reflecting the mainstream dogmas of science. He views himself as
expressing the scientific viewpoint. His view of science is that —

* science says that there is no free will;
* science says human rights are not real;
* science says human subjectivity and love itself would not be missed in the
cosmos.

Whoa! Whoa! That’s a story! Science has nothing to say about that. That’s a
story that’s told by the scientific community.

Yuval has the audacity to say all the other stories are not real, but this
story, which has no empirical validation whatsoever, is true. And the
implication is, if you don’t think that story is true, there is something wrong
with you.

He is penetrating Reality with a made-up story — a dogmatic story that’s claimed
by science, by hijacking authority from equations that work, in order to make a
storied claim about Reality.

And Yuval is saying, “That story is not to be debunked. It can’t be challenged.
But all stories are not true.”

Do you begin to get the level of unimaginable confusion?

But it’s not Yuval’s confusion. This is not about Yuval. Yuval is a helpful
window into the Zeitgeist.

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413 — Mad Love: When Madness Becomes Sanity

413 — MAD LOVE: WHEN MADNESS BECOMES SANITY

Elena Maslova-Levin. The birth of Venus.

Dr. Marc Gafni

Published in

Office for the Future

·
30 min read
·
Sep 13, 2024

Listen

Mad Love the only way we can respond to this moment of meta-crisis

Summary: What does it mean to love madly?

In this episode, we talk about three interrelated qualities of mad love. First,
a mad lover doesn’t confine their love to the narrow bounds of a particular
human relationship (however cherished and exclusive); they know that their mad
love participates in the whole; it is not mere human sentiment, but the heart of
existence itself.

Secondly, a mad lover realizes their mad love is wildly powerful; it has the
capacity to impact the whole.

And finally — and here is the rub — it actually is mad; this very knowing of
one’s own capacity to impact the whole is madness in today’s world.

This idea of madness can be better understood through the prism of three levels.
Level one is the ordinary sanity and insanity; our capacity to be in the world
as it is, to recognize and respect appropriate boundaries. At level two, we
begin to recognize that, in the insane world, sanity itself is insanity; an
excuse for corruption. Madness becomes my protest against the insanity of the
world. Greater is wisdom that comes from madness; that’s what happens at level
three, when we realize that the only true sanity is mad love — not merely as a
futile existentialist gesture, but because mad love is our true nature.

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LOVE MADLY?

There is so much we want to touch, and do, and feel today.

We are at this incredible moment, filled with portent and with possibility, with
promise and with peril. We want to find our way and potentiate this moment.

We want to find our own potency, which will allow us to potentiate the moment —
to love the moment open, and to allow the moment to love us open.

In this path that diverges in the woods, we can take the path less traveled, and
we can make the difference that desperately needs to be made. The last six weeks
were a time of enormous beauty on so many levels, and enormous heartbreak on so
many levels. Part of the heartbreak was cataclysmic, and apocalyptic, and
horrific.

For example, the execution of the six Israelis in Gaza was horrific. It was a
terrible, and tragic, and senseless insanity — apocalyptic death that stands
against a culture of life — against Eros.

There were also beautiful turnings of the wheel — death which is part of life,
death which is a kiss, death which is a night between two days, which opens us
up into the new world, and the next possibility, and the next stage of the
journey. Our beloved Becca passed. She passed onto the next stage of her
journey, and we miss her dearly and deeply.

What does it mean to be a mad lover?

That’s what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about the experience of
mad love —

* mad love in politics and economics,
* mad love in the way we wake up in the morning,
* mad love in relationship,
* mad love in art,
* mad love even in war; even in war there is mad love.

What does it mean to love madly?

I began talking about Outrageous Love somewhere back in 2011. And then, when I
started studying with Kristina Kincaid, my partner, she sent me a song, which
became our song — about this quality of Outrageous Love, which Rumi called mad
love. She evoked the term mad love as one of the ways to talk about this quality
I was trying to share — this quality of Outrageous Love, which is core to
existence itself.

What does it mean to love madly?

What does that speak to?

* We don’t want to be mad. Don’t we want to be sane? Why would we want to be
mad? Who would want to be mad?
* What is this quality of Divine madness, of human madness? The place where the
human being and God meet is in this madness…
* Why is this quality of mad love the only way we can respond to this moment of
meta-crisis, which is itself a moment of madness?

It is, as one author called it, a Molochian moment. In many circles today, the
ancient Canaanite deity of Moloch is invoked to describe the systemic
underpinnings of the meta-crisis. It’s not one person. It’s not one event. It’s
a Molochian system.

The response to Moloch — who is madness in its shadow form, madness in its
anti-value form — is

* madness as an ultimate value,
* madness as a penultimate achievement,
* madness as the summit of our spirituality, the summit of our depth.

Rumi wrote a lot about mad love, and my lineage master in the Solomon lineage,
Leiner, also talks about madness. There is a beautiful text, which says greater
is light than darkness. It is a Solomon text, from the book of Ecclesiastes.

* Greater is light than darkness.
* Greater is wisdom than madness.

That is a binary split: light — dark, wisdom — madness.

Then the Zohar, the Book of Radiance comes along in the 12th or 13th century and
says, not greater is light than darkness, but greater is light that comes from
the darkness.

> Greater is wisdom that comes from the madness.

There is wisdom that emerges from the madness, and Solomon says, that’s the moon
in her fullness. By the moon, he means Eros, She, the full possibility of a new
form of governance, and a new form of economics, and a new form of relationship
between nations, and new forms of religion — all of what Solomon was looking
for. That’s called the Wisdom of Solomon, and it’s a hidden crosscurrent of
world history.

There is a wisdom of Solomon’s strata, a quality of that wisdom. You could also
call it a tantric quality, but tantra not as a particularly Eastern tradition,
not as a particularly Hebrew tradition, but as a particular way of thinking, a
quality of consciousness, a phenomenology, a way of being. It is a new way of
being — because our current way of being generates the meta-crisis. Our current
way of being is the Molochian systemic rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose
metrics that generates fragile systems that optimize for efficiency and
short-term profit instead of depth, and holding, and love, and resiliency, which
is the core source of the meta-crisis.

At its very core, we saw a very tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule dress rehearsal in
COVID, when the entire world shut down because the world had optimized for
efficiency and short-term profit — not resiliency.

The response to the madness of meta-crisis — to the madness of Moloch — is the
madness of a mad love, of Outrageous Love.

We are going to talk about what that means. I want to make that real.

Are we ready to participate as mad lovers in the evolution of love in a way that
is

* so grounded, so responsible, so rigorous that it avoids all ruptures,
* but also so rapturous, so filled with celebration, so filled with joy that
every step we take, we tremble with joy, and we tremble with potency, and we
tremble with possibility, and we tremble with potentiation, and we tremble
with poignancy?

That’s the quality of mad love.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
The single best recapitulation of the interior sciences and the
contemporary exterior sciences is:
- Reality is constituted by mad love.
Mad love is the true real, and the true real is mad love.
Mad love is Outrageous Love.
~Dr. Marc Gafni

RUN FROM WHAT IS COMFORTABLE. FORGET SAFETY.

Rumi writes:

> Your life has been a mad gamble.
>
> Make it more so.
>
> You have lost now a hundred times running.
>
> Roll the dice a hundred and one.

It’s a beautiful text. The one who is in mad devotion to the whole — to the
Divine — is in devotion a hundred and one times. The one who is in devotion a
hundred times — that’s someone trying to be sane; it doesn’t work.

You can’t actually serve, you can’t be a devotee, you can’t be an artist at a
hundred times. Anyone who serves in devotion at the level of a hundred does not
serve, and is not devoted, and does not create art. The move between a hundred
and a hundred and one is not one extra. It’s the place of madness.

“Your life has been a mad gamble,” says Rumi, “make it more so. You have lost
now a hundred times running. Roll the dice a hundred and one.”

“I am so mad with love,” says this mad Sufi love prophet, “that mad men say to
me, be still.”

The reason I’m sharing Rumi is not because he’s a good poet, although he is, but
because Rumi was a profound realizer of the interior sciences. He headed one of
the most important formal schools of Sufism. Sufism is under attack today by
Islamic fundamentalism world over: the Shiite attack on Sufism within Iran tries
to undo the deep ground of Sufism in Iran; but even within Sunni Islam, which is
in part Sufism, there is a deep attack on Sufism. Sufism is hated by Hamas,
hated by ISIS, hated by Hezbollah.

Sufism’s spirit is alive and well in the world, and Rumi is not one person. Rumi
was part of a school that has existed for several hundred years. Hafiz was also
in that group of thousands of Sufi realizers that spoke, breathed and felt this
mad love. Run from what’s comfortable, writes Rumi. Forget safety. When we say
forget safety, we don’t mean be unsafe in some absurd way — but today, we have
created an idolatry of comfort.

> We never get to mad love, because you have to reach an optimum point of
> discomfort to experience mad love.

Mad love is maddening. It is not comfortable. People say, the opposite of pain
is pleasure, and we always say, no, the opposite of pain is comfort.

Comfort is comfortably numb (Pink Floyd). There is no place for mad love.

We have this idolatry: to get as safe as you can possibly be, to be completely
safe, no risk of any kind, to live as long as you can live, as comfortably as
you can live. Safety, longevity, and comfort are the new holy trinity — but of
course, in the end, you die. Because life is unsafe; no one gets out of life
alive.

It’s not the end of the story. Life as we know it here is but one dimension of
Reality, that’s true, but it ends. When I am not willing to recognize death as
my close friend, then I become corrupt, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray.

That’s what Rumi is writing. He is talking about this idolatry of safety. Of
course, there were ways that we weren’t safe before. In previous generations, we
needed to create safety on multiple levels. Of course, that’s sacred and good.
But within that construct of safety — of protecting your family, and the stable
structures of your life in all the ways they should be protected — “Run from
what’s comfortable,” says Rumi, “forget safety. Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long
enough. From now on, I will be mad.”

Finally, last piece — Rumi again:

> The intellectual is always showing off;
> the lover is always getting lost.
> The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning;
> the whole business of love is to drown in the sea.
> Intellectuals plan their repose;
> lovers are ashamed to rest.
> The lover is always alone,
> even surrounded with people;
> like water and oil, he remains apart.
> The man who goes to the trouble
> of giving advice to a lover
> get’s nothing. He’s mocked by passion.

What Rumi is pointing to is this sense of living life out loud and in love,
madly.

OUR LOVE LISTS ARE TOO SHORT

Couples often have a song. KK and I have a song, Truly Madly Deeply 1997, Savage
Garden song. This is our song. It’s a mad love song. We are going to do
something with the song. We are going to turn it on its head in the most mad
possible way.

It’s a gorgeous song that we love. And — in all of its stunning beauty — the
song itself is making a mistake.

What’s the mistake of the song? It’s about just the two of them.

It’s gorgeous. It’s beautiful. It’s stunning.

But our love lists are too short. That’s the first quality of mad love: Our love
lists are too short. The song personifies the contemporary move in culture. That
song should live between beloveds. That’s beautiful. We include that stunning,
unimaginable beauty.

But mad love is not mere human sentiment, as gorgeous as human sentiment is. It
participates in the Field of ErosValue. It participates in the Field of
Existence.

Mad love is not something that emerges at a particular poetic moment in human
culture —

* whether that’s in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the wild love scene there at the
very beginning,
* or whether that’s in the Arthurian tales of the medieval period,
* or whether that/s Jacob madly in love with Rachel in the canonical text,
* or whether that’s Magdalene and Jesus.

