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Conversations with David J. Temple

David J. Temple

Listen to intimate conversations with David J. Temple and friends exploring the unfolding vision of CosmoErotic Humanism.

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Monday · 30 min
Value and Anti-Value: The Silence That Thickens Into Divinity or Evil
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein enter a series of conversations on the Tree of Life, exploring value and anti-value. This first dialogue focuses on Keter, the crown, and on how silence can either deepen into divinity or thicken into evil. They examine how this happens and scenarios where silence arises from a loss of voice, where individuals become numb to suffering, manifesting anti-value. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, September 2026, Episode: “Value and Anti-Value: The Silence That Thickens Into Divinity or Evil” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:34 — Context Setting: Exploring Value and Anti-Value by Understanding Anti-Sefirot in the Tree of Life 2:07 — Where the Tree of Life Is Located: The 10 Sefirot Are 10 Divine Stories that Are Numbers 5:58 — Keter Is the Ultimate Silence of Presence 10:02 — The Value Within Keter: It Isn’t just About Silence; It’s About not Speaking 13:28 — About First Principles and First Values 14:15 — The Value Within Keter: It Isn’t just About Silence; It’s About not Speaking (continued) 15:16 — The Anti-Value of Silence Isn’t The Silence of Fear, It’s the Silence of Having Lost Voice 17:51 — Three Ways to Lose Your Voice: The Story You Live In, Early Trauma and the Digital Disruption of Speech 22:55 — There’s An Anti-Value Evil in the Bureaucracy: I’m Participatory in the System Because I Don’t See Any Way Out 25:45 — Evil Is Coming from the Parts of You that You Have Silenced Within 28:46 — A Certain Kind of Silence Thickens Into Divinity; Another, Into Evil 29:32 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting: Exploring Value and Anti-Value by Understanding Anti-Sefirot in the Tree of Life Zak: David isn’t here again, and he’s in a kind of dark mood. He left us a note about evil. It’s a topic he’s brought up before, but this note was interesting. It was cryptic, in the lineage, something about the anti-Sefirot. Marc: Yes. It’s funny, I looked at it, you sent me a copy of the note by text. It’s always good to see his handwriting. And it’s a big topic. So let’s do this: apparently, if I understand, he wants us to spend some real time talking about this topic that we might call value and anti-value. That’ll be our frame. His suggestion is to talk about it through the prism of the Solomon Lineage. We’ll use that prism, and particularly through a particular prism within the Solomon Lineage: the Tree of Life. We’re just going to get started today, but in the next two or three conversations, let’s really focus on it. I’ve been thinking about this, obviously, for a long time. I remember when David first sent us a note about this a couple of years ago, we began this conversation then. We began it, I think, on the porch here, in this great state that we’re in. So let’s try to frame it in a broader sense for a second. Let’s see if we can locate the Tree of Life, and then enter into its details. Where the Tree of Life Is Located: The 10 Sefirot Are 10 Divine Stories that Are Numbers Marc: When we say the Tree of Life, we’re talking about a particular structure within the Solomon Lineage. For anyone who hasn’t caught David before: the Solomon Lineage’s major document, in the thirteenth century, is the Zohar, the Book of Radiance. The Zohar is the major influence on Luria, in a particular line of understanding: Lurianic Kabbalah. So the Zohar is thirteenth century; Lurianic Kabbalah is approximately Renaissance time. What’s so interesting—and we have talked about this before, Z—is the influence of the mystery schools of the Renaissance: • Particulary the Florentine Platonic Academy, which has in it Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. • It was funded by Cosimo de’ Medici. • We have talked about Plethon, as a big influence on Cosimo. And we hae also talked between us, that: • The teachers of Pico are Yohanan Alemanno and Elia Delmedigo. Many people have talked about this—when I say many people I mean, within a very small group, there’s an awareness that this is the case. We mentioned before that Moshe Idel, in his book Kabbalah in Italy, traces some of these filaments. So the point is: this Tree of Life—the Solomon Lineage—appears in many places. Let’s locate ourselves in the Zohar, the Book of Radiance. The Book of Radiance shapes Luria; the Tree of Life is a primary structure that Luria developed extensively. And then this Tree of Life enters the Renaissance in many ways. I just want to locate it. Already in the Zohar, in volume two, there’s a passage, maybe in one of our conversations we’ll actually read it, but it’s pretty cryptic. It’s heavy Aramaic, which doesn’t make it cryptic; it just makes it Aramaic. The allusions aren’t actually clear, but what he’s doing is looking at this Tree of Life, which is: • 10 luminations. • 10 sefirot. • 10 divine qualities. • 10 sefirah — mispar, number; the word mispar, number, like cipher in English. • 10 sipurim — 10 stories. So: 10 numbers that are stories. Or 10 divine qualities. Usually it’s translated in English as 10 attributes, which doesn’t get you far. It’s 10 divine stories that are numbers. It just occurs to me now, this way, the gap between the stem cells and the humanities just disappears. Number and story are thought to be one—mathematics and story are thought to be one. So there are these 10 core story-numbers, essential logos structures of Reality. That’s the Tree of Life. And the relationship between the 10, and the nature of each of the 10, is critical. So what we’re going to do—I think this is what David’s wanting us to do—is, you and I, way back in the day, looked at the 10. Zak: Yeah. Totally. Marc: Now we’re going to go through each of these 10, following the Zohar, which does this explicitly, although what the Zohar means is actually completely unclear. Keter Is the Ultimate Silence of Presence Marc: We’re going to start with the top of the Tree of Life, which is Keter, the crown. Our friend and colleague Art Green actually wrote the primary scholarly work on Keter, Princeton University Press. An irrelevant piece of information, I agree. Keter is the crown. If you read lineage sources carefully, Keter is often identified with silence. Shtika, silence. For example: when Akiva, who’s the transition between the Temple and the oral law, the Temple and the study hall—is being killed by the Romans, in Tractate Menachot 29a, there’s a description of Moses saying to God: he’s the master of Torah, zu Torah, zu sekharah, and this is his reward. And God says: shtok—be silent—kach ala b’machshaba, so it ascends in My thought. When the Solomon Lineage mystics read it, they say: shtok, shtika, silence—the quality of Keter. Keter, that top quality, which is silence, that is the path to Me. So they read it, instead of the classical Talmudic reading, which is: shut the f**k up, don’t ask questions, this is divine providence. No. Actually, divinity is saying that when you confront the void, this apparent evil, this master who’s being tortured, there’s actually a way through the void, which is shtika, which is silence. There’s actually a way through the void, which is shtika, which is silence. And the person who reads it this way is Nachman. In Torah 64, he says: oh, no. There’s a way through the void: silence. So silence is this silence of presence, where you have this experience—let’s cross-fertilize traditions—of shunyata. Of this living, breathing meaningfulness, even if you can’t formulate it as theology, even if you can’t formulate it as laws of ethics. I remember you describing to me, a couple of years ago—I’ll pass it to you—we’ll talk first on the positive side, a particularly beautiful meditative experience with our friend at the monastery in Vermont, with our friend Soryu. You were meditating there, and you had this very deep experience of this very deep shunyata. This very deep silence, where you’re in the meaning field. In some sense, you’re in it. That’s classical Keter. It’s what I call the ultimate silence of presence. Keter is beyond meaning structures, and yet it’s an ultimate meaning structure. It’s the link between the world of manifestation and the ultimate world. But those two worlds are not unrelated, those worlds bleed into each other. They’re actually one world. It’s actually an omni-coherent Cosmos. So Keter would be the silence that discloses ultimate meaning and Value, even when I can’t see how it plays, even when I can’t put it into concepts. That’s Keter. I actually just got a deeper realization of Keter in sharing this with you. I wasn’t just sharing information. That’s the nature of true study. I had, in a certain sense, missed that Nachman is citing this verse, this Talmudic text, and I didn’t realize it until I was sharing it with you. I didn’t get what he was doing until I said it out loud: this silence is ultimate Value presence, even in the face of brutality. Which is going to be very important in terms of the anti-value. The Value Within Keter: It Isn’t just About Silence; It’s About not Speaking. Zak: That’s the frame here: we’re trying to see the anti-value, which means clarifying what’s at stake. What’s the actual value there? We have talked before about the common sense sacred axioms, and silence, moments of silence, which are one of the last remaining vestiges of reverence for that sacred silence, which is incontestably part of every tradition. The Keter comparison with the shunyata is a long-standing part of the dialogue between Buddhism and Hebrew mysticism. It’s that point where they meet, which is utter silence: absence of division, distinction, membrane, boundary. That kind of thing. I remember Kurt Fischer, who was my teacher, a Piagetian, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst. He was talking about defense mechanisms of withdrawal, among other things. When someone raised their hand and said, “But what about all the Buddhist monks who go away and never talk to anyone? Isn’t that a good thing, to be withdrawn?” Kurt said, “Maybe.” He said: “We can’t rule out the fact that you could get some weird ass stuff going on in monasteries, and people are avoiding life by doing all that stuff.” So he was seeing what we’re going to point to with the anti-value: that hidden in the silence, there are… • Different kinds of silence. • Different motivations for not being around noise. • Different motivations for not making noise. And speech, in particular, as opposed to screams and guttural things, would be the way that a human breaks silence. It isn’t just about silence; it’s actually about not speaking. That’s what’s meant there. And then, of course, “in the beginning was the word”. Before creation is this silence: presumably not even just noiselessness, but no speech, no order. So again, in the silence, there’s either the thing before order, or there’s actually disorder. One of the reasons people don’t speak, if they’re overwhelmed, is because they don’t know what to say, as opposed to knowing very well what’s going on, knowing exactly what to say, and not saying anything. As Akiva would obviously say: “You guys are wrong”—it’s obvious what needs to be said to the Romans torturing him, but he says nothing, notoriously. Whereas the silence that comes from confusion, delusion, overwhelm—those kinds of things—is still silent, still sitting there, still not clear how to read the reaction of silence. So yeah, it’s a deep issue. One more thing: the hidden and revealed First Principle and First Value, which is deep within the First Principles and First Values book. That’s tied up in that dynamic of silence and speech, and revelation requiring some preamble of silence. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Marc: Beautiful. Just one small thing, I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole, though it’s an important one—in the Moses story, where Moses sees Akiva being tortured by the Romans, the Talmud has the divine voice say to Moses: “Be silent.” Akiva actually speaks. Akiva cries out this statement of meaning, of faith. He cries out: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”—and dies as he says echad, one. As he says echad, the Talmud says, “yatz’ta nishmato b’echad.” His soul left his body as he said echad, as he said one. So there’s this distinction in the Talmud between the one who’s actually experiencing the suffering and the one who’s watching the suffering. That distinction is, of course, deep and profound and heart-rending, but let’s bracket that for a second. I just wanted to clarify that. The Anti-Value of Silence Isn’t The Silence of Fear, It’s the Silence of Having Lost Voice Marc: Let’s go deep here. When we talked about this earlier today, we just began this conversation, and it’s so subtle and deep. So: silence. What is the anti-value of silence? Let’s construct a couple of scenarios: • I’m a Hamas person, and I go and I massacre. Or I hear, I witness, a massacre, and I’m silenced. In other words, I hear about it, but I don’t protest. I don’t even think to protest, because I’m not actually screaming out in protest in the face of evil, because I have been silenced. And I’ve been silenced because my capacity to actually feel what’s happening has been taken away from me. I have been down-regulated, downgraded as a human being. In this case, I’ve been downgraded. Or, • I’m a Christian crusader killing Muslims at a particular moment, outside Jerusalem. • I’m a Khmer Rouge soldier, involved in that slaughter. • I’m involved in the slaughter between Hutus and Tutsis. In other words, whenever there’s a slaughter which people stand by and are silent in response to, they can be silent because they’re afraid. That’s true, let me bracket that for a second. That’s a different kind—that’s actually not the anti-value, that’s fear. And that’s tragic. But it’s fear. There’s a different kind of silence where I’m actually silenced. Zak: Yeah. Marc: I’m actually silent because there’s no cry that’s coming out. And I have lost voice. It’s not that I have voice, but I’m afraid—I have voice, I’m speaking it to myself, but I’m in dead fear, so I make this human move to protect myself, which is very hard too, it’s tragic, and the world needs heroes, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about—I’m going to give a couple of instances of it—where actually I have lost voice. I’m silent in this essential way. I have lost the essential quality and power of voice. Three Ways to Lose Your Voice: The Story You Live In, Early Trauma and the Digital Disruption of Speech Marc: There are at least three ways I can lose it. 1) One is what we just described, where the story I live in is so broken that I don’t actually experience this person to be worthy of my voice, of my empathy. So I’m silenced. But I’m silenced in a way where I can literally see brutality in front of me and not be moved by it. 2) A second version of that would be when somehow—either early on, early trauma, early tragedy—evil comes through the wound is one of the doctrines, kind of, or one of the realizations of CosmoErotic Humanism. Somehow I have been wounded early, traumatized, and frozen in a way that I have lost access to my voice, and then I see suffering and I’m silent, not because I’m in an ethnocentric story, but because I’m silent. But then it goes even further. Just like in the ethnocentric story, I then become brutal. That silence turns into evil — that silence, of the crusader or of the Hamas person, turns into evil. It actually becomes anti-value. I have been so silenced it becomes anti-value, in the same way the orcs, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, were once elves. In Tolkien’s imagery, they were of Elvine descent. Elvine descent was noble. Zak: They speak though. They yell at each other. Marc: No, no, they speak, but they’re silent in the sense that… Zak: They don’t protest the inhumanity. Marc: That’s right, they have no voice. Zak: Exactly. Marc: Their speech is not speech. Zak: That’s what I meant by grunt. They grunt and do things, but they don’t have speech. And so, to bring this conversation to, let’s say, the end of Exit the Silicon Maze, where you’re talking about the digital disruption of the ability to use speech—which isn’t the digital disruption of the ability to make noises. 3) It’s the removal of voice through the capture and distortion of language and relationship. This is a version of the death of humanity, which follows from being rendered silent. Even though we’re talking, there’s no voice. Marc: I think that’s very, very, very important. I think that’s a different stage, though. I think that’s going to be closer to the anti-value understanding of Binah, the third sefirah. There’s this deconstruction of all meaning structures, that in the end becomes part of the anti-value structure. I think that’s absolutely true. The digital rendering is this gradual thing where you basically deconstruct all the pieces. Zak: For example, if you think about trying to say something on social media. It’s like when you’re in a dream and you’re shouting, but there’s no effect from the shout. This is how social media feels to most people. It’s so much energy expended in giving voice, in a context where they’ve actually been removed from having a voice. This is different from being unable to understand reality. It’s actually sometimes watching reality, seeing things, and then trying to say something, and not being allowed to. And so the incapacitation. This is why people are afraid of the loss of the public sphere, or the town square, where you could go and be a crier and break the silence with your voice. Marc: Right. Let’s go slow for a second. I get the distinction. Totally received. When we’re looking for anti-value, what we’re saying is that it actually has become anti-value. There’s a fabric in culture of anti-value, and a fabric in the personal of anti-value. Just like the sefirah: value plays out in the fabric of communitas, or its collapse, and it plays out in the fabric of the personal. This notion of silence in culture, the silencing in culture is what you’re describing, you could be describing the anti-value of Keter as the creation of a space in which no sound can be made—because there’s so much sound that no sound can be made. And so every scream becomes Edvard Munch’s silent scream. There’s a silencing that takes place because there’s so much noise. Zak: Exactly. Marc: But then what that does is… I want to take it the next step to anti-value, we’ll stay with just this first one, with Keter. There’s An Anti-Value Evil in the Bureaucracy: I’m Participatory in the System Because I Don’t See Any Way Out Marc: When you read the transcript of the Hamas terrorist who calls home, this kid who calls home to his parents and says, “Mom, mom, I just killed 10 Jews.” I have two threads that I look at on my phone. One is from Al Jazeera, which is essentially a Hamas propaganda outlet. But I go there to see, I want to see the faces on both sides. I see the faces of some of the worst Hamas, brutal terrorists, and their faces are angelic. Meaning, you see that they’re distorted, but they don’t look like they have horns. They look like these young men who were killed. What happened to them? They lost access to their own voice. They still need amphetamines, as you pointed out before, to jack themselves up in order to downregulate their empathy, but nonetheless, they become evil because their voice has been silenced. And there’s also an anti-value evil which is a collective evil—and social media is one expression of it—but there’s also the expression where I’m, kind of, in the bureaucracy. Let’s say, the Vietnam War is happening. Scott Peck describes this in one of his early books, I think it was People of the Lie, though it might have been in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled. He describes: the Vietnam War is happening, I’m working in the system in Washington, and I’m actually participatory in the system because I don’t see any way out. In other words, that’s the collective structure of social media, or of this maze-like bureaucracy where there’s no voice. So if I become part of the evil. It’s not just that I’m sad. Zak: Yeah. Totally. Hannah Arendt, her notion of the banal nature of most evil. It is just the meager, not even overwhelming, fear: just a kind of avoidance of major life disruption as a result of giving voice to something that’s obviously bad. And so the bureaucratic disabling of heroic speech, because there’s no place for it. Marc: That then becomes silence. I just want to trace it—that then becomes evil. Zak: That then becomes evil. It gets absorbed into the actual evil act. Evil Is Coming from the Parts of You that You’ve Silenced Within Marc: So we have identified three dimensions of this: 1. I’m in a story that mediates my voice through that story, like an ethnocentric, narrow, fundamentalist story. Therefore I go silent, and I do evil. 2. Or I’m in a traumatized story, which destroys me. Evil comes through the wound that then numbs me to my own voice, and I become an instrument of evil. 3. Various forms of Molochian structures, collective structures, that are either digital-systemic or bureaucratic-systemic, in which the voice is destroyed, silenced. The vocal cords are ripped out, but then I don’t go neutral. I participate in a bureaucracy of evil. So when Goldhagen writes his book at Harvard, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, it’s about that, what you were describing. They become Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It’s not that I go neutral. It’s that I’m actually participatory as anti-value evil of the worst f*****g kind. Not a minor kind. I’m participating in the f*****g Nazi machine. It’s not minor. Zak: No. And this has to have to do with the suppression of the voice of the inner part. I don’t want to pass over the point you made about parts theory, in terms of evil coming from the part of you that you have silenced. That part is like, hanging out in the basement, making plans that you’re not paying attention to because you’ve silenced it. So, psychoanalytically: the dream, dream work—which is the transformation of the repressed thing into something you can see vaguely in a dream—the work of the dream is to try to give voice to this thing that you cannot hear, that will eventually become evil if you ignore it. The work of the dream is to try to give voice to this thing that you cannot hear, that will eventually become evil if you ignore it. It’s trying to show you, in the dream: “Hey, I’m here.” [Laughs] That’s what the Gestalt therapist means by that practice, talk to the things in your dream. Even if they’re weird things, talk to them, see what they say. Because you’re trying to get the voices that are part of you, that you don’t listen to, that are within you. That’s the most obvious source of neurosis, and then that deepens into things that become quite bad. Marc: You’re adding something very important here, which is: when I don’t give voice to my split off parts, they hijack myself. Zak: Exactly. That’s almost like, your classic summation of psychoanalytic theory. Marc: Yeah, it’s crazy important. Zak: That’s why people don’t want to meditate and do other things. Because you just sit there in silence and you’re going to start to hear all the things that are going on in your mind, that you’re too busy to ignore. A Certain Kind of Silence Thickens Into Divinity. Another, into Evil Marc: So what we’re saying across these four, is that silence thickens into evil. Silence thickens into anti-value. That’s what happens. Zak: Yes. And what we said at the outset was that: Another kind of silence thickens into divinity. Marc: That’s right. Exactly. One kind of silence thickens, shtok—be silent—and that’s the path. Kach—that’s how—ala—you actually ascend into b’machshaba, into the Divine mind. Another kind of silence thickens into evil. Wow. Thank you, brother. Zak: Beautiful. Yeah. Mentioned Sources: * The Zohar, c. 13th century; various editions * Idel, Moshe, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280–1510: A Survey, Yale University Press, 2011 * Green, Arthur, Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism, Princeton University Press, 1997 * Nachman of Breslov, Likutei Moharan, Torah 64, Breslov Research Institute, 1808 * Temple, J. David, First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024 * The Talmud, various editions, c. 200–500 CE * Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, 1954–1955 * Temple, J. David, Exit the Silicon Maze, World Philosophy and Religion Press, Forthcoming * Peck, M. Scott, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, 1983 * Peck, M. Scott, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, Simon and Schuster, 1978 * Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 Mentioned People: * Isaac Luria (1534-1572) * Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) * Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) * Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464) * Plethon (c. 1355/1360-1452) * Yohanan Alemanno (c. 1435-after 1504) * Elia Delmedigo (c. 1458-c. 1493) * Moshe Idel (1947-) * Arthur Green (1941-) * Rabbi Akiva (c. 50-c. 135) * Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) * Soryu Forall * Kurt Fischer (1943-2020) * Jean Piaget (1896-1980) * Moses * J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) * Edvard Munch (1863-1944) * Scott Peck (1936-2005) * Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) * Daniel Goldhagen (1959-) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already committed to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
August 28 · 39 min
Value is Real: From Mathematical to Mystical Value – Part 2 (with Ken Wilber)
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein explore the profound assertion that "Value is Real," tracing its presence through five dimensions: mathematical, musical, molecular, moral, and mystical. They also analyze the modern tendency to interpret spiritual experiences through materialist and computational prisms, arguing that the experience of awakening can never be value-neutral. They discuss how the deep realization that "I am", is always "I am Value", always revealing inherent value and meaning. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, August 2026, Episode: “Value is Real: From Mathematical to Mystical Value – Part 2” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:42 — Context Setting: The Five Ms as an Opening Frame 1:40 — It’s a Mathematical Cosmos, and Mathematics Is This Unimaginably Complex Set of Meanings 6:02 — Musical Value: Music Has an Ought in Terms of the Beautiful 8:06 — Molecular Value Is Mathematics Coded to Generate a Reality that Creates Larger Wholes 9:05 — Wholeness Is Moral Value; It Is the Right Relationship Between Parts 9:46 — Mystical Value Is the Realization that the Human Being Is a Part of the Largest Whole, But Is a Discrete Expression of It 10:25 — Value Has Weight and Gravitas, and that Weight Weigh on Us as a Measure of the Value 11:54 — Gravity Is Allurement and Autonomy, All the Way Down 12:33 — The Phenomenology of Discovery in Music and Math Are Actually Similar 16:44 — About First Principles and First Values 17:31 — My Identity Is Value: My Unique Perspective Is a Unique Configuration of Value, Intimacy and Desire 19:46 — There’s A New Nihilism: When Awakening Gets Split from Value 23:51 — An Insight from Semiotics: Awakening Is Coded with the Good 25:05 — Awakening Means Awakening to Meaning per se, to Value per se, to Gravitas as gravitas 27:18 — The Revelation of Satori Is that Meaning Is Everywhere, Not an Absence of Meaning 31:12 — Waking Up Is Always Interpreted Through Growing Up, and a Materialist Will Interpret Awakening Through a Materialist Lens 33:58 — We Need to Take Away, In a Sacred Way, This Hijacking of the Authority of Meditation for Nihilism, Materialism and Computationalism 39:04 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting: The Five Ms as an Opening Frame Marc: We were thinking, in our little convocation here, that we would riff a little bit on: Value is Real, and the relationship of value and meaning. And I thought, to kick us off—you guys have assigned to me that job as the kicker offer, so I want to be good about that. Everyone has to have a job in the football team. I want to go back to something that we raised, that came up spontaneously right before one of our calls. We talked about it maybe three or four David J. Temple conversations ago. That was what we could call the five Ms: * Mathematical value * Musical value * Molecular value * Moral value * Mystical value Zak and Ken, I’m going to riff for a few minutes, to unpack it a little, and it’ll be at least a good place to start. It’s a Mathematical Cosmos, and Mathematics Is Nothing but Meaning Marc: When we talk about mathematical value, one of the great things about mathematical value is that it lives at the very inception of the manifest universe. At the very inception of the manifest universe, we clearly have mathematical value; the laws of physics are at play. What we mean by mathematical value is that it’s not a tabula rasa Cosmos. It’s not a blank cosmos. It’s a Cosmos with vectors. Ken: It’s mathematical. Marc: It’s a mathematical Cosmos. And mathematics is nothing but meaning. Ken: Right. Marc: Mathematics is not a blank slate. It’s this very unimaginably complex set of meanings. Ken: And it’s astonishing that it describes the universe with mathematical precision. It’s just mind-boggling. Marc: Right. What was that Wigner’s phrase, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics? It’s astonishing. And you could almost have, in the beginning of a book, one of those pictures of some theoretical physicist writing all the mathematical equations, and then right on top: “no meaning in the universe.” [Laughs] It’s actually a great New Yorker cartoon. Oh, that’s no meaning. Got it. It’s a very dramatic New Yorker-cartoon, inspired by what you said before we flipped the switch on, in terms of responding to some of the nihilism of Harari’s children’s book writings with a kind of childish response. We could almost have, in this new book, some New Yorker-cartoon kind of things. Zak: [Laughs] Marc: You have the physicists writing all the mathematical equations and then, you know, “conception of cosmos”, no meaning. Right? It’s not a bad cartoon. So that’s mathematical value. And again, there are mathematicians who should be in this conversation—it’s clearly, obviously true when I read, for example, Morphogenesis, I specifically did not do the mathematics. I don’t know mathematics. I can play in mathematics, but unlike a page of Talmud, I don’t have a feel for it, I can’t tell if it’s wrong. But having said that, if you look at even something like Cantor, who committed suicide, and Hilbert, who were trying to complete mathematical sets, and essentially what Gödel is saying is: well, actually there’s an infinitely unfolding field. Mathematical sets unfold into infinity, and you can’t create complete mathematical sets around infinity, or you’ll kill yourself. And Tarski takes Gödel and formalizes it across knowledge fields. So in some sense, our notion that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, or that eternal value is evolving value, actually is very, very tightly interlinked with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, in a very beautiful way. And also with constructor theory. When I was at Oxford, I was at Wolfson College. There were two good things about Wolfson College. One is that Isaiah Berlin was there before me, and I sat in his row — that’s where I did my writing, which was fun. But the second thing is there’s this guy, David Deutsch, who’s the head of the physics department there. I know you guys are both into Peirce, which I’m not—I just say things, and Zak tells me it was in Peirce already, so I’m annoyed. But if I would try to say clearly what Deutsch is saying, he comes up with something that’s almost a Peircean kind of move, where he says: “There are no a priori constants or laws in the classical sense. The laws are always evolving as nodes in an interconnected network of underlying physical properties. And because of that, it’s not just that there are new higher-order things coming out of the base without changing the base layer, because there is top-down causation, it is always changing as the higher-order ones are emerging and affecting it.” So what he’s basically saying is that he’s trying to develop this ontology of physics that evolves with time—and he’s actually happening in physics in a big way. So in all of this, we have at play both value and evolving value. That’s my point: that we not only have value at play, we have evolving value at play, which is quite interesting. That’s one. Musical Value: Music Has an Ought in Terms of the Beautiful Marc: So then, briefly, we move to musical value—and these are the ones that take a little time; the rest are pretty fast. When we talk about musical value: first off, we’d have to write, Zak, a few paragraphs about the relationship between music and mathematics. Zak: Well, they’re all deeply — all the Ms are deeply connected. Marc: Yeah, all the Ms are completely interconnected. We have the Pythagorean realization of the musical-mathematical nexus. Music is a particular expression based on interval and rhythm, because music also only appears with the manifest universe. Music is an expression of the manifest. And now we have these musical values, which mean a very particular quality in Cosmos, which has a rightness to it. A quality that has a rightness, and you hear it, as we said last time—da da da da—and you’re moved by it. It lives in us. Ken: Right, and music is sung mathematics. Marc: That’s a sentence. That’s a gorgeous sentence, my friend. I guess you can keep the jacket. Music is sung mathematics. That’s exactly right. And it’s very clear there’s musical value, and the musical value is interesting. It doesn’t have an “ought” in the sense of the should, the good: thou shalt save a person from drowning. It has an ought in terms of the beautiful. We should. And it’s very clear that the value of beauty discloses, in some sense, the sanity of Cosmos. In the tree of life, and the interior sciences of the Solomonic tradition, each of the illuminations in the tree of life has a particular color — quite a bit more sophisticated than certain color charts that exist in developmental thought, at a certain time. And in each color, you go deep into the color and you explode into a certain dimension of Cosmos. So we have musical value. Molecular Value Is Mathematics Coded to Generate a Reality that Creates Larger Wholes Marc: And then from there, essentially, molecular value is precisely what we’ve talked about many times, this notion that the proton and the neutron come together with the electron, or three quarks come together, but not every three quarks come together. There’s already a code that defines the nature of allurement between different parts that form larger wholes. It’s clear as day as atomic numbers, chemical structures, all of the elements in the chemical tables, all the way down, all the way up. It’s very clear we’re talking about particular values that are all coded for life. In other words, mathematics is coded to generate a reality that creates larger wholes. Ken: Right. Marc: And the same thing is true, obviously, about the molecular world. So you clearly have molecular value. And then once you have that, you just naturally move up the evolutionary chain. You have cellular value and value naturally evolves with the rest of evolution. Wholeness Is Moral Value; It Is the Right Relationship Between Parts Marc: So moral value is simply the relationship, the right relationship between parts. And this is where our Eros equation plays. Because the way we’re defining Eros in our interior science equation is: Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. Wholeness is moral value. It’s right relationship between parts. It’s how Whitehead defines it in Process and Reality. Beauty is that all the contradictions create a larger whole, and the more contradiction creating the more whole, the more beauty you have. It’s stunning. Then, finally, we have mystical value. Mystical Value Is the Realization that the Human Being Is a Part of the Largest Whole, But Is a Discrete Expression of It Marc: Mystical value is, again, simply disclosing the true nature of reality. What it’s saying is that the nature of a human being is that a human being is not a part—the human being is actually a part of the largest whole, but is a discrete expression of it. And the relationship of that part to the larger whole is the nature of mystical value. It’s quite compelling. I just want to throw that out. Any thoughts on any one of the Ms, or on what do we mean by “Value is Real”? And Ken, when we finished last time you were talking a little bit about weight and gravitas. Value Has Weight and Gravitas, And that Weight Weigh on Us as a Measure of the Value Ken: Right. We introduced the notion that value has weight. It has a gravitas, and that also connected it with the material world, because the metaphor was a material metaphor. And so, “The Meaning Crisis, Value Is Real,” is to say that meaning and the crisis itself have a weight. That’s a very important part of what we’re saying. And frankly, I like the order—“The Meaning Crisis, Value Is Real”—because “Value Is Real” seems educational, whereas “The Meaning Crisis” points to, well, you have a meaning crisis, you better read this book. Marc: It’s a problem and a solution. That’s very good. So weight and gravitas is a very big deal. Value has gravitas. Ken: Right. And that is the weight that it has on us. That means the weight to alter us, to persuade us, to push us in certain directions and not in certain directions. All of that is due to the weight that is weighing on us as a measure of the value. Gravity Is Allurement and Autonomy, All the Way Down Marc: And Zak, I’ll pass to you, love, but just one sentence as a transition, Ken, from you to Zak, which is: underneath gravity is absolutely nothing. In other words, underneath gravity is allurement. Ken: Right. Marc: So gravitas, the gravitational nature of something, means that it is a quality of actually allurement and autonomy. Gravity is actually allurement and autonomy, all the way down. Our friend Howard, has done very good physics on the claim that there’s allurement and autonomy all the way down, in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. So there’s gravitas all the way down. Beautiful. The Phenomenology of Discovery in Music and Math Are Actually Similar Zak: I just love the frame of the different Ms — math, music, molecular. And then up and through the things that are normally associated with value. They’re all related. Pythagoras comes to mind. But then also, when I was studying music—I was a musician before. Actually, it was Ken’s writing that messed up my music career. Ken: [Laughs] Zak: I was going to be a musician, and I started reading Ken, and one thing led to another. That’s a true story. I was reading Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was a Sufi who played Indian classical music. And he basically spoke about all these Ms. Specifically the ability for the right music to rearrange your molecular intimacy, meaning the healing power of music at the biological level, which is also something Pythagoras said. The idea that when you’re striking the right chord, it actually reverberates in your body to the extent that you’ll be healed. That’s well documented in many healing practices, but then also the mathematics of it. The point that connects them all is this weird phenomenological perception of the rightness of it. That’s where math gets really weird philosophically. If you get into the phenomenology of doing math, how does one do math? Marc, you said you can kind of get math, but you can’t tell if it’s right. That’s like, the whole point of math. Saying it’s right. [Laughs] Now the question is: how do you know if it’s right? And this was where Charles Sanders Peirce was actually corresponding with Cantor, and he was doing phenomenology of mathematics. He was trying to figure out what’s the feeling of correctness, of obligated correctness. It’s a weird thing to think about. So there’s this deep point where discernment, phenomenologically, becomes super important in mathematics. One of the reasons they suppressed the William James–Charles Sanders Peirce correspondences was because they were both talking about using stimulants in order to be able to do math. The focus required to be a calculator in those days was so great that they had to use caffeine and tobacco. So they suppressed those letters. Not to get into the drug question, the point was the attention it required. And similar with music, the attention and focus required to be engaged with music. There’s something profound about that ability to know when you’re seeing what’s right, and to feel the weight of it. So I’m closing with: mathematics is valuable. Why is mathematics valuable? Because it gears into the universe. When you have a mathematician stumble upon an obscure theory that no one will understand, the weight of the discovery is such—the implied value of it. There’s just this discovery that’s at the core of mathematics, and discovery at the core of music. In the Indian classical tradition, you discover a raga, you don’t write it, you discover it. That sense of discovery, through clarified perception, through clarified anthro-ontology of Value across all of these domains, was resonating for me. And I’m not going to get into what we did to music in the West, with its production and its moving to the well-tempered scale—these things moved it out of the Pythagorean universe and into something that’s less healing, and actually feels less right. It can actually be bad for you. Certain rhythms and sounds, dystonic, atonal, arrhythmic, can mess up your heart. This has been shown by the HeartMath people. It’s a deep thing. The integration between all those Ms, to me, was profound. And the mysticism of doing math. The mysticism of having the discovery of math. I’m not a math guy, so I’ve never had that experience, but I have had music—a feeling like I’ve discovered a melody, or made precisely the right move in an improvisation. I know that feeling. I imagine that’s similar to what the mathematician feels. That’s our broadest claim: Value is across all these domains, and the human can operate in and know truth in all of these domains. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. My Identity Is Value: My Unique Perspective Is a Unique Configuration of Value, Intimacy and Desire Marc: That’s great. Let me transition to you, Ken, and comment in two ways. First, Value is identity. Let’s bring identity into the conversation. My identity is Value. Back in the day, Ken, when we were young—I think it was 2004 or 2005—we were hanging out in the loft, and formulating Unique Self equations. An early formulation was, of course, True Self plus perspective equals Unique Self. Ken: Right. Marc: And over the years, though the core equation remains, that equation has evolved in a number of ways. In some sense, we began to realize that my Unique Self is my unique perspective. But another way of talking about unique perspective is my: * unique configuration of value, * unique configuration of intimacy, * unique configuration of desire. And desire, intimacy, and value are deeply related. Clarified desire and clarified need disclose value. Intimacy—the intimate—means there’s a shared identity between two parts which creates a larger value. And intimacy requires, if we remember the Intimacy equation: intimacy equals shared identity, in the context of relative and otherness, times mutuality of recognition, times mutuality of pathos-feeling, times mutuality of value. There is no intimacy without a shared structure of value. So my identity is: I am Value. I’m an irreducibly unique incarnation of Value. I’m going to bring it back to what you were saying, Zak, about how the five Ms are inter-included. The mystical disclosure is always some version of “I am.” But it’s “I am Value.” And “I am” means Value, that’s what “I am” means. There’s A New Nihilism: When Awakening Gets Split from Value Marc: Paradoxically—and I want to point to the strangeness of this—we have this new phenomenon of serious figures who are not idiots, who are doing serious thinking within their best vector, who are doing practice, like Sam— our friend Sam is doing waking up, a guy like Yuval, whose calling card is that he meditates two hours a day. Or there’s a whole world—that Maria Popova, who’s also friends with Sam and that gang—a Bulgarian, math-and-science writer who writes this thing called Brain Pickings. They’re doing practice, and yet they’re splitting between the experience of I am and the experience of inherent value. Of course you can do that—but it’s a very, very shattering and violent disintermediation, because the experience of “I am” is “I am value.” So the mystical disclosure is a disclosure of identity. And of course, just like: * Mystical value means that “I am” lives in me; * Moral value means that, anthro-ontologically, I have an eye of value—value lives in me. * Molecular value lives in me, obviously. * Musical value lives in me—which is why I’m moved by, or healed by, music, Zak. * And the reason the mathematician can wrap their mind and heart around the Cosmos through mathematics is because, in some sense, mathematics is also an interior. It’s an interior and an exterior at the same time. So all of these, all five M’s disclose identity. They all disclose identity. It’s all an identity of value. I think we need to address though, this new phenomena. I mean, the truth is, this phenomena existed in the pre-Socratics as well. We’d have to trace it through history. The phenomena where a person can have an experience of some version of Kensho, some version of Satori, and then misunderstand it. For example, Harari, who’s our foil, says consistently that the contribution of Buddhism is to liberate us from meaning. That’s the contribution of Buddhism, according to Harari. And what I basically said in this talk I gave yesterday is: if you read Buddhism carefully, the Buddhist point is not that you’re liberated from meaning. It is: stop searching for meaning. But what it means is, stop searching for meaning because everything’s meaningful. Ken: It’s the discovery of a higher meaning, a deeper meaning, a very profound meaning, and that liberates you from trivial meaning. Marc: Right! And it’s all meaning. There’s nothing that’s not meaning. So there’s this new phenomenon that’s very strong in intellectual circles adjacent to us—and, by the way, the metamodern gang manages to do this just as well—where there’s this movement to neutralize the implication of the direct experience of an awakening. And again, it’s not by accident, culturally, that a dude who views himself as a materialist, who writes a book called The End of Faith, correctly attacking pre-modern religion, but then claims a kind of materialism, spends half his time doing stuff on waking up. And then another guy, his friend Yuval, actually becomes a Silicon Valley kind of guru because he’s meditating, and yet makes the claim that the meditation is value-neutral. And I would say, Ken, the reason you particularly are threatening to that world is because you’re expressing—as I am, as Zak is—but you’re more adjacent to that world, this realization that in the waking up, there is a value structure. An Insight from Semiotics: Awakening Is Coded with the Good Marc: I’ll go to semiotics for a second, because language is code. In Hebrew, when you play with language, people think it’s sleight of hand—it’s not. You’re moving the code around. So the word for awakening ”er”—ayin-resh—would be, in English, “er,” awake. It means to be awakened, or to be aroused. Same word, but it’s always the way Hebrew codes: it’s the word evil, “ra”, spelled backwards. So “ra”—resh, ayin—evil, you flip the letters around, and it becomes “er,” awake, awakening. Meaning, awakening has the good. That’s the point. Awakening is coded with the good. So I think we need to respond in some way, even without mentioning the people, to this claim that you can have an awakening that’s actually value-neutral, and that you can talk about consciousness as this epiphenomenon. It’s a strange phenomenon that we’re seeing today that needs to be addressed. And the metamodern gang is a perfect example of a gang who is, kind of— well, yeah, we’re practicing, but. Value-neutral. Huh. Awakening Means Awakening to Meaning per se, to Value per se, to Gravitas as gravitas Ken: That’s ridiculous. That’s the most ridiculous of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard. Marc: Right? Ken: Why on earth would you strive for something that has no value and no meaning whatsoever? Explain that one to me. And particularly when we remember that value has weight, it has gravitas, it has meaning. Remember when God was asked, “Who are you?”—He said, “I AMness.” And that was the correct answer. “Who shall I say sent me to them?”—“Tell them ‘I am’ sent you.” And so Moses is like, okay. Zak: [Laughs] Ken: But that’s the important part about I am: it has weight. It has, in a sense, the weight of the universe, because it has the gravitas, the value of the whole universe. And that’s why God is “I am.” God taught universal value and universal gravitas and universal weight. And that’s why you have to pay attention to it, because it has purpose and meaning and value. Those are going to replace all the trivial meanings and trivial values and inconsequential weight that you have throughout your life. Those are all a waste of your time, and—more importantly—a waste of your identity. You don’t want to identify with any of those, but most people do. And that’s why you want to meditate and get a real awakening—and that doesn’t mean an awakening to nothing of value or nothing of meaning. It means awakening to meaning per se, to value per se, to gravitas as gravitas. And that’s worth desiring; it’s worth working for. The Revelation of Satori Is that Meaning Is Everywhere, Not an Absence of Meaning Zak: Yeah, I would say: * There’s a difference between sitting there. * There’s a difference between sitting there and meditating. * And there’s a difference between sitting there meditating and having insight as a result of meditating. So that would be one argument—that they’re not actually having satoris. Ken: Right. Zak: Because the revelation of satori is that meaning is everywhere, you can’t escape it. There’s maybe too much meaning, not an absence of meaning—and actually that it’s ultimately valuable, and that you should desperately try to have that experience again, that there was something so important about the absolute, and being the unique expression, and the experience. Marc: Right. It’s a plenitude of meaning. Zak: So that’s one response: that in fact, it’s that view of meditation that’s a sign you’re not doing it well, or haven’t practiced in a tradition such that you’ve had enough experience of Value per se. And that’s been my experience with a lot—I’ve been around a lot of people who’ve meditated a ton, and seem to have gained nothing from it. In fact, they’ve gained a sense of nihilism, almost, because they’ve studied a lot of postmodernism, which conspires with bad interpretations of Buddhism—which is something you pointed out in the nineties, Ken. That there’s this weird agreement between bad interpretations of Buddhism and Derrida’s sliding signifiers and endless contexts revealing everything’s meaningless. “That’s what the Buddha said, everything’s meaningless”—you’re like, no, actually that’s the opposite of what the Buddha said. So it’s a deep confusion. There’s also the issue of “really enlightened people” being complete f**k-ups. So there is that issue… Marc: That’s a different issue. Zak: Right. But it’s similar, in the fact that there was something that wasn’t transmitted in the state experience, that wasn’t held by the vehicle, or something like that. Marc: That’s the state-stage issue. Zak: Right. Marc: Which is obviously, Ken, you’ve talked about it a lot. You and I talked about it also in the whole wake-up, grow-up thing. Welwood talked about it in his particular way, not in terms of levels of consciousness, but in terms of psychological maturity. And Ken, back in 2003, 2004, or 2005, we talked about, in the lineage tradition, you would have Isaiah and Ezekiel, who would both have realized state experiences, but they would be mediated through their prisms of culture, psychology, and so on,—which is an early proto-form for this beautiful wake-up, grow-up idea that you’ve unpacked, Ken, at great length, in multiple volumes. But I’m going to bracket that one for a second, Zak, and go back to the other one, which is this “neutral” thing. This neutral thing is a very big deal. It could be they’re not having realized experiences, or— Zak: —that their experience of meditation has bored them. The experience of a valueless, meaningless thing is actually just the experience of “I’m bored.” Marc: I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think actually that the two sides are related, meaning, the same way that a satori or a kensho can be mediated through an ethnocentric prism, it can also be mediated through a materialist prism. In other words, the same way you have a wake-up and grow-up— Zak: —that’s the same as a state thing. Because a materialist would be a certain stage of consciousness. Marc: No, but, in other words, if I have an a priori materialism, which is my prism, and then I have a classical kensho experience, or a rapturous, mystical, second-person experience, whatever it is—I’m going to interpret it through my materialism. Zak: That’s state-stages. Exactly. Marc: Well, I’m saying that the state-stage thing—although materialism is not a structure-stage of developmental consciousness— Zak: It’s close, though. Waking Up Is Always Interpreted Through Growing Up, and a Materialist Will Interpret Awakening Through a Materialist Lens Ken: It occurs in a structure of growing up. And what we have to remember is: when anybody has a fairly authentic waking up experience, mostly what they notice is, “My God, I am. And I’ve always known I am. I’ve always been enlightened.” That’s why Buddhism correctly maintains you can never gain enlightenment, any more than you can gain your lungs or acquire your feet. It can’t be done. You can realize you have them, and that’s a real reality. But this I-am-ness is an identity which carries value. And your value, your waking up experience, is always interpreted through your growing up experience. That’s why you can interpret it in a very materialistic way, or a very naturalistic way, or—particularly depending on how deep the realization is—you can interpret it through a Christian way, a fundamentalist way. That just comes with the territory. Waking up is always interpreted through growing up. And depending on what stage of growing up you’re at, and what your worldview is at that stage, that will tend to be the way you interpret your experience. If you’re a Christian, and you’re going to name a god, it’ll be Christ. St. Paul said, “Let this consciousness be in you, which was in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one.” That’s a very good expression of his enlightenment, oneness experience—“Not I, but Christ liveth in me.” He’s going to talk in those terms. He’s not going to say, “Well, I discovered my Buddha mind,” or, “I discovered my Advaita Vedanta self.” He’s going to talk in Christian terms, because that’s his interpretive, growing-up context. Zak: So a Yuval Harari materialist would speak in material terms. Marc: That’s right—that’s exactly the thing I’m saying. That a materialist will then do that same thing. So those two separate sides you were talking about, Zak, we’re bringing them together— Zak: Totally. Marc: —and we’re saying that just like my prism of interpretation which is invisible to me, as Christian, or Hebrew wisdom, or et cetera—if my prism of interpretation is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the mind, therefore I have this experience which is very calming to me, and I experience Buddhism as teaching that I’m liberated from all meaning. Ken: Right. Marc: It’s actually a shock. We Need to Take Away, In a Sacred Way, This Hijacking of the Authority of Meditation for Nihilism, Materialism and Computationalism Marc: So I think we need to point to this, because we need to take away, in a sacred way, from Sam and Yuval and our friends, this hijacking of the authority of meditation for nihilism. Zak: Right. Marc: And it’s nihilism, even if Sam’s claiming—because Sam claims to be, the ultimate moral position, he’s taking a moral high ground—but it’s like C.S. Lewis, in the beginning of The Abolition of Man. Remember, Zak, when we were reading, and he says: in the first or second generation, those people who claim these kind of, out-of-the-Tao realizations, they’ll be good and moral for a generation, for two generations, but then it’s gone. It’s what Will Herberg, that sociologist, called in the late fifties “cut-flower ethics.” You cut a rose from its root, and for one generation, for two generations, it still looks like a rose, because it’s still actually holding the roots of the Field of Value. By the third generation, the fourth, it’s dead. There’s a cut-flower ethics here that’s at play. And maybe in the Meaning Crisis book—and I think we’re agreed that “The Meaning Crisis” is the beginning of the title, the colon, and “Value Is Real” is on the other side — maybe we should actually cite some primary texts of Buddhism. Ken: Well, what we can say is: establish that waking up is always interpreted by growing up, because that allows us to take away their inherent identification of waking up with nihilism. It’s a particular form of growing up. It’s a particular worldview. And once we’ve established that connection, we’ve won. We can shoot down anything that they try to propose. Marc: That’s right. We can actually show, it’s a slightly different version of states and stages. And as a developmentalist, you know this, because you can be a materialist in any developmental stage, obviously. Zak: Yep. And there’s also types. I would argue some of the materialists, it’s a type. They’re very complex, but they’re actually this kind of weird, neurotic, control-oriented type or something. Marc: That’s our friend McGilchrist’s argument that you’ve pointed out to me. Zak: That’s McGilchrist’s argument. He’s basically saying that. Marc: I’d be more hesitant to make that move, frankly. Ken: [Laughs] Zak: But it’s a similar move. No matter how good the revelation is, from Reality, from Source, you’re going to have to put it into language. And if the only language you have is materialist language, that’s what you’re stuck with. Ken: That’s right. And we can establish that connection between waking up and growing up just by giving a handful of examples. I already gave the example of Paul, and he’s talking Christ terms, and Buddha is talking Buddha-mind terms, and Shankara is talking Advaita Vedanta terms. And you can just point out two, or three, or even four of them, and nobody would disagree with you. St. Paul’s using Christ terms, and Buddha’s using Buddha terms. We can’t expect Buddha to use Christ terms, or St. Paul to use Buddha terms. So I think that’s a fairly easy point we can make. Marc: Yeah. Adding materialism to the grow up prism is a cool move. Ken: Right. Zak: Yeah. And I would also say materialism, and what I would call computationalism. Marc: Yeah. Ken: That’s right. Zak: I met a woman by chance who leads medicine ceremonies, and she does it with Silicon Valley dudes, and she says they mostly have the experience that they are in a simulation, or that they are somehow in a game, or otherwise interpret their experience through this computational lens. Marc: We’ve added two good examples today to the grow up structure. This is very cool and very important, because in a certain sense those are the examples that play in culture that haven’t been addressed. Ken: That’s right. And that’s why people in our culture, in the materialistic culture, if they have a spontaneous awakening, they’ll tend to interpret it in materialistic terms. Certainly if they get a chance to think about it—they might be overwhelmed by the godliness of their experience at first, but give them a week or two, and they’ll be interpreting that through materialistic terms, because that’s what the worldview tells them is real. Marc: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s hold here. Guys, what a crazy pleasure. Zak: Yeah. Ken: Okay. Bye-bye. Mentioned Sources: * A. M. Turing, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (1952; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 237, no. 641, pp. 37–72) * Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (originally published 1929; Free Press edition, 1979) * Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (founded 2006; renamed The Marginalian in 2021)Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004; W. W. Norton & Company) * C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (1943; Oxford University Press) Mentioned People: * Eugene Wigner (1902—1995) * Yuval Noah Harari (1976—) * Georg Cantor (1845—1918) * David Hilbert (1862—1943) * Kurt Gödel (1906—1978) * Alfred Tarski (1901—1983) * Isaiah Berlin (1909—1997) * David Deutsch (1953—) * Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914) * Alfred North Whitehead (1861—1947) * Pythagoras (c. 570—c. 495 BCE) * Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882—1927) * William James (1842—1910) * Sam Harris (1967—) * Maria Popova (1983/84—) * Socrates (c. 470—399 BCE) * Jacques Derrida (1930—2004) * John Welwood (1943—2019) * Isaiah (The Bible) (c. 8th century BCE) * Ezekiel (The Bible) (c. 6th century BCE) * C. S. Lewis (1898—1963) * Will Herberg (1901—1977) * Iain McGilchrist (1953—) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
August 19 · 45 min
The First Principle and First Value of Attention; The Mathematical Value, to Musical, to Molecular, to Moral, to Mystical Value; Introducing ErosValue (with Ken Wilber)
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: What if the simple act of paying attention was one of the most powerful forces in the universe? We often think of attention as something we do, but what if it’s something that does things—something that actually shapes the world around us? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein propose a radical new idea: that attention is a First Principle of reality, a fundamental value that gives rise to everything else. They explore how this value expresses itself across five different dimensions of existence: the mathematical, the musical, the molecular, the moral, and the mystical. You’ll also hear them discuss the deep connection between value and “gravitas”—the weight that creates integrity and coherence in reality. By the end of this conversation, you’ll be introduced to a completely new understanding of how the universe is held together and the crucial role your own attention plays in the unfolding of it all. This is the fourth in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, August 2026, Episode: “The First Principle and First Value of Attention; The Mathematical Value, to Musical, to Molecular, to Moral, to Mystical Value; Introducing ErosValue” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:01 — The Critique of the Tech-Plex Has Fallen Flat Because Its Critics Are Not Willing to Declare Attention as a Value 3:57 — Framing the Inquiry: Where’s The Continuity of Mathematical, Musical, Molecular and Moral Value? 8:38 — There are Two Dimensions to a Value: Quality and Configuration 12:19 — Three Things True of Every Value: Irreducibility, Depth, Quality 13:21 — Value Is Wholeness that Evokes Wholeness 16:06 — The Idea That a Part Ever-Evokes the Whole Is Present Across Several Domains 17:55 — The Elder and the Child Are Valued for their Different Forms of Evoking the Whole: The Elder’s Integration and the Child’s Undeterminedness 19:14 — We Could See Mathematical Value as Truth, Musical Value as Beauty, Molecular Value as Goodness 22:32 — Ken’s Question: What’s the Relationship Between Value, Gravitas and Weight? 23:39 — Part of the Nature of Mental Breakdown Is the Incapacity to Weight Things Properly 26:14 — Midah: Weight, Measurement, and Value in One Hebrew Word 28:58 — About First Principles and First Values 29:52 — There Is An Ancient Connection Between Weight, Our Ability to Measure It and the Value that Exists 31:59 — There’s Only One Gravitational Field: The Field of Gravitas Is a Moral Field 36:07 — Love Is Goldilocks: It’s Precisely The Right Weight Between Allurement and Autonomy 36:51 — You Can Be Wounded By Wrong Weighting 38:15 — Right-Weighting Is a Practice, Not a Finicky Thing 39:51 — Gravitas Is the Weight of Evolution 40:32 — Value Confers Dignity Because Value Means: You Are Weighty, You Have Gravitas 42:11 — A Number Is Always Telling a Story: A Question Left on the Table 45:12 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: The Critique of the Tech-Plex Has Fallen Flat Because Its Critics Are Not Willing to Declare Attention as a Value Marc: Zak, Ken, I want to try and clarify a couple of things here, throw some stuff down on the table, and then open it up in our usual style. Ken, Zak and I were talking about—we wanted to share with you, but probably for next conversation—that as we deepen into value, we thought of the three of us taking one particular value which is not viewed as a value: attention. Paying attention. Attention as a value. And you know, David J. Temple, being the three of us in this moment, has been talking a lot. These two components of David J. Temple, I would like to talk to that expression of David J. Temple about this value of Attention. It is wildly important because, if I can just frame it in a sentence: you have someone like Shoshana Zuboff, who writes Surveillance Capitalism—just one example of a book—screaming against the tech-plex for essentially stealing attention. But then when she tries to locate what’s wrong with that, she makes this complete—what Walter Kaufmann, if you both remember, called “intellectual gerrymandering.” She makes this move and says, wow, attention, Sartre talks about the first person—and then she quotes Being and Nothingness. Ken: [Laughs] Marc: So she puts the apostle of cosmic meaninglessness as a source for critiquing the tech-plex for stealing attention. Meaning, she’s not willing to declare attention as a value. So, after we finished the meta-conversation on Attention, on Value, we want to turn our attention with you together to particular instantiations of Value which have enormous implications. In some sense, David J. Temple might argue that one of the reasons the critique of the tech-plex has fallen flat is because—paradoxically—Shoshana Zuboff agrees, in her ground, with the people she’s critiquing: that there’s no Field of Value. And so they’re like, huh. Zak, you and I had talked about that the other day—when I was thinking, Ken, maybe when I come out, or we come out, we could spend that day just talking about attention. It would be crazy fun. And obviously your Buddhist training—that dimension of you—obviously has a lot to say about this, right? Ken: Right. It does. Marc: Okay, so I’m going to dive in. Again, thank you for your forbearance as I take a few minutes—then I will, as the Talmud says, third century, shut the f**k up, and turn it to you guys. But I’m going to take a little time to try to identify a very particular issue which is core to this whole conversation. It takes us precisely to the next step. So, just bear with me to unfold a little bit, okay? Framing the Inquiry: Where’s The Continuity of Mathematical, Musical, Molecular and Moral Value? Marc: We could talk about Value in several registers at once: * Mathematical value. * Molecular value. * Musical value. * And—other than the fact that they all begin with M, which is helpful—we could add a fourth: moral value. Now we already have, even in our framing, a very important and interesting thread. In other words, there’s music at the very beginning of Cosmos. There’s an enormous literature of the kind of gong music that moves through Cosmos. Our friend Howard Bloom has collected a lot of that literature in his footnotes on pages 39, 40, and 41 of his The God Problem. One of his most interesting sections is where he adduces that literature; he has a good set of footnotes there. But yes, we know there’s music at the beginning of Cosmos. In other words, Cosmos does not emerge from music—part of manifestation is intervals in music, etc. So there’s music, there’s musical value. There’s clearly mathematical value at the very inception of the Big Bang... Ken: Why are you limiting it to four values? Marc: I’m being arbitrary. Completely arbitrary. Ken: Okay. Marc: This is just a way of talking about a broader field. This is not a clear boundary, and these are not absolute categories, as in, like, four quadrants in any way. These are just—if we can borrow a term from my Bar Mitzvah—a smorgasbord of values, right? Zak: It was illustrative and alliterative, right? Marc: That’s right. But the point is that these are, from the inception: you have mathematical value, you have musical value. You don’t quite yet have, but you’ll have very soon, molecular value. But you start very early with what we talked about last week—two up quarks and a down quark as a proton, two down quarks and an up quark as a neutron. Those are values that are going to lead to that reality—that leptonian, muonian, or hadronian reality is going to lead to an atomic reality, which is going to lead to a molecular reality. So let’s talk about a molecular value just to stand for that whole vector. I’m obviously jumping forward a little bit. And obviously, at some point, we’re going to incept a conscious realization of a moral value. What we’re saying is that there’s this principle of continuity and discontinuity. Clearly, we’re not making an absurd animistic claim that there’s a necessity for relational therapists to deal with protons and neutrons in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang because they’re attracted and allured to each other, and they love each other, so they need relational therapists. No, we don’t think that. [Laughs] Clearly, there’s a principle of discontinuity. In other words, the molecular attraction, the allurement, and the particular values—let’s say in the molecular vector, which goes all the way back to quarks—that’s not the same value that Dostoevsky is trying to figure out when Raskolnikov kills the old woman and wants to know how he feels in the aftertaste. At the same time, we’re actually saying: there’s a continuity between those. There is an omni-coherent Cosmos. Those are not dissociated from each other. This Raskolnikov aftertaste, when he kills an old woman—it doesn’t quite work for him well. That sense of dis-ease is not because he’s violated a social construction. Actually, Raskolnikov is filled with the molecular vector, the musical vector, and the mathematical vector. All of those lead to the moral vector. It actually emerges out of them—there’s continuity. This is the principle of continuity and discontinuity, and Zak, as we’ve talked about often, there are intellectual sins on the side of continuity, which overstate continuity, and intellectual sins on the side of discontinuity. But what we want to talk about today is: I want to try and throw out two or three formulations on how we would view that relationship, very precisely. Meaning, where’s the place? What’s the continuity? Let’s look today at the continuity, because we know the discontinuity. But what’s the continuity? What’s the sense in which value means something in a shared sense—there’s a shared semantic field, a shared semiotic field, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain? That’s our frame. So I want to make a couple of very simple suggestions—and here we need to be in the realm of second simplicity, so these are kind of second-simplicity suggestions—which would go something like this. There are Two Dimensions to a Value: Quality and Configuration Marc: In a certain sense, there are two dimensions to a value. One is that a value is a quality. It’s a particular quality of Cosmos. We were listening—we were listening to Beethoven’s Fifth before, that we talked about. It’s so stunning. I mean, the first ninety seconds of Beethoven’s Fifth, they blow your heart. We just kept listening to it again and again and again. And it starts just with—da-da-da-da—right? And then it just goes... The first ninety seconds are shocking, and it evokes a musical value. No matter how you interpret that value—that value might evolve, it might be interpreted by different conductors and different maestros—but there’s a value there. It’s clear. It has a certain stability, just like in chemistry, a chemical has to have a certain stability. When we say it has a certain stability, we mean it’s real. It participates in some eternal dimension. It’s not just contrived. Once it’s there, it has a stability, and it’s a particular quality of Cosmos that evokes wholeness. Right? It evokes wholeness. This is where wholeness is so important. So: 1) A value is a quality of reality that either: a) evokes wholeness, orb) generates more wholeness, orc) plants the seed for more wholeness. Or another way to say it might be: it evokes more possibility. Ken, you and I talked about this—my God, it was like 2004, I think I still have the recording of that loft dialogue. We talked about this phrase in Maimonides, where he talks about the famous Aristotelian notion—or medieval, it became much more popular then—of the not-possible. In other words, there’s nothing that’s not possible about the Infinite, meaning the Infinite or the Divine, in his perspective—The Guide for the Perplexed, chapters 50 through 70—the Infinite is the Possibility of Possibility. If someone puts a gun to your head and says, “give me a definition of God or I’ll blow your brains out,” this is one possible way to save your life. It’s not bad: God is the Possibility of Possibility. It’s an ultimate wholeness in the sense that it contains all possible wholenesses, and it’s a wholeness that alludes to, that evokes, that generates, that seeds—four different words—more wholeness. God is the Possibility of Possibility. Another way to say it—a different dimension of value, which is slightly different but inter-included, not redundant or isomorphic—is: 2) Value is a configuration of parts which generates new possibility. Now, I have to be precise there, because beauty, truth, goodness—let’s take that big three—those are all qualities, but they’re not qualities that live in isolation. Goodness obviously doesn’t, but neither does beauty. Ken, you have talked a lot about beauty as right relationship between dimensions. So there’s the sense of value as a quality—or configuration of parts—that evokes new possibility, or greater possibility, or greater wholeness. That’s a way to begin to discuss value. And here’s what’s so crazy and interesting: this value is this particular quality that evokes more possibility. Three Things True of Every Value: Irreducibility, Depth, Quality Marc: So: * It’s a quality that’s irreducible, that’s irreplaceable. It’s not reducible to another quality, not replaceable with another quality. * It has its own particular depth. * It points towards, it incarnates, a quality—a qualia of Cosmos—that’s not exchangeable with anything else, even as it evokes more potential wholeness, more possibility. That’s true about the mathematical, that’s true about the musical, it’s actually true about the molecular, it’s actually true about the moral. So, okay, now we’re in a conversation. When you go to the core of them—how they actually function at their very, very constituent essence—there’s actually a similar, profoundly inter-included, even overlapping, even isomorphic, functioning. This has been keeping me up, literally, all week. Right? Because we’re so close. It’s that leap. What are you thinking, Ken? Value Is Wholeness that Ever-Evokes More Wholeness Ken: You said value contains sort of two aspects. One is quality, which evokes wholeness. And the other is the configuration of parts, which evokes wholeness. So we’re doing a lot of evoking of wholeness. Marc: Well, you could say it is wholeness. It is wholeness. Ken: Well, that’s what my question is. A value is wholeness. Marc: That’s valid. Absolutely. A thousand percent, holy brother. In other words, it actually is wholeness that evokes wholeness. Right? It’s wholeness, which is, in some sense, your secret lover, Ken: the holon. It’s both whole onto itself—it is wholeness onto itself—and yet it evokes. Ken: Right. Marc: Because it’s a part of more wholeness. So it’s always evoking. That’s right. It’s actually ever-evoking. It’s never static. Ken: Right. Marc: And it does it in different ways. We just kept listening, as I said, again and again, to the opening of the Fifth. And each musical value is both its own wholeness, and yet it’s literally evoking the next... Ken: The whole that it’s a part of. Marc: The whole that it’s part of, even though it’s a whole by itself. And all of a sudden—the moral, the mystical, the molecular, the mathematical, and the musical, all five—you notice I slipped in another one. Because the mystical really is: I’m part of that larger wholeness. That’s what the mystical is. The mystical is actually the realization that I am both whole, and I participate in that larger Field of Value. And then I’m ultimately isomorphic with that larger Field of Value, even as I’m irreducible. And that was, Ken—remember when we were reviewing Unique Self at some point for JITP, the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, one of the editions—as we talked about it, our friend Andrew, bless him, was talking about uniqueness being social, psychological, and cultural conditioning. And we said to Andrew—who we were loving dearly—we said, no, no, uniqueness is irreducible. Right? It’s non-exchangeable. It’s not “merely”—it’s irreducible. I am both an irreducible value, and I’m part of the larger whole at the same time. That is the mystical. So all of a sudden, our alliteration, Zak, is doing well. We’re going to stop at five, right? Ken: [Laughs] Marc: But it’s very exciting, because we’re so in second simplicity here. We’re in kindergarten, which is the most advanced. Right? So, yay. Zak, what are you thinking there? The Idea That a Part Ever-Evokes the Whole Is Present Across Several Domains Zak: I mean, the notion of the part ever-evoking the whole that it is a part of—even if it can’t quite grasp it, and even if you, seeing the part, don’t see that whole—is super interesting. So as a piece of music begins, there’s something implied already, that is held in the completion of the end and the total listening. In the single tree in the forest, you have this sense of containment of the entire forest, and the region, and the ecosystem, and the biosphere, and all that stuff. There’s this ever-evoking, echoing harmonic. And that idea is a pretty simple idea: the acorn and the oak, the sapling and each stage of the tree. In human development, there’s that classic idea that you can see in the child, and then in the adolescent, that form that’s taking shape—which is very interesting. It’s not deterministic. That’s what’s interesting to me about improvised music as opposed to written music. You could sit with the Fifth for days and weeks and months with that introductory section, but then you have John Coltrane, who never played the same thing twice and yet had the same ability to evoke, trans-temporally, across genre and referencing prior—like, even ancient and canonical, hymnal and children’s tunes on the playground. All these things that you’re able to get into this association—the more of that you bring in, the greater the value of the gesture that’s being made. The more that the gesture evokes that total personality, the more that has this value—there’s something in the charisma there. The ability to speak from that total set of Self, and even the potential self you could be, and all of that stuff, is what’s brought. The Elder and the Child Are Valued for Their Different Forms of Evoking the Whole: The Elder’s Integration and The Child’s Undeterminedness Zak: That’s very deep from a meta-psychological, myth-of-the-self, personal-mythology place, which Marc and I have been working on. That sense of—why are you more valuable as you grow older and mature and become more integrated? Why is the elder held in reverence? Or should be, ought to be. A properly valued culture would hold the elder in reverence because of this—because of the structure of value. It’s how you get that integration. And why is the child uniquely valuable? Because so much is yet unset, because there’s so much potential value, because the possibility of possibility is more present in the child—you could argue. Because of the undeterminedness. And yet, clearly, the child depends on the elder, and the adult depends on their parent. So there is that transmission of value. The ever-evoking and the harmonic self-reflection, very much like Indra’s Net with the holonic theory, gets very deep. Marc: Yeah. The good, the true, and the beautiful are, of course, always both values onto themselves and inter-included with each other. That’s generally true. We Could See Mathematical Value as Truth, Musical Value as Beauty, Molecular Value as Goodness Marc: Ken, you and I had a great conversation when we were doing Integral Sexuality—our first take on the seven levels of Eros, back in the day, which was massively fructified by our conversation—and that was, of course, an opportunity to use the word “fructified,” which one should not pass up easily. But we were talking there about pleasure, and that pleasure would seem to be its own vector. The aesthetic, the beautiful, obviously, but we, the think tank, are now completing a book that we’ve been working on for a very long time, which is basically about pleasure as the source of ethics, and this notion of what Stuart Kauffman’s wife, Kathy, in one of her articles, calls “quantum hedonism”. This notion that, if I would sum up the way we understand it: evolution evolves because it feels good. In other words—as a very core notion, you and I talked about that then, Ken, you formulated, I believe, very beautifully, this notion of the interior of Eros being pleasure. I’m bringing together these conversations. So one of the things we were moving towards then was the sense that pleasure, the beautiful, is inter-included with the good. And so now we’re completing—it’s been actually a ten-year project, since 2014. We did, like, a thirty-hour seminar on this notion of pleasure as the source of ethos. But of course, what we mean by pleasure, to say it in a sharp way—in a painful way—is this: a couple walking to the gas chamber is getting more pleasure than the Nazi guard guarding them. So when we talk about pleasure, obviously we’re talking about a very discerning sense of what levels of pleasure are, and what cultivation of pleasure is, et cetera. Having said that—even though they’re inter-included, and that’s a whole conversation about the inter-inclusion of values with each other—we could for a moment step back from the inter-inclusion and think about mathematics as truth, music as beauty. And the we could think about the molecular vector in terms of goodness, simply because it’s the coming together—it’s always a relationship between parts. The molecular vector is always about an intimate configuration, and other chemicals have a lot of chemistry, as we said last week. So it’s actually very interesting that, in terms of value: * You have a mathematical vector in which the value is truth. * You have a musical vector in which the value is beauty. * You have a molecular vector in which the value is goodness. Which is helpful just to see—that in different vectors, even though there’s an inter-inclusion between the value vectors, there’s often a primacy of one, a center of gravity of one. So, I think that’s helpful, right? And then the second thing I thought was worth us talking about is the evolution of value. Part two, right? Let’s think about the evolution of value. Ken’s Question: What’s the Relationship Between Value, Gravitas and Weight? Ken: I want to ask a question before. How does value fit in with the notion of weight? Marc: Gravitas. Ken: Gravitas, weight—and how precisely does it do that? Because weight tends to just be a thing, as opposed to value—say, attention. Attention is both a thing and a tool. Marc: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Ken: I mean, weight is just the weight of something. You don’t usually use weight to get to something else. Like, you can use attention to get to something else. Marc: Say a little bit more about how you’re using the word weight. Ken: When I think of value, I think of the weight that I give something. It has value, it has weight. Marc: That’s right—no, I love this. This is crazy exciting. My God, wow. So, Zak, I’ll take a crack and pass it to you, brother. Okay? I love that inquiry. I’m going to go from a kind of clinical place to a semiotic place, and move between them. Part of the Nature of Mental Breakdown Is the Incapacity to Weight Things Properly Marc: I want to start in the clinical place for a second. I’m talking about our colleague, Ken—you’ve met her, she came to the loft with me, we’ve talked about her over the years. Zak, of course, you know her well—she was our board chair of the center in, 2013, ’14, ’15: Laurie Galperin, who is a brilliant clinical practitioner and theoretician. Laurie is anti-cooking. Laurie, I apologize for sharing this publicly, because I assume you’ll hear it. We ate out every single night, seven nights a week. That was, you know—a lot of wine, man. That’s a lot of wine. And Laurie has several glasses of wine at dinner, so dinner was always good. And what we would do, at the end of the day, without breaking any Hippocratic oaths or any confidentialities, we would go over her cases and talk about them, to try and understand them. Zak: That’s probably worse than “she’s not into cooking,” I would say. [Laughs] Marc: Right. And most of the time, Ken—we were talking about, Zak—we were never able to quite work that out, so we just kept talking. But seriously, what emerged was something really fascinating, it was that part of the nature of mental breakdown was the incapacity to weight things properly. I remember there was a particular story of a particular woman—I’m going to give her a name, I’ll call her Gila—that I knew when I was, I don’t know, 25, 27, 28. And she would always get these great jobs in Israel—fantastic jobs, assistant to the president, you know, incredibly high-powered jobs. And she would always get fired, or quit, within about three months. And she would always come to me and my friend, Gedalia, Gary, she’d say, you know, he or she, whoever the boss was, said this, and that’s outrageous, and therefore I had to quit. Now, it’s not that she was wrong—she wasn’t wrong, she was actually generally right that that was somehow out of bounds. But the way she weighted it was off. And so one of the things that Laurie and I began to notice was that when we’re looking at the difference between bipolar one and bipolar two, the issue is always how you weighted something. Often a bipolar person saw something with more clarity, but with a worse capacity to weight it properly, right? The values. Ken: Their values are screwed up. Right. Marc: There was an inability to evaluate. The evaluative function is a function of weighting. Ken: Right. Midah: Weight, Measurement, and Value in One Hebrew Word Marc: Now, here’s a crazy thing. Zak and I had a period—I don’t even remember why—where we stopped doing Holy of Holies, like, in the first half of 2011 or something like that. And I remember the first time we came back together—and Zak, of course, is one of the world’s experts in measurement, that’s Zak’s field—the first Holy of Holies we started again, I can remember where I was, I can remember the conversation. Zak: Yes, that’s right. Me too. Marc: We talked about the Hebrew word midah. Midah, a classical biblical word which means both measurement, weight, and value. The same word. Ken: Right. Marc: You’re directly speaking, brilliantly, into the semiotic field, where value is related to two things, both dimensions of value. One is: the right relationship between parts is the right weight. In other words, the valence—the atomic valence—is the right-weighted relationship that forms the configuration of intimacy that gives it a particular value, from which its strength comes. In Latin, valentia. Valentia is to be strong, to stand strong—it’s the stability. The valence comes from the currency of valentios—Eros—which is based on its valence, its right relationship, which creates its self-evident validity, which is the source of its value. You have this very beautiful semiotic field, and out of that comes the hero—and the hero is the one who has valor. Prince Valiant. And they weight things the right way. It’s this very deep relationship. And Zak, I’m crazy excited to hear how you’re going to think about this in terms of metrics—in terms of weighting—but they’re very deeply intertwined. It’s very exciting. Ken: And weight has a physicality to it, which brings in that whole material dimension of all things. And that’s an important evaluative tool. Marc: Yes. Ken: When we think of value as the weight that we give something, if I really value something, I give it a lot of weight. And a lot of weight, if you just take weight in its straight-out meaning, as physical heaviness—then that points out that whatever values we’re talking about, they do have a very real physical dimension, because they have a weight. And that hooks the four quadrants together, and all sorts of stuff. Marc: Yes, I get it. Huge. It’s hugely important. