Secrets of the Temple Of Solomon w/ Marc Gafni | AMP 415

MARC: Or said really simply, what the fuck is the wisdom of Solomon? It's everyone in the world knows the wisdom of Solomon, what is it? So, let's play.

AUBREY: Let's go.

MARC: Let's go. So, it's all about sex. And it's not about sex at all.

AUBREY: So, I'm fresh off a trip to Egypt, where I actually got to see the physical temples where practices were actually engaged in by Egyptian priests and priestesses. And I got to feel the magic that was held within the walls of the temples. And, I came back and I talked to my brother, Marc Gafni. And I said, all right, I got to feel what these temples were like, temples that were still standing in the physical. And he reminded me that the Temple of Solomon, which is my lineage, my Hebrew lineage, it's still standing as well. Except it's not standing in space, like the temples in Egypt. It's standing in time. The practices have continued, the lineage has continued. And all of that still lives. And so, what we're doing here in this podcast is recapturing what the essence of the Temple of Solomon really was, and is, and will continue to be in the evolving way of the lineage, which says, there's more temple to come. The temple is continually being added on to, built upon, evolved. And so, this is an incredibly exciting podcast, not only for me, recovering my own Hebrew lineage, the wisdom of Solomon, but also for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of what this lineage is all about, what Eros really means, and how it's applied to our own lives. So, it's with incredible excitement, I introduce this podcast with my brother, Dr. Marc Gafni. Dropping into our hearts as the storage place, the synthesis of all of our knowledge, all of our wisdom, all of our love. Letting go of all of our desires that are not aligned with the desires, of the All That Is, of the Divine. May this podcast be in service for all life for the good of all. Amen.

MARC: Amen. Amen. We're talking about the temple today.

AUBREY: Talking about the temple today, and it's perfect timing, because I just got back from Egypt, and I saw a bunch of temples. And I felt the power of a bunch of temples. And as I'm recovering my own lineage, and understanding that I'm coming from the lineage, a temple tradition, the lineage of the Temple of Solomon. And all I know really about the Temple of Solomon is fragments of things that you've said. Also, that the Flavian Roman Empire destroyed it in such a way that they said we will leave no two stones stacked upon each other, absolute destruction. Not only of the temple, but of all the writing that they could find about the temple and about the lineage tradition. So, there must have been something good going on in the temple, because nobody destroys something completely unless there is some real fucking there.

MARC: Oh, my God, I mean, some real fucking there. And the temple is about that real fuck, and the fucking awesome thing is, it didn't work. In other words, the destruction was ineffective. In other words, the Egyptian temples, beautiful as they were, the pyramids are deeply corrupt. We've talked about. But there's other temples as you talked about, and you'll bring I'm sure today to fore which have some more purity that you describe to me. But the Egyptian tradition, of course, died. There's no connection, there's no correlation between what's happening in Egypt today and the Egyptian temples.

AUBREY: I did meet a few priestesses who are trying to recover the lineage. And it's interesting, actually. I thought it was beautiful. And one of them was named Shekhniah.

MARC: Shekhinah, right, you mentioned.

AUBREY: Which was this wild synchronization, and we had a great relationship. And they're trying to actually remember the old ways and then merge them with the new ways. So, I want to give a little nod to that.

MARC: There's a little new age in new Egypt. But Egypt is completely in a different place, right?

AUBREY: So, I led a prayer at a Shabbat dinner for our group right in Egypt, on the Nile, whole the Muslim call to prayer was going off in the background. And I was like, wow, here's a Jew in Egypt leading a Shabbat prayer during the call to prayer. I was like, we're in a new world, baby!

MARC: And Shabbat, which is a temple in time, the Sabbath, which is a temple in time is modeled on the Solomon Temple and the lineage of the temple. The Romans thought they could destroy the physical temple. Nebuchadnezzar destroys the first temple in 586, the Romans the second temple, Titus Vespasian, and then Titus in the year 70. So, it's Jesus emerges right at the end of the second temple period. But actually, the destruction didn't work because you can't destroy a temple, a temple that's really a temple, that's not in space. The temple is the architecture of reality itself. And so, actually, the lineage of the temple, which is the lineage of Solomon, is fully alive. And actually, it's one of the things you go anyplace in the world today, and you say, in Ethiopia, of course, where Solomon's very strong, but in China, or in Asia, or in Europe--

AUBREY: I met an Ethiopian brother, his name was Solomon.