No, no, no, no. Mad love doesn’t appear as industrialization sweeps through
Europe, and individuation appears, and social mobility becomes a possibility, so
being in love becomes a new commodity.

No, no, no, mad love is not mere human sentiment.

Mad love is the heart of existence itself.

What that song is describing is not that couple, but Reality itself.

Reality itself is about the quality of allurement of mad love that demarcates
and animates Cosmos, all the way up and all the way down.

We’ve talked so many times about the love dance of Cosmos that incepts Cosmos
and plays in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang, when — if you do your
physics well — you see that there is autonomy and communion, coming close and
holding my individuation, which is what love is.

Love is not merging, and love is not fusion. Love is the dance of union. Love
is:

* We come close, and we step apart; and we come close again, and we step apart.
* We come close and we step apart, but we never look away.

That’s the Song of Songs of Solomon.

That gorgeous and beautiful song, Truly Madly Deeply, is a Song of Songs. The
lovers are looking for each other, it literally plays with the same movement
that the Song of Solomon — but the lovers can’t quite find each other. Just like
as the author of the song, Canticles, tells the story, there is a duo, these two
gorgeous men in this little band of two called Savage Garden. The garden is the
garden of Eden, and savage is: it’s hard, it’s complicated, it’s paradox, it
rips your heart apart. They are the bards, they are the minstrels of the song,
and they are looking for each other, and they find each other at the end, but
then they are going to lose each other again, and then they find each other —
but they never look away.

But that’s not just them, that’s the story of Cosmos itself.

THE MITOCHONDRIAL DANCE OF EROS IN OUR CELLS

Science has dogmatically overreached its bounds, and moved to hide that story.

For example, has anyone here ever heard of mitochondria?

Mitochondria are constantly converting energy; they are essentially the
activating force of all cells, whether it’s nerve cells, or bone cells, or skin
cells. What mitochondria are doing is, essentially, they are accessing the flow
of Eros — the flow of love between electrons and protons and neutrons. They are
accessing that proton flow. They are actually accessing the currents of Eros and
allurement which emerge from particular configurations of Eros, of union, of
intimacy. They access that movement, that yearning, that energy of allurement,
that energy of radical aliveness, that energy of Eros, and, through a very
complex process, they distribute it.

Essentially, science has lied to us.

Here is how science describes mitochondria:

> “The machinery that the mitochondria use to convert energy is called the
> electron transport chain.”

Do you get what a lie that is?

First off, it’s called machinery. It’s an electron transport chain, meaning it’s
this mechanical device, like a forklift in the Amazon warehouse or something
like that.

> “Mitochondria convert chemical energy in the form of a chemical called
> adenosine triphosphate (ATP for short). ATP is an energy currency that every
> cell in our body can use. The electron transport chain is made up of four
> complexes, which are groups of proteins.”

Do you get what’s going on here?

A protein is a configuration of Eros. It’s a particular, gorgeous configuration,
a stunning allurement, a new erotic whole. And then, there are five different
patterns of protein groups. There are these different configurations of
intimacy, and five broad groups that are dancing with each other in this
unimaginably sophisticated, dazzling dance of Eros and allurement.

They are madly at play. They are madly in love, and they are filled with value.
There is a value, and the value is life.

And the value is depth.
And the value is feeling.
And the value is, ultimately, cognition.
And the value is uniqueness.
And the value is transformation.

In other words, the movement of mitochondria is to support all of the First
Principles and First Values that we have outlined in CosmoErotic Humanism.

In the book, First Principles and First Values, we talk about the value
structures of Cosmos. Those are ErosValue structures. Mitochondria access the
flow of Eros that takes place in the electron chain and then actually draw that
Eros, absorb that Eros and distribute it through a very complex dance of Eros,
which has nothing to do with machinery.

This is not machinery, this is music. It’s not an electron transport chain —
it’s literally a mad love dance, which is unimaginably precise and unimaginably
passionate. All of the universe is constituted by that play of Eros — the play
of Eros that happens in the world of matter. That which happens in the world of
matter is driven by value; it is driven by what matters.

Matter itself is driven by value — by what matters. This entire subatomic world
is driven to create more value, more of what matters — which is more depth, and
more uniqueness, and more possibility, and, ultimately, more care, and more
cognition — all the way up the evolutionary chain. There is obviously
discontinuity (there are not a lot of therapeutic issues in the electron
community); that’s absolutely true. There are new emergences of love and Eros
all the way up the evolutionary chain; that’s absolutely true.

But it is not just discontinuity. It is not just new emergencies.

The flow of allurement, Eros, and love in the world of subatomic particles (the
physiosphere), and in the world of living organisms (the biosphere), and then in
the world of humanity (the noosphere) are inter-included. You and I are now in
the middle of this mitochondrial dance of wild mad LoveEros — in this very
second, every single one of us.

That is not mysticism. That’s the reality of our lives.

That mitochondrial structure is participating in the subatomic structure. The
flow of Eros love that lives in the world of matter is accessed, and then
intensified in its participation in the mitochondrial unfolding. The jump from
matter to life is an intensification of intimacies. Stuart Kauffman got this, in
a couple of little passages (I thought I had made it up in my own meditative
dreaming, and then I saw a bunch of very, very important scientific footnotes,
both in Levin and in Kauffman, which validated this reading).

We, human beings, are constituted by all of the subatomic world and its flows of
Eros and mad love, and all of the biological world. Just one small dimension of
the biological world, but a crucial one, is the mitochondrial dance of Eros in
every one of our cells. That’s what we are.

That’s literally our very identity; and then Eros intensifies; intimacies
deepen. There is an evolution of love. We participate in the evolution of love,
and then it emerges in us. We can become — if we actually grow up, if we
actually wake up and we begin to show up in our lives — we actually become mad
love, awake, alive in person.

The weakness of the song is that it suggests that that quality of searching,
that quality of yearning, that quality of longing exists only in that couple.
But they are actually mad love awake and alive, and their mad love itself can’t
survive if they’re only looking deeply in each other’s eyes, because mad love is
the quality of Cosmos itself.

Mad love is the heart of existence.

If I hijack mad love, and I make that a quality that’s only mine, that’s only
between the two of us — but I don’t madly love the cab driver, and I don’t madly
love the people across the world or down the street who have nothing to eat, and
I don’t madly love the gardener, and I don’t madly love the clerk at the bank
who is harried and busy and tired — I am not a mad lover

MY MAD LOVE PARTICIPATES IN THE WHOLE

The first quality of a mad lover is:

* I have an experience of my mad love being part of the whole. My mad love is
not separate from the whole.

The beginning of mad love is that I have a direct and clear experience that my
experience of mad love is an experience which is the quality of all of Reality,
all the way up and all the way down.

I am participating in this field of mad love. The field of mad love is awake and
alive in me.

Therefore, even when I am having a bad day, even when I am feeling depressed,
and sad, and devastated, and hurt, and harmed, or irritated, it’s okay. I’ll
work on that, and I’ll stay safe; I’ll do the best I can to take care of myself,
but that’s not who I am.

* Who I am is mad love come awake.
* Who I am is mad love in person.

Homo amor — the word that we’ve used in CosmoErotic Humanism to describe the New
Human and the New Humanity — is a mad lover.

The first characteristic of mad love is: I am in relationship to the whole.

I don’t exile mad love to a white-picket-fence particular relationship that
looks a particular way, and is socially acceptable in a particular way, and is
conventionally appropriate in a particular way. We love who we love, and we want
to love wide, and we want to love deep, and we want to love big.

We want to be radically committed to our closest relationships, gorgeously — so,
we love that couple. KK and I love that song, and we love each other. We have
our exclusive mad love.

And then, we open up, and we open up, and I can actually say to my friend, oh my
God, I love you madly. I love you madly doesn’t mean romantic love. It means
something else. It means this quality of aliveness, this quality of depth, this
quality of care, this quality of commitment. It’s so deep.

The exile of love is threefold:

One, we claim that love is purely human. That’s the first exile.

Two is, it’s only between particular groups of humans. It’s only particular
configurations of humans. Heterosexual married couples — that’s where mad love
lives.

But then, since it doesn’t work there all too often, we say, oh it works, but
between heterosexual married couples at the very beginning of a relationship,
when they meet and fall in love. That’s mad love. That’s the third exile.

We exile mad love —

* into the human world,
* then into a very narrow sector of the human world,
* and then to the very beginning of the relational structure and cycle in that
particular vector in the human world.

It’s a triple exile.

No, no, no. Mad love is everywhere. It’s always there. It’s ever always already
present. It’s actually my true nature. I am a mad lover. And my mad love
participates in the whole; it’s the quality of the whole.

That’s the first characteristic.

MY MAD LOVE IS WILDLY POWERFUL

The second quality of mad love is: I have a quality, a capacity, a feeling that
I want to influence the whole, that I want to impact the whole, that I want to
gift to the whole. I want to have a direct realization —

* that my loving, my aliveness, my being, my mad love loves the whole;
* my mad love impacts the whole;
* that my mad love changes the trajectory of the whole;
* that my mad love is wildly powerful.

The second quality of mad love is that it’s unimaginably powerful and has a
power to transform the whole, to lift the whole, to create this Field of
Radiance and this Field of Possibility.

When I am madly in love with the whole, then the whole opens up to me.

In the mystery schools that animated the Renaissance of Italy in the 16th
century, there was a strong set of sources drawn from a great thinker named
Isaac Luria. At the core of those sources was the second quality of being a mad
lover. It is articulated by Luria as the invocation that one makes in every
movement of one’s life, often dozens of times during the day, LeShem Yichud ‘for
the sake of intimate communion’: I do this action for the sake of intimate
communion.

I do this action —

* whether it’s to say hello to my cab driver,
* whether it’s to edit an episode,
* whether it’s to turn to my child and put them to bed in the most beautiful
way,
* whether it’s to help my sister get to a critical meeting or through a
pregnancy class,
* whether it’s to help my sister find her way in transforming her life,
* whether it’s my brother, whether it’s my friend, whether it’s my dear, dear,
dear beloved, whether it’s some new person I just met and I realize that I
need to help this person, I need to stand forth and be there,
* whether it’s the way I distribute my funds,
* whether it’s my willingness to take my resources and pour them where they
should be in a way that’s mad —

for the sake of the whole.

I step out of the exile of the song, where I speak the language of mad love, but
really it’s about me and my family; I am really egocentric. I say this because
it makes me feel better, but the way I spend my resources, my time, my energy,
my funds, is about me and my small group of people. No, be a mad lover for the
sake of the whole!

Luria says that in every action I do, I can pour the resource of my energy into
the fabric of the whole. I do it for the sake of the whole. And I say, LeShem
Yichud ’for the sake of intimate communion’.

The intimate communion of what?

Of all the broken people, of all the broken parts, of all the split-off parts,
of all the broken hearts, of all the shattered minds, of all the twisted
scripts, of all the distorted yearnings, of all the sadnesses, of all the
breakings. It’s all holy and broken. When I say Hallelujah, when I say, LeShem
Yichud, then —

* something becomes more coherent in Reality,
* something becomes more whole,
* something becomes more alive,
* something becomes more filled with joy.

I have unimaginable power.

The second quality of mad love is that it’s powerful. I have the capacity well
beyond the capacity of any of the presidential candidates in the United States
and any of the high office candidates anywhere in the world. I don’t need to be
a senator or a prime minister or a king or a queen or a president or a vice
president. I am royalty. I am king or queen.

MY MADNESS IS MY PROTEST

But here is the thing: I need to be actually (not figuratively) mad.