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. There Is An Ancient Connection Between Weight, Our Ability to Measure It and the Value that Exists Zak: Exactly. Yeah, totally. And if I go back to the ancient world, you think of monumental architecture, and why we would build pyramids and other things? They’re massive physical objects, Stonehenge, these huge obelisks, these things were literally endowed with the most value. The sacred place was the place with the biggest, heaviest objects, basically. [Laughs] Move a little forward in history, and you get the first laws—the laws of Manu, the laws that held the ancient Mesopotamian city-states together—and they were about measurement. A lot of them were about weight: are you dealing fairly in the marketplace with the weights of different things? And currency piggybacks on the scales in the marketplace that say, this weighs as much as that, and therefore it’s worth this. Then you move up into the Middle Ages, and you get all this folklore about unjust weights and measures with the different fiefdoms and the different aristocrats, each king has its own foot, and literally it’s the foot. So you’re tying the value of the royal body itself to the thing you use to gauge distance. Ken: It’s worth its weight in gold. Zak: Yeah, it’s worth its weight in gold. Ken: [Laughs] Zak: There’s a very deep connection between literally the weight of things and our ability to precisely gauge differences in how heavy something is, and how much value there is. The original coinage was—in Fort Knox, you had gold that was represented by paper, you had the gold. The coinage was the gold, the bullion. Then we had it represented. And now there is no actual thing that backs the value of the currency, except measurement infrastructure. Except the sensor networks and the different measures that determine the precise weight and precision mechanics of the stuff... So yeah, it’s a very, very interesting connection. Ken: Well, that’s obviously, weight is an important consideration. And it does tie us in with the physicality of all value. There’s Only One Gravitational Field: The Field of Gravitas Is a Moral Field Marc: Let’s talk about that, this is important. Let’s stay perhaps in the semiotics, and then move from that to the felt, the cognitive, intellectual, conceptual. So when we say something has gravitas, it means it’s weighty. This is a weighty issue. It’s not a flimsy issue, it’s not a light issue. This is not Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being. This is weighty. And what we’re saying—it’s very beautiful—you’re talking about the relationship, Zak, between weights and currency. So when we talk about valences, obviously we’re talking about currencies, if you will. And currencies are always—in other words, Reality is a currency of ErosValue. Reality is a currency of ErosValue. If you will, there are currencies of ErosValue, and then you need to evaluate: what is weighty? So in some sense, you might say there are two forms of gravitational field. You have one form of gravitational field which is, in an obvious way, about the weightiness of things—and that’s why, the image that a school child grows up with is of the apple falling down. That’s how we learn gravity, that’s the image we have of gravity. And yet, at the same time, the gravitational field is a field of allurement and autonomy—whether you want to use terms like prehension, Ken, which I know you love, or we want to talk about allurement and autonomy all the way up and all the way down, or the lures that Whitehead talks about in Process and Reality. Allurement means there’s this Eros allurement, which is in dialectical tension—and a constant larger wholeness—between allurement and autonomy, which is not a fifth force, but it animates the four forces. And one of those is the gravitational. So this gravitational field is a field of gravitas, and of course it’s interiors and exteriors, all the way up and all the way down. Of course there’s a field of gravitas. Of course there’s a gravitational field, which is about right weight, right value between things. And again, this is what’s critical—the place where Brian Swimme’s approach to The Universe Story becomes not weighty—and blessings to Brian, if you’re listening, brother, blessings, we talked to him a little bit—is that it makes a mythopoetic move. It says: there’s gravity—physical gravitational—and then there’s gravitas in Cosmos. Well, no. Actually it’s one Cosmos. And there’s a principle of continuity and discontinuity. So yes, we’re not animists. But we’re also not ruptured, truncated, dissociated beings who are dangling modifiers in reality, or not part of the coherent grammar of reality. When you dislocate a person from grammar, they begin to stutter, and ultimately they become mules, they go silent and commit suicide. So what we’re saying is that the gravitational nature of reality—which is the precise relationship of allurement and autonomy—is a moral relationship. Ken: And there’s only one gravity field. Marc: And there’s only—right, thank you, deep bow—exactly. So actually the relationship between allurement and autonomy is a moral relationship. Now, it might be an unconscious, implicit morality of Cosmos, but Cosmos is pretty f*****g moral—because Cosmos militates towards life. Cosmos is this huge militation towards this improbable, fine-tuned set of constants that somehow generates this thing called life. Ken: Right. And it has arrows built into it. And that’s why it’s moral. Marc: Yes, yes. That’s why it’s moral. That’s exactly why. That’s what we were talking about a couple of weeks ago—maybe it was already a couple of months ago, in Boulder. That’s why you can’t say the word Eros without saying the word value. It’s a wrong word. It’s a mistake. It’s deceptive. Ken: Gravitas. Gravitas is a great addition. Love Is Goldilocks: It’s Precisely the Right Weight Between Allurement and Autonomy Marc: Gravitas, right, is great. It’s fantastic. Gravitas is really, really important. Maybe last sentence: love is not allurement. Zak, I remember when we had this first conversation, back in 2015, right… Ken: Love is gravitas. Marc: Exactly. It’s gravitas. And gravitas is exactly the right-weighted relationship between allurement and autonomy. * If there’s too much allurement, there’s suffocation. * If there’s too much autonomy, there’s dissociation and alienation. So love is not—we’re coming close. Love is Goldilocks. It’s just right. The right relationship between allurement and autonomy. It’s so f*****g precise. Weight is everything. Love is Goldilocks. It’s just right. The right relationship between allurement and autonomy. You Can Be Wounded By Wrong Weighting Marc: If I could just say one personal thing—it’s a silly way to say it, but quite serious. My son got quite seriously injured. He’s okay, but he got quite seriously injured in the battle in Rafah. And I mentioned this to Colin in an email—but he wasn’t hit by a bullet. That’s not how he got injured. He was injured by wrong weight. He leads a bunch of commandos. They’re carrying an enormous amount on their backs. They’ve got so much weaponry on them, launchers… He sends me sometimes pictures before they go out, and it’s like, don’t send those to me, I don’t want to see them, just tell me when you’re back. But they’re weighted down. And the army didn’t actually have the right backpacks—they’re not backpacks, they’re these huge… And it was packed fast, incompetently, so the weight was slightly off, and he was moving very, very fast. He just got thrown onto the ground, and spasms—he couldn’t move for a week, and then another six weeks of intense pain. And now he’s going to be working on his back for the next five years, at least. Ken: God. Marc: But it’s weight—literally, in the strangeness of the intimate universe, it’s weighted the wrong way. It’s not about what’s in the bag, but it’s precisely how it’s weighted. And the gravitas is your ability to move between and balance the weight and get to the right place. Right-Weighting Is a Practice, Not a Finicky Thing Marc: So on that—and I would just say one other image. Ken, we’ll take you a little bit into Zak-Marc world, at least one piece of it that’s interesting. Zak and I have, for many, many years, an enormous rigor around right balances between autonomy and communion. So often I’ll leave a message about something, and I’ll erase it three times, so I can say it the right way, so that, whoever’s side it happens to be on, we pay a lot of attention to that. It’s this kind of right-weighting, right? Because it’s very easy, when you’re moving fast over many years, to have the band break up. And the band always breaks up because of bad weighting, and not paying attention to weighting. I think that’s right, Zak. We pay an enormous amount of attention to right-weighting—not as a kind of finicky thing, and not as a lack of fierceness, but as a fierce commitment to right-weighting. Zak: Yep. Ken, you and I have done that over the years many, many times. So yeah—this quality of precision, and value. Ken: Right weight. Marc: Right weight. Here’s my suggestion, you guys correct me: we have a whole new topic, but let’s start that next week, because it’s really, the evolution of value. That’s much more than ten minutes. We only have ten minutes left. So I’m thinking—I want to have a right-weight moment, although I’m dying to get to the next topic. But this is such a good completion. Any weighty comments remaining on weight? Gravitas Is the Weight of Evolution Zak: Well, sometimes it’s good to wait. And there’s a value in the waiting. In fact, psychology confers us—sometimes the waiting is better than actually the getting of the thing. Ken: And our connection to next week is that gravitas is the weight of evolution. It’s what moves evolution. So we’ve got value built in to evolution. And the entire universe—every single holon in the universe is evolving because every one of them has gravitas. Or value. Value Confers Dignity Because Value Means: You Are Weighty, You Have Gravitas Marc: Value, value. Right, completely value, complete value. Two things are worth saying, just so we’ll be semiotically appropriate. The Hebrew word for honor—kavod—as in Psalm 8:5, kavod v’hadar ta’atrehu—you crowned him, adorned him, the human being, with kavod—with honor—and hadar, a kind of radiant beauty. But the word kavod, though it’s translated as honor, literally shares its root with kovid, and kovid means weight. Kavod—honor, or dignity—is kovid—literally, right weightiness. Kavod—honor, or dignity—is literally right weightiness. Reality has conferred on the human being this unique charisma, which is rooted in this unique kavod, this gravitas, this right-weighting—this capacity for weighting, which is very, very beautiful. And then it says—vat-tehasserēhu me-at me-Elohim—and in that, he became but a little less than the divine. So the quality of kavod, dignity—value confers dignity because value means that you are weighty, that you have gravitas, and therefore it’s a non-nihilistic world. You count, and therefore there’s accountability. And accountability, back to Zak, is right weights. You’re accountable—you have to count right. Ken: Right. Which is dignity. Zak: Right. Yep. A Number Is Always Telling a Story: A Question Left on the Table Marc: Gorgeous. Wow. So, Ken, I’m going to leave this as a question—Zak, I’m leaving this for Ken, because I think this is less our field, but correct me if you have some massive—the relationship between number and story, because we just talked about accounting and accountability: you count, so you’re accountable. In a text that Zak and I have worked with many times over the years—Ken and I talked about in 2004 or 2005—the original text of Western esotericism, which has, I don’t know, 455 words, called the Book of Creation [Sefer Yetzirah], dated somewhere between the second century before to the first century after the Common Era. It opens with a kind of verse-sutra that says, reality is constituted by mispar—number, or cipher. It’s that same word in English, “cipher”: mispar, number, and sipur, story. Number and story. We’ve talked about this in a different context, which I won’t evoke the depth of now—Zak, you and I, David J. Temple has begun to write on this notion of the ontology of story: it’s story all the way up and all the way down, in a particular way. Let’s bracket that—and the three of us talked about that in Dialogue 11, before the First Principles and First Values book. But there’s this relationship between number and story. The cipher, or the mispar—the same root word—so that the word sefer, book or text, and mispar, number, and sipur, story, all come together to create the sapir—the sapphire, the radiance of reality. So in mathematics, there’s this notion that a number is also a story. In other words, a number doesn’t stand by itself. A number is telling a story. Two is not just a truth that stands by itself—two somehow leads to three, which leads to four. I think this is important. Zak: Phenomenologically—that’s how people who have great facility with number, who are, for example, autistic: when they see a number, they don’t just see the number, they see all of the connections a number has to all of the other numbers, and therefore, whole, huge, weird numbers live in their minds, because of this story that the number lives—it has a personality in relation to the other numbers. That’s literally how they talk about it. There is something about the uniqueness of each number which is weird, right? Because how is a number unique? And yet it is one of those things that are ontically unique. Ken: There’s something in that story about sickness leading to a radiant reality. But that’s for another discussion. Zak: Yeah, that’s true. [Laughs] Marc: This last piece is important. Wow. There’s a lot to say about that. We have it on the table. What a crazy pleasure, my friends. What a crazy pleasure. Mentioned Sources: * Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019) * Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (Prometheus Books, 2012) * Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (first published in Russkiy Vestnik, 1866; first book edition, 1867) * Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (George Routledge & Sons and E. P. Dutton & Co., 1904) * Marc Gafni, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment (Integral Publishers, 2012) * Journal of Integral Theory and Practice * Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Harper & Row, 1984) * Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (originally published 1929; Free Press edition, 1979) * Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) * Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation), traditionally attributed to Abraham (late antiquity). Mentioned People: * Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) * Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) * Andrew Cohen (1955–2025) * John Coltrane (1926–1967) * Stuart Kauffman (1939–) * Katherine Peil Kauffman * Laurie Galperin Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
July 20 · 53 min
Value and Desire Broken Open: The Ontological Structure of Cosmos (with Ken Wilber)
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is the third in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. Philosophers and truth-seekers for thousands of years have wrestled with a timeless question: is life innately meaningful, or are we just merely the byproduct of a random cosmos? In this dialogue, three great philosophers—Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein—take a radical stance. They argue that meaning and value are woven into the very fabric of reality itself—more fundamental to the cosmos than even space and time. Throughout this discussion they explore how desire, prehension, value, and meaning are fundamentally interwoven, and how chemistry itself can be seen as the music of desire, with each element expressing unique scripts of desire. They conclude that understanding desire and value as ontological primitives reveals a universe of intimate coherence, re-enchanting science and the internal daily experience with deeper meaning. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, July 2026, Episode: “Value and Desire Broken Open: The Ontological Structure of Cosmos” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:01 — Context Setting 1:49 — Desire, Prehension, Value, and Meaning Are All Words for the Same Thing 8:47 — Chemistry Is Literally the Music of Desire 12:36 — This Characterization of Chemistry Is a Way of Revivifying Logos Mysticism 15:33 — Chemistry Is a Desire Between Parts that Generates a Unique Whole, and the Cosmos Is Intimate Coherence All the Way Up and All the Way Down 20:45 — Value Is More Primordial Than Space and Time 26:11 — Three Stages of Scripts of Desire: A Degraded Condition, a Deed, a Condition That Can Be Clarified 29:18 — The Desire We Hold Is Continuous with the Animal Realm of Desire, but It Is Also More 33:20 — About First Principles and First Values 34:08 — Value Is Both the Field and the Emergent Properties of the Field 41:01 — Value Is Both the Cause and the Product 47:53 — In Order for My Desire to Be Dignified, Desire Has to Be a Value 52:55 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Marc: Thinking even a little more deeply, we’ll start maybe with holons and deepen a little bit into what we actually mean by value. Ken, we had started last time, at the very beginning our conversation, throwing out a few understandings of value, so we thought we’d stay in that conversation, but before we did that, to circle back to holons, because holons always like being circled back to. To find our way. So I’m just going to dive in. I don’t know why, by the way, you started like three years ago on the hair thing, it’s getting better and better. This new iteration, it’s nice. Ken: [Laughs] Desire, Prehension, Value, and Meaning Are All Words for the Same Thing Marc: Ok, so when we talk about value, we talk about Value as being the logical primitive of cosmos. Value is a given. It’s not that value is equally primordial to space and time. It’s prior. And it’s not that Value is equally primordial to space and time. Value is that in which space and time arise. I’ve been thinking about this the last few days. So one way to say it, which is wrong, is, oh, value is equally primordial to space and time. No, value actually operates both in the frame of being and becoming. So value is that in which all being arises. Or Value is being, and Value is also the space which is the ground of becoming. It’s prior to space and time in that sense. Ken: Since we’re circling back to holons, let me present it in a similar way. All holons have prehension, or a small amount of awareness, or consciousness, or feeling, or however you would like to think of it. And generally speaking, meaning has value because what meaning is, linguistically, let’s say, is a signifier. Like the meaning of the word tree. The signifier is T-R-E-E. And the meaning is whatever the tree it’s pointing to. That’s the value of that signifier. So all holons have a signifier, which is prehension. Because prehension touches everything that it’s aware of. That’s Whitehead’s point. And so value is an intrinsic part of the self-prehensive meaning system of the individual holon. It has prehension, prehension reaches out and touches, sees, feels, knows something. And that’s its meaning. The meaning of the word tree is the real tree, which is the referent to the signifier T-R-E-E. You can see value as a sea that things arise in. So you’re saying space and time arises out of Value, and that’s, in a certain sense, correct. I just wanted to mention those couple of facts. Marc: That’s great. In a certain sense, we’re in the elephant conversation. There is a lot of ways to describe the elephant. Let’s see if we can go into a couple of doors here, see how they work and just see what happens. Let’s go to holons for a second, because that’s where we started. So we have holons, which are whole parts. And we say that all of reality’s foundational structure is holons and that everything that exists in the world, in the universe, in any form, is either made up of holons or made by holons. Holons are fundamental building blocks of the universe. Now, of course, I’m just going to say the obvious, so I apologize for boring you both. I know you both know this well. Let me just say it so we can have it on the table in the conversation. A holon is anything that’s at the same time, both a whole and a part. * An atom is both a whole and a part of a molecule. * A molecule is both a whole and part of a macromolecule. * Macromolecules are wholes and parts of cells. * Cells are wholes and parts of organs, etc… These are all holons. Now here, what’s crucial for us is that holons are a structure of Value. And there’s a currency of desire that runs through all holons. In other words, parts come together in desire to form larger wholes. The larger whole is formed in fulfillment of the desire of the parts. Ken: And the prehension that’s in the holon is always reaching out and touching. So Value is an inherent part of every holon. Marc: Exactly. And touching is: I’m desiring deeper contact. Ken: That’s right. Marc: And then you get particular value because the whole itself, which comes from the part reaching out prehensively, is a direct result of a particular pattern or configuration of desire. In other words, the unique configuration of desire in the parts forms the intimate coherence of the whole. And we’ve been driving each other crazy in a good way. I’ve been just marinating, almost like in this insane ashram meditation on Value the last couple of weeks. Zak and I have been going back and forth. It’s getting very clear. * The whole itself is the direct result of a particular pattern or configuration of desire. * This unique configuration of desire in the parts forms the intimate coherence of the whole. Or said differently, you could say: * The intimate coherence of the whole is woven from the threads of the unique desire configuration that inheres in the parts. We can say one more thing: * The parts can be said to share a common telos that’s implied by each of their respective—and I want to make up a word here—scripts of desire. In other words, every part has a script of desire. But in order for these unique parts, these scripts of desire to come together and to create something new, a new value, there’s already a shared ground of Value between them, a shared telos. The implicit ontological structure of the science in this regard, the disclosure is that diverse parts, each with their own quality of desire, both share a desired ender telos. In other words, the ontological structure of reality is such that, again, diverse parts, each with their own quality of desire, both share a desired ender telos that’s enacted in the whole that emerges from the distinct parts. So all of a sudden we have this realization that, literally, holons and desire generating new value are exactly the same. I mean, it’s very beautiful. It’s so f*****g elegant, you could cry. And it’s structural to the f*****g cosmos. Ken: The script of desire is created by prehension. Marc: Yes. Ken: And it’s the very size and nature of the holon that determines how much prehension it has. And that’s going to determine the type of desire that it engages in. But all of those are always present. Marc: Yes. Ken: So desire, prehension, value, meaning, they’re all so many words for the same thing. Marc: Right. Chemistry Is Literally the Music of Desire Marc: So look at this, and then, Zak, passing to you, brother. Let’s throw in chemistry, just to have chemistry on the table. When you think of chemistry for a second, this is where it gets. We have our friend Dmitri Mendeleev, that’s 1869. He formalizes this periodic table. Ken, this is your original stomping ground in science, this is where you were originally going to go. One of the ways people talk about chemistry, which is absolutely wrong, is that chemistry is this mechanical manual describing building blocks of cosmos. But we forget that that’s not true. It’s not a mechanical manual. Chemistry is actually the music of desire. Literally, ontologically. Right? In other words, we forget that a chemical element is actually a particular configuration of desire and allurement that generates a unique structure of wholeness and reality. Ken: Right. Marc: And so that when we say, oh, wow, there’s chemistry between Zak and Florida, and the goddesses of Florida, when we say there’s chemistry, we’re not being metaphoric. Ken: No. Marc: We’re saying that the same structure of reality that creates chemistry down there in Florida or between the three of us, there’s chemistry, or we wouldn’t be talking to each other. The structure of chemistry in reality is f*****g literal. So that the whole thing is gorgeous. Ken: And chemistry has a prehensive desire. Marc: And therefore creates a unique value. Ken: That’s correct. Marc: And that value has meaning. So it’s actually meaning-value all the way down. And all of a sudden, it just clarifies at the level of almost, like, beautiful idiocy. Meaning, we skip all the b******t of hijacking physics to say things it’s not saying. In other words, what we’re saying is, let’s skip over the Tao of Physics complexities that are over-claiming or miss-stating the observer effect. Let’s put all that stuff aside. Ken: Let’s really put that aside. Marc: Let’s really put that aside. And that’s your Quantum Questions introduction point. Ken: Right. Marc: That essay. We put that aside. We’re saying: there’s a much stronger structure of value in the world than bad interpretations of quantum entanglement, which is literally chemistry itself. Chemistry all the way up and all the way down. And when you get that, actually, there’s this table of periodic elements. You actually get those are all values in reality. Ken: That’s right. They’re all prehensive desires. Marc: And so desire discloses value. Ken: It creates value, however you want to see it… Marc: However you want to tell that story. Ken: That’s right. They’re absolutely interwoven. Marc: They’re interdigitated, inter-included, interwoven. And here’s the last sentence. Desire and need themselves are inseparable at foundational levels of Cosmos. You can’t even separate them. And all of a sudden, the hard problem falls away. It’s gotten very soft and it just literally doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve actually read science not through a dogmatic prism, in which science is actually disintermediating between the Cosmos by actually obfuscating the ontology through a series of words. We’re reanimating, but we actually don’t need anything more than high school science. Ken: That’s right. Marc: Literally. Right? It’s high school science. Desire and need disclose value. Ken: And that’s the periodic table of desire-value. Marc: Right. Exactly. It’s literally the periodic table of desire-value. And all of a sudden, when you read this dogmatic notion of a meaningless cosmos, you’re like… I mean, let’s hold here. Zak, what you thinking over there down in Florida? This Characterization of Chemistry Is a Way of Revivifying Logos Mysticism Zak: [Laughs] All kinds of stuff. A few things I’ll say. One is that, of course, when you when you characterize the periodic table of elements as basically a script of desire, these complex interweaving scripts of desire, it’s a beautiful phrase. You end up with both a re-enchantment of chemistry and also a way of revivifying logos mysticism, if I can put it that way. Which is the mysticism of the cosmic as semiotic, which is what Ken began us with. Which is the cosmic scroll… Ken: As logos. Zak: With logos. Exactly. Precisely. You have a logos mysticism. And so there’s a sense that it’s not chemicals we’re dealing with. In some sense, it is a signifier. And each chemical signifies everything, but with a particular vector of desire and potential interaction with all things. That’s what’s interesting about chemistry. It’s the base of the stack. Ken: We should notice that desire itself doesn’t always latch on to something that is in a sense, correct or true. I mean, desire can be misplaced. Zak: Yes. Ken: Let me give a quick example. If I say the universe is meaningless, that’s a sentence that has a perfect meaning. I know what you mean when you say the universe is meaningless. The problem is: it’s wrong. Zak: Right, exactly. [Laughs] Ken: It still has desire. It still has a signifier. It still has value. But it’s a wrong conclusion. Marc: Right. Yes, yes, yes. That’s right. But underneath that sentence, “the universe is meaningless.” That sentence is meaningless without meaning. You couldn’t even say the sentence. I want to make a big point, but Zak, finish that point. Zak: This is the point that Ken made. Ken was saying, you have the periodic table of elements, only some of them get together in certain configurations to make things that work. They say, like: in physics, it breaks. In chemistry, it blows up, or it smells, or something… If you try to mix things together and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. So similarly, this reinterpretation of, back to the notion of normativity or rightness and these things, there are certain chemical reactions that are both possible and probable. There are others that are impossible. And others that you just shouldn’t do. [Laughs] Although something happens. So there’s a way of interpreting chemistry as a type of meaning-making, a type of inter-animating of these different scripts of desire. That was something that came up. And then this weaves into this history of logos mysticism, it weaves into this history of the universe as a process of self-writing, this process of signification. That was very deep to me. Ken: Which means correct desire. Zak: Which means correct desire. Marc: Which means right desire. Chemistry Is a Desire Between Parts that Generates a Unique Whole, and Cosmos Is Intimate Coherence All the Way Up and All the Way Down Marc: Let’s go back for a second before we get off of it, because we want to go down the logos mysticism road. But I want to, if I can, lulē d’mistafina. It’s an Aramaic phrase, which means lest we overstep, which is what you always say right before you’re about to overstep. You say it in Aramaic and everyone’s good. But I want to go back to chemistry for a second. I just want to read a simple wiki just here. Just a random thing, okay? So: “Each chemical element has a unique atomic number representing the number of protons in its nucleus.” Ken: And therefore the size of its prehension. Marc: That’s right! Exactly! Again, it’s like it’s such a pleasure to talk. I’ve been so lonely in this. It’s so obvious. Ken: [Laughs] Marc: You know what I mean? It’s such a pleasure, right? “All elements have multiple isotopes, variants with the same number of protons, but different number, numbers of neutrons. For example, carbon has three naturally occurring isotopes. All of its atoms have six protons and most have six neutrons as well. About one percent have seven neutrons and a small fraction have eight neutrons. And of course, you got to remember that isotopes are never separated.” That’s in the periodic table. “They’re always grouped together under a single element… And then remember one last thing, when atomic mass is shown, it’s usually the weighted average of naturally occurring isotopes. But if no isotopes occur naturally in significant quantities, the mass of most stable isotopes usually appears off in parentheses.” Thank you very much. It looks like an innocent text, but actually, you could actually read that text and be completely uninspired because you didn’t actually realize what you were reading, because you got disintermediated from the field of pulsing Eros you just read. This is actually hiding that chemistry is defined by chemistry. [Laughs] In other words, that’s what it’s hiding, that actually at the very core, chemistry is a desire between parts that generates a unique whole. And “chemical elements” means that there’s a particular pattern or configuration of desire, or Ken, you would call it a pattern of prehension between parts, borrowing from Whitehead, that generates an emergent whole, which is the chemical in question. So every chemical has scripts of desire. And actually, every human being is going to be a unique configuration of chemistry with unique scripts of desire. And Ken, as you said, Zak, as you were referring to, we actually can sometimes have false scripts of desire. You have to clarify your scripts of desire. You can have plagiarized scripts of desire. You can be wrong. Right? In other words, the script of desire actually has to be aligned with something. I mean, the reason the universe doesn’t stop with hydrogen, helium, lithium or carbon, and each one of those is a particular script of desire, is that each one of those is coded with its script of desire and its script of desire wants more. * The reason the universe doesn’t stop with hydrogen, helium, lithium or carbon, and each one of those is a particular script of desire, is that each one of those is coded with its script of desire and its script of desire wants more. It takes you… It doesn’t take you all the way to the human being… It takes you to the next step. Ken: Eros. There’s Eros. It’s what pushes it higher and higher, and more whole and more whole, and therefore more valuable and more meaningful all the way up. Marc: And that’s what—I don’t know if you guys heard about this, but there was this book by this dude, what the f**k I have here somewhere… This guy, some guy, Temple. David J. Temple. David J. Temple did this little book called First Principles and First Values. And he has in there an Eros equation, which is: Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. Ken: Yeah. Marc: Which is the movement of reality towards ever greater Value. Right? Ken: Right. Marc: Even if you look at something like, we’re at the very first nanoseconds of the Big Bang and you have gazillions of f*****g quarks. Right? They literally are f*****g quarks. [Laughs] That’s actually what they are. This huge, crazy singles bar. You have, let’s say, two down quarks and an up quark. Oh, a neutron. Two up quarks and a down quark, oh, a proton. Actually, what that is, is a configuration of desire that generates a unique value proposition. And then you throw and make it into a ménage à trois 380,000 years later, you have an electron and now you literally have an atom, which is actually a new quality of interiority, a new structure, and it’s a new intimacy. And all of a sudden we have our second Value of Cosmos more clearly alliterated, which is: Intimacy equals: * the experience of shared identity—protons, neutrons, electrons; * in the context of otherness—there’s still protons and neutrons and electrons, even though there’s an atom; * times mutuality of recognition; * times the mutuality of pathos—they feel each other; * times the mutuality of value—there’s literally a shared Field of Value; * times the mutuality of purpose—they have a shared purpose. And all of a sudden, the notion of a meaningless cosmos, which is the greatest source of the metacrisis and all suffering, evaporates, because you realize, literally, the Cosmos is intimate coherence all the way up and all the way down. Ken: Right. Marc: How could you not be ecstatic? Ken: Right. Marc: It’s right in front of us. Wow. F**k. Yeah. It’s crazy. Value Is More Primordial Than Space and Time Zak: So, there’s a way that from that structure we just described, you end up having to boot time and space. Because it’s weird to say, when all those quarks were moving around, way back in the day, that 30 million years went by. Because it’s like, really? Time was the way we think about it now? When in fact, what you’re getting is, you’re starting to boot the temporal and you’re starting to boot space itself from the structure of Value. So, for example, if the universe is booting from Value, then it has to have things separated from each other. If the universe is booting from desire, then it has to have delayed gratification, which means something has to unfold. And the structure of prehension is temporal by definition. The structure of prehension is me perceiving my past. Another place I went was to William James, which is where, through Peirce, you end up getting Whitehead pulling out this notion of prehension from principles of psychology, where you have the drops of experience and the myself now looking back on my past self and moving into this future self through this stream of consciousness. Therefore, you boot the temporal and phenomenological experience also from this stream of prehensive desire towards connection and the future. So that place where you started, which is that actually Value is more primordial than space and time, is almost a little bit structurally in the definition, the way we just talk about Value. Marc: Yes. Zak: Which is, what other seed could boot a universe with space, time and this type of dynamism and this type of growth towards greater complexity? It would be something like a seed of desire. I think also about the skandhas in Buddhism, this basic unit of consciousness, which kind of iterates, in a way, around a desiring, booting consciousness. Marc: Back to the skandhas. Skandhas are referring possibly in certain ways to pseudo-desire as well, but… Zak: They are. And that’s what enters. Marc: We’re talking about the ontological primitive. Yes. Here’s the funny thing. We think of will. We talk about willpower. We say, yeah, you have willpower. What does willpower mean? Oh, it means I have enough willpower to overcome desire. That’s the way we think about it, which is, of course, a complete mistake. Actually, will is desire. That’s what will is. The original Hebrew word for will is ratzon, which is a Solomon word. And it comes from the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon, as, Ken, you and I talked about in 2003 and 2004, back in the day when we first talked about Eros, Zak, we’ve talked about it so many times… The Song of Solomon is called Sanctum Sanctorum. It’s holy of holies of the entire esoteric Western lineage, which comes the account of the chariot, which forms all the mystery schools that Marsilio Ficino is teaching at the Florentine Platonic Academy, being funded by Cosimo de’ Medici, they’re teaching these core structures. So this notion of will, will is ratzon. The text is, mashkheni acharékha, draw me after you, kind of seducing, narutzah, and I will run after you. We’ve literally lost our access both to what will means and to what seduction means. For us, seduction is unholy seduction, degraded seduction, where I try and get you to violate your appropriate boundary for the sake of my greed. Unholy seduction. But actually, seduction is the structure of Cosmos. Cosmos is a sacred seduction. And that’s why Whitehead’s always talking about the lure, about the structure of seduction, where reality is seducing me to break the boundary of my contraction and to desire my larger wholeness. Draw me after you, narutzah, ratzon, I will run towards you. So, of course, ontologically, phenomenologically—they’re the same, ontology and phenomenology are the same here as they always really are—the description is: that place in the world of sensuality, where I give up my lower will in order to access the larger current of desire that’s moving through me. We’ve lost access to that primal notion of will and we’ve now made will a materialist structure of your willpower that overcomes desire. No! Actually, will is the deepest structure of desire, which you access, which then allows you to access your clarified desire. So the clarification of desire becomes the human action. At the foundational levels of Cosmos there’s no clarification of desire. As we move up through matter to life and all the life’s levels, then life triumphs as the depth of the self-reflective human mind. There’s a process of being more, having more and more capacity to edit my scripts of desire. I become more participatory. But only if I understand that, can I actually have any dignity. If I am will, will is what I am, and there’s no dignity to my desire, then my life is essentially degraded. Three Stages of Scripts of Desire: A Degraded Condition, a Deed, a Condition That Can Be Clarified Ken: What do we mean by dignity? Marc: That’s a great… Ken: And also think about dignity of desire. Marc: Yeah, totally, I appreciate it. Let me try and frame it this way. It’s actually weird. This is the very first time, Ken, that we met, post that Steiner that brought us together. It’s when I had written that article On the Erotic and the Ethical as the cover of 2003. And we were talking about those three levels. And so the three levels, you talk about pre-trans fallacy, which is the way that you talk about that three. And I had written there about this thing about, She Comes in Threes, this tripartite structure of Cosmos. Let’s take desire for a second, take it to dignity of desire. Marc: In some sense, if you would read St. Paul and then Augustine, they would say that desire is not a deed. Desire is a condition of the human being. And it’s a degraded condition. It’s not a deed. It’s a condition. The condition is degraded. Then when you get to that station: * Station one of desire, of scripts of desire, desire actually doesn’t have dignity. Desire opposes dignity. And the word for dignity in Hebrew is kavod. Kavod means honor, dignity, but it’s koved, it’s heavy, it has gravitas. It’s that which has gravitas. * Then level two would be, you go to your straight biblical reading, it is no, no, no. * Desire is not a condition. Desire is a deed. And that’s a deed that we enact. * Desire is nature, but I also have this divine force in me. * Because I have a divine force and divinity is not just imminent desire, divinity transcends desire. * So I have the capacity to control my desire. So people like, let’s say, Dennis Prager, who’s a classical proponent of the biblical position, that’s what he’ll say all the time. Ah, no, no, no. God is beyond desire. Therefore, you can control your desire. And that was our basic response to paganism, and fair point. Script of desire, too. * But script of desire three is: you realize, again, at the trans level, using the Wilberian pre/trans observation here, at the trans level, you realize, no, no, no, desire is a condition. [Laughs] And it’s not just a deed. The desire is actually a condition. Ken: And therefore, you can have a dignity of desire. Marc: Yes! Yes! Motherfucker! Yes! Right? Exactly! Therefore, you can have a dignity of desire. I could jump out of my chair. It’s so exciting. You realize, oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah. No, it’s not a deed. It’s a condition. Because it’s a condition, if I clarify that condition—and part of my dignity is that it’s a condition and that I have the capacity to clarify the condition. That’s my dignity. Zak: And it’s worth mentioning, Augustine and those guys were characterizing desire as continuous with the animal world’s desire and making no distinction between it. That’s why it was debased and degraded and below what the human should be trying to achieve. Ken: They were chakra three and below. Zak: Exactly. The Desire We Hold Is Continuous with the Animal Realm of Desire, but It Is Also More Zak: So what we’re saying is basically, the desire we hold is continuous with the animal realm of desire but it is also more. And it can be subject to the clarification of desire. Marc: And this is where we have the principle that, if you guys remember, the same guy that wrote First Principles and First Values, Temple, has this principle of continuity and discontinuity. It’s very important that there’s a continuity of desire and there’s a discontinuity, and that actually you can pathologize on either side. a) Speciesism pathologizes on the side of continuity. b) Descartes pathologized on the side of discontinuity, which is why he thought you could brutalize animals. This notion of being participatory in the field of desire is absolutely critical because the clarification of desire is evolution itself. The evolutionary process itself is the process of clarifying desire and the clarification of desire is the clarification of value. There’s no split between them. And what’s so crazy exciting as we move towards this crisis of meaning, anthro-ontology writing, is like that old text in Deuteronomy, where: it’s lo ba-shamayim hi, it’s not in heaven, ve-lo me’ever la-yam hi, it’s not over the sea. It’s not someplace else. It’s so elemental. It’s so basic. What we’re saying is so fundamental, and for whatever reason, I don’t know why, it’s clearer than it’s ever been. We can feel it. It’s bursting in its clarity. From there, we can actually offer a couple of definitions of desire, of value. So: * Value is clarified desire. Clarified desire equals value. Period. End of conversation. Or: * Clarified need equals value. And then we make the point that the three of us talked about, that the foundational level and the aspirational level of Cosmos—aspirational meaning the highest level of the enlightened bodhisattva and the foundational, need and desire are the same—but at the middle levels, as you pointed out, Ken, desire can go wrong. You can say a false sentence. Right? Need and desire split. So now we begin to have a very, very serious theory of moral realism that’s not utilitarian or not deontological, it’s actually structural inherent in the very structure of cosmos, which actually breaks open value theory. All of a sudden we’re talking: a) About a Field of Value in which everything arises. b) Value is both the irreducible rightness of the omni-coherent Cosmos and the aspirational ought of reality, the prehensive aspirational ought of reality. c) And when we say something like, holons all the way up and all the way down, what we’re actually saying is Value all the way up and all the way down. You know, there’s a very influential book, by the way, on Temple, early on, called Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. It’s a very influential book. When he talks there about the four primary notions of a holon, what he’s describing there is actually the four qualities of value. The four dimensions of value. Holons and Value become very much interchangeable, but Value is actually more primary, because a holon is an expression of the Field of Value. So we’ve come very, very far, just to say from the beginning of our last conversation, we’ve clarified it. In the beginning, at beginning of our last conversation, we were saying, how does this all fit together? Now it’s kind of obvious. It’s become self-evidently clear. Right? It’s crazy because it’s this is the next step that’s been waiting to be taken. And once you see it, it’s so clear, but the confusion around it is enormous. Now it’s like we can actually cut through and get it quite clearly. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Value Is Both the Field and the Emergent Properties of the Field Ken: Let me ask, where does value come from? Because we were talking about prehension and its reaching out in a creation of meaning and therefore value. So we have to have something like prehension first, right? Marc: Yes. Ken: Okay. And prehension is defined as the core of a holon. Marc: Yes. Now, where does prehension come from? Ken: And where does a holon come from? Because we’re hanging value and meaning off of holonic stuff. In other words, value doesn’t come first before a holon. Marc: Well, let’s go slow for a second. In other words, a holon is a part-whole of the manifest universe. Ken: Right. Marc: The unmanifest generates the manifest. Let’s say it a little differently. I mean, cosmogenesis is under quite a bit of attack these days, but let’s bracket that issue for a second. Let’s just hold it for a second. Let’s assume the Big Bang for the moments that we still can. When reality explodes into—and we have those gazillions of quarks that were referred to earlier, raining down, and there’s only 16 basic configurations of quarks, and all the laws of mathematics, with all of the values and all of the mathematical (to-be-disclosed) equations are all operative. Those are all inherent in reality as it arises, right? Which is of course, why it makes very, very little empirical sense—forget about anything else—empirically, it doesn’t make sense to understand creatio ex nihilo, as creation from nothing. It makes sense to make it as creation from no thing. It’s creation from no thing, meaning no thingness. Right? Some dimension of infinity generates finitude, which means—let me be an Abhinavagupta acolyte for a moment, right? Thank you, Sally, for exposing me to Abhinavagupta, and thank you, Ken, for forcing Sally and I to talk like 20 years ago. Ken: [Laughs] Marc: When Ken brought Kabbalah to meet in Kashmir Shaivism, that was a successful conversation. And we did balk a little bit at the beginning, if I recall, right? Back in the day. So Abhinavagupta talks about a stirring of desire in the infinite. A stirring of desire in the infinite. Meaning, infinity desires finitude. Right? So this something that’s going on other than “oops”, that something, whatever one’s cosmology is, what’s very clear is that the unmanifested infinity desires finitude. And in effect, that’s what Blake meant when he said, eternities in love with the productions of time, right? Ken: Right. And this, what comes out of infinity is prehensive. Marc: Yes. So the tattvas can’t get lost in ultimate tattvaness in the cosmic Shaivite view or the Ein Sof in the sefirot. I just had my dear friend Art Green up here who wants to, who’s going to join us for one of the future dialogues. He’s a great scholar of Hebraic mysticism and he wrote the definitive piece of scholarship at Yale University Press on Ayin. On Ayin, on that infinite category. And one of the issues in scholarship is Ein Sof, or Ayin, in any way separate from sefirot, the 10 luminations of the Tree of Life, and from the manifest world. In some deep sense, when you read the sources, you realize, no, no, no, they can’t, because that would be duality. So the desire that is inherent in the manifest is emerging from the infinite. And how do we know that infinity desires finitude? Well, there’s Zak. You know what I mean? It’s not just infinity desired finitude, infinity desired Zak. I mean, that’s shocking. Zak: Especially if he doesn’t know me. Marc: Right. [Laughs] It’s such a shocking realization. You can actually access it in direct meditation, you have the sense of infinity desiring me, infinity therefore intending me. I’m intended. The sense where you can actually get under your own finitude and experience this prior ontological primitive that’s intending you, then for the first time you actually experience yourself as being welcome in the universe. We could cry. You’re not welcome in the universe without that. You’re not desired. Ken: And where does mathematics fit in this emergence? Marc: Zak, you want to take a crack before I do? Take it away. Zak: I’m still hung up on this, which comes first, value, the prehension or the holon—and thinking like, it’s all at the same time insofar as there’s a time. [Laughs] That’s how I’m holding that. Marc: It’s a little bit of a holy trinity. Zak: And they’re not the same thing. Ken: When you have prehension, you have to have it encased. All prehension occurs within a holon. And all holons have prehension. Marc: Which arises in the Field of Value. Ken: Well, yes, because prehension reaches out and touches something and what it touches is Value. Marc: Yes, I see what we’re dancing around here. Hopefully we’re spiraling and not circling. Zak: Let me say that, in Charles Sanders Peirce’s objective idealism, every thing that appears as an object to me is itself a subject. Right? This is Whitehead as well. So that table over there actually is looking at me somehow. And vice-versa. Similarly, as you’re saying, prehension reaches out, it hits a value. But what is that value? That value is just another prehension reaching out. [Laughs] Right? It’s this way in which the mirrored Indra’s net of all of these interconnected prehensions result in the appearance of objective and creates objective value. So this question, where is Value? Where does it come from? It is both the field and the emergent properties of the field. Because it’s both there, as Marc’s been saying before at all, and yet it also gets increasingly characterized. It gets increasingly featured. Value Is Both the Cause and the Product Marc: Yeah. Let’s throw a term on the table. Ken, a term that we played with before. Temple mentions it in First Principles and First Values, it’s implicit in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality in other ways, but let’s put the term on the table, which is ErosValue. It’s a great term, and it’s funny because, for many years—and this takes us directly back to the prehension value issue—I would talk about, Value has Eros. I’d say something like, when we’re in the middle of COVID and one entire part of the political sector of reality believes that if you step out of your house, you will be killing 17,000 people, therefore you are evil. And then Floyd is tragically killed, whatever happened there, but it was a tragic horror and everyone watches it on their phones. So they have an experience of Value having been violated and all of sudden, f**k COVID, f**k killing 17,000 people, everyone pours into the streets the next day because Value arouses will. Right? In other words, whatever was organized or not organized, there was still a spontaneous explosion because there was an experience of having seen Value being violated, which arouses will. And will is a quality of Eros. I would say, okay, Value is filled with Eros. But then you say well, no, no, on the other side of it, Eros is a value of Cosmos. Right? Eros is a value. Eros is not just a mechanical description Cosmos, Nietzsche’s point, it’s music. It’s not mechanics. Right? You know, Nietzsche, famous, the last of the philosophers who pretends not to be a metaphysician, but who’s filled with Fields of Value every other page so gorgeously. So, Value is Eros and Eros is Value. And then you realize, no, it’s one word. It’s ErosValue. Right? It’s ErosDesire and ErosValue, or each ErosDesire and ErosValue. Reality is not Eros and Reality is not Value. Reality is ErosValue. It’s a new word and it’s a good word. We need to create that new field of language. And ErosValue means that Eros is the value of Cosmos. So prehension is value. In other words, prehension is a value of Cosmos. Prehension is not a neutral mechanical function, it is actually value. Which takes us back to the inquiry about mathematics, Ken, that you threw on the table. In some sense, we could say that mathematics, music, and value, all three of those, are all interdigitated. They’re all forms of mathematics of intimacy. In other words, Value is that structure in Cosmos which causes the movement of desire and which evokes our response. Life is lived in response to the Field of Value. What is life? Human life? Human life, but all life, is that which is lived in response to the Field of Value, that which is evoked by the Field of Value. So in that sense, thinking of Value as music is helpful. And music and mathematics, we remember of course, from as far back as the Solomon mystics and obviously Pythagoras, that music and mathematics are flip sides of each other. Right? They’re actually structurally the same. And we know that music is intervals, it’s forms of mathematics. I would say, Value is the space in which it all arises, but then Zak, Ken, as you guys say, mathematics exists instantly at the first moment of the Big Bang. And mathematics are all values, they’re unique value structures. And Value means a particular quality which evokes a field of desires which creates responses. That’s actually what it is. Ken: I’m getting a little confused here. Because we start with a series of definitions, rough definitions for prehension, value, meaning, and so on. And by the way, almost any of the central terms we’re talking about can be hyphenated with all the others. But when we want to emphasize the relation between Eros and Value, we can talk about ErosValue. But we were moving towards defining value in a sense as a result or even a product of prehension. Marc: It’s both. Now we’re getting to the place we want to try and line and circle and spiral. Value is both a product of prehension, which I totally understand exactly what you mean, both cognitive, but you can feel it, right? It’s more than cognitive, it’s visceral. And prehension itself is a value. Ken: Well, and we can assign the word hyphen value to almost anything. Marc: Right. Something that gets very hard to disambiguate. Ken: Right, because every object we see has value, every thought we think has value, every desire we have has certain value. But in all of those cases, it’s in the sense a bit of a product, even though it’s interwoven with the thing that it’s a product of. Marc: Let’s stay with this for second. Let’s say, when Abhinavagupta talks about—and Abhinavagupta, as you know, is this kind of materialist mystic. He’s just talking about the nature of what is. When he describes this stirring of desire in the infinite, the infinite is, in a certain sense, the infinite Value. The infinite is not just a mathematical set in a neutral sense. It’s not a mechanical mathematical set. By the infinite he means the infinite source of all Value, right? There’s a stirring of desire that emerges and that desire is an expression of the infinite Field of Value. Ken: Okay, wait, so now we’re having Value produce products. Marc: I think it’s both sides. Ken: Yeah. Marc: That’s exactly right. Ken: Well, that’s all I was getting confused over. Having value cause, in a sense. Marc: Yes, that’s right. It’s both. Literally, Value does both. Ken: Yeah. In Order for My Desire to Be Dignified, Desire Has to Be a Value Marc: And in a certain sense, if we get back to that notion of dignity... In order for my desire to be dignified, then desire has to be a Value. It’s not just that I desire value. It’s that my desiring has ontological value. It’s not just, oh, I’m desiring a great car, a great man, a great woman, a great book, a great aesthetic. It’s not just 10 desires, really kind of a very particular kind of aesthetics. I remember sitting with Ken in 2003-04, showing me the first mockups of Integral Naked in the art. Ken: [Laughs] Marc: It’s not just that Ken desires something that has high value aesthetically, it’s that Ken’s desire itself is a Value. Ken: As long as you take seriously the phrase, “it’s not just.” Marc: Right. Agreed. This is great. Ken: And that’s just another way that we add a hyphen between words. Marc: Yes. I mean, this hyphenation of words is, as I think we’re all pointing to, very important because there’s a paucity of language. Language has become impoverished. Zak: And postconventional cognition and perception usually involves the creation of new language, almost necessarily hyphenation of terms. Some languages like German give themselves to this, like Habermas just makes these huge compound words which translate basically as a sentence in English. But that the hyphenating of the words is innovation with the language necessary to express these higher order cognitions and most metaphysics. Ken: And that’s a real source of the famous German philosophical tendency. Zak: I agree. Marc: Yes, totally. Because in order for us to enact a new Story of Value, it needs to be rooted, we’ve said, and this is a point that Temple, again, made—and it’s made in other ways in Wilber’s discussions of semiotics, you guys may or may not be familiar, I’ll point you guys to some footnotes—but this notion that we need to lay down what Temple calls a universal grammar of value. And a Story of Value needs to be based on a universal grammar of value, which itself needs to be embedded in First Principles and First Values. And those are not quite redundant to each other. In other words: * There’s a Field of Value, that’s the field that’s beneath all values. * There are actually structural First Principles and First Values. For example, Reality desires uniqueness. There’s a movement which is called—Herbert Spencer, chapter 15—differentiation and integration. It’s a particular First Principle and First Value. * There’s a grammar of value. There’s a set, it’s a basic syntax out of which your Story of Value can be enacted, and it’s only that that can generate intimate coherence. And without intimate coherence in Cosmos, you get extinction. By definition. That’s what it does. We’re feeling the need to lay down a new field of language at this moment, which in essence, we’re scaffolding, on integral, integral integrated all its multiple vectors and streams. And now we’re saying, okay, now let’s enact this language, and a language is essentially code. That’s what a language is. Ken: And it has a grammar, and the grammar is a system. That’s why. And system is another word to put a hyphen between everything you see. Marc: Right. It’s beautiful. And it emerges from the silence. Ken: Sure. Marc: Ken, this is one of the very, very first things we talked about again, I don’t know why we’re harking back today, it just happens to be between 2003-04, this notion in the account of the chariot, Zak, that you and I have looked at together multiple times, where there’s the sense of ḥashmal. This description of the chariot in Ezekiel and Isaiah and ḥashmal, which means the silence out of which words emerge. The silence is the Field of Value. It’s a silence of presence. It’s not a silence of absence. It’s the suchness that you talk about Ken, all the time. So I say we hold here, Davids and holy myth. This is fantastic and gorgeous and yay. What crazy pleasure. This is great. Love mad, guys. Zak: Yeah, love you all. Ken: Much love. Bye bye. Mentioned Sources: * Ken Wilber, Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (Shambhala Publications, 1984) * Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Shambhala Publications, 1975) * Marc Gafni, "On the Erotic and the Ethical", Tikkun 18, no. 4 (July/August 2003) * Marc Gafni, She Comes in Threes: Reality's Plotlines Are the Three Stations of Eros: Trialectics Are the Structure of Cosmos (World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers, 2024 * Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala Publications, 1995) Mentioned People: * Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) * Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) * William James (1842–1910) * Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) * Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) * Paul the Apostle (c. 5–c. 64/65 CE) * Augustine of Hippo (354–430) * Dennis Prager (1948–present) * René Descartes (1596–1650) * Abhinavagupta (c. 950–c. 1020 CE) * Sally Kempton (1943–2023) * Arthur Green (1941–present) * Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) * Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BCE) * Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) * Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
May 18 · 51 min
Understanding the Field of Value: Holons, Eros, and ErosValue (with Ken Wilber)
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is the second in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein do a deep dive into metaphysics and the clarification of terms they're using to articulate what they call a new grammar of value. They discuss the distinctions between Eros in the Greek and Christian sense and their definition of ErosValue, the difference between value and the Field of Value, and how holons and their core drivers play into all of that. Join in as a fly on the wall as these three great philosophers discuss the nature of the Field of Value itself and explore the relationship between these terms in the context of Integral Theory as well as CosmoErotic Humanism. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, May 2026, Episode: “Understanding the Field of Value: Holons, Eros, and ErosValue” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:48 — Context Setting 1:41 — First Definition of Value: Value Is the Quality of Irreducible Rightness that Exists in the Universe 8:59 — "Rightness” Works Across The Good, The True and The Beautiful 13:05 — Is the Field of Value a Real Place or a Real Thing? 15:52 — Understanding the Field of Value in terms of Self: Separate Self, True Self, Unique Self 21:36 — We Need to Distinguish Between the Field of ErosValue and the Narrow Sense of the Greek and Christian Notion of Eros 26:14 — About First Principles and First Values 27:01 — The Four Core Drives Of All Holons Are Included in Our Definitions of Eros and Intimacy 39:31 — We’re Using The Word “Value” in the Same Way Ken Uses Holons — Value Is Not Hard to Find, It’s Impossible to Avoid 51:18 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Marc: David J. Temple’s next book is really anthro-ontology, which is how we know what we know. Anthro: human. Ontology: real. * How do we know what we know? * How do we know anything? * And how do we know that value is real? But it’s really two related questions: * How do we know what the value is real? * What is value? Which are obviously co-joined and related. What we did is, David J. Temple came over the other night, and he looked a little bit like you, Ken. He looked a little bit like Zak. He had some Jewish genes there someplace, but he came over and he wrote down about 50 formulations of what is value. And we actually had our friend Daniel over for three, four days, where we also did a deep dive into this topic: what is value? Only if value is real all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain do we have an omnicoherent Cosmos. Otherwise, we don’t have a coherent Cosmos. So when David talks about the Intimate Universe, he means intimacy all the way down and all the way up, right? Intimacy and coherence are almost the same word. It’s intimate coherence or coherent intimacy. With that in mind, I thought we would just jump in. I’ll throw out possible definitions of value. And it doesn’t get more delightful than this. We’re throwing out actual definitions of value, some of them will be, of course, overlapping. We haven’t done stage two here to get it down to five definitions. We’re still at the list of 50, where Zak rolls his eyes and says, “When’s that going to get down to 5 or 10?” But let’s play for now. Let’s play, okay? Here we go. First Definition of Value: Value Is the Quality of Irreducible Rightness that Exists in the Universe Marc: 1) Value is the quality of irreducible rightness that exists in the universe. Or I’ll say it a little differently. * Value is the quality of irreducible rightness for its own sake that exists in the universe. Before we comment on it, I’ll say it again. We’re going under the assumption that we’ll have to unpack, David has to unpack this, that all value, when we say value is real, we mean value is real and that it is eternal and evolving. Ken?: And each value has to be a part of some other value. Marc: And each value needs to be part of the Field of Value. Ken: And we already have a name for what that is. It’s called a holon. Marc: It’s called a holon. Okay. Ken: So value is a whole entity that is a part of a larger value. Essentially. That’s why value is part of a field. And if it’s a field of entities, then they each have to be interconnected. All holons are interconnected because they’re a whole that’s part of a larger whole, that itself is part of a larger whole. Atoms are parts of molecules, which are parts of cells, which are part of multicellular animals , which are part of an entire tree of life, and it just goes up. And each one of those has a value. Marc: Each one of those has a value and no value is independent of all the values. Ken: That’s right. Marc: And that’s what’s key. To have an omnicoherent Cosmos, we have to recognize that no value is ever dissociated from the larger Field of Value. If it would dissociate, it would become the source of evil. Meaning, it would become anti-value. And that’s beautiful, right? Ken: Right. Marc: The dissociation itself causes it to become anti-value. Ken: And that’s a great definition of anti-value. Marc: Right? It’s a value dissociated from the larger field of value. I decontextualize a value from the larger Field of Value, I transform it into an absolute, non-holon, and it becomes anti-value. Ken: And that’s to say, a value that isn’t part of another value ceases to be a holon. Because when any holon breaks off being a part of a larger whole, it ceases being a holon. Because it’s by definition not part of a larger whole. Marc: And in some sense, what it’s done is, it’s become cancerous. Ken: Right. Marc: It’s become a cancer. Then that value metastasizes by itself, it sub-optimizes the larger system, and then winds up both suiciding the larger system, and then itself. That’s the process. A good example would be a value like power. In some sense, power is a value. If we lose our relationship to power, we become powerless, which is often tragic. But power is a particular value which is most prone to dissociate from the larger field. Right? It’s funny, in Tolkien, when he writes Lord of the Rings, “My precious!” Precious means value. But it’s the value of power which is dissociated from the larger field, so that power becomes this ultimate eros dissociated from all other values. So it becomes the ultimate anti-value. Ken: The ultimate evil. Marc: The ultimate evil. Yay. Zachary, thoughts from the third floor? Zak: Yeah, insofar as we speak of a grammar of value and holonic theory applies to the idea of grammar, then you get this idea of: one way of thinking about what we’re saying is, value is not some illegible, weird ephemeral feeling, there’s a grammar to it. It has that logic of them being nested, they’re related. You get these things that appear as polarities that are actually these deep inter-inclusions in some way. So a lot of the holonic theory applied to thinking about the Field of Value is one way of getting into some of what we’re discussing. I think it’s an interesting cross-fertilization there. Back to your definition of whatever it was, Mark, at the beginning there, that the intrinsicness of the universe being appropriate… Marc: I’ll give it to you, just so you have it. Value is the quality of irreducible rightness for its own sake that exists in the universe. Zak: So rightness, goodness, appropriateness that there’s something at the base of the universe that is good, would be one way of thinking about the root of the whole value conversation. Without that as a premise, you can’t arguably, for example, boot from a universe that’s bad and create value, right? That’s an interesting place to start. “Rightness” Works Across The Good, The True and The Beautiful Ken: Let me ask what exactly you mean by—how does it compare to the good, the true, or the beautiful? Why not goodness? Marc: We could go for goodness, right? Ken: Because there are very real, there are very specific meanings to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Marc: Yes. Ken: The good is ethics, how I should treat you. I should treat you in a good fashion, in a correct fashion. The beautiful is aesthetics, and that means my aesthetic intelligence and capacity to spot beauty and so on. And the true generally is used in a very generic way, but when it’s used specifically, it applies to the objective truth of science. So that’s why the good, the true, and the beautiful are always a threesome. * Because the beautiful, which is in the eye of the beholder, is the upper left quadrant. * The good, which is how I should treat you, is the lower left quadrant. * And then objective truth applies to material existence, which are the right-hand quadrants. And of course, there’s a singular truth and a plural truth, so we have the right quadrant, we have atoms, molecules, single animal, and we have ecosystems, a biosphere… Marc: This quadrant idea, Ken, you should write this up, yeah. Ken: [Laughs] Yeah, I agree. Zak: I think that would take a big, thick book, though, to really get it right. Marc: It’d be a big book, yeah. Ken: But “right” isn’t normally pegged in that, in a specific way. It could mean: * the rightness of a mathematical truth, * the rightness of a good, a social cultural good, or * the rightness of beauty. Marc: That’s one of the advantages of the word—I’m not stuck on the word rightness. That’s just an initial foray… Zak: There’s a philosopher, Robert Brandon, who talks about normative meta-vocabularies, and there’s a class of terms that applies across good, true, beautiful. They’re weird terms, as you’re noting that. Norm, normative… Marc: And rightness works across. Zak: But you have to say that or else most people will put it in one, the one that they like, “Oh, it’s correct.” When in fact we mean it’s both correct and appropriate and aesthetically correct or beautiful, right? So there are these kind of pragmatic, normative meta-vocabularies that allow us… And this is what many of the people who are pointing to something deeper than any specific one, to try to reintegrate, to get a reconstructive postmodernism, they’re saying, “Actually, no, there’s a deeper meta-vocabulary than the good, the true, the beautiful,” which Habermas calls reason, right? But we’re calling something like, discourse around value. Which we’re trying to include. We’re not placing value in the good. We’re actually saying, to properly understand science and even mathematics, you’re looking at something like rightness in the domain of science, which is a value status, the claim is a validity claim in science. So there’s some way that it is a good or bad claim. So we’re looking for that broader vocabulary. Marc: I mean, the word value is deeper than values. There’s a Field of Value that underlies all values. Right? So the good, the true, and the beautiful are each unique vectors of value expressive of an underlying Field of Value, which is the intrinsic or inherent rightness of the Cosmos in all of its dimensions. But another way to talk about it… Is the Field of Value a Real Place or a Real Thing? Ken: Wait, does that actually exist as a real place or a real thing? Or is that simply an abstraction of what they all have in common? Marc: It’s interesting, right? So it’s a quality… Zak: Interesting question. Marc: Two different directions. Let me introduce another term which will help us engage it. So there’s a term that we’re playing with which is the term ErosValue. As a term. But not as it appears already in the book that we all threw into the world, First Principles and First Values, which by the way, Ken, it’s very sweet. People are buying it up and reading it, which is nice. Ken: Great. Marc: By ErosValue, we’re referring to this underlying Field of Value in Cosmos, and we’re understanding Eros as a particular interior science equation. I’m going to go slow for a second. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. Huge word for you, wholeness. This experience of Eros is ethics. There’s no split between the erotic and the ethical. Eros and ethics are one, meaning Eros is both a value of Cosmos, but it’s ErosValue. What Cosmos does all the way down and all the way up is, Cosmos is an evolving expression of ErosValue, which then expresses itself as the good, as the true as the beautiful. But ErosValue is the very core. Let me give an example of how this might play. Let’s say we’re talking about the abortion debate, right? Pro-life, pro-choice. We all know that the abortion debate polarizes for the exact reason that you pointed out before, because the value ceases to be a holon. Right? When we take choice and it’s not part of the larger field, or we take life and it’s not part of the larger field, they become actually deconstructors of the field and they polarize. When you’re in the larger field you go from polarization to paradox. And as you and I have talked many times, paradox is where you begin to see the glimmers of truth. Understanding the Field of Value in terms of Self: Separate Self, True Self, Unique Self Marc: But let’s step back for a second and stay with your inquiry. Let’s think about this in terms of self. You have separate self, True Self, Unique Self, as we know. * Values which are non-holons are separate selves that think that they’re really true. Because they’re separate. They think they’re separate, and just like separate selves clash with each other, values clash with each other. 