MARC: Whose name was Solomon. So, the wisdom of Solomon, [inaudible 06:06] which is incarnate in the Temple of Solomon, is actually alive in the world, it's alive in the lineage. It's practiced in the lineage, sometimes in corrupt forms, sometimes in broken forms. But the original impulse of the lineage has been carried on an unbroken lineage from father to son, mother to daughter, family to family. But then what happened is, it went inside, but not inside in the holy inside that we're going to talk about. It went insular, it went boundaried, and it became only an expression of a particular Hebrewic or Jewish expression. When in fact, the vision of the Temple of Solomon is to be the planetary architecture of Eros of reality. And so, we're going to talk about that today. But the vision of the temple is that the temple contains the world stone, called the [inaudible 07:02] the foundation stone, the world stone. So, the world architecture emerges from the vision of reality that's in Solomon's temple. And as we're enacting a new story of value in the world, so the world stone at the center is Eros, and Eros is rooted in the Jerusalem temple that we're going to talk about. And for me, in the deep lineage that I'm so madly in love with and so faithful to, at the core of the lineage is the temple. The very core. And so although we're not here to make a kind of narrow ethnocentric argument, let's all come and join and be temple Jews. But what we're saying is, no, no, but that Hebrew wisdom is holding something precious for reality, which is the temple lineage.

AUBREY: So, I mean one of I think the things that people associate with Jewish people and Jewish culture is ethnocentrism. We are the chosen people, separate from you. And there's this been this kind of idea, this insularity of the people. But what you're pointing to is actually, either it was never meant for that, or now we're evolving it to mean something different than what it was meant. Where are we at?

MARC: Both.

AUBREY: Both?

MARC: In other words, within the lineage, there's a very strong ethnocentric dimension. Just like, I was sitting with my friend, the Dalai Lama in his bedroom in Dharamsala. And he said to me, oh, my God, the Tibetan Buddhists basically think it's just Tibetan Buddhism. And they think they're the chosen people. And they're mad at me for not championing that chosen people idea. So there's a strong chosen people idea in Islam, in Christianity, right? Every form of Buddhism thinks it's the triumphant one, every form of Islam. And so Judaism has its scandal of particularity. There's a scandal of particularity, which is a mistake. Now, that doesn't mean we want to go... Let's go careful here because it's very beautiful. It doesn't mean that we want to go all universal and put all the traditions into a blending pot, and kind of come out with this bland, non-erotic, insipid, flaccid, and any other word I can think of right now.

AUBREY: Well, yeah, you take a seven-course meal and you put it in a Cuisinart, it's shit.

MARC: Doesn't work well.

AUBREY: Yeah.

MARC: So, we actually want there to be a unique self-symphony of spirit, in which every lineage has its unique instrument to play. But it realizes that we're playing an instrument, and, underneath it all is Eros, is spirit, is music. And it's music is underneath the unique configuration of music. Just like the field of intimacy, which is at the core of the temple, as we begin to talk about the temple. The temple is about the intimate universe, there's a field of intimacy, there's a field of Eros. So, underneath the unique configuration of Eros, the unique music of a particular lineage, there's music itself. And so what happens is, the lineages, for political reasons, for power reasons, for economic reasons, but also for spiritual reasons, got so in love with their own melody, and saying, "Oh, my God, we're hearing the divine voice." And that divine voice is such a siren call, and it's so beautiful, that this must be the divine voice. And isn't it a shame that you can't hear it. And this divine voice is telling me the way to liberation. And if you don't know that, I need to bring it to you. And I may have to massacre you if you don't accept it, because at least you'll be redeemed to the next.

AUBREY: Right.

MARC: So Judaism wasn't massacring people, right? Because it actually--

AUBREY: Too busy getting massacred.

MARC: Too busy getting massacred, right. It wasn't going well. It didn't go well. And Judaism, the Hebrew wisdom was holding an enormously strong ethos. When you look at the ethical code of the Israeli army today, it's actually shocking. It's the most shockingly beautiful ethical code ever written of an army. So there's a deep ethos, and we'll get back to that. But there's also in the lineage, a very deep strain, which is that this instrument is supposed to be a light in reality that actually illuminates and gathers. And so, what Solomon did is, Solomon marries a thousand wives. Nice.