To be mad means I have a capacity to see beneath the surface.

* I can access depth.
* I have the capacity to be mad.
* I have to be mad in some sense in order to realize that my action truly
affects the whole, my transformation actually is the transformation of the
whole.

The small action that I do as I paint is transforming the whole.
The small action I do as I create a blog post in order to open up space.
The small action that I do as I collect clips and I edit them.

The small action that I do as I buy a couch so me and my wife (or me and my
partner, or me and my guests who I entertain at my house) have a nicer place to
sit, so we can actually find each other’s eyes — if I do that for the sake of
the whole, then something actually changes in the whole.

For a mad lover, their relationship to Reality changes. A mad love has
omni-pathos, they are omni-considerate, they are omni-feeling with the whole.
That very experience, to know that that’s true — it is madness, but it’s divine
madness.

In other words, if I am very normal, if I am a reductive materialist
rationalist, it’s insane to know that what I do affects the whole. Yes, that’s
insane. That’s the point. Mad love means to be out of your mind, but ‘out of
your mind’ means out of your materialist mind.

That’s this third quality of mad love — the madness part. That’s the third
quality.

Let’s get this madness.

Level one, you have classical sanity and insanity. That’s good. We should be
sane. There is developmental psychology. There are stages of development. There
is knowing that this is my arm and it’s not your arm, that there are appropriate
boundaries between people. We want to be sane, right? And if I feel like I have
some condition, I might want to work with that condition. I need to be sane.

Sanity means the right proportion. I don’t make myself bigger or smaller than I
am. I take responsibility, I show up, my word is good. I’m reliable. I’m steady.
I don’t get hijacked.

There is a way that mad love can have shadows. I can lose proportion. Murders,
crimes of passion happen when mad love gets dissociated from ordinary
grounded-ness, from ordinary sanity. I need to be sane, not mad — of course.
Insanity is not an excuse; pleas of insanity are overplayed these days. I am
responsible for being sane. I’ve got to take responsibility for my sanity.
That’s beautiful. That’s level one.

But then there is level two. At level two, we realize that we’ve been confusing
appropriate sanity for resignation for the status quo, and often for corruption.
What we’re calling sane was actually corrupt. There was a fabulous movie, I
think in the mid-sixties, called King of Hearts, where everyone was involved in
slaughters and wars. There was one person, the King of Hearts, who was insane.
It was clear that he was insane. But of course his insanity was a protest
against the slaughtering sanity, the cruelty of the sanity, the senselessness of
the sanity, the barbarity of the sanity, the brutality of the sanity.

* Is it sane to have factory farms in which we torture animals for three months
in order to eat them, to have our lamb chop be a little more succulent? Is
that sane?
* Is it sane to have ten million dollars in the bank, and make sure to
distribute it well, when that money would be much better spent in other
places in the world, where I could save 200 lives or change the course of the
evolution of the source code? Is that sane?
* Is it sane to spend my entire life trying to be safe and comfortable, and
live as long as I can when, in the end, I’m going to die?
* Is it sane to be lost in my narcissistic bubble?

Sanity can become an excuse for corruption, an excuse for betrayal of my deepest
self, an excuse for an abandonment of my true nature, for an abandonment of mad
love.

What I need is a level two of protest.

The sacred text of the Solomon lineage says that in our day today, prophecy is
with the madmen and the fools. That’s what Rumi was talking about. I need to be
responsible and safe in all the appropriate ways, but then, I need to protest,
and my madness is my protest. My level two insanity protests against this
level-one dichotomy between sanity and insanity, this very respectable
conventional appropriate dichotomy.

WHY DID WE BETRAY OURSELVES?

One of my closest friends died two years ago, and I actually didn’t know. We
didn’t talk often. When we did, we went deep in all the way and we both had
intense lives, and he wrote a book called, The Tyranny of Malice. His name was
Joseph Berke, and he was the key student of R. D. Laing. R. D. Laing wrote a
book called, The Divided Self in 1960, and another book called Wisdom, Madness
and Folly (1985). It’s beautiful.

What he basically said was, we can’t make that easy split between the sane ones
and the insane ones; some of those who are insane are actually mad lovers. They
are actually protesting. They are the king of hearts in that sixties movie; they
are saying, it’s not okay. They are saying the status quo which claims to be
sane is actually insanity.

* A status quo in the 20th century which allowed for 100 million non-combatants
to be killed is insanity.
* A status quo in which the entire world doesn’t rush to the aid of Ukraine
today is insanity.
* A status quo which cannot distinguish between a culture of death and a
pluralistic democracy with all of its flaws is insanity.
* A world in which two billion people don’t have drinking water.

Why is that sane?

R. D. Laing said that there is a continuum between sanity and insanity; there is
no sharp divide. Sometimes we move into insanity for a moment, as in a shamanic
journey. There is a dissent, but it’s a dissent for the sake of assent.

There is a moment of protest. I need to let myself go mad.

Now, I don’t mean to go mad in a clinical way. I don’t mean if you’re taking
appropriate balancing medication, you should stop because we said to go mad.
That’s not what I mean, obviously. That needs to be checked individually in
every case, to see where you are. This is not about that.

It’s about something deeper: we can’t use sanity as our defense plea when we are
held at the bar of cosmic joy and justice, and we are asked why we didn’t live
our lives.

We have this huge life of unlived love, and unlived life, and unlived
commitment, and unlived integrity.

Why did we betray ourselves? We were being sane.

R. D. Laing points out that there is a mad lover inside of us that’s protesting.

* The mad lover understands that yes, I do affect the whole world.
* The mad lover says, oh my God, I’m the king of the world.

And we say, oh my God, you are mad, you are not the king of the world. Why are
you saying you’re the king? You’re crazy mad.

And of course, he or she might be mad. That might be an actual state of madness
that needs to be engaged, but in many cases, they are seeing something. They are
understanding this quality of Luria’s, LeShem Yichud:

* I am actually powerful.
* I actually am royalty.
* I actually can affect the whole thing.

A gesture, a flutter of my eye, a caress of my heart, an opening of my deepest
interior, a flutter of my soul, a moment of my purity, the moving of my lips in
sincerity, the opening of a space that I was never able to open before, the
digging deeper, the unearthing, which creates an authenticity that I thought
could never happen — when I offer that, and pour that into the source code, I am
affecting — quite literally, ontologically, for real — I’m changing the whole.

The truth of Reality is that Reality is my canvas. I have a relationship to the
whole.

TRUE SANITY IS MAD LOVE

The mad man, the mad woman, understands that for a second. We call them mad, but
actually they are on a shamanic journey, and they are trying to bring us back an
important message:

> True sanity is mad love.

This is level three,

Enlightenment at its core is sanity, but what sanity means is knowing my true
nature.

My true nature is not a desiccated separate self who uses love as a social
convention in order to get sufficient comfort and sufficient status to get by,
to live as comfortably and as long and as safe as possible. No, that’s not
sanity. Sanity is to know my true identity, and my true identity is —

> Who am I? I am a mad lover. I am an Outrageous Lover.

That’s actually who I am. That’s actually my true nature.

Enlightenment means that I am intimate with everything. Enlightenment is
intimacy with all things, wrote Master Dōgen — but I am not just intimate, I am
uniquely intimate, and my intimacy, and the quality of my intimacy, and the
quality of my gifting, and the quality of my laughter, and the nature of my
poetry, and the movement of my sincere and pure and devoted heart changes the
whole.

I am royalty.

My mood changes the mood of Cosmos.

It matters to find my deepest mood, and to pour that expanded gorgeous deep
profound self into the source code of Reality — because I do change the whole
thing. That is actually sanity.

The ultimate sanity is when the knowing of madness is disclosed to be true.
That’s the ultimate sanity — where we go mad, we think, oh my God, I am
superman, I can save the whole thing.

Yeah, actually yes, you can. Yes, you can.

And then, I become sane for real, not sane as a disguise — a thin veneer for a
desiccated separate self for the hollow men and the stuffed men; sane as a mad
lover.

That’s the third quality. The third quality is:

> I am mad.

I’ve broken the boundaries of the narrow separate self.

I am deeply grounded, I am sane in all the good ways, then I go insane as a
protest, I go mad as a shamanic journey.

Why does a person do a medicine journey?

A medicine journey is a descent into madness, but it’s not a descent into
clinical insanity. It’s a descent into a world in which I can see more clearly.
In which I realize that that stunning and beautiful song, Truly Madly Deeply, is
about the whole world. Mitochondria are truly madly deeply. “I’ll be your dream.
I’ll be your wish. I’ll be your fantasy. I’ll be your hope, I’ll be your love.
I’ll be everything that you need.”

That’s what we are all saying to each other.

We are a band of Outrageous Lovers. We are unique incarnations and discretions
of the field. That’s what we mean when we say we live in a world of outrageous
pain, and the only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love. The only
response is to love madly.

LET’S REACH FOR A WORLD BEYOND BETRAYAL

The opposite of loving madly is betrayal. Judas loves Jesus madly, and then he
can’t hold the mad love, and the mad love becomes sane and ordinary. The only
sane thing to do is to be with Rome, betray Jesus.

Betrayal is a violation of mad love.

There are a thousand ways we get to be committed to each other.
There are a thousand ways we get to be madly devoted to each other.

We forgive the betrayals that have happened, but let us commit.

Let us commit — not to the cynical notion that betrayal is just part and parcel
of human life — let’s reach for a world beyond betrayal! Let’s reach for a world
in which we are madly loyal to each other. There is a loyalty in mad love. There
is a seeing.

We see each other.
We know what matters.

It’s not what appears to matter. It’s something so much deeper.

You know the story of the mad king? It’s Nachman’s story of the mad king that
Kafka loved so much. His country is starving, and they eat the grain, and when
they eat the grain, the grain makes them mad.

We are starving. We need some sort of nourishment, but we are fed a fare that is
not nourishing. We are fed a fare of insanity, which makes us mad and not in a
good way. They eat the grain, and they go mad — not a holy madness, a level-one
madness, when they don’t remember who they are.

* There is a madness which causes us to remember our true nature. That’s holy
madness.
* And then, there is a fallen madness, which causes us to forget our true
nature, but not only to forget our true nature, but to forget that we’ve
forgotten.

There is a madness which invokes a memory of who we really are, and there’s a
madness that causes us to forget.

The grain that they ate in this story made them mad in the bad way, it was a
fallen madness. The people were starving, and so they became consumers, and they
consumed and consumed the grain, until they were all mad, just the king and his
advisor were left. And the king says to his advisor:

* What do I do? All of my people are mad, and I love them madly, and I want to
be with them, but they are mad. How can I be mad?
* Well, you can’t be their king if you’re sane and they’re mad. You’ve gotta
eat the grain, but you can’t be a mad king, unless it’s holy madness, says
the advisor.
* Well, how am I going to find my way to holy madness?
* You know what? I’m going to eat the grain with you. But before we eat the
grain, let’s make a mark on each other’s forehead. And after we eat the
grain, we are going to be mad, but then if we look at each other, we are
going to see the mark on our forehead, and we’re going to remember. It’s
going to become holy madness. We are going to remember who we really are.

Beloveds, we have marks on our forehead.

* It’s the spark in us, which is un-betrayed and unbowed.
* It’s the love in us that flames and refuses to be quenched.
* It’s the hope that refuses to be extinguished.
* It’s the possibility of possibility.

It’s the feeling that actually I matter so immensely that the whole world was
worth creating just for me — not as a narcissistic predicament, but as the
truest indication of my true nature. I am mad with love — and the whole world is
mad with me, but it becomes a holy madness.