2) Then we move to True Self. In True Self, the way you like to describe it, always very beautifully is, the singular that has no plural, quoting Schrödinger. The total number of true selves in the world is one. Right? So True Self is not just the field of consciousness, though, it’s the Field of Value. But it’s the Field of Value before there’s any individuation. And it’s everything within the field. There’s no story here. There’s no individuation. Right? The total number of true selves is one. 3) We get to Unique Self. Unique Self is when reality’s having a Wilberian experience. Reality’s having a Zak experience, reality’s having a Marc experience. Now we’re unique selves. So that’s the discretion of True Self into an individuated uniqueness, at a higher individuation beyond separate self, beyond ego. So that is, in terms of value, that’s individuated values. Life, pro-life and pro-choice, those individuated values are unique expressions, like Unique Self, of the Field of Value. In the same way the good, the true, and the beautiful are individuated expressions of an underlying Field of ErosValue. I think that’s how David might think about it. Zak: Yeah, what’s interesting to me in this question is thinking about the reality of the big three. If you think in terms of human development, there’s a time before you get the differentiation between the I, the we, and the it. For a long time, it’s just probably Mom, just some diffuse, other subject. And then out of that, you distill an objective world. Then you start, after the mirror stage or something, getting a sense, other’s a me, and then you get the I, the we, and the it, right? And then that’s great, you get the egoic structure. Then eventually with the transpersonal rungs, that differentiation between I, we, and it dissolves. Right? And you get not to the thing that was before temporally, which was this diffuse field of eros and attachment, which you differentiate out the value spheres from, you go to the prior thing, which is that transpersonal Field of Value. And then sociologically, the emergence of the big three with modernity. Then you have this big question, is there a way to get some post-postmodern reconstruction where you don’t have science fragmented from ethics, fragmented from aesthetics? Because we realize they’re all about this deeper field, that actually on the back end, they connect with the deeper Field of Value. Right? That’s one way to think about it. So I like that notion that there’s like a prior thing, there’s a differentiation of the big three, and then there’s this movement to a vocabularies that transcend but include the big three, like the transpersonal experience, where you go again into a reality where there’s not a clear distinction between I, we, and it. You’re not psychotic. You’re not psychotic, but you’re in a state where the I, we, it… Marc: Nirvikalpa samādhi, is in some sense, a collapse for a moment of I, we, and it, until it returns in sahaja samādhi. Ken, these were our earliest conversations around Unique Self, they were about these distinctions and how they work. I think the notion of a field is helpful. The notion of a field is helpful because in field theory, both in contemporary thought and in the great traditions, it instantiates something. In the Hebrew wisdom tradition they talk about hakal tapuchin kadishin in Aramaic, which is the field of holy apples, which is very close to what we would call the Field of ErosValue. Right? Which is underneath the four forces. It’s underneath everything. It’s the field out of which everything emerges. That’s the Field of Value. In some sense, we’re trying to stay away from the word consciousness and get closer to the word value. But what we mean by value is consciousness, right? In other words, instead of talking about the non-dual consciousness, we’re talking about non-dual value, and you can actually read… I just had a short call, I hadn’t talked to him in a long time with Sëan-Hargens. And I said to Sean, instead of talking about non-dual consciousness, let’s talk about non-dual value. Let’s read the same set of texts, but replace the word consciousness with value, and it actually works quite well. We Need to Distinguish Between the Field of ErosValue and the Narrow Sense of the Greek and Christian Notion of Eros Ken: When you say that underneath all of these expressions is a field, let me just use the four quadrants as an example. When we talk about eros, we’re talking about the vertical natural drive of a holon to transcend and include a previous holon. That’s what eros is, and that’s why it underlies the drive to unity, ethics, sex and so on. But the field of all quadrants is not itself a quadrant. So we can talk about Eros, but not eros meaning the upper drive, because that’s just one of four separate realities. It’s not a field… Marc: I’m going to throw a point here, and it’s a decision we have to make, which is the split between Eros/eros… When we’re using the word Eros, we’re using it not in terms of the split between eros and agape, because I think that’s a Christian mistake. For a lot of reasons, which has gotten a lot of trouble. In Star Wars, the Jedi Knights are only related to agape. They’ve got no eros going on, which is why they don’t marry, etc… Zak: It’s hard to take someone from the Hebrew tradition saying the Christians made a mistake. and I’m like, “Yeah, we know you. The Christians made a mistake. We get it.” [Laughs] Marc: Correct. [Laughs] Thank you, Dr. Stein. Zak: That’s my commentary. World religion commentary. Marc: We’re using the word Eros or ErosValue. That’s why we’re not even using eros. We’re using ErosValue, and by ErosValue, we mean eros, agape, philia, the whole thing, right? We don’t mean eros only as an ascending include and transcend. We mean Eros as the entire field of being and becoming. That’s what we mean by ErosValue. So we’re using Eros in a much broader sense. Ken: Okay, but then we also need eros in a narrower sense. Marc: Yes. Ken: Because we do need these four major drives. Each holon has: * Eros, a drive toward, of the lower to embrace and love the higher; * Agape, which is a drive of the higher to embrace and love the lower; * And then we have agency, which is the drive of a holon to be a whole; * And then we have communion, which is the drive of a holon to be part of a larger whole. And those all, those are four directionalities, all of which are needed. So what we’ve been doing here is we’ve been switching back and forth ever since we began this conversation. We’ve been talking about value, meaning: 1) The good or the true or the beautiful. But then we’re also talking about value as: 2) The field of everything. So that gives us a separate entity. And we might as well face up to that. As you say, Marc, we’re going to have to make a decision about how we’re going to use value, and if it means the same as my word holon, for example. What all four quadrants have in common is they’re all various holons. And if that’s similar to value, then what all four quadrants have in common is a Field of Value. That’s a field, and it has to be named. It has to be pointed out and it has to be proven, in a way, different than an eros value, or an aesthetic value, or a truth value, it has to be demonstrated and proven. So I just don’t want us to make that confusion of value versus Field of Value. We’re acknowledging both of them throughout this conversation, and so I suppose we should continue to acknowledge both of them. So what do we want to call the field of all value? The Field of All Value? Marc: Yeah, I think it’s the Field of Value, of all value. In other words, it is the holonic field, right? Zak, what are you thinking, love? Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. The Four Core Drives Of All Holons Are Included in Our Definitions of Eros and Intimacy Zak: Of course, we’re very deep in metaphysics right now, so it’s actually a kind of interesting question. When I think about what it is, those four drives are—and we could do this now, but we’ll probably do it later—are included in the equation for Eros, our definition of Eros. Marc: Yes. Zak: But when I think about those drives, I also think about the structure of all the holons, and I think about the process of selection, which is to say, why do some holonic structures survive in the universe and others don’t? That’s what we’re in a sense pointing to with value. Because we’re saying that the trajectory of this thing over time in terms of what the universe wants, the appetition of the Cosmos, in terms of where it’s moving, why certain things emerge and other things don’t, isn’t explained in the structural explanations. You require that other dimension of drive. Which is the fuel, as it were, moving through these necessary grids of holonic grammar, if you will. And the will to speak into that grammar, and then the decision to keep or not keep certain meaningful things within the grammar of the holons is that kind of Field of Value/Eros, which is the good/bad at the base of it. Okay, a holon emerges, it’s nested. Why does it survive? Does the universe want it or not? And some of that’s answered by the formalities of the holon structure, and then some of that has to do with these drives, which are included in the dynamics of ErosValue. Which then at a certain point get quite interesting with the emergence of the human, because of the reflectivity around value and self-conscious human choice, as opposed to just the universe choosing what passes through selection. So that’s that flip to conscious evolution as a value question. Ken: The only word that I can think of to relate to what you’re talking about, which is, does a holon survive?, is that it depends upon the balance of the four drives that all holons have. There’s eros, agape, agency, and communion. And you can automatically think of what a proper balance means, or you can certainly think of what happens when there’s an imbalance. Way too much eros and not enough agape, and the thing just explodes. Way too much agency and not enough communion, and it just becomes a blob individual whole that’s not a part of any other whole, and therefore is tending towards evil. Zak: Yeah. Ken: And same with communion and the same with agape. The only way I’ve been able to picture them is just as a balance, and the balance can vary from different situations to different situations. We can’t say “there must be 10% eros, 90% agape, 20% communion and 80% agency.” They’re going to vary from situation to situation, and they should. And that should be part of the thing that we’ll take into account when we’re thinking about values and individual values: what does balance mean among values? Because you rarely find an entity that has just one value. You don’t find something that’s just nothing but good, it has no beauty and no truth or anything like that. And you very rarely find anything that’s just beautiful, but has no truth, no goodness or anything like that. So we’ll be having to talk about balance in values. And we just want to make sure that we don’t confuse that balance of values with the field of values. Marc: Right. Yes. Let’s go back to basic terms. I think we never want to use the word eros without the word value, right? Ken: Okay. Marc: We’re trying to coin this new word, which is ErosValue, which takes eros out… In other words, autonomy and communion are what we often call allurement and autonomy, but the same basic idea. Those are First Principles and First Values of Cosmos all the way down. Right? By the way, Howard Bloom in his core physics equations that he wrote with a key scientist in Moscow, one of his core notions is that actually allurement and autonomy are all the way down. So those are core structures, right? Allurement and autonomy. And then the nature of ErosValue is, as Zak said, is the Eros equation. And so the nature of Eros equation, the nature of ErosValue is it both receives everything that came before, it includes that, and then emerges something new. So ErosValue does both of those. The word ErosValue, a Field of ErosValue—and the Field of ErosValue is the holonic field which both receives and transcends. It does both. So the word ErosValue or the Field of ErosValue, incorporates both eros and agape in the old way of talking about it, and autonomy and communion. Ken: That’s what we have to decide. Because if we’re talking about eros as just eros in contradistinction to agape, then it does have these two different aspects. One is transcending, moving beyond, embracing a greater whole. And then agape’s meaning is to embrace what went before. The love of the higher for the lower, God’s love for man, typically. Those are two different forces. We’re not saying that ErosValue includes eros sub 1 and agape… Marc: We could be saying that. Ken: But then we’re, we’ve got to think of something what we place as agape. Given the nature of holons, they have to have these four distinct forces: * An inclusive force, * an embracing force, * an autonomous force, and * an allurement or communal force. All four of those are necessary for every holon. Zak: Yeah. I think those are found in the Intimacy and Eros equations. I just think we haven’t formally related to those drives. We could do that. I think it would be very interesting, because I believe, it’s a field that animates, that’s similar to these drives. Because the question of: * Where do the drives come from? * At what point did they emerge and really start to direct things? Is similar to this question of, at what point did the universe want some structures to exist and not other structures to exist? For example, integrity was selected for super early, even at a geometrical, organizational level. So I think it might be worth clarifying the relationship between holonic theory and the value theory that we’re proposing for people who want to see those. I think it could be clarifying for both projects. Marc: They are overlapping, but they’re saying the same thing in a slightly different way. In First Principles and First Values, all of the elements, all of these four are covered. Of course, they have to be, because the universe can’t arise without it. So, in the Eros equation: * Eros equals radical aliveness desiring deeper contact and greater wholeness. You have that equation, then you have the intimacy equation, which is: * Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness, times mutualities of recognition, mutualities of feeling, mutualities of value, and mutualities of purpose. So in those two equations, you have both the emergence and the embrace, if we could say it that way. There’s both the embrace of the higher and the embrace of the lower, right? But we’re coming in through a slightly different… Zak: And the autonomy and communion, because you have difference in the context of relative otherness, and you have both the inclusion and the exclusion. So I think they’re there, and each of the components of the equations dials up and dials down, which is about the rightness or the appropriateness of the balance of the forces, depending where the holon is placed. And that’s the kind of judgment of the evaluative field of the universe, which is driving and selecting, in the context of these structures that can’t move, that are generative, like a grammar, right? But they’re restrictive. Ken: We’re still moving around the distinction between Field of Value and a specific value. So when you say rightness means the balance of all of them, that’s fine, but then rightness cannot mean goodness, because goodness is one of the values. At least we’re using it as good, true, and beautiful. Zak: I was saying, you said before that a big question is with the four drives. It’s, what’s the balance of them? What’s selected for is the thing that has the right balance depending where the holon is. And so that’s what I was referring to balance there, when you’re thinking about eros… Ken: But then that is not what goodness means. Goodness, the way I use it, when I talk about the good, the true, and the beautiful, is the way that individuals treat each other in ethical ways. That’s the good. That’s the social goodness. That’s what you do to be a good person. You treat people correctly. That’s a specific value, that’s not the same as beauty, that’s not the same as… Marc: Good, true, and beautiful. Ken: systems, individual or plural systems… So we still have to just be careful because we haven’t sub-defined all of these forces yet, in a way that we don’t keep using several of them in two different ways. Marc: You’re right. You’re right, holy man. And again, this is an appropriate conversation for an initiating conversation to clarify terms, because basically we have two ways of saying the same thing, but if we don’t clarify it, it will get totally confusing. So, totally agree. If we think about it for a second, when we say Field of Value, let’s go back to True Self and Unique Self for a second, okay? True Self is the Field of Value, right? And that’s what you were talking about, Zak, in the early pre-development, before you get to I, we, and it, there’s this field. Right? And this Field of Value is the intrinsic quality of Cosmos, which is not reductive materialist, it’s not empty, it’s not neutral, it’s actually value itself. By the way, when Aquinas identifies his favorite verse in the Bible, and he chooses it from the Book of Psalms, when David says, “Taste and see that God is good,” he’s not using the term good there in the sense of one of those three vectors. He’s using the term good to mean the underlying Field of Value, right? It’s a taste. We’re Using The Word “Value” in the Same Way Ken Uses Holons — Value Is Not Hard to Find, It’s Impossible to Avoid Ken: Okay. If we’re going to do that, then we’re using value in the way I use the term holon. Marc: Yes. Yes. Ken: Because everything is made up of holons. And so if we’re going to say, everything is made up of value, then we can’t name one value “value”. Marc: Exactly, Ken. I think that’s the f*****g home run out of the park. That’s exactly right, in the sense of the rightness of the whole thing. [Laughs] In other words, value is the holonic field. Everything is… Ken: Everything is a holon, therefore everything is a value. Marc: Holons are not hard to find, holons are impossible to avoid. Ken: That’s right. Marc: In your phrase, right? Value is not hard to find, Value is that out of which everything arises. Ken: And that we can get from evolution because every evolutionary stream unfolds in holons. Marc: Yes. Ken: I mentioned atoms to molecules to cells to animals, the tree of life… Marc: Another way to think of it is, holy man… Yes on holons. That’s a full stop, hard yes. But let’s move over into more of your classic Buddhist training, right? The field of awareness. The notion of the field of awareness is, there’s an ever-always present awareness out of which everything emerges. Right? You could call that the field of consciousness. Another way to say that would be the Field of Value. In other words, the Field of Value is not a value. It’s the quality, but it’s not just the quality of awareness. Value is ErosValue, so it’s awareness and allurement together. Ken: Wait a minute. That’s the problem. We can’t do that. Because you’re equating it with allurement. The reason, if we talk about a field of awareness as what an infant two months old has, then we’re going to... Emergence is an important concept at this point. Because if we start naming some of the higher levels as concrete operational thinking, or formal operational thinking, or logic, or desire, any of those cannot be present in a one-month-old child. So we can’t get them to come out of what is present at a one-month-old child. Is the Field of Value present in a one-month-old child? Yes. Marc: Yes. Yeah. Ken: Can higher stuff come out of it? Only with emergence. Because emergence means something new comes out of what was previously. It’s now old, and it’s embraced by agape, and the eros is the emergent part of it. Marc: Yeah. Zak: That’s what we’re saying. Ken: And as long as the field of awareness has an ErosValue to it, which all holons do, then we can start getting emergent things up the whole spectrum. Zak: Yes. Marc: Yes. We’re aligned. It is worth saying that allurement is primary. In other words, allurement is not just a later emergence, but actually allurement is always present in the manifest world. Ken: It’s one of the four drives of all holons. Marc: Okay. So, if you go back to the four drives, the other way to say it is that the Field of ErosValue is constitutive of all those four drives. All those four drives emerge from that field. Ken: Okay. So, we then need something for the special drive that is just emergence or just eros. Because we can’t keep mixing them up like that. Marc: Emergence, by the way, is a really good word. Ken: Yeah. Marc: The drive to emergence is actually a very nice phrase. Ken: It’s a nice way of talking about eros. Marc: Yes. Or Whitehead’s distinction between being and becoming. Whitehead’s thing about the lure of becoming. That’s how Whitehead uses, all over Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas, the allurement and lure is there all the time. Exactly. Ken: Because eros is there all the time. Marc: Yes, that’s right. It’s there all the time. We’ve agreed on a holonic field, which is a Field of Value, right? Ken: Which is just a field of holons. And what’s the lowest holon? Whatever the smallest holon that they find exists, and they’re going to keep discovering ones. Right now it appears to be a photon or a quark, and that’s fine. Quarks are wholes that are parts of larger wholes and so on. So that’s fine. And we can start speaking about emergence as one of the four. And since the Field of Value is a field of holons, that doesn’t mean just what underlies all values or underlies all holons, but it is itself a field of holons. So what’s the holon that’s present? Whatever the holon of a quark is. Give it whatever name you want. That’s how you find this field. The other way you find a field is you find an abstraction that covers all the elements of the field. And we’re switching back and forth between these two meanings. Marc: Yes. Ken: And that’s what we have to watch out for, because they’re very different things. Marc: When we describe a holon which is, a part whole. In other words, every part is part of a whole, right? When we say every part is part of a whole we’re actually saying in some sense two different things: * One is a structural thing. * And the other is a metaphysical thing, in some post-metaphysical way. Ken: Basically. Marc: We’re saying both of those at the same time. 1) A whole is structurally, the part is part of a larger whole, it emerges from a larger whole, and then it creates a new whole that then births another part whole. So, holons all the way up and all the way down, as you like to say. Ken: Right. Marc: And 2) wholeness is, if you will, the Field of Value. Right? The Field of Wholeness is the Field of Value. Ken: That’s because you’re using wholeness in an abstract way. Marc: You’re right… Ken: There’s not a single thing called wholeness that exists in a place or time. There is a single thing called a holon which exists in a place or time. But you can also use holon abstractly. When we say everything’s a holon, then we’re using that. We’re saying everything has a wholeness. And we run into the same thing. Wholeness can mean an abstract quality that is ever-present, or it can mean something that is whole, that has wholeness, and that is therefore a whole. But those are two different meanings. Marc: Understood, received. In some sense, when we say there’s a Field of Value, what we’re basically saying is we’re rejecting reductive materialism. Ken: Basically. Marc: Basically, right? And it’s in your opening piece in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, which is one of my favorite pieces, the kind of “oops” versus “something going on.” The something going on is the Field of Value. Right? The Field of Value is that, God’s implicate order, all the possibilities. Zak: What we’re also saying is, it’s structured. Right? That’s where the holonic theory with the 20 tenants offers, in a sense, another angle on these First Principles, First Values. You could say that the First Principles and First Values, our list, is implied in the 20 tenets. You could argue something like that, which is that they’re unnamed features that apply across all the tenets. It might be one way to think about them. That the entirety and the implications of holonic theory are attempted to be articulated from a different angle in this list of things, which are more obviously closer to things like values, right? And why are they valuable? Because they’re part of the structure of the universe. And what’s the structure of the universe? Holonic theory. Right? Those things are mapped together. So that’s another angle in. I think that’s a pretty clean angle. it includes the forces. It includes the inside, outside, collective, individual. It includes the tenets, the hierarchies and everything in the tenets. But nowhere in the tenets does it say some of the things that we list as principles. Marc: Another way to say it is the very basic idea that evolution comes after involution. That’s what we mean by the Field of Value. Right? Ken: It’s an involutionary given. Marc: It’s an involutionary given. Yeah. That’s really the way to say it. When we go to that question that Wittgenstein asks, Fichte, Schelling, everyone asks some version of that question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The way that the interior sciences of kind of Luria, engage that question, is something like: infinity desires finitude. Ken: Right. Marc: Infinity places its attention on finitude, and the placing of attention is the act of ErosValue, which discloses the infinite and the finite. And if you’re disclosing the infinite and the finite, you’re disclosing value. Ken: Well, if it’s infinity valuing finitude, that’s the driver of involution. Involution gives you a type of emergence, but it’s a creativity emergence of, * Spirit decides to go out of itself, so it reduces to soul. * Soul goes out of itself and reduces to mind. * Mind goes out of itself and reduces to body. * Body goes out of itself and reduces to dead matter. And that’s an involutionary sequence which leaves all of those higher levels or higher values, body, mind, soul, inherent in or enfolded into the world structure. And therefore, evolution can start to occur because the return of spirit produces… Marc: Evolution emerges out of the involutionary given of the Field of Value. Ken: That’s right. Mentioned Sources: * Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, The Free Press, 1929 * Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas, The Free Press, 1933 * Wilber, Ken, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Shambhala Publications, 1995 Mentioned People: * Daniel Schmachtenberger * Sean Esbjörn-Hargens * Howard Bloom (1943–) * Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) * Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) * Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) * Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) * Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) * Isaac Luria (c. 1534–1572) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
May 13 · 39 min
Selection, Desire and the Becoming of the Universe
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the profound interplay between selection, desire, value, and the evolutionary process of the universe. They discuss: why does the universe select certain structures instead of others, across all levels of matter, life, and mind? They engage with the deep cosmic question: what does the universe value? — and argue that in order to respond to our escalating challenge of humans overriding natural selection with their own choices, we have to be able to clearly see and distinguish between value and its counterfeit forms. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, May 2026, Episode: “Selection, Desire and the Becoming of the Universe” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day deep dive into CosmoErotic Humanism course, valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:41 — Context Setting 1:02 — Framing the Conversation: There Is a Selection Process across the Levels of Matter, Life, and Mind 3:20 — There Must Have Been a Point in Which Humanity Started to Override the Organic Selection Processes of the Biosphere 6:44 — Distinguishing Between Value and its Counterfeit Forms Is Not So Simple 13:13 — We Have to Be Able to Say that Selection Is Off Course 15:38 — About First Principles and First Values 16:25 — To Liberate Yourself from Pseudo-Eros and Counterfeit Values, You Need a Better Script of Desire That’s Part of the Field of Value 26:36 — You Don’t Want to Make the Fantasy into Reality, but to Bring the Fantasy in Touch with What Is Real 33:27 — It’s Through Imagination that We Can Be Covenanted with All of the Present, All of the Past, and All of the Future 39:08 — Invitation to Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: So, joking aside, David was in touch. He hangs out in a bunch of places. He was over at CRI with me and Schmachtenberger and others, thinking about this topic of what sometimes is called generator functions. We’ve talked about this with regards to X-Risk with David quite a bit. Marc: Right. That sweetheart, Chris, who was at the house here for a couple of weeks, was he there? Zak: Precisely. Yeah, he’s a sweetheart. Framing the Conversation: There Is a Selection Process across the Levels of Matter, Life, and Mind Zak: One of the things that emerged was this notion of selection. It’s a very deep topic. Meaning, we know selection from natural selection. That’s where there’s a genetic mutation, and then it either lives or it doesn’t live. And that’s interesting, because that’s kind of the whole biosphere deciding if this thing stays or goes. But what’s interesting is before you get biological selection, there are structures in the universe that simply don’t exist, and other structures that are super, super common. There’s a selection process at the level of the physiosphere, meaning, physics. So, there’s this deep question about multi-level selection across basically matter, life, and mind. It’s a deep issue. And another way to frame it, to bring it into our bailiwick in terms of value theory, is: One of the deeper questions is: why is there something rather than nothing? Which is, why was there first, the universe, selected for at all? Meaning, the universe was chosen. And then, if you set the universe adrift temporally, it means at any moment you can ask the question, why is the universe in this state and not in some other state? This is the big question of cosmic selection, which is, what does the universe value? Why does the universe have some things hanging around? Other things are basically impossible, and other sets of things come for a time and then disappear and be selected out. Deep questions. It begins with thermodynamics and then self-organization at the level of physics. So, that’s the biggest frame. And then, there are these layers of the selection process. And again, we know natural selection because it’s popular and it totally exists. 1) Natural selection is very common. But there’s also all of these other ones, which you know a lot about. 2) Group selection, what’s called co-selection. The lion becomes more powerful, but then the gazelle becomes faster. And so, you get symmetry of co-selection, balancing ecosystems. You also get niche creation, which results in phenotypic accommodation. This was the Baldwin effect, where the organism creates for itself an environment that protects it until there’s a genetic mutation that allows it to adapt better. That’s a quasi-Lamarckian mechanism. There Must Have Been a Point in Which Humanity Started to Override the Organic Selection Processes of the Biosphere Zak: 3) Then this abrupt thing occurs, and this is where the whole conversation started, which was: How is it that the things that are selected for in the biosphere lead to more life, and then at a certain point, the things that start to get selected for in the biosphere start to destroy life? Marc: The meta-crisis. Zak: The meta-crisis. And at a micro level, something like suicide. How is it that an organism emerges, which has the capacity to destroy itself when that just didn’t exist in nature? There’s not suicide in nature. Humans are unique in the category of suicide. And so, this question of species suicide—which is what the meta-crisis is—and ecocide, we take the whole biosphere with us. What that means is there must have been some switch in selection where humanity at some point started to override the organic selection processes of the biosphere. So: * Technological group augmentation becomes the predominant mode of selection. * That turns into self-domestication, which means we start to self-alter our own genetic codes, the genetic codes of animals, crops and other things—and start to radically alter through our own choice, not the holistic selection of nature, but our own choice augmented by technology. * Then, eventually we’re at this moment of cyborgic self-augmentation, which even more fundamentally augments what’s possible to select into or out of existence. So, there’s this stack. And what’s interesting about that is that at all of those layers, First Principles and First Values suffuse the mechanisms by which selection work. And so, this is the classic thing we’ve said for long, just slightly reframed. In the first minutes after the Big Bang, there are these processes of intimacy and Eros which draw together certain structures. Those structures survive to this day and constitute us. Every moment of the universe, they’re continually selected for, and they instantiate these principles. Now, the things that get selected out, like a civilization that self-terminates, for example, must somehow have deviated from those things which are selected for which confer survival. And of course, we don’t mean that in the simple Darwinian sense. We mean in this really richly ontologically stratified way. So, that biggest question of selection is this question of what the universe values, and the human steps in at this juncture and starts to override, through its own freedom and creativity, that universal structure. That’s the thing. And it’s so related to First Principles and First Values, but that specific launchpad to reflect this was useful… Marc: Yeah. In some sense, it’s the same conversation, but with a unique formulation, which is always good. There’s always a particular formulation that reopens it again in a very fructifying and rich way. I love the presentation, thank you. I haven’t thought this through, so this is not like a prefabricated home. We’ll build it together. Let me just put a few pieces together. First, just a meta comment. Distinguishing Between Value and its Counterfeit Forms Is Not So Simple Marc: What we found over the years is that there’s these series of issues that we frame in terms of existential risk as particular problems. Like, existential risk is a particular problem, of a particular nature, which, of course, never existed before. And as a result of a unique set of variables, both in the interiors and the exteriors that conflate at a particular moment in time in a way that they never have before. At the same time, we became aware. I remember that phone call, that, oh, right, right. Okay. Existential risk. That has something to do with a sheath of material extant in sources, transculturally, cross-culturally, which talk about this end of days, this collapse. And then they also talk about this new possibility, whether they call it: * messianic, whatever the name they give to it, * this arhat who’s become a bodhisattva, or * this new way beyond Kali Yuga, * we go into this new era, however you tell the story. Some version of this new human, new humanity, some version of Homo amor. So, in some sense, this is not entirely dissimilar. Let me just say why. We’ve talked about over the years, but particularly over the last year, we’ve had a whole bunch of new conversations about value and anti-value. And that was a porch conversation on a Saturday afternoon. Now, what value and anti-value say is, citing a verse from the Solomon lineage—this corresponding to this, did the Divine manifest, ze le’umat ze asa ha’Elohim. Meaning, there are actually always two potential trajectories. There are always two vectors at play. And it’s very fascinating because one of the things that we basically said is that at the moment of the Big Bang, and our dear friend Howard Bloom has done a lot of physics on this, you already have autonomy and communion in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. We’ve talked about, what is it that causes a particular neutron to need a proton? There’s this need-desire which creates two up quarks and a down quark proton, two down quarks and an up quark neutron, etc. And there’s this movement, this desire for value. We talked about in a recent conversation, there’s a line between: * mathematical value, * musical value, * molecular value, * moral value, and * mystical value. We pointed out, they all share certain core characteristics in common in the very fabric of Cosmos. Having said that, there’s also another vector. I want to just point to it in three ways. For example, every particular First Value and First Principle has a counterfeit form. 1) Let’s say you have a principle of Uniqueness. Uniqueness is your principle. So, your counterfeit form is separateness. It’s very not so simple to disambiguate between them. As we know in the early dharma of CosmoErotic Humanism that we’ve both written about, the distinction between Uniqueness and separateness was actually very core. Uniqueness is the First Value and First Principle, but then, the structural nature of Reality is that it demands the clarification so that we don’t get stuck in the eddy or the undertow of separateness. We transform to uniqueness. 2) Let’s take something like Transformation. You and I have talked about, transformation is very different than growth. Right? Developmental transformation, that’s a genuine transformation, which is measured by a number of variables. That’s different than growing. And so, there’s this value, First Principle, First Value of Transformation. But of course there is the broken version of it, or the untransformed version of it, if you will—or it can even have an anti-value version. 3) For example, there’s a particular quality of Reality, which is a quality of power, which acts for its own sake. It has the self-evident goodness of that experience, which is the power of, that moves through Reality. It’s the elegance of relationship and power for, when the father protects his daughter and has power. It’s both the power over and the power for, but then if you dissociate that power, you decontextualize it from a larger Field of Value, it becomes an anti-value. If we would take a look at pages 168, 169 and 170 of the First Principles and First Values book, we go through all these 18 First Principles and First Values. And what we had committed to do and God willing will do, in the next iteration of this book is precisely what’s the anti-value version of each one of them. There’s two forms. There’s an anti-value version, and then there’s a broken or counterfeit form, which is not an anti-value version, it’s a counterfeit form. One last example. 4) Let’s say, pleasure, which is the interior experience of Eros. The interior feeling of Eros is pleasure. It feels pleasurable. One of the counterfeit forms of pleasure, for example, would be novelty. Novelty is not anti-pleasure. It’s just a counterfeit form. If we actually consider both the counterfeit form and the anti-form, then that allows us to approach this and actually begin to understand what happened. And then, it also points us towards, critically—that’s why I got so excited this morning, I got so excited because of this last sentence—because what that then does is validates for us, which is really important, how we need to approach the meta-crisis. In other words, if it veered off based on either: a) anti-value, or b) a counterfeit form of value; Or a disqualification of the universe—Mumford, who’s on actually your book here to the left, it’s this disqualification, the machine—then reanimating the machine or re-grounding the Field of Value or telling a New Story of Value is the evolutionary structural move that re-uploads the appropriate selection process. So, boom, that’s just a larger sense. It’s exciting on so many levels. We Have to Be Able to Say that Selection Is Off Course Zak: If you’re a techno-optimist transhumanist, an effective accelerationist, you think we’re right on course. The whole thing was meant to have us excarnate into silicon and destroy all of biology — that’s the thing going well. What we have to be able to say is that no, the thing’s off course. And in order to say that, you have to be able to say some things can be selected for in the universe. Marc: That there’s a course. There has to be a course. Zak: That there’s a course, and that things can be off course—that’s very complicated. How can it be that things can be selected to exist in the universe that “shouldn’t be there?” That’s this question of pseudo-selection mechanisms, or sitra achra— Marc: Or selection mechanisms that select for pseudo-eros. Zak: If Uniqueness is the actual thing, separateness is close enough that you could run a lot of s**t for a while on separateness. And what that means is that there’s something just adjacent to many of the existing generative dynamics that would be congruent with—and not self-terminating with—the long-existing selection processes that brought the universe to this point of intricacy and beauty. That’s very intriguing, because otherwise you’re stuck with the view that evolution does this and thermodynamics does that, and therefore humans had to do this—there was no way not to. We have to get out of that story and into this place where the ability to point to the actual existing grammar of value in the Cosmos gives the opportunity to weave civilizational progress into that, rather than just making it up like some Tower of Babel thing. Marc: Without that you literally don’t have a chance. You can’t boot the conversation. There’s literally no way to boot the conversation. It can’t be done. Zak: And that’s what the effective accelerationists are saying: you don’t have a chance. Thermodynamics wins. The cyborgs have already won. Why are you so attached to this whole humanity, trees, and nature? Marc: What they’re assuming is that the inertia force of the lowest common denominator, non-effort, will win. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. To Liberate Yourself from Pseudo-Eros and Counterfeit Values, You Need a Better Script of Desire That’s Part of the Field of Value Marc: And this is very important. I’m going to give an example. I was writing today in the personal myth meta-psychology domain, thinking through scripts of desire. There are basically eight iterations of scripts of desire, and I’m finally at the end—getting to fantasy. The literature on fantasies is in complete confusion, so I went inside and tried to outline four kinds: * Archetypal fantasy, * Unique fantasy, which itself divides into two: * Fantasy as pathology — emergent from pain and wound * Fantasy as prophecy — the call of potency and wonder When you look at fantasy as pathology, you have an early wound, an early pain. Dr. Kincaid (Kristina) has spoken publicly about her experience of early abuse. So, in the story that she’s told publicly, which is also in the Phenomenology, she did what we call, she eroticized the wound. She developed this fantasy called Lord of the Manor. Meaning, you can only get aroused sexually if you have some vision of Lord of the Manor—your mother kind of works for the Lord of the Manor and he takes you when you’re young and you can’t say anything because he’s the protector, etc. So, that becomes the fantasy for arousal. You eroticize the wound. And here’s what’s so interesting. You can’t overcome that or liberate yourself from that hijacking of your script of desire unless you have something more potent, more powerful, and more authentic. When Kristina came to work within the context of CosmoErotic Humanism, three things changed everything: * Reality is desire. * Desire is a value of Cosmos. It’s an actual value of Cosmos. * I am desire. Desire lives in me, and I’m a unique configuration of desire. In the same way that only your unique script of desire can overcome the hijacked script of desire of the pornographic universe—if you think that your desire is the whole story, your desire is the separate-self desire in a valueless universe, it means basically, desire is, from a Freudian perspective, this broken thing in your system, in your equilibirum. You’re a steam engine. You’ve got a broken engine, and not much you can do with a broken engine. How much can you fix a broken engine? So you’re this little rivulet of desire and you’ve got these undertows and these eddies and these things that drown you. But if you realize, no, no, your little rivulet of desire is part of a larger current—there’s a river that goes forth from Eden, the overpowering verse of the Zohar. There’s a larger river of desire, and that desire is sacred, moving towards value, moving through you uniquely. That’s enough power to liberate yourself from the old thing. Now, why is this relevant? Because if you don’t have the pull, the strange attractor, of a Field of Value; if you don’t have a value called transformation, or a value called clarification of desire; what you’re going to do is the Skinner move, or the MIT Media Lab Pentlandian move: speak to the lowest common denominator. You can’t really work that stuff out, you create some pseudo-Eros to cover over your emptiness and then, reality will go where reality goes. You can’t change the natural vector of the lazy versions, the untransformed, pseudo-forms, counterfeit forms of value—the effective accelerationists are right about that—unless you have a Field of Value. In a Field of Value, effort, transformation, virtue, and nobility are strange attractors towards something. Unless those are intrinsic, inherent features of Cosmos., then you’re always going to be stuck in the old scripts, which are very easy to write. Then those old scripts keep getting iterated again and again. You can only change the script if you have a better script, a better plotline, a better strange attractor. Howard Bloom is a great example of that… Zak: Tie it into selection and… Marc: Yeah. You’re always going to select. Let’s say, evolution wants Uniqueness, but it’s easier to do separateness—and as you said, separateness will make it for a while. Evolution holds Desire as a value of Cosmos, and desire is a desire for Value. But there’s a counterfeit version where desire becomes a desire for pseudo-erotic fulfillment, which is pseudo-value. The desire will come up. You’ll fulfill it pseudo-erotically, and you’ll become a modern consumer, activating your desire all the time at a lowest common denominator expression. If you don’t activate your desire at all, you feel like an idiot, you want to commit suicide. That’s why people go shopping, to feel better. If you have no capacity to actually activate your desire, whether that’s for consumption, for food, for sexuality, for entertainment, if you can’t activate your desire, you’re fucked. But you have this very lowest common denominator way of activating desire. What would cause you not to do that? What would change the selection criteria? What would change the story? You’d have to insert a value. And what would that value be? The clarification of desire. Aragon, in Lord of the Rings, has to clarify his desire and his destiny. He is called by this inherent value of Cosmos. Arwen says to him: go. She sleeps with him once in a dream and says: I’m not available to you unless you go and be your destiny. Go. Go with Frodo, and I’ll meet you on the other side if I do. But I’m calling you— sexual selection—I’m the woman who’s calling you to the Field of Value to go transform, and be a hero. That is a form of sexual selection, which is tied into a Field of Value, which demands that the masculine rise and meet it. That is just one example. Otherwise, you’ve got this thing called desire… I mean, you just go f**k Arwen. What’s the problem? You’ve got desire operating at the lowest common denominator field. It’s only when Transformation is itself a desire, only when you have a larger Field of Value which demands that those values be realized in their clarified form, that selection shifts. It’s not enough for Zak to be an incredibly successful separate self academic and rise to the top of the academy. No, his life might take him on a particular path where he wants to give his unique gifts in a very particular way towards addressing the meta-crisis—and he might not do as well as a tenured professor at Yale. Even though he could decide: okay, I’m now at a particular moment where I can go be a tenured professor at Yale. I’m going to do that. F**k this stuff, Schmachtenberger, Gafni, you guys are all crazy anyways. I’ve got all the credentials. I’m going to get a f*****g great job with a great tenure, with a great department and have a nice next 40, 50 years. Don’t tell me you’re doing that. Please. Zak: That would be a fantasy. Those things don’t exist. [Laughs] Marc: You get my point though. Zak: I hear you saying that all of the things about selection at the level of the physical, biological, and ecological cash out in human phenomenology in terms of clarification of desire—because that’s where we do our selecting. What do you want to be there in the future? Right now we’re selecting in terms of an insane fantasy of, say, infinite growth and perfect control of nature. Marc: And separate-self dominance… Zak: Exactly. And so, swapping out that script of desire for a realistic fantasy about what should be in the future requires introducing a grammar of value that can articulate that future. Marc: And remember we said that value arouses us. Value is a strange attractor. Value arouses political will and moral will. That’s one of the things Temple said in the First Principles and First Values book—when he went through the seven links between existential risk and the collapse of the Field of Value. I think number seven was: Value arouses will. Without Value arousing will, we have the effective accelerationist fantasies correct. You Don’t Want to Make the Fantasy into Reality, but to Bring the Fantasy in Touch with What Is Real Zak: Something like that. And it is actually quite complicated, because fantasy is involved in the distinct and unique ability for humans to take things so off course that we put all of life at risk. How could we do that without something like this imaginal capability, and specifically the ability for that imaginal capability to be distorted? Marc: Yes. Zak: For there to be fantasy. For there to be fantasy wrought from trauma, fantasy wrought from illusion, and delusion… And then the task of CosmoErotic Humanism is to tell that story, to replace fantasy with— Marc: Or to clarify the fantasy. Zak: Clarify the fantasy. Right. So, the exploration of fantasy. Marc: That’s right. We live a fantasy-aroused existence. That’s who we are. Human beings live a fantasy-aroused existence. We don’t have an option not to have fantasies; we have an option to clarify our fantasies. The verse in the lineage is, by the hands of my prophets, I’m imagined. You know, everything around Ibn Arabi is about this power to imagine and the clarification of that power. There is no possibility of non-imagining. You and I have talked about Harry Potter before. The gift Harry Potter gives to children is: after an entire generation of reductive materialists told them it’s just your imagination, Harry Potter comes back and re-ontologizes imagination. It says, of course there’s a Hogwarts School. Of course you can go through at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and find your way in the Hogwarts School. Of course Dumbledore is real—and so is Voldemort. You have to take those things seriously. This is the re-ontologizing of imagination. We think we can kill imagination and still survive. But we’ve said in CosmoErotic Humanism, we’re not just Homo sapiens, we’re Homo imaginus. The need to reimagine a fantasy is essential. The reductive materialists thought you could remove value and keep the fantasy good. The best example of that is someone who I’m sure we’re both madly in love with, though we haven’t discussed him extensively, it’s someone like Rilke. Rilke is structurally an atheist, a rejecter of all previous systems. But he’s living this obviously gorgeous fantasy-aroused existence, because it’s a given to him that you can throw out the old fields of value and reject their faulty empiricisms, and yet still remain in an appropriate fantasy. He just didn’t get cut-flower ethics. Herberg’s idea from late ‘50s sociology: you cut a rose, one generation it’s okay, two, pretty good—second day, third day, the rose is a little wilted, fourth day, the rose is dead. You think you can cut off from the ground of the Field of Value and survive. That’s what Rilke does. Rilke cuts off from the ground of the Field of Value, and yet, the rose is completely a rose. You’re convinced that it’s going to go on. And this is an educational point—your domain—it won’t. Over several generations, you lose the arousal quality of desire that lives in the Field of Value, and then that desire will have to be filled pseudo-erotically. And now you’re in a meta-crisis. Zak: And what’s interesting too, psychoanalytically, as you were getting into the case study example with KK, there’s this movement of: you don’t want to concretize fantasy. You don’t want to make the fantasy into a concrete reality, but you want to bring the fantasy in touch with what is real. Marc: That’s a very nice way to say it. Zak: And so, the exploration of fantasy is also thinking about what is in it that is real, even though it remains a fantasy. Like, the First Principles and First Values, when they’re perceived anthro-ontologically, what faculty perceives them? I would say it’s probably the faculty of imagination. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And there’s a difference between the imaginary and the imaginal as products of imagination. The imaginal is when, for example, if you are frowning and I take your perspective—I’m imagining your perspective, and you’re upset—and I can do that well. It’s called empathy. Then my imagination conforms to reality and allows me to actually perceive what’s going on within you. It’s a little bit Kantian. Marc: That’s beautiful. I love what you just said. I love the idea that the moral faculty is the faculty of imagination, because what it does is… Blessings to my old colleague Michael Lerner, who just passed, editor of Tikkun Magazine. I once wrote an article for him, On the Erotic and the Ethical, and the relationship of prophets and pagans. Because the prophet is, by the hands of the prophet, I’m imagined. The prophet was saying that ethos and Eros are one, which is exactly what you were pointing to: that the quality of imagination and the moral quality are not separate. And let me reflect back what you said, because I think it’s super great. The reason I’m good to you is because I imagine you—and the more I can imagine your feeling… In a certain sense, God has the ultimate imagination, which both generates Reality and allows the Divine to feel every person. Imo anokhi b’tzarah, says Isaiah, I’m with you in your suffering. So I have this infinite, Divine, intimate identification, where my Divine imagination imagines every human being. This is so beautiful. So Adam, who is Homo imago dei—the imago, the image, is imagination. The image of God is the capacity to imagine, and Divinity is somehow the capacity of the Infinite to bracket itself and imagine our pain, our joy—to imagine us into existence. Okay. We can at least report back to David that we started the conversation. It’s Through Imagination that We Can Be Covenanted with All of the Present, All of the Past, and All of the Future Zak: Yeah, totally. Marc: It was great. Zak: It was beautiful. A couple of things on this—the presence of others when they’re not there. It relates to object permanence in child development, and it’s actually quite profound because it’s not present in other animals. You’ll notice, birds will mate for life but they will spend long times apart from one another. How does that work? Mammals don’t do that. It’s because they’re not really able to imagine the other bird when they’re not there. The reason you love your dog is because you know your dog is imagining you when you’re not there. Marc: Do we know if there are Winnicott’s transitional objects in the animal world? Zak: Dogs, definitely. If you’re not there, they will anxiously pick up a stuffed animal— Marc: Right, transitional object. Zak: One of the things they’re doing is imagining you. They’re not thinking in sentences or imagining long, complex things, but they have images of you. And when you come back, because it’s not a complex image, they don’t know how long you’ve been gone, so they freak out as if you’ve been away for a year every single time. That’s why you love dogs—they’re thinking of you when you’re gone. That’s why we love other people. When I say I miss you, what I mean is: I’ve been thinking of you, even though you’re not here. It’s one of the main reasons people prefer—and will always prefer—psychotherapy with a human over a bot. One of the things therapists report as most effective is letting the person know that you thought about them even when you weren’t on the clock. Marc: It’s very beautiful. Zak: It’s impossible for a machine to imagine you when you’re not there, because they don’t have imaginations. Marc: This touches another principle of CosmoErotic Humanism, not in the political-economic vector, but in the return-to-Eros vector. We have this principle: the sexual models the erotic. We say all the time—there are 12 billion years of Eros before sex—which is quite important to realize. One of the places where you see the sexual modeling the erotic is in the relationship between fantasy and imagination. What does fantasy mean? What fantasy means—and this is precisely what’s been destroyed by the internet—you once referred me to that scene that the guy who wrote Sadly, Porn, Edward Teacher, refers to about Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982: There’s this scene where Judge sees Phoebe getting out like the red goddess with her red bikini from the pool, and we go into his imagination. He’s looking out the window, he closes the window and he withdraws into the realm of his imagination to do what people do in the realm of the imagination. So fantasy means: I can hold your image when you’re not here. The sexual models the erotic. I’ve got to hold your image not only in regard to your incarnate sensuality in the sexual sense, but in regard to your need—your need is my allurement. You’re hungry, so I’m hungry. You don’t have capacity to grow and be educated, so I don’t have capacity to grow and be educated. That’s our notion of your need is my allurement. I can imagine your need, and really, the abject cruelty of the aristocracies was precisely their ability to close down their imagination. Zak: Yeah. The failure of the imagination through the closing of the heart. Marc: Right. The failure of the imagination. And that’s what was so great about Marx, whatever we think of Marx, he was like: hey, I’m going to sit for 12 f*****g years in the library in London and I’m going to imagine the workers. Zak: Precisely. He imagined into the Reality of the situation and then imagined the possible future. That’s what the prophet in many ways does, and I’d classify among modern prophets, Darwin and others did that. Natural selection is not visible. Natural selection exists in the imagination. It’s about imagining—what’s the thing back there? That’s why the First Principles and First Values are perceived with the imaginal faculty. The First Principles and First Values are perceived with the imaginal faculty in the same way I empathize with you to understand what’s going on within you. As I take in the universe and empathize with it, the interior sciences disclose these ontogenetic beings in the imaginal—beings that are existing and generative of more Reality and directionality to Reality. Marc: That’s also precisely what we’ve called in other texts, the memory of the future. Zak: Right. Marc: When someone is right in front of us, we help them. If someone is spatially not-synchronous with us, it takes a greater leap to imagine them. But if someone is temporally non-synchronous with us—they’re in the future—it takes an enormous act of love, of Eros, to access that imagination and be covenanted not just with the present in front of us, but with all of the present. And I can imagine the past—and I’m covenanted with the past—and I can imagine the future. And so, that’s a fantasy-aroused existence. Zak: Totally. Marc: Beautiful. Zak: Wow. Marc: Good, David. Good. Zak: Love. Mentioned Sources: * Temple, J. David, First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024 * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Abridged Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Teach, Edward, Sadly, Porn, Edward Teach, 2021 * James, E.L., Fifty Shades of Grey, The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2011 * Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, 1954–1955 * Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter series, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997–2007 Mentioned People: * Daniel Schmachtenberger * Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) * Charles Darwin (1809–1882) * Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) * Howard Bloom (1943–today) * Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) * Kristina Kincaid * B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) * Alex Pentland (1951–today) * Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) * Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) * Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) * Michael Lerner (1943–2022) * Karl Marx (1818–1883) * Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
April 29 · 1 hr 34 min
Value and Wholeness: A New Story of Value Is a New Story of Wholeness (with Ken Wilber)
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is the first in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. In this conversation, they discuss anthro-ontology, exploring the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism and the relationship between value and wholeness. Are they the same thing? How are they different? The dialogue also goes on to clarify the only actual cure to the meaning crisis: the clarification of value. This is a foundational conversation for anyone seeking to deeply understand and recognize value in their own lives. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, April 2026, Episode: “Value and Wholeness: A New Story of Value Is a New Story of Wholeness” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:45 — Context: Value and Wholeness Are Inter-Included 9:41 — There’s a Danger of False Certainty in Fixating on the “Why” Question: The Why Is Self-Evidently Responded To 22:45 — Existing Theories of Value in Philosophy Are Pallid 27:38 — The Relationship between Economic Value and Intrinsic Value Is the “Pointing To” 31:01 — We Need to Align Use Value with Exchange Value 32:35 — Before We Are a Specific Value, We Are Value Itself 39:19 — Your Personal Value Is Your Unique Personhood and It’s Part of the Field of Value 45:13 — The Core Assumption of Technofeudalism Is that There Is Nothing Sacred, There Is No Field of Value 52:37 — We Are Talking About Value, Love, Eros in a Four Quadrants Perspective 55:08 — About First Principles and First Values 55:55 — It Should Be as Clear as Day that the Fundamental Problem Is a Problem of Value 57:25 — The Crisis of Meaning Is Used Today to Avoid the Value Conversation 58:54 — The Only Cure to the Meaning Crisis Is the Clarification of Value 1:02:13 — It’s a Conversational Cosmos — And Conversation Is the Exchange of Meaning, Which Is Embedded in Value 1:15:37 — Creativity Itself Isn’t Necessarily Good, Creation that Moves Us Towards Value Is Good 1:25:04 — We Need to Be Messiahs — We Need To Raise the Conversation to the Assumption that There Is a Field of Value 1:31:17 — By Hijacking Conversation, AI Can Create a Sense of Nothingness and Take Away Our Ability to Create Meaning 1:34:16 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context: Value and Wholeness Are Inter-Included Zak: We want to speak about wholeness and value. Ken: Sure. Zak: I think Marc wanted to kick it off. Marc: Yeah. We will kick it off, but first, just to say, we’re here to celebrate the release of First Principles and First Values, which is really exciting. And to our friend John Mackey, who’s listening, John stepped in and created this possibility for Ken and I to work on this, Zak, many years ago. Ken: Right. Marc: This is a fulfillment of a commitment to John to put out a book together. And John is obviously excited that Zak has stepped in, and so David J. Temple has come through big time. Thank you John. That’s a good place to start. It’s so delightful to be at the beginning of another set of conversations. Ken: Right. Marc: People are not aware of this, Ken and I did a series of conversations six, seven years ago on Eros and sexuality on the seven levels of sexuality. That’s now a 12 volume set, which is being completed. So these things get somewhere, right? It’s very exciting. Ken: Right. What are you doing with it? Marc: It’s going to be published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, first as “2 motherfucker volumes”—those big, you know—and then 12 individual volumes. It’s The Phenomenology of Eros. Zak subjected it to a very critical reading, on multiple levels, it’s gone through many years of revision and care. And it’s done, it’s monumental and you are clearly present, evoked, and of course cited. Ken: Ah! Great. Marc: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So, David really wants us to talk about: how do you know what you know? Anthro-ontology. By anthro-ontology, that Ken, Zak and I have talked about before, we mean anthro: human being, ontology: for real. That which is for real. True existence, the true essence, nature of things, that I know by accessing my own interiors. Or anthro-ontology in some sense: there is a mystery and the mystery is within us. Something like that. Now, what we want to particularly look at is this mystery through the prism of two lenses. One that David J. Temple spent a lot of time in this book First Principles and First Values, and one that Ken spent a lot of time completely independently in this new book about to be released, about Wholeness. And I would just note that Ken, you’ve been in this wholeness conversation for a long time. Back in 2004 you recommended, when I was talking about the four faces of Eros, that the fourth face, which was then the interconnectivity of the all with the all, you said, no, that should be wholeness. Which I changed in A Return to Eros, and that was yours. So this is an ongoing conversation for many, many years. And it’s really exciting to get to this place. Let’s begin. First off, what we’re saying is that that mystery within us could be called Wholeness, it could be called Value. And those are somehow two faces of the one. 1) One of the things we want to explore today is the relationship between them. Are they related? Are they the same word? Are they different words? That’s one. 2) Let me enter for a second from the perspective of value. David’s established a formula which is: clarified desire equals value. It’s based on a bunch of premises and CosmoErotic Humanism. And Ken, you’ve written way before CosmoErotic Humanism. I was writing on Eros on my side. You invoked Eros in multiple texts all through the years. And we’ve talked about Eros from the beginning. Ken: Right. And Eros, for me, is a primary force in the whole Cosmos. Marc: Right. And when we speak of Eros, we formulated an interior science equation of Eros. By Eros we mean: the experience that moves through all of reality, all the way up and all the way down, of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That’s an interior science equation of Eros that appears of course, in First Principles and First Values that we’ve tested over the last 10 years. You can talk about: * Eros in an organization, * Eros between people, * Eros on the biochemical level, * Eros in the pure world of interiors. And we’re talking about the same thing, Eros. So: 1) Reality is Eros.2) One of the faces of Eros, the qualities of Eros is desire.3) Desire moves towards deeper contact and greater wholeness.4) Clarified desire yields value. Now, we could rewrite the Eros equation in one of two ways. We could say: Eros equals radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. Or we could say the exact same thing: Eros equals radical aliveness desiring, moving towards ever deeper contact and ever greater value. The equation actually works both ways. It’s one of the places you begin to see the kind of inter-inclusion of value and wholeness. We actually have this understanding that value is not just—like Ken, you immediately said Eros is cosmic Eros, we’re understanding it the same way we always have. So by value we don’t mean values. By value, we don’t mean Christian values or the values conversation. By value we mean the Field of Value in which all values are included. And that is in the interior science tradition of Solomon, the lineage of Solomon, which strangely was pointed out to me when I was talking about it, is mirrored by Whitehead and I looked it up, it’s true, in Process and Reality. One of the 10 sephirot, the 10 luminations is tiferet. Tiferet means beauty. Beauty is the intensification of experience in which nothing is left out and all opposites are included. So the other name for tiferet, beauty, is shalom, wholeness. Because the word shalom literally means wholeness, of course. It’s very beautiful. So we have this sense of a Field of Value or a Field of Wholeness in which we participate, which discloses—not an answer, but at least a response to three questions: 1) Where am I? 2) Who am I? 3) What ought I do? What ought I do. Ought. Not just an is, but an ought. Should. Right? In other words, entering into this Field of Value or Field of Wholeness discloses some direction. It doesn’t answer, it’s not a fundamentalist answer, but it’s a response that orients—where am I? Who am I? And what ought I do? That’s significant. And then we’ve teed it up. Because not by accident, when Turing writes his great essay Morphogenesis, he’s trying to figure out how you create coherent complexity. If we could summarize all the mathematics and cut through all of Morphogenesis, he basically says, simple first rules, iterated again and again, and again and again, generate coherent complexity. Ken: Yeah. And that force is Eros. Marc: And that is Eros. That is Eros itself. Right? It’s Eros all the way up and all the way down. And so if we would say, okay, what are the simple first rules that are the scripts of desire? The scripts of Eros. It would be the answer to the simplest three questions. And the simplest three questions are, who am I? Where am I? Or in Bible, where the f**k am I? And what should I do? So this is, we’ve begun anthro-ontology. There’s a Danger of False Certainty in Fixating on the “Why” Question: The Why Is Self-Evidently Responded To Ken: Is there a why? Marc: That’s very, very interesting. I was talking to a great guy who’s actually a great sports guy, very smart, and we were talking about this a few months ago, and he said, where’s the why? We deliberately left out the why, because the why is where people usually go, of course, but when they go there, they get lost in theology or theo-logic, theology, theologic. They try and work out the why, but there’s a sense that if you actually have a sense of where you are—I’m in a Field of Eros. You know who you are—you’re a unique incarnation of Eros. What should I do? I should uniquely incarnate Eros in the world. Then the why question kind of falls away and what people tend to do is move towards the why but bypass those three more elemental questions. Ken: They are more elemental, but does “why” really disappear? Marc: I don’t say it disappears. It’s a great inquiry. I think it does not disappear, it is self-evidently responded to. So I’ll give you an example, and I don’t know if this is an experience that’s familiar to you, maybe we shouldn’t talk about that now, but there’s an experience in a reality which is called orgasm. It’s described in many texts. So when a person is like a moment before the height of the most cataclysmic orgasm with the right person, at the right time, in the most ethical mutual situation, they don’t stop and say, why do I exist? Very few people do that and people who do that are in need of some therapy, right? Ken: Well, they might ask other “why” questions, like, “why am I making love to this particular person?” Marc: Right. But those “why” questions hopefully are earlier, right? Because once you’re at the moment before the explosion, it’s a little late. There’s a moment where you’re so in Eros… There’s a beautiful person who’s in the think tank today, who’s a great linguist. She wrote her doctorate in Leningrad in one particular language, and she’s painted today a painting for each of Shakespeare’s sonnets that are stunning. She’s a true intellectual, Russian artist. And when she goes into painting, she’s gone. She’s the full Eros of reality moving through her. And the why falls away. Then when she comes out of painting, she comes back to the why. I’ll give you a more simple moment and I’ll pass to Zak. Okay? Ken: So, it wasn’t excluded. Marc: It doesn’t exclude it, but then she remembers there’s a moment in which it falls away. I’ll give you the last example. When we said hello yesterday, I was so happy to see you. The why of our trip didn’t matter. It just falls away. Right? So there’s a moment in which the why disappears, and then it appropriately reappears, but then we’re infused by a response to where and to who and to what, which allows us to reapproach the why not as so sophistry, but as something real. Ken: That tells me, that gives me another reason to include why. Because it brings together all these other important questions. So is there any reason we can’t have four fundamental questions? Marc: No. Let’s think about it, right? Let’s tentatively include why. What you’re saying is, let me make sure I get it straight. We’re not including why in a kind of surface way, we’re including why in its ultimate depth. Ken: Yeah, because so many people go to the why first, right? Just as you said, even though they misunderstand it. But we’ll give a correct interpretation of the why and the why is basically the operation of all the other three, right? Marc: Exact. That sentence is critical. The why is the operation of all the other three. So to get to the why on the other side, that’s another reason to include it. Zak: But just to specify, the why is resolved performatively. The why is resolved through practice. So I remember Ken, at some point in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, you say something like, the mind-body dualism cannot be resolved by me talking to you about it. It can only be resolved in something like kensho. Right? Which for the time you’re in it, there is no sense of mind and body being separate at all. And then you come out of it and you’re like, oh, now I’m neurotically separate from my body. So I think similarly with the why, moving through these questions allows for the why to be answered in practice. Rather than the why to be answered as a bunch of sentences that go through your head that you try to fit into the world. You’re answering it spontaneously through practice. So the performativity of the why, of the response to the why is different from the other ones. That’s one way in, and then, I don’t want to move us off of this because I have other things to say. Marc: There’s a tradition in the lineage and I’m now remembering, Ken, that you and I actually talked about it maybe a decade ago, or maybe it was in our conversation on evil. So we have, let’s say 10 sefirots. 10 luminations in the tree of life. Let’s just use that image, right? Whenever you do a normative action in the world, you’re identified with one of the bottom seven. If I help an old lady across the street, I’m in number five. Each action, normative action identifies me with one of the bottom seven. When I stream out why, Luria writes, I’m identified, only then, with the highest of the three. Ken: That’s especially important. Marc: So that why is a why that is after I have an experience of the where, the who and the what. So I’ll just give an example. When Ivan is talking to Alyosha in Brothers Karamazov, after that horrible scene where the general has the boy ripped apart by the dogs. And Ivan says, I want nothing to do with your God. I don’t want to be there when the general and the boy make up with Jesus. F**k this. Right? And Alyosha doesn’t understand it. He’s screaming this, why? But he has no place to go with it because there’s no conversation, there’s no reality that’s meaningful. There’s no Eros. So that why question leads, for example, the gentleman from Caltech who wrote a book called War of Worldviews with a colleague of ours. He says he rejects all spiritual arguments. Because he says, my grandmother was made to kneel in Auschwitz and the commander walked behind her and randomly killed this person. Didn’t kill that person, killed that person. He says, that why is so big, I reject all of spirit. And that why is beautiful. It’s holy heresy. It’s the heresy that’s holy. But we need, in order to really ask the why and not have the why destroy me, I have to actually ground so deeply as you were saying, Zak, citing the Sex, Ecology and Spirituality material, I’ve got to ground my gnosis in such deep practice that the why doesn’t destroy me. Ken: Yeah. Marc: So there’s these two kinds of why. The why that’s destructive and the why that that creates. That is the ultimate question of spirit. Zak: I would say, to touch on value and wholeness. The why that creates would be a why that seeks more wholeness. Bigger answers to why. here’s a way of answering why, which is, why it’s a dangerous question, is that you can answer why and give it a very concrete, idolatrous answer. Right? Like, why do I exist? Fill in the blank... The point is, if you can fill in the blank, you’re fucked. The thing needs to be infinity. It needs to be a deep, deep answer. The answer to why needs to be some type of infinity. It needs to be an impossible ideal. It needs to be something like the Bodhisattva vow, which emerges out of a deepening into the Field of Value. Whereas a neurotic, pathological, nihilistic answer, you could say, oh, why? I’m here to become the most famous technologist who’s ever existed and implant my technologies and shape all the future of history. That would be a very narrow, idolatrous answer, not seeking wholeness, whereas sincere seeking of wholeness through the asking of why, sincere seeking of wholeness through the answer in that question, in the why, is one of the deepest inquiries you can ask, sincerely. Similar to who am I, would be something like why? At that highest level. Marc: So really we’re saying is that, let’s reframe the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism as four great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. Okay, let’s bring the why. Right? Zak, we excluded the why because we didn’t want to go for the narrow why. Sure. But when we go for the big why… Ken: It’s necessary. Marc: It’s absolutely necessary. It actually reminds me of the conversations we had many years ago around certainty and uncertainty. Right? What Zak is suggesting, what we’re both saying and what Ken was implying, we all realize there’s a why that can be answered with a false certainty. We have to avoid false certainties. And it’s almost like we have to instantiate in our interiors. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, as applied to meaning. Meaning, there are no complete mathematical sets. Right? It goes on into infinity. There’s this why that’s always, that’s never going to be ultimately answered, and yet that can be approached. And that question also disappears at moments of radical lived certainty. We greet each other after having not seen each other for a number of years. We’re ecstatic at that moment, the why question disappears. It’s self-evident goodness. But then it comes back, then we’re informed by that value or by that wholeness. So a why question uninformed by value or uninformed by wholeness is devastating. Ken: Yeah. And let’s remember that a la Whitehead, a whole is actually a holon. It’s a whole part. As far as I can tell, there are almost no exceptions to that, with the possible exception of Infinity or Godhead or Ground. But Eros is what moves from one holon to another holon, and a holon, of course, is so whole, this part of a larger whole. And so everything in the universe is created of holons and they all unfold. So we have evolution operating at all levels in all areas. And we have to be careful to distinguish value from whole, from holons, in that sense. Because not all values are made of lesser values, which are made of lesser values and so on… Marc: That’s right. That’s correct. Ken: Wholeness is, to the extent that we have an existing value, that value is going to be a holon. So I actually started thinking about all the stuff that I had read in the theory of value in philosophy, and I just made a couple notes on what scholars distinguish as types of value. I have 5 major types. Marc: Fantastic. Let’s play. Existing Theories of Value in Philosophy Are Pallid Ken: I’ll just mention them very briefly. And I’m not sure any of these are necessary as a component, part of our discussion. I mean, they’re always footnotes, right? For example, we have: 1) Intrinsic value and instrumental value. Instrumental value is something that helps you get to something that’s really intrinsically valuable, right? And intrinsic value is something that has value in and of itself. So that’s a fairly straightforward one. 2) We have Immanuel Kant who distinguishes between hypothetical and categorical value. And the categorical value is an absolute value. And the hypothetical values are relative value. So an absolute value or categorical value act according to those maxims you would see as a universal law. Marc: Categorical imperative. Ken: Categorical imperative. That’s right. And of course, can’t try to find mostly just those values, which are categorical. But he recognized that there were hypothetical values and they were usually involved in “if then” statements. So, the sun is valuable only if you don’t live in a desert because then you can be overcome by it, then it becomes a bad, not good. If Sally dances with John, that’s good. Right. But that’s not something that we would want to make a university. Marc: No, it is not. Ken: 3) In economic theory, they have donor type value and receiver type value. Receiver type value is in the market, it’s your willingness to pay for something. And so that can vary enormously from 5 cents to $5 million and so on. And a donor type value is what actually had to go in the labor or the value or the creativity or the substance, the structure that had to go into creating the product. Not what somebody’s willing to pay for it. Which is a receiver. 4) And then other theories of value divide between an ends value and an aims value. And they’re just exactly what they mean. Something that is value as an end or something that is a way to get right to that end value. 