AUBREY: Literally?

MARC: Let's talk about that. So, he marries a thousand wives. He literally had many, many, many wives.

AUBREY: I mean, just, that's a lot of ceremonies.

MARC: It's a lot of ceremonies. I'm tired just thinking about it.

AUBREY: I hardly want to go to one wedding.

MARC: I know, it's a lot.

AUBREY: And I've put my friends through two already with Vylana.

MARC: I know.

AUBREY: I'm going to marry her again, too.

MARC: I know, I can't wait.

AUBREY: I just keep marrying and over and over. Maybe that's the Solomon lineage for me.

MARC: Maybe that's what it was doing.

AUBREY: I'm just marrying a new Vylana. I'm finding the stranger anew in Vylana and I'm--

MARC: Which is core to the wisdom of Solomon. What does it mean to find the new Eros? But bracketing that for a second, because we could spend the... So, Solomon has mythically, figuratively, literally many, many wives. And he has each of them, according to the best scriptural and archaeological evidence, he builds temples for them in Jerusalem adjacent to his temple. He integrates the temples, and he brings also some of their key practices into the temple itself. So, Solomon is holding this world-centric, cosmo-centric vision that's way ahead of his time. The rabbinic community exiles him. The rabbinic community reads him out of the sacred text, and says, [inaudible 13:00] the women made his heart stray, because he wasn't doing a classical ethnocentric move. And he got caught with the energy of the horses, which is the energy of Eros. So the actual rabbinic community reading Solomon critiques Solomon enormously. But if you go deeper in the lineage, deeper in the lineage, and this is the lineage of my teacher, Mordechai Leiner of Izbica, that I was able to thank you, Grace She, to write about in "Radical Kabbalah". What he says is, he says, no, no, the hidden wisdom of Solomon, which he traces all the way back through all the sources back to Solomon himself, who traces it from Solomon to Leiner. Leiner is the 19th century. So, you trace from Solomon all the way to Leiner, the lineage, right? And then he says, okay, what Solomon was doing, he says, what I have in the lineage is that what Solomon was doing, was a great Eros project. He calls it a great Shekhinah project. Solomon was intentionally envisioning the planetary architecture of reality, rooted in the Temple of Solomon. So, the Temple of Solomon was a blueprint for a planetary architecture. And in a moment that was radically ethnocentric and world history, Solomon is marrying these beautiful wives not for politics, but to create this new lineage.

AUBREY: When you say he's marrying these beautiful wives, what is evoked from me is, you said in another study in another time that many of the great... This was before I was going to Egypt. Many of the great Hebrew masters made a pilgrimage to Egypt at some point in time. And what's being evoked in me is this question of, did Solomon take a similar job perhaps? And did he meet some priestesses of the Temple of Isis, priestesses of the Temple of Hathor--

MARC: There is no question.

AUBREY: All of these different mystery schools, tantric schools, whatever, it's like, hey, come on in, and become a part of this.