I want to drink with you.
L’chaim!
Let’s become holy mad drunkards, what Hafiz calls the rogues, and the drunkards,
and the madmen.

We don’t want our place around just the civilized.

We want to be so civilized, and yet we want to be rogues, and madmen, and holy
thieves, and holy beggars.

> We are committed to Outrageous Love.

There are three kinds of drunkards. There are drunkards who just feel the pain
of their own lives, so they just drink a little bit. But if you feel the pain of
all of your people, you can’t just drink a little, you’ve got to drink a few
good glasses. But now, in the mystical realm in the palace of imagination, let’s
drink bottles and bottles — for all the people in the world that ever were, that
ever will be.

Let’s be holy drunkards, holy madmen for the whole thing, because that’s the
only sanity.

Mad love, everyone, mad love, mad love.

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MOUNTAIN:

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and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths.

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 View on Medium


410 — Wars through the lens of CosmoErotic Humanism: opening our hearts to
Ukraine

410 — WARS THROUGH THE LENS OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM: OPENING OUR HEARTS TO
UKRAINE

Oleksandr Bohomazov. Train. 1915

HOW CAN WE RESPOND WITH OUTRAGEOUS LOVE TO WARS RAGING IN OTHER COUNTRIES?

Dr. Marc Gafni

Published in

Office for the Future

·
27 min read
·
Aug 30, 2024

Listen

> Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin’s recent talk at One Mountain Many Paths is important
> for many reasons. It models the deployment of the categories of CosmoErotic
> humanism by a world-class original scholar, artist and human being to the
> living, pulsing, excruciatingly painful reality of the polis in this very
> moment of time. Her arguments speak for themselves, but as you read, also pay
> attention to this crucial new form of discourse — writing, and thinking, and
> feeling — that takes places as an expression of the CosmoErotic Universe in
> person, as the writer, Elena, clarifies the field of ErosValue and ErosDesire,
> as they appear in the terrible theater of war, demanding, with humility and
> audacity, our attention, energy, and action. This writing understands that
> there is no split whatsoever between policy and Eros. Indeed, a policy of
> Ethos can only emerge from the field of Eros.
>
> Marc Gafni
> Center for World Philosophy and Religion

JOIN WEEKLY EVOLUTIONARY SENSEMAKING WITH DR. MARC GAFNI

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WARS THROUGH THE LENS OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM: OPENING OUR HEARTS TO UKRAINE

By Elena Maslova-Levin

In the August Symphony of CosmoErotic Humanism, we are exploring how to live
CosmoErotic Humanism, how to bring its principles and values in our daily life,
and respond to its challenges as Homo Amor.

This is easier said than done, especially if the outrageous pain is not right in
front of us — nor even in the daily news vying for our attention.

* How can we respond with Outrageous Love to wars raging in other countries?
* How can we accurately understand what’s going on in today’s information
ecology, with its abundance of fake news and covert and not so covert
propaganda?
* Does this understanding — the stories we tell (or don’t tell) ourselves about
these distant events — even matter?

We will explore these questions by looking at the Russian aggression against
Ukraine — a war that has been raging on for more than 900 days, and which makes
it painfully clear that our attitude — our attention, our inner response, our
ability to live the New Story of Value — matter so much that they can actually
decide the outcome of the war and change the course of history.

WHAT IS THE EVOLUTIONARY LEAP CALLED FOR BY THIS CRISIS?

When a crisis or a breakdown happens, a natural human longing is to go back to
how it was ‘before’; to somehow return to how it used to be, so we can live
again as though the crisis never even happened. But even if we manage to do that
(which is not always possible), the crisis would be in some form; I think we all
know this on the individual, personal level. But the only way out is always
through, which basically means each crisis calls us to evolve — or, in more
practical words, to learn some lesson (or lessons). In the framework of
CosmoErotic Humanism, every crisis is a crisis of intimacy — and it wants to
birth the next level of intimacy.

We tend to experience something like that in the situation of collective crises,
for example, when a war erupts — whether it affects us directly or not — the
longing is for it to end somehow; to return to the pre-war peace, however
fragile it was (at least that was what was happening to me in the first weeks of
the Russian-Ukrainian war). Just like in personal situations, we refuse to see
(or cannot see) that it is this very past that generated the crisis in the first
place. And just like in the individual realm, even if we manage to end it
somehow, the crisis will come back, probably more mighty and destructive than
before, unless we respond to its call to evolve — unless we learn its lessons.

For example, the push to force Ukraine into a negotiated settlement with Russia
(‘peace in exchange for territories’) — which you must have heard of if you are
tracking this situation at all — is fueled by this longing: to return to the
seeming certainty and security of the ‘before’, to the existing ‘world order’.
But the conditions of ‘peace for territories’ offered by Russia (at least before
Ukraine recently captured some of Russian territories) amount to Ukraine’s
capitulation: they involve not only surrender of the territories currently
occupied by Russia (or even more), but also cutting Ukraine off from any future
international military help (even in the limited form it is offered now, let
alone the opportunity to join NATO), and severe limits on the size and equipment
of the Ukrainian standing army. In other words, in exchange for ‘peace’ Ukraine
is supposed to agree to make itself completely helpless before the next Russian
attempt to swallow it whole, while Russia gets new territories and an
opportunity to prepare for the next assault (because its proposals also involve
lifting economic sanctions). In other words, this kind of peace would create
ideal conditions for a repetition of the same crisis (sooner rather than later).

In this respect, like in many others, the war in Ukraine brings some universal
patterns into a sharp, clarified focus.

The question is, what are the lessons we are to learn, collectively and each of
us individually?

Or: what evolutionary leap is called for?
Or, through the lens of CosmoErotic Humanism: how do we live from the New Story
in response to this crisis?

Two more specific dimensions of CosmoErotic Humanisms in particular came into
focus as I contemplated these questions:

* The notion of Unique Obligation.
* The right relationship between the part and the whole.

POLLUTION OF THE NOOSPHERE

My first working answer to these questions was simply this: one should pay
attention to what’s going on, to the facts — basically, closely following the
news (rather than turning away from them). This would clarify the situation and
show us where our help is needed.

But there are many problems with this answer:

* Human attention is limited; we cannot pay close attention to everything going
on in the world. Following the news can very easily become a distraction from
something more important (personally, I am very liable to this).
* Reality is messy: it not only reveals, but also obscures the deeper patterns
and stories it is shaped by.

For example, in this presentation, I can make sure that I share only truth and
nothing but truth, but I can never share all truth. Try as I might, it will
always be a selection of facts; it will always be filtered through my
perspective, and my language, and my story — and another person can present a
different set of facts that would better fit another story. Yes, as an honest
(although not impartial) observer, I can also include facts that don’t seem to
fit with my story; but this, too, will be a selection colored by interpretation.

We cannot escape this limitation of the human mind: ‘facts’ are always built
from language and dependent on the story and perspective. This is the truth of
post-modernism.

Think of it in terms of the familiar triad of pre-tragic, tragic and
post-tragic:

* At the pre-tragic level, facts are simply facts. White is white, black is
black.
* At the tragic level, we see that there are no ‘objective facts’, no ‘all
truth’ — so any idea of informed opinion begins to seem like a delusion. We
find ourselves in the ‘post-truth’ world.
* The question is: how do we lift ourselves up to the post-tragic? How do we
cut through the messiness of reality to see the deepest underlying patterns?

Dealing ‘in plain facts’ would have been a delusion even if lived in a pristine
information ecosystem with only honest, transparent actors, with everyone
reporting agenda-less truth, at least as they see it. But we don’t. Apart from
the “organic” messiness, we are literally in the information war zone. Our minds
— the public opinion of the West — is one of the major battlefields of this war,
because the stories living in our minds matter enormously, as we will discuss
shortly. Filling the information space with multiple ‘facts’ and ‘stories’ about
any event — some of them completely fake, some closer to reality — is one of the
most effective weapons of this war.

I realized that this pollution of the noosphere has become so bad that actually
paying attention to the news can be worse for true understanding than not paying
attention. Perhaps it would be better just to stay with the initial moral
clarity: there is an aggressor and a victim, and no news can possibly change
that.

I invite you to explore together how we can live the New Story — how we can
apply and embody the First Principles and First Values given these limitations,
in this complex and messy world.

How do we find a post-tragic relationship to the messiness of reality?
How should we respond to a war in a faraway land?

WAR IN A FARAWAY LAND

Before this war erupted, my overall strategy (one of my “first values & first
principles”, I might say) was, to simplify it a bit:

* Make love, not war. I am always for peace, so against all wars — and thus,
against any military-industrial complexes, any kind of sending weapons into
war zones, etc.

This strategy was shattered by this war — and this was the first war where I
understood the situation a bit less superficially than usually. I realized it
was a ‘lazy’ strategy, which allowed me to have an opinion about a situation
without really looking into it.

By the way, as things stand now, a consistent application of this strategy would
mean I have to vote for Trump in the upcoming election; it would also mean
Russia’s victory over Ukraine, which would lead to extreme suffering for
millions of Ukrainians and further degradation of Russia, let alone what it
would mean for America.

For Ukraine, this is not just about territory or even abstract issues of
dictatorship and colonization versus democracy and independence. Right now,
there are at least eight thousand Ukrainian POWs in Russian prisons. This group
includes not only soldiers taken prisoner in battles, but also civilians from
occupied territories suspected of helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine in some
way (justly or unjustly). It is not just that the Geneva conventions do not
apply to any of them; no international human rights organizations or Russian
lawyers are allowed any access to them. While Russian inmates have at least some
rights, the Ukrainians don’t. They are being tortured, beaten, raped, starved.
In many cases, they are put under a special regime called “freezing”, which
amounts to disappearance from the face of the earth — nobody can get any
information about them. Those who were lucky enough to become part of prisoner
exchanges with Russia often look like the prisoners of Auschwitz in photographs
from WWII. This is just a glimpse into what awaits Ukraine if Russia is allowed
to have its way.

To say the least, my “first principle and first value”, my lazy strategy was
challenged; this was my first lesson.

But what are the alternatives?

I cannot conceivably know the situation as directly and carnally in other cases,
nor follow each war with this kind of attention. Just like most of you cannot
know the whole Ukraine-Russia situation and its history in all their messy
details. Marc’s generally good advice (read two books ‘on each side’ before you
can have an opinion) doesn’t really work here either — it takes considerable
time for books to be researched and written; they cannot reflect unfolding news
in real time. Beyond that, in my experience, it is usually not enough to read
four books.

To decide that — given that I cannot possibly form an informed opinion — it is
simply not my business is obviously not a Homo amor solution. ‘Not my business’
is as far from intimacy with the whole as it can get. And simply turning my
attention away from the news feels like another version of the same approach.

So what is the solution? CosmoErotic Humanisms gives us one guiding principle
that is today’s code:

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
We live in the world of outrageous pain. The only response
is Outrageous Love.

IS UKRAINE PROTECTING US FROM WWIII?

To get a clearer picture of what’s going on, let us zoom out and look at the
beginnings of the first two world wars:

1. WWI: all countries jump into the war with minimal provocation; what follows
is senseless loss of life, chaos, brutality, etc., which undermined the
inner integrity of some countries (Russia, and to a less extent Germany,
collapsed internally) and taught others to try and avoid wars at all costs.
2. WWII — the beginning of WWII is marked by the tale of two British
prime-ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill: in trying to
avoid a new war with Germany and ensure peace, Chamberlain cedes
Czechoslovakia to Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia without any kind of
international support. They surrender, including all their industries, which
dramatically helps Germany equip itself for WWII. Chamberlain’s approach is
remembered by history as a huge mistake.