5) And then they have something that gets often mentioned, and I’ve never quite gotten it, but a good-first theory of value and what’s called a value-first theory. These are known as the different topics for value claims. One puts good first and one puts value first, and there is making a distinction between the good and the value. So pleasure is good, is a good-first type of value. It’s just pleasure in itself is good. A value-first claims that pleasure is a value, and that the more value you have, the better something is. Marc: Right. Ken: So they go back and forth between these two ways to talk about… Like I say, I’m not sure. I think that when we look at how we’re talking about value, we can determine what of these we’re talking about, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Marc: No. Ken: To any of these, which I find weird because it sort of tosses out the whole theory of value from philosophy. Marc: Yeah. It’s quite pallid. There’s something we could say here though, in one limited regard, which might be helpful, which is, there’s two parts to value theory right there. There’s a lot to say about value theory, obviously, in terms of multiple formulations and also the relationship between deontological value and teleological value, which is important, we can get to it, but let me step back for a second. In general, there’s value which is related to economics. Right? I value something economically. There’s value which is instrumental, and all those kinds are related to that economic line. And then there’s this other kind of value, which is intrinsic and we would call it in some sense, priceless. It’s non-commodifiable. It’s the realm of the priceless. It’s its own end of itself. The Relationship Between Economic Value and Intrinsic Value Is the “Pointing To” Marc: However, there’s a relationship between those two kinds of value. Those two strains have a relationship, much like we talked about years back. And there’s a chapter on it. There’s a relationship between separate self and Unique Self. The difference in between them is True Self. Right? Separate self is isolated, fragmented. It’s not true. It’s an illusion. It’s not who you are, and yet it’s pointing to something. In other words, separate self is not a mistake in the Field of Value. Reality generated this, this experience of separateness, and separateness exists in the mind of God. But separate self points towards something which is Unique Self, which is this unique individuation of the ultimate True Self Field that you always like to add the sentence, the singular that has no plural. Right? Ken: Yeah. Marc: Which is beautiful. Ken: Yeah. And I also wrote a book called The Atman Project. Right? Which talks about the relation between those two. The small self is always intuiting. Marc: It’s always pointing towards. Right? In Unique Self, we talk about these 30 distinctions between ego and Unique Self. And then each one of those, the ego is pointing towards Unique Self. So in a similar way… Ken: And often confuses itself. Marc: Right. I talk about the pointing a lot in Unique Self. You talk about the confusion in The Atman Project when, for example, I believe you talk about there, it hijacks immortality as its own. Ken: Immortality project. Marc: Right? Which is a form of what I call someplace else, we talked about, pseudo-eros. But to stay on this, the two lines of value are not completely unrelated, right? There’s a reason they’re both called value and this is one of the places that Wittgenstein wasn’t wrong. There’s a field of language here. So in some sense I have a desire and I desire value. Now, the more deeply I clarify my desire, the more I get to my deepest heart’s desire, the more I get to the intrinsic desire of the ontic Infinite that’s awake and alive in me, the more that will point me towards intrinsic desire. And the more I’m locked in my surface desires, I can’t clarify my desires or I’m locked in my trauma, I can’t disambiguate myself from my trauma, whatever the set of issues is that we all experience, then actually my desire points me towards instrumental value, right? Or I simply have a healthy, separate self that points me towards instrumental value, which itself has value. Ken: Sure. Marc: And instrumental value itself has value as part of life and the affirmation of life, which participates in an eternal Value. So there’s not a sharp dichotomy between them. And one of the things that value theory does is it too sharply dichotomize between them when actually one points towards the other. But as you said, in The Atman Project, we could apply it here, the instrumental value could confuse itself with absolute value. So it feels that it’s valuable, but then it confuses itself and it hijacks the identity of absolute value. We Need to Align Use Value with Exchange Value Zak: Right, exactly. The classic distinction between exchange value and use value in Marxism is very similar to your receiver versus creator value. And one of the things that has to happen at planetary scale is the alignment of use value with exchange value. Which means something like, how much is a tree actually worth? Because right now we sell it for a few hundred dollars of lumber, but it actually holds the soil together and makes houses for birds that we need and emits oxygen… Ken: It has an ecological value. Zak: It has an ecological value that’s probably in the millions or billions of dollars, like, one tree. Right? We couldn’t make it. And so we’re profoundly confused about, how valuable is the tree? Is it invaluable or is it sellable for $300? And so you multiply that by all of that’s happening everywhere on the planet. Fundamental misevaluation of things like nature. And it’s a confusion of exchange value for use value. In the short term, cut the trees down, make the money, build your house. In the long term, we’re realizing that we’re fucked. It is a very fundamental misunderstanding of how valuable nature is. And so part of the project here with value theory, with CosmoErotic Humanism is reinvigorating the languages of value that stand against the simplistic economic reduction of value. Ken: Sure. Zak: Right? Stand against the flatland, the de-ontologizing of value, which means that whatever the price tag says is what the thing is actually worth. Before We Are a Specific Value, We Are Value Itself Ken: And that’s what has become the commonest meaning of value. And that’s why most people don’t think in terms that we’re talking about right now, and that’s what we’re trying to do is reintroduce this linguistic line of thinking to a common understood line. Marc: It’s kind of like Leonard Cohen took the word hallelujah from the Bible into the street. He took the word hallelujah from the Book of Psalms into the public culture. All of a sudden people have a sense, they have a fragrance of hallelujah. Ken: Yeah. Marc: And he actually got it right. He was reading carefully. Hallelujah means, it’s a very subtle meaning. It means halal, pristine praise, how beautiful. And holel lut, drunken, broken intoxication. I’m completely broken. And then all of that is Jah. The breath of God. And Cohen gets that. He takes hallelujah, which had become something else, it had become this formal word of the cathedrals, and he says, no, there’s a holy and broken hallelujah. There’s a blaze of light in every word. It doesn’t matter what you heard, the holy or the broken, hallelujah. And now across the world, there are more covers of Hallelujah than any other single album right across the world. Ken: Right. Marc: People don’t even exactly know what he’s saying, but they can feel hallelujah. Right? So it’s the same thing that you’re saying, Ken, that we want to do with value. Which is, now when people think value, they think values, and they either think economics or they think fundamentalism. And it’s more, the majority values or economics. Which is why we’re saying no, no, there’s a Field of Value. And by the way, although not all Daoist scholars would go this way, but I think if you read really carefully, a good word for the Dao would be the Field of Value. The Field of Value, which is underneath all values. I want to offer a distinction and then turn it to Zak. Let’s go back to yesterday, what we were talking about. We were talking about pro-life and pro-choice. So we said life is a value. Choice is a value. But both the pro-life people and the pro-choice people who are in this values clash, are both outside the Field of Value. I’m going to go slow here for a second. If I’m in the Field of Value, then we’re both first Value before we’re a specific value. Before I’m life or before I’m choice, I’m Value. And a nice way to think about it would be the Field of Value is like the Field of True Self. So Ken, Marc and Zak. Before we’re Ken, Marc and Zach as Unique Self, we meet each other in the field of True Self, which is why we can love each other. Because if we just meet each other as separate selves, well it’s annoying, right? Why did Ken do integral, man? I should have written integral… No, not my job. It was his to do, right? Oh, why am I not like this leading educational theorist? No, that, that’s Zak’s to do. That’s not mine to do. Right? So we each have something. But if we’re separate selves, then our value is our separate self, then we’re in values, then we clash. We have a state of war. Hobbes was right. We step out of values into the Field of Value, into True Self. Now we’re in the Field of Value. Then we can go to Unique Self. We individuate as Ken and Marc and Zak, and we individuate as individual values. Choice, life. Now we can synergize. It’s very beautiful. So if I’m talking about values, there’s no possibility of synergy. Because values become identities and they become separate self identities. And we have a polarized value classroom culture. But if we’re in the Field of Value, which is your language now that we talked about yesterday, we created yesterday, talking together and your book coming out, Wholeness. Yesterday we said, let’s talk about the Field of Wholeness. So if I’m in the Field of Value, in the Field of Wholeness, then when I come to the other side— which is why, for example, if you look at Hindu Brahman legal scriptures about abortion, they’re fascinatingly complex and they’re not in any way pro-life and not in any way pro-choice. And if you even look at Orthodox Jewish structures of abortion, and when I was in an earlier lifetime functioning as an orthodox rabbi, I adjudicated quite a few of those cases of women who were pregnant. I went to the leading ruler in the orthodox world, David Feinstein, Moshe Feinstein’s son, the ultimate ultra orthodox decisor. And he made decisions that would make the pro-life world stand on its head because he was synergizing two values. He was in the Field of Value and he was synergizing life and choice. But paradoxically, the liberal world that stepped out of the Field of Value says there’s only one value: choice, and you can never have too much of it. But then the conservative fundamentalist world is also not in the Field of Value. They say: only we are value. There’s no Field of Value. So then they hypothesize life and you can never have too much of that. This distinction we’re making between values and the Field of Value is what you’re saying, Ken, we need to reclaim, like a hallelujah experience. We say the Field of Value, we all know what we mean beyond polarization, and then we can start the discussion about values. That’s exciting. Ken: And let me ask, when we say value, you said there’s market value and ecological natural value. What about personal value? Because I think most people, when they think of value, they definitely think of market value, or how much did I pay for that? And they think of ecological value, like how is it doing? But they also think of, you ask them, what’s an example of something you value? They often have just their own personal likes and dislikes, and they think of those as values. Your Personal Value Is Your Unique Personhood and It’s Part of the Field of Value Ken: When we say value, are we talking a universal value, are we talking a personal value or are we talking a spectrum of values that stretches between those? Zak: I would say it’s a spectrum. Ken: Yeah. Zak: I would say it’s a spectrum. Where, the process of the clarification of desire would begin by releasing you from the idolatry of your specific little value. Your specific little personal value, as you’re describing, the move away from sacred values towards the everyday value of the modern, right? That’s something Charles Taylor talks about. Making sacred your lifestyle. And your lifestyle would be whatever I happen to value. Right? Ken: Right. Zak: And so there’s something inside of that, which is the valorization of uniqueness, which is saying, the valorization of uniqueness, of personhood. Ken: Yeah. Zak: That’s the core dignity of modernity. In one sense it’s saying actually, your lifestyle does matter. So moving into that conversation about personal value in order to deepen it and saying actually your value for, let’s say, your own personhood, the integrity of your own personhood. The reason you value that is because the Cosmos values it. This is a key distinction we’re making here. That’s a key distinction. The arbitrary, relativistic, embracing of any lifestyle you happen to like, that is not Value. That is value in the absence of the clarity about value. It is value in the absence of clarified desire. So it would be pseudo-value, it would be pseudo-erotic pursuit of value. Hopefully you learn in that process and refine and realize, oh, I thought that was valuable, actually. This is valuable. And so value development proceeds. Marc: Let’s lay out a distinction here. This is great, right? This is a great distinction. So Ken says, okay, what about personal value? How does that fit in and relate to? Is that a universal value or is that particular to me? Zak points, and I think completely correctly, and I’m going to formulate the distinction differently, but the same, which is, there’s a strange word in modernity, which is “it’s merely subjective.” As if objective was real. That’s real. But subjective always has the word “merely” before it. But merely is actually not a qualifier of subjective. Actually, Reality is in some sense, from a second-person perspective, infinite subjectivity. And this is actually just in the last six, seven months, we were trying to think of—you know, every generation names God. Right? Calling God’s name is something that every generation does. We were thinking about: how do we call God’s name in the language of CosmoErotic Humanism? And what emerged was this beautiful word, God as the Infinite Intimate. God as the Infinite Intimate. So that’s: God is ultimate objectivity and ultimate subjectivity with no split between them. Now, if that’s true, part of the human experience of subjectivity is one of the First Principles and First Values of Cosmos, which is irreducible uniqueness. As the old conversation we used to have with our friend Andrew, not just social conditioning, not just psychological conditioning, not just cultural conditioning. There’s an irreducible Ken-ness that’s more than the story of his father, right? It’s an imprint into the world which Reality intended and desired. And even the Buddhists affirm that. They just slip it in the back door through reincarnation, right? So that irreducible uniqueness means personhood. Not personhood as broken, separate self seeking mind, personality, coiled contraction. No, the infinite dignity of my irreducible personhood, that actually is irreducibly unique. And it’s only when I value that, I get to understand the great sin of what we’re calling technofeudalism. Because the technofeudalist enterprise seeks to essentially harvest your data through the asymmetric power of machine intelligence and then without your knowing, beyond the pale of your awareness, through invisible technologies of control, reduce you to your lowest common denominator. And when you read Pentland at the MIT Media Lab, he says, we’re not interested in uniqueness, we’re not interested in anomalies. They’re statistically irrelevant. That’s actually what he calls them. Therefore, there’s no dignity of personhood. So there’s no reason not to steal your attention, which is a function of your personhood or your data because there’s no personhood. So personhood is personal value. There’s a personal value. I think that’s what you were pointing towards. There’s a personal value which is expressed in your irreducible uniqueness, which then participates in a Unique Self Symphony. Ken: Yeah. That’s the key sign. Unique Self is what informs your personal is-ness and value. Marc: Yes. But it has to be part of a Unique Self Symphony. And Zak, you cited Kant when we were talking about that, about the Kingdom of Ends, so maybe you want to talk to that, that’s related. The Core Assumption of Technofeudalism Is That There Is Nothing Sacred, There Is No Field of Value Zak: Well, I was going to go in a different direction, which is that when you begin the conversation about technofeudalism, when you begin the conversation about the colonization of our life world by these invasive technologies, what’s interesting is the way they get you. The way they first opened that door and where you let them walk in basically was with the making of the self sacred. Like, what did Facebook do? What did MySpace do? The first things. What does Instagram do? It’s the idolatry of the self. That’s the door that they walk through that lets you get them all your data, all the backend, all the surveillance, all the behavior manipulation. So they walk through that same door of, okay, there’s nothing sacred. The baseline value is your own self-promotion. So we hijack that. * Through the search for self-expression, * through the search for connection, * through the search for being seen as unique, * through the search for being seen as valuable, * that’s where they find a way to turn your behavior against your own sincere pursuit of value. They distort value very profoundly, which is why this category of anti-value or this category of basically pseudo-eros or pseudo-value is so important. Because most of what people pursue is not the result of clarified desire. It is the result of the manipulation of desire. We’re at the level where the manipulation of desire now goes from persuasion, which would be what advertising was, where I believe now we have coercive information technologies. Which means you can’t not be affected in these ways, whereas you can kind of ignore the advertisements. We’re at the point now where technology is… Marc: An immersive environment. Zak: Exactly. And it’s intentional. The Pentland lab at the MIT Media Lab, but you also get the Stanford lab, B.J. Fogg’s Persuasive Technologies Lab. And I believe that beyond a certain point, persuasion becomes coercion. So we’re in a situation now where we’re being more or less coerced into holding values that we don’t actually have, that we would not have… Marc: By people who have declared that there’s no Field of Value. Zak: That’s why they can do it without any… Marc: That’s right. B.J. Fogg at the Persuasive Technology Lab, explicitly bases his work on Skinner. And B.F. Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the chapter before the last chapter is a chapter on value and the chapter’s almost impossible to read, by intention. It’s the ultimate set of euphemisms. And then on page 200 and 201, he drops the facade and he basically says, we need to move beyond what C. S. Lewis was talking about—and he mentions Lewis, and you get, he’s angry at Lewis. Because Lewis wrote that book, the Abolition of Man in 1943, where he’s basically attacking Skinner. He is describing how a few good men will come to be the controllers, who will control everything through these, Lewis calls it, irresistible scientific methods. Skinner’s burned by it. It’s now 1971. And he writes this thing, and Lewis was wrong, he says, he doesn’t use these words, but he describes existential risk. And he says, “autonomous man, man who’s invested with ethics, man who can choose. That man. Man who’s invested with freedom and dignity (because he has intrinsic value), we have to move beyond that man.” “We have to move to the man who’s only real in that which is observable and manipulable.” It’s a direct quote, observable and manipulable. Those two pages are the structure that essentially the entire tech—and Skinner says, I don’t know how to do it yet, though. Because I don’t have the instruments and methods. Ken: And I’ve just spent the last 200 pages trying to do it. Marc: Totally. Trying to do it. Chomsky and Kessler, there’s a series of these reviews that go to kill Skinner. Looks like Skinner was dead, but he was actually faking it. Ken: Right. Marc: What he was doing was in the book by Brian Dear, Friendly Orange Glow. We found that book by accident. It’s this brilliant independent scholar who writes about the early proto-system of the internet before the internet, the proto-internet. And his entire first chapter is on B.F. Skinner, who has this realization that actually these are going to become the instruments and methods. Skinner dies. Along comes the first wave of AI, data science, machine intelligence, and essentially Alex Pentland, who’s the founder of the MIT Media Lab directly devours Skinner, pretends like he never read him. Like Locke pretended like he never read Hobbes, right? And then when you read Pentland and his public book was called Social Physics, 2014, he resurrects Skinner and basically says, there’s no free will. It’s not real. He says, value’s not real. But none of this does he say explicitly. You could read the whole social physics book and not catch it. So it got, like, 20 great reviews in the liberal community. But when you read it really slowly, Zak and I read it really slowly, carefully, and we read it and compared it to Skinner. We looked at older papers of Pentland and you realize he’s directly by intention reprising Skinner. And his assumption is: * Freedom is not real. * Value is not real. * Uniqueness is statistically irrelevant. * Love is not real. * Eros is not real. And Pentland is the MIT Media Lab. These are not side players. These are the mainstream legacy architects of the whole story. And it’s all based in one thing. There’s no hallelujah. Because what hallelujah says is that it doesn’t matter which you heard. Ken: Wait. Did he actually say there’s no hallelujah? Marc: No, no. I’m saying it. I’m saying, what hallelujah means is, it just occurs to me now to say it this way, hallelujah means Value. That’s really what hallelujah means. When David says hallelujah, he says, f**k, I’m agonized. I’m devastated. I’ve been rejected. I’ve been trampled, but I’m in the field of wholeness. I’m in the Field of Value, so I’m going to scream. Hallelujah means there’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you heard. The holy are broken, hallelujah. What he means is it’s all in the field of hallelujah. It’s all in the Field of Value. So no matter what happens, I’ve never left the Field of Value because you can’t leave the Field of Value. Because you’re always in the Dao. As you said, Ken, restoring the language of the Field of Value beyond economic value and the distinctions of value that you cited 25 minutes ago, all of them that went economic, instrumental. Beyond the surface versions of ecological value that Homer Rolston pointed to so beautifully. Rolston wrote beautifully. That’s the Field of Value. We Are Talking About Value, Love, Eros in a Four Quadrants Perspective Ken: Yeah. When you say that this guy says there’s no Value, there’s no love, etc… Marc: No freedom. Ken: I mean, it is all pathetic. And one of the reasons that the language that I chose to use for fundamental constituents of the universe, they had to apply fairly well to all four quadrants. Because most hardheaded empiricists, take just the external exterior, right hand quadrants as real. * So is an ecosystem real? Yeah, that’s real. * Is a brain real? Yeah, that’s real. * Is an atom real? Yeah, that’s real. So I use the term holon. Because even quarks are holons. And nobody, no standard model physicists would disagree with that. Marc: Right. Ken: And then I had to come to a term for consciousness, because it’s hard for a lot of people, even me sometimes, to think of a proton as having consciousness, certainly it doesn’t have an elaborate self-consciousness. But I ran upon Whitehead’s term prehension, which is great. Because, first of all, almost nobody knows what prehension means. [Laughs] Marc: It just opens up the field there. Ken: Yeah, it does. It makes it a lot easier to push that on somebody when they don’t know what you’re pushing on. [Laughs] And so I have a spectrum of prehension. Then when I get up to concrete operational, or formal operational, I can start introducing terms like awareness or consciousness, concrete operational thinking. Marc: Yeah, that’s great. Ken: That’s one of the things that we’re going to have to do here. Because we’re talking now fairly easily about consciousness and value and even love as Eros, right? We’re talking all the way down. And so let’s just keep in mind, whatever terms we use, let’s really think of them in a four quadrant way. Because it’s going to be really important in terms of getting value to be an explicit part of every citizens’ internal state. Marc: Which is the goal. The formulation, that’s the goal. Yeah. It’s very, very important to formulate. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. It Should Be as Clear as Day that the Fundamental Problem Is a Problem of Value Zak: If you think about, everyone agrees there’s the climate crisis. Let’s put something like that. Ken: Yeah. Zak: So the idea that there’s an objective state of affairs with the climate, we agree. The idea that we’re in a crisis of value, people would be like, I don’t know, are we in a crisis of value? Ken: Yeah. Zak: The people who would say something like that would be fundamentalist or something. But it should be as clear as day, right? As clear as a superstorm, or as clear as a melting glacier or something like that, that you cannot run the civilization on value relativism. You cannot run a civilization on relativism. Ken: Right. Zak: You cannot run a civilization on nihilism. You cannot run a civilization on any… Ken: Empiricism. Zak: Empiricism, precisely. Because those are all related. That should be as clear as like, you can’t keep extracting endlessly from the environment. Ken: Right. Zak: And because of the state of the culture, there’s a deep confusion about even the idea that the fundamental problem is a problem of value. When in fact the fundamental is a problem of value. Again, I think Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, there you are saying that it’s not the CO2 that’s the problem. It’s not the emissions. It’s our minds. That’s the problem. Ken: Yeah. Zak: Which is another way of saying, it’s how we are valuing this. It’s a crisis of value, decision-making and level of consciousness before any of the environmental things come in. And yet it’s so easy these days to talk about the environmental stuff. And it’s so difficult to get out of the relativism, to get out of the nihilism. The Crisis of Meaning Is Used Today To Avoid the Value Conversation Ken: Yeah. That reminds me actually, when you said that not many people think that there’s a value crisis, but what almost everybody talks about now is a meaning crisis. Marc: Right. Ken: And everybody knows what you mean when you say we’ve got the loss of meaning or a meaning crisis. So, what does meaning mean? Marc: Yeah. It’s such a great distinction. It got me very excited. Because we were talking yesterday about critics of the techplex saying, how could the techplex hijack attention? Shoshana Zuboff, for example, says, you can’t find your inward space of meaning. But then she refuses to identify meaning with anything which is real in a Field of Value. She then cites Sartre, the apostle of cosmic meaninglessness, as her source for meaning, which is a very bad move. Walter Kaufman called that back in the day, intellectual gerrymandering. Ken: Oh. Marc: It’s a great term, right? It’s an intellectual gerrymandering move. She’s hijacking the language, but what she’s actually signaling is that she wants to be cushier with Pinker, who’s down the hall in Harvard, right? And she wants to be a good postmodernist that there is no real Field of Value. The Only Cure to the Meaning Crisis Is to Clarify Value Marc: So one of the ways that this crisis of meaning is used today is to actually avoid the value conversation. Ken: Absolutely. Marc: In other words, there’s a crisis of meaning. And it’s a very clever move. There’s a certain intellectual move that’s being made. Let’s avoid the value thing. Let’s talk about a crisis of meaning. That’s very appropriate and that can be answered without asserting value. And in some sense, the entire f*****g existentialist movement was to engage the crisis of meaning by avoiding the Field of Value. Ken: Okay. What you pointed to is another central concern of what we have to be doing, which is interlinking and resurrecting value to go with meaning. Marc: Yes. You’re right. Ken: So when we’re talking about value, almost everything that has value has meaning. And most things that have meaning have value. We can resurrect meaning and a cure for the meaning crisis while we’re resurrecting value. Zak: And that would be the only cure. The only cure to the meaning crisis is to clarify value. Ken: Yeah. Zak: And this is actually going back to the question of why. Because the question of why is about meaning, right? And we’re saying, there’s a bad way to answer the question why. Which would be the existentialist answer to the meaning crisis, which is whatever the f**k you want. That’s why. Ken: Yeah. Zak: And we’re saying, on the other side of passing through the clarification of value, you ask again why, right? Ken: Yeah. Zak: And now meaning is self-evident, right? The real contact with Value clarifies meaning. So the clarification of desire reveals Value. Contact with Value provides meaning. So what we’re trying to get at is the semantic answer to the why question. Ken: Right. Zak: The why question cannot be answered semantically, it can only be answered by merging with the Field of Value, engaging value, having meaning redeemed in your life. Marc: Let’s clarify. We shouldn’t even have to clarify this, but maybe if someone’s joining us for a first dialogue, we all understand that there are social constructions that are real. * We all understand that all meaning and all value is mediated through historical prisms. * We all understand that truth is not just a mirror of an objective reality. * We all understand that Value is not just eternal value. That’s the point of our book, First Principles and First Values, that Value is evolving value. So let’s take that as a given so no one should misunderstand this as a kind of disguised fundamentalist trope. Quite the opposite. Ken: Right. Marc: We’re taking as an axiom that we’re talking about Value, which is both real, intrinsic and evolving, at the very core of the universe. And it’s so beautiful to say. Zak, as you were saying, Ken, as you pointed to in the question, meaning is rooted in the Field of Value. Its essential nature. It’s a Conversational Cosmos — And Conversation Is the Exchange of Meaning, Which Is Embedded in Value Ken: Right. And meaning is very intrinsic to the human condition. The simplest meaning of the word meaning is: any signifier has meaning. Any word, any symbol we use is a signifier because it points to something other, the signified. So, signifier and signified. That’s meaning. So we’re generating meaning with every word we make now. And we just have to hook that to value. Marc: And now let’s go down the evolutionary chain, back to what you said earlier. We were having a conversation with all of our mutual colleague and friend, Howard Bloom, who kind of sets himself up, although we don’t believe him, but he sets himself up in public as, he calls himself a stone cold atheist. You know, he’s an atheist, like I’m the pope. But he definitely does reject all of the medieval and modern caricatures of religion. Howard and I began, Zak joined us in an early draft, to think about these ideas and I think it needs to become part of anthro-ontology, this notion that meaning from a scientific perspective goes all the way down. For example, when you have a proton and a neutron and electron that are coming together to create a new whole called an atom. Ken: The holon. Marc: Right. So that is beautiful. That is, number one. It’s a new intimacy. So there’s an Eros and allurement. There’s a new intimacy. So, what happens? Ken: Well, holons are just degrees of increasing intimacy. Marc: The declaration of holons is that evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies. That’s what holons are screaming out. Right? So now it gets very exciting because: 1) We’ve got this proton, neutron and electron. 2) They’re allured to each other. 3) They form a shared identity, which is a new wholeness. But that shared identity is in the context of a mutuality of recognition. They obviously recognize each other, they feel each other. So they have: * shared pathos, but they also have * shared value, * shared purpose and * prehension. Prehension and shared value. Shared value is in the sense that, if they didn’t have shared value, meaning, if they weren’t communicating in some way… Ken: If they had no reason to integrate. Marc: They couldn’t integrate. There’s absolutely codes of communication. It’s a conversation of a kind. And in that sense, you could say it’s a conversational cosmos all the way down. And conversation is the exchange of meaning, which is embedded in value in a very real way. And this is actually much more accessible to the broader public culture than thinking about… When you say a proton is conscious, people get lost. When you actually begin to realize that, in order for an atom to be formed by a proton neutron and electron, there needs to be shared scripts of value. Because there’s a conversation that has meaning. That’s actually true. That’s not a conjecture. Right? When our friend Howard Bloom, thinks about this, he says, well, I’m a complete scientist. And sometimes on a more honest day, he calls himself a materialist mystic, which is closer. But the point is, he’s a pure materialist scientist in the sense that he refuses to introduce any, what he would call, “supernatural causes that are not intrinsic”. Ken: Like communication. Marc: That’s right. And there you have communication. Exactly. And he agrees with us that you cannot talk about an atom without there being codes of meaning that actually create the allurement, that creates the wholeness. Ken: That’s communication. Marc: Right. And so that’s beautiful. So, wholeness always implies conversation, which always implies meaning, which always implies value. Holy f**k. Right? Beautiful. Ken: Yeah. Zak: And conversation is interesting because it blurs the lines between instrumental and intrinsic value. Because a good conversation exists for its own sake. No doubt. Ken: And we have to blur that distinction if we’re going to carry it all the way down into quarks. Zak: Precisely. And so there has to be some mode of activity, which is both in and of itself valuable and extrinsically, instrumentally valuable for other purposes. Conversations like this one are both of those, it’s like lishma, right? For its own sake. Ken: So we’ve managed to hook it down into the most fundamentals of a quadrant. Marc: In the most scientific way. In the most precisely scientific way. No animism. Zak: And if I dare say, like the notion of lila, right? Play. That most basic notion of conversation as both serious and not serious. As both intrinsic and somehow accomplishing something. It’s very interesting that, what’s the most basic thing that’s happening? Some type of serious yet playful conversation in pursuit of what? Some open-ended expression of value, open-ended pursuit of value. That’s like, a bad answer to the why question. Marc: It also solves another problem, which is, if you want to try to understand what’s the relationship between contingency, randomness and design. That big question. All you have to do is look at this conversation, and actually all of our conversations through the years, we’ve never once prepared for a conversation. We’ve never prepared a script, we’ve never prepared an outline, we’ve always come together. There’s always been the sense of play, the sense of lila, Zak invokes. A sense of delight. And yet if you would then read the transcript of the conversation. You would think that we had spent literally weeks orchestrating. Oh, Ken will say that. Then Marc, then now we’re talking with Zak and then Zak… And so it’s complete. When you look at it post facto, it looks completely designed, and yet it’s completely filled with contingency, surprise, and not randomness, but freedom, openness. So you actually see in this conversation the actual structure of evolution itself at play as conversations all the way up and conversations all the way down. Now that is crazy exciting, and that gets to be the interior of what’s now exteriorized as information theory. Ken: Good. Marc: And information theory is the attempt to take the music out of the conversation and reduce it to its mechanics, which is the main problem with it. Zak: That’s essentially turning the exchange of meaning into a causal process. Just causality. Ken: Yeah. Zak: But meaning is beyond the category of causality. And that’s what’s so interesting about the First Principles and First Values notion. It’s attempting to blur the causal and the normative. Which is to say, why does something occur in the world? Is it because of causality or is it because there’s agency? Ken: Yeah. Zak: And Whitehead was also exploring categories that had both qualities. For him, causality doesn’t exist, but prehension exists. But what is prehension? At a very low level looks a lot just like causality. Ken: Yeah. Zak: And so, similarly, we’re talking about how values express themselves through the material and the biological through this conversational process, which if you’re just a physicist, you would read as, oh, that’s just causality. But then what the f**k are we? If you read that as conversation, then we make sense. We’re just having a conversation that’s been going on for billions of years as opposed to no, there was no meaning exchange, there was no teleology. Ken: And our conversations have lost meaning. And therefore we have a meaning crisis. Marc: That’s the core of it. Ken: And that goes down to the atom. Marc: Right. That’s gorgeous. In other words, all through reality, conversations have had meaning. From the beginning of time. And all of those conversations are coded in us. Because although not all of evolution is in me, but all of the stages of evolution, or most of the stages… I have atoms in me, I have leptons, hadrons, mesons, and I have single cells, multi cells… Everything’s in me. So all of those conversations are happening, which means I’m constituted by meaningful conversations. My interiors are physically constituted by meaningful interior conversations. Now, all of a sudden I then try and have a conversation with someone else. And I’m desperate to have that conversation. Remember that movie, Tom Hanks, Castaway. He’s on an island, right? Ken: He’s warded with Wilson. Marc: He sees the Wilson basketball, he paints his blood a face on a Wilson basketball because he’s desperate to have a conversation, even though he’s worked out all the neo-Darwinian survival issues. But he’s desperate to have a conversation, and he’s so desperate for his interior to have a meaningful conversation with another interior that he’s willing to throw himself off the island into the ocean with almost no chance of survival and the slim chance that he might be able to, once again, before he dies, have a conversation. And there was no one in the world who didn’t get the movie. No one was like, huh, that’s really weird. Why is he doing… Like, of course. So you get this public culture recognition and all of a sudden we understand the root of mental crises. Now, all of a sudden, I’m told that there are no meaningful conversations that exist. Right? Because “there’s no shared value, there’s no love story.” And I’ll just give one example of this, which is a frightening and stunning example. It’s the movie that won, they created a special Golden Globe award for best performance at the box office this year was Barbie. Ken: And they had to create that in order to be able to give Barbie some sort of award. Marc: That’s right. And Barbie actually went wild to the box office. And Barbie’s about this story in which Ken wants to be a hero. But there are no heroes. Because it is so beautiful… A hero has valor, is valiant. Valiant participates in Value. They’re all the same Latin root, which goes back to Valeria or Valencia, which means “be strong in value,” which is rooted in, very beautiful, Valentia, Valentine. Love. So you’ve got this stunning Latin root, which is, the hero participates in the Field of Value. Therefore the hero’s willing to give him or herself up for the sake of the field, because the hero experiences, there’s a larger Field of Value beyond my separate self. So we get to Barbie, and what Barbie basically says is there’s no Field of Value. That’s the point of the movie. There’s a moment where Barbie wants to become human. And Mrs. Mattel, Ruth, tells her, you know, humans just make meaning up. There is no real meaning. She says, well, that’s okay, I’ll do it anyways. And Ken can’t be a hero because there are no heroes, right? Because there’s no value. And the whole point of the movie is not that this Barbie doesn’t love this Ken. It’s that there is no Barbie in Ken. There is no love story. And so you walk out of the movie, I remember the phenomenological feeling. I had the same feeling walking out of Barbie that I had finishing reading our friend Yuval Harari, Sapiens. This chilled feeling, you’re like, something’s wrong and you’re not sure why, because you just got told there’s no Field of Value, but in a very eloquent way. And so they have to create an award at the Oscars. The great moment was three weeks ago, when Ryan Gosling sings, “I’m just Ken”, he brings the house down. But if you read the words of “I’m just Ken”, it’s the pathos of no, but I’ve gotta be more than just a life of blonde fragility. My desire’s gotta mean something. But of course they place that in the mouth of Ken, who’s patriarchy. And of course Harari does the same thing. There’s no Field of Value and you’re chilled, you can’t be a hero. So we’re saying to people, you actually can be a hero. And you’re a hero in every conversation. Hallelujah. Creativity Itself Isn’t Necessarily Good, Creation That Moves Us Towards Value Is Good Ken: Yeah, that’s great. Listening to you reminded me of another aspect that I think we should talk about, and that has to do with Eros. In particular, I’ll preface this by saying we’re tracing this all the way down to quarks and atoms, and then all the way up through molecules, cells, multicellular animals, the entire tree of life, linguistic communication, and so on. And that points out that Eros is a creative drug. And creativity has to be hooked in here somehow with meaning and value. Marc: Yes. Ken: And I’m not sure exactly how, but whatever we think will be the way to tie them together, we can reinforce that by saying our creative value, or our creative meaning. Marc: That’s great. That’s really important. Zak: There’s a few things to say. One is to bring Whitehead back, right? The creative advance into novelty is one way of thinking about evolution. Ken: Yeah. Zak: And the idea that you can make choices that direct evolution in ways that are not good, right? Therefore, Value is something that is a rudder, it’s a steering mechanism. It’s a rudder or steering wheel or north star, for directing creativity. Ken: Right. Zak: Because if you think about our civilization in one sense, it’s massively creative. Like, to do a fracking organization, the tar sands up in Alberta, the size of the UK, that’s a massive, huge creation, which is completely antithetical to value. So creation itself isn’t necessarily good. Creation that serves, pursues, moves us towards true Value is good. Ken: Right. Zak: I would see this relationship between creativity and value as that. There’s a constraining of the total possibility of creation by the pursuit of value and getting off of the ability to know what’s valuable allows us to create anything and see it as valuable. Ken: This undercuts another factor that we’re working into all of our conversations, and that is different terms we’re using positive and negative. And everything we’re talking about has a good and a bad version. Value, there’s good, there’s bad. Wholeness, there’s good, there’s bad. A bad example of wholeness is the collapse of the Roman Empire. Marc: Right. Ken: That was a very systematic whole. And it sucked. It really did. All sorts of s**t came from that. There’s good creative and there’s bad creative. Marc: Let’s pick up both threads. First, creativity, Zak’s comments. Then let’s call it, the words that we’ve been playing with are Value and anti-value. Wholeness and anti-wholeness. Ken: Yeah. Marc: In which anti-value almost has its own ontology. It’s not just Aristotelian privation. There’s actually a sense of ontology, and that was very, very strong in the lineage of Solomon. The sense not that evil is a full ontology, it’s not a gnostic position, it’s not about a demiurgus, it’s not about committing suicide to get out of this world, but there’s a sense of this and we can actually feel it in the world. It’s the sense of Sauron. The Eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. Sauron is not just the privation of the good, Sauron is this ontological or almost ontological force that’s bad. And the text in the book of Psalms that’s cited in the lineage is always ze le’umat ze. This corresponding to this did reality manifest. So Reality manifests: * Value and anti-value, * which is Eros and Thanatos, * but a better way to say it is actually Eros and anti-Eros. It’s actually more clear, and when you think about this sense of anti-wholeness, the Holy Roman empire, which was at least Roman—well it wasn’t even that Roman, but I guess it was an empire, absolutely—that’s a great example of this ring of Sauron, which is about this enveloping wholeness, it’s this wild “creative force”, which nothing can be outside of the eye of Sauron. It’s not the Eye of Value, it’s the Eye of anti-value, and it wants to absorb and gobble up everything, in which nothing can be left out because that would be a lack of wholeness. And nothing’s left out of the Roman Empire. So the sense of anti-value is very important, but now let’s link it to creativity. Public culture always intuitively understands something even when it gets it wrong, which is why you can speak to public culture because it actually has this very beautiful grounding, even when it’s unconscious, in the Dao, in the Field of Value. In the world of education, Zak, your world, there was this moment for 30, 40, 50 years that’s still out there, it’s slightly less pronounced, in which the educational value was your child be creative. It’s a major thing in schools, all over the place. To make sure your child is going to really learn to be creative. So there was this sense that schools are not allowed to teach Value, they’ll teach skills and will teach your child to be creative. But there was this recognition that creativity was a value. But what happened is, just like pro-choice and pro-life, creativity itself was decontextualized from the Field of Value and turned into the absolute value. And so then creativity meant moving commodities, it meant junk bonds, it meant Sam Bankman freed on a bad day in crypto. It meant this sense of, you’re wildly creative, and in a certain sense, that was the true value. If you couldn’t achieve that, then we’ve often said between us, the booby prize was, you were sincere. You were very devotional. They’re very, she’s very, he’s very sincere, right? He’s very devoted. Or the worst is sincerity, devotion and purity. He’s a very pure soul. In other words, it’s a complete failure. He’s not succeeded in this commodified measurement of wild creativity, but he’s very sincere. So we have to actually recontextualize the creative in the Field of Value. And I remember this very beautiful statement by a teacher of mine that I only spoke to once, when I used to sit outside of his apartment in Washington Heights. His name was Joseph Soloveitchik. He was too old for me to attend his formal Talmud lectures, but when I was 13, 14, I would go to anything I could hear. I read all of his books, and I sat outside his door to get a glimpse of him and talk to him for a second, which was the sense of devotion. Of course, I was so excited and so idiotic that I thought I was the only person who really understood his works. So I wanted to tell him that I understood it so he’d be less lonely. [Laughs] I was committed to this, this committed 15-year-old project. And I finally found him and I kind of pushed him way through his attendance and I told him this. He looked at me and he kind of got it. [Laughs] He said, thank you. He writes in an essay called The Man of Law. A very beautiful essay. He writes a very beautiful section on the sacred, he says, the sacred is self-creation. Creation is the sacred and the self is the tapestry of creation. It’s interesting. He had just gotten disillusioned with Heidegger. He had gone to Heidegger’s lectures in 1931, and that’s the world—he wrote his doctorate there, Soloveitchik. He was the greatest Talmudist of the era. He wrote his doctorate on Neo-Kantianism, he went to Heidegger’s lectures, and then he got completely devastated when Heidegger makes his Nazi move for at least a couple of years. Ken: Yeah. Marc: Michael Zimmerman writes about that. I’ve just been reading his book for the first time and it’s actually a great book. Heiddeger has this great statement where he says, the human being is the only being who problematizes their own being. Ken: Yeah. Marc: It was very beautiful. And that’s what Soloveitchik was saying, actually, self-creation is the sacred, and that’s very beautiful. Now we’ve recontextualized creativity in the field of Self, which is the Field of Value. Now we have a conversation. We Need to Be Messiahs — We Need To Raise the Conversation to the Assumption that There Is a Field of Value Zak: Right. I’ll say one thing. I can’t think about this conversation without thinking about this category—you have this conversation, the Eye of Value, which allows us to see intrinsic value, which can bind desire, can hold the will and allow creativity to be flowing with the Cosmos, right? And then you have the eye of anti-value, which actively seeks out the sacred to destroy it, which would mean, in the conversational context, it would be destroying conversations, seeking to destroy the deepest conversations you could have. So it would be using Barbie to make it impossible for you in your relationship to talk about love, actually. Right? The eye of anti-value is advertising. It is the thing that gets right into your heart and clicks the thing, and now you can’t see correctly what you value. There’s of course, the term Messiah, which means to raise the conversation, right? Marc: Right. Zak: So, very much what we’re attempting to do, what this re-articulation of a new language for value would allow for would be, throughout all of these conversations, a changing of the conversation, which would say, actually Barbie’s insane. Right? It’s actually insane. Where it’s not even like you have to argue against it anymore. And this is the way Habermas talks about cultural evolution, the old ways of making arguments don’t even work anymore. We’re in a new stratum of language and justification. So similarly, we need to move out of the place where you can have as an assumption that there’s no Field of Value back into a place where you have as an assumption that there’s a Field of Value. I think it was in The Religion of Tomorrow, Ken, where you say something like, in medieval times God was everywhere. And then you get modernity and God’s nowhere. And then what’s ever next? God is everywhere again. And that’s a very fundamental messianic… Marc: That’s the Field of Value. Zak: And the messianic transformation of the assumption behind all the conversations. Ken: Right. And that involves a pre-trans fallacy. Zak: Yes. Ken: What I’m getting is, as I’m listening to us talk is, let’s say the result of our conversations on value come out as a book. What would that book be called? An idea that keeps coming back to me is, because we talked about value and that led us to meaning, and wholeness and creativity… Listen to all those different terms that we’re introducing and in a sense, recontextualizing, and giving new meaning to. What if we had like a book called, it wouldn’t be this, it would be something clever, “The Meaning Crisis.” “The Crisis of Meaning in Today’s World.” Something like that. And we start with meaning and introduce value, and then development, evolution, then creativity and Eros, etc. Because I’m sure we’re going to come up with several other topics that were… Marc: That’s a good start. Ken: Yeah. So if we, if you just play that out, it would be, here’s meaning and here’s the meaning of meaning. And here’s value and here’s creativity, pre/trans God… Marc: It’s great. Zak: It’s beautiful, right? Marc: I mean, I know we’re wrapping and it’s just delightful to be back in conversation. We didn’t take that much time off, maybe like 10 months or something like that. Ken: Yeah. Marc: So it’s great. It’s great to pick up and congratulations on our first book out together, David J. Temple, it’s very sweet of him. As we move into this kind of anthro-ontology and value, I want to play off of what you said, Ken, and we said Zak. We invoked this Hebrew trope that messiah, mashiach means shiach, conversation. And by the way, if anyone wants to source it’s in a man named Nahom of Chernobyl, who wrote a book called The Light of the Eyes, and it’s in the section on Pinkas, our dear colleague, Arthur Green translated it, and he did a very good job. So anyone can also find the translation of it, that mashia, shia means conversation. In essence, what Messianism, Messiah is, in some sense, waking up, growing up, showing up, cleaning up and opening up—your language, right? Messiah is the new human, new humanity. Messiah is Homo amor—language we’ve used. So Messiah’s the one who reinvigorates conversation at the human level as intrinsically meaningful. And I want go back to that earlier image that emerged from between us, which is understanding that the mental breakdown, which is the source of the meta-crisis there, the core breakdown of self, the meaning crisis, if you will, is sourced in this human being who experiences their whole physicality and their interiors—being all these meaningful conversations—and then is told that there’s not an ultimately meaningful conversation to be had. And then all of your conversations feel like the hollow men and the stuffed men. Right? Ken: The eye of Sauron is everywhere. Marc: The eye of Sauron is everywhere, watching… Ken: And it started by getting rid of Value. Because value and meaning are hooked, it very quickly became a meaning crisis. It hasn’t quite destroyed the meaning of meaning for people because everybody talks about the meaning crisis, therefore they know what they’re missing. Marc: Right. There’s a sense it’s missing. Ken: But when the eye of Sauron finishes the sense of meaning, there won’t even be a meaning crisis. There will just be a nothingness. By Hijacking Conversation, AI Can Create a Sense of Nothingness and Take Away Our Ability to Create Meaning Zak: That’s what AI would do. Because think about what AI is, right? It’s producing text on a screen which you perceive as meaningful, which actually is not meaningful. Marc: It’s pretending. And this is the point that you’ve made, Zak, before. Right? Zak’s made the point before that, if AI would actually look like it was AI, it would be okay, but it’s pretending to personify itself. So another way to say that is the same thing, your core point, but let me move it into this Messiah conversation. It’s pretending to have a conversation. Zak: Yeah. Marc: So it’s hijacking the very notion of conversation, which is the defacing. Zak: And it will also make it so that anytime I read text on a screen, I’m thinking, was this text produced by a human or was this text produced by something that isn’t human, that has no intended communicative intent? It has no semantic manipulation ability. So it’s this deep thing where it’s moving past the meaning crisis and possibly taking away our ability to create meaning, even in the very simple sense of, like, having language that we share together. Marc: I mean here’s the strange analogy. In the same way that the pornographic universe literally deconstructs people’s ability to participate in Eros, including sexually, because the pornographic universe deadens. In the same way, this AI-invested world of artificial conversations, literally, is a kind of pornographic universe that de-eroticizes your capacity to have a conversation. And it’s not by accident that we’re responding to this by having conversations. Right? In other words, we’re saying, we’re going to actually have conversations that are ultimately meaningful. And we’re going to share those conversations. Zak: Yeah. Until the Field of Value is understood such that conversation matters again, then you won’t care if you’re talking to an AI. Until humans clarify what they are and what it’s worth to be a human, right now, it’s very difficult to convince… Ken: And that’s another fundamental area that we’ll be talking about, which is communication and conversation. Marc: Huge. Ken: And we’ve already established this, it goes all the way down. Marc: Right. And what is the definition of polarization, which is one of the major vectors of the meta-crisis? It is the incapacity to have a conversation. Once there’s a conversation that’s happening, then we can play. Zak: The universe starts again. Marc: And I would say, I’m not going to invoke any particular piece of anyone’s autobiography or biography, but I’d say we’re all familiar, in the very real world, with the places where the tragedy was not that the conversation broke apart, the tragedy was, the conversation never started. It never happened. Ken: Yeah. And our conversation happens to follow all of the principles we’re talking about. It’s a drive from one holon to a greater holon. That’s what we’re groping for. So, we’re evolving as we’re talking about it. Marc: And you can feel the joy in it. Zak: You can feel the joy in it. Marc: Thank you. Zak: Beautiful. Ken: Yeah. Marc: Thank you. That was awesome. Mentioned Sources: * Gafni, Marc; Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, 2017 * Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, The Free Press, 1929 * Turing, Alan, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, Vol. 237, No. 641, pp. 37–72, 1952 * Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, The Russian Messenger (serial publication); separate edition, 1880 * Chopra, Deepak; Mlodinow, Leonard, War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet — and Do Not, Harmony Books, 2011 * Wilber, Ken, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Shambhala Publications, 1995 * Gafni, Marc, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, Integral Publishers, 2012 * Wilber, Ken, The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development, Quest Books, 1980 * Skinner, B. F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 * Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man, Oxford University Press, 1943 * Dear, Brian, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture, Pantheon Books, 2017 * Pentland, Alex, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science, Penguin Press, 2014 * Wilber, Ken, The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions—More Inclusive, More Comprehensive, More Complete, Shambhala Publications, 2017 * Nahum of Chernobyl; Green, Arthur (trans.), The Light of the Eyes, Paulist Press, 1986 Mentioned People: * John Mackey (1953–) * Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) * William Shakespeare (1564-1616) * Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) * Karl Marx (1818–1883) * Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) * David Feinstein (1948–) * Moshe Feinstein (1895–1986) * Charles Taylor (1931–) * Alex Pentland (1958–) * B. J. Fogg (1963–) * B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) * Noam Chomsky (1928–) * David Kessler (1951–) * John Locke (1632–1704) * Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) * Homer Rolston III (1932–2025) * Shoshana Zuboff (1951–) * Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) * Steven Pinker (1954–) * Howard Bloom (1943–) * Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) * Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) * Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) * Michael E. Zimmerman (1946–) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. 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April 1 · 56 min
CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism: Fragrances of Their Important Distinctions
About this episode: This dialogue is a special episode, a spontaneous conversation of Dr. Marc Gafni with Layman Pascal and Brandan Graham Dempsey, held at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. It is a first step towards deeper conversation between CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple (Marc Gafni) in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, April 2026, Episode: “CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism: Fragrances of Their Important Distinctions” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. P.S. If you want to meet Dr. Marc Gafni in person, there is only one event of the year, and seats are going fast. Click here to join. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:45 — You Can’t Reduce Evil to Trauma 7:17 — Can We Talk About Evil Without Metaphysics? 27:07 — About First Principles and First Values 28:03 — Metamodernism and Cosmo-Erotic Humanism in Conversation 41:25 — We Need to Cultivate an Ethic of Synergy and Kindness in the Space End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Marc: So Isaiah Chapter 45 verse 7. We look at Isaiah as a prophet. He’s more of a shamanic master. Prophets are more shamans. We use the word prophet, it’s this kind of Christian word… But if you look at the literature, prophets are described almost always in the third century Midrashic literature, through texts of the Song of Songs. Meaning they’re erotic texts. By erotic I don’t mean sexual, I mean they’re shamanic erotic texts, and essentially the Song of Songs is a shamanic erotic document. The prophet for us is this guy at the gate saying, “Repent ye, repent ye,” but actually it doesn’t capture who they were. Which is why the prophets and the pagans were interlocked in debate. Not because the prophets were like, “Oh, pagans are bad,” but they were very close—they’re the flip side of the pagans. And what’s his name, that guy? Oh, Gafni. He has a chapter in The Mystery of Love, in the old thing, a chapter on prophets and pagans, which you would like—something we’ve never talked about. It’s directly related to that conversation. Layman: But we haven’t discussed it. Marc: Right. So back at the ranch. You Can’t Reduce Evil to Trauma Marc: 45:7 the text reads, Isaiah shamanic master, yotzer ohr u-boreh choshech oseh shalom u-voreh ra. yotzer ohr—who creates light u-boreh choshech—and creates darkness oseh shalom—creates wholeness (not peace) u’voreh ra—and creates evil Brendan: Mm-hmm. Marc: That’s the play. In the end, there’s a nondual monism in play, but there’s a dialectical ontology of evil within it. Brendan: Yeah. Big theodicy questions. Marc: Yeah. It’s everything. You may remember Brendan, we were once together in the space at that Symposium and we talked a little bit about that on Sunday, we talked there about the term “anthro-ontology.” Anthro-ontology tells me that I can’t reduce evil to trauma. There’s this move that we make in modernity, we basically reduce evil to a therapeutic problem. I’ve pushed back on you in a couple of conversations we’ve had just on this or that where you know, Layman’s very understanding of everyone and I’m saying, “No, there’s actually a line--that’s not okay.” But it’s not a moralistic prophetic sense. It’s a shamanic sense. We’re like, “What’s the line?” The Borgias were the line—they were murdering people all over. So it’s not just trauma. Trauma doesn’t anthro-ontologically explain it. Brendan: I know we both have benefited a lot from Nietzsche and integrated some thoughts around his framings into a religiosity that Nietzsche could maybe get behind or be comfortable with. And as an interesting exercise to attend to the critiques that he’s leveling, and then say “Oh, well, there’s something there.” He talks about the great health and about the possibility of conceiving a lot of these metaphysical principles more in terms of what leads to flourishing, vibrancy, vitality, increase of well-being—these sorts of things. Will to power, you could put that in that matrix. But yeah, for me that was very helpful to be able to re-situate, re-understand notions of sin and also evil as a failure to bring out the fullness of the vital, the healthfulness of things and so people… Layman: Somewhere between what the two of you are saying, the way I normally talk about nihilism and fascism is being related. The culture is full of nihilistic elements operating in various dimensions at various scales, where there’s self-undermining of all kinds of things going on, but it’s not really in my mind fascism until it mobilizes to start to destroy these things. Right? There’s all these tendencies that undermine or take away from or not fully increase in thriving, but there’s a slightly different move and a different felt quality when it actively starts to go back the other way. It’s not just not establishing thriving. It’s actively intending anti-thriving. Marc: Sauron. Yeah. Received. Nietzsche, I love Nietzsche. His passages on music and his understanding of reality not as mechanics, but music and his mocking of the mechanical understandings of reality are just like, “F**k! Thank you!” And Nietzsche is, in a way, Rilke is a similar way, where… When I first encountered Nietzsche I was majoring in philosophy, so I did all the courses at the college for one semester. Like, 25 courses in philosophy when you’re 18 and you do that crazy move. So I’m reading Nietzsche, and I’m like, “F****r, you motherfucker.” What he basically does is he takes a loan of social capital. Nietzsche is the last great philosopher in a certain way. He’s both the end and the beginning of something new. He both destroys, but he’s still in the lineage. Nietzsche is taking a loan of philosophical capital or metaphysics from the great tradition still, in which he assumes that… On the one hand he’d have a passage where a postmodernist could say “It’s a social construct,” then he’ll have a whole series of other passages where he’s assumed that that aliveness and that flourishing is a value of reality and an inherent and intrinsic value of reality. Not a made-up value. When you read Rilke, Rilke is like, “Yeah, it’s all over when we die and dah, dah, dah,” and he’s filled with Value. So there are these hinge figures. I’ll give you another example. There’s a guy named Ephraim Ben Chaim, who was one of Israel’s great poets. We were very close friends. Another guy is Haim Gouri—these are two of the great poets of Israel and they died, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago. They were at the ‘48 war, they were in love with Hebraic texts. Complete heretics, but they assumed the text would always be there. They never meant to get rid of the text. They meant like, “We’re going to borrow all that capital, then destroy it and then assume it’ll go on forever.” So that’s what Rilke assumed and Nietzsche thought: “Of course the values.” It never occurred to them that “Oh, it’s all made up.” Can We Talk About Evil Without Metaphysics? Brendan: Yeah, I understand that and could see how you could put Nietzsche in that lens. I guess for me, it’s less about Nietzsche as a philosopher, as a thinker, but he names a particular thing that I think is a merit of an idea that can be entertained outside of Nietzsche and the rest of his project. That’s the big thing for me. It’s an “immanent-izing” of value—in a way that we can appreciate how things have an intrinsic relational dynamic that can give rise to, “This is valuable, this is good,” for all the things. You’re talking about the Borgias, right? Murder, torture, all these things are entropic, dissolving things. They take away complexity. But if there’s an aspect of, “When do I feel full? When do I feel rich and filled with a kind of enthusiastic capacity?” These are things that enhance, improve and complexify—that all seem to be totally cognizable without having to refer to metaphysical principles in the classic sense. Marc: So here’s the question. This is great. I totally get it. You just hit the crux of the conversation, and again, you and I have talked through Z and we were in that space together, we’ve never been in a different space. But it’s the crux, which is like this. Let’s take a different example. Look at parapsychology. It’s a good example. It’s very clear that parapsychology violates the laws of physics. Clearly—time, etc. etc. So why would one think the laws of physics apply, when it’s very clear—based on a radical empiricism—that they don’t. The laws of physics are both real, yet it’s very very clear there’s an entire other world at play. In other words, it’s true that all metaphysical principles should be immanent. They should be available in an immanent way, immanent-izing. That makes perfect sense. But why would we think that the immanent-izing is not sourced in a wider, deeper set of structures? Because, it’s like when you read Nick Bostrom. Let’s say you read Superintelligence. For Nick, if the lights go out, the lights go out. Therefore he’s so crazy about it, because this is the only place there’s light in any place, and if the lights go out, there’s no more light! But why would you think that? There’s lots of information that tells you when the lights go out they probably open someplace else. So I noticed (and again, I could be completely wrong—I’m pulling the exchanges up in my mind now at that symposium) that in a certain sense it seems like you’re trying to find a way to dance at both weddings. I’m translating from the Yiddish phrase. On the one hand you want to access the richness of the ontological traditions, and on the other hand you want to remain within a purview of a larger conversation that includes the structures that disallow metaphysics—because that’s where there’s a big mainstream dialogue there. But maybe we need to challenge—and all met tenderly with so much honor—but maybe we need to challenge the inappropriate reductions in a very direct way. Brendan: Mm-hmm. Marc: And in that sense, I’m religious. I’m overtly religious in that sense. And I think we need to be. I think we need to reclaim religion in a very direct way, which is why we changed the name of the Center, to the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. Does that make any sense, that exchange? Brendan: It certainly makes sense. And then we’d want to deepen into that. Marc: That’s right. Layman: There’s a lot of different approaches we could use that maybe cut both ways for the new religiosity. Maybe we do need to proffer that challenge. But maybe we also have to consider that dancing at both weddings is a good idea and something we can get better at. Marc: Right, so, both of you guys, if I understand correctly, are dancing at both weddings in different ways. Brendan: Maybe could you spell out the significance of that metaphor? I’m not sure if I’m dancing at both weddings. I like being invited to multiple weddings. [Laughter] Marc: It’s exactly all of that, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s exactly all of that. Of course, at different weddings there’s different menus and different kinds of wine, so we’re happy with all of that. But I think the core is actually what you just said, and you said it in a funny way but of course there’s a deeper intuition, which is we want to be invited to all the weddings. I think that’s actually true. We need to be invited to all the weddings. In other words, it’s a moment where we can’t afford to close ourselves into any community. We need a broader reach. And if I understand, and again, I’m mediated through Zak here, the way Zak has shared with me what you’re doing, so I’m going through it, but basically you’re leaning towards the wedding…. I mean, Howard’s that way, Howard Bloom. Howard’s fantastic. He’s a wild, crazy, insane man in all the good ways. Reading Howard’s like, as Ken said to me once in a phone call, “reading postcards from the edge.” Howard’s crazy in a great way and he’s done so much original work. He’s like 81 and he did his own wild move in the world, very uneven. Layman: He came up a few times this week. Gregg Henriques just spoke with him on something. Marc: So Howard and I have talked every other week for seven, eight years at the think tank. Whenever I do something in science, I bring it to Howard and ask him to challenge it because he does science well. That’s his thing. I talk to Howard mostly science, just straight science. But there was a particular point I was pushing on a particular—doesn’t matter what it was—and he said, “Marc, I just can’t do that.” So I said, “Howard, we’ve been talking for seven years. I gave you the seven steps. It’s clear that I’m f*****g right. So just say I’m f*****g right and let’s get over it.” He says, “I can’t.” I said, “Why?” He says, “I’m a Jewish boy from upstate New York and Buffalo and I overthrew religion and I’ve identified my whole life in a particular box. I just can’t do it.” I said “Okay.” That was really beautiful and we have a recording of it. Barbara Marx Hubbard was on the call. It was a very beautiful moment. It was a very honest, “I just can’t do that.” He said,” I’m a stone-cold atheist.” I said, “Okay…and you’re a materialist mystic? Okay…” I just wrote a 5,000 word introduction to his new book which we’re publishing called The Sexual Cosmos, and he had read a draft of a book I did called The Intimate Cosmos. He said, “I like that name,” but it’s Howard. He won’t break his… He just can’t. So he’s dancing at that wedding. Brendan: So, if I understand the idea of dancing at both weddings, there’s this notion and it relates to the drawing from the social capital of traditionalism, to then undermine that with modernity and you want to have it both ways. So I’m following that, but I guess that’s not the way that I see this kind of move and what it can offer. Because let’s say, the example that comes to mind is from King Lear. “What is the cause of thunder?” “Where does lightning come from?” That’s what Lear asked the fool. “Where does lightning come from?” You can, in a certain context, say: well, it’s got to be a god up there of incredible power, who’s hurling some kind of lightning bolt in this sort of a thing, and that is a mapping to what is the experience of a thunderstorm, of a lightning storm. You’re like, okay, that’s an accounting for that, that makes sense and I can see that when I experience that. There’s a correspondence. Then another way to account for that is, there’s this electromagnetic field and then there’s a gradient and there’s a discharge, and this, and that. Now what’s interesting, I think, is that that’s still accounting for the same phenomenon. It’s giving a different account, but of a different kind and I think of an ultimately superior quality, in that it’s causally closed in an Occam’s razor sense, it’s sort of like, there’s nothing left over. It’s like ah, that is a very sufficient account of this phenomenon. So, for me when I look at value, I’m like, can we make a similar move? And so instead of saying is there a god in the sky throwing lightning bolts in here, it would be, is there some foundational metaphysical principle outside of space and time or something? I would say, well, is there a different way of conceiving that in the same way that we reconceived lightning and thunder to be an immanentized naturalistic phenomenon that we can account for, with a kind of closure to it? But it’s not dancing at both weddings because you still experience value. When I see it this way it’s an account that maps and it’s not like, I’m having my cake and eating it too. This is all real and in fact, it’s a confirmation and a deepening into the realness of value, but it’s a reframing of it, but it’s done in a different way. Marc: First, this is beautifully said. Thank you. And that’s pretty much how Zak has related it, so I guess you got it right. So here’s the one sentence response and it’s a fantastic conversation, which I deeply appreciate. I think you’re just wrong. But that’s where it gets exciting and interesting, which is for the following reason. The experience of value is not the experience of ascribing a thunderstorm to a kind of external to the universe God, etc. The experience of value, and that’s what I mean by anthro-ontology, when I experience the rape of a baby, I’m not experiencing an immanentized survival drive driven by evolution moving towards flourishing. I’m experiencing evil. Raping babies is evil. It’s a violation of the cosmic order, which is always beyond space and time. Even parapsychology tells us space and time doesn’t exist, so why are we reverting to the space-time continuum? It’s obviously a much larger world than the space-time continuum. So why would we even make that move? And what drives me is, to be very overt about it, my parents, and my mother in particular—my father’s Siberia camp, my mother’s your straight horrible story Holocaust survivor person. She sees when she’s four years old, the story of my youth was about a baby being literally ripped apart by a wishbone. I heard that story probably thousands of times. That was my mother’s milk. Brendan: S**t. Marc: Everybody was killed, but in pretty bad ways. That’s a violation of the cosmic order. It’s not oh, there’s an immanentized thing called… No. No, it’s Sauron. You’re violating something here, which is clearly not limited by the space-time continuum because we know that the space-time continuum—I could cite six papers, but you know the same six papers. We know what’s happening in science today. If you’re reading the leading edge of mathematics, I’m sure you are, you’re reading all over that stuff. We know the space-time continuum, citing one paper right now, is collapsing. We know that’s true. And I could send you a bunch of footnotes, but I’m sure you’re reading similar things. So, why would we limit it? I just don’t get it. Why would we, and again, the sharpness of my voice is not personal, it’s delightful, right? It’s like: 1) Why would we limit ourselves to the space-time continuum? 2) The anthro-ontological experience is that of a violation of a Platonic principle. And why are we okay—and I can cite six people on this, I’m sure you can as well—but let’s say, there’s X amount of reductive materialists who talk about mathematics as being Platonic and they contradict themselves. Brendan: Mm-hmm. Marc: Ah, Platonic!? Right? Like, work that out buddy. So you have to read, which most people don’t, if you read across a wide enough vector you just get, why would you want to immanentize evil? I’ll be very direct about this. What’s the name of that guy? That Howard wanted to introduce me to and I never met him. He wrote a book called romancing something…and reality… Brendan: The Romance of Reality. Layman: Bobby Azarian. Marc: Right, I’m just going to be this very direct and I apologize for this. I’ll give an example. Zak and Alexander and a bunch of those people forwarded me a thing, about a whole bunch of weeks ago where Bobby attacks me on the thread. Brendan: The IDW listener thing? Marc: The Alexander thing. Brendan: Yeah, the Bard thing. Marc: Yeah. Like, viciously. Brendan: I didn’t see it but I heard about it. Marc: The guy’s never met me. They don’t know me. Clearly read me, he’s got some intellectual jealousy. I’ve experienced this many times. Never talked to me and makes a bunch of crazy, insane assumptions. And Zak was like, there’s like a little evil, this is bad. It’s like that. And they push back on him. They said, what the f**k? I had never read him, so I got the book. I open it. I read a bunch of pages. I said, oh, okay. That makes sense. Meaning, he was making a similar move to what you’re describing, when I read him, which was like complexity theory, but actually when it came right down to it, he went into materialism. And when you go into materialism, you know—the churches were evil. We know that adopting a metaphysical view doesn’t avoid evil. Voltaire, “remember the cruelties.” I get that, of course, but our hope for the future, in the end the only thing that drives me is a battle against evil. I grew up in that. I think we grew up in a different place. Layman: Sure. Marc: I grew up in a battle against evil. Brendan: Mm-hmm. Marc: I’m still fighting Hitler. That’s what I’m doing. I’m hard to understand even to myself without understanding that. Brendan: Sure. Marc: I see that baby being ripped apart and think I’m responsible… Layman: When we look at CosmoErotic Humanism and the metamodern, I think we come from a nicer place. We’re thinking, yeah, battle for good. We’re not necessarily thinking battle against evil, but we’re open to those possibilities. But what I hear is an uncertainty relative to the scale. Like, when we say beyond space and time, is that just unthinkable infinities or is it some other space-like, time-like something else? And when we say immanent, how immanent is immanence? Is there another, bigger range of things that we could still call immanent that are outside of what normally gets that? Marc: And that’s great. Brendan: Yeah, my notion of transcendence is an immanent transcendence… Marc: No, no, I get the dancing at both weddings, right? In a good way. That wasn’t a critique, that’s beautiful. Brendan: Yeah, in a good way. Because the negative side of dancing at both weddings is saying, you know, wanting to have your cake and eat it too. It’s an impossibility as a contradiction, it’s in some ways a kind of deep hypocrisy. Marc: Did I say all of that? [Laughter] Brendan: Oh, no, no. I’m just not familiar with the idiom. I think that’s sort of an incomplete contradiction. But then there’s that dialectical synthesis. Marc: Totally. Brendan: And that’s what I’m always looking for. Here’s this radical polarity, is there a way in which if we set it up that way, we’re missing how these are actually deep parts… Marc: Totally. And you and I, because you’ve done it with Zak, we should at some point do a dialogue. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: We’d have this conversation and it’s why I’m an atheist. You know what I mean? Although I’m not. That’s the thing. Atheism has—if we ever have time, at a different time, maybe next year, there’s a Torah by Nachman of Breslov called Torah 64. You have the Sufi thing, in which you have this password when you’re in the market in Damascus and you say this password, they realize you’re a Sufi… So in certain circles of Hebrew mysticism, there’s what they call Torah 64, which is Nachman 64. That’s his thing, where he basically starts by saying, God withdrew and left a void. And we’ve always said that that void is epistemological. Meaning, I cover the Sun, don’t see the Sun. But he’s saying and we’ve dismissed for the last 200 years of text the idea that void could ever be ontological. Because how could you not have God? So Nachman says, if you know how to read him, he says, no, no, let’s take it seriously. Let’s take the void seriously. Brendan: yeah, yeah Which is of course the atheistic move. So here’s Nachman, this major motherfucker Hasidic master saying, oh, void. And the other dude who did this was Mordechai Leiner of Izbica, that’s why I wrote about him in Radical Kabbalah. He is the guy who basically is making a move on the other side, which is, the void is real and of course, it’s not. We need to make that move. The first book I ever wrote, I wrote it in English, it got translated in Hebrew, published in Hebrew, I was like 26, 27 and we haven’t yet published it in English. It was about this issue. I tried to review all the theodicies in the world. I did all the theodicies and then said f**k these. That’s b******t. They just don’t work. And try to then work from there. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: There is no theodicy that stands in the face of burning babies. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: It just doesn’t. That ripped apart baby? Do not f*****g explain it to me or I will f*****g shoot you. So that’s where your play is really important. Does that make sense? Brendan: Yeah, sure. And one of the things that’s always helped me about a kind of evolutionary take on folding God into the divine aspect of evolution, development and unfolding, in a sense, and I think you’d take a very different take on this, is this notion that in some way there are things that actually aren’t intended, aren’t planned, aren’t under God’s control. There’s a limitation of the divine because when babies are getting ripped apart, that’s not because there is this God who’s created anti-value and is somehow ultimately in control and had a big master plan, it’s because God is part of the unfolding evolutionary saga as well, and until people can get their act together then God’s going to be part of that story as well. So we are in the process of evolving God and if you go back, this is where the developmental stories come in. If you look at how God has evolved through human history, you’re like, oh, yeah, God used to be more of a pantheistic Mars or Zeus or this kind of figure and amoral. And then God does actually undergo a kind of moral evolution and… Layman: And I’m curious about your take on this kind of thing, because do you read the Old Testament as an improvement of God through the intercession of the prophets? Marc: Right. Each one of these is huge. But let’s step back for a second. I just want to go back to something that you said in passing. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Metamodernism and Cosmo-Erotic Humanism in Conversation Marc: It probably is worthwhile to more overtly juxtapose and bring into conversation what you’re calling Metamodernism and CosmoErotic Humanism. If I can again apologize, insincerely, of course, but for being overt, there’s a very big temptation for intellectual world-building and you know, philosopher-emerging, which human beings have. Right? I’m a little older than both of you guys and what happens is that I’ve also probably suffered in a different way. I’m sure you have your verticals. We all have verticals of suffering, so we’re not in a suffering sweepstakes, but what happens is in a certain sense, you become disinterested in a certain way and kind of intellectual world-building. It’s one of the reasons that we created David J. Temple. We wanted to create a different move. So in a certain sense, if we’re looking at the metacrisis together, we’re looking at the potential suffering together, we need to be more deeply aligned against unvalue, whatever that unvalue is, whether it’s immanent, or like… Brendan: We can all agree that ripping babies apart is a serious no-no. Marc: Right. And we need both contrast in intellectual debate, but also where are we standing together? Brendan: Yeah, for sure. Marc: Because we’re staying together in really important things, and we need desperately to have a shared space in which we can begin to really affect culture in more important ways. So when I first met Ken—and I know we haven’t circled back yet to the two points you made—but when I first met Ken, we talked about on the porch there, I remember the conversation, about Integral and how Integral has been adopted into Metamodernism not with a lot of citation, we talked about that, that hasn’t changed—so, bracket that. But when I met Ken, he was deeply in Buddhism, obviously, so he had a sense of this transcendent Buddhist notion, and so that was my challenge to Ken. And what came out of that challenge was the second person of God. We did the three faces of God after Ken and I talked for a couple years. We said, okay, let’s get God back in this story and let’s get rid of your kind of reductions of God to the Thunder story, which is what Ken was doing in Up from Eden and A Sociable God. That was his move. If you read the texts of our interiors and the sacred texts, in a given sentence in a sacred Sufi text, for example, you will find God as God and God as this immanent kind of play. So they were dancing at two weddings. And I think they’re both true. I don’t think God is only immanent in Cosmos, to be clear. I think that’s a mistake. An intellectual, spiritual, existential, moral mistake on every ground. And God’s also not dissociated from Cosmos. So there’s that dance of both weddings thing, and I think the dance of both weddings is just the truth. That’s where the truth lies, right? In other words, the truth is the Garden of Eden is not paradise. The Garden of Eden is paradox. That’s its notion. Layman: So I want to leap off that and who knows whether we’ll circle back to anything or not, but to me there’s a sense that the dancing at two weddings-ness is God’s nature. And that doesn’t preclude any fundamental moral and experiential limitations, but it’s a way of framing metaphysics as a kind of parallax, or adjacency, or doubleness in a way that would satisfy a lot of the postmodern critiques, but take those same structures in a positive sense and move forward. I think what we’re doing in terms of the sociological level, the metamodern is working out its theory collaboratively and what it’s focusing on collectively is community spirit building, [inaudible], we’re doing all that stuff outside of the theory but in tandem with our theory. But we do recognize a lot of moral sympathies with what you guys are doing here and a broader sense that a lot of different flavors and hubs in these related networks have to come together in order to cause some kind of cultural effect, which is why we’re here. Brendan: Yeah, if I had the First Principles and First Values book I could probably find the page, but there’s a great unfolding or articulation by David J. Temple about the project of being a post-postmodern project to reconstruct value, something to that effect. Marc: Great. Brendan: In that sense there’s profound alignment and I think also the diagnosis of the problem is also, vast amounts of overlap. And then it’s a matter of, okay, we’ve identified a set of issues that are these deep core problems at the root level of the meta-crisis and we’re zooming in on those. We’ve identified that value is a core aspect of that core and how we can effectively frame a reconstitution of this in a way that’s going to make sense to people, that’s going to play, that’s going to be in conjunction with reality, but most importantly, to make sense of this issue, to help resolve this. All that’s there. And then I think, to Layman’s point, that leads to, I think, a sort of variation and selective retention, sort of like a flower. You get a blooming, you get different approaches to this sort of problem space, and so I think we’re all chasing the solution to that issue and I think that is unfolding in different ways. And it’s good to have that plurality because there’s going to be pros and cons, benefits and demerits of any approach. Yeah, I see a hyper-fixated sort of like “this is the space that we’re operating in.” So there’s a lot of shared overlap in all of that. But then when you zoom in, how do we account for these? What are the answers that we’re giving? Then I think that’s where some of the diversity shows up and then I feel like there can be really fructifying, generative conversations across those differences. Debates, discussions, symposia, all of that. So then it’s just a matter of identifying those different hubs and working together to make sense. Marc: Yes, yes, and yes. And so, maybe friends, the thing to do is, practically, we should do in the fall—we don’t have to in person—an online symposium with Zak, the four of us, where we have a kind of CosmoErotic Humanism meets Metamodernism conversation. I think it’d be helpful for people. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: I think it’s good for the space. Layman: I think that could be really… Jeffrey: Do you mind if I shared a couple feelings about it? Layman: Yes! No. [Laughter] Go on. Jeffrey: First of all, I’m very new to all the philosophical context, you guys know I’m taking my first newborn steps, but in terms of the metacrisis, I’m someone who in the past maybe three years has done as much research as I practically could in terms of our context, and all of the trajectories and all of the insane kind of time limits on where we are going. I personally look up to all of you here who have been working and thinking about this for quite some time and for someone who, my skills are in 3D arts and film, and I feel I have a strong potential to pull levers that can do larger things. For someone like me, who is so emotionally invested in the well-being of all life and how we can move forward and make everything that I value about being a human possible in 100-200 years from now, and to even, in that process, remedy all of the pathologies of our current society as best as we can. I think similar paths, right? I definitely lean on a unification of those who really understand it and I think, you three, especially, and many others, if unified can produce such powerful energy that to me is the only way forward that works. Marc: Beautifully said. I want to just honor you Layman, and you Brendan because we’ve stepped into a space over the last couple years, which is seeing that—which is why we’re in conversation. We’re in conversation because it actually matters. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: Even starting in the fall with the symposium. It’s a message, because there’s so much—I got a little sad when they forwarded me that Bobby guy stuff because we have no time for this. Stop. We have to be visioning together. And it’s one of the things that Aubrey saw and had the kind of courage to step in. There’s no time for the nonsense. Brendan: Yeah. A couple thoughts. One of the challenges is when people can be putting some really valuable stuff into the space, but then they’re also juggling their own psychological health issues… And we can also appreciate the value of someone’s work while also recognizing there’s a problematic aspect for how this person’s showing up interpersonally, and that they’re bedeviled by some other aspects, to not necessarily overread what goes on in those kinds of contexts is anything significant in that sense. But the more important point I wanted to say is that unity, I think you probably would know this the best. The Jewish tradition is so beautiful in encouraging this kind of intellectual spiritual debate, right? The Talmudic scholars will like, all get together and they’ll be like, but this means this and this means this, and it’s this school, and this school… They’ll tear their hair out and pound the table. But this is a spiritual practice. So I see that when we have these kinds of conversations, it’s like it’s in both that lineage and that tradition, but it’s also in that spirit. There’s a deeper unity in that. Because at the end of the day, yeah, we’re fighting against a really nasty system with however we want to language it, in terms of anti-value or psychopathy or…. There are big problems and we’re all on that shared mission to reconstruct… Marc: Yes, yes, and yes, just the and...I think that’s what you’re pointing towards. We don’t make that apparent enough. We’ve understated that in a way. Jeffrey: I feel like there’s like 500 different organizations all doing something but there’s no… Like, there should be some messaging… Marc: We start small. We don’t need 500… Jeffrey: Sorry, I was hyperbolizing. Many different organizations now, doing their own thing. Important. But I think what’s lacking is a voice from this corner at this point. Marc: At this point, I’d say the two interesting emergences in the space—CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism. If we just start there. I’m saying take a baby step. That’s what I’m saying. Tenderly. I totally get it. Layman: You’re right, but it has to start somewhere. Marc: It has to start somewhere. In a certain sense, we have immediate access to this, and that will ripple. Weirdly enough, we don’t have to make any big declarations. Just by doing it, which you suggested, it was really as you said at the symposium, just by doing it, goodness will ripple. We don’t need to make declarations and stands on personal issues. We just do it. Layman: That’s how organic systems function. They’re not doing out their manifestos of lines necessarily. They’re just interacting. Marc: There’s lots of things we don’t need to take stands on. Layman: I want to flag for us to remember for another discussion, I’d be really interested to exchange a little bit about Andrew Cohen’s passing, but we can do that next time. Otherwise, I think what’s coming up here is, the urgency of this has to be more front and center and act as, not a unifying thing, but a reason for bringing these contexts together. Marc: Yes, the unifying thing but not a fusing thing. Brendan: Sure. Yeah. Marc: Yeah, exactly. We don’t want to fuse with you guys because you’re wrong. [Laughter] Brendan: I guess there’s a synergy that we’re missing and I feel like that synergy could then extend into communication with larger institutions and those in power. I think we’re not quite reaching that group. Marc: Received. Received. And I want to circle back to what Layman said. We Need to Cultivate an Ethic of Synergy and Kindness in the Space Marc: You don’t get to be unkind. You don’t get to brutalize people. You don’t get to it. In the Center, Jeffrey, I think you can attest to that, one of the things I work very very hard at is that kindness runs the Center. It’s a very very kind place. It’s a good place. No one gets to be an a*****e behind the scenes. If someone’s an a*****e, just get the f**k out. Layman: When you mentioned synergy what I thought was, it’s an ethic around synergy, right? Marc: Yeah. Nicely said. Layman: It’s an attitude of kindness and cooperativeness and conviviality between different centers, hubs, individuals and approaches to the same problem, so that they can coordinate as like a larger team against real problems. Marc: Well said. Brendan: The kindness thing I totally agree with. I think that there are ways to be kind, to be respectful and to have a sense of kinship with folks while also acknowledging disagreements and… Marc: And fierce. Brendan: Yeah. I think that that’s just the key. And we should call out, like, whatever Bobby was saying in that particular instance, for example, like that’s in no way a defense, it’s just saying, that’s really uncool. But there’s this other thing I did want to mention too and I’m curious how you parse this. I don’t know if you like Wagner’s music at all. Marc: I do. Brendan: You know, gosh, if you listen to Tristan und Isolde, and you listen to Prelude, you’re just like, this is literally the most f*****g piece of beautiful music that’s been ever created by a human being. How is this even possible? At the same time, as you know, Wagner was a terrible human being and an anti-semite, that was awful. So you’re stuck with and this is often unfortunately the case with folks who’ve gone on to produce these things that we marvel at and then we learn about them and we’re like, oh my God. There’s not just sometimes, often a disconnect between what people are able to instantiate in a particular kind of canonical oeuvre and how people show up in the world, in all their, you know, worse than foibles. And so, somehow having to be able to hold that is also an important skill to recognize that the interpersonal is somehow deeply related to but also separable from what has been the intellectual contribution of a particular person. Those should be both separable but also not independent, right? Like, it matters if someone’s writing a bunch of spiritual texts and then is a terrible person. That’s actually a significant datum. It’s not like, oh, but their work is great. We should take that seriously. But at the same time, especially when it’s not spiritual work, like, maybe you’re a great physicist, but you’re a lousy human being. The fact that you discovered something about electrons doesn’t necessarily bear on your EQ. That’s just something to consider as we find our sparring partners in this space and weigh what’s significant here. Marc: Yes, but with a distinction. An important distinction. We shouldn’t use that as a way not to do investigation, check issues, because otherwise what we’ll do is we’ll just lump everything into that. And the reason, of course, I’m sensitive to that is because there’s been a number of people over the years who have called me and said, yeah, yeah, we heard all that but you’re brilliant, so let’s talk. I said, I’m not talking to you. Do the investigation. Read the information. There’s a laziness… Brendan: Yeah, yeah. Marc: We don’t want to lump it all into that. Brendan: Sure. Marc: Because there’s that question that you’re dealing with and then there’s the question of, we actually are doing the “credibly accused” thing when there’s nothing. And it’s actually funny. We have a website up, that Barbara Marx Hubbard put up, called “Who Is Marc Gafni?” And it’s gotten, I don’t know, 30,000, 40,000 hits. But we’ve actually found that none of the attacking people ever look at it. Like, never. They just don’t look at it. There’s this laziness in the space and there’s all sorts of agendas and there’s all sorts of— we’ve lost touch with a word in the old text called tzedek which doesn’t translate well. It’s justice, it’s also kind of righteousness, but it’s kind of like ethos. It’s like there’s a fierceness to ethos. It matters. And if people feel that in us, they’ll be much more allured to what we’re doing. Correctly. Brendan: Yeah, and then there’s another aspect to this too, where it’s like… Before this most recent retreat someone posted a meme, basically the joke was the things that happen at Sky Meadow are a suicide death cult, people are drinking the Kool-aid and here’s the Kool-aid Man. Everyone’s laid out on the floor and ha ha ha. So there are ways that people just, like, lob things at you. Marc: Yeah, totally. Oh, wait, so it’s not a suicide death cult then? Brendan: Apparently. Jeffrey: I’m still alive! Brendan: I was looking to find out at this one, but it didn’t go that way. [Laughter] So, yeah, there’s a way in which, how do you hold that and how does one respond to it? There’s a certain way where the more that can fall away—and I also recognize there’s a big difference between the stuff that’s lobbed at you and me, and all that—with that being said, I’ve really valued talking to Layman whenever things come up in the space because I think you’ve got a good sense. It’s like, look, we should expect more and more of these kinds of things as this stuff hopefully continues to grow, and so there should be kind of an antifragility that we get comfortable with. There’s wisdom in recognizing, all right, I’m not going to go after them, trying to clear up the record that Sky Meadow isn’t a death cult when this kind of thing comes up. This is in some sense par for the course and on another register kind of insignificant. Because if there’s a real signal there people are going to tune into it, and so the kinds of people that are going to be along for this ride are going to be able to see that, and also see that it’s noise. Marc: Some will. Brendan: Yeah. And again, I’m confident enough that there’s enough signal there that it would be a waste of my time and energy to try to attend to those things rather than the project at hand. Marc: That makes sense. Brendan: And we wouldn’t want to over-amplify our detractors by responding to them and then making a thing out of something that doesn’t have to be. That’s why I think there’s a lot more unity than we probably appreciate. The less we can get bogged down in terms of who did, this person, what they say, and all of that… Marc: Agreed. I think antifragility is a good description of it. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: Good word. Layman: Yeah. It’s a good word. Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that the public outreach arm of Integral was really weak on. They really tried to promote this image of themselves as like this clean, new version of super inclusive, super consciousness or something like that, right? And when it’s shiny and white, any little bit of dirt on it makes it look completely soiled. Someone says well, it failed now! Look at all those controversies! You know, yeah, it should have been something like the way Taleb presents it. If you’re set up to be antifragile, when something comes at you, in some ways it ought to be able to make you stronger. It ought to be able to reinforce what you’re doing. And if it doesn’t, then you probably haven’t come at it in quite the right way. But our whole system is set up to design us toward fragile systems. Brendan: Yeah, it’s almost like Trump’s playbook. Layman: Yeah, Trump’s been an incredible personal demonstrator of it. But this goes against Taleb, right? Like, he exports fragility onto others to get antifragility for himself. But he does demonstrate that antifragility is a viable factor. Marc: Yes. Yes, and here’s the thing. You can be antifragile because you’re a sociopath or you can be antifragile because you’re so filled with love and Eros. Brendan: That’s beautiful. Marc: And that’s the distinction. Trump is antifragile because he’s such a f*****g sociopath, even though he’s right about a bunch of technical things here and there, because he’s got a bunch of good advisors. Basically, and the way you know it is, if any of us here had a daughter, who would want Trump to know your daughter? So there’s a way to be antifragile then which comes from, how can you be an empath? Brendan: Yeah, yeah. Marc: Yeah, the distinction is very big. How do we even be mad lovers and then be antifragile? That’s all because the reason we’re fragile is because we feel so much. Brendan: Yeah. For sure. So we’re so fragile. How can we be like mad lovers and antifragile, but Trump’s the other. He’s sitra achra. He’s the tragic on the other side. Layman: This is a whole good conversation of its own because I bet we all have some strategies worked out to solve exactly that. Marc: Yeah, this is great. Layman: You wanted to say something? Jeffrey: I was going to touch on the love piece, because to me… Marc: No time for that. [Laughter] Jeffrey: It’s kind of similar in your framing. Trump is so sociopathic that he can hold any criticism because he doesn’t give any care at all. Marc: Because he’s not holding it. Jeffrey: It just passes by. Right. But love, when deep enough, can hold it all without letting it hit you in a sense. Marc: Yes. That’s the A of love that the new age points out correctly. And B, love discerns. Jeffrey: Absolutely. Marc: Love wields Manjushri’s sword. So Brendan and I were saying, we’re not going to just lump any controversy into, yeah, f**k that. It’s good work. Although we need to figure out when to do that, and we’re going to have to actually discern. And discern doesn’t mean—here’s the thing, no one has time to go into every issue. God, I don’t want to read Who Is Marc Gafni… It was so long ago… But we can discern. There’s ways to discern. And you could read one article. I won’t do a podcast with anyone today unless they’re willing to read two, three articles. That’s a standard policy. I won’t do a 10-minute conversation with any new podcast without saying, hey, you’re going to get hit. These three people are going to write you… They’re going to say… Go read an article. If you can’t do that, right? We found our own way, but people have to be willing. We have to learn to cultivate discernment and Layman, as you say, especially as the information ecology is breaking down so dramatically that we have to stand for that and distinguish. We have to be radiance in some way. Layman: Not only can we not learn and study everything individually, but not everybody has to be in every conversation. But some people from each network have to be able to be in those conversations, right? Alexander Bard brings this up really well in his understanding of the traditional role of the shaman going way back. If you have two tribes and they’re running into each other and they’re extremely alien, they might as well be demonic to each other as far as they’re concerned. The individuals with high trait openness or high inter-tribal skills or something like the shamans have to do the inter-splicing between those things. Not everybody in those tribes can be expected to be in those conversations. Marc: That’s true. Layman: We’re all going to be in spaces where you talk to somebody, like, they’re not capable of it. And maybe they don’t have to be. But the ones who are then need to move over. Marc: Absolutely. Brendan: And there’s a number of folks that are actually right in the middle of the Metamodern and CosmoErotic Humanism spaces. I just did a podcast with Brad Kerschner, he came to one of the labs and he’s familiar with a lot of stuff going on. Or Daniel Thorson, a lot of overlap. So there are a lot of folks metabolizing the CosmoErotic Humanism stuff that are also playing the Metamodern spirituality scene. And to that point, these are mushy membranes that are overlapping and you’re going to find those edges at a certain point of, like, oh, I read it this way or I go this way with this idea, but there’s a lot of fructifying, cross-pollination going on there. Marc: Totally. No, no, it’s good. Layman: I think we’re really willing to work with you even though you’re wrong. [Laughter] Marc: I just want to say something, I notice…it just occurred to me that the conversation this year is appropriately the next step deeper than it was last year…we can all feel that…it’s nice to just collect that. Brendan: Yes. Layman: There’s something in the moment that’s occurring now which is allowing risks of various kinds to come forward, and one of the things that allows us to do is put down some of the superficial social and emotional baggage that’s been inhibiting the kind of higher level synergies we need in order to move forward. Brendan: Yeah, I don’t know, my impulse is something in the other direction, where I’ll take the things that I care about most and if someone comes up to me and they’re like, hey man, and as long as it’s done in good faith, like, let’s say, I read your metamodernism book, but I think you’re wrong on x, y and z, and I think this whole thing is deeply problematic and here, let me tell you why. I won’t say nope, flag in the ground, sorry. I’ll be like, okay, well, let’s talk about it. Marc: Totally. Brendan: We should also feel this deep openness to take the things that are most dear to our hearts and again, and this is the discernment aspect as well—is this person is coming from a genuine good faith orientation… Marc: On that we agree a thousand percent. Brendan: So, like, a fierceness against the b******t, but when it comes to genuine good faith engagement, it’s like… Marc: Meaning, there’s no dogma in this space. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: We’re anti-dogma. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: We’re happy, I hope that, for example, reading First Principles and First Values appropriately influenced you. And I look forward to, as I read you or Zak does, right? In other words, we should actually be delighted to impact each other. Brendan: Yeah. I have a footnote in my last book, like, this is how I’m reading this and this is my response to it, that sort of thing. Marc: Fantastic. Yeah, citing and reading… Layman: This also ripples up in the individual styles as well, right? You’re talking, you have an age and you have a background, right? So your person’s going to ripple out a certain way. You have a view of a certain thing, right? My thing is always going to be a little bit more nebulous. Everybody was talking about that the other day, right? [Laughter] Marc: Layman’s “nice Nazis problem…” Layman: Well, we’re going to have to qualitatively… Marc: There’s different kinds of nazis… Layman: #novelnazis [Laughter] Layman: Yeah, I just mean that it takes time to work it out. Because we don’t initially know that about each other and we have to figure out where that fierceness is relative to each person’s style, background and function in the overall system. Brendan: Exactly. That’s the plurality bit, like, the diversity is good, it might seem like it’s disconnection or even fragmentation Layman: And it might sometimes be. Brendan: Yeah, but even when working well, that friction can be like oh, this is actually like different cells in the body or different organelles doing different functions. Marc: Yeah. Layman: Let’s get close enough to make our disagreements useful, for sure. Brendan: Yeah. Marc: That’s a great sentence. That’s exactly right. It’s interesting, there’s a big category in Hebrew, which also exists in English, but not as dramatically. Contronyms. Contronyms are great. Close is one of them. Close (to close, closed) and close (near). It’s very beautiful. It’s a very beautiful contronym. I just wanted to use the word contronym because it’s so much fun. [Laughter] Layman: Very fructifying word. Marc: Very fructifying. Perspicaciously. [Laughter] Marc: That’s totally good. Mentioned Sources: * The Bible * Gafni, Marc, The Mystery of Love, Atria Books, 2003 * Bostrom, Nick, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014 * Bloom, Howard, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025 * Gafni, Marc, The Intimate Cosmos, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2024 * Shakespeare, William, King Lear, c. 1606 * Azarian, Bobby, The Romance of Reality, BenBella Books, 2022 * Nachman of Breslov, Likutey Moharan, Torah 64, Breslov Research Institute, 1808/1995 * Gafni, Marc, Radical Kabbalah (2 vols.), Integral Publishers, 2012 * Wilber, Ken, A Sociable God, New Science Library/Shambhala, 1983 * Wilber, Ken, Up from Eden, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981 * Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Antifragile, Random House, 2012 Mentioned People: * Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) * Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) * Ephraim Ben Chaim (1895-1981) * Haim Gouri (1923–2018) * Nick Bostrom (1973– ) * Zak Stein * Howard Bloom (1943– ) * Ken Wilber (1949– ) * Gregg Henriques (1968– ) * Barbara Marx Hubbard (1929-2019) * William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) * Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BCE) * Alexander Bard * Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) * Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) * Mordechai Leiner of Izbica (1801–1854) * Richard Wagner (1813-1883) * Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960-) * Donald Trump (1946-) * Brad Kerschner * Daniel Thorson Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
March 23 · 27 min
Journey of Becoming – Exploring the Garden of Eden – Part 2 of 3
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is Part 2 of a series of dialogues on the Garden of Eden. If you still haven’t listened to Part 1, we recommend you listen to it first by clicking here. In this second dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein deepen their exploration of the Garden of Eden, engaging with its complexities as a profound narrative about the evolution of desire, loneliness, and the process of becoming human. They examine the transition from the innocent unity of Adam and Eve to the birth of human complexity marked by desire, disobedience, and existential tension. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J.,Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, March 2026, Episode: “Journey of Becoming – Exploring the Garden of Eden – Part 2 of 3” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:31 — Context Setting 1:09 — Recapitulation: Garden of Eden, Chapter 2 2:31 — A Parenthesis on Genesis 2:24 - Leaving Father and Mother: The Condition of Desire 5:39 — The Garden of Eden, Chapter 3 16:42 — About First Principles and First Values 17:29 — The Garden of Eden Is a Text About Becoming Human 26:05 — Invitation to The Crossing End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: So again, David, he’s not here. But he asked us to record, continue speaking about the Garden. We were just getting into it. You might want to recapitulate maybe a little bit where we were. Marc: Yeah. On this one, if anyone is joining us for now, just listen to the immediate previous one, which is about 25 minutes on the Garden, where we opened up the Garden of Eden in Chapter 2 of Genesis. We’re going to go directly into Chapter 3. And what we decided to do is before we talk about the Garden in a meta frame, we’re just going to do this practice of actually just reading the text and raising issues as we raise it. Recapitulation: Garden of Eden, Chapter 2 Marc: So we saw in Chapter 2 that they’re in the Garden, they’re naked, there’s no shame. That’s how we ended. That’s where we ended. So there is sexuality. There’s this loneliness. The three steps are: 1) There’s the Garden. 2) Then apropos of nothing, we go to this lonely being. In response to loneliness, there’s the bringing to the human being of all of the beasts of the field. The lineage reads that as sexual relations with all the beasts, but not in a bestiality sense, sorry to disappoint everyone, but just in an archetypal sense. It doesn’t work. That’s after the two verses of calling names, meaning, dominating, controlling. He doesn’t find a helpmate against him that liberates him from loneliness. 3) And then there’s the sacrificial act. He falls asleep as it were. He’s split asunder. The woman emerges. And they’re then brought together. And when they’re brought together, there’s this great declaration, “The flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone. Therefore, he shall leave his father and mother. He shall cleave sexually, erotic union. They shall cleave together and they shall be one flesh. They’re naked and there’s no shame.” That’s the text. A Parenthesis on Genesis 2:24 - Leaving Father and Mother: The Condition of Desire Marc: And by the way, just a little parentheses, before David asked us to talk about the Garden, we were talking a little bit just in Zak and Marc’s space about that book that you referred me to, Sadly, Porn, by Edward Teach. He has this analysis that we were talking about briefly of the Fifty Shades of Grey story where he basically says, they’re exporting their desire to contract. They’re both controlled by contract, which he calls parental authority. So that’s parental authority. And of course, his point is that if they’re both brother and sister under parents, it’s actually not romance, it’s incest. That’s his dramatic point. But his point actually is this text in Genesis that we just finished reading, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife,” that is to say, step out of parental authority. * You have to each leave your parents. * You have to each not be under parental authority. * You have to actually have thrown mommy and daddy out of bed. You have to actually have a dimension of your own autonomy and your own script of desire in order to come together not as children of the great parent, but as autonomous free beings in which you can, with your own script of desire, create a new script of desire. What he’s describing is this kind of sexuality that takes place under the guise of parental authority. And the parental authority is not the inherent value structures of Cosmos, it’s the social construction of socially sanctioned visions of desire. He got a deep intuitive sense there of how sexing happens when you’re under parental authority. The penultimate text for that is Genesis 2:24, which is the text that we read last time, right before we’re about to start now, which is, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother.” And then w’davaq b’ish’to, “create erotic union with his partner, and they shall become one flesh.” It’s an incredible verse. You actually can’t create a Field of Desire without first leaving your father and mother. It’s a very tight structure verse, which is making a big demand. So that’s just a general thought. Before we go on, any thoughts on that one? Zak: It struck me as we read it last time, that particular bit, because of course Adam didn’t have a father and mother. So it’s just interesting. Like at that point, they’re like, “Leave your father and mother,” when in fact, “Who were those two?” Because right now we have one creator. And then of course there’s that sense of the giving away at the wedding. The kind of gestures of maturity that are thresholds, like leaving a Garden, like actually exiting. Leaving the nest. That stuff emerged. But the first thing was just that, “Well, I didn’t have a father and mother since...” Marc: Right. These texts, the silliness of superficial scholarship is to of course read them superficially. They’re not historical texts. They’re intentionally mythical archetypal texts, which are telling a story. And then the narrator says, and it’s like that. Zak: Yeah. The Garden of Eden, Chapter 3 Marc: All right, Garden of Eden. 3.1. Let’s see if we can at least read through this chapter today. If we can get through the text today, then in part three, we’ll raise the issues, then we can really look at the Garden. Or maybe we’ll be able to do it as we read. So the snake. This is actually where the phrase comes from in the West, but there was a snake in the Garden. This is the snake in the Garden. They’re in the Garden. There’s a snake. The snake is in the Garden and the snake was more arum. The word arum means naked and wise, in Hebrew, both words. So it’s both meanings, arum. So the snake was more wise, or more cunning or more naked. Arum literally means naked. The snake was more naked than all the beasts of the field. And the snake says to the woman, lo tokh’lu mikol etz hagan, “God told you not to eat from any of the trees of the field.” And the woman says, Verse 2, “No, no, no, God didn’t say that.” That’s what the snake does. “And God said, no, eat from all the trees. Just from one tree, don’t eat. From the tree which is in the center of the Garden, don’t eat. And don’t touch it, lest you may die.” Of course, the good reader of the text notices that God didn’t say don’t touch it. So you just notice how people play just in terms of dialogue, the dialogue here in these first three verses. What both of them are doing is recalling a conversation and distorting the text intentionally in order to actually evoke a result. The snake says, “And God said don’t eat from any of the trees in the Garden, but of course God didn’t say that.” So he’s distorting the text. Then she goes, “No, no, no, no, no, God didn’t say that. God said he ate everything.” But then she goes on and then she misquotes. They’re both misquoting God. The misquoting of God is this process in the Garden of Eden. This is very structurally in the text. It’s the ambiguation of the God voice, the intentional misquoting, this early taking of God’s name in vain. And so she says, “And God told us don’t eat from those trees in the middle,” which God did say, but then she says, “And don’t touch them lest you die.” And the snake says, in the lineage supplementary text, the Midrash text, they say that the snake then pushes the woman into the tree, “And look, you didn’t die.” Because she’s overextended, she’s overreached. It’s the overreach of the misquote, which in terms of communication, we could go far on this, we won’t, but just to be aware as we’re reading it. So the snake says, “No, you won’t die,” Verse 4. And the snake goes on, Verse 5, “Because God knows that on the day that you eat from the tree, your eyes will be open and you will be like God having direct gnosis of good and evil.” So again, strange. So God doesn’t want you to have eternity. God wants you to die. Why would that be the case? And then God wants to keep your eyes closed? Meaning, if you would eat from the tree, your eyes would open. But isn’t that good? And indeed, the entire point of the Book of Genesis is who opens their eyes and who doesn’t, and the good people open their eyes and the bad people don’t. So clearly, this text is playing with you. It’s saying, “Okay, God doesn’t want you from the tree because your eyes will open.” Why? So then the woman sees, watere, the same word, she sees, meaning her eyes are open. She sees that the tree is good to eat, taawah-hu laeynayim, “But it’s a desire to the eyes.” W’nech’mad, is now added. In the earlier description, this didn’t exist. Now we’re in the Field of Desire. It’s a desire. The word taawah means lust. It’s a lust to the eyes. That’s a direct word, three letter root. W’nech’mad, nechmad is that same word we saw before, thou shalt not covet. So again, it’s a desire to contemplate the tree. And she takes from the tree, she eats and she gives also to her husband to eat. Now you notice that the snake is not the one… everyone thinks the snake takes from the tree and gives to the woman. This is not what happens. The snake plays with her mind. He just says, “No, you won’t die.” That’s it. So he gives his little talk and then she acts autonomously. And then watipaqach’nah eyney sh’neyhem, “Their eyes are opened, they know that they’re naked. They make clothes.” Then they hear God’s voice in the Garden, moving in the Garden. In other words, in this moment of vulnerability, of this violation in some way of the divine will, which we’re not sure why, how, this other strange thing happens, they hear God talking. It’s a revelation. Instead of God disappearing… God usually disappears. There’s a direct correlation throughout the canon between violation and I will surely hide my face. Deuteronomy, for example. Here’s the opposite. So you just get this text is f*****g with you intentionally. That’s very clear in the text. All of a sudden, God appears. They now hear God talking for the first time. And then they hide. They’re overwhelmed by the voice, they hide, mip’ney Adonai Elohim, from the face of God in the Garden. And then wayiq’ra Adonai Elohim, this is the first time that God calls to them. There’s no prior verse of God calling to them. Now God is calling to them. Now there’s an I-Thou. Now there’s a relationship. Something is happening. And God says, “Ayekah?” “Where are you?” “Where are you?” “Ayekah?” “Where are you?” And then Adam says, “I heard your voice in the Garden.” Et-qol’kha shama’tiy bagan. “I heard your voice,” waiyra, “and I was afraid, but also I was aware.” The word awareness and fear are the same word, in the same sense that your hair stands on its end when you’re afraid. There’s this direct continuum between, like, you go to a horror movie because you’re in fear, but it means you’re fully awake and aware. There’s this full continuum between fear and consciousness. So he says, “I heard your voice,” waiyra, “I was afraid, but I was also aware,” kiy-eyrom anokhiy, “that I am naked,” waechave, “and I hid.” So it’s this very human exchange between them. Wayomer, and then the Divine voice says, miy higiyd l’kha kiy eyrom atah, “Who told you, you were naked?” Hamin-haetz asher tziuiytiykha l’vil’tiy akhal-mimenu akhal’ta, “Did you eat from that tree?” So again, clearly an omniscient God should have this figured out in the biblical text. So there’s this wonderful exchange. In other words… There’s this dialogue.There’s this pedagogy…There’s this coming into consciousness…There’s this beauty of hiding…There’s this hearing of a voice that I wasn’t aware was there…There’s an awareness of self that wasn’t… This is all implicit in the text that all commentary kind of misses. So then what happens? Then it goes a little bad, Verse 12. Adam says, “Well, the woman that you gave me, she gave it to me and I ate.” And by the way, in the Hasidic tradition, they say that this was the sin. That he didn’t cover for her. There’s a major Hasidic tradition, which is, he didn’t cover for his wife. That’s the sin… The sin was this moment. This, he didn’t cover for her. It’s very beautiful. This notion, like, you cover for her. You cover for your woman. Your woman covers for you. That was the disharmony between them, that this is the actual sin in the Garden. Wayomer Adonai Elohim, “So God says”, “Ah, it was the woman.” [laughs] So, Mah-zot? “What is this?” “What have you done?” And the woman says, “Ah, the snake did it.” But the woman’s text is interesting. Hanachash hishiyaniy waokhel, so, hishiyaniy, if you read the English, “The serpent beguiled me.” But the word hishiyaniy also is the same word for married me. Nissu’in is to be married or hishiyaniy, raised me up. God is ram v’nisah, God is exalted. In other words, the English goes, “He beguiled me.” But actually, there’s this erotic moment between them, there’s this kind of coming to this Field of Desire, there’s also that, he raised me up. He made me insightful. He gifted me with something. He exalted me. So again, there’s this play. There’s not like, “What’s the violation? What’s happening here?” Then God turns to the snake. And God says to the snake, “Because you’ve done this, you shall be cursed from all of the beasts of the field and you shall go,” al-g’chon’kha telekh, “You shall go in your belly.” W’afar tokhal kal-y’mey chayeykha, “You shall eat from the dust all the days of your earth.” W’eyvah ashiyt beyn’kha uveyn haishah uveyn, “create tension between you and the woman and between your descendants.” And then God turns to the woman. He says, “You shall experience the pain of childbirth. With tension, you shall raise children. Your desire shall be to your man and he will be the one who speaks. He will be the one who will dominate.” And then to Adam he says, “Because you listened to your wife, in other words, you abandoned your own autonomy and you ate from the tree, which I told you not to, so then the land is cursed.” B’itzavon tokhalenah, “And with tension, angst, you shall eat bread.” “And thorn and thistle will emerge from the ground and you’ll eat the grass of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread until you return to the earth, because you’ve been taken from the earth for you are dust and to dust you will return.” And then wayiq’ra haadam shem ish’to chauah, And Adam calls his wife Chauah, because she is em kal-chay, the mother of all of existence. And then God makes them clothes, and clothes them. It’s a very, very strange text. And then they’re exiled from Eden. God says, Wayomer Adonai Elohim, “and God said,” hen haadam hayah k’achad mimenu, “Man has become one with us. Man has become one with us, to know good and evil.” So perhaps he will eat from the tree of life and live forever. Therefore, I’m going to exile him from the Garden. He’s exiled from the Garden, and he dwells East of Eden, and there is a flaming sword that revolves to not allow for entry to the Garden. And then finally, “and Adam knew his wife.” They’re actually intimate for the first time. And they birthed the first children. What a text. Zak: It’s very crazy. Marc: I mean, what a text. Zak: So complex. Get the book: 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. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. The Garden of Eden Is a Text About Becoming Human Marc: So maybe what we can do is, we can at least, let’s notice a couple things. The text begins with the naked man and woman in the Garden who are one flesh. There’s no sense of shame. V’lo yitbosh, there’s no shame. By the end of the Garden, clearly there’s a sense of shame. They hide. They hear the Divine voice. They’re exiled from the Garden. And there’s an entire series of punishments, which is the snake walks on the ground, eats dust. The woman has the pain of childbirth and the pain of raising children and all of the sexual tension with her husband. The man has, by the sweat of your brow, you’ll eat bread and the entire tension of subsisting, existing, surviving, making a living. And yet at the same time, there’s this emergence. So in a word, I think we can say a couple things about this text. We could spend many, many weeks and months in the text, but let’s just look at a couple of things. So from one very close reading of the text, you could actually read the text, I think, correctly, as a text about becoming human. Zak: Yep. Marc: Actually, all of these punishments… Zak: That’s what I was going to say. They’re the things we take for granted. Marc: Right. Zak: They’re the things that we take for granted about being human. Marc: Right. All of these punishments are actually those things that demarcate our humanity. Sexual tension. Would we want to go back to an era before there was sexual tension? In other words, that description of the idyllic Garden of Eden is almost this kind of primal, proto-human being who is kind of in the savannah. Maybe it has become Homo erectus, it’s kind of standing erect in this unconfronted bliss. It’s an unconfronted man and woman. Man and woman have been split. They’ve been brought to each other. There’s no existential tension. Zak: Yeah. There’s no plot. If they stayed in the Garden, there’d be no plot. Marc: There’s no journey. Zak: There’s no journey. And it seems like God wasn’t interested in that. And the idea that he comes down and is like, “Where are you? Did you eat that?” It seems like he would have to know, in which case he’s teaching them. Marc: That’s right. Zak: Like, he’s trying to find a way to communicate with them. He’s basically saying, “I know you ate it, but tell me, kid.” Marc: So this entire process is actually, in some sense, the birthing of humanity. This is the birthing of humanity. So the second thing we can say is that we’re birthed in the fall. And we’ll talk about that next time. We’ll talk about sin, originals… But the fall is not the sense of, oh, you’re damned or you’re impure or you’re not redeemable. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s actually, we become human in the crisis. In other words, our crisis is a birth. Literally. That is the story of the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden is a crisis. It’s a shattering of vessels in the Lurianic understanding. And that shattering of vessels births this new possibility of going up from Eden, of actually emerging, of being born. And how am I born? Well, sexual tension. The tension of childbirth. The tension of raising children, this uniquely human process in which the calf doesn’t get up and walk 15 minutes later. So there’s this tension of childbirth. There’s this tension of child raising. There’s this tension of making a living. But it’s all of the things that demarcate the human journey, so the journey always begins with a fall. It’s not an event. It’s a journey, which is very beautiful. Zak: It is. I mean, one thing here that’s implicit would be that it’s a feature, not a bug. Marc: It’s a feature, not a bug. Zak: It’s a feature, not a bug that we leave the Garden. And this is some misunderstanding about even human development, if you will. Kind of tip the hat to Ken, who’s David’s good friend. David was very inspired by Up From Eden, which is a phrase you mentioned. This notion, in childhood, if you are lucky, very privileged, that doesn’t always mean a lot of money, it’s like the right niche, you’ll have a pretty sweet deal. It’ll feel a lot like the Garden, there won’t be any of those types of tensions. You don’t have to worry about getting food for yourself. You don’t have to worry about sexuality. You’re a kid. And all of these things. But of course, you have to leave that. If you don’t leave that, you don’t become a human. There’s no plot to your life. There’s no tension that’s driving you. There’s this misunderstanding in psychoanalytical, but also in a whole bunch of areas that, oh, childhood innocence should be returned to or somehow be preserved, or that children shouldn’t grow up, which is a lot of what you find in some of the more progressive educational niches. But in fact, this reading here is that, no, God laid this out in such a way that it would be threshold event, that it would be crisis emergent, and throw a story out in front of it, as what happens often when you leave the nest as a person, as a young person. There’s a story or an adventure, but there’s usually some event, some sense of what’s happening and also a sense that you can’t go back, which is very interesting, like the flaming sword. Marc: Right. And there’s a temptation to go back. Zak: Of course. Marc: I want to regress. I want to go back. And Kurt Vonnegut’s son, Mark Vonnegut, calls his memoir about his intense addiction, he calls it The Eden Express where he’s kind of understanding that when you try and go back to Eden—an addiction is a form of trying to go back to Eden—you actually get flamed by this sword that’s turning around and around and guarding the entrance to the Garden. So there’s a very, very strong allurement for the regressive developmental move. And you find it later on in the Exodus text when the slaves say, Erich Fromm’s beautiful phrase from the Frankfurt School, who leaves Germany at the end of the ’30s, “We want to escape from freedom.” There’s great desire to go back to the Garden. And the slaves say, “F**k this Exodus thing. Let’s go back to Egypt. We’re actually in an environment that…” Right? Zak: Yeah, totally. I would say that there’s something like, “Can I go back to the Garden?” But you have to go forward into that orchard of holy apples. Right? There’s some other place that’s like a garden, which is not that Garden, but the world to come. A holy place. Marc: No, beautiful. Let’s take two minutes and we’ll wrap, but we at least got it started. We’ll look at it more carefully next time. Next time will be our penultimate. We’ve gotten the text out. And I think David was right. He said to us, “Don’t just talk about this,” he said, “Force people to actually read the text with you.” Like, “Let’s read the text. It’s worth reading the text. And whoever’s listening, read the text, chapter two and three.” What we’ll do next time is, in a more formal way, we’ll list the 10 problems with the text, even more formally. And then we’ll offer resolutions. But just for now, as we close, I think what you said is exactly right. In other words, what the lineage calls chakal tapuchin kadishin, in this field of holy apples, which is the Field of Eros, which is the Field of ErosValue, which is the Field of Desire, is actually the Garden. Zak: Yeah. Marc: So in other words, on the one hand, you’re in the Garden. You leave the Garden and then you return to the Garden, but you don’t return to the Garden in a restorative way. It’s not a restorative redemption. It’s a utopian redemption. In other words, when I come back to the Garden, I’m more than I was when I was there originally. I come back and I’ve actually become a human being. In other words, everything is changed in some very dramatic and beautiful way. So that journey is the journey of—we want to return to Eden. We feel exiled from Eden, but we can’t go back. We actually have to go on this human developmental journey. That’s the beginning. Okay. Zak: Beautiful. Marc: All right. Love. Zak: Love. Mentioned Sources: * Teach, Edward, Sadly, Porn, Edward Teach, 2021 * James, E.L., Fifty Shades of Grey, The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2011 * Wilber, Ken, Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981 * Vonnegut, Mark, The Eden Express, Praeger Publishers, 1975 Mentioned People: * Ken Wilber (1949–) * Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) * Mark Vonnegut (1947–) * Erich Fromm (1900–1980) Join Us In-Person or Online: This April 20–24, a small group of visionary humans willing to believe that their individual actions matter, are gathering at a castle in Holland, allowing their hearts to be ripped wide open and together, they’ll be co-authoring a new story of value for humanity. If you’ve been following the teachings, feeling the pulsating truth of CosmoErotic Humanism in your body and wondering what it would mean to fully step in... Then this is your invitation to The Crossing. If you’re feeling the pull to help humanity at a time where it most certainly needs YOU, then click the button below or send us an email to info@erosmysteryschool.com. Join us at The Crossing 2026, a five-day portal into the New Story of Eros, Power, Purpose and sexuality. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
March 9 · 30 min
Desire and Loneliness: The Garden of Eden and the Evolution of Scripts of Desire - Introduction: Part 1 of 3
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the evolution of desire through the lens of the Garden of Eden, situating it within the context of CosmoErotic Humanism. They do a recapitulation on scripts of desire, proposing seven key steps to recognize your own scripts of desire and how they participate in the larger field of desire of reality. The dialogue then moves on to a reading and hermeneutic of the Garden of Eden, Genesis chapter 2, examining how early human experiences with loneliness and desire are expressed through the narrative, emphasizing two dimensions of the human being: majestic man and redemptive man. This discussion sets the stage for future dialogues exploring the deeper ethical and existential implications of desire. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast are drawn from the following volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Gafni, Marc. Codes of Desire: On the Nature of Reality: The Answer to Who, Where, and What. 2025. * Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni. Forthcoming. The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, March 2026, Episode: “Desire and Loneliness: The Garden of Eden and the Evolution of Scripts of Desire - Introduction: Part 1 of 3” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:58 — Context Setting 1:49 — The Six Steps on the Evolution of Scripts of Desire 4:48 — Clarifying Another Step: The Plotline of Reality Is the Evolution of Desire 9:44 — The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Context from Chapter One 12:22 — The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Chapter Two 16:56 — Majestic Man and Redemptive Man 22:41 — It’s Not Good for the Human Being to Be Alone 29:27 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: Okay, so, last week David prompted us to begin this conversation about scripts of desire, moving towards this discussion of the Garden of Eden, which he said that he had seated with you. So I’m curious if you have been in touch with David since last week. I know he’s traveling… Marc: Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know why he does this, but he goes both to the, in America, to the Republican and to the Democratic National Convention, each time disguised as a different delegate. He was probably at the DNC this week, you know, after doing the Republican thing. So he’s had a little bit of a busy week. He had lots of cultural insights, but I guess that’s a different conversation. Zak: Gotcha. Yeah. Marc: Let’s think about this, holy man. I woke up in the middle of the night to a little ping on my phone where David did like a little recapitulation and with a little note said, start this next time. So here’s the quick recapitulation. And then we got the garden text. We’re ready for the garden. The Six Steps on the Evolution of Scripts of Desire Marc: Six steps. * We have three questions, the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. They are: * Where. Where am I? Where are we? * Who. Who am I? Who are we? * What. What ought I do? What ought we do? * We answer those questions. All those questions are completely bound up with desire, scripts of desire. * Where am I? In a Field of Desire, CosmoErotic universe. Where are we? Same. * Who am I? Who are we? We are personal scripts of desire and we are cultural scripts of desire. * What. What ought I do? Meaning, what desire should I fulfill? What desires deserve to be responded to, fulfilled and engaged, and what ones do not? * We’ve got the three questions. We’ve now understood them in terms of desire. Then when we go on we say, okay, what do we know? We know: * Reality is a script of desire. Reality is scripts of desire. * I participate in Reality and Reality participates in me. So I live in Reality scripts of desire and Reality scripts of desire live in me. I know you and David spoke about that a lot, and I know that you’re tracking that in a whole other way, but you referred to it last week. That if you look at Lacanian or Freudian or even Gestalt, or Jung… They don’t use the actual word script of desire, but the basic idea, as you pointed towards and elaborated on, Z, was that: * You’re making your unconscious scripts of desire conscious. So that. Then David points out, we pointed out in the last episode that from the CosmoErotic Humanism perspective, of course, that’s woefully insufficient. In other words, what I need to do, step four is: * I then need to actually clarify my scripts of desire. And when I clarify my scripts of desire, I do that because there’s something that is clear and something that’s unclear. Because desire is backed by the universe. It’s a value of the universe. So when I clarify my script of desire (d), then e: * My script of desire becomes aligned with the script of desire of reality. So there’s an ontic identity of wills. And will is desire. And then finally, I got my last step. * I need to add the second part of clarification: my unique desire. Okay, good. We can live in that. It’s very beautiful. Right? There’s a home there. Zak: Yeah, that’s good. Marc: Okay. So now we go. So, not surprisingly, now we’re going back to the garden. Any thoughts on that before we go? I was just doing a little recap. Clarifying Another Step: The Plotline of Reality Is the Evolution of Desire Zak: It’s a good recapitulation. I would say the other thing to add, and you alluded to it, the cosmological vision here is one that gets that kind of logos mysticism, where you have these scripts of desire instantiated billions of years ago moving up, becoming more complex. So it’s part of that CosmoErotic Humanist vision where there’s continuity between the human psyche, culture, aspiration and the universe’s aspirations and scripts of desire. Marc: So what we would do then is I won’t repeat all six, but we would change the numeration. I actually thought about going there and I just literally in my mind skipped it over. It’s actually brilliant. Thank you for putting it on the table. You’re right. What we would say is in the second numeration after: 1) Reality is scripts of desire. Before we got to the human being, we would say: 2) And the plot line of reality is the evolution of desire. And then: 3) The human being participates and the human being participates in desire’s evolution. Zak: Yeah. And it’s fascinating to think of, like, the interpretation of animal, molecular, chemical behaviors as scripts of desire. It’s very clear, of course, in the animal world, especially mating, that they’re acting this thing. It’s a very complex dance. And it’s a script of desire. When you see chemical catalysts and other things, it’s a very evocative way to re-characterize structure and process in nature. Marc: Totally. That’s great. And you added to that. I like just going slow in these structural parts. So we’ll get to the garden, the garden awaits us, but you added, I think completely appropriately, this. We always say, both of us, that we can’t talk about world religion without saying: world religion as a context for our diversity. Otherwise it’s so completely confusing what we mean. So, in the same way, we can’t talk about desire being backed by the universe as a structure of Cosmos and the evolution of desire, without adding what we formulated a couple of years back, this principle of continuity and discontinuity. It’s just so important, right? That there’s this continuity of desire all the way up and all the way down. And yet there are these discontinuities. There are these emergences. And it’s funny, I was talking to our mutual friends, the Marcus’s, Aubrey and Vylana. They have a cat. Vylana was commenting on how this cat is a very feline, quite expensive, rare cat, who just delights in eating lizards in a torturous way, but the cat doesn’t actually eat them. Just kind of tortures them in this kind of erotic frenzy of aliveness. You know, and it’s quite clear that if your next door neighbor was doing that, that would be complex. Right? In other words, it’s clear, there’s both continuities and discontinuities. Right? Zak: Yes. And domesticated cats are a strange creature because they’re predators that get their food given to them, so something sadistic emerges in cats. I mean, there’s a whole conversation about domesticated cats. Marc: Right. Domesticated cats is a whole kind of conversation. But, so what happens is—what happens when you interfere with scripts of desire? Zak: Exactly. That’s the question of domestication and civilization in many ways. Marc: And education, right? Education is supposed to be precisely not domestication. Education is to align. Zak: Yeah, not the overriding of scripts. You don’t want to override it. You want to help articulate it. Marc: You want to cultivate the capacity to discern, to know, to clarify my script of desire. Zak: Right. Marc: Beautiful. In one sense, there’s nothing new that we’ve said here at all. And we’ve been talking about this for the last 12, 13 years in various teachings. On the other hand, it’s crystallizing. This particular door in is crystallizing. Therefore, we’re not surprised that the epic story of Western civilization is a culinary desire story, if you will, right? [laughs] Marc: You know, mixed with nakedness and then sexuality… So, it’s the story that mixes in it visual desire with intellectual desire, with embodied desire of the culinary kind, with sexual desire… Right? In other words, it’s a complete desire story. All the way up and all the way down. So, I’m thinking, Z, should we talk about this, about the text, or should we actually enter the text and spend two, three conversations actually reading it through together? Zak: I think we should read it through because it’s so rarely done. People don’t spend time doing this kind of hermeneutic and I think it’d be very useful. Marc: I was hoping you would say that. I wanted to check in with your script of desire on this. Okay. okay. Yeah. Away we go. Zak: It’s the study hall. We’ll get the study hall. The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Context From Chapter One Marc: Okay. So let’s go to chapter two. Friends, Romans and countrymen, I just wanted to give a shout out, this is the first time someone told me that this group had constellated and they were studying David J. Temple dialogue, so to those groups who are doing that, hi everyone. Just so you know, the text, in chapter two, essentially begins in verse seven. Seven is about where it goes. But eight is where it starts. The rest of chapter two is related to this story. Part of it is the Garden of Eden, and then it goes to the creation of the human being. But it starts with Eden, then human creation, then sexuality and all that, loneliness. We’ll get to that. Then all of chapter three is the classical garden story, of the snake, the snake, garden, tree, apple. That story. And then, when you get to chapter four, we have essentially the aftermath. What happens right after they leave the garden. But it’s basically from 2:9 till the end of two, all of three and basically 4:1. That’s really the whole thing. That’s it, so everyone can have those texts. And of course we’ll spend much less time on the 2 stuff. We’ll spend most of it on 3. But let’s look at 2. Okay. So, there’s these two creation stories. This is just the context. The first creation story is in chapter one of Genesis. It’s the story in which the description is, ur’du u-ve’of ha-shamayim bi-dgat ha-yam, “fill the earth and conquer it, rule over the fish of the sea,” et cetera. The name of God that’s used is Elohim, which is this kind of cosmological God. And there’s the first description there of Homo Amago Dei. God says, let us make the human being in our image. And God created the human being in the image of God. So there’s this notion of Homo Amago Dei. There’s no communication, no dialogue. The second name of God, is Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, the four-letter name of God, Adonai, is not used. The cosmological name of God is used. And there’s this sense of what Joseph Soloveitchik calls in his book, Lonely Man of Faith, that you and I looked at 13 years ago, majestic man, who conquers. This majestic man, let’s call him Adam 1. Adam 1, who conquers, who’s majestic, is one with the force of Cosmos. The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Chapter Two Marc: Then we get to chapter two, and then it happens again, right? The human being is recreated. That’s basically where our story starts. Verse eight is the planting of the garden, verse seven is right before. God creates the human being. It’s this much more humble, complex, human humus kind of thing. And then there’s this intimate act. Vayyipach be’appav nishmat chayyim—God breathes into the human being the breath of life. We have a living being. God plants… The language here is Adonai, not Elohim. It’s not cosmological God, it’s intimate God. Adonai. And then verse eight, the Garden of Eden, Adonai and Elohim come together, the two names. Vayyitta Adonai Elohim—the cosmological God, who is the intimate God, gan be’Eden miqqedem—plants a garden in the East, vayyasem sam et ha’adam—and places there Adam, aser yasar—who He created. That’s verse 8. Verse 9: Vayyasmah Adonai Elohim—notice cosmological and intimate God are again adjoined. Min ha’adama—God causes vegetation or trees to emerge. But what emerges, kal es, every tree, nehmad lemar’e, which one desires to look at. In the Ten Commandments, word is lo tachmod, you shall not desire. This is the same word. Nehmad lemar’e. It’s not pleasant to look at as it’s translated. The word chamad is the same root word as the Ten Commandments. It’s that which you desire to look at. So it’s visual desire. And again, the English translations read out the desire dimension. But it’s nehmad, it’s a direct desire word. Vtob lama’akal—and it’s good to eat. There’s all these trees which are aroused desire. And then, v es hahayyim, the tree of life is in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowing good and evil. Okay, that’s our garden. And then ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, there’s a river that flows from Eden, l’hasqot et hagan, to water, to l’hasqot. L’hasqot, again, is a funny word. L’hasqot is to water, but the root word is shaqah, desire, meaning you’re thirsty. So the experience of desire is the experience of being thirsty, meaning I want to be watered. So when the baby nurses at the mother’s breast, he wants to be watered. In other words, the word l’hasqot is the same root word as shaqah. You can hear it in the word, right? Chesheq, which is a desire word again. So ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, a river goes forth from Eden. And just a little parentheses for the scholarly listeners. A colleague of mine, Melila Eshet Helner, who’s a student of Liebes’, wrote her doctorate and she published it on the Zohar. The name of the doctorate is ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, the river goes forth from Eden, which she does a very excellent philological analysis of this text in light of her teacher, Libes, and what Yudah basically is saying, and I correspond with him on this on one occasion, he’s saying basically ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, the river that goes forth from Eden, that’s the river of Eros. He actually writes a very important article, a philological article called Zohar and Eros. So I’m merely pointing out that we’re being very rigorous here in our reading. A river goes forth from Eden, l’hasqot, to meet the shaqah, to meet the desire. This is a desire story, which is very easy to miss. And then, there’s four dimensions to the river. There’s lots of mysticism on why there are four. That’s not our topic. Zak: Yeah. Marc: We will skip a couple of words, there’s a description of the four rivers, which are obviously four qualities of desire, but that’s already the realm of mysticism. We’re just reading the text. Then verse 15, right? And Adonai Elohim, vayyiqqah Adonai Elohim, again, this conjunction of right cosmological and intimate God, vayyiqqah ha’adam, so God takes man, vayyanniḥeu began ‘eden, places him in the garden, l’abda ulsamra, to be in devotion and in guardianship. Which is very different. This is Adam 2. Majestic Man and Redemptive Man Zak: I’m still hung up on the whole Adam 1 thing. Like why? Marc: So Adam 1 is fill the earth and conquer it, 1:28, right? Now Genesis 2 is this intimate relationship in which I breathe into you and then you’re in the garden. Your relationship to the garden is devotion and holding. There’s these two typologies, right? Zak: And that there were two would imply God was unhappy with the first one? Desired a different kind of creature, or... Marc: So why are there two creation stories? Right. Zak: Yeah, why are there two? Well, specifically the first Adam, second Adam, yeah. Marc: This is where I believe biblical scholarship does a very bad job. Right? Well, it just happened to go together because there were two different texts... No, anyone who knows anything about this document, who’s a good reader knows this is a coherent text. It’s not like some sloppy text where, isn’t it a shame, we didn’t get a copyeditor... Zak: We left that one in there. We left that sentence in there all those years. [laughs] Marc: We couldn’t afford copy editing, so we left it in there. That’s just so absurd. Right. So there’s this coherent notion, and what Soloveitchik is doing in his Lonely Man of Faith, is of course, he’s echoing a theme in first, second, third century Midrash, he’s solving your question. He’s answering that. Zak: Yeah, I’m now remembering The Lonely Man of Faith, the two Adams of The Lonely Man of Faith. Marc: What he’s saying is that Adam 1 and Adam 2 are two dimensions of the human being. And we would call one majestic man, and then would be redemptive man. Adam 1 surges forth majestically and Adam 2 is sustained, he’s got this experience, I’m sustained by the divine breath. I’m le’ovdah uleshomrah, worshipping, serving, in devotion, I’m guarding, which is a very different relationship. Marc: It’s not the sense of this kind of infinite Elohim, infinite power, and El, the word El, David Kimhi, in the 13th century, El he does the etymologies of stuff. El is power. El is El HaKochot. and you look up the etymology word El, Kimhi is tracing all the texts, El HaKochot the god of power. There’s this unabated power in Adam 1, and there’s this check on power in Adam 2. You, David and I have talked about power. It’s one of our essays. This relationship to power is at play here. Okay. As we talked about before, we’re just reading the text. We’re just staying very close to the text, right? Zak: Hmm-hm. Marc: So just worth mentioning that again, le’ovdah, to serve, to be devoted to, again, is a quality of desire. Devotion and desire. People don’t realize that devotion and desire are inherently inter-included. It’s very beautiful. Right? And if I could say something, I’m not graphic, but explicit, if I can make that distinction, is that in sexuality, when a person is on their knees in devotion, that’s deeply bound up with desire. In other words, the devotional and the desires are not split. We think that desire is this kind of rapacious violation. Actually, desire opens up to the desire to serve. Zak: Right. And as if devotion is like a kind of flaccid, insipid, moralistic thing. Marc: Beautiful. That’s the other side of it. In other words, desire is not inherently rapacious and devotion is not inherently flaccid. Those are shadow forms of each one of them. It’s really beautiful in the philological and anthro-ontological structure of devotion and desire. Zak: Mm-hmm. Marc: We’ll get through at least Genesis two today. We’re in 2:16. And so then God commands man—vaysav Adonai Elohim vaysav ha’adam. Now you have a command for the first time. And He, God says, mikol es hagan ‘akol to’kel, eat from all the trees of the garden. There’s again, this relish. It’s ‘akol to’kel, it’s double language. Eat. But from the tree of knowing good and evil, you shall not eat for on the day that you eat from it, mot tamut, you shall surely die. So, eat from everything in the garden. Don’t eat from the tree of knowing good and evil. And if you do that, death is introduced. So that’s obviously a strange text because wouldn’t you want to know good and evil? And why would you die from knowing good and evil? Zak: Right. And why put the tree there? He put the tree there. Marc: Right? And why is there a tree that you’re not supposed to eat? What’s obvious again is that the superficial readings of the text as kind of an absurd fundamentalist text are clearly not the case. In other words, the text is aware of what it’s doing. It’s very clearly self -aware. It’s like, huh, okay. So, you can’t understand canonical text, at least in the Torah, the canon got extended in certain places over a couple thousand years, but in the major canonical texts, you have to read as a koan. It’s not like, one hand clapping? Did you make a mistake? Was it two? You forgot, the text was wrong. [laughs] It’s f*****g one hand clapping. So you got to read this as a koan. Now, here it gets wild. We’re at the end of verse 17 and then, apparently apropos of nothing and what would seem to be a complete non sequitur, the text completely shifts its mode and it goes to a new text, but it’s the same flow. A text that we’ve actually studied together over the years, looked at and it actually appears in our The Phenomenology of Eros. And what’s the text? It’s Not Good for the Human Being to Be Alone Marc: The text is, and God said, it’s a divine declaration, it’s not good for the human being to be alone. And the word levado, as we’ve talked about many times, levado, which is alone, connotes not physical aloneness, but a kind of loneliness. Right? It’s both alone, single, not good to be the single one. At the same time, loneliness. It’s aloneness and loneliness together. And then the divine response to that declaration, it’s not good for the human being to be alone, lonely, which in essence, it’s all of chapter one, which is Adam 1 and the cosmological God, Elohim and fill the earth and conquer it. Majestic man is not lonely. So the experience of loneliness, of aloneness, that awareness is redemptive man. That’s a different experience. It’s lo tov, it’s a value statement on the nature of relationship. In other words, all of chapter one goes, and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good. Then all of that it was good, then crescendos in chapter two, you can’t actually read this without realizing it’s not good as a response to chapter one. That’s all of cosmological God, all of majestic man, all of a sudden it’s not good. And of course, Z, we know this anthro-ontological experience, right? We’re having a hard time with our beloved or a beloved. And you can’t work. The whole day is wrecked. Right? There it is. Like, what just happened? What’s the problem? It’s not a functional problem. It’s an existential problem. It’s an existential text. It’s not good to not be in relationship, to be lonely. But there’s only one human being. Therefore, e’eseh lo ezer k’negdo, I will make for him a helpmate against him. And I’m gonna resist now, Z, getting into the interpretation of this text because that would take us in a different direction. That’s its own conversation. But very simply, after that we’ve got this lonely human being, God then creates all of the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, I’m translating the text, brings them to man, lir’ot mah yikra lo, to see what name he will call them, and everything that Adam gave a name to became its name, and man called, vayikra ha’adam, man gave names to all of the beasts and all of the birds and all of the animals of the field. Then, middle of the text, but man did not find a helpmate against him. So it’s a strange text. Of course, the lineage masters understand that this was kind of, first attempts at dates. In other words, not bestiality, rather physicality, sexuality. The aperture’s there, the release is there. But no, but he didn’t find an ezer k’negdo to a helpmate against him. And helpmate against him is the category set out by the text that ameliorates loneliness. So lots of beautiful one-night stands with the beasts of the field, but he’s still lonely. Zak: Yes. I won’t repeat the whole, the apertures there. Marc: Right. Then verse 21, God causes a sleep to fall on man and he sleeps. So again, it’s not victoriously surging forward, he’s now sleeping, it’s almost like going into the operating theater. It’s the sense of vulnerability. Then God takes one side of him, tsela, which is translated either as rib or side, right? It’s often the side of the tabernacle. So it’s not a rib actually. But it takes one side of them and splits, takes out, then sews them up, literally, vayisgor basar tachtenah, God, this intimacy God then closes his flesh, and then God builds out of that side that he took from man, woman, and brings woman to man. And then Adam says this time, meaning the beasts didn’t work before this time, etsem me’atsamai, flesh of my flesh, right? Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, this shall be called woman for she has been taken from me. I mean, she’s of me. And then the text reads, therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his woman, v’hayu, and they shall be one flesh. So sexuality, first sexuality. They were both naked. Adam and his wife, v’lo yitboshashu, and there was no shame. So they’re in the garden. This is how we got there. They’re in the garden. The garden is described as a Field of Desire, nechmad, filled with trees that arouse desire. There’s an attempt to sate the desire with physical encounter with beasts, meaning the vitality of physicality. That doesn’t respond to loneliness. There’s a need for this kind of vulnerability. He’s almost sedated. He sleeps, he’s laid out. Half of him is taken out. God takes half of him, builds from half of him. There’s this sacrificial act of sleeping. Half of you is taken out, built into woman. They then come back together. God brings Adam to isha, to woman, and they are one flesh. Now notice that in this description, there’s not a description of desire. It’s not, and he desired her. It’s God brought him. Vyvi’eha el ha’adam, God brought woman to man, places them together and they engage sexually, they become one flesh. They’re naked, v’lo yitboshashu, there’s no shame. So there’s something which is almost like, I think we’ll hold here and we’ll start with three next. It’s a proto-human. You can already feel, if you’re reading this carefully, there’s this proto-humanity here. There’s this Field of Desire, this loneliness that can’t be addressed by the rawness of physical fulfillment. It’s existential in some way. It’s then addressed by this bringing together, which addresses loneliness. In other words, this is sexing. So let’s assume that there’s desire here. So it’s kind of desire sexing that liberates us from loneliness. Zak: Right. Marc: This is sexing that addresses loneliness. It’s: desire somehow ameliorates loneliness. They become one. They’re not two anymore. There’s the sense of union. They’re in the garden and the snake is about to enter. Zak: Right. Beautiful. Marc: So, I guess we meet the snake next? Zak: Yeah, I’ll be here. Marc: I guess, brother, we’ll read it through and then we’ll talk about it. Zak: Yeah, that’s the only way to do it. Marc: Delight to be in the garden with you. Zak: Yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure. Until next time. Mentioned Sources: * Soloveitchik, Joseph B., The Lonely Man of Faith, Doubleday, 1992 * Hellner-Eshed, Melila, Ṿe-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, 2005 * Liebes, Yehuda, Zohar and Eros * Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni, The Complete Phenomenology of Eros (Forthcoming) Mentioned People: * Aubrey Marcus * Vylana Marcus * David Kimhi (1160–1235) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get the book: 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. 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February 14 · 30 min
Value Cracked Open