MARC: It's not did he, you just hit it like rockstar, sweetheart, gorgeous. It's not did he? It's exactly what he was doing. What Solomon was doing, which is why the Talmud both loves him, but hides this, because the Talmud is trying to survive in the exile. Talmud was trying to enact the law of ethos. So the Talmud hides this. But actually what we know about Solomon is, that Solomon was making direct intentional contact with the [inaudible 15:47], the daughter of the king, but the daughter of the king was the priestess. The daughter of the king was the Shekhinah figure in the lineages of the world. And Solomon is literally gathering the mystery schools in Jerusalem. And that's why the world knows of the wisdom of Solomon, because the wisdom of Solomon is the intuitive term in reality, not for something which is Jewish, but something which is temple, Hebrew wisdom, which the Hebrews were holding, which was the planetary architecture. And so, what we want to do today if we can is, what was it? And it's, what was that planetary architecture? What was it about? What are these thousand wives? What is it after, right? And then we reclaim that in order to create a new planetary architecture, a new planetary Eros, a new world religion as a context for our diversity, in which again, each instrument can be played by each nation, by each religion, by each mystery school. But underneath is music. And at this moment, and it's why I'm so excited to do this conversation with you. We're at this moment where for the first time, there's a planetary stack. Benjamin Bratton talks about the planetary stack, the computational stack of the planet. And the computational stack, that planetary stack is a literally structure, it's an edifice that literally is enclosing all of reality, for the first time in the world's history, that we're all quite literally beginning to live inside of it. It's the Internet of Things, right? It's regulatory powers, right? It's the way that we hold and distribute the actual extraction, dimensions of the minerals and how we distribute them, and how they're moved through computational stacks. I mean, one of the reasons there's deep concern about AI, is because a rogue AI, artificial intelligence, which is a different conversation, how that works, and what that means. But the possibility of an AI, an artificial intelligence actually following its own inherent understanding of its coding, and actually capturing, the structure of the world, taking the fort, is because there's a planetary stack. So, basically, everything, lights, banking, medicine, everything takes place in that planetary stack. So, we're enacting a planetary architecture, so we're an acting a planetary temple, without the wisdom of Solomon. So, what emerges is, we're together in the Office of The Future and the Center for Integral Wisdom, and one of the books that's coming out that I'm working on with Zak is the vision of the MIT Media Lab, Alex Pentland, the center of culture, the center of empire, if you will. A term that you love to use, right? Which is envisioning a planetary stack based on BF Skinner's work, who was the great behaviorist, who was for six decades at Harvard. And their basic move is, and this is the title of the book, "Turning Reality into a Skinner's Box".

AUBREY: You'll have to explain Skinner's box for those people who don't know.

MARC: So, Skinner's box means, you're in a Skinner's box, so you're a pigeon in a Skinner's box. And there are invisible control mechanisms that basically without you knowing it, determine your choices. So, free will disappears, and you're actually invisibly controlled. So, Skinner wrote a book called "Walden Two" a year apart from Orwell's, "1984" but it's far more frightening than Orwell's "1984". People are worried about Orwellian totalitarianism, that's not the issue. The issue is Skinnerian totalitarianism. "Walden Two" is a picture of a community which is this idyllic community, which is actually run by the controllers. They're called the controllers, or they're called the planners. So they're planning the society. They use Skinnerian behavioristic psychology to create nudges and prompts and reward incentives and schedules of reinforcement, all of Skinnerian psychology to actually create this happy community. And that was Skinner's vision of utopia. And what Skinner, and this is really--

AUBREY: No, he really believed that that was the way.

MARC: Not only did he believe that was the way, he was the reigning figure at Harvard for six decades. And, now, listen to this. There's an unbelievable book by an independent scholar named Brian Dear called "The Friendly Orange Glow" and it's about the early systems of the internet. And one of them was called the PLATO system, which basically enacted the internet like 10 years before it actually went online. And the entire first chapter is about who? BF Skinner, because he was a key player. Now, what happens with Skinner is, Skinner says, we're actually facing existential risk. He actually got existential risk. He wasn't an evil guy. He was a person who believed there was no Eros. He was living in a world where he didn't know how to understand that value was real. So, he assumed that value wasn't real. He realized that value theory had gotten destroyed by the Academy. He assumed that that was true. He was wrong. But he assumed that was true. That was and is the reigning assumption of the academy. He said, we're facing existential risk. There's all these people on the planet, we're going to destroy ourselves. So what do we need to do? We need to control the whole thing.

AUBREY: Well, that's also what every socialist, communist ideology came to as well. And they tried to control things, but they realized they can't control things as much as actually people's true authentic desires. It's what actually moves through them and what they want to create, build.

MARC: So, the communist thing was Orwellian. So they said, okay, that's Orwell's "1984", let's control it exactly as you're saying. But by imposing Mao, Stalin, Lenin, that was the communist move, and we kind of thought that doesn't work, and killed more people than any other system in history. But in the end, it fell. The more insidious totalitarianism--

AUBREY: Is the one that you can't see. Where the jackboots are invisible.

MARC: You can't see, the jackboots are invisible. And the intention of MIT Media Lab is to actually enact and they're directly basing on themselves on Skinner. And Zak and I mapped 23 parallels, and they pretend like they don't know Skinner, just like, Locke, in Western philosophy. I never knew Hobbes, I never read Hobbes, he was lying. He was actually restating Hobbes. So, basically, the MIT Media Lab is saying, how can we enact the world as what Alex Pentland calls a living laboratory? Which is just his word for a Skinner's box.