What is going on now?

Not unlike Germany after WWI, Russia, after its loss in the cold war, felt that
it had lost its rightful place on the world stage (as a major player and one of
the ‘poles’ of power). Rather than using its unexpected riches from exuberant
oil and gas prices and economic cooperation with the West into cultural,
economical, and technological growth, it decided to regain its place through
military might — first with relatively minor incursions in Georgia in 2008 and
Ukraine in 2014 — testing the West’s willingness to defend the world order. The
West generally responds in the Chamberlain-like fashion, following the general
policy of appeasement (including, for example, Obama’s ‘reset’ policy, right
after the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008).

In February 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hoping for an
easy take-over, for Kyiv falling into its hands in two-three days. In many ways,
this is a replay of the German take-over of Czechoslovakia, or so Russia hopes.
It will give it the additional resources for further actions — e.g. against
Baltic countries; and probably more.

The collective West is prepared, again, to respond in the Chamberlain-like way
(evacuating its embassies in advance; all experts predicting Ukraine’s fall).
However, two factors intervene:

* Ukraine fights back (with resilience and valor which are surprising only to
those who don’t know anything at all about Ukraine).
* The public opinion in Europe (and to a lesser extent here in America) is
aroused by this blatant violation of value (One Mountain dedicates four weeks
to this topic, taking this time away from articulating the New Story).

As a result, the West (primarily, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, who probably
wanted to be more Churchill-like than Chamberlain-like) finally rejects — at
least in part — its Chamberlain-style policy of appeasement, and helps Ukraine
out with resources and weapons — but with making it a priority that American &
European soldiers aren’t involved.

The West is helping Ukraine, but just barely enough to prevent the Russian
takeover; it takes an enormous amount of time to decide to deliver each next
type of weaponry (because we are wary of crossing Putin’s “red lines”, which we
invent ourselves), and then even more time to actually deliver them in
meaningful quantities.

The public and the press gradually grow “tired” of the war, and turn their
attention away. The story of David and Goliath is supposed to end quickly with
David’s victory; but this particular Goliath doubles down, despite the enormous
loss of human lives and degradation of its own economy, and the fight continues
— for over two and a half years now. Ukraine suffers and bleeds out, but mostly
holds its ground.

Imagine this scenario playing out in the late thirties of the last century:

* Czechoslovakia decides to fight, and Chamberlain decides to help it out to
some extent (so as not to cross Hitler’s red lines, and to the extent
supported by the public opinion). And so the fight continues for years,
Czechoslovakia bleeds out and suffers. The public turns its attention away:
it doesn’t know that Czechoslovakia is protecting it from WWII. It doesn’t
know the alternative, so it begins to feel like a local conflict which has
little, if anything, to do with them.

Are we actually in this kind of situation? Is it potentially the beginning of
WWIII (a violent eruption of the meta-crisis), and Ukraine is protecting us from
it?

I don’t know, but I think it is possible. We can tentatively assume, for
example, that Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine are fragments of the same
bigger picture (at least we know that some Hamas leaders visited Moscow just
before the October 7th attack, one of its purposes being to distract the West’s
attention from the events in Ukraine, as it indeed happened).

WAR IN UKRAINE AS A WAR OF STORIES

At the deepest, mythic level, war in Ukraine is a war of stories — rather than
simply a war between two countries (let alone a local conflict). I wouldn’t call
it a war between good and evil — not because this isn’t true, but because I want
to be more specific: it is a war between the Past and the Future — or, to put it
in other words, between the old story and the new story. Or: between the idea
that we are slaves of the past and the idea that a different future is possible.

Reducing this to utter simplicity, we might say that Ukraine is on the side of
the Future — indeed, the war wouldn’t have started if Ukraine hadn’t chosen a
future different from its past; it has a vision of its future Russia doesn’t
like. Russia, on the other hand, is on the side of the Past — it is not by
accident that Putin’s justifications of the war tended to start in about the
tenth century AD. By this logic, once a colony of whatever empire, always a
colony — that’s why Ukraine has to surrender.

Of course, the old story and the New Story are also fighting within Ukraine, and
within Russia — but this is outside the scope of today’s conversation. A more
relevant question, in the context of our August symphony is: what about us — be
it America, or the collective West? Which story are we living?

Well, this is the question, isn’t it?

Within the West, these two stories — the old story and the New story — are
fighting it out, too. As a collective (or multiple collectives), we are not
unified —

* E.g. Hungary blocking the EU’s decisions.
* Within America, we have a polarization along all-too-familiar lines — now
almost fully clarified and articulated in the presidential race.

But if we look at it through the lens of this war, this is not quite our
familiar left-right polarization. For example, The New York Times consistently
speaks from the voice of the past (which is not exactly identical to the
narrative promoted by Russia, but way too close to it).

Whenever I would encounter what are essentially Russia’s talking points in
unexpected places, like The New York Times, or a book recommended by Marc, by
David Ray Griffin, a Whiteheadian scholar he respects, or a Noam Chomsky
interview, I would wonder what’s actually happening Many pro-Ukrainian observers
are quick to deduce that they are all Russian assets, but I think this is,
overall, too simple an explanation.

They are simply seeing — and speaking — from the past, and this story filters
and colors their perspective of reality — their choice of facts and
interpretations; and this makes them, in many instances, willing victims of the
Russian information war. Let’s face it — for the vast majority of Americans, the
past story doesn’t include Ukraine at all; in this past story, Russia and the
Soviet Union are essentially the same thing.

Being anchored in the past — interpreting the present in terms of the past — is
natural for human beings; that’s how we function in normal circumstances. It
takes unusual circumstances to break away from the past and respond to the pull
of the future — and even then, it takes personal effort, which comes easier to
some, more difficult to others.

This means that this fight between stories, very obviously, takes place within
every one of us.

It became crystal clear to me — clearer than ever — just in this past week or
ten days, when Ukraine began its Kursk offensive, invading Russia proper. The
Ukrainians maintained complete radio silence about their plans and progress, so
facts were few and far between. Everyone had very limited information, certainly
not enough for any serious analysis. Yet almost everybody had an opinion, and
these two stories — the old story anchored in the past, the new story anchored
in the future — came into sharp focus, because they made people discern two very
different pictures. Some saw a reckless mistake; others, a potential strategic
turn in the whole war.

THE STORY LIVING IN US MATTERS. IT SHAPES REALITY

At the core of what we are doing here is the idea that a new story can change
the course of history; that the story we are living — the story living in us and
through us — matters. This, too, is brought into focus by this war. The story
matters painfully — it may, in fact, determine the outcome of the war.

Here is an example:

One popular narrative (here in America at least) goes like this: it is a war of
attrition, and thus it will be decided by the overall difference in resources.
Since Russia is a much larger country and has much more resources, it is bound
to win anyway, so Ukraine should seek a settlement (on Russia’s terms — in other
words, it should capitulate). I heard Noam Chomsky say in an interview,
literally, Russia has infinite resources (even as he does acknowledge that,
morally, Ukraine is right and Russia is wrong). If this is so, sending weapons
to Ukraine means fueling the war, and we should stop doing that. (Obviously,
this narrative is very much promoted by the Russian information-war efforts.)

Sounds reasonable, but only in the context of ‘it’s not our business’ story —
that is, only if we consider the war in isolation, as a local conflict. If it is
our business — that is, if we are truly world-centric, if the collective West is
really on the side Ukraine, and actually helps Ukraine (as, in a sense, it
does), then we should really be comparing Russia’s resources with our collective
resources. In this case, it is our resources that are infinite in comparison to
Russia, so it is Ukraine that is destined for victory.

If we live from the new story — the story of all of us being in this together —
then the resources on the side of life, and freedom, and future are almost
infinitely more than those on the side of oppression, imperialism, and death.
We, together with Ukraine, are bound to triumph in this war, and Russia is bound
to collapse in some way (just like the Soviet Union collapsed under the pressure
of arms race of the cold war, which was also a war of attrition of sorts).

But if we take the perspective that it is a local conflict somewhere out there
in the east, in the sphere of influence of a powerful Russia with its infinite
resources — than Ukraine is bound to lose, and all we can possibly do is help
negotiate its capitulation as soon as possible (which is basically Trump’s
solution).

Which story is more accurate? Is Russia winning or losing?

One can easily muster a selection of facts to support both, because reality is
messy, and wars are even messier. Neither is true, and both are true — they are
at war, and we cannot be certain of the outcome.

But this is less important than their capacity to generate reality; both are,
very straightforwardly, self-fulfilling prophecies. The outcome of the war
directly depends on our capacity and willingness to live the New Story.

The very minimum of our responsibility is to hold the new story — to be on the
side of life — even if, at times, it might be difficult in the face of daily
news.

Just like we are committed to hold the New Story of Value in the face of the
meta-crisis.

Just like it is a mother’s responsibility to hold the hope of health for her
sick child, even on bad days.

ARE WE LIVING THE NEW STORY?

I have formulated four “checkpoints” to test whether (and when) I — you, we —
am/are — responding to this war from the New Story.

MORAL EQUIVALENCE CHECKPOINT

Morally, the right is clearly on the Ukrainian side, and Russia is undeniably in
violation of value. This is the moment of utter moral clarity that aroused the
public opinion in the very beginning of the war.

Alternative stories:

* The situation is so muddied and complicated that moral equivalence is the
only reasonable approach (we cannot really form an opinion; we cannot judge
because we don’t understand). This is the pattern of finding failings in a
victim of rape, so as to avoid getting involved.
* Morally, Russia is in the right, for example, because Russia had/has
legitimate security concerns (e.g., because of the NATO expansion). But if
Russia had really felt threatened by NATO, would it have left its western
borders completely undefended, as Ukraine demonstrated recently to the whole
world by its Kursk offensive?

CAN DAVID DEFEAT GOLIATH?

Ukraine is capable of defending itself and defeating Russian aggression, but
only if we (= the collective West) help it with all kinds of resources,
including military resources (as we have just discussed).

The alternative story is that Russia will win anyway, because it has “infinite
resources”, and it has never been defeated, so helping Ukraine only prolongs the
war and leads to loss of life.

Let me tell you a recent joke inspired by the Kursk offensive:

“Frightened by the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region of Russia, Putin
invokes the ghost of Stalin, and asks:

* The Nazis are approaching Kursk once again, what should I do? [Because he
calls Ukrainians Nazis.]

Stalin answers:

* Well, do what I did, send the best Ukrainian troops there, and ask the
Americans to send you weapons.”

The moral of this story is very simple. The myth that Russia cannot be defeated
comes from two wars: the Napoleon invasion, and the Hitler invasion (it did
collapse as a result of WWI, resulting in the revolution of 1917 and years of
civil war). In both these cases:

* Russia was a victim of the invasion; and indeed it is so large that it is
difficult to occupy.
* Russia was in alliance with the West, or at least some of the western
countries.
* Ukraine (with its remarkable talent for fighting) was integrated into Russia.
Although there were no ‘Ukrainian troops’ per se, Ukrainians played a major
role in the Soviet army.

None of these conditions apply now:

* Nobody intends to occupy Russia now. All it has to do is to withdraw from
Ukraine, and the war will end.
* Even though the West could help Ukraine more, it is certainly not in alliance
with Russia.
* Ukrainians are fighting on the other side.

MORAL OBLIGATION: THE COLLECTIVE

We (= the collective West) have a moral obligation to help Ukraine in any way we
can. We are all in this together.