About this episode: What if the story of the Garden of Eden is not just an ancient myth, but a powerful “script of desire” that is still running our lives today? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore this radical idea, revealing how reality itself is a script of desire, and how your personal interpretation of the Eden story can expose your own unconscious programming. To help you understand your own script, they first take us on a journey through the four major ways humanity has viewed desire—as negative, neutral, positive, or sacred—before introducing a new script, which recognizes Reality itself as “ErosDesire.” This conversation is a call to action to crack open our own programming, discover which historical script we are unconsciously running, and clarify our unique desire in the love story of the universe. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast are drawn from the following volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Gafni, Marc. Codes of Desire: On the Nature of Reality: The Answer to Who, Where, and What. 2025. * Gafni, Marc. Value Is a Feeling and Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel: Responding to the Existential Risk of A.I. with a New Story of Value: Not the Death of Humanity but the Death of Our Humanity. 2025. * Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni. Forthcoming. The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, February 2026, Episode: “Value Cracked Open” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:00 — Context Setting 1:52 — The Garden of Eden Is a Scripts of Desire Story 3:55 — Desire Negative, Desire Neutral, Desire Positive, Desire Sacred 7:04 — Reality Is Scripts of Desire 12:16 — Integrating Human Desire into Cosmological Value Realism 14:21 — About First Principles and First Values 15:16 — We’re Prone to Having Our Scripts of Desire Hijacked 19:15 — What Artificial Intelligence Does Not Possess: A Script of Desire 21:17 — Aligning with the Desire of Reality as It Expresses Itself Uniquely in Me 26:41 — Your Unique Desire Is Aligned With and Distinctly Additive to the Script of Desire of Reality 29:46 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: Well, David said he was reading the Bible or something. He sent you some note about some part. Marc: He was reading the Bible. Yeah, he said he was reading the Garden of Eden stuff. Garden of Eden is wild. I left—you know how it is, right? I wrote a note back, and just left it under the door on the porch, but it wasn’t there in the morning. So I guess he picked it up. But I was thinking, we got about a half hour now, maybe let’s talk a little bit generally about scripts of desire to open it up, and then on Saturday, where I think David might—maybe I’ll even come by once—but maybe we’ll actually open the Genesis text on the Garden of Eden. Zak: Good. Marc: If we can maybe set the frame for this set of conversations, what he basically said in the note was that—and he used this term that he’s been using for the last year—Scripts of Desire. An interesting term. Zak: Yeah, he’s mentioned it a few times. I picked it up, but he never, you know, really— The Garden of Eden Is a Scripts of Desire Story Marc: Yeah, he never—so I thought that maybe we would talk about that term a little bit. His basic point was that the Garden of Eden is a Scripts of Desire story. It’s a story about desire. Meaning, it’s a story about desire in the garden where all of the fruits that can be eaten are ta’avah la’einayim, they’re a desire for the eyes, is the text. They’re a beautiful text. And the word ta’avah is literally a desire. They’re a lust for the eyes; they’re a desire for the eyes. So we have all these trees in the garden, and the garden story, by the way, starts at the second part of chapter two. It’s all of chapter three and part of chapter four in Genesis. The garden is filled with these trees that are a lust or a desire for the eyes. And then there are two trees in the middle of the garden. One is the Tree of knowing good and evil, and the other is the Tree of Life. So you can’t eat from that tree, from the tree of knowing good and evil, because if you do, then you’ll be like God and live forever in one of the readings of the text. That doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing. Zak: It’s not like they’re disincentive. That’s a pretty bad disincentive. Should read more Skinner, right? Marc: Right. Not such a great disincentive there in terms of negative reinforcement. So what is the story about? Really, what he pointed out in the note was that the way you read the story will tell you what your script of desire is. In other words, how you read and the history of this story, and how the story shaped civilization is actually… * It’s a script of desire story. * The story is a story of desire. * It’s a story also of what’s the boundary of desire. And then: * How you read the script of desire story will depend on your script of desire. Zak: Right. So it’s a Rorschach, you’re saying. Marc: That’s right, exactly. So let’s maybe we’ll literally open that on Saturday and look at it in a deep way. Zak: Yeah. But before that, so we can dig into that—what’s the script of desire? What does that even mean? Desire Negative, Desire Neutral, Desire Positive, Desire Sacred Marc: Yeah, totally. What do we mean by scripts of desire? And just one more thing. At David’s request when he was still anonymous, you and I spent a couple of years—I did some draft writing, and you did some intense critique and up-leveling of a project we were doing with one of our key faculty, Dr. Kincaid. And Ken Wilber was very involved. I did an intense dialogue with Ken on each one of what we called the seven levels of Eros and the four narratives of Eros. So we outlined in this thing that we’re calling The Phenomenology of Eros, we outlined four stories of desire. And out of those four stories of desire—which are really four scripts of desire—you could call them: 1) “Desire negative,” and it gets you in really dangerous, it gets in a lot of trouble. Classical, medieval script of desire. 2) “Desire neutral.” Classical scientific script of desire. “Desire is neutral, let’s call it attraction.” So science says, let’s call it attraction, and when science uses words like “attraction,” it’s like a mechanical structure of Cosmos. That’s actually desire neutral. Zak: Right. Marc: It’s actually—it’s interesting, right? And it was just, that’s one of the things he wrote in the note. He said, “Take a look back at the old scripts of desire, the old four narratives of desire,” which back in the day, we called them “sexual narratives.” And then we said, “No, no, they’re narratives of desire.” Zak: They’re broader. Marc: Broader. Narratives of desire. So “desire neutral” is the scientific narrative. It’s like, attraction is a mechanic of Cosmos. And then there’s more of the beginning of modernity. You have this other modern script of desire, or story of desire, which we call: 3) “Desire positive.” And in modernity, it talks in terms of, like, not “the gravitas of desire negative. It’s dangerous to the Divine.” It’s positive, it’s affiliative. It’s affiliative and positive and constructive and all those things that are positive. But of course, as we pointed out back then, desire’s a lot of things. The positive is a little bland. Zak: Yeah. Marc: It’s a little bland for its blandishments. Zak: Yeah. They’re maybe more efficient at work if you— Marc: And then, of course, there’s: 4) “Desire sacred,” which is, “Oh, desire creates children so it’s sacred.” At least in its sexual expression. And desire to serve God so it’s sacred in its more religious sense. But again, “Huh?” First off, in its embodied sense, when was the last time someone engaged sexual desire to have children? Well, some people are doing that, but it’s definitely not the preeminent form of embodied desire in the world these days. Zak: No. Marc: That’s A. And B, our point back then was, desire is not sacred because it creates life. It’s sacred because it is life. So then we came up with this notion of—we called it “desire Eros,” or “ErosDesire,” or “desire erotic.” In the sexual, you would call it “sex erotic,” but it’s more like “desire erotic.” It’s ErosDesire, which is: Reality is Desire. But saying that itself—here it gets really subtle—is a new script of desire. Reality Is Scripts of Desire Marc: In other words, the new script of desire is the realization that Reality is a script of desire. And it’s very precise. It’s not that desire is this local form, this thing that’s coming into you… “That’s really negative. It’s dangerous.”“Oh, it’s very positive. Oh, you’re feeling this desire, it’s very affiliative and positive.”“Oh, it’s this mechanical, neutral thing that kind of pops up once in a while. It’s mechanical.”Or “oh, it’s the sacred thing that you use to have children, or to serve God, or whatever it is.” No, no, Reality itself is a script of desire. And so the desire that moves through you across platforms is an expression of your participation in reality. Reality is quite literally scripts of desire. The way the lineage would say that, in the lineage of Solomon, would be: Reality is names of God. So the name of God means the structural essence, the fabric of reality is “names of God”. Meaning, inherent everywhere and in everything, there’s this animating quality of infinite value that adheres in finitude. We call that the name of God. Now, the Name of God is a four-letter name. That’s the classical name, which is Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey—YHVH, if you were translating it into English. And Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey is actually levels of Eros. It’s a Yud, which is a kind of mini phallic symbol, that enters a Hey—a line entering a circle. Jah, as in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It’s the Jah. It’s the out-breath of reality. י (yud/Y) ה (hey/H) ו (vav/W) ה (hey/H) יהוה But it’s the Yud entering the Hey, and then the Vav, which is an elongated Yud. It’s pulled down. So it’s a classical line. Again, enters the Hey. That’s Vav, Hey. So the Yud, Hey, the first one, is called “constant arousal” by the Zohar. The physical, external expression of constant arousal would be the four forces. For example, constant: electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and the weak, nuclear—constant arousal. And then the Zohar says that the Vav entering the Hey is arousal, which steps apart and comes back together. It’s not constant, so it’s this actual process of coming together, stepping apart, and that’s the human world. That’s where human action and integrity and alignment with Value causes arousal in the divine field. So if Reality is, according to the Zohar, for example, Names of God, that means Reality is ErosDesire, quite literally. Or if it says, God looked into the Torah and created the world. And the Torah is—says Nachmanides, 13th century, Names of God. So God looked at Names of God and created the world. So Reality is scripts of desire. Recognizing that Reality is scripts of desire is itself a new script of desire. In other words, your recognition that desire is not this imposition on reality. It’s not this aberration. It is Reality’s nature: sex erotic or desire Eros, or ErosDesire—I’ll just call it ErosDesire for this conversation. ErosDesire, that is a new script of desire. And then the seven levels of Eros, the ways that that expresses in the human experience: * the vital experience, * the way desire expresses in personality relationships, * the way it expresses in healing, * the way it expresses in its kind of the Eros desire of pleasure, * the way that expresses in mysticism, the mystical experience of being one’s true nature, * the way it expresses in unique artistic creativity, * and the way it expresses in the desire for evolutionary power coursing through me. This kind of evolution coursing through me, and I’m a bodhisattva influencing everything. Those are actually seven scripts of desire. Seven ways that desire moves through me as I create. They’re both embodied forms of desire, but also Eros. You could be a kind of Jesuit, hanging out by yourself for 40 years, and you’d have those seven qualities. Those are seven scripts of desire. It’s like, “Huh?” Zak: Yeah. Marc: That’s just to begin. Like, “Huh, reality is scripts of desire, and wow.” Zak: Yeah, and to be clear, Teilhard de Chardin was definitely doing something like that. Hanging out as a Jesuit, reflectively integrating evolution itself in his script of desire, which is what you’re describing—bringing the entire stack of all the scripts of desire before us into a situation of now, “Oh, I’m part of this massive emerging set of scripts of desire.” Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful conception. And I went to a couple of places. Integrating Human Desire into Cosmological Value Realism Zak: One of the things we’re doing with CosmoErotic Humanism is making things like attachment theory and psychoanalytical theory part of a coherent cosmovision. Or a coherent cosmological scheme. So this makes that very clear. The basic move in psychoanalysis, if you will, from this language would be something like: you have a script of desire you’re not aware of. You have a script of desire that’s unconscious. And so you’re doing stuff you don’t understand, or you’re not aware of, that’s not explicit. What happens there is that you then are doing things you don’t quite understand. That’s the notion of a symptom. Like, “I don’t want to be this way, but I am this way.” It is a misunderstanding of what you actually want. And so the making of the unconscious script of desire into the consciously held script of desire is one way of thinking about what you’re doing in deep psychotherapy, deep healing, those types of things. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And then the significance of that further is that you can then take the step you just took, which is, then: “Okay, so I’m aware of my script of desire. So what?” “Do I rewrite it any way I want, or what’s the correct ‘script of desire?’” Which is where you have to integrate human desire into cosmological value realism, right? Otherwise, as a therapist, you can’t say, “Don’t do that script of desire” as opposed to, “Yes, you’ve made it conscious, now you can kind of operate on it.” And yet, there are limits to the ability of you to rewrite your most basic, foundational scripts of desire. And then the sense in which: 1) What are the scripts of desire being written around you in the Unique Self Symphony of people that are near you? 2) The overarching scripts of desire that are biology, basically. That’s very interesting to me, that there’s a leverage that’s provided here with tying the script of desire into the Field of Value, into the cosmological unfolding. The repurposing of a kind of logos mysticism into this way that’s very intimate and phenomenologically tangible. Which is to say, everybody kind of gets that. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. We’re Prone to Having Our Scripts of Desire Hijacked Zak: And I think we’ve mentioned before, advertising and other places that because of our proneness to having unconscious scripts of desire, we are hijackable by things like advertising because we’re not in a conversation about scripts of desire. Which ones are good and which ones are keeping with the Field of Value. Marc: Right. I know. We’re literally unaware that they exist, almost. Zak: We’re unaware that they exist. And for those who are aware, let’s say, you’ve done psychoanalysis or you’ve studied post-modernism or something, it’s arbitrary. They’re arbitrary. They’re not grounded in a cosmological vision that’s coherent. So even if you do get reflective in our culture, there’s nowhere to go. And so the advertisers, politicians, political propaganda type things have full reign over the script of desire that’s dominating your action because it’s able to parasitize on the one that’s within you that you’re not aware of. Something like that. It’s a way to think about it. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And they do that, you know, psychoanalytical work in the United States disappeared basically into advertising and the intelligence community, as far as I can tell. Because if you want to get analyzed, you go to South America, Europe or something. And I think what happened was that they figured, “Oh, this is actually how you manipulate people. Let’s go f*****g hide this s**t.” And it runs all in this program, basically. Get that script of desire, make it sure it doesn’t become conscious, manipulated behind the scenes, and now they’re doing things and buying stuff they don’t want. “Why am I buying this? I don’t need this. I don’t want this.” Marc: Right. Zak: “Why am I eating this? It’s not good for me. It actually doesn’t make me feel good.” And nowadays, of course, “why am I watching this? I don’t really want to be watching this.” Now we get into the attention capture, hijack of the script of desire thing. And that’s the attention hijack capture that’s possible as a result of leveraging the script of desire as a way in. That’s very, very deep. That’s very, very deep. Because when you think about YouTube rabbit holes, or I forget the term that they use—which is a pejorative term used to describe people who get indoctrinated by YouTube—but what’s happening there is the algorithm is reliably differentially responding to what you’re responding to. But what you’re responding to is what you want, or what you think you want. And so there’s this weird, perverse feedback loop that’s created around your script of desire, where it itself becomes distorted as it’s giving you what’s available. Who knows what will happen when generative AI allows us to go into impossible realms of human desire. Because that’s what technology has always been seducing us into this unlimited script of desire. And it’s hijacking again, on an unconscious belief, which is that, yes, we have an infinite power, desire, Eros, and yet we’re finite. So the sense that there is that move which is seducing us into a technologically advanced hyper desire, hyper stimulus. There’s this kind of hyper desire. Sugar is probably the best example. Like, if you’re a mammal in the jungle, max pursue sugar because it’s hard to get. If you’re a mammal in New York City or something, don’t max pursue sugar because it’s refined and it’s everywhere you could look. You could really eat sugar all day and not stop. So, that script of desire—how do you bind it? How do you correct it? How do you make it wholesome with the rest of what reality is (wholesome in that Wilberian sense of inclusive)? That’s what was coming up for me. But I think specifically, I’d be curious about the unconscious to conscious, and then beyond the conscious into evolutionary or something, which is what I heard in terms of your awareness. The Universe’s scripts of desire is a script of desire, or makes possible new scripts of desire, CosmoErotic scripts of desire, if you will. Marc: Right. Beautiful. Let’s stay real close to it. Let’s just take a step at a time. What Artificial Intelligence Does Not Possess: A Script of Desire Marc: When you get that Reality is scripts of desire, you get how heinous advertising is. When you get that Reality is scripts of desire, which are not mechanical, but which are musical—meaning, there is desire which is melodic, which is untune, which is resonant with the omni-harmonious and the omni-coherent Cosmos. And because I am directly emergent from and participatory in the CosmoErotic universe, the scripts of desire that live in me are identical. They might be more evolved, they might be more refined, they might be more crystallized, but they participate in—in other words, I’m not alienated or dissociated—every quark, muon, lepton, hadron, atom, molecule, macromolecule, cell, organism, neural net, neural cord, all the way up, mammalian, it all lives in me. Everything is a script of desire, and precisely what artificial intelligence does not possess is a script of desire. Zak: Beautiful. Marc: It’s like, “Huh.” Zak: It’s scary. Marc: Right. Zak: Because it sure seems like I might start wanting things. But then what is it? Marc: You begin to get that actually all of our intelligence is grounded, animated, and suffused in a script of desire. There is no disambiguating of intelligence from desire. Now, if I then try and actually dissociate intelligence from desire, I will get Frankenstein, but not a good Frankenstein. I mean, I’ll get a horror. I’ll get something which actually violates desire. In other words, it can only be that way. You see that really clearly. Aligning with the Desire of Reality as It Expresses Itself Uniquely in Me Marc: So at the foundational levels of Cosmos as we’ve talked over the years, and we had early conversations with our friend Ken about this, and the set of conversations we did when we were all hanging out with David and writing the First Principles and First Values book. At the foundational levels of Cosmos, there’s no split between need and desire. So when we say protons, neutrons, and electrons need to come together to form an atom, that’s an existential need. It’s a need of existence if you will. And it’s also an existential desire. It’s unlikely, although possible, but you know pretty unlikely that protons, neutrons, and electrons are doing intensive processes of sacred text study or yoga or psychoanalysis, in order to decide whether to come together to become atoms. That’s just not how it’s happening. But we do. So what happens is as desire evolves and we get to the human level, there’s this new possibility, which is there’s this evolution of first-person interiority, which introduces this process, which is choice. And what choice is, is actually, it’s not this abstract thing, “Oh, let me intellectually choose.” No, choice is berur. Choice is: I clarify my desire. Choice is, by its nature, it’s a process of the clarification of desire. So evolution is desire. It’s a desire for transformation. It’s a desire for more and more of the value structure of Cosmos. That’s a big deal. So we clarify desire. Now let’s just go one more step. So first off, let’s just say again, if that’s true, which it is. 1) Evolution is desire. 2) Evolution is the evolution of desire. 3) What’s introduced at the human level is this new emergence which is in the lineage Homo imago Dei. It’s the participation in the capacity to clarify my desire. My desire becomes voluntaristic in some sense. It’s no longer pure necessity. There’s a voluntaristic dimension, which is where my dignity comes from. My dignity comes from my capacity to clarify desire. So first off, you get again the heinous nature of advertising, which is deliberately geared towards the deception of one in terms of what their own desire is. In a certain sense, you could say it like this—the new script of desire, the realization of CosmoErotic Humanism is that actually: * Reality is desire, * that desire moves through me, * I have to clarify that desire in order to align with the desire of Reality as it expresses itself uniquely in me. So if Reality desires uniqueness, I’ve got to align with that desire for uniqueness. If Reality desires transformation, I’ve got to align with that desire for transformation. If Reality desires intimacy, I’ve got to align with that desire for intimacy. But as that desire lives uniquely in me. Meaning—let me add something here. The nature of the evolutionary movement is that evolution desires deeper and deeper levels, and one of the new depth levels, of the new evolutions of desire, is that desire is getting more unique. In other words, the crystallization of reality’s uniqueness is the crystallization of new qualities of desire. So, if Zak’s desire would be a bland desire that blended in, in this insipid, mellifluous static harmony. It would be just, “Oh, it’s very sweet.” No, no. What’s interesting about Zak-ness is, it’s a unique expression of desire that never existed before. So it’s additive. There’s a new quality of desire. Evolution evolves, and it becomes Marc, it becomes Zak, it becomes Ken, it becomes KK. It’s this new quality of desire. So the evolution of desire is to not just be one with the Field of Desire, but it’s to be both one and distinct in the Field of Desire and aligned with the whole field. “Wow,” right? When I go and undermine that, when I go to actually block the ability for that to happen, it’s because my hidden script of desire is that desire is this neutral structure of Cosmos. In other words, basically, desire is simply a mechanics to be manipulated. Zak: Yeah, so you manipulate it, and you manipulate society through it, in the way you tinker with an engine, for example. Marc: Exactly. In other words, paradoxically, it’s the desire neutral scripts of desire. Zak: Most dangerous. Marc: Or this bland, mechanistic, positivistic merged together. It’s mostly desire neutral made with a little desire positive. Zak: Advertising runs, you have to have some desire positive for advertising. Marc: Right. Zak: But you also feel guilty about your desire, because then you do reaction formation. But yes, it’s very—advertising is fucked. Your Unique Desire Is Aligned With and Distinctly Additive to the Script of Desire of Reality Zak: And I would say a couple of additional things here, as we close. It’s often said in the Dharma, which is that the universe is not a fact; it’s a story. It’s a love story. And this is another angle into that prism, which is a very deep idea. One way to ground that is that the resolution to the meaning crisis isn’t the idea that everything’s connected to everything else. That’s actually not gonna help you. But the idea that you are woven into a story, literally, resolves the meaning crisis. Like, actually, literally, technically, from a linguistic standpoint, everything being connected to everything else—I think it was Manson who said, “If everything is one, then nothing is wrong.” But if there’s a story, there are precisely things that are wrong. Story has protagonists and scripts of desire. So there you can be off. You can miss the mark. You can desire for the wrong thing. So yeah, there’s a deep need in the culture to clarify this. Marc: That’s great. Let’s finish exactly with that. Let’s go back to that piece of CosmoErotic Humanism, which is one of—and it’s in the First Principles and First Values book, David’s book, is: * Reality is not merely a fact. Reality is a story. * Reality is not an ordinary story. Reality is a story of Eros. It’s a love story. * It’s not an ordinary love story. It’s an Evolutionary Love story. Or it’s Eros. Meaning, it’s the quality of Cosmos itself. And then the key part that you’re pointing towards: * Your story is chapter and verse in The Universe: A Love Story. So what we’re saying there is—and this is a crazy exciting place to finish—what a story means is a thread of desire. That’s what a story is. Zak: Yes, precisely. Marc: A story is: I have a desire. And a story is: a desire for Value. It’s for the realization of Value, whether it’s the value of personhood, whether it’s the value of creativity, whether it’s the value of depth, whether it’s the value of intimacy. So Story is a thread of desire. and when we say your story, we mean your unique story, which means your unique quality of desire is chapter and verse, is a script of desire in the Universe: A Love Story, and the script of desire of Reality. So your script of desire is a unique script of desire in the larger script of Reality. It’s a gorgeous place. Which is why the clarification of your desire, we move it both from unconscious one to conscious, but then, as you said so beautifully, which is completely correct— we can’t just do the neutral move from unconscious to conscious. I need to clarify to actually identify the depth of my unique desire, which will be aligned with and distinctly additive to the script of desire of Reality. Zak: Yeah, beautiful. Marc: That’s a good reason to be born. Zak: Yeah, that was well said, sir. I think we clarified some stuff there, man. Marc: We got started. Zak: We did. And then, yeah, Saturday, we’ll see David with his Bible. Marc: If he shows up with the Bible, we’ll show up with ours anyways. Zak: Yeah, indeed. Marc: Yay. It was good to talk to you, man. Zak: Yeah, you too. Marc: Cha. Mentioned Sources: * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Abridged Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Temple, J. David, First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024 Mentioned People: * B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) * Kristina Kincaid * Ken Wilber (1949-) * Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) * Nachmanides Moses ben Nahman (1194-1270) * Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. 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January 31 · 25 min
Scripts of Desire
About this episode: What if the universe isn’t just a collection of matter, but a story being written? But not just any story, a story that’s fundamentally driven by the evolution of desire itself? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore how scripts of desire are a fundamental structure of reality. They reveal how these scripts are visible everywhere—from the devotion in sacred texts like the Song of Songs to the very laws of chemistry and biological evolution. They argue that every entity in the cosmos, from an atom to a human being, is following an innate script of desire, seeking deeper contact and greater wholeness. The dialogue concludes with reflections on attachment theory and identity formation, emphasizing how important it is to clarify one’s own unique script. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast is drawn from Marc Gafni’s Codes of Desire: On the Nature of Reality: The Answer to Who, Where, and What and David J. Temple’s First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, January 2026, Episode: “Scripts of Desire” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:51 — Context Setting 1:38 — The Name of God Is a Script of Desire 10:00 — A Holon Is a Script of Desire 14:07 — About First Principles and First Values 15:02 — Scripts of Desire Include Cosmogenic Scripts of Desire 20:37 — From Your Unique Perspective to Your Unique Quality of Intimacy to Your Unique Configuration of Desire 24:31 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: David sent me an email. He said that he had sent you a note. Marc: He did. Zak: He did. Okay. Good. Because sometimes it’s not clear what’s actually happening. Marc: He wants us to talk about a little more—we talked about it last week because you dropped it into the space just spontaneously—the scripts of desire. Zak: Right. Marc: Tell me if this works for you. I’ll take a little more of an extended pass, then give it to you for an extended pass. Is that okay? Zak: Sure. Go for it. Marc: Or just cut me off in the middle. I want to see if I can kind of unwind a little bit. Okay? So like this. I’m going to do like this. Let’s start with lineage and then go to science. We could go the other way, but let’s go that way for now. Zak: Okay. Marc: Well, in lineage, we have basically four or five ways in and one of them we alluded to last week. The Name of God Is a Script of Desire Marc: So one, we have the name of God. The name of God is, for almost all the lineages, the name of God means kind of the fundamental structure of Reality. So Reality is not atoms. Reality is something underneath. That something underneath,that something going on instead of the “oops,”that kind of inherent organizing principle, which has many faces,that inherent cohering principle. I don’t like the word organizing because it feels too mechanical, but the Eros of intimate coherence that makes it all hang together because: there’s a rightness of things,there’s a right order of things,there’s an aspirational ought,it’s trying to go somewhere. That whole—the intelligent organismic Cosmos that’s awake and alive, whatever that is. That’s called the name of God. And the name of God, in many of the lineages, but let’s just look at the wisdom of Solomon here, the lineage of Solomon, the name of God in the lineage of Solomon is as we’ve talked about many times, is a four-letter word, in which the word itself means desire. We have a yod, hei as in jah, and a vav, hei. The yod is this little small letter. The yod enters the hei, the first two letters, and then the vav enters the hei, which are the second two letters. And the yod entering the hei is called by the Zohar in the 13th century, zivug matmedet trein re’in d’la mitparshin, two lovers that never separate. And then the vav entering the hei is trein re’in d’la mitparshin, says the Zohar, which is two lovers that separate and come back together. It’s very beautiful. י (yud/Y) ה (hey/H) ו (vav/W) ה (hey/H) יהוה The way I’ve understood this, and I’ve written to David about this, at different times, you and I have talked about it over the last decade, is that the yud entering the hey, the jah, is, its exterior expression of that interior force, is for example the four forces. It’s not a fifth force. It is the four forces themselves and it’s the animating force of the four forces. The four forces are disclosures of it, expressions of it. The electromagnetism, gravity, the strong, the weak, nuclear, those are expressions. And then whenever you get to any kind of the Higgs boson field, it’s all an expression of this jah. And that generates, that is the nature, the fabric of the whole evolutionary process. And then when the human being enters the story, there’s this split that takes place, at least a potential cognitive split, even if it’s a delusion, between need and desire, in which I can desire something that I don’t actually need, so I can have a pseudo desire and think it’s a real desire. I can actually step away from my union with the larger whole, my union with myself, and then I can claim it again, enter it again, recover my place and go deeper. That is the lovers that come together and step apart, which means, there’s this dimension of activating arousal that theurgically creates, using the word theurgy, that we actually affect and create and reweave the fabric of Cosmos through the clarification of our own desire. So that means we have these two different dimensions. It means that the name of God—and I know we’re cliff noting here in an intense form, but that’s okay—the name of God is a script of desire, literally. It’s quite literally the name of God is a script of desire. Zak: That’s so clear. Yeah, you footnoted that, you cliff noted that, but it’s very clear. Right. That’s a book length of stuff to actually clarify that. Marc: Right. So, let’s stay in lineage for a second before we go to science. We now have these sacred texts of, let’s say, the lineage of the great traditions, but in this case, again, we’ll stay with the lineage of Solomon. All the sacred texts, the kind of preeminent sacred text actually attributed to Solomon is the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs, which is eight chapters, which many scholars say it was originally a tavern song. And it’s a tavern song of bawdy, raucous desire. That’s actually what it is. And of course, there’s a key text, I think 6-8, which is tocho ratzuf ahava, its insides are lined with love, with Eros, with ErosDesire. So it’s this book and the book is actually not… it’s not a chaste love song. It’s an explication of desire. Then we have three texts, and these texts are formative. 1) One says, “All the books are holy.” The Song of Songs is Holy of Holies. 2) The second says, “All of creation is sufficiently valuable, simply for the sake of the Song of Solomon.” 3) And then the third text, “if the Torah would not have been given, the Song of Songs should be sufficient to govern the world.” And of course, what we see here... Zak: This was Akiva? Marc: This is Akiva. These are all Akiva texts. Two of them are in the Mishnah in Tractate Yadayim in 3-5, in terms of a source. But what’s wild is, essentially what it is saying is, the Song of Songs is literally a script of desire. And we’re saying that desire implies Value, like Torah. Torah doesn’t mean in this text—we’re not being homiletic or metaphoric, no—Torah here clearly doesn’t mean, in this Akiva text, the laws of the Torah. It doesn’t mean that you would derive the laws of Sabbath from the script, the text. It means Value. That’s what it means. It means that the Torah had not been given, we could derive all value, which is the matrix of governance in all of its domains from this text of desire. And this text of desire is sufficient reason thereof to have a world. Meaning, the purpose of the world is to allow the possibility for the human response to the Field of Value. It’s very deep. There’s a Field of Value, we respond to the Field of Value. How we respond to the world of the Field of Value is the raison d’etre of the enactment of the manifest universe. So that’s like, “F**k!” Which tells you something completely crazy, which I just got a little note suggesting to look in that direction, literally, I kid you not, this afternoon. We’ve talked about before, and I don’t know if we’ve ever… David’s ever had us recorded or not, I think we have, but it talked about desire implies Value, which we just saw from the Song of Songs text, that Value implies rights. So we’ve talked about that in terms of attention. Here, we see that Value also demands response and response is responsibility. In other words, desire discloses Value.Value generates rights.In other words, Value demands devotion.Desire discloses value, but desire and devotion are inseparable.Desire and devotion are completely isomorphic.You can’t split desire and devotion.So desire is devotion.Devotion discloses Value.Value generates rights and devotion implies I’m in service to you. I owe you something. I want to give you something. I want to serve you.But Value also demands a response. And it’s very subtle. I spent the afternoon thinking about this. In other words, I respond to Value. For example, let’s say we’re talking about the experience of desire in the embodied sensual. There has to be a loyalty when we come together, let’s say, in desire with a beloved. The beloved allows us to witness their surrender. That demands a response. That’s a script of desire, which is a script of value, which both evokes devotion structurally, which gives the person rights, but it also demands a response. We’re responsible to it. I’m responsible to that. You’ve got this kind of rights and responsibility that’s very, very deep and very profound in the nature of it. That’s the second set of texts. So we have both the name of God, we have the Song of Songs texts and the Song of Songs texts are clearly scripts of desire that disclose Value. Let’s use that as kind of a lineage framework. Zak: Great. Marc: Now let’s flip over to science for a second and it gets kind of wild. A Holon Is a Script of Desire Marc: Let’s go to Koestler’s holons for a second. What is a holon? What a holon is a script of desire, actually. A holon is a part whole, in which there’s a part. The part is both a whole and the part desires more wholeness. In other words, the part is animated by what we call the Eros equation. That part itself desires deeper contact and greater wholeness. So the part which is also a whole is not satisfied with its own wholeness. It’s not self-satisfied. It doesn’t say, “Hydrogen! We’re good. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, first three, 380,000 years later, we’re good.” No, no, no, no. We don’t stop at hydrogen, helium, and lithium because even though they are wholes onto themselves, because they are chemicals—and what a chemical is, literally, a chemical is f*****g literally a configuration of desire that yields a particular wholeness. That’s what a chemical is. And again, we forget that. That’s literally what a chemical is. Literally, not figuratively. That’s what we mean when we say there’s chemistry between people. What it literally means is that there’s a particular form of desire that brings this atomic number, that then literally creates this particular whole, that then has a script of desire written into it, literally. And that script of desire evokes a new whole, which then has a new script of desire written into it that evokes another whole. That’s what it means. When we tell the old joke where the king says, “What’s on top? What keeps the world going? A lion. A lion’s holding it all up, but what’s holding the lion up? An elephant. What’s holding the elephant up? Turtles. What’s holding turtles?” “Shut up, King. It’s turtles all the way down.” So “it’s holons all the way down, all the way up,” means literally that it’s scripts of desire all the way up and all the way down. I just got a note from David and he asked me to just write up a first text of this and send it to you for you to write it up your way, but it all clarified today. It’s just crazy exciting. That’s literally what chemistry means. It’s chemistry all the way up and all the way down. Literally: chemistry equals script of desire,which generates a unique configuration of desire, which is what a whole is,which has written into it a new script of desire, which will allure to it through its particular vectors of attention and capacities and potentiating possibilities,it will create literally a new whole,which then has a new script of desire written to it. So actually, holons, the structure, are scripts of desire. That’s literally what they are. And each new level of wholeness is new value. New value means that there’s a rightness to the relationships. In the relationship, there’s right relationship, meaning every part has its own fully individuated vector, its own autonomy, it doesn’t disappear, and yet it has exactly right communion. And we would call that intimate coherence. Meaning shared identity—intimacy, in terms of the intimacy equation—but in the context of relative otherness, in which there’s precise relationship between the allurement and autonomy, which is what allows for the wholeness. That’s literally exactly what it is. So in that sense, it’s a value. The value is: * there’s a rightness to it, but * it’s the irreducible rightness that exists, and * it has an aspirational ought. Meaning, it has a telos, it’s going somewhere, it’s reaching for something. It has a script of desire that’s reaching for the next stage. So it’s like, “Huh?” David’s helped us clarify this a little bit in the last... Right? Boom. Exciting, huh? Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Scripts of Desire Include Cosmogenic Scripts of Desire Zak: Yeah, super exciting. Very interesting. And the word cluster grows because what you’re saying there about chemistry is true, in a sense, more true than what had previously been said, which is that it’s a configuration of intimacy. But a configuration of intimacy is… Marc: Better! Zak: So there’s the Story of Value, there’s the configuration of intimacy, there’s the script of desire. These are all different views of something that’s similar. Because when you say script, like story, you’re implying something that’s linguistically mediated more so than other things which don’t imply that. So it’s amazing to think about not just the configuration of intimacy, but one that has this normative structure. If you think about evolutionary selection, more generally, what I was thinking as you were speaking was that when something is selected for, it’s as if it’s completing a sentence within a script of desire, meaning that it is the thing that the universe wanted. So, every time you get this evolutionary advance and you get the sense of, like, this is the new thing, this is the atom, or this is the molecule, or this is the vertebrate animal. That thing hangs around because it is part of a script of desire. This desire very, very fundamentally written into the universe as it were. In psychoanalytic theory, the desire is, of course, primary. And so if you look at Lacan and Freud and all these guys, and Girard’s work focuses on desire, there’s this thing in Lacan called the objet petit a, which means the object a little A. And it basically means like the focus of desire that structures your whole identity. It basically means a script of desire that’s constitutive of who you are. Meaning how do you think, what is an identity? Who am I? What is it? How do we best conceive that? One good answer is that Zak is a script of desire, Marc is a script of desire. That there’s a thread that is woven through all the moments of your experience and all your different capabilities. This thread is some script that’s kind of like an archetypal script of desire because it’s uniquely yours. And yet, it has these other characteristics and flavors of other scripts you’ve seen and heard and been exposed to. And of course the biological script. This is where I want to go, because there’s a science of the biochemistry. There’s a science of attachment and animal behavior. Like, Darwin’s first work on the expression of emotions in humans and animals is fascinating, because what he was studying there was basically the scripts of desire that are written on faces and in interactions during mating, mothering and parenting. So the notion of attachment is clarified even further. It’s a configuration of intimacy, yes, but it’s not just a configuration of intimacy. It’s this very precise reciprocal script of desire where there’s mutuality of call and response, and the mutual meeting of the script that’s needed by the other. So there’s this way to think about mating behavior in animals, and again, attachment behavior in humans, even before you get linguistically mediated actual scripts. Because then there’s the actual scripts, like love songs and the Song of Solomon. Marc: Yeah, those are later. Zak: Much later. Before that, you get these pre-linguistic scripts of desire that are very clear. And so that’s what we mean. And then before that you get to chemical/structural… Marc: Scripts of desire. Zak: Cosmogenic scripts of desire. And then we start talking about the s**t. And what’s crazy, and this is where I’ll give it back, because I’m curious about your thoughts on this, we’ve talked about I think here, the Sitra Achra. In this realm, advertising becomes even more clarified as these scripts pornographically refactoring the need for a script of desire. You can’t not have a script. You can’t not have something that constellates this thread of your movement towards and your valuing of. And so advertising runs direct interference and gives you these b******t scripts of desire and then therefore really reconstitutes identity. Marc: So you get the evil of it. Zak: The evil of it, exactly. And that’s before you get the attention capture driven advertisement stuff, which disrupts the possibility for a lot of identity formation around scripts of desire. So it was a little bit of the arc that I heard. And I think the deepest thing that I would focus on because the other stuff, attachment and those things I can see clearly, but there’s this other thing, which is that, in some sense, the deepest mechanism of concrescence, as Whitehead would call it, or like, the movement of the universe is one where it’s creating and completing these scripts of desire. Which means it’s calling out for something. It, like, says something and then it’s “…”. And what it is doing is the universe is exclaiming: there’s a niche. There’s an opening. There’s a value that is now actualizable, a desire that’s now fulfillable. And so this script of desire expands and grows. Marc: Let’s take this. That’s great. I’m going to bracket for a second the two very important things that you raised, which one is, of course, selection and the second is attachment. The attachment theory, we’ve talked about over the years many times, but I’ll come back to that. And this notion of calling out. Right? Zak: Yeah. From Your Unique Perspective to Your Unique Quality of Intimacy to Your Unique Configuration of Desire Marc: So in the origination of Unique Self Theory, we were reading texts that were about the revelation at Sinai, the theophany, and the Solomon tradition, which talked about your unique perspective on the mountain as it were, on Mount Sinai, hearing the voice in a particular vector. From a particular angle. And there was this notion of there are 70 faces to the Torah. So it’s about your unique perspective. I was talking a lot to Ken then who was into perspective theory, the kind of big way. I think our brother, Clint, was doing some lots of work on, I think his doctorate actually at Fielding is on perspective taking. So, I formulated Unique Self originally as unique perspective. That was the original formulation. Then what happened is it then became in 2014, I realized unique perspective is just an insufficient way to talk about this. So I added your unique quality of intimacy. Beloved brother Ken wasn’t… Ken, if you’re listening, brother, you weren’t ecstatic about that. He liked the cleanness of perspective, but we went back and forth and we agreed. It was just insufficient. Then in 2016, as Return to Eros was being written, we started talking about it in Return to Eros and the chapter on Your Unique Self, Your Unique Configuration of Desire. So that’s what you’re pointing to, right? Zak: Exactly. Yeah. So clarification. Unique Self therapy, Unique Self coaching, Unique Self pointing out instructions. A lot of stuff opens up when you start to think about… Again, Lacan did the wrong thing with his conclusion, but the right thing is that the identity is woven on these threads of the scripts, and these scripts are scripts of desire. Marc: I’m completely interested. I have an old friend named Mark Kirschbaum. Mark may be listening. He listens to all sorts of funny things. He’s a brilliant doctor and brilliant scholar, who’s a great reader of Lacan. And another, I wouldn’t say friend, but old colleague, I used to eat at in Jerusalem named Avivah Zornberg, who also writes extensively about Lacan. Zak: Girard as well. So the scapegoating thing in your language now would be a script of desire. Girard is like, “Why do we keep scapegoating?” Because it’s a script of desire, we can’t escape. Marc: No, beautiful, beautiful, That’s a big addition. I don’t know Lacan. I’m fascinated to hear how that fits in. I’m neither a Lacanian nor have even read Lacan. So I’m really fascinated. Zak: Weirdly enough. And then we could wrap. Lacan got his notion of that objet petit a from James Mark Baldwin. Marc: Oh, that’s very interesting actually. That’s very interesting. Zak: And it was Baldwin who actually was talking about imitation and basically you have this thing, you imitate, which you usually get from somewhere else, that you desire so much and you move towards it. You consulate your identity around this. Marc: That’s so interesting. Zak: And Lacan read Baldwin. Yeah. Marc: Well, let’s just say one sentence and we’ll wrap. Which is, we need to distinguish between a model that I imitate in order to evoke my own irreducibly unique script of desire and a model that I imitate, which obscures my script of desire. So for example, Pentland bases himself on the work of one psychologist who coins turn homo imitans, which is exactly not what we’re talking about. Zak: Precisely. This is a very deep issue in metapsychology, because the more mature your personality is, the more you can relate to other people in a way that deepens your own unique script. Marc: That’s a critical distinction. Zak: With immaturity, you just take on the scripts of others, and in fact, they’re not your scripts. Marc: I think that if David has us write this up for the World Religion book, it seems like maybe you write up the selection stuff, which is very, very, very important. We’ll come back next week. Maybe we should stay next week in one more conversation in scripts of desire. Zak: Oh, that would be very interesting because it very much opens up into metapsychological territory. Marc: Okay? Yay! Was this great? Zak: It was beautiful. Marc: Okay. Zak: Later. Marc: Yay! Love. Mentioned Sources: * ha-Nasi, Judah, Mishnah, ca. 200 CE * Gafni, Marc & Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, 2017 * Gafni, Marc, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, Integral Publishers, 2012 Mentioned People: * Akiva ben Yosef (ca. 40-135) * Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) * Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) * Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) * René Girard (1923-2015) * Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) * Charles Darwin (1809-1882) * Ken Wilber (1949-) * Clint Fuhs * James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) * Alex Pentland (1951-) * Mark Kirshbaum * Avivah Zornberg Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
January 16 · 32 min
On Eros, Value and ErosValue
About this episode: Is the universe a random, meaningless accident? Or is there a deeper plot and hidden scripts guiding everything from the Big Bang to our own lives? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the deep interconnection between Eros, Value, and desire. They introduce the concepts of ErosValue and scripts of desire, exploring several different definitions of Value. They propose that the Field of Value is not a social construct but an involutionary given, shaping the Cosmos from its inception. They also propose that story is an intrinsic structure of reality, shaped by desire and value. Stories provide coherence and meaning, forming the foundation for human rights and ethical living. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast is drawn from David J. Temple’s First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, as well as the following forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 * Stories of Inherent Cosmic Value Are Real: Love Stories Model Stories of Real Value: Personal, Global, Galactic, and Cosmic Love Stories, Toward a New World Philosophy and Religion as a Context for Our Diversity, Vol. 1-3 If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J.,Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, January 2026, Episode: “On Eros, Value and ErosValue” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:51 — Context Setting 1:36 — Eros as Both a Quality of Being and a Quality of Becoming 3:20 — The Field of Value Is the Space in Which Everything Arises and Value Is the Script of Desire of Reality 5:04 — The Field of Value as an Involutionary Given 6:13 — David’s Addition to the Definition of Value: Normativity, i.e. Irreducible Rightness 11:18 — We Can Answer “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” Anthro-Ontologically 14:14 — About First Principles and First Values 15:09 — The Involutionary Given of Value Is a Script of Desire 21:04 — Story Is Equally Primordial with Desire and All Stories Are Scripts of Desire 24:36 — Yuval Harari Discovered a Thread: Rights Emerge from Value, but His Claim on Stories Is Performatively Contradicted in His Behavior 31:42 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community Episode Transcript: Context Setting Marc: Oh my god. Zak: Yeah. So, David dropped a note off or something, right? Marc: Yeah, David dropped a note off.. And the note is pretty much on “what is value?”—I mean, that seems to be the topic that he’s deeply interested in. Let’s see if we can look at that. He wrote a note that he sent to both of us, and then he also scrolled—I don’t know if you saw—he scrolled a couple of texts. So I want to start with the texts. He suggested that we go back to the Return to Eros material, the original material, which I wrote a book, and you wrote a very beautiful review, which was its own essay, essentially, on the Eros material. He wrote and said, “Hey, go look at that again,” which is always his way of saying we missed something that he wants us to think about. Eros as Both a Quality of Being and a Quality of Becoming Marc: When we talk about Eros, we’re very careful, in Return to Eros and in the original Mystery of Love material, to distinguish between Eros as both a quality of being and a quality of becoming. There’s what I like to call “The hijackers of Eros”. So everyone who believes in feminine value, “Eros is the feminine.” Well, no, actually, Eros is the feminine and the masculine. Zak: Yeah, and, of course, the little cherub is a man. The God of Eros in Greek myths is a man. Marc: That’s right. He’s shooting the arrow, he’s a little cherubic man. And of course, the cherubs above the ark in the temple are man and woman in most of the lineage. So just like people try and hijack Eros as the feminine, they often try and hijack Eros as the quality of pulsing, becoming. But actually, Eros has two qualities. There’s an Eros of being, which is a quality of being, and there’s an Eros of becoming. Once you get that, you get, Oh, okay. So now, as we’ve been talking with David for the last year or so about Eros as ErosValue, Eros is ErosValue. So I just want to say it through, I want to slow us down, if David’s listening, so he feels like we did it carefully. We say in our interior science equation: Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. So that quality, that is describing this movement of becoming. But Eros is also this quality of being. Now, what we’ve said is that this equation describes Value itself. It’s this desiring of contact, Value, and ever greater wholeness, Value. That’s a new value. Right relationship, right value. The Field of Value Is the Space in Which Everything Arises and Value Is the Script of Desire of Reality Marc: So what that tells us, is that the Field of Value, when we’re asking the question of, “What is Value?”, there are two different possibilities: 1) The Field of Value is the space in which everything arises. It’s very clear and elegant. Instead of us saying, “Oh, being is the space,” or “Awareness is the space in which everything arises,” we’re saying Value is epi-primordial. It’s the space in which everything arises. This one sentence would be from the perspective of the Eros of being, or the ErosValue of being. Because we’re saying Eros is Value. Value is Eros, and Eros is Value. They’re inseparable. So as ErosValue, Value is the space in which everything arises. One. Then from the perspective of the Eros of becoming, we say something, and we’ll get to this, of course, later, because it’s later in David’s chart. But we say something like, 2) Value is the script of desire of reality, or: Clarified need plus clarified desire equals Value. Because both need and desire have this pulse of moving towards this pulse of becoming. So now, we have two different ways of holding the Field of Value: Value as the beingness, the space in which everything arises, and then Value as becoming, which is very, very different. It’s the exact opposite of a kind of postmodern view that says that values are a social construct that only exist on the human level, and they’re fully contrived. And there’s nothing to rest in because they’re all completely made up. No, no, no, no, no. In other words, Value emerges when the unmanifest discloses the manifest. And that disclosure is in the Field of Value. Those were in David’s text, so I thought I’d just put those on the table to start. The Field of Value as an Involutionary Given Zak: Yeah, it’s beautiful. And one way to speak of that is as the Field of Value and all the potentialities of ErosValue as involutionary givens to cosmic evolution, which is to say: downloaded into Cosmos with its genesis is the Field of Value itself. So that notion that it’s the condition for the possibility of all emergence towards what the universe is desiring, what the universe runs after. It throws out in front of itself this infinite and potentially infinitely evolvable field of ErosValue. Marc: Right. And we were talking to our dear friend the other day, it’s only when we formulated it as an involutionary given that the conversation began to find its way. Zak: Precisely. There are many semantic leverage points from the prior traditions. Many of the traditions have these ways of talking about that. Even the being-becoming kind of paradox polarity as central to whatever the primary ontic concept is. Marc: That’s exactly right. I think that’s why David was texting us. It’s clarifying now. It’s good. It’s exciting. David’s Addition to the Definition of Value: Normativity, i.e. Irreducible Rightness Marc: So, before we get to David’s letter on Value—he said to us on Value is real—let’s go back to David’s book on page 168, where we discuss First Principles and First Values. There’s a list on pages 168 and 169–170. There’s a list of First Principles and First Values, and there’s, as we both know, first-order First Principles and First Values, and there’s second-order First Principles and First Values. And the seventh, the last one in the list of first-order First Principles and First Values is, of course, Value itself. Zak: Right. Marc: So what we write here is, what David writes is: “Better and worse—i.e., normativity is constitutive of Cosmos, manifesting as the ubiquity of appetition, aka (desire and need).” Let’s talk about that. That’s a good start. You go, David! One way to think about this definition—and this appears a little bit in, as he always does, David writes like one to 115 which, of course, we’ll condense. But he wrote us this kind of sprawling thing. He’s like that. But his first one is: “Value is the quality of irreducible rightness that exists for its own sake.” Zak: Yeah. Marc: This is very related to this particular definition, that there’s a sense of rightness. Now, rightness is not only goodness. And it’s not only truth; it’s also beauty. Zak: Yes. Marc: There’s a rightness in beauty. This is a very beautiful word. I love this sentence, “Value is the quality of irreducible rightness that exists for its own sake.” Meaning, it’s not instrumental. It’s for its own sake. Now, David has added here on the definition of value—”Better or worse, i.e., normativity.” That’s the sense of irreducible rightness. It’s for its own sake. It’s non-instrumental. It’s not a social construct. But David added something: “manifesting as the ubiquity of appetition, desire, and need.” That’s adding something to it. That’s adding that there’s a desire and a need that ought to be fulfilled. So, last sentence, then, to you, man. I want to put these two together. So his second play is, “Value is the aspirational ought that is backed by the universe.” Or, last one, “Value is an intrinsic ought which allures reality towards its next level of fulfillment, of depth, and of wholeness.” Zak: Yeah. Marc: David’s in play. He’s clarifying a little bit. Any and all thoughts, comments, alternative speeches, or antisemitic remarks? Zak: Just that sense of that when in the universe something comes from nothing, that it’s a “yes”. Not from a kind of evil, as the kind of Manichaean-like Gnostic view would be. But in fact, that this is joyous, correct—like both do this, and it’s beautiful and it’s appropriate. Marc: It’s good and it’s true. Zak: Exactly. It’s good and it’s true. So that sense of the—each basic move the universe makes in evolution is somehow right. And that the Field of Value lays down this potential for that to be. Otherwise, every movement of the universe would be arbitrary. Every movement of the universe, you would say, “Well, is that a right or a wrong thing for the universe to do?” And you’d be like, “Well, that’s a stupid question.” But if the Field of Value is an involutionary given, and there’s an intrinsic sense of appropriateness, inappropriateness, goodness, badness, incorrectness, correctness, beautiful, not beautiful, that in every move the universe makes, you can ask the question of its rightness. One way to think about that in a very interesting way is just to think about selection, which is just what survives—what continues to exist in the universe is what the universe wants to be here. That means that it’s saying this is the right thing, this is the wrong thing. The wrong thing doesn’t continue to exist. And as you get into a more complex notion of selection, you get into what Ken used to call all-quadrant selection, which means that it’s not just functional fit of causal interface that allows a thing to exist. It is all dimensions, which means the fulfillment of clarified desire meeting with the existence of intrinsic value couples, and you get being—intrinsic more being and more intrinsic being. Marc: That’s what we mean when we call it “more God to come.” Zak: Exactly, but that as the universe clarifies its desire, there is something for it to attain and to achieve. With that clarified desire is the notion of—so every time more and truer desire emerges, there is the possibility for its satisfaction. This is the dynamic of the evolution of the universe, in this sense, it is the calling for more and the receiving of more, the asking for the thing to be correct, and then the correcting. The making right. We Can Answer “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” Anthro-Ontologically Marc: Yes, it’s beautiful. And we’re pointing towards Value. In other words, it’s what we mean when the lineage says, “Hakadosh Baruch Hu Mit a- vheh, God lusts, la’asot Dirato, to make His dwelling place Ba-tachtonim, in the manifest world.” It’s the sense of—the way I like to say it is, Infinity is desiring finitude. There’s this “desire is core.” And when Wittgenstein asks or Fichte and Schelling ask, or recently, in the 25–34 years ago, John Leslie wrote some really nice stuff on that, but everyone’s asked this question: why is there something rather than nothing? We can anthro-ontologically say it’s more than something’s going on. Zak: Yeah. Marc: Yes, something’s going on, and it’s not random. Something’s going on. It’s not like, as Ken beautifully wrote who, I think, David also knows, he mentioned. It’s not “oops, something’s going on.” It’s a great and wonderful way to phrase it. Ken told me, he said it was his favorite page. Zak: I mean that page is great. And people’s reaction to that phrasing and kind of parsing of issues is interesting because it backs you into a corner. Like, are you willing to think it’s all arbitrary? Marc: Which is the claim that’s being made. And so, it’s a good summation of the master of cuts. You and I talked about, like, a decade ago. I actually remember talking about it—a beautiful conversation where the master of cuts says that the religionist has to explain suffering; the atheist has to explain everything else. Zak: Yes. Marc: That’s the “oops,” moment. But actually, we can go beyond that moment. We can’t occlude the mystery, but there’s another step into knowing that we can go, and we can actually access that step, anthro-ontologically—anthro: human being; ontologically: realness lives there, the mysteries are within us—which is the desire for intimacy. It’s why we’ve called in CosmoErotic Humanism, the name of God, as it were the Infinite Intimate. So, infinity desires finitude. Now, we can’t plumb the nature of that desire. Desire is mysterious in human beings, and it’s totally mysterious in the Infinite Intimate, but we can have an experience of being welcome in the universe. Infinity desires finitude. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because infinity desires finitude. It changes your whole experience of being in reality. Meaning, I’m valued. In other words, reality is the disclosure of Value, and this begins to bring us towards this other understanding of Value, which is: desire discloses Value, or, clarified desire discloses Value. So the desire of the Infinite discloses or generates Value in all… Zak: In all of reality. Exactly. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. The Involutionary Given of Value Is a Script of Desire Zak: So, one way of saying it like that is the involutionary given. And this is weird because we get into free will versus determinism, or something like Providence versus randomness, or something, but that the involutionary pre-given of Value would actually be a script of desire. That actually there’s something that boots, that is something like a script of desire is downloaded as the evolutionary pre-given. This is me spitballing, but the idea that people like Wolfram have had that there’s something like a core generator function, or algorithm from which all the others emerge, that creates the whole thing. The idea that here we have a script of all scripts of desire, which is this crystal Field of Value thing. That’s the involutionary pre-given. And then you get all of these specific scripts—each tree, each subspecies, each unique human. All of these scripts within scripts within scripts, but the possibility of boots, and so it’s not just that the value encodes; it’s that a story is about to be told or something. Marc: Yeah. So, let’s go slow. First, I just want to introduce this term, because David just texted it to us, like, a few weeks back, which is “script of desire.” I want to give it space. Zak: I don’t know that I’ve heard David. I haven’t heard David’s formal definition, actually. Marc: I think he told me he shared it with you but you guys haven’t really talked about it. I get that. So, the way I understand it in discussion is, “scripts of desire” means that at the very core of reality, reality is Eros. Eros is ErosValue and ErosDesire. They’re not splittable, which is the essential Eros of reality, essential desire of reality, which itself that desire of reality is for Value. Life, for example, is a value. And so reality will move towards life. But actually, at every level of reality, reality will move towards the next level of depth. And each new level of depth generates new value. So, in essence, a “script of desire,” is a script of value. That’s what it is. A script of desire is actually a script of value. There’s no difference between them because desire discloses value. But let’s just play with text for a second. There’s a Mishnah, a kind of second-century text. In a tractate called the tractate Yadayim, the Tractate of Hands, which says something like, or refers to something like this idea. In the name of Akiva, it implies this idea, Ilmalei nit’nah Torah, if the Torah would not have been given, we could have learned all wisdom or all value from the Song of Solomon, from the Song of Songs. It’s very beautiful. So, the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, is an erotic set of love notes. It’s a story of desire. The entire text is about desire. It’s not even about love in an emotive sense; it’s actually desire. In other words, the Song of Songs is a script of desire. So what it’s saying is that all scripts —and I just realized this reading, literally, in the last four or five days. It’s beautiful. That all scripts of desire are scripts of value. In the middle of the night, I woke up just ecstatic, Oh, that’s what it’s saying. And then here’s another text. Second text, which also I didn’t realize that that’s what it meant. And I’ve seen this text for 40, 50 years—50 years at least. Probably the first time I saw this text was probably 45 to 50 years ago. I’m 93, so it was way back. Where the Zohar says, “Istakkal b’orayta, The Infinite looked in, gazed in or right to the Torah, u’vara alma, and created the world.” So the Torah is text. Now, as Nachmanides points out in the 13th century, is kind of the greatest kind of interior scientist of the 13th century. And he points out, all of the Torah is really the names of God. Now, the name of God, the four-letter name of God, is the Yud-hey-Vav-hey. So if you would spell it, it would be the Yud enters the hey, as in “Hallelujah.” As in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The Yud enters the hey, which is the line entering the circle. And then the Yud, which is a tiny letter, is then pulled down and becomes the Vav, which is the third letter. And then the Vav enters the hey. So the hey is always the circle, which is what the letter looks like in Hebrew. י (yud/Y) ה (hey/H) ו (vav/W) ה (hey/H) יהוה The Yud and the Vav are kind of phallic, and the idea is that the name of God is called, in the Zohar, the first two letters are called zivuga mitm’da, constant erotic union. And the next two letters are zivuga d’it’ar mitata, Erotic union that is aroused—aroused by what? By human beings. Meaning the name of God is the Field of Desire. Zak: Right. Marc: So if the Torah is the names of God, which I mean the Torah is an expression of the field of desire. So the Torah is value, which is disclosing the field of desire. How beautiful, right? Zak: Yeah. Marc: So all of a sudden, these texts reclarify. Just in the last days, it’s like, “of course.” Zak: Well, and you can see how it is that—you’re the one who said it—we killed every god except for Aphrodite. The idea that the distillation of the culture past the common-sense sacred axioms ends up being love songs. It ends up being actually quite crude love songs these days, which is that it’s not the, like, you know, what’s the one? The most famous one that they played in Ghost? I can’t remember. Anyway, so the deep old love songs from the ‘50s and stuff like that. But now we have these other ones, where there’s nothing left, in terms of the sacred, which is that the Torah is no longer being written, where do we look? We have to find it in something. And in some sense, the Song of Solomon is a kind of a crass love song, in a way, if you take it— Marc: Yeah. Absolutely! It’s why scholars try and explore— there’s a whole school of scholars that says, “It’s just a tavern song.” Zak: A tavern song. Right. Exactly. Marc: But the point is a tavern song is where it all is... Zak: Right. That’s what I’m saying. Marc: Exactly. Beautiful. Story Is Equally Primordial with Desire and All Stories Are Scripts of Desire Zak: So there’s something unavoidable about the kind of captivation of the scripts of desire that play through the culture. So this is back in the primacy of Story. So is it that Story is the superordinate class, or is it that all stories are, in a sense, scripts of desire? Given the ontology and the definition of story, it seems like all stories are in some sense scripts of desire. Marc: Let’s dive into this for a second. Because, again, I know that David has influenced a little bit, and we apologize for this with some degree of sincerity and some degree of insincerity. We apologize for not taking sufficient care of our listeners, which we don’t, we’re just kind of chatting, and we’re delighted and honored that people eavesdrop a little bit. But here I’m going to just take care of the listener a little bit. So what you’re referring to, of course, is this piece of work that David’s done, which is on the Ontology of Story. What we’re actually saying is—which is a very big idea—I’ve been deploying that idea a lot this year in One Mountain. And actually, we decided to do a pastiche on this idea of the ontology of story. Pastiche is your word, you brought into my consciousness. It’s a great word. An excuse for unfinished work, a pastiche. Zak: Don’t tell the post-modernists that. They think that this is how you do art. Marc: But this pastiche on story, the ontology of story, what we’re saying is that story has these six core elements, and the elements are: 1) There’s a causal relationship. In other words, it’s not merely constant conjunction, but there’s a necessary connection. 2) There’s a plotline driving the story. 3) The plotline is animated by desire. 4) Desire is always desire for value. 5) There’s often crisis which generates new value or new structures. 6) There’s some dimension of animated proto-freedom in the story. And what we’ve shown is with David, is that that definition of story goes all the way down. Zak: All the way down. Marc: And all the way up. Zak: Yeah. And it’s equally primordial with desire, so back to my point that it is, in a sense, saying that story—all stories are scripts of desire. In insofar as your story is an arbitrary set of events, it’s not a story. That’s interesting. Marc: Let’s stay with it. It’s beautiful, right? In other words, what we begin to realize is, and this is where it’s exciting. This is where I’ve been so excited about this in the last year, that you realize the tightness of the word cluster. I’ve been thinking about this for, literally, last year, like, day and night. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. It’s like, oh, there’s really, I don’t mean in terms of root, or in terms of formal meaning, but in terms of phenomenology, phenomenologically, there’s no distinction between the word “story” and “desire.” They’re the same word. In other words, it’s actually story and desire, and then Story, Desire, and Value are all epiphenomenologically primordial in Cosmos all the way down, all the way up. It’s ecstatic to realize that, because: * desire is always desire for, it’s the desire for Value. It’s for something. It’s driving action. It’s a process of becoming, aka, it’s a story. And then story always has desire—you and I are never interested in talking about—we always say to each other, we’re never telling a new story. And then we want a new Story of Value. Zak: Right. Marc: It’s very beautiful. It’s very tight. And maybe last sentence. This is f*****g crazy. Yuval Harari Discovered a Thread: Rights Emerge from Value, but His Claim on Stories Is Performatively Contradicted in His Behavior Marc: Take something like our friend, who gets demonized on the web. I’m sure he’s a wonderfully nice human being. I’m sure. Yuval Harari. Yuval’s big deal that he loves to say for the last seven, eight years, and he’s kind of reflecting the post-modern consciousness. He’s an uncontaminated reflector of that consciousness. He’s not a philosopher, but he reflects it. He always says, “Human rights are just a made-up story,” and you would say, like, you would think, like, “Huh? Do you really want to be saying that?” He is enjoying it because he’s not thinking about it as an educator. He’s thinking about it as a kind of provocateur, doing podcasts. But actually, do you really want to be saying that? So bracket that question, what our role is when we say things like that—but what he’s actually saying is, paradoxically, he’s discovered a thread that we’re just now articulating in that new book on attention that David just drafted, which is that actually rights emerge from Value. Zak: Yeah. Marc: In other words, that desire times need generates value, which then discloses rights and responsibilities. That’s our thread that we’ve been working on the last three, four months. Now, if you remove Value, there’s no rights. Of course, there’s none, because where would they f*****g come from? Go, please. Yeah, it’s exciting. Zak: Well, it ends up being interesting etymologically and semantically in terms of wordplay, because you get, as we started with this notion that there’s an involutionary pre-given of the rightness of the universe, which is the condition for the possibility of there being rights. Marc: Yes. Zak: And then, you also have the term “rite”, which is like a ritual, which is one way to think about a rite—the eye of value being opened through ritual practice to reveal the appropriateness of the world. Marc: And it’s particular rituals. Rituals of a particular face—I’m sorry, finish it, I apologize. Zak: I’m just making like: * Rite in the normative sense. * Rite in the ritual sense, and then * Rite in the legal sense. Are all related in terms of primacy of Field of Value. And again—story, like, if you can’t tell a story about why a right is worth protecting, if the answer is, “Who cares?” then you’re done. So again, story is also necessary. Marc: Story is utterly necessary. When Harari says, our friend, “Stories are actually human creations. They’re not intrinsic to the cosmos. They’re fabricated, social constructs which are never doing anything other than lying.” That’s his basic position. Stories are all fictions. They’re never saying anything true. And Yuval, brother, with total affection, my friend, and be delighted to talk to you about it. But we got to get a little real here. What he does is he sets up a straw man, and he says, “Well, money’s a story, and corporations are a story,” which are both true. There’s some deep truth in that. And, you know, “the Sunnis are telling one story and they’re killing the Shiites who are telling another story, fundamentalist Protestants are killing the fundamentalist Catholics who are telling a story.” Right? So he goes through caricatured versions of story, meaning story in its shadow form, and concludes, “Oh, stories are just made up.” But it would actually be a much more powerful conclusion to say, Oh, there’s a reason why stories cohere. Stories generate coherence because stories participate in the intrinsic coherence of the Cosmos itself. Number one. And number two. The reason people don’t feel an experience of being at home in the world without participating in a story is because stories are the structure of reality. So the correct educational, philosophical, existential, moral, mystical, and psychological move—all of them—is not to abolish story as a reality, but to clarify story and to create a shared Story of Value as a context for diverse stories. Zak: Yeah. And you can’t say a story is incorrect without standing on the ground of some story that is correct. So the deeper issue here is the performative contradiction in a philosophical sense which is: which story is it that claims all stories are incorrect? Is that story correct? And so the inability to say anything without that. And then what you want to be able to do is say: some stories are made up and some stories are not. You have to be able to say that. There are some stories about abstract things, like concepts like human rights, for example, where it’s harder. But it seems to be very clear if I was dealing with someone like Yuval Harari and a child, and the child took something they weren’t supposed to take, and the child said to Yuval, that they did not take it, and Yuval knew that they took it, that Yuval had said, he’d say, “You’re lying.” And what that means is that there’s a story that is actually true about what happened with regard to that thing. So if you lose the ability to do that, then you cannot raise children, then you cannot run a culture. Yuval is at the podium saying things which he performatively contradicts in his behavior. It’s true that abstract stories are harder, but the principle holds that there are clearly stories. For example, the stories we tell about two plus two being four, where does Yuval Harari land with that? Or, what about the story, like, “Hey, I’m telling a story that there are errors in your book in terms of copy editing.” Would he be like, “No, that’s just some other story.” No, he’d be like, “Fix the book.” So it’s just like, either become a philosopher or don’t say philosophical things will be my point to Harari here, because it’s an easy trap to fall into if you’re a sophomore in college trying to be a philosophical relativist. But if you’re talking to the whole world, and they’re hanging on your every word, and you don’t even realize you can’t stand on your own two feet because you’re committing performative contradictions, you’re being irresponsible. Marc: My trouble with Yuval is the chilling effect that he’s having actually, in reality, which is starkly beyond irresponsible. It’s unloving in a kind of fundamental way. Because when you say—I’ll give you an example, so our friend Yuval, and again, with all affection and sweetness—the reason I’m saying that is because there’s all these memes on the web demonizing Yuval, so f**k those. We’re not coming from that at all. This is talking about just a direct—which I’m sure you know our friend would appreciate. For example, there’s an entire chapter in his book Homo Deus saying freedom is not real. There’s no choice; choice doesn’t exist. He kind of adopts that position. Then the Ukraine War starts. And then he kind of writes this thing in The Guardian, “Well, we can handle this because human beings can choose, because we have choice.” So, are you joking with us? In other words, obviously, you’re taking a position on choice in a normative way, and you’re taking a position on the ultimate, at this moment, superiority of the liberal order. And then at the same time you undermine it. So that’s complex. It’s important to be a jester at the king’s banquet. It’s important to challenge dogmatic certainties, but it’s also important to stand in the rightness of, for example, human rights. Zak: I agree. Cool. Marc: Good start. Yay. Zak: Maybe David will show up next time. We keep showing up and he just is not here. Marc: I know. I know. Yeah, it was good to talk to you, man. Mentioned Sources: * Gafni, Marc & Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, 2017 * Gafni, Marc, The Mystery of Love, Atria Books, 2004 * Temple, J. David, First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024 Mentioned People: * Ken Wilber (1949-) * Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) * Johann Fichte (1762-1814) * Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) * Stephen Wolfram (1959-) * Nachmanides (1194-1270) * Yuval Noah Harari (1976-) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! Who We Must Become is an evolutionary community rising in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
Dec 16, 2025 · 38 min
What the &#%! Is Value?