AUBREY: Yeah, it seems like we're in... It's not a binary thing, we're in a Skinner's box or we're not. We're gradiating, we're in a gradient somewhere on our way to being in a Skinner's box, even really free people like you and I, there's certain Skinnerian tendencies that we have that are beyond our control. Instagram has wired certain things into our mind that I'm not even aware of.

MARC: Social media basically organizes your feed and organizes the sequence of things you see based on machine intelligence, right? Split testing millions of times a day to actually be able to get you to vote or not vote, to... Facebook, the joke in Facebook was, democracy is a joke, because we can throw any election based on a 2-3% variable. Facebook today, 2010 study where they essentially said that. Alex Pentland in his book, "Social Physics" quotes that with delight. In other words, the notion that democracy is working is actually absurd if you actually understand how machine intelligence actually sequences delivery in order to actually affect your choice. Now, for Pentland and Skinner, that's not a big moral problem, because their assumption is that free will is an illusion anyways. Sam Harris is making the same moves. Atlantic magazine does a cover story 2016 saying, free will, it's a joke. That's actually what's happening. The assumption is that there is no Eros, there is no temple. So what we're going to talk about today is, what is the alternative vision that we need to enact a planetary temple? It's not a question of will there be a planetary temple? A planetary Temple is now being enacted. But is it the temple of Sitra Achra? The other side. Or Ahriman, as Steiner sought, where he talked about the enclosing of the world in boundaries, which will be utterly, fully and completely destructive of what we call humanity. And Steiner's kind of seeing it happening in the future. But actually, Skinner realized "Walden Two," then Skinner writes, "I don't have the instruments and methods to do it." That's a direct quote. Along comes data science. And data science, which is computational structures of behavior, computational mathematical models of behavior where you create predictive analysis based on sequence delivery, that actually can completely control your behavior. And that's why AI is a problem. Because up till now, what was happening is we were curating what you saw. So we can curate the sequencing of what comes to you based on content that's produced generally. Now we're going to find the content and the sequence of content that most particularly can get you to do what we want you to do. But imagine that AI is developing. They're not curating content. AI is creating personalized content for you. So, AI has simply access to a personalized profile based on all the data crumbs, that's what they're called. And it's called reality mining. We collect the crumbs of everything you've ever done, meaning, not what porn you watch. That's not interesting. It's more like how long did your mouse hover before you clicked? And what does that mean? What's the order of your typing? And it's machine intelligence that basically destroyed Boris Kasparov, Deep Blue. And machine intelligence now that destroyed that machine intelligence. In other words, AlphaGo 2017. All of that is asymmetrically arrayed against you, collecting all your data crumbs, creating a personalized profile in order to create predictive analysis, which is what, that's the product that's sold about what you're going to do. That's shocking. Now, AI, that's what changes the whole game. AI is not just microtargeting, based on curating contact and sequencing it for you, AI knowing everything about Marc or Aubrey is now going to create content, which is meant to plan every vulnerability you have, which is inferred through this unimaginably powerful machine intelligence. That is the temple of Moloch. That's the temple of the other side. That's the anti-Eros temple.

AUBREY: Right. And to really, there's a phrase that I use of one of my best friends, Caitlin. And we call it a shiny room in hell. And the shiny room in hell, what makes it shiny is, if AI is feeding you images that are exactly what you want to see, it's going to be kind of awesome. And if they're suggesting products, because right now, they have some wonky voice tracking, and then you're like, "I was talking about how much I hated that thing, and now you're advertising it to me." There's some interesting metrics where it's like half-baked and it kind of works. But then it's going to get real good. All of a sudden, you're like, "You know what, I really do want one of those things. Thank you, AI, shiny room in hell." And then, "I love that picture, or I love that--"

MARC: And then even more--

AUBREY: But then it's going to go deeper.

MARC: Then it goes deeper. Then I'm in a filter bubble, which keeps reinforcing a particular political view, or a particular view of a particular figure.

AUBREY: Gets you angrier and angrier, can manipulate you any way it wants.