Alternative stories:

* It is Russia’s sphere of interest anyway, so we should leave the whole
situation alone.
* As we have already discussed, this is a clear expression of the old story. It
reflects the human addiction to the past, and when all is said and done, for
most Westerners, the past doesn’t include any Ukraine at all, whereas Russia
has ‘always’ been there.
* If Russia feels threatened, it will unleash nuclear war, we shouldn’t ‘poke
the bear’.
* But the West and Ukraine (especially Ukraine) have been crossing Russian
supposed ‘red lines’ one after another, and this didn’t happen. If Russia had
been prepared to launch any kind of nuclear attack, it would have done it by
now.
* We (= the West) are so imperfect (or downright morally corrupt) anyway that
it is not our business to interfere in other nations’ wars. We (especially
we-America) have involved ourselves in so many seemingly right causes with
disastrous consequences (Afghanistan being the latest one) that we should
really stop doing this and mind our own business.
* But are past sins an excuse for committing new ones?
* If we stop helping Ukraine, the war will end — and value is on the side of
peace anyway (wars are universally bad).
* I have already addressed that in the beginning. If we stop helping Ukraine,
there is nothing to stop Russia from swallowing it whole, with disastrous
consequences to Ukrainians.

MORAL OBLIGATION: INDIVIDUAL

I have a moral obligation to be (in some sense) on Ukraine’s side in this war,
and help it in any way I can — even if just by holding and living the new story.

Alternatives:

* There is no way I can get a clear and accurate picture of what’s going on, so
I am not in a position to have an opinion about the matter (or interfere in
one way or another). It is irresponsible to take sides in such a situation. I
can simply be on the side of peace — that is, against all wars and weaponry
and military-industrial complexes.
* My attitude to this war doesn’t matter anyway. (Ukraine is not in my unique
sphere of intimacy and influence).
* I don’t have a unique obligation in this situation, so even paying attention
to it may be morally wrong because it takes my attention away from my unique
obligations; for example, in articulating (helping articulate) the New Story
of Value, which is the only response to the meta-crisis.

According to CosmoErotic Humanism, a unique obligation is an absolute moral
obligation that arises when

* I see the need (but if I don’t follow the news, I don’t even see it).
* The need is real (there are, I think, no doubts about that).
* I am uniquely capable of fulfilling this need.

None of us individually is ‘uniquely capable’ of fulfilling Ukraine’s need, so
we have no unique obligations here (except maybe for me — arguably, I have a
unique capacity to speak about this war to this community, and thus plays my
role in keeping our hearts open to her need). Does it mean we have no moral
obligation to help?

The problem is: there are so many important causes that would collapse if we
only fulfilled our unique obligations, situations where our non-unique help is
desperately needed. Essentially, every charity in the world would collapse the
moment we decide to limit ourselves to our unique obligations and stop making
our small, non-unique donations.

COLLECTIVE UNIQUE SELVES

In describing global events, we inevitably talk in terms of collectives (mostly
nation-states, but sometimes smaller collectives — like states or provinces, or
larger collectives — like ‘the collective West’). Some formulations in
CosmoErotic Humanism suggest that these indeed are (at least potentially) Unique
Selves, with their own instruments to play and songs to sing.

In doing so, we inevitably gloss over many, many complexities and distinctions,
let alone the fact that we have limited knowledge about how the will of these
collective entities (and their thinking processes) work. It may seem more
appropriate to talk instead of individuals or groups that seem to be making
decisions on behalf of collective selves — Putin, Zelensky, Biden (or — the
Biden administration), Macron, Johnson, etc. There is another danger here
though: forgetting our own moral obligations and responsibilities as
participants (constituents) of these collective wholes.

Russia shows us this danger: ‘delegating’ the will and responsibility to the
leader willingly, inevitably brings about loss of freedom and, ultimately, moral
degradation. When I hear an American say ‘I am not political’, I shudder
internally, because I’ve seen where this road leads. Isn’t it strange: if you
don’t trust the government, is it really a good reason to delegate all important
decisions on behalf of the collective to it? It is just another version of ‘not
our business’ story.

On the other hand, Ukraine — especially in the first period of the war — showed
us how the will of a leader and the wills of individuals taking responsibility
for the whole can merge harmoniously to lift up the collective:

1. President Zelensky accepting the unique obligation of a noble king in dark
times with valor and abandon.
2. Hundreds of thousands of individuals accepting the moral obligation of the
moment even though for many of them — poets, ballet dancers, musicians —
taking up arms was very far from the unique expression of their unique
gifts; they were not uniquely capable of responding to Ukraine’s need in her
darkest hour, and yet without them, the resistance would have been
impossible.

Had either of these ingredients been absent, Ukraine wouldn’t be able to respond
as effectively as it did.

UNIQUE OBLIGATION OF A COLLECTIVE SELF

But what about the West, and more specifically, our own countries (in my case
and for many of you, America)?

Here is what I realized while working on this presentation, that is, looking at
the Russia-Ukraine war through the lens of CosmoErotic humanism:

While the idea of Unique Obligation doesn’t seem to apply, in this case, to each
of us as individuals, it does very much apply to the US.

After WWII, a new world order was established, essentially based on some balance
of power between NATO and the Warsaw pact (also known as “the cold war”), the
threat of mutual destruction (nuclear weapons), and the mutual agreement never
to violate the established international borders. With the dissolution of the
Warsaw Pact (in the late eighties), and then the Soviet Union (in 1991), this
world order was shattered.

In many ways, the responsibility to sustain whatever remains on it fell on
America, with all its imperfections. Europe was essentially so relieved that it
didn’t need to fear the Soviet Union anymore that it rapidly demilitarized — and
preferred not to notice the rise of the new danger (with the exception of the
Eastern European countries who know this danger too well, and so they rushed to
join NATO). In many ways, we have been living in Pax Americana — the (more or
less) peace ensured by America’s military power. This worked precisely to the
extent that the US could act world-centrically and honorably (which is very,
very far from always).

It probably shouldn’t be this way, and there are many downsides to this state of
affairs, but the result is that America has a Unique Obligation to fully support
Ukraine in this war:

* The US sees the need of Ukraine.
* This need is as real as can be.
* The US is uniquely capable of fulfilling this need, because it is the only
country that currently has enough military resources to do so.

Does it fulfill this obligation? To some extent, but not quite.

Our initial question then can be clarified as:

* What does living the New Story mean for a (tiny) particle of the whole that
is currently not quite fulfilling its Unique Obligation?

In a sense, this brings living the New Story to the more familiar ground of
political activism (like, for example, writing letters to our representatives).

ARE WE TRULY WORLD-CENTRIC?

I began this presentation with the question: what are the lessons we need to
learn from this crisis?

For me, the main lesson was that I am not fully world-centric — not as
world-centric as I thought myself to be.

We usually put a very low threshold on what it means to be world-centric:
Ethnocentrism means that killing someone outside my circle of ethnocentric
intimacy is completely different from murdering someone within (the latter is
prohibited, the former is OK). In this sense, I of course pass the test; murder
is murder.

But what if we ask ourselves how we are actually affected by mass murders or
wars in faraway countries (if at all)?

This war pushed me to admit that I was less affected, for example, by the
tragedy of Aleppo than by the tragedy of Mariupol (even though Russia was
responsible in both cases). The tragedy of Mariupol feels like mine in a more
real, carnal sense. I cannot justifiably call this circle of intimacy
ethnocentric (because I am not Ukrainian), but it is evidently narrower than the
whole world.

What if you ask yourself whether the tragedies of Mariupol and Aleppo touched
you as deeply and profoundly as, say, 9/11 (if you are an American)? Or, if you
are in Europe, in the same way as you would have been touched by a brutal
destruction, followed by rape and torture — of, say, Manchester, Cologne,
Rotterdam, Florence — some city in your native land? Some city you know
intimately?

If your honest answer is yes, then you are more world-centric than I am.

We like to think that the so-called center of gravity of modern Western
democracies is world-centric (this is one of the dignities of modernity), but
here is a major lesson of this war:

Had it been true, it is not just that our collective response to the war in
Ukraine would have been different, but this war would never have happened. If
Russia knew that we (collectively) would respond to this war as if it were waged
against us (which it actually is, in ultimate analysis), it wouldn’t dare to try
to invade Ukraine, because the collective resources of the West are incomparably
more than Russia’s.

But it is not really true, at least not fully — that’s why, for example, Biden’s
priority not to let American troops be involved in this war in any way feels
right to him and so many Americans. American lives matter more to Americans than
Ukrainian lives — this is just the way it is.

The ‘center of gravity’ of the collective is directly determined by the center
of gravity of individuals, even though each individual’s contribution might seem
to be minuscule. Living the New Story means, then, doing our best to transcend
these remnants of ethnocentricity. How? To begin with, by noticing them, making
them ‘object’: noticing when we act and feel from the ethnocentric level of
consciousness.

Because truly shifting to world-centric intimacy — both individually and
collectively — is, I think, precisely the evolutionary leap called for by this
crisis.

Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin is a scholar and an artist. She is an author (as Elena
Maslova) of three books and multiple academic papers on endangered languages of
Siberia and linguistic typology, and two books and several online courses on
“synergistic seeing”, the visual art’s capacity to help us see through one
another’s eyes and cleanse the doors of perception. In her paintings and
teachings, she approaches art as a grand collective inquiry into the nature of
reality, probing the edges between painting, poetry, and philosophy. Her
mostimportant series is “Sonnets in colour”, a “translation” of Shakespeare’s
sonnets into the medium of painting. She holds a doctorate in linguistics from
the Russian Academy of Science and a post-doctoral qualification from University
of Bielefeld, Germany. She is co-authored Glory to the Heroes: the First Four
Weeks of the Russia Ukraine War: For the Sake of Value and the Arousal of the
West Beyond Moral Equivalence, with Dr. Marc Gafni.

JOIN WEEKLY EVOLUTIONARY SENSEMAKING WITH DR. MARC GAFNI

LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online:

 View on Medium


407 — Cosmos Is Hungry for Value — and You Are Too: Why That Matters More Than
Anything

407 — COSMOS IS HUNGRY FOR VALUE — AND YOU ARE TOO: WHY THAT MATTERS MORE THAN
ANYTHING

Van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889

CRITIQUE OF YUVAL HARARI’S STATEMENTS ON HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS ARE NOT
FICTIONS, BUT ARE GROUNDED IN A FIELD OF VALUE.

Dr. Marc Gafni

Published in

Office for the Future

·
20 min read
·
Aug 2, 2024

Listen

Summary: This episode analyzes and critiques Yuval Harari’s statements, which
offer us a prism into the Zeitgeist that defines our major institutions and
drives reality. He assumes that value is not real, stories are but figments of
our imagination, and any experience of meaning is an illusion; therefore, human
rights are just a story, an illusion. This view, presented as a given of Cosmos
— as being firmly grounded in science — fails to notice that there is a core set
of shared patterns across the world of matter, the world of biological life, and
the world of human mind. These patterns are patterns of value; they disclose the
Field of Value from which everything arises, and they evolve. Value is disclosed
in the recognition that there are desired qualities of Reality, qualities backed
by the universe, which are better than others, whose manifestation is desired by
Reality itself. Human rights are grounded in the Field of Value; they are more
real than anything. Without this realization, we have no chance of responding to
the meta-crisis.

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MOUNTAIN, MANY PATHS:

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OUR STORIES ARE TOO SMALL

Here on One Mountain, our commitment is to articulate a New Story of Value that
allows us to be the deepest, most potent, most poignant, most true, most good,
most beautiful beings that we can be —

* to evolve the source code,
* to evolve love itself,
* to evolve value itself.

But all of that is taking place uniquely in the context of the meta-crisis.

It is the context of a world whose hidden story is:

* rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics — a success story,
* or a narrow romantic story — this separate self loves that separate self in a
particular way,
* or an egoic hero’s journey — the hero’s journey that is about me and my
personal transformation.

That’s the best that we have, and those stories don’t work.

Those stories are too small. They are not equal to the experience of a global
community with exponential technologies and exponential risks.

* Our exterior technologies are exploding in ways that are not bound by
government, and not bound by law, and not bound by value,
* Our interior technologies are impoverished beyond measure.

The gap between wisdom and technology, between interior technology and exterior
technology is the meta-crisis.

Telling the New Story of Value is our stepping into the meta-crisis.

This is what we understood — after thinking, and feeling, and crying this, and
laughing this for years and years. I came to this conclusion independently.
Barbara Marx Hubbard came to this conclusion independently, Zak Stein, Ken
Wilber, Lori — everyone. We started the Center because we realized we need to
tell the New Story of Value, we need to evolve the source code.

* The source code of Reality is story, and we need to evolve the source code.
* The source code of Reality is value, we need to evolve value.

By telling this New Story of Value, we change the vector of history. The only
thing that ever changes the vector of history is a new story of value.

That’s our context. That’s what we’re doing here. Every week, we come together
in community, in intimate communion, as a band of outrageous lovers, disguised
as a think tank, disguised as a One Mountain, Many Paths, to participate
together in the revolutionary act of evolving the source code.

We don’t do it by declaring things to be true. The declaration has to emerge
from blood on the ground.

We spend all of our time deep inside —

* contemplating, studying, practicing, reading,
* consuming culture whole,
* traversing the vectors of human knowing, interior and exterior, in all of the
disciplines of wisdom;
* and then figuring out how to we weave together all the strands of traditional
knowing — pre-modern gnosis, modern gnosis, and postmodern gnosis,
* how to purify them of their overreaches and weave their validated insights in
a new fabric, a new hieros gamos, a new coming together, and spiral into the
future, and create a new possibility.

That’s what we’re doing. We are creating hope, because hope is a memory of the
future.

It’s the story that calls us into tomorrow.
It’s the story that can be the strange attractor that changes the vector of
history.
That’s where we are. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Value is real.
Value creates rights.
Without value, there are no rights.
Value is disclosed in the recognition that there are desired qualities of Reality, qualities backed by the universe, which are better than others, whose manifestation is desired by Reality itself.
Value is the script of desire, which discloses Reality’s Ought.
Value is the Yes of the Cosmos.

A DIRECT PRISM INTO THE ZEITGEIST

What is value?

Value is disclosed in the recognition that there are desired qualities of
Reality.

It’s not created by human beings.
It’s not a construction.

There are desired qualities of Reality that are backed by the universe, which
are better than other qualities. Their manifestation is desired by Reality
itself. There is a Yes:

* Yes, these qualities are better. No, those are not so good.
* Life is a value of Cosmos; murder, anti-value.

I want to show you why this matters so unbearably much. The way I want to do
that is, I want to play two clips for you. The first clip is exactly one minute
and 30 seconds long, and the second clip is one minute and 37 seconds long. It
is three minutes and seven seconds of watching.

These two clips are of my friend Yuval Harari.

Now, the reason that I sometimes talk about Yuval as a foil is not because I
believe (like many people do on the web, which is, I think, absurd) that Yuval
is some terrible figure, an agent of the empire, who should be attacked, and
vilified, and demonized. Nothing like that. I’d be delighted to have Yuval over
for dinner. I am sure he is a completely wonderful man. He was my son’s teacher
for a little bit at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

I assume Yuval is a beautiful guy; and he is a really bad philosopher. He is a
good historian. I read his doctorate on war; it’s a beautifully written
doctorate on the nature of war, and a history of a certain segment of time of
war. But his public books represent uncontaminated material (It’s a phrase that
one of the greatest scholars of medieval literature, Chaim Soloveitchik, shared
with me when I was 19 or 20).

There are certain writers who give you a direct prism into the Zeitgeist.
They’re not forming the Zeitgeist, but they are unwitting or witting agents of
the Zeitgeist, and they reflect what the Zeitgeist is actually thinking, but
often doesn’t say. They pierce the veil, and they disclose what’s actually
driving the Zeitgeist, what’s actually driving reality.

Yuval is one of those figures. He is an unconscious (and sometimes conscious)
parrot of conclusions of modernity and postmodernity, or a particular strain of
conclusions, which he articulates as givens of Cosmos. Meaning: if you don’t
think that way, there is something wrong with you. These are expressions of the
basic mainstream scientific legacy institutions — the knowing that defines
universities, policymakers, the tech plex, most economic planners,
communications, and education — all across the board.

I want to show you two clips, and then I want to comment on them from the
perspective of the New Story of Value. We will then begin to understand what One
Mountain is, why we need a New Story of Value, and how desperate we are for that
New Story, without which we can’t respond to the meta-crisis, we can’t respond
to existential risk —

* to risk to our very existence, the death of humanity,
* or to the potential death of our humanity, of the depth of what it means to
be a human being.

Clip 1: Human rights is just a story — Noah Yuval Harari [1 minute 30 seconds

CLIP 2: Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies |
Lex Fridman Podcast #390 [1 min 37 sec] (Start at 2:41:13 mark)

YUVAL HARARI IS REFLECTING A HIDDEN DEEP CONSENSUS

What Yuval is articulating is not a fringe position, but the mainstream position
of legacy institutions around the world. He is reflecting the academic consensus
on value and the nature of Reality, which lives in the legacy institutions that
define policy and reality. It’s a big deal. It’s more than a True Self bypass.
It’s a very deep conclusion drawn from studying the classical sources that are
shaping the conversation today.

Yuval is dead wrong, to be clear. Yuval basically says, in any number of places
— I’m giving a direct quote — that there is no meaning to life whatsoever. Any
claim that there is a meaning to life is an illusion. If human subjectivity were
lost from the planet, nothing would be lost.

If human subjectivity — meaning the interior experience of human beings and our
entire experience of value and living — were lost, there would be no actual
loss. Nothing would be missing, because meaning is made up. It’s not true. Any
sense that there is a meaning to life itself is a pure illusion.

That’s a big deal.

Yuval assumes that value is not real. His understanding is shared by many, many,
many people. Barack Obama says, best book ever, this book’s fantastic. Bill
Gates, yeah, this is my book. Jeffrey Bezos, this is my book. Sam Harris, wow,
this is my book. Lots of prime ministers, kings, heads of corporations, this is
my book. They have all read this material, and they say this is great; this is
my book.

He is reflecting a very deep consensus.

It’s a hidden consensus. No one actually says this stuff out loud. You can read
the whole book and almost not notice this material. But it chills the very heart
of Cosmos, and undermines our very core ability to respond to existential risk.

So, Yuval’s first assumption: value is not real. Value is made up. “Value is a
social construct.” His words. “It’s a fiction.” His words. “It’s an imagined
reality.” His words. “A figment of our imagination.” His words.

For example, Gaddafi’s Libya — Gaddafi, who was a brutal, strongman, who
violated, with every form of torture, every form of human rights we can imagine.
Yuval says, “Why is everybody so upset with Gaddafi in Libya?” Human rights is
just a story. It’s made up. It’s like money. It’s like a corporation —
completely made up.

Of course, he’ll often cite, as evidence for stories being made up, made-up
stories — that is, stories that are really made up. He says, let’s take a look
at Christian fundamentalism, or Sunni Islam, which says that Shiite Islam needs
to be completely destroyed in one way or another, according to certain texts.
Those are made up stories. Or let’s look at a particular version of communism
held by Mao’s Red Guards who attacked everyone else in the country. Why? Because
they were following a made-up story.

But of course, there are made up stories!

Yuval, my friend, that’s intellectually disingenuous, and unimaginably stupid,
and deceitful, and not true on top of the whole thing. Of course, there are made
up stories in the world. The fact that there are made up stories doesn’t mean
that there are no real stories, the structure of story is not true.

And of course, there are socially constructed values that are actually fiction
or imagined. Of course, that’s true; but that doesn’t mean there is no value.
That doesn’t mean value is not real.

VALUE IS THE IRREDUCIBLE RIGHTNESS THAT LIVES IN COSMOS FOR ITS OWN SAKE

What is value?

Value is not a social construct that we froze into everlasting time and refuse
to change. That’s the value that’s critiqued by modernity and by post-modernity.
This is not what value is.

> Value is a structure of Cosmos that desires an Ought, which lives in the very
> structure of Cosmos itself.

Value is the quality of irreducible rightness that lives in Cosmos for its own
sake (not because it’s instrumentally right).

And value evolves.

There is a structure of value — and then, as that value clarifies, as it
interacts with human beings, human beings gradually clarify and discover more
and more of that value. More and more of that value is disclosed and revealed.

Eros is a value of Cosmos. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness,
desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. So:

1. Desire is a value.
2. Radical aliveness is a value.
3. Deeper contact is a value.
4. Greater wholeness — separate parts forming a larger whole — is a value.

These are four values. Those are all values of Eros. Eros itself is Value.
That’s the ErosValue Cosmos.

Now, that value evolves. Eros follows its own desire, and the desire is always
for more value. Eros is always desiring more value. It’s what Whitehead means
when he says, Cosmos has appetite for value.

At the very inception of Cosmos, there is an entire Field of Value.

* There are all the mathematical values.
* There are the sets of relationships between different kinds of quarks.
* Protons and neutrons are a set of relationships that have a particular
quality, they’re a particular value of Cosmos, and they play in a larger
mathematical set of values.

Each value is a particular quality of Cosmos. Cosmos is not neutral. It’s not
empty. Cosmos is filled with different qualities. Those different qualities are
Value.

And then, value evolves.

Hydrogen is a value, helium is a value, nitrogen is a value. It’s a particular
set of relationships with a particular quality, with a particular vector, which
moves in a particular direction — it has a telos, it has a desire, and Cosmos
doesn’t stop at hydrogen, it doesn’t stop at helium, it doesn’t stop at
nitrogen, it keeps going. It creates deeper contact, greater wholes, more value.

That’s what Cosmos does. That’s its nature.

Then, as this value unfolds, it discloses more and more clearly. Eros discloses
more and more clearly. We go through the world of matter, and we get into the
world of biological life, and then we get into the world of human life — and
gradually, Eros discloses as conscious loving, conscious caring — following each
other, loving each other, holding each other.

But the configuration of relationships, and of holding between different parts —
different values that hold each other and form larger wholes — lives all the way
down in Cosmos. That’s a feature of Reality.

Let me say it another way.

> Value is the aspirational Ought that’s backed by the universe.

Or:

> Value is an intrinsic Ought which allures Reality towards its next level of
> fulfillment of depth and of wholeness.

In other words, value is the meaning structure of Reality. Value is the meaning
and aspirational need and desire of Reality.

VALUE IS BOTH BEING AND BECOMING

Value has two dimensions:

* First, value is the very space in which the entire manifest world arises. The
entire manifest world arises in a Field of Value. This is the quality of
being.
* Then there is another quality of value, that’s the quality of becoming. It is
not just the space in which all of Reality arises, it is the need and desire
of Cosmos. Cosmos has needs, Cosmos has desires, and the need and desire of
Cosmos is value.