About this episode: We have established that our values are not just social constructs or personal preferences. They reflect a deeper sense of value itself, which is foundational to reality. But what is this value we’re talking about? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein offer a startlingly simple and profound answer: Value is clarified desire. They state that the universe isn’t a random collection of matter, but it contains “plotlines of desire”, an ongoing story of the Cosmos yearning for deeper intimacy and greater wholeness, which disclose value and make it as ontologically real as mathematics. Then conversation then turns to a critical question: if value is so fundamental, why is it so often distorted? By the end, you will have a powerful new understanding of what value truly is and why reclaiming clarified desire is the most essential task for navigating the modern world. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast is drawn from a forthcoming volume published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, December 2025, Episode: “What the %! Is Value?” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Check out the full transcript at: https://worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/ Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:05 — Context Setting 6:56 — Value Is Clarified Desire, and the Nature of Value Is That It Is Self-Validating 7:49 — Value In Evolutionary Terms – A Value Is the Desire of Reality 8:44 — Clarified Need Equals Value. Clarified Desire Equals Value. Clarified Need and Desire Equal Value. 9:28 — Reality Is Desire Disclosing Value 11:20 — When Answering What Is Value, We Go Immediately to the Lineage Traditions and Then to the Ontology of Value 14:07 — Value Pre-Exists the Emergence of the Human Mind, It Suffuses and Haunts Reality as It Exists 15:16 — About First Principles and First Values 16:11 — The Great Lineages Say: Spirit Is Real, God Is Real. Our Hermeneutic Says: Value Is Real. 20:48 — Our Hermeneutic Allows Us to Salvage the Work That Was Done in the Clarification of Desire by the Great Traditions 24:12 — Misinterpretations of Desire Can Grease the Wheels of Late-Stage Capitalism 26:39 — There Are Five Movements Against Story 31:38 — Value Is Not Extractable, Co-opt-able, Transformable Into Your Own Pet Project 34:05 — Value Is a Great Pleasure and Pleasure Is a Great Value 37:30 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 12, 2025 · 39 min
Why the &#%! Is Value So Important?
About this episode: So, why the %! is value so important, anyway? In a world that increasingly tells us our values are just personal opinions or made-up stories, what’s the big deal? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein deliver a powerful and urgent answer. They argue that value is not a human invention but a fundamental part of Reality itself, directly challenging the popular idea that meaning is just a useful delusion. They reveal what happens when a society loses its shared sense of value. The result isn’t a neutral void, but the rise of what they call “anti-value”—a predatory, nihilistic force that drives existential crises and can be seen in rising suicide rates and the disintegration of social trust. This conversation makes the urgent case that reclaiming a universal grammar of value is not an abstract philosophical game; it is the essential, foundational step for addressing the meta-crisis. Note on Source Material and Citation: The material covered in this podcast is drawn from a forthcoming volume published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, November 2025, Episode: “Why the %! Is Value So Important?” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:05 — Context Setting 1:46 — Value Is Real, And We Need to Evolve Value—Not Deny It 8:09 — You Actually Can’t Run Education on Relativistic Value Theory 13:29 — We Need a Third Way Beyond “Values-Free” and “Value-Free” Education 15:14 — About First Principles and First Values 16:10 — Life Itself Is Valuable Because It Participates in the Field of Value 26:37 — The Deconstruction of the Field of Value Doesn’t Lead to a Neutral Void, But to Anti-Value 32:33 — Relativism Is a Gateway Drug Into a Much More Serious Problem: Anti-Value 39:19 — Invitation to the World Philosophy and Religion Academy Episode Transcript: Zak: So, once again, we’re waiting on David as it were. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And he has asked us today, I believe, to enumerate the reasons that the conversation around value is essential. Why is value so important to focus on? Why are we spending so much time focusing on value? I think that’s what he was concerned about today. Marc: Yeah, totally. He was. And it’s rare that he is—he’s very refined. So, I was surprised that when he left it out, he said like, “why the f**k does value matter so much?” Zak: Right. Marc: It was kind of unusual. Zak: The use of expletives. Marc: Yeah, not his style usually. So, let’s dive in. I’ll take a first pass at it. Value Is Real, And We Need to Evolve Value—Not Deny It Marc: For the last several years, since I read, I don’t know, seven, eight years ago, that book Sapiens by my Israeli colleague Yuval Harari who’s a lovely man, and actually taught my son as well in Hebrew University, and we overlapped in certain circles. I think, he, Yuval, if you’re listening you can confirm, he probably watched my television show as he was at a particular spot in the country. I remember reading the book and having this sense, as I completed the reading, of this intense chill in my body. Like, feeling chilled. Yuval’s a good raconteur and I think a decent reader of at least certain dimensions of history, not others, but he ventured beyond reading history and became a kind of uncontaminated parrot. Borrowing partially from a scholarly phrase invoked by a medieval scholar, Chaim Soloveitchik, uncontaminated, meaning un-self-reflectively, un-self-consciously parroting dimensions of the zeitgeist with a kind of—and I mean this, Yuval, tenderly, but quite fiercely—dogmatic clarity and self-assertion that essentially denuded reality of value. One exact quote in Sapiens was, this is a direct quote: “Any sense that human beings have, that their life has meaning or value is a delusion.” It’s an exact quote. You have sentence after sentence like that, running through the book. And you’re like, “wow!” At the same time, there’s something paradoxically seductive about the book, because he actually surreptitiously hijacks a particular value, which is the value of story and actually tells a story. And so, you feel like “oh, this was good.” It’s value, right? We just linked together a story. But it’s a story that says that there’s no value—but it doesn’t in any way demonstrate it—and it actually asserts it as a scientific truth, which it’s clearly not. Let’s start with Christina Koch, who’s writing today, or Stuart Kauffman, or even someone like Ray Kurzweil, or any of the Omega Point theorists, let alone all of the ontological traditions, pre-modern, modern, and post-modern, that invoke direct realizations and empirical evidences of various forms for inheriting intrinsic value. I want to talk about the chill, because we’re here to talk not about philosophy, but the chilled feeling. The chilled feeling you get is: Let’s go back to Dostoevsky, “without God, all is permitted.” You get this complete breakdown: all is permitted and yet nothing matters, where the world is constituted just by matter and not by what matters. You get that book that I read when I was 19 or 20, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, echoing Shakespeare at the end of Macbeth, “life’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sounds and fury, signifying nothing.” And, as much as Sartre, our apostle of cosmic valuelessness, meaninglessness, can tell us to assert the kind of brave courage in face of a grotesque meaninglessness, it doesn’t work. It just literally destroys the order of goodness in the Cosmos. The direct order of goodness. That’s number 1. But Number 2: it literally destroys any kind of joy, any kind of motivational architecture. The human being can’t live without an experience of value or meaning. Not because that is a crutch, no, because the inherent structure of Cosmos discloses value and we participate in that structure. Therefore our yearning for meaning, or to disclose meaning, is an expression of the inherent nature of Reality. The denial of that is just utterly devastating. It’s the cause of all ultimate suffering. The ultimate cause of suffering. And it’s a paradox—we’re just getting started. It’s not that we don’t recognize that religions that affirm value don’t cause suffering. Of course we do. Of course we know that distorted senses of value cause suffering. They always have. Voltaire begins modernity by saying: “remember the cruelties.” So, we understand that. Of course we understand that. But we can evolve religion, and we need to evolve religion. We can evolve value, and we need to evolve value. That’s actually one of the values of Cosmos is evolution itself, is transformation. But if we basically say: “nothing matters at all, there is no value, there is no ought and there is no value that’s backed by the universe,” then ultimately we’ve dismissed any kind of—let me say it, last sentence: value is the simple first rule of Reality. Value itself is one of our First Principles and First Values. And without value, essentially, the bottom falls out of everything and every manner of horror emerges. As we’ve said before, we’re not talking about which values get on the list. We’re talking about the Field of Value itself that we’re living, that answer to the questions of: * “Where are we?” We live in a Field of ErosValue. That’s where we are. We live in the Tao. We live in a Field of ErosValue. * “Who are we?” The field lives in us uniquely. * “What ought we do?” We ought incarnate the field uniquely the way that we do. That’s where, who, and what. Without that the center doesn’t hold. That’s just to begin the conversation. You Actually Can’t Run Education on Relativistic Value Theory Zak: Yeah. And what I would say is the first thing is just education, which in a sense is just repeating what you said, which is so sad. There is something so foundational to the discourse around value, and specifically the discourse engaging value as real. There’s something so foundational to our ability to come together to discuss value in a non-arbitrary way. It’s as simple as: how do you know that the identity that’s taking shape in a young person is desirable or not? It’s that simple, which is to say, “Hey kid, you’re doing a good job,“ or, “Hey kid, you’re not.“ Marc: Right. Zak: That’s the basis of education. It is the intergenerational transmission of skill, personality, and value. Marc: And value. Zak: Which is to say: some lives are worth pursuing, some lives are not. That’s the basis of the question of education: what is a good life? What’s a life that has not been misspent? The degree to which education avoids that question, as most public education does, or reduces that question to something very simple, like being a worker or being a citizen or a consumer, is a degree to which it ceases to be education and becomes something else—propaganda or domestication. And so, to keep the question of value alive in a very real way is to keep education actually happening, actually going. The possibility of evolving value, of discussing together the things we aspire to be, the things that are not valuable to us because we happen to be this way at this time in history, or this place, or to have these parents, or to have had these micronutrient deficits or whatever the things be that would contribute to our subjectivity. You can’t actually run education on relativistic value theory. You can run a certain kind of thing that engages young people and— Marc: —trains them for the economy. Zak: Right. If you think about, and I’ve used this example before: If you think about a coach with a quarterback, and you’re just throwing the ball and you’re looking at the arc of the ball and the speed of the ball and you’re discussing together, his arm motion, the velocity of the ball and all that stuff. You, him and a third thing, this object. We take for granted that we can talk reasonably about the objective world. We can improve our behaviors relative to a shared understanding of the subjective world. Value realism says there’s the same thing with value. Instead, it’s me and the quarterback talking now about an admirable person, an admirable quarterback from the past. Then you’re looking together at a story and you’re taking from the story, value. You’re talking about it, you’re thinking and unpacking why is that actually valuable, or why is that a misunderstanding of value. And so, in these contexts in our culture now, the ways and means of people’s virtue are arbitrary. Marc: Yeah. Zak: Therefore you can’t have a conversation that is truly instructive about an objective Reality in the domain of values. You can only have some arbitrary conversation which ends up amounting to a power game. But when it comes to which person is throwing the ball faster or more accurately, that’s not a power game. That’s just there to see. You can just see that that was the truer throw. So, the argument we’re making is that we’re losing our access to that other way of using language together, relating to the world, relating to shared value. And that has forever been the focus of education. In fact, that was more the focus of education than the objective world for a long time. Marc: What is the final—in the Exeter Charter—what is the final end and the real business of living? Zak: Yes. The final end and the real business of living. Marc: That’s what education is. Zak: Exactly. Specifically, let me use this phrase because it’s a nice way to say it: it’s the non-arbitrary asking and pursuing of that question. It’s not that there’s an answer. It’s not that there’s a final dogmatic answer. It’s that we can ask that question in a way that can be answered where it’s not just up to us. Like, that ball was more accurate. Not because I say so, the ball was more accurate because everyone here can see that, and because we have measurement. This realm of value was for a long time explored by ritual practice, by text practice, by the things that we classed under the Eye of Value in this domain of Anthro-Ontology. Value is important to discuss now because we are running on fumes. And we have to resuscitate those practices. We have to, again, encode education with value. Not values. Not values education, not some dogmatic list, but actually encode education with this sense that value is a domain as real as the domains we explore in chemistry and physics and gym. We Need a Third Way Beyond “Values-Free” and “Value-Free” Education Marc: It’s this third place. We’ve created this false binary. Either you’re doing values-free education, which is a kind of particular conservative agenda, which is arguing from a particular list of values, or the alternative liberal response is: it’s a value-free education, which becomes the value. We’re pointing towards this third way, which is utterly essential, which is: no, we’re in the Field of Value together. And within the Field of Value, we bring different value propositions to the table, but they’re both value. Therefore, there’s an affinity and allurement between them. And therefore they can engage, they can synergize, they can dialectically play. I mean, just for the sake of humor for a second, I just want to point out that if I would say to our dear friend Aaron who has some skill in throwing the ball, if I would point out to him that my throw is better than his. I mean, “No, what do you mean? Why do you think your throw is better? Well, you think it spins more gracefully? I like my throw better. Mine’s better.” It’s so obviously absurd. It’s funny. I mean, I have pointed this out to him but he hasn’t bought yet. But it’s so obviously insane because when you see a football go across the field and you’ve got three defenders on a wide receiver, and someone lands at 75 yards and it just slips right into their hand in this kind of miraculous act of divine revelation. And then you see my throw, which pathetically wobbles across the lawn. The notion that there’s not a value hierarchy here in terms of grace, elegance, precision, throwing a ball is obviously absurd. So, it’s that level. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Life Itself Is Valuable Because It Participates in the Field of Value Marc: But let me step in from two perspectives. 1) You talked about, in education we have to be able to point towards what is this final end and the real business of living. We need to point to what kind of life is a better life. But of course, we can go even more fundamentally, which is that life itself is valuable. In other words, before you even get to a better life, which is part two, there’s actually a part one, that it’s only value inherent in the very structure of Cosmos that makes life the self-evident telos, the self-evident goal, the self-evident demand. We want to be alive. And we do everything, we fight to stay alive. We do everything we can to stay alive and to also help those people that are closest in our circle. And then when we expand our circle, we try and help everybody stay alive. But just the simple notion of staying alive, which in evolutionary psychology, when evolutionary psychology encounters dimensions which seem to point towards interiority or meaning or telos or consciousness, like in Geoffrey Miller’s writing, when he talks about sexual selection, which selects for partners who are musical or who are humorous, or a whole host and… Classical evolutionary psychology says, “no, no, those are not pointing towards consciousness or interiority, those are just survival drives. Those aid survival.” That’s a classical move that over the years I’ve collected references. And of course, it’s a completely disingenuous move because survival itself means life—and life is the inherent and intrinsic value of Cosmos, and I participate in the Field of Value, which values life! So, that’s a value. It’s not just how to live, it’s that life itself literally ceases to become a value. It’s such a given to us that life’s always going to be a value, that we forget that actually if you actually remove your access to the experience of being in the Tao—which we’ve creatively translated as the Field of Value, the Tao is the Field of Value—then you actually lose access to the self-evident goodness and demand and ethical invitation and command to stay alive. I’m not talking about—there are moments when life becomes so intensely painful. I have a very close friend who just passed, who asked me if I would help with assisted euthanasia. And we had a joke between us and “well, sure, I’ll help you. But then they’ll accuse me of murdering you, so, it won’t go well…” But it was, it was a very real and deep request. And there are moments in which assisted euthanasia, is obviously something which at least deserves ethical consideration. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an entire trend in multiple parts of the world. Holland is, of course, one of the places that’s being studied and there’s been a series of articles in which, as one writer who’s been involved in the euthanasia movement pointed out. He said: “when I started to get involved in this movement, assisted euthanasia, was a response to extreme suffering of unimaginable kind. And then, can we ask a person to go through this extreme suffering or do we have to offer a potential off ramp from life?” And that’s a very complex, painful, agonizing moral question. But what he points out is that what’s actually happening in Holland and other places is that assisted euthanasia is becoming almost a standard life option. In other words, “oh, okay, that’s another possibility. Just step out.” And it’s based on a deconstruction of the Field of Value. The intrinsic value of being alive. So we take it for granted that that’s an intrinsic value. I’ll just give one more example and make one last point, which is: 2) Even take something like sex. We always assume sex is a value. People grow up with this kind of inherent understanding, inherited from thousands of years of the affirmation of this value, which is a value, that great sex, with the right person, in the right way, at the right time, whatever that means—and I’m emphasizing that because sex has context—when it’s in right relationship in all ways, that ideal, that is a value of Cosmos. That level of intimacy and connection and communion and depth is a great value of Cosmos. And literally, as modernity exploded into post-modernity and the Field of Value gets deconstructed, that assumption itself is disappearing. And so, we have pretty significant data over the last 10 years from both closed and open societies that actually, the amount of sex being had is going down, but you would think it would go down in the older populations. No. If you look at the data, it’s 18 to 24, 24 to 30, in other words, the younger the people are. And it’s not explainable only by—it’s always multi-factorial. There’s #MeToo, there was an AIDS issue, and there’s the pornographic universe. Obviously there’s a number of issues. But none of them quite explain it. There’s something—as we were working on The Phenomenology of Eros, I looked at a lot of this data, and you can just feel in the interviews, it’s just not a given anymore that’s a value. And maybe this brings us to the last thing, just to begin to touch this, which is: you can’t be at home in the Intimate Universe unless you feel intimate with Reality. Unless you feel welcome in the universe. Value makes you feel welcome in the universe. The experience of value tells you that you’re at home. There’s an actual experience. You actually experience value. It’s one of the reasons that people love to walk by the ocean. When I lived in the Middle East, in Tel Aviv, on Dizengoff Street, I used to love to go in the evening to walk the promenade by the ocean because people would come from all walks of life, ultra-orthodox, the hippie population, every color, every age. It was just gorgeous just to feel that. I would look at the ocean, I’d just watch the people and all of a sudden everything just disappeared and people are actually just basking in the radiance of the beauty, which is clearly a value. It’s not just a kind of accidental aesthetic of a random meaningless Cosmos. It’s actually disclosing something and people actually felt welcome, this ErosValue of Cosmos. When you remove ErosValue from Cosmos, which means that your actions have no value, so therefore you are not needed, you’re no longer welcome in the universe. And, of course, one very narrow sliver of that is all the set of psychoneuroimmunology studies that were done some 20 years ago, about couples who have been together for a long time, when one passes and the other remains, and they express that their sense of value was particularly in service to their partner. They can’t find a new locus of value. The statistics are unimaginably high that they pass away soon afterwards. Because there’s no reason to be here. I’m not welcome in the universe anymore. If we educate a generation right into a world in which we tell them there is no value, there’s nothing for them to pay attention to. Because attention moves towards the real, and it moves away from the unreal. And so, we’re literally dislocating Cosmos from itself. Zak: Well, if we raise a generation on the idea that there is no value, there will not be another generation. Marc: Right. Zak: The implication of what you’re saying, both the euthanasia, the absence of sex and a bunch of other related trends, suggests that the reproductive impulse itself, which is the most basic biological impulse to stay alive, if we keep quoting the Bee Gees here, but that is the pulse of ErosValue. Through the biological, it would be reproduction through sexual dimorphic mating. So, pulling away from that pattern. Marc: I love when you say dimorphic. Zak: Well, you know me. The pulling away from that pattern and the long demonstrated decrease in birth rates among the most advanced technological and well-educated societies in the West. There have always been both increasing suicide, and decreasing birth rates as this thing called modernity progressed. So, with the disenchantment of the universe correlates increasing suicide, less babies, and it just makes sense, right? Why? It just makes sense why. It’s hard enough to keep yourself alive. It’s a lot of work to keep yourself alive. Marc: Yeah, life’s a great effort. Zak: And then having kids, of course, like why would you do that? That’s an incredible lot of work. So, it’s actually a quite profound existential risk. Many people worry about overpopulation—and overpopulation certainly is worrisome given resource constraints and the way we distribute resources—but there’s a very real factor which Elon Musk, for example, is one of the people who raises quite seriously of population decline, which is actually “no, we’re going to run out of people,” and it will start slow and then it will speed up because these types of population things have certain— Marc: —precipitous drops, he’s describing— Zak: Exactly. And so, it’s hard to see a way out of that without addressing the issue of value. Because when you look at the communities that do continue to reproduce, they tend to be religious communities. Marc: Right. That take value as a given. Zak: That take value as a given, and that can put language to the urge and impulse to give effort to life. Because if you can’t explain that, and in fact, the only explanation is something like “it’s your selfish whim,” then it’s kind of strange, you’re at odds with yourself. There’s a part of you that desperately wants to live, that desperately wants to reproduce, and that desperately wants to stay alive. And yet, the entire culture is telling you that that makes no sense, actually. It makes no sense to stay alive, really. Marc: Right? The Deconstruction of the Field of Value Doesn’t Lead to a Neutral Void, But to Anti-Value Zak: It’s this deep drive towards anti-value, towards the removal of investment in life, the drawing back from and pulling away from the impetus towards the creation of more life. The power that the human has to take their own life is interesting. We’re talking about all the things that make us human, language, story, all of that stuff. But you could argue that suicide is one of the things that makes us human. With suicide comes the emergence of this domain of anti-value. With the radical freedom, sometimes it’s called, of the human choice where you can drastically separate desire from need, you can get profound confusion and you can end up in situations where you have psychologies that destroy value rather than psychologies that naturally pursue value. And so, the discussion of value becomes essential in this context now as we’re describing, because the opposite of the conversation about value isn’t just no conversation at all. The opposite of the conversation about value is conversations about something else. Marc: Let’s pick up on anti-value now, because this is such a key thing. We sat, when David wrote us and asked us to really think about anti-value, I think it was Spring last year, in the first year up here, we sat and thought deeply about anti-value. Let’s go a couple of steps. 1) You can have the absence of value. You have a kind of emptiness, not a Buddhist emptiness, not a sunyata, but an actual void. But again, not a Buddhist void, but a real void. It’s actually empty. You can’t bear the emptiness because it violates your interiority, which participates in the Field of Value, which participates in the Field of ErosValue. So, then you move to cover the emptiness with pseudo-Eros. And pseudo-Eros is pseudo-value, and pseudo-value might be acquisition, it might be hoarding, in kind of caricatured ways. It might be every form of acting out. It might be personal, it might be collective as described in Erich Fromm, in his book Escape from Freedom and The Sane Society. So, that’s a whole world. That is the world of pseudo-Eros. 2) But anti-value is a step beyond. Anti-value is, and I want to try and say it precisely: At the level of separate self, the classical separate self, the ego self, generally what you’ll get is separate self. If you don’t get a healthy separate self, you’ll get a pseudo-erotic separate self, a driven, grasping separate self, which is well described by the mystical traditions. Then when you go to True Self, which is the field of not just of consciousness, we’ve tried to correct the vision of True Self. It’s the field of teeming, throbbing, interconnectivity, and wholeness. That’s True Self. The opposite of True Self is anti-True Self. It’s not just that it’s empty, but that it has an ontology that seeks not to connect everything, but to fragment everything, to destroy, to rip apart. When the Ministry of Love in 1984, what they want to do is they want to rip apart Julia and Winston. And then, when you go from True Self and its value form—so the anti-value is this field that wants to rip everything apart—but then you get to Unique Self, which is the ultimate, this “I’m the unique expression” or Evolutionary Unique Self, in our model of the four selves from CosmoErotic Humanism—the evolutionary impulse pulses in me uniquely. The version of that which is the opposite of it, it’s not just the pseudo-erotic Unique Self—you’ve chosen a wrong uniqueness—there’s an anti-Unique Self. If we can hijack Tolkien for a second, Gandalf has a teacher. Gandalf’s teacher is Saruman. Saruman’s a great master. But Saruman’s blown away by the power of Sauron, who actually hijacks him and makes him a servant of anti-value. So, the Eye of Sauron is the response to the Eye of Providence. There’s divine providence, the hero, who places attention on the whole, is an extension of Divinity. Then Sauron, the Eye of Sauron, is the anti-hero. And the anti-hero is anti-value. When you deconstruct the Field of Value, you don’t just get too much acquisition and too much of vapidity, you actually get anti-value, because that’s precisely—in the language of the text: Ze le’umat ze bara elohim, ‘This corresponding to this to Divinity creates’. So, there’s the Tree of Life and there’s the anti-Tree of Life. We’re now seeing the emergence not just of pseudo-Eros, but of what we’re calling anti-Eros, or anti-value. And you can’t respond to anti-Eros or anti-value with insipid claims to constructed social constructs. That’s what Putin said to so many of his people around the Ukraine, whatever we think of that issue, however we’re going to unpack that issue, but he basically said “the West has no social constructs. They’re not going to stand for anything.” So, if we don’t stand for something then actually Xi in China, he’s standing for something, it’s called anti-value. Not that the Chinese are. The Chinese are very complex and heterogeneous and we need to engage China on multiple levels, but we need to engage China by finding a common Field of Value which is so strong that it can respond to anti-value. It just begins that conversation. Relativism Is a Gateway Drug Into a Much More Serious Problem: Anti-Value Zak: Yeah, exactly. And because often when we speak, it seems like we’re complaining about relativism. But really, relativism is like a gateway drug into a much more serious problem, which is not the absence of attunement to value, because by our arguments that would actually be impossible. It’s like Charles Sanders Peirce used to say, it’s not that you don’t have a metaphysics, everybody has a metaphysics, it’s that you’re just doing bad metaphysics because you’re not thinking about it. And so, similarly with value theory, everyone’s got a value— Marc: Value is not hard to find. It’s impossible to avoid. Zak: —it’s impossible to avoid, which means that if you’re deeply confused, you’re not “not going to see it”, you’re just not going to know what to do with what you’re seeing. In terms of object relations theory and psychodynamical theory, early childhood environments where there’s an absence of access to real value, meaning you have a need, which in a normal environment would be met by the universe, namely probably your mom, you would experience again and again real need being met by real value and you would begin to idealize the objects in the environment that satisfied value for you. You’d have, your mom and dad and others eventually, in your early childhood, and then you internalize those idealized people, who for you were value incarnate, that gives you a conscience. If you’ve never experienced value incarnate in your early childhood environments, you would have no idealized persons to internalize. And so what would you internalize? One hypothesis is that you internalize the thing you fear the most, like a Stockholm syndrome, that you become the thing you’re afraid your mom secretly is, which is a predator. They say you internalize the stranger’s self-object, which is basically like, the scariest thought you have about the internal state of another person when you’re a young child. You become that frightening stranger that everyone fears in the night. You seek to become that. And that isn’t something that’s arbitrary. That’s something that seeks the most vulnerable and most beautiful to destroy it. And when you think about the nature of the broadest activities of our civilization, even things like acquisitiveness, what you have there is this. It’s not arbitrary acquisitiveness. It’s like you’re seeking the stuff that’s the most valuable, not in order to preserve it for its own sake but in order to acquire it, to aggrandize yourself. And so that’s the eye of anti-value. It is not indifferent to value but predatory in relation to value, whereas the Eye of Value, non-pathological Eye of Value, stands in respectful symbiosis to value, locates itself uniquely in the Field of Value. The eye of anti-value stands in predatory, acquisitive relationship. Marc: Attention is drawn there. And, maybe when we talk in a couple of days, we’ll go back a couple of steps and just spend a conversation on what is value, which we’ve kind of assumed in this conversation. We’ll go back, although we’ve pointed towards it, but just as we conclude this, attention turns to the real. Zak: Yes. Marc: Right? That’s the nature of attention and attention averts its gaze from the unreal. Linda Lohman says to Biff, in Death of the Salesman, about her husband, Willy, “attention must be paid to this man.” And then no one comes to the funeral. Attention is not paid. And it’s a suicide story. It actually is this great story of suicide because there’s no attention that’s paid. Because there’s no recognition of value. But paradoxically, and that’s what we’re talking about in terms of anti-value, why do people go to—what happens is attention moves towards a value and its violation. That’s why people go to a horror movie. Why would you actually go to a movie to see people not murdered in a caricatured, kind of stylized violence, but you want to see actually the most actual depictions possible. Zak: That’s exactly. The culture actually drives us towards the pursuit of anti-value. Marc: —towards the pursuit of anti-value, because we can’t find aliveness and intimacy and value, therefore we’ll literally go to find aliveness and intimacy and anti-value. Zak: Yeah. And in those contexts, the horror movie, what’s the most frightening scene? It’s when the most innocent, most beautiful thing is vulnerably— Marc: —and most brutally ripped apart. Zak: Exactly. So, there’s that dimension of evil which is precisely the seeking out of the sacred to defile and destroy. Marc: Right. I mean, the actual Hebrew yirah is literally fear of God, but, auto translated incorrectly is “creature consciousness”, but it’s the awareness that I am value in the Field of Value, but then the word yirah is also just raw fear. There’s this actual continuum of the consciousness of value in myself as participatory in that field, and then all the way on the other side of the continuum is the raw fear that I have of the predator who will destroy value. The fear itself has to be traced to its root. It’s only by tracing the fear to its root, you realize that actually you’re detecting value. But that’s a complete tantric way to transform it. We need to now go directly and actually articulate it. And really that’s the attempt of CosmoErotic Humanism. To actually take the critiques of value theory seriously, to respond to them seriously and not to make a regressive move into a fundamentalist value or a fundamentalist scientism empty field, field devoid of value, but to actually articulate a vision of value that is profoundly philosophically cogent, congruent, and potent. I think we’ve done that. But that’s not what we’re talking about here in this conversation, we’re talking about David’s question, why the f**k does it matter? It’s so fundamental that you can almost miss it. Right? When you realize that nothing stands without it, nothing moves without it. Zak: Right. And without it, also this whole other way of operating in the world begins to become possible, probable, unstoppable. Marc: Yes. Zak: —without these other countervailing forces— Marc: It’s everything. Zak: It’s everything. Marc: Yay. Zak: Yay. Marc: Yay. Good. Mentioned Sources: * Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper. * Faulkner, W. (1929). The Sound and the Fury. Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. * Shakespeare, W. (1871). Macbeth. J. Dicks. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Abridged Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart. * Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. Rinehart. * Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg. * Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954–1955). The Lord of the Rings (Vols. 1–3). George Allen & Unwin. * Miller, A. (1949). Death of a Salesman. The Viking Press. Mentioned People: * Chaim Soloveitchik (1853-1918) * Christina Koch (1979-) * Stuart Kauffman (1939-) * Ray Kurzweil (1948-) * Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) * Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) * Voltaire (1694-1778) * Geoffrey Miller (1965–) * J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) * Vladimir Putin (1952-) * Xi Jinping (1953-) * Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 5, 2025 · 41 min
The Nature of Desire
About this episode: What if every right you possess—from free speech to privacy—is actually based on a form of desire? And what if our new socio-technological conditions necessitate the protection of new rights, such as the “right to attention?” In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the fundamental nature of desire, unveiling it not as something merely psychological, but as an ontological principle that underpins rights, needs and values. They establish a central thesis of CosmoErotic Humanism: that clarified desire equals value, and that a clarified first principle or value is a right. The conversation highlights the inseparable link between rights and responsibilities, bringing profound implications for creating a society that honors human dignity rather than one that manufactures and exploits desire. Note on Source Material and Citation: The material covered in this podcast is drawn from two forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 * Attention: First Principle, First Value, and Human Right If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, November 2025, Episode: “The Nature of Desire.” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:59 — Context Setting 1:45 — The Right to Sex Is Absurd, But the Right to Desire Isn’t 4:35 — Rights Emerge From First Principles and First Values 5:40 — Desire Is a Fundamental Structure of Reality 7:37 — Reality Desires Value, Desire For Value Is A Need, and The Desire and Need For Value Are Rights 10:01 — The Right to Have Rights and The List of Rights Must Expand 12:33 — Unique Self Symphony as a System of Rights: My Right Can’t Stop You From Pursuing Your Right 16:45 — Anthro-Ontology Provides the Basis for Clarifying and Establishing Rights and Responsibilities 23:15 — About First Principles and First Values 24:11 — The Basis for Protecting Attention in the Technological Age Is Clarified Value and Human Dignity 28:20 — The Right to Desire and The Right to Be Desired Confront Propaganda and Should Transform How Our Society Shapes Desire 32:30 — Advertising Is Fundamentally Disrupting Your Ability to Clarify Your Desire 34:48 — Desire and Need Generate Rights and Responsibilities Through Power and Powerlessness 38:34 — Biological Needs Are Different and Complementary to The Needs of God Episode Transcript: Zak: All right. Well, we’re here again on David’s request, but, of course, David has not shown up. But I know he gave you a note earlier about what we were going to speak about. Marc: He did. He’s very interested, and I’ve been getting a whole bunch of texts from him. He’s also on Signal now. I think he’s got like a new app or something. I know he’s been texting you at the same time. Maybe Zak, if this works, brother, I’ll take a bunch of minutes to spaciously lay it out, then I’ll pass it to you and you’ll spaciously lay it out your way and then we’ll kind of meet in the middle. I think it’ll take a little time for both of us to lay it out. I’ll go in that way. Okay? Zak: Sounds good. The Right to Sex Is Absurd, But the Right to Desire Isn’t Marc: I just happen to have this book here, truly by coincidence, Amia Srinivasan, writes this book, The Right to Sex. She’s a professor at Oxford and part of the classical gender conversation. The classical gender conversation which has gotten really greatly embarrassed by Judith Butler in the past several weeks [editor’s note: he’s referring to February and March 2024], in the way she’s taken positions and kind of refused to recognize Hamas as anything other than armed resistance. She’s just been at the extreme left and a fundamental denial of the atrocities there. Judith Butler’s just been really tragic in the last few weeks. But Amia Srinivasan comes out of a somewhat similar feminist perspective, but not a Laura Kipnis or bell hooks kind of power feminist perspective, but more of a classical somewhat male demonizing perspective. Her book, The Right to Sex, is a good summation of certain perspectives in second wave feminism, the ones that actually led to the formation of women’s studies departments, which kind of problematized masculinity per se. But for our purposes, what’s important is she is mocking the notion of an idea of “a right to sex.” And what she mocks is actually correct. In other words, she attributes that idea to a particular incel manifesto of a mass murderer and who’s kind of claiming “I’ve got this right to sex.” “Here are these women, I have this right to sex,” which is obviously a gross violation of how we understand humanity. And she’s, of course, correct in that, but the notion that there’s—and let me change the words slightly—a right to desire is actually not an absurd notion. We actually need to clarify desire. There’s a right not to any desire. There’s a right to clarified desire. There’s a primary human imperative to clarified desire, but I also have a right. I have a right to both desire and to be desired. Just like I have a right to be intimate and to provide intimacy. There’s both a right and a responsibility. Desire implies in it both a right and a responsibility. There’s actually a series of what David has called, what we’ve called together, Zak, with our dear friend Ken, First Principles and First Values. Rights Emerge From First Principles and First Values And here’s the equation: A First Principle and First Value, when it is clarified, when it’s a clarified value is a right. And so let me go step two: It’s not that the right to sex is an absurd idea, there’s actually a right to sex and there is a responsibility in sexing. There’s a right to desire and a responsibility. * There’s a right to be desired, to desire, and to respond to desire. * There’s a right to intimacy. * There’s a right to attention. All of these: attention, intimacy, and desire are actually First Principles and First Values of Reality, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. When they’re clarified, they become—or they’re disclosed as—pristine values of Reality, and those values of Reality emerge from—or they’re disclosed by—our core needs and our core desires. So, let me just go a couple more steps. Desire Is a Fundamental Structure of Reality Marc: Reality desires. At the kind of subatomic level, protons and neutrons desire each other. They’re allured. It’s 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and they come together and they create a new immersion called an atom. So, at that level there’s a desire and there’s a need. There’s no split between desire and need. They’re the same. Desire and need are the same. But the desire and need is for a value, and what’s the value? The value is this deeper contact in this greater wholeness which are the basic structures of the Eros equation. In the interior science Eros equation of CosmoErotic Humanism, Eros is radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. So, that desire lives in the structure of Reality. It lives all the way down the evolutionary chain. * It lives in the world of life. All through the levels of life. * It lives in the world of the depth of the self-reflective human mind. All through the levels of the self-reflective human mind. And there’s a very clear both desire and need that are congruent with each other. At some place in the human world desire and need seem to split. We have the sense “I need this but I desire that.” That’s in a classical life of the egoic human, the separate self human. That’s a given that there’s this split. But then at the higher levels of consciousness desire and need come back together. You actually realize: my clarified desire is my clarified need. I have surface desire, but I can clarify my desire and know that my desire is not to be an incel, for example, or to commit mass murder, or to be madly rude to my partner that I just had an argument with. My desire is to create wholeness, my desire is for deeper contact, my desire is for more goodness, more truth, more beauty, more love. That’s a clarified desire. Reality Desires Value, Desire For Value Is A Need, and The Desire and Need For Value Are Rights Marc: So, let’s see if we can put it together and turn it to you: Reality has value. We desire value. In CosmoErotic Humanism, based on the panoply of sources that informed us and realizations that informed us, we talk about Reality desires and Reality desires what? Value. Paradoxically Whitehead, reading a different set of sources, and I guess having his own experiences, came to a similar conclusion. That Reality’s appetite is for value. So, there’s a desire for value. That desire is a need at the most fundamental levels. And that desire and need is a right. In other words, I have a right to, just like I have a right to breathe, right? It’s an absolute desire and need: I have to breathe. I can’t live without breathing. And I actually can’t live without intimacy. I can’t live without the placing of attention and having attention placed on me. What we’re formulating here is that we can’t just think in terms of value. We have to think: clarified desire equals clarified need, which generates, which points us towards the fulfillment or the realization of clarified value, which itself is both a right and a responsibility. So, I have a right to be desired and to desire. I have a right to intimacy, which might express itself also in privacy. And I also have a responsibility in my desire, responsibility in my intimacy. A responsibility in my placing of attention, responsibility not to hijack attention, etc. You and I, Zak, we’ve been thinking about this on and off for a couple of years. I think we’ve come to the place where both in the work on CosmoErotic Humanism, in the work on TechnoFeudalism and in the work on attention, we want to clarify and formulate—I think David really wants us to write it up—this relationship between these five dimensions: desire, need, value, right, responsibility. Because that maybe sets the table here for the conversation. The Right to Have Rights and The List of Rights Must Expand Zak: Yeah. It’s very interesting. Traditionally, the discussion about rights has always been connected to a discussion about human nature. The discussion about rights has always been about what are the fundamental, inarguable, unreplaceable aspects of human nature that to not give people political assurances about access to these things would be to dehumanize them. And so, Martha Nussbaum’s work here is probably foundational with her work on the capabilities approach with Amartya Sen. It’s just: look at what is the nature of the human capability set that’s requisite to dignity, and then how do we assure that people have political assurances for these capabilities that are requisite to dignity—which is to say: it’s not just that we promise you which is the assurance, but the political assurance is that there are mechanisms and legal structures in place that make it so you can do this. Not just saying it, but actually we give you the day off so you can vote, or we make the schools available so that you can read, so that you can exercise your capacities to grow your identity. And so, you’re, I see, clarifying a couple of things here that are left unclarified in that discourse which have to do with several things. One is: value evolves. Which means that there’s not going to be some universal set of rights that doesn’t change and one of the things that’s been discussed throughout modernity and the problematization of the rights discourse would be: how do we expand the rights? Like: how do we expand the rights that are on the list of rights both to people who are secure rights, which means to women, people of color and all of that stuff—the expanding of the sense that the citizen is all humans, not just a small number of landowning males or something, who have the right to have rights. So, the right to have rights expands. And then just the number of rights, which is to say the enumerated list of things that you actually have a right to. And so, the evolution of that—how would you even think about evolving that list of rights? You’d have to find a way to clarify the actual nature of what humans need, the actual nature of the human need. So, that’s, I think, essential. And that type of anthro-ontological clarification of human need in the interest of political change, in the interest of changing the shape of the political assurances that are given, nothing could be more important at this time when humanity itself is on the line. Unique Self Symphony as a System of Rights: My Right Can’t Stop You From Pursuing Your Right Zak: So, a couple glosses here that I would throw back to you to just kind of help clarify the position. * The right to sex is complicated because it involves somebody else. The right to desire is kind of easy. Of course you can desire whatever you want. But the right to consummate your desire, which is to say, the right to sex is different from the right to the desire to have sex. So, there’s something very complex. And this is the case with almost all rights, which is that it requires a community that holds rights and responsibilities in reciprocal relationship. To not have the language of rights create a kind of distortion in the culture. Marc: Or my rights intrinsically violate your rights. Zak: Or just that we become selfishly all pursuing our own rights without stopping to reflect on what the responsibility would be. So, like the idea that I have a right to sex irrespective of how I act towards people or how I manage my own life, or my hygiene, and all of that stuff is insane. It would be like saying: I have a right to vote even if I have done nothing to prepare myself to be a politically reflective citizen at all. This is an issue in the rights discourse, which is why some people have abandoned the language about rights. Because it can become absent of the correlative necessary language of responsibility. The language of rights becomes too focused on just whatever the hell you want. So, that would be one thing to think about. * You’ve mentioned this, but in the context of attention in particular, which is moving into this conversation by expanding the notion of rights through the clarification of desire. Via Anthro-Ontology. That moves us into this sense of like, “okay, of all the places we would need to secure rights, right now, in this moment of time, with this current political technological setup, where do we need to secure rights?” And I would say, attention is one of the main ones. The right to discretion over your own attention is root to exercising any of your other rights. So yeah, if we could focus on the right to attention and thinking specifically, okay, if we have a right to attention, which is to say: the discretionary use of my attention, what’s the correlate responsibility? Marc: Right. Zak: It would be: you actually must shepherd or steward your attention in ways that are appropriate and especially in ways that allow other people to use the discretionary use of their own attention. So, that notion of the responsibility-rights relationship. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And then to take it one step deeper, and this touches on the notion of what we would call a Unique Self Symphony, but what Rawls and Habermas called a system of rights, which is to say, if you think of each right in a system of interrelated rights, they all need to make sense together. Which is like: my right to something can’t stop you from pursuing your right to something. Kant called this the Kingdom of Ends, where all of the things that are trying to reach actualization are kind of brought together into a weave where you have maximal possible freedom for all members. It doesn’t mean everyone has total freedom. That’s different. Or it doesn’t make some people have total freedom, some people have no freedom. The system of rights is one in which you have maximal total freedom for all members, which means a little bit less freedom than you might otherwise have if you were allowed to do whatever the hell you wanted, but way more freedom for everybody due to the balancing of the rights and responsibilities, and the ways that the rights are named and seem to relate. So, I kind of throw that out. Marc: Yeah. No, that’s great. So, let’s just reflect together. Let’s talk about two different things that you were working in. Anthro-Ontology Provides the Basis for Clarifying and Establishing Rights and Responsibilities Marc: One is the relationship between human nature and rights. Right is reflective of my nature, and the deist language of “it’s self-evident” is, of course, a way of both avoiding and rooting the right in a Field of Value, and yet pointing to something which seems to be intrinsic in nature. So, this is very, very helpful because as you pointed towards, there’s this anthro-ontological clarification. Anthro, my personhood; ontological, what’s real. So, I clarify through my own experience what is absolutely real and what is, not just a real desire, but my deepest heart’s desire, my clarified desire, and my clarified need. For example, if I actually begin to realize I have a need for relationship, I cannot be alone. I am Tom Hanks and I’m in the movie Cast Away, and I’m on an island and I’ve got all my near Darwinian issues handled, and I can survive forever. And yet, I find my Wilson basketball, which somehow made it onto the island with me without being a spoiler of that old plot, and I take my blood and paint a face on the Wilson basketball because a face is interiority and I need relationship, I need intimacy, I need Eros, the desire for deeper contact even if it’s only in the realm of the imagination with a basketball. And when the Wilson basketball doesn’t quite do it, I throw myself into the Pacific with 2% chance of living because my intrinsic anthro-ontological nature is that near Darwinian survival is insufficient, and if my interior can’t meet the interior of another human being, f**k. I’m going to kill myself, and I actually am willing to risk probably killing myself for the very vague possibility that I might get there. So that’s a very big deal. That’s a very big deal. I realize, “oh, my nature is that I am both a being of irreducibly unique autonomy and yet, I am already in relationship to you.” Just like in Buddhism, we talk about there’s an ever-always already present awareness, there’s an ever-always present relationship. Reality is relationship, this communion. Therefore I have both a right and a responsibility towards that communion, and it’s very beautiful. Meaning, very often Zak, when I say very often, I mean once every three months, I’ll have this kind of deep conversation with someone who’s particularly bright, who’s not fully engaged in the world, and they say: “listen, it’s my life. I have right to do what I want.” And the answer is: well, no, not exactly. That’s not exactly right. You don’t have a right to do what you want. That’s only an expression of one dimension of yourself. But another dimension of yourself is communion and you have a particular responsibility for communion. You have a unique responsibility and capacity for communion that no one else that ever was, is, or will be has other than you. And you have the capacity to ameliorate unlove or loneliness, someplace in the world that no one else can do. So, you have a right and a responsibility for intimacy. And it’s very beautiful, right? And that includes an entire set of actions and boundaries where actions can’t be taken. The same thing is true about desire. I have a right and a responsibility of desire, and I also have a right and responsibility towards sex, but not with any particular person. In other words, the incel tragedy is to say because there’s a right to sex I can therefore claim that right from a particular person. That’s absurd. The same way I can’t claim the right to intimacy from any particular person, or I can’t say “I have a right to attention—I’m going to place my attention on you.” No, that’s actually a violation of privacy, right? So, intimacy also demands a sense of privacy. So, I think: 1) The human being participates in the Field of Value, and therefore we can clarify rights by clarifying our own interiors. 2) Rights like values evolve, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not real. The fact that we think: “oh, right evolves, it’s not real.” No, no, a right is real just like a value is real. And rights and values are both in some sense eternal and evolving. 3) And lastly, and then, I’ll turn it back to you, just to say something about desire and need. One of the formulations, I remember, David scribbled on a piece of paper and I remember seeing it, and he formulated it in three ways, which I thought was good. And they’re all really saying the same thing. * Evolution is love in action in response to need. * Evolution is love in action in response to desire. * Evolution is love in action in response to value. And just question where you start, what discloses what, but when you actually realize, that—I mean it’s very beautiful and I think it’s really a big part of CosmoErotic Humanism’s definition of value: value is clarified desire. Clarified desire equals value. That’s a stunningly important sentence, and I remember for years people—and we’ve been talking about First Principles and First Values—and people would raise their hand and say, so what do you mean by value? And gradually this clarified to David. Clarified desire equals value. That’s like once you get that—I remember when we first talked about this sentence—It’s very ennobling, affirming of human dignity in a fundamental way, back to Nussbaum and dignity. I haven’t read Nussbaum in this regard. I actually was not aware of her work. So, thank you. But in terms of dignity, desire implies dignity, and actually the humiliation of our desires, the humiliation of our basic needs is the violation of dignity. So, beautiful. Back to you. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. The Basis for Protecting Attention in the Technological Age Is Clarified Value and Human Dignity Zak: And some of the things we’re saying here is that the evolution of socio-political organizations has to do with this process here. Like the idea that we even need to think about attention as something to be protected by legal frameworks as if it was a right. There was no need to do that when the most stickiest thing was like a novel, or like the newspaper or something, but changing technoscientific conditions force us into a position to start to feel creepy, undignified. You start to feel like you’re missing something and this forces the clarification of desire and then you realize, “oh my gosh, attention has to be protected like almost as much as our right to free movement and our right to speech, our right to breath, access to water, political voice, and those things.” Attention. Marc: Yeah. Zak: But we never had to have a rights framework around attention, because we never had technologies or life worlds that were threatened to this extent. So, that’s essential for us to understand as there’s no slowing down technological development. And there’s no slowing down its intention or inevitability of creeping in and kind of colonizing the life world as it said. So, in that process the work of the anthro-ontologist, the work of CosmoErotic Humanism to protect the human is in fact to clarify the rights that we didn’t even know we need to name. We didn’t even know we had to claim a right to intimacy because never before has intimacy been so endangered by the absence of, let’s say, for example, privacy. Or the absence of meaningful language, or stories that are organically emergent rather than manufactured for you. So, there’s a whole bunch of ways that our work in TechnoFeudalism, specifically the work that we’ve been doing there is clarifying for us the need to name new rights in order for that to be protected from the encroachment of the technological system. And that’s quite powerful. Now, if you are in a framework, a la Harari or others who espouse a kind of value relativism or a value skepticism, then you can’t answer the question of how you would do what we’re trying to do here. We’re saying in another way what we’ve said before about the inability of the critiques of the techplex. The Zuboffs and the Hararis who want to say, “shut it down, stop it.” Marc: The whole gang. Zak: The whole gang, that in fact, they’re trying to say, “we have a right to be protected from your technologies.” But if you’re skeptical as to the existence of the possibility of truly clarified value, which means that one value is just as good as any other value, there’s not really truly clarified value. Then where are you going to stand to try to construct a framework to protect a new class of rights? Marc: That’s right. Zak: You’ll have nowhere to stand. And so it couldn’t be more essential. But to rewind to where I started, it begins with the intuition of being able to feel the sense of losing dignity, you’re able to feel the sense of being exploited, of being somehow kept from the thing that you feel like you have a right to. Marc: Which is your humanness. Zak: Your humanness, precisely. And that’s why the intuition that, “oh, I have a right to be loved and I kind of have a right to sex,” it’s so sad that we’re in a position where a young man would have to feel that type of barrier to access to something so fundamental to the human, which would be close physical contact with another human that loves you and that desires you, and that you love and desire. And so, the idea that we’re in a culture of society so radically alienated, that in fact people are trying to start to say, “wait, I have a right to have a woman.” Like that’s how bad— Marc: —or to have a man. Zak: Or have a man, precisely. And that’s the irony. I’m not going to go into the dynamics of that, but yeah. Marc: Totally. That’s beautiful, Z. Let me pick up on that last point. The Right to Desire and to Be Desired Confronts Propaganda and Should Transform How Society Shapes Desire Marc: So, let’s say we’re talking about the right to desire and the right to be desired. So, if I understand that desire’s an intrinsic property of Cosmos, Reality has appetite and that’s an appetite for value. It’s what we’ve called ErosValue, an appetite for autonomy merging with communion. And one of the things we’ve said in CosmoErotic Humanism is that in the depths of intimacy, in the depths of ecstasy, the old split between autonomy and communion disappear. In other words, you’re both most free and most in communion. That’s true in beautiful sexuality, but it’s also true in a rave. You go to a rave, you’re fully part of the field of communion and yet, you’re most free, you’re most individuated. So, let’s go back to that notion, this realization that the structure of Reality is desire. And by the way, one of the ways we’ve expressed this and in other works of CosmoErotic Humanism, and I’m sure it’ll come back up in the new stuff we’re writing with David now, is that the name of God is desire. The Yod, the four-letter name of God that so shaped the Renaissance, is the Yod enters the Hei. Yah, as in hallelujah, as in Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. And then the Vav enters the Hei. And these are erotic unions which are at the core of Cosmos. So let’s operate in that, whether it’s from a Whiteheadian perspective or from a CosmoErotic Humanism perspective. Now, what does that mean in terms of how you educate? What does that mean in terms of how you create society? If that’s true, then that means—and this is so f*****g obvious that it’s embarrassing to say it out loud, but—that obviously desire should not be structured through the visual propaganda of society to generate desire only for people that look a particular way. Right? If your body type is this, then you arouse desire, but if your body type is that, then you don’t arouse desire. That’s completely fucked up, because actually, we need to create a field in which we honor, all expressions of body which all deserve to desire and be desired. And so, one of the things that just made me so exceedingly happy, looking in at classical systems, whether they were Amish systems or, at their best, Jewish Orthodox systems, both of which have great shadows, but I’m saying at their best is that everybody gets together with everyone. Everyone’s supposed to have a great match. We basically have this predatory system where the most “beautiful” in a particular embodied way get to fulfill their right to be desired, and most of the rest of society doesn’t. And the amount of times, I’ve talked to people in deep Holy of Holies conversation, in the inner sanctum, a woman or a man would say to me, like “if only I could actually be desired.” And they had this innate fundamental, heartbreaking craving, not because they’re pathological, but because I have a right to be desired. And therefore, we, all of us, as educators, as constructors of society need to construct a system of value which generates desire through its visual structures. That has enormous implications. If there’s a right, we have a right, we also have a responsibility to generate a field in which all can be desired in the field by someone. Zak: Yeah, totally. The right to desire and the right to attention are so linked. Marc: Totally. Desire is the placing of attention. Advertising Is Fundamentally Disrupting Your Ability to Clarify Your Desire Zak: Exactly. So, if it is the case that you have a right to your clarified desire and a right to clarify your desire, then that means that we would outlaw advertising. Because like, what is advertising doing? Advertising is fundamentally disrupting your ability to clarify your own desire. Now, in a truly well-functioning market society, you wouldn’t have advertising, you’d have consumer information, which is completely different. Consumer information allows you to make a decision that clarifies your desire, because it tells you what the f**k’s actually going on with the commodity. Marc: Right. Zak: In an economy like ours, which, sorry guys, is not actually a free market economy, it is an economy that manufactures demand. An economy that manufactures demand really well is an economy that fundamentally distorts your ability to clarify your desire. Marc: Exactly! Zak: Right. So, if you have a right to desire and to clarify it, it would mean that we would move a lot of things off of our table and all of that would be advertising. We would put back in our table actual information about the world, and then we can actually have a market that would function, for example. So, for all the people who are pro-capitalist and pro-free market, you should be pretty opposed to the current setup right now, because the social media systems, one of the things it does, if what we’re saying is true and it is, is that they manufacture demand better than any prior possible system could manufacture demand, which means you just broke the market—and the market’s predicated upon that the consumer somehow clarifies their desire. There’s a signal in the market, right? There’s a feedback in the market to reality. You can break the feedback of the market’s reality by distorting desire. Marc: Right, yeah. Zak: So, it’s just worth noting, the visual, the auditory, all of these things that warp our sense of what’s actually valuable, what we actually want. That’s a science that’s put in front of us every day to try to make us confused about what we actually want. Marc: Yeah, this is unimaginably important. Unimaginably. Desire and Need Generate Rights and Responsibilities Through Power and Powerlessness Marc: A couple of things. Let’s just talk about desire and need for a second. We said earlier that at the lowest, lowest or the foundational, better word, structures of Reality, need and desire the same, protons and neutrons, need and desire, no distinction. We essentially got to go pretty high in the evolutionary chain into the world of self-reflective human life, perhaps high mammalian, but into self-reflective human life and a sense of even separate self to make this split between need and desire where, “oh, I need food. I desire a car which is shiny red.” which is that split. We completely split them, which is part of our demonization of desire. In other words, we actually lost contact with this notion of what the lineage of Solomon calls tshuka, the radical intrinsic desire, which is the actual fabric and structure of Reality. And then at the higher levels of consciousness, we said in the beginning of our conversation, need and desire come back together. So, I actually can clarify my deepest need and clarify my deepest heart’s desire and they turn out to be the same. But now having said that—here it just gets really interesting: need. When we recognize a need, then we understand that we need to generate or articulate a right that can meet that need, that can allow us to meet that need. When we talk not in terms of need, but in terms of desire, which is the actual force of the evolutionary impulse, which is filled with power, there we recognize the need to generate a responsibility, right? In other words, a need generates a right, and a desire generates a responsibility. At least at first, that’s our first take on it. And that’s true. That’s a true split. When we go deeper into it, you’ve got needs that generate rights and you have desire that generates responsibility. I have desire, and that generates responsibility in multiple levels. But actually, when you go deeper into desire, desire is actually power, it’s the power of the evolutionary impulse, and a need has a sense of, “I’m powerless. I need you to fulfill the need.” So, the need, powerless, needs to generate a protective right. The desire, powerful, needs to generate a kind of protective responsibility. But when you go deeper into desire, last step just to lay this out, actually desire itself is far more dialectical, far more vulnerable. Desire itself both has power and powerlessness in it. I’m on the one hand, I feel the power of my desire. On the other hand, I feel the powerlessness of my desire, this daemon that’s acting in me or this devil that’s acting in me or what is this thing in me that I can’t. There’s far more pathos, far more poignancy in desire than mere power. Desire’s not just potency and power, it’s also poignant pathos, which points towards not just power, but actually a powerlessness. And in some sense, whenever we have powerlessness, we need to generate a right to protect it. And whenever we have power, we need to generate an obligation to responsibility. That helps us frame the whole thing in terms of its fundamental, CosmoErotic Humanism frame in terms of how it all works. I just wanted to land that. David’s been thinking about that. And he’s been texting about that this week a lot. Biological Needs Are Different and Complementary to The Needs of God Zak: It’s very important. I’ll say one thing and then we’ll wrap. The conversation is never over, of course, but the needs language is complicated. That’s why I kind of like the desire and the clarification of desire more than I like need. And here’s where it gets interesting. Need implies something like biological maintenance, like, the baseline definition of need is something like “the things that keep your body alive.” So, you could argue that animals have needs and desires, but we share with animals certain needs. Like for food and other things. But rarely is it the case that the animal desires something that will have them override their basic need for survival. Humans do that. This is what’s like a hunger strike. A politically motivated hunger strike is an example where you need food, but you want this political system to change a lot more than you need food, kind of. So, this is an interesting thing where there’s a something that occurs with human desire and the clarification of human desire that actually retroactively supervenes across the biological. And this is where the kind of redemption of ancestry and biology and all of this stuff becomes possible through the clarification of desire. Marc: So, first thing on the table we can get to next time, is one of the things we talked about, like, I don’t know, it must have been a decade ago. It was the needs of God. Zak: Right. Marc: Right? In other words, when I go deeply into it, I realized that the need for freedom is actually as visceral a need as—Wallace is tragically being ripped apart, the great Scottish hero, he screams “freedom!” And so the evolution of need, until we actually become identified with what the lineage masters of the wisdom of Solomon called Divine Pathos, which is Divine Need. This sentence, maybe we’ll end here. We can talk, maybe spend a whole conversation: Avodah tzorech gevohah—Divinity needs your service. So, that takes need to the next level and begins a whole next conversation. Zak: Totally. Marc: Crazy delight. Yay. Mentioned Sources: * Srinivasan, A. (2021). The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mentioned People: * Judith Butler (1956-) * Laura Kipnis (1956-) * bell hooks (1952-2021) * Ken Wilber (1949-) * Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) * Martha Nussbaum (1947-) * Amartya Sen (1933-) * John Rawls (1921-2002) * Jürgen Habermas (1929-) * Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) * Yuval Noah Harari (1976-) * Shoshana Zuboff (1951-) * Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. 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#2
