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. 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