Or you can say it like this:

> Evolution is love in action, or ErosValue in action, in response to need.

Need generates more contact, and new levels of wholeness. There is a need that
early elements have — to evolve, to deepen, to create deeper intimacies, to
create deeper configurations of relationship.

Evolution is this progressive deepening of intimacy. It is this progressive
deepening of sets of relationships of love, of holding, of embrace, of new
wholeness between parts. That’s what evolution is. That’s its nature.

Or: Evolution is love in action in response to desire.

Need and desire disclose value.

Value as being is the space in which everything arises, so value is not hard to
find — value is impossible to avoid. Value is the Field in which all of Reality
arises. Value (as becoming) is the desire for more value. The becoming quality
of value is that value evolves. Value is not static.

For example, life is a value of Cosmos. Greater intimacy is a value of Cosmos.

It begins with mathematical values. It begins with subatomic particles. There is
a very limited number of ways (a hundred plus something ways) that subatomic
particles can form an atom. Then you have an unimaginable amount of ways that
atoms can form a molecule. There is this increase in possibilities of contact.
There is this increase in new possibilities of intimacy. So, intimacy is a value
of Cosmos — more and more configurations of intimacy, more and more
configurations of relationship —

* which create more and more wholeness,
* and more and more possibility,
* and more and more vectors of attention,
* and more and more depth in Cosmos.

Value evolves because Cosmos desires more value. Cosmos has needs and desires.
Need and desire creates more value. That’s what generates Cosmos. Cosmos evolves
because there is this desire inherent in Cosmos — this appetite inherent in
Cosmos — for more wholeness, for more value, for more possibility, for more
attention, for more Eros, for more intimacy, for more uniqueness. These are the
plotlines of Cosmos. And that is the cosmic story.

THERE ARE COMMON PATTERNS OF VALUE IN THE WORLDS OF MATTER, LIFE, AND HUMAN MIND

In Yuval’s book, there are exactly two paragraphs — one paragraph on the world
of matter, another paragraph on the world of biology — and then he starts the
book. He says, now history starts.

No, no, no, actually, the world of matter is a world which is driven by an
appetite for value, and that appetite for value evolves. We go through all the
world of matter — that’s the first Big Bang. It then triumphs in the Second Big
Bang (the emergence of biological life) — and a similar set of patterns of value
governs the world of matter and the world of biology. Now, there are more
patterns. There are deeper patterns, there are new patterns. There are new
emergences in the world of biology, but there is a core set of common patterns.

That’s what systems theory understood. Read Ervin Laszlo’s 1972 book on systems
theory (Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of
Contemporary Thought), or his Evolution: The Grand Synthesis. In both of them,
he sums up systems theory as the realization that there are common patterns in
matter, and in life, and in the depth of the self-reflective human mind. Those
are common patterns of value.

Reality is going somewhere. Reality has plotlines. Reality is a story.

Harari always says, stories just work because they create coherence.

No! The reason stories create coherence is because Reality is constructed from
stories, from narratives. Atoms have stories. Atoms are a story —

* there are causal relationship between events;
* there is a plotline, a telos, a direction;
* there are new possibilities creates through crisis;
* there is some degree of freedom in the story.

An evolving freedom, an evolving intimacy, an evolving Eros — those are values
of Cosmos. That’s the structure of Cosmos itself. You can’t skip the world of
matter, and skip the world of biology, then go to the human world and say they
made it all up. No, they didn’t make it all up.

> There is a Field of Value. And that Field of Value evolves and unfolds.

Let say it differently:

> Value is the script of desire of Reality.

This cuts through everything we just said.

Or: value is the meaning and the aspirational need, the demand of Reality.
Or: value is the script of desire which discloses Reality’s Ought.

There is an Ought in Reality. Reality is trying to go somewhere. It wants more
life, and it wants more depth.

Value appears as a story. Value is a story. It’s a becoming.

Value is both the space in which everything arises, and it’s the plotline of
becoming.

Reality has First Principles and First Values. Those First Principles and First
Values are the plotline of Cosmos.

Cosmos wants more uniqueness, more individuated uniqueness, wants more clarified
desire, desire is a value of Reality. In the First Principles and First Values
books, we’ve listed 18 core structural values of Reality that drive Reality all
the way through matter, life, and mind.

Harari has literally no cognizance of any of this, because the modern and
post-modern world just assumed that Reality was inert, and lifeless, and
materialist, and has no meaning, and everything is a pure social construct; and
if stories are powerful, it is simply because they cohere people. No. Stories
cohere Reality, because they are part of the structure of Reality.

First Principles and First Values are storied. They have a narrative arc. They
are telling the story of Cosmos. Eros moves to more and more, deeper and deeper
unfoldings of chapters of value in the great arc of the universe, and it’s an
arc which moves towards value.

Story is real.
Story operates at every level of Cosmos.
Story evolves.

The story of evolution is the evolution of First Principles and First Values.

VALUES CREATE RIGHTS

The next sentence in the code is:

> Values create rights.

Rights come from values.

Value means need and desire. Need and desire create value. Clarified need and
desire create clarified value.

Life is a value. What do I need to have life? I need food — so, nourishment,
feeding someone, that’s a value. Sustaining life, value. That’s a need.

I need and desire oxygen. Oxygen is a value. Do I have a right to air and a
right to food? Yes. Why do I have a right to air and a right to food? Because I
need them, because I desire them.

I need and desire food, so, I have a right to food.

Let’s deepen it.

* Let’s say that uniqueness is a value. Now, I have a right to foster my
uniqueness.
* Let’s say communion is a value. Now I have a right to create communion,
relationship.
* Let’s say desire’s a value. Now, I have a right to desire.

Value creates rights.

If there is a value of freedom and choice — in other words, life is not
mechanistic, there is a degree of freedom — then I have a right to freedom

When we talk to each other, there is an implied experience of freedom, which is
what creates aliveness between us; without that, there would be an anti-life, a
deadness. There is an implicit sense of aliveness in Cosmos. Life demands a
dimension of freedom. If you have a mechanistic universe, you don’t have a
story, you have a mechanical manual. Freedom is a value of Cosmos. If freedom is
a value of Cosmos, then I have a right to freedom.

And that right evolves.

At the subatomic level, it’s but a wisp of freedom. Then there are beginnings of
greater freedom as we go up the evolutionary chain, to biology and then to the
depth of the self-reflective human mind. As I deepen at each level, I get more
and more freedom.

If you don’t have this, then what do you have?

You have my friend, Yuval, who gets up and says, human rights is just a story,
and all stories are made up. And don’t go to stories, stories aren’t real. Just
feel and respond to what’s in front of you.

No.

> Story is the structure of Cosmos, and all stories are stories of value. Value
> creates rights, and value creates responsibilities.

But If I say there is no Field of Value, then —

* there are no rights, then there are no human rights,
* then love is not real,
* then I don’t have a right to be alive, I don’t have a right to life itself,
because there is no value.

It’s all a coincidence of a meaningless cosmos.

WE HAVE TO GROUND COSMOS IN THE FIELD OF VALUE

Now, let me ask you a question.

Do you think we have a bat’s chance in hell of responding to the meta-crisis —
in a way that’s profoundly human, profoundly filled with love, profoundly
compassionate, profoundly dignified — if we can’t even establish that life is a
value, or that value is real, that any story of value is real?

Yuval is saying human rights aren’t real because he says story is not real. and
value is not real, and stories of value aren’t real. Since value discloses
rights, and there is no value, so there are no rights. Wow!

Does that matter? That matters beyond imagination.

If we don’t go back and ground Cosmos in a Field of Value —

* then love is not real,
* then life is not a real value,
* then goodness is not a real value,
* then truth is not a real value,
* then beauty is not a real value.

If truth is not a real value, then the information ecology collapses.

If life is not a real value, then we’ll sacrifice huge swaths of life (as Thanos
did in the Avengers movie) in order to save the rest of the Earth, we’ll kill
half of the Earth, or kill the whole Earth — just do a reset on the whole thing,
and leave a bunch of tech billionaires in bunkers, as was described by a number
of writers.

That’s actually what’s happening today.

> We need to ground Cosmos in a Field of Value, which means we have to re-vision
> value theory clearly and accurately.

That’s what we are starting to do in the First Principles and First Values book,
and I want to ask you to read it, and comment on it, as we are now going to the
next step and beginning to write the next step of the David J. Temple series.

Value is revolution.

It’s a value revolution. It’s an erotic revolution. Value is Eros. It’s an
erotic revolution, it’s a sensual revolution. Sensemaking is sensual. We have to
ground ourselves in the sensuality of the Field of Eros, which is the Field of
ErosValue, which then allows us to do sensemaking, which allows us to establish
human rights.

Value is Reality’s script of need and desire, which discloses the Ought of the
universe. And the Ought is the inherent yearning and aspiration of the cosmic
process, as it shows up in the world of matter, life, and mind — and in your
particular life.

Value is the script of need and desire that’s backed by the universe.

(I am just giving you different ways to say this.)

First Principles and First Values are the plotlines of the Intimate Universe.
Clarified desire discloses authentic value. Value is disclosed in the
recognition that there are desired qualities of Reality — qualities backed by
the universe.

I’ll give you one more. Better or worse is the nature of Cosmos disclosed by
need and desire, the appetite of the universe. Value is the recognition of
intrinsic inherent worth which discloses the need, desire, and demand of
Reality.

Value is the intrinsic appetition, appetite, need, desire, or demand of Reality,
which discloses the omni-coherence of the Intimate Universe. Omni-coherent means
all of Reality is coherent, all of Reality is organized in patterns of value,
and everything the universe does is to move towards that value, ultimately.

You can’t be upset by anti-value, or by evil, or by suffering if there is no
Field of Value. It’s only the Field of Value that allows me to challenge
anti-value.

If there is no Field of Value, the Hobbits can’t challenge Sauron. And there is
no one to walk with Gandalf, because why shouldn’t there be just a world of Orcs
and anti-value? But the lush green fields of the hobbits — that’s the Field of
Value.

Value is the irreducible rightness of the Cosmos, which is both eternal and
evolving.

Value is the recognition of the inherent appetition and desire of Reality.

Value is the nature of Eros. Eros is Value. Eros is ErosValue.

Without this, there are no human rights. Human rights don’t exist. Rights have
to be rooted in a Field of Value.

In modernity, you could say rights are self-evident (“We hold these truths to be
self-evident.”) That was a deist ploy to cover up the fact that we don’t know
how to ground rights in anything, because we’ve read too much David Hume, and
we’ve interpreted Kant wrongly.

We need to ground rights in a Field of Value. Otherwise, you have Harari’s
statement, the world is meaningless. If human subjectivity was lost from Cosmos,
there would be no loss at all. There would be nothing to grieve.

> If we can’t grieve the possibility of existential risk, we can’t respond to
> existential risk.

But what is grief? Grief is the experience that I’ve lost value. I only grieve
if I lost value.

Shame is the experience that I am alienated from the Field of Value. Shame is
not just toxic shame, but the shame that I’m not being the full human being I
should be, I’m alienated from the Field of Value — the good shame, the holy
shame. If there is no Field of Value, there is nothing to ever be ashamed of and
you just become “my precious,” a murderer, a violator of humanity.

To become a lover, to become a mad lover, to become a mad, erotic, ecstatic, and
sensual being, I have to be grounded in the Field of Value.

Value is the hottest, the most sensual, the most erotic structure of Reality
itself, which is Eros.

I know that was a little hard. That was hard work. But story is real, and value
is real, and stories of value are real. And human rights are more real than
anything.

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