Oct 30, 2025 · 33 min
Attention as a First Principle and First Value – Part 2
About this episode: In the first part of this dialogue, we heard the radical claim that attention is a First Principle and First Value of the universe. Now, we explore the devastating consequences of disowning that truth. Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein diagnose our current meta-crisis as a “Planetary Attention Disorder”—a global intimacy disorder where our inability to connect is rooted in the fundamental dysregulation of our attention. How did we get here? The conversation traces a fascinating history of communication media and where humanity has placed its collective attention—from the pre-premodern, pre-modern, to modern, and in the postmodern era driven by our current technologies. Note on Source Material and Citation: The material covered in this podcast is drawn from two forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Attention: First Principle, First Value, and Human Right * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, October 2025, Episode: “Attention as a First Principle and First Value — Part 2.” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:50 — David’s Request & Context 1:37 — The Relationship Between the Collapse of Attention and the Meta-Crisis 3:10 — Attention in the Eros Equation 6:26 — Attention in the Intimacy Equation 7:49 — Attention in the Uniqueness Equation 9:43 — Attention as a First Order, First Principle and First Value 11:56 — Synchronous vs Asynchronous Attention at the Root of the Mental Health Crisis 16:37 — Attentional Dynamics Perpetuating the Global Intimacy Disorder 18:55 — About First Principles and First Values 19:51 — Introduction to Pre-Premodern, Premodern, Modern, Postmodern Attention 23:15 — Attention in Premodernity, Modernity and Postmodernity 26:43 — Attention in Pre-Premodernity 28:44 — The Evolution of Attention in Relationship with Communication Media Episode Transcript: Zak: Yeah. David canceled again. Marc: David didn’t make it? Zak: He does not make it again. He’s not going to make it. Marc: Wow! Okay. Zak: So we’ll just do it. Marc: I got a note from him. He wants us to do those essays on the First Principles and First Values one on each one, but he pointed out that there’s this implicit value that is mentioned in the uniqueness interior science equation in the First Principles and First Values book, but it’s not differentiated as its own First Principle and First Value. And that’s attention. Zak: Ah, yeah. Marc: It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, but he actually asked us to just get him some material because he wants to actually write an essay on attention. Zak: On attention, it’s necessary. You’re saying it’s woven into all of the other First Principles and First Values, or at least an important subset. Marc: Yeah, it is. Zak: He was like, “Maybe attention is a First Principle and First Value. Discuss.” Marc: Yeah. So let me try and do a couple of riffs and then you do a couple of riffs. We’ll at least get something in here. Let’s just see if we can split it into two. 1) Let’s look at where attention actually shows up in the First Principles and First Values as they exist now in the First Principles and First Values book. 2) Let’s look at attention in a kind of premodern, modern, postmodern sense and see what’s the post-post-modern or vision of attention and why that matters so much. The Relationship Between the Collapse of Attention and the Meta-Crisis Marc: In a certain sense, you could say, “Why the f**k are we talking about attention when we’re in the middle of a meta-crisis?” No, actually, it’s the collapse of attention which in some sense is one of the primary causes for the meta-crisis. That’s our frame. Tell me if this works for you and we go back and forth, but I’ll do like a first riff on the equations, flip it over to you, then we’ll do a second riff on the premodern, modern, postmodern, flip it to you. Zak: Yeah. But if I will, just a gloss on what you just said, which is: we’ve characterized the meta-crisis as a global intimacy disorder, and you’re saying root to any intimacy disorder is actually some type of dysregulation of attention. Marc: Yes. I mean, that is exactly right. That’s actually the perfect way in. So, well, let’s start from there. We’ll look at three equations. Okay? Let’s start. Attention in the Eros Equation Marc: I’m going to start with the Eros equation. If you all haven’t been hanging with us, first off, it’s only our second one of these little conversations. So hanging would just be one podcast. But if you haven’t been hanging in the CosmoErotic Humanism conversation for the last few years, just to know that there’s a book called First Principles and First Values where these equations are listed. The Eros equation, and by Eros we mean not love as in ordinary love but Love as in the cosmic principle, not love as ordinary human sentiment, but as the heart of existence itself. And we would call that Eros or we would call it Evolutionary Love or we’d call it Outrageous Love, but all terms for the same. Our equation is, and I’m not going to do the equation precisely, but just approximately: Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring, big word “desiring”, ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholes or ever greater wholeness. In that equation is Eros and ethos, number one, and attention because ethics is about the nature of our contact with each other. We want deeper contact. Deeper contact requires greater ethics. And deeper contact means at its core deeper attention. The desire for deeper contact, which is a desire of Cosmos, lives all the way down and all the way up. In other words, desire is the nature of Reality and we give it different names. For example, we call it allurement, the allurement that animates the four forces. And we understand that allurement, which is another word again for Eros, Eros whose expression is desire, Eros or love is the precise right nature of the contact. So it’s not why you fused all the way. Well, that’s not right contact. It’s not that you were totally autonomous. That would be dissociation. Fusion and dissociation wouldn’t be love. Love would actually be all the way down, protons, electrons, neutrons and Marc and Zak at their best. It would be the exact right calibration of contact, which is exactly the right level of attention. And then that then creates larger wholeness. And larger holes, I mean, parts, creating a greater whole is essentially parts placing attention on each other. And in that placing of attention, something is actually created. We’ll get maybe next week until how attention shows up as a First Principle and First Value. And what does that mean that attention is creative, that it blooms Reality? But you already see it here. It’s that Eros, which is the creative movement, animated by attention, and attention is creative. Attention blooms Reality. Attention is generative by its nature. That’s one. And I’m going to resist the temptation to go down the road of attention being generative and start to talk about differentiation and attachment theory. That’s a separate conversation. Attention in the Intimacy Equation Marc: Two is the intimacy equation. The intimacy equation and the Eros equation, these two interior science equations that are foundational to CosmoErotic Humanism, we know are kind of mirrors of each other. Intimacy equals shared identity, but it can’t just be shared identity because you have to place attention on each other. So it’s got to be shared identity in the context of otherness, again, the precise balance of autonomy and communion. So intimacy equals shared identity in the context of otherness, meaning we’re placing just the right amount of attention on each other to be both part of a larger whole and to be distinct. So intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness, and then it goes times mutuality of recognition, which is pure attention, times mutuality of pathos—we feel each other, which is attention—times mutuality of value, meaning we’re in a shared Field of Value, which actually is the prism through which our attention moves, times mutuality of purpose, which means we have a shared attention on a future. We have a shared desire. We have a purpose. We have a telos. We have a shared telos. Telos, which is another dimension of shared attention. And so you can’t even think about the intimacy equation without it being lined with this notion of attention. Attention in the Uniqueness Equation Marc: Then finally three, just to get this on the table, three is the uniqueness equation itself. In the uniqueness equation, I’m flipping open the book here, but the uniqueness equation is basically, at its core, is that uniqueness is the differentiation of the field. In other words, there’s a Field of Eros. There’s a Field of Desire, of Intimacy. And uniqueness is the differentiation of that field. So uniqueness is the emergent distinction from the field. That’s the emergent distinction from the field, which generates new value, new capacity. And what we say in this equation is, I’ll actually read it just for a second. It’s fun to read it. Okay? It’s first time we’ve ever read from this book. This is fun. Uniqueness equals emergent distinction from the Field of Reality, universal Reality, times radically new value because that emergent distinction is radically new value. And that radically new value is a new quality. It’s new consciousness. Zak: You’re not reading. Marc: Right. Good point. Times new capacity. And new capacity is (in parentheses, attention plus Eros, plus function, plus integration). Uniqueness equals emergent distinction from the Field of Reality times radically new value, times new capacity. So just to say that simply for those of you not following that equation, uniqueness means two things. One is: uniqueness comes from the differentiation of attention. I differentiate, I say, “Ah! Ah!” I see that. So the seeing, the placing of attention generates the uniqueness, and then the uniqueness itself is a new quality of that, which is attended to. But it also has a new capacity for placing attention. That’s what uniqueness is. So Zak’s attention to say it simply, Reality being Zak is a particular quality of attention that is completely different than Reality being Marc. If I called up your dad and said, “Hi, I’m Zak,” he’d be quite disappointed. Because it’s different attention field. So, yay! That just kind of sets in play what’s already in play. To you, sir. Attention as a First Order, First Principle and First Value Zak: I’ll say something which may or may not be true, but we have the first and the second order First Principles. Marc: We do. Zak: It may be that attention is a first order, First Principle and First Value. Marc: That’s interesting. Zak: It’s not listed because the way you’re describing it here is that you can’t get most of the equations off the ground without attention. You also can’t get them off the ground without the other first order First Principles. That’s one of the reasons they’re first order. So temporality, you don’t have the dynamic equations unfolding over anything, but time. Right? So you need that. And I think we’re saying here the hidden and the revealed is another one which again the equations express what is hidden and it becomes revealed. So some gloss perhaps on one of the first order principles, turn it more towards attention or that attention itself needs to be considered. Marc: You know what? It could be. That’s really interesting. Just for 10 seconds, and I’m cheating because I have the book in front of me, just to say. Zak: It’s not cheating. Marc: Yeah, we like books. So the First Principles and First Values, the first order principles are: the three perspectives—first, second and third person—time and eternity, the hidden and the revealed, polarity and paradox, interiors and exteriors, value… And I intentionally changed the order and I’m reading this one last, although it wasn’t last, because this could be where attention comes in: wholes and parts. Zak: Interesting. Marc: Because wholes and parts, Reality is composed of holons. There’s no part that’s not itself a whole and no whole that’s not itself a part. And as such, holarchies emerge. So that’s just interesting because when parts come together to create wholes, they’re placing attention on each other. But the truth is actually first second and third person are also quality… Yeah, I think it’s all the way through. You’re right. Zak: Irrespective of where it fits, it’s deep in the cosmic architecture that attention… as we unfolded last time that it unfolds over all of the chains of the great chain of being. Marc: Yeah. It could be a first order. Zak: I think it may be. Marc: It might be a first order. That’s interesting, brother. Zak: Yeah. And it’s deep. Marc: It’s deep. Zak: And to give you a sense of some of the sociology, one of the things that occurred to me… Marc: We should send it to David and see what he thinks. Zak: We should propose it as a first order. Marc: You think we should? Zak: I think so. Marc: Okay. I think so. Okay. Zak: I think so. We’ll see what David says. Marc: All right. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Synchronous vs Asynchronous Attention at the Root of the Mental Health Crisis Zak: So, this notion that attention is a need of the Cosmos would also imply that it’s a human need. Both to be able to have discretion over what you give your attention to and to be the receiver of the appropriate kinds of attention. One of the things that’s been up lately, just because of what’s going on in society and the recent Senate hearing on protecting kids from social media is this question of the correlation between social media use and adolescent mental health. And I had, for the first time, the thought that yes, it is the case that the kids are attending to the phone, therefore their attention is disrupted by the phone. But it’s also the case that everybody else is looking at their phone, which means no one’s paying attention to the kid. Marc: Right. Zak: So the root of the mental health crisis may not just be the fact that the kids getting dysregulated by the phone. It may actually be more fundamentally the fact that he is not on the receiving end of any basic attention, the kind of attention that you could take for granted as a human before, which is just that you wake up in the morning, you sit down and your mom’s there and she pays attention to you over breakfast. That may or may not happen now in a much more profound way. And it may not even appear to be neglect because it is just normal. So it’s not even sociologically seen as bad that adolescents actually don’t pay attention to each other anymore. And what’s even weirder is that if you are an influencer or someone who gets paid attention to a lot online, you’re actually paid attention to asynchronously. Meaning like: we are recording this right now, but it’s just you paying attention to me. No one else is actually paying attention to us technically speaking. They will pay attention to a representation of us asynchronously in another time. If you’re an adolescent and you record a video of yourself for TikTok and it gets a thousand views or whatever… Marc: You don’t have an embodied experience of a neurochemical transformation and an interior transformation. Zak: Right. And yet, you’ve been massively paid attention to, more than any adolescent could have been, like thousands of people watching this thing. Marc: Right. Zak: There’s this very strange kind of almost paradox here. We’re paying more attention, like, kids are able to pay more attention to each other than ever. And yet, they are not, in a very simple way, holding basic attention with each other. Marc: They’re not having an actual direct experience of being bloomed by attention directly. Zak: Precisely. Marc: That’s right. Zak: So the notion of how you understand the mental health crisis… It is actually, I think, more fundamentally that second absence of the right kind of attention paid. Marc: What is the name of such a beautiful boy that Kristina introduced me to on a plane on the way to one of our mystery schools, who committed suicide, who did that beautiful song, Hey Brother. I apologize, everyone. He was one of those DJs who kind of synchronizes, synthesizes, and creates kind of new music. What was the name? Avicii. Avicii. He was just stunningly beautiful. And KK ran me through just both his music and these unimaginable crowds of people, this unimaginable attention on him, and he commits suicide. It’s the point that you’re making in a different way. Although that’s not asynchronous, but it’s not dissimilar from it. When someone is placing attention on you directly, the two of you are talking and love, of course, is the placing of attention, then your life is self-evidently good. It’s self-evident. You are in life. You’re not exiting life. And paradoxically, that level of attention is both enlivening in the moment and yet deadening in some fundamental way because it’s fundamentally not personal. Attention is the discretion of infinity through a person to a person. In other words, infinity is moving through me uniquely and then intimately and uniquely placing attention on you. So attention by its nature has a dimension of uniqueness, which is why attention shows up in the uniqueness equation. Zak: And discretion. Marc: And discretion. Zak: A whole bunch of subtle characteristics that make the difference between the types of attention that are beneficial to people and the types of attention that actually are alienating and uncomfortable. The last time I think we talked about surveillance, as an example of a kind of attention you don’t want. And yet, the notion that God is aware of every hair in your head and that like the mothering one who wouldn’t be smothering, but would somehow know so much about exactly what you need is also reassuring. So there’s the sense of like both wanting to be seen in some context and another context not wanting attention. Marc: Yeah. Attentional Dynamics Perpetuating the Global Intimacy Disorder Zak: And so that notion of the intimacy disorder at a planetary scale, being fundamentally rooted in an attentional deficit disorder. Marc: An imbalance of attention in a certain sense that moves in two directions. One is excessive attention, which is why the European Parliament, whatever, it’s not exactly European Parliament, but the European structures are trying to create this right to be forgotten. And the fundamental breakdown of attention, which is exacerbated by all the structures of modernism and talked about appropriately by a number of thinkers. So is this a good place to jump in? Zak: One more thing. Marc: Please, please, please. Zak: Because you brought up like the celebrity status and I brought up the kind of YouTube or TikTok. Marc: Asynchronous attention. Zak: Asynchronous attention. And then also “the many watching the few” as the model of the celebrity attention dynamic. “The many who watch the few” goes way back in human history when you think about the king and the aristocracy. They actually put themselves on display, on purpose. So there’s the many who watch the few is one model. And there’s another model where “the few watch the many”. And this is the panopticon or the surveillance. Marc: The surveillance model. Zak: And then with the internet, the many who watch the few is the classic broadcast celebrity. And the few who watch the many is the classic surveillance panopticon. But the many watching the many is the postmodern digital thing, where the 15 minutes of fame for every person is possible. Marc: Right, but it’s a chaotic. Zak: It’s chaotic. Marc: Many watching the many without the underlying structure of order under chaos that chaos theory is trying to point to. Zak: Correct. Marc: It’s chaos theory without the chaotic orchestration. Zak: It’s also a kind of surveillance where everybody is up in everyone’s business in a completely different way, and a kind of narcissism that makes everyone believe they’re a celebrity or somehow asymmetrically talented to deserve the 15 minutes. So it’s a complex perspectival and attentional situation. And then when you add on the asynchronous dimension, it’s very hard… Marc: Asynchronous placing of attention. Zak: Exactly. Then it’s really hard to locate yourself. It’s only through attention that you literally locate yourself. Marc: So it’s the inability to locate the self. That’s great. Introduction to Pre-Premodern, Premodern, Modern, Postmodern Attention Marc: Let’s think for a second. Let’s see if we can step back and in the second part that we chat a little bit here, we just point to the nature of attention, but with the following intention, if you will, which is: what we really want to do, and maybe we’ll talk about that next week, is we really want to trace the history of attention. We want to look at premodern attention, in a word, the attention on God. And the premodern monks. You place attention in order to create union with God. They knew exactly what attention was for in that model. The movement of attention in modernity, and we’ll talk much more about it next week, but the movement of attention from kind of God to man, science, psychology, and yet also the emergence of new oppressive forms of attention, kind of Taylorism factories. So that’s kind of the modern notion of attention we can get to next week. And then postmodern attention, which is: there’s actually nothing to pay attention. Zak: Because everything is equally worth paying attention to. Marc: Because everything is equally worth paying attention, or worthless in other words. Zak: Or worth ignoring. Marc: That’s right, kind of Spinoza’s comment that the most polite form of atheism is pantheism, which was not completely accurate, but not entirely inaccurate. Meaning there actually is no hierarchy because there is no quality. So nothing is better than anything else and nothing is worse than anything else. And so there’s nothing to pay attention to. Zak: Yeah. So that’s great. If I would say reconstructing that history. Marc: And I think David, it’s weird. He was like on a new app. So I think he said he wants us to talk about that. And I think he wants to even write about that this week. Zak: I’d be happy to do that. The best way to do that would be to talk about McLuhan. You can’t really do that reconstruction of the history of attention without looking at the history of media specifically. Because before the premodern is the pre-premodern, which McLuhan gets into because you start with oral. You don’t start with text and you don’t start with monks and god and agrarian societies. You start with the oral cultures, then you get the text-based cultures. Marc: Right, which is this very dramatic history of attention. Zak: Very dramatic history of attention, tied into the history of technologies, communication technologies. Marc: Right. So the whole thing. The history of attention and the history of communication technologies are deeply interwoven with each other. Zak: Yeah. And what’s crazy is the pre-human. Marc: Let’s actually each do a take on this. Because I was going to go into the nature of attention itself, but I’m going to bracket that and put one thing on the table that we can get to next week, which is… There’s this whole realization that the collapse of attention is the cause of all forms of evil, which is not wrong, and placing attention on that is critical. We need to value attention. But as we’ve talked about so many times together in the last years, you can’t value attention unless attention is a First Principle and First Value. So what we’re moving towards is to actually locate in this post-postmodern moment, in this new moment, in this New Story of Value, attention as a First Principle and First Value. So I’m saying let’s bracket that conversation. And maybe if we can each do five minutes on premodern, modern, and postmodern, maybe you hit the McLuhan stuff a little bit. I’ll do a little bit of a deeper take premodern, modern, postmodern, at least so we’ll have that on the table because I think he wants to start writing. So at least we’ll do that for him. Is that fair? Zak: Sure. Marc: Okay. So let me just recapitulate in my mind. Attention in Premodernity, Modernity and Postmodernity Marc: So premodern, we’re not going back to the oral for a second. Let’s go into classical premodern: last couple thousand years. We’re already in the written word. In the premodern world, you’re paying attention—I grew up in a premodern tradition, which I still actively practice within a larger context. And I would do a particular prayer, which has about 30 words, which one does not fulfill one’s kind of sacred obligation, if you will, for that prayer without actually having attention on every word of the prayer. Meaning on the “you”—I’m in prayer to the “you”—and on the meaning of the prayer. That’s the first blessing in the 18 benedictions that are kind of this daily prayer. So in most of the prayer, there’s kind of a general intention on you’re before the “you”, before the second person. But in these, the first blessing, which is again about 30 words, there’s actually a kind of ritual, legal requirement to have attention on every word and to know the meaning of every word. So I would, a couple hours in the morning, keep trying to do it again. In other words, the practice was for many years to keep placing attention on every word—and that really captures the best of premodernity, which is your attention is on the Field of the Divine. It’s acosmic. It’s all God. And therefore, you place attention, you’re always placing attention on the Divine. You’re always placing attention on God. Every place you’re placing attention is to reveal the God in it and to reveal the inherent divinity that’s always there, but that’s where the attention goes. It’s towards that revelation and towards the union with that, towards participation in that. So that’s one. The modern, as we already noted, has this shift towards three things. I’ll just say them and it won’t even indulge in them. One is romantic love. It’s attention on each other romantically. In other words, not love of God, it’s love of each other, whether that’s romantic, man, woman in the classical sense. Or it’s Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. But it’s not really all for France or all for the church. Those are kind of mocked. It’s really fraternity. It’s placing attention on each other again. And it’s placing attention on this world. It’s kind of Michalengelo’s David. He’s not obeisant to the Divine. He’s this emergent, shining figure who clearly has dignity and who has Eros. * It’s attention on humanity. * It’s attention on interior psychology. * It’s attention on science in terms of its inherent laws of nature and not to reveal the Divine in it. That’s modernity. And it just kind of assumes the value of things without actually establishing it, which we’ve talked about at great length about that assumption. Then finally, it’s in postmodernity that all breaks down. There’s this realization: “Wow! Wow! There is no real Story of Value. The value actually is not real.” That implication of modernity breaks out in postmodernity. Therefore there’s no place that ultimately deserves our attention. That’s the postmodern mind. And then the internet becomes the exteriorization of the postmodern mind. Our attention is pulled in a thousand different directions. There’s nothing wrong with stealing attention because there’s nothing to place attention on. “Attention is not a value, so what’s the problem?” Boom! So we’re trying to get to the fourth, which we get to next week, which is: “okay, what’s our reclaiming of attention?” So put that aside. And I would love to, in the five minutes we have left, hear some McLuhan. Attention in Pre-Premodernity Zak: Yeah. And McLuhan is really about the history of the transformations of attention. Even just the idea that the media of communication are extensions of the senses and powers of the human. A little bit before you get the kind of like pre-premodern, you get biosemiotics. You get the communication technologies of the biological world—chemical, vision, and all of this stuff. Marc: And before biosemiotics, you’ve got the interior communication between protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. Zak: Exactly. So we won’t get into kind of like pansemiotic evolutionary theory, but that’s where it goes. Marc: Right, but that pansemiotic evolutionary theory is key here. Zak: And then that blends into looking at the history of attention through this transformation of basically communication technologies, starting with language and innovations in language being… Marc: Oral to language. Zak: Well, oral being language. And like before language, which specifically would be propositionally differentiated speech, we paid attention to each other’s vocalizations in a different way. So animals pay attention to each other’s vocalizations. Marc: That’s what I meant by oral to language. Zak: Exactly. Marc: The oral is grunt. Zak: Grunt. And then, but the beginning of it really is what we would think of as language when humans first get propositionally differentiated speech and they start sitting around the fire and they start telling complex stories to each other. story, language. Marc: So oral to language to story is the semiotic thread. Zak: Right. The language allowing story and specifically the oral cultures being continuous with the biosemiotic attention to nature that the early humans must have had to spend. So they were communicating with nature and attending to nature in a way that we probably can’t even really understand. So there was before the attention to God, as it were in the premodern, with the great traditions, you had what they would say is paganism, which is paying attention to the forces of nature. Marc: Kind of the Garden of Eden before God speaks. Zak: Correct. Marc: I mean, that’s beautiful. The Evolution of Attention in Relationship with Communication Media Zak: And there’s a huge transformation in the history of attention with the emergence of the written word. So you don’t get anything that resembles what we think of as civilization—which Mumford characterized as the mega-machine—you don’t get any of that without the ability to have written word because you need to keep records. You need to have written laws. You need to give exact instructions to people who are thousands of miles away with a runner and all of these things that characterize the early civilizations. The focus on the written word gives us a whole bunch of crazy things occurring, including things that we think of as schools, scholarly and priestly casts, libraries, and specifically history in a written form. Marc: Which is a new form of placing attention on the story. Zak: Correct. And so now we can, at great distance from one another, very precisely attend to exactly the same thing. And we can now integrate. Marc: It creates a shared attention space in humanity. Zak: Exactly. So then you get the printed word. So it starts with papyrus and clay tablets and stuff. But then when you get the printing press, the so-called Gutenberg revolution, that is, again, a radical transformation because now you don’t have a small number of people dealing with a written word and allowing for this kind of like early premodern organization. You get the kind of high premodern organization, which is where you get the Protestant revolution and this massive move towards the democratization of access to text. And that births modernity. Marc: And modernity is, in a word, this is a beautiful way to say it. Modernity is: “Oh, now the ordinary human’s attention on politics and economics is possible and wanted and desired.” Zak: Yeah. Marc: There’s no reason for premodern ordinary humans to place their attention on that. It had nothing to do with them. Zak: Yeah, totally. And the idea that the text mediates the relationship between you and God individually, which is part of the Protestant revolution, which just comes from the fact that you could translate the Bible into the native languages and print them. Marc: So it’s actually the sacralization of the attention of the individual human who’s not part of the elite. That attention is the nature of modernity. Zak: Totally. And the idea of a human sitting alone with a book is weird, from like the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years before the printing press. Humans sat and they talked to each other. You know what I mean? But the idea that now you’re going to be alone with a text and be communicating with an author who died a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. So the possibilities for identity formation and what you have the discretion to pay your attention to expands drastically. You’re an aristocrat in the middle ages with a library? That’s like some radical, crazy identity formation material that just wasn’t available to attend to before that. We got to wrap now, but then you get the electric, which gives us radio and television. And that again, as you can see with the effect of television, fundamentally transforms the dynamic away from text back to the oral in a certain way. The radio revives the fireside chat as Roosevelt described his communications to the country for the first time. Through the radio, you sit and huddle around the radio as if it’s a campfire and you listen. You don’t read it, you listen. So you move through the electric to the digital and then you return to the text, in a sense, but also have available all the other prior modalities. The digital recapitulates a return, in a sense, to a type of premodern. We can talk about that next time. Marc: Let’s pick up exactly here. There’s so much to say, but we’ll pick up exactly here. Zak: Yeah. Marc: Yay! Mentioned People: * KK (Kristina Kincaid) * Avicii (1989-2018) * Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) * Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) * Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe
Oct 7, 2025 · 36 min
Attention as a First Principle and First Value
About this episode: We all feel our attention is under constant attack. But what if this digital war for our attention is a battle for something far more fundamental than our productivity? What if attention isn’t just something we do, but something the universe is? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein introduce attention as a fundamental quality of the Cosmos, intrinsically linked to the First Values of Uniqueness, Eros, and Intimacy, noting that the universe itself evolves towards organisms with ever-greater capacities for attention. They identify how “joint attention” is a uniquely human capacity that gives rise to language, story, and culture, and therefore, they argue that the problem with the modern “attention economy” is that its stealing and hijacking of human attention is a violation not merely of a cognitive faculty, but of a fundamental value that gives rise to an Intimate Universe. Note on Source Material and Citation: The material covered in this podcast is drawn from two forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Attention: First Principle, First Value, and Human Right * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 For citation of this episode, please use the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, October 2025, Episode: “Attention as a First Principle and First Value.” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:49 — Context Setting 1:37 — The Attention Economy 3:10 — The Problem with Stealing Attention 5:08 — The Value of Attention 5:34 — Attention in the Interior Science Equations 7:04 — Attention as a Core Structure of Cosmos 8:02 — The Evolution of Attention (Pre-Modern, Modern, Post-Modern) 9:27 — Attention in Post-Post-Modernity 10:20 — Attention in Evolutionary Science 12:00 — Attention in the Human — Joint Attention, Semiotics and Language 16:28 — The Universe Values Attention 18:14 — The Anthro-Ontological Realization of the Value of Attention 19:14 — The Relationship Between Love and Attention 20:19 — Invitation to the Academy 20:55 — The Continuity and Discontinuity of Attention 23:27 — Attending Beings vs Reliably Differentially Responding Beings 25:05 — The Distortion of Love and Attention 28:47 — What’s Missing in the Discussions About Surveillance 31:57 — The Conditioning Chamber as the Infinite Absence of Intimacy 34:13 — The Need for Attention Episode Transcript: Zak: Yeah, so David J. Temple is probably not going to show up again today. Marc: He’s not coming? Zak: That’s the impression that I get. And so, he asked us to record again in his interest. So, yeah, Center for World Philosophy and Religion, content meeting. I don’t know, 1,002? Marc: We’ve been doing this for a bunch of years. Zak: So, yeah, now we’re getting another record for David J. Temple, and wherever he is, may he receive this recording. Marc: Yeah, I guess he needs it for the writing. Zak: He needs it for the writing. Marc: Okay. Maybe let’s talk about attention. Good. Because we’re right in the middle of writing on attention. And I hope this works for David, we’ll do it the way we’ve done it for the last seven, eight years or so. As you know, I’ll lay out a whole thing, you lay out just whatever’s on our mind on attention. The Attention Economy Marc: There’s this movement to this attention economy that we’re all familiar with. That, in some sense, you could say data is the new oil, and data is gained online through the grabbing of attention. So the online structure grabs attention or even hijacks attention, and that’s the critique of the attention economy. This is all stuff that, at least within a very small circle, people are familiar with. There’s been this grabbing of attention, this hijacking of attention in order to keep people online and engaged. Engagement is a kind of euphemism for addiction. And so, the business model of the attention economy is to keep people online long-term, return, repeat customers for as long as possible, for as much time as possible. It took people a while to figure out why that was true. When you read books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010), or even Yuval Harari’s book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in 2018, they didn’t actually get the business model straight. Their descriptions of the business model were wrong. They assumed this was in order to get more eyeballs for advertising, which is only one dimension, but we both understand, that, of course, the real issue is digital exhaust. And the real issue is gathering data in order to create the possibility of micro-target personalization with all of its deleterious effects, kind of undermining all these goods. What I want to focus on is three things. The Problem with Stealing Attention Marc: First off, and this is the big problem, which we talked about four or five years ago when we started this techno-feudalism conversation, what’s the problem with stealing attention? “Who the f**k cares? Take attention.” And we’ve talked to several people who are key figures in the economic world, in the libertarian world, who basically said: “taking people’s attention? That’s your right to do.” So, besides the fact that this is completely different than print or broadband advertising, because it’s micro-targeted and personalized and because you have the asymmetrical power of machine intelligence arrayed against you—besides that distinction, which is, of course, true—there’s a bigger issue at play, which is: What is the actual problem taking someone’s attention? Why is that a problem? And when you read the people who are really—some really good people, and some that we know and like and love—who’ve done fantastic work on pointing to the fact that you have these Persuasive Technology Lab via B.J. Fogg’s. And one of his students Nir Eyal writes his book Hooked, which is all about the hijacking of attention. But in the great objections to it, no one actually tells you why it’s a bad idea. There’s this skirting around it, and that’s true in Surveillance Capitalism and Zuboff’s great work, but it avoids: What’s the problem with stealing attention? But it’s also true in a book like Stolen Focus by Hari, which is also a great book, great job, in 2022. And there’s a whole other set of literatures. There’s a book, Z, that we haven’t gotten to talk about called Thoreau’s Axe by Caleb Smith at Yale, which is about attention. Another book by a woman named Kreiner called The Wandering Mind. So there’s this whole slew of books. And there’s another book called The Loop by Ward, which kind of deals peripherally with this. But they’re all kind of crying in different ways about attention, and they’re saying “you have to value attention.” The Value of Attention Marc: And the first thing that we want to say is: there’s no reason to value attention, ultimately, unless attention is a value. There’s no reason to value attention unless attention is a value. If attention is not a First Principle and First Value, there’s no reason to actually be exercised at its violation. That’s the first thing. Attention in the Interior Science Equations Marc: And in the interior science equations that we formulated in CosmoErotic Humanism, there are three equations, one of them which explicitly talks about attention, which is the equation about the irreducible value of uniqueness. Uniqueness is both unique quality of attention and your attention on that which is unique. That which is unique demands attention, and we have unique qualities of attention. And my unique quality of attention is part of my unique personhood. Meaning, I both demand, in my unique personhood, the unique attention of reality, the personal address of reality, and my irreducible uniqueness enacts my possibility of placing my unique attention on reality. So attention is an intrinsic part of uniqueness. It’s an intrinsic part of the core quality of Eros. And then the Eros equation, which is the experience of radical aliveness desiring: ever deeper contact, which involves the placing of attention, and ever greater wholeness—separate parts place attention on each other and then generate something larger. And finally, it’s an intrinsic part of the intimacy equation: Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness. Shared identity comes from: * Mutuality of recognition, we place attention on each other. * Mutuality of pathos, we feel each other. * Mutuality of value, we place attention and/or we speak from within a field of shared value. * And then mutuality of purpose, we place attention on an intention. Attention as a Core Structure of Cosmos Marc: So attention is this core structure of Cosmos. And let me just say one last thing and give it to you, which is: A) we have to reclaim the First Principle and First Value of Attention.B) we can’t do that without First Principles and First Values. Without there being a First Principle and First Value, there’s nothing that’s being violated.C) it’s implicit in uniqueness, in Eros, in intimacy, but really in everything. In other words, all of the equations assume, the First Principle and First Value of Attention. By saying First Principle and First Value of Attention, what we mean is that attention itself is a quality of Eros, of love. It’s a quality of Cosmos, and that attention goes all the way down. Then, in some sense, protons, neutrons, and electrons place attention on each other. And all the way up the evolutionary chain, there is this increasing process of attention, until we get to the human level, the depth of the self-reflective human. And the self-reflective human is the history of humanity, the history of the evolution of attention. The Evolution of Attention (Pre-Modern, Modern, Post-Modern) Marc: Last piece, we could actually look for a second at pre-modern, modern, post-modern just in terms of attention. The pre-modern mind places attention, but it places attention for the sake of a religious action, which is usually some form of union with the Divine. So, I have to place my attention in order to create union, in order to kind of not be distracted by this world. The modern world kind of rejects that. Modernity rejects that for partially right and partially wrong reasons. And modernity places attention on the sciences and pays attention to the natural world. Let me measure the natural world, which is a way of placing—measurement is a form of attention. And let me place attention interiorly, in my own psychology. So, there’s this movement of attention. And then post-modernity comes along and says, “Actually, there’s nothing really to place attention on.” Zak: Hmm. Marc: See that? That’s why the attention economy emerges out of this post-modernity, because nothing’s actually real. Zak: Who cares? Right. Marc: Who cares? What’s there to place attention on? Therefore, the post-modern mind is exteriorized in the structure of the internet in which there’s complete interrupting of attention. The structure of the internet is the scattering of attention in every moment, because attention is no longer a value. The process of attention is no longer a value. Attention in Post-Post-Modernity Marc: Then post-post-modernity, in this new world, in this new story of value in response to the meta-crisis, we’re saying, “No, no, no. Actually, attention is at the very center, it’s actually the center of ethos. It’s the center of Anthro-Ontology.” The ability to turn inward and place attention on my interior, actually is the way that I impact, that I formulate ethos. It’s the way I formulate law, because, actually, the mysteries are within us. Infinity is within us. We participate in the field, and that participation happens through the placing of attention. So, we actually reclaim attention in this very, very dramatic new way. Emergent from the best strains, I would say, in pre-modernity and modernity. Okay, that takes us into attention. Zak: Get it going. Marc: Yeah. It’s exciting. Zak: It’s exciting. And the idea that the Cosmos, or the universe values attention. Attention in Evolutionary Science Zak: The evolutionary morphology that evolution itself moves towards structures that have more capacity for attention. This was part of Teilhard’s hypothesis about celebralization. The idea that, if you look at the evolutionary record, it’s building bigger and bigger nervous systems, and it’s making the organisms dependent upon the ability to pay attention or die. It’s one way to think about it. So, even from the perspective of Neo-Darwinian evolution, you get a situation where the organism’s ability to pay attention to its environment is the thing that gives it selective advantage. Marc: Yeah, beautiful. Zak: And it didn’t have to be that way. There’s plenty of processes in the Cosmos that work really well without things that look, from our perspective, like a lot of attention being paid to them. Even insects are an interesting example, where the amount of attention that an individual ant can pay, as opposed to the total unified attention, let’s say, marshaled by the entire ant colony, right? And then you get the attention of a single hunting lioness. Watching for hours the gazelle pack to look at the one who’s injured, to wait for the right moment. So there’s all of these places in biology where the attentiveness of the organism itself is what is selected for evolutionarily. So we’re looking at a situation where we’re growing these organisms, and they’re adapting to become more attentive. Attention in the Human — Joint Attention, Semiotics and Language Zak: And then, of course, you get the human. And the human—and this is where I’ll start looking at books—you look at the work of Michael Tomasello who is a comparative psychologist at the Max Planck Institute, and he’s looking back at the American pragmatist tradition, and specifically George Herbert Mead. George Herbert Mead was one of the first people to talk about semiotics. He picked it up from Peirce, and he was talking about the fact that we use signs in a way that other animals don’t. So one of the things animals pay attention to, and have to pay attention to, are the signs that their species put out. Mating signs are the most classic ones, but also hunting signals from pack animals that coordinate, and then the signs that other animals leave. And then, of course, the vocalizations of animals are essential to their living. We vocalize in a very different way, and it has to do with this—what’s called the joint attentional situation—which is the way that we attend to together. Not attend alone, one-on-one with an object, but attend to me and you looking at this thing together. So the joint attentional situation allows us to understand our complex vocalizations in a much more dramatic and useful way than any other vocalizations that animals make. And there’s a whole field of sociology called symbolic interactionism that emerges from this approach that Tomasello locks in. But basically, he proves that, like, monkeys don’t do this. No other animals do this. Humans spend a tremendous amount of time in very complex joint attentional situations where we are able to create, draw from and learn from the world together in real-time. And one of the main places that happens is in intergenerational transmission. That’s the kids with the elder, sitting down, exploring the world together, holding attention together for an extended period of time while looking at how a tool is made, or holding attention together for a long time while looking at how food is prepared. What Tomasello is basically saying is that there are many traits that humans share with other animals, but if you’re looking for those traits that might be the ones that are candidates for the differentiators—the traits that we have that could explain the difference, the obvious difference, like we build hospitals and other animals don’t build hospitals, and we go to the moon and all of that. So how does that all get started? His argument is that it has to do with this capacity for joint attention, which he doesn’t say, but which, I would say, which is the outcome of a universe which is pushing towards greater and greater capacity for more and more intimate and complex forms of attention. And so the idea that the distinctly human thing, which would give rise to what we think of as language and story, which would just say: so me and you together looking at the world, what do we do? We tell the story about the world. Or me and you together talking about other people. So the equally primordial emergence of humanness with language, story, and joint attention—that’s what Tomasello is basically proposing. And we’re proposing that more or less also. Saying that, “Listen, one reason, strongly, to say that you have to value attention is that it is not a secondary quality of the universe.” That’s basically what they’re arguing. So, like, most technologists wouldn’t say you could ignore gravity. They wouldn’t say you could ignore the laws of thermodynamics, or you could ignore the laws of electromagnetism. These things you respect, but the idea that there are limits on human nature, that there are ways that the human mind, psyche, soul works, which if you transgress or trespass certain limits, it won’t work anymore. You can break it, just like you can exhaust natural resources. You can exhaust all available attention. And just like you can cross thresholds with pollution, you can cross moral or ethical thresholds. So it’s just putting on the table, and then I’ll throw it back to you, that indeed the universe does seem to be pushing towards attention. The human being, in one sense, what defines us as human is a unique capacity for a certain type of attention. And so therefore, the preying upon or degrading that very thing which separates us and unites us to the universe—because through the joint attention, we can tell more complex stories about the universe and understand it better—is a fundamental transgression. The Universe Values Attention Zak: So you’re tinkering with something very, very fundamental when you’re tinkering with attention, akin to a law of nature. So to devalue attention in the human is to transgress. It’s basically to push against the flow of the universe, is to say. We value something that, or rather, say we don’t value what the universe values. And that’s a— Marc: Yeah. It’s great. I want to come back to joint attention, because that’s so big. Because joint attention, as you described it, is an expression of how this quality of attention, which we’re now establishing as a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos, emerges uniquely at the human level. Zak: Right, exactly. Marc: Which is, as we point out in lots of our conversations. And I think, David talks about this in the First Principles and First Values book, that every First Principle and First Value, I think he writes, has continuity and discontinuity. Zak: Right. Marc: So continuity is attention all the way up and all the way down, and then there are unique qualities of attention that emerge at each level. So let me just kind of go back for a second, just kind of riff with you for a second. So, one of the things that David talks about there is that—and we’ve talked about it many times, is that you only arouse, what Zuboff calls, appropriately, astonishment and outrage. Zak: Right. Marc: If you’re violating a value, or you arouse communion. You arouse political will, moral will, economic will, if you’re going to support a value. And this is exactly what we’re pointing to. Zak: Right. Marc: If attention is not a value of Cosmos, there’s absolutely no reason that you should be concerned with its hijacking. And indeed, the entire structure of techno-feudalism basically says, “Well, there’s no law against this.” Law, as we’ve talked about many times, has gotten dissociated from value. Zak: Right. Marc: And so, why not do it? So that’s one. But let’s go even deeper. The Anthro-Ontological Realization of the Value of Attention Marc: It’s very beautiful that the very nature of reality itself, in the interior sciences, and you can get a deep sense of this realization in your own interiority—anthro-ontologically, by anthro-human-ontologically, as we always say for realness—you can get this. You can get an interior sense of this. What reality is, is that the Infinite places attention, and that placing of attention manifests the finite. So really, when you read, for example, Genesis, vayar, divinity looked—Infinity placed attention on the finite. And we’re trying to formulate together, brother, this. Whenever you do a new Story of Value, you want to articulate a new world religion as a context for our diversity, you have to try and find in your own realization the new name of God. So we’ve talked about this new name of God together, as God is the Infinite Intimate. And what the Infinite Intimate means is that the Infinite is being intimate, meaning the Infinite is placing attention. The Relationship Between Love and Attention Marc: So, attention is: A) an act of intimacy. It’s an act of Eros. B) it’s a creative act. Attention blooms reality. It manifests reality. Attention births. And really, when you think about it, what is the act of loving? To love someone is to place my attention on them. And we talk about a lot in CosmoErotic Humanism, we try and distinguish between love and sexuality and Eros, and our point is that it’s really not about sex. That the sexuality models the erotic. In what sense? Because sexuality is the placing of attention. That’s what it is. Zak: Right. Marc: We begin to get this notion that love and attention, love and creativity and attention, are actually utterly related to each other, inextricably related. And that all of personhood and all of intersubjectivity is about the unique placing of attention. So, if we hijack attention, we’re actually deconstructing the very interior structure of reality. Zak: Totally. Yeah, there’s a couple of things to say. Marc: Please. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. The Continuity and Discontinuity of Attention Zak: Just to get the continuity/discontinuity thing in a couple of ways. An early evidence that attention goes way down is plants. Right? Plants attend to the sun and to moisture in the soil. The roots grow in the direction of moisture. Leaves and whole structures of a thousand-pound limbs will reorient to the sun. And there are some plants that do it drastically, where they come out, and they close again, and they come out. And so there’s an attentiveness that the plant has. But then, of course, it doesn’t have a nervous system, and it certainly doesn’t have the things that we most associate with attention, with your eyeballs. There’s a whole world of attention in the universe, which includes jellyfish and other stuff which do not have eyeballs but which are constantly attending to the world. Then you get this whole world of things with eyeballs that are looking at stuff. And that’s what we associate with attention. “Pay attention!” Like, “wake up, open your eyes.” So, then there’s this whole world of attention with eyeballs. And just to get that, that’s an example of continuity/discontinuity. There’s the turning towards, there’s a tending to, there’s the moving towards, but then there’s the having visual capacity, which opens up this ability to be intimate with things that are much farther away, in one sense, or at least to see these things. So it’s worth noting that we live in this world of attention where it’s eyeballs and eyeball capturing, but that’s stacked on top of this whole complex compound individual of attention that goes back down to the responsiveness of the plant tissues. And that’s just kind of gorgeous, just to sit in. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And you have that whole stack—your body is responsive at the level of a plant to the sun, and you get goosebumps and things occur that you can’t even control in your body, that have to do with your body attending to itself or the environment. That kind of continuity of attention is a way of thinking about the spectrum of consciousness and the differences that move with the different types of affordances that organisms evolve. And many people think, when they think of the plant turning towards the sun, the instinct is that the plant loves the sun. So, the way you describe the plant turning towards the sun, and the way many things attend towards things, it is as if through that attention. I want to make one final point, which just to maybe to complexify a little bit: and then you get the digital. Attending Beings vs Reliably Differentially Responding Beings Zak: So there’s the whole “digital capturing our eyeballs”, which is “great”... But then there’s the digital has eyeballs. So, sensors, sensor networks. And what’s weird about this is that there’s a way that something can be reliably differentially responding. So it’s a sensor, but it’s actually not attending to you. Right? Marc: Right. Zak: And this is very important to get this distinction. It’s a subtle philosophical distinction, and it’s made in Brandom, and it’s made in Sellars and a couple of other analytical philosophers. And it became part of the philosophy of mind and up into cognitive science. But the difference between an attending being and a reliably, differentially responding sensor is something that needs to be worked at. So, imagine you go to a door, and it’s one of those doors where as you approach it, it’s got a sensor, and the door opens. Another door, you walk towards it, and a human being opens it for you. Marc: Not the same. Zak: Not the same. In one sense, identical, especially if that guy’s hired to do that. And every time you walk towards a door, he does it exactly the same way. In one sense, the same, and in one sense, not the same at all. And so this is the case as well with, let’s say, a chatbot. The experience of being in conversation with someone—even on text, when you know it’s another human, and there’s “...” on your screen, they’re texting you—is the experience of “they’re paying attention to me.” The experience of being on with a chatbot is the experience of something paying attention to you when actually nothing is paying attention to you. You’re dealing with a reliably differential responder, but not an actual attending being. You’re dealing with a language bot, but not a language user. The Distortion of Love and Attention Marc: It’s the difference between a stalker and a lover, in some sense. In other words, every move you make, every breath you take, I’ll be watching you. But that’s exactly not placing attention. And it’s paradoxically there. It looks like I’m placing attention, but actually I’m not. The placing of attention is intimate, and intimate means we have a shared identity. There’s a context of otherness in the intimacy equation that’s laid out in the First Principles and First Values book. And then there’s a mutuality of recognition. There’s a mutuality of feeling. There’s a mutuality of value, there’s mutuality of purpose. So surveillance and stalking is not the placing of attention. The placing of attention is, by its nature— the Hebrew word for attention is sim lev. Actually, in the army, “Attention!” Attention means something of gravitas is happening. So sim lev means the placing of the heart. Zak: Totally. But even unethical attention is attention. I mean, it’s not that the only time we call something attention is when it’s the right type of attention. Marc: Well, let’s think about it for a second. So, love and attention are kind of inextricably bound up at their best. So love can be distorted. So, for example, when love gets distorted, it becomes hate. Hate actually has an obsessive placing of attention. Zak: Mm-hmm. Marc: So it actually, paradoxically, it is a kind of obsessive attention. So I guess we could talk about the stalker as a kind of— but it’s precisely an objectifying when you can’t be felt. When someone places attention on you, and that placing of attention is an expression of Eros, because attention and Eros are intimately related then you’re bloomed. It’s why we feel violated by surveillance. Because it’s actually a distortion, a degrading of the quality of attention, which is, by its nature, intersubjective. Meaning, I’m actually feeling you. So when Infinity places attention on reality, it’s an attention, which is an erotic attention. Its insides are aligned with love. It’s an Intimate, Erotic Universe. When that attention is hijacked and distorted—that’s exactly what you were saying before. So when you’re being surveilled, when you’re not only looking at the Internet, but the internet’s looking at you, and it’s a machine being. So we’d say that’s not attention. When a human being is obsessively looking at you, and it’s for the sake of killing you, or it’s a stalker, there’s something deficient in the quality of attention. Meaning, if you were really paying attention, you would actually see my interiority. If you’re really paying attention, you wouldn’t be reducing and objectifying me. You wouldn’t be degrading me. Zak: Right. Marc: So you’re paying a level of attention. You’re seeing something about me, but you’re actually not placing full attention. In other words, the act of, for example, demonization, Joseph Berke points out in his book Tyranny of Malice. That the way malice works is you place attention, but it’s distorted attention, where you kind of identify some deficiency in the object of your attention. Then you magnify it, distort it, then you occlude from your field of attention all of the good, and that becomes hatred. Hatred is a degraded form of attention. Something like that. Zak: Something like that, yeah. And that’s all attention paid by humans to other humans. Marc: Right. Zak: And then there are the sensor networks, where you have whole complex things happening without any human in the loop. What’s Missing in the Discussions About Surveillance Zak: And so I think this is one of the important things to think about with what’s wrong about the framing of surveillance is—and the reason we would not succeed with some techno-feudalists and raising the argument, because they’d be like: “But it’s not that, it’s not that there’s someone looking at you. It’s precisely, there’s precisely no one looking at you. It’s just like the door opening when you leave the grocery store. It’s just a sensor. There’s nobody looking in your house or looking over your shoulder at your web browsing. No one ever will. There’s millions of people doing it. How could we possibly look at your web browser? It’s just an algorithm that happens to know everything about you well enough to advertise to and to direct your behavior and all of that stuff.” So the creepiness factor of surveillance, the idea that the KGB is tapping your phone, or they’re looking in through here with binoculars, or something like that, that’s actually not what’s occurring. And that’s important to get which is why the frame of surveillance, I think, is less useful than the frame of operant conditioning chamber. Marc: Right. Skinner’s Box. Zak: Which, of course, involves surveillance. But a whole bunch of other stuff. And so the idea that the apparatus is surveilling you, but it’s not actually creepy in that sense. It’s creepy because it’s controlling your behavior. It’s shaping your preferences, and it’s degrading your attention to the point where you don’t even know that it’s degrading your attention. Marc: So this is very important, actually. This is a distinction that we’ve talked about a lot, between surveillance being the problem, which is actually itself problematic, and it’s one of the reasons it’s ignored by techno-feudalism. Zak: Because it’s not your dad’s surveillance, right? Marc: It’s not that kind of surveillance that you’re describing. And it also can be munificent. Let me go slow for a second. Surveillance is a form of attention, in that, the surveillance that happens through the first wave and second wave of AI. Let’s just say first wave AI—social media, being fed into machine intelligence and then being turned into data. And then the Internet of Things, and the ability to kind of turn what they call dark data into kind of usable data, which then creates this kind of personality profile about you. That is actually an evolution in the structure of reality, in that it allows reality to pay attention to you in a way that you are actually unaware of, in a certain way. And it could do that in a very, very benign way. Wow, we’re concerned with existential risk, and we need to, as Bostrom says in The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019), we need to keep our eyes on everyone, because we’re afraid of a particular kind of black ball that can actually be wildly destructive. So we do surveillance within the context of First Values and First Principles. In other words, we’re not looking to control you. We’re just simply creating a thing which is held by some sort of responsible structure in order to be aware if there’s actual existential threats that are actually real. So I’m doing this limited surveillance, limited in what I do with it for the sake of love, of Eros, of protection, of etc. A Skinner’s box, an operant conditioning chamber, mean: I’m paying attention to you in order to manipulate you. In other words, I focus on everything that’s observable about you in order to create a pattern which allows me to control you. That is attention which fundamentally degrades. The Conditioning Chamber as the Infinite Absence of Intimacy Zak: It does. I may need to wrap here. But I would go so far as to say that no one’s paying attention to you in the operant conditioning chamber. That’s the saddest— Marc: No one is paying attention to you. Zak: To you, that’s the saddest thing. That goes back to what we said before. That’s that saddest thing about it. In fact, only if you were important enough to actually be surveilled. But you’re not, you’re basically an anonymous, predictable agent within a system of control, being treated as a class of person. And so therefore there isn’t anyone anywhere. Marc: It’s the opposite of divine providence. Zak: It’s the opposite of divine providence. Marc: Precise opposite. Zak: Where they’re paying attention to every hair on your head. Now, the irony is that you’re being surveilled to the level of your hair. And yet, there’s no one actually watching. So this is where it gets kind of weird. We just went into, like, a dark mirror. Marc: In other words, this is the God’s eye view that’s described by the MIT Media Lab and by Skinner, which is digital omniscience, which is the precise flip opposite of Providence. Zak: Exactly. So, digital omnipotence, in which there is no actual care or attention being paid. Marc: There’s no Infinity of Intimacy. Zak: There’s no Infinity of Intimacy. There’s an infinite absence of intimacy. Presence of control and manipulation. And that’s terrifying. They capture your attention, isolate you, don’t pay attention to you, while simultaneously manipulating and controlling behavior. And the way the whole thing hinges is the vulnerability of the attentional system to capture. So this is back full circle. Evolution built this incredibly complex thing, which was built to be hyper-aware and attend to its environment, and then we spend billions of dollars figuring out how to hack that thing to capture the attention, to make it manipulatable. That notion of hyper-stimulus you already mentioned—basically engagement as a euphemism for addiction. A whole bunch of things are going on here, which are leveraging the beauty of what evolved as the most complex attending organism, is just being… “Degraded” is too weak of a word when you think about what’s happening to the youth, in particular, with regards to the addictiveness and stickiness of the technology. Marc: Right. Yes, yes, and yes. Last point on my side. The Need for Attention Marc: Something which is a value I have a need for and I desire. So there’s a First Value and First Principle of Eros. So I need Eros. I have a fundamental set of Eros needs, and I desire Eros. * I have a need for intimacy. I desire intimacy. * I have a need for uniqueness. I desire uniqueness. * I have a need for transformation. I desire transformation. So, attention, which is built into all of these, so I have a need for attention. I have a need to be personally addressed by Cosmos. And Anthro-ontologically, that’s how I know that I am personally addressed. In other words, when there’s a fundamental need to be personally addressed, there’s a fundamental—to close here on my side, you remember that line in—we were in high school. We were reading Arthur Miller. And Willy Loman’s wife in Death of a Salesman. She says, “Attention must be paid.” We have a fundamental need for attention, not because we’re psychologically, you know, somehow degraded—no—but because the essential nature of reality is that placing of attention on us and our capacity to place attention in a way in which we’re not degraded. We have that capacity to place attention, which is basically the need to be loved and the need to love. That is a fundamental human value, and to degrade that is the death of our humanity. That’s the death of humanity. Zak: Right. Marc: That’s a big deal. Zak: Yeah. On the record for David. Marc: On the record for David. Mentioned Sources: * Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company. * Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau. * Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio/Penguin. * Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs. * Hari, J. (2022). Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. Crown. * Smith, C. (2023). Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. Princeton University Press. * Kreiner, J. (2023). The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. Liveright Publishing Corporation. * Ward, J. (2022). The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back. Hachette Book Group. * Berke, J. H. (1988). The Tyranny of Malice: Exploring the Dark Side of Character and Culture. Summit Books. * Bostrom, N. (2019). The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Global Policy, 10(4), 455–476. Mentioned People & Institutions: * B.J. Fogg (1963—) & Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University * Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) * Michael Tomasello (1950—) & Max Planck Institute * George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) * Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) * B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) & MIT Media Lab Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe

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