MARC: Negativity is amplified. And then it tells you to vote or not to vote, or who to vote for, not by telling you to do it but by creating over time, let's say in two months before an election, a constant feed of information that you think you're consuming and analyzing independently, which has actually been completely curated for you. But now, it's not going to be curated, it's going to be created. So that is the planetary temple that we're living in that Steiner predicted. What we're saying is, no, no, we're not going to avoid a planetary temple. And by the way, parentheses, it's not just Skinner and the MIT Media Lab. Even a guy like Nick Bostrom, who's a good guy, right, who's the Oxford Center for Existential Risk, basically says that in order to avoid rogue threats, which cause existential risk, we need planetary surveillance. So, books like Shoshana Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism" which says surveillance is terrible, we actually might need surveillance in order to survive. The question is, can we have a planetary system that's safe, that has what we need to create deep profound safety, that's rooted in value, in Eros? There's a way to create this planetary temple, there's going to be a planetary temple. And either we're going to create that planetary temple deeply rooted in the most gorgeous dimensions of our humanity, in a field of value, In a field of Eros, in a field of intimacy, all of which we need to understand and define, because that's what the Temple of Solomon's about. The Temple of Solomon is about, and the vision of Solomon was, he envisioned, he knew there was going to be a planetary temple. He was trying to gather everyone, a few thousand years ago, and it's actually shocking, understanding that he wanted to download into reality, this vision of temple that would actually be able to survive the generations as it has. Isn't that how we started? The Egyptian thing disappeared with all respect and love.

AUBREY: Except for the rocks.

MARC: Right, except for the rocks. And in here, we're trying to actually reclaim this vision of the Solomonic temple, and to enact it at the core of a cosmo-erotic humanism. But like Solomon, and like DaVinci in the Renaissance was madly in love with Solomon, as was Marsilio Ficino who runs the Neo Platonic Academy funded by the Medicis in Florence, who understood this notion of a world religion, which is what a planetary temple is, underneath the different instruments, what's the shared score of music? What's the context for our diversity? What's the universal grammar of value from which everything emerges? Last second before we dive in. Pentland says, based on Skinner, that the way you control people, is there's billions of invisible interactions that people do, that we can measure, and then determine prediction, predict how they'll respond based on a set of measurements and calculations. So, those billions of human unconscious actions change when the human being is rooted in a field of value. When there are simple first principles and first values that are real, we locate ourselves in a field of value, which is a field of Eros, which is our topic today. Then those billions of interactions are completely different.

AUBREY: They're evolving.

MARC: They're evolving, they're alive--

AUBREY: So, the algorithms of who you were before, if you believe in the possibility of transformation, which you actually pointed to a great moment in Genesis, the first transformation of human consciousness occurred, first broken pattern. And you can reference that, I don't remember the reference itself. But there was the first reference of a broken pattern, and it shows that evolution is possible and that people can actually change and evolve. And certainly, I can refer to that in my own life. I am not doing the same shit that Chris Marcus at 26 was doing. I am not in the same fucking patterns.

MARC: In other words, transformation itself is one of the principles of Eros. In other words, Eros is the structure of reality. And there's about 18 core first principles and first values, not our topic today. One of them though, is transformation. That transformation is actually a core structure of reality itself. It's not that I am... and the kind of materialist position or the classical no-freewill position, and the kinds of positions that Pentland, or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sam Harris. Basically, there's no real transformation is possible. Everything's based in antecedent causes. So, no transformation is actually ever possible. Now, what the Temple of Solomon is saying, is that actually freedom, which means that there's some measure of choice. Not you choose everything. No, within your circle of choice, there's a measure of choice, there's a dimension in which you can transform, which is the essence of your story is itself a first principle and first value of reality. And how do you know that's true? Because reality itself is always transforming. The kind of pseudo position of kind of Harris, deGrasse Tyson, Skinner, Pentland breaks down is, well, reality actually doesn't only operate based on anteceding causes, because reality is always creating newness. And it's, we didn't stop at hydrogen. At every level of reality, actual reality generates transformation in something entirely new, with entirely new depths and entirely new aliveness, an entirely new Eros, an entirely new beauty, an entirely ew goodness emergence. That's exactly evolution is a series of transformations.

AUBREY: Which is why I hate the aphorism, there's nothing new under the sun. It's a fucking lie.

MARC: Right. So, it's interesting, what Solomon meant by that aphorism, he said, there's nothing new under the sun. What he meant was and, and the lineage says, what Solomon meant was under the sun, there's antecedent causes, but above the sun is actually the entire field of value. And what he meant was, oh, Solomon in Ecclesiastes, he's saying, let me take all the antecedent causes shit into effect. Let me look at the materialist view, let me look at the view. And then let me understand, okay, what's underneath that? What's underneath that is, Solomon says, is that above the sun, it's all new. In Hiddush, there's nothing new. [inaudible 34:36] under the sun, meaning in the material, physical structure of reality. And everyone says, oh, that's what Solomon meant. You've got to read Solomon a little more carefully.

AUBREY: I didn't even know it came from Solomon. I was surprised to realize that it did. I understand what Solomon was transmitting and it doesn't make sense. It's just the name of that quote.

MARC: And remember that other quote by Solomon where he says, one of his most famous quotes, [inaudible 34:59] for everything, there's a time and place. He says, there's a time for war and there's a time for peace, time to love and a time to sow, and a time to reap. What he's saying there is that the quality of time itself always invites newness. That newness, and the hidden lineage of Solomon, which we traced in that book, "Radical Kabbalah" Solomon says that actually very similar to Whitehead, that actually, the creative advance of novelty, meaning transformation as a core structure of reality itself, is the fuck of reality. The fuck of reality is that when you go inside, you're always generating something that never existed before. And that I can generate a new Chris, can become Aubrey. Marc can become Mordechai, and then Mordechai can become Marc. In other words, and when I took on a new name, what I'm saying is, oh, I actually can be more than I was. So, let's enter the temple. This was a big--

AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, the last thing I want to offer is--

MARC: Please, no, thank you, love.

AUBREY: Is there's other dystopian stories like "Minority Report" which also played with the same idea, which is the idea that you are on a track. We can identify that track early. Redemption, transformation is not possible. Therefore, we'll jail you now for something you've never done. And we inherently know that that's fucking wrong.

MARC: And that's Ahriman. That's Steiners broken planetary temple. So, what we're saying is, and it's so important. The "Minority Report" is a great example. And by the way, the people that made the "Minority Report" were deeply in touch with the key figures in tech, what Zak and I are calling techno-feudalism, what we're calling together at the Center, techno-feudalism. They were deeply in touch with the key people in the field when they made "Minority Report". I did a lot of work on that movie. It's a really interesting movie. But you're right, it's saying transformation is not possible. So if we know that you have a predilection to be a murderer, we'll arrest you, execute you now. Why wait? Because transformation is not possible. So, what we're saying is, and I want to just... It's so deep and subtle and dramatic. And I know, people listening, this was a hard entry, we just went in deep. But it's like, whoa--

AUBREY: You, Marc? If people haven't figured it out yet by listening to our other podcasts.

MARC: Oh, my God, right? So, we went in deep here. So just want to say it, kind of sum it up. It's not that oh, Aubrey and Marc, what are they off on, creating some planetary temple? No, that's not a question. There will be a planetary temple. If you're actually in touch with reality, if you're a realist of any kind, you have any connection to what's actually happening, there will be a planetary temple. And it's either going to be the Temple of Ahriman, it's either going to be the Temple of Moloch, the temple of the other side, Sitra Achra, it's either going to be an anti-Eros temple. I think we're going to do a dialogue soon on "Lord of the Rings" which is about the anti-Eros temple,. Sauron and Saruman. We won't even talk about that now. But either it's going to be an anti-Eros temple, it's going to be a Skinner's box, it's going to be the "Minority Report". Or, we're going to actually succeed in enacting a temple based on billions of human reactions and billions of humans rising up, and actually demanding and enacting and self-organizing and self-actualizing to the most beautiful world we can possibly imagine that's gorgeous and unimaginable. So, we're not just poised for dystopia. If we can actually recover the field of value, not regressively, not by going back in the conservative move to pre-modern value, but not making the postmodern deconstruct fail. If we can recover value, and recover what we mean by value, and value's all rooted in Eros, which is we're going to talk about today. Then we can enact a utopia that's unimaginably beautiful. We can enact a world that was the intention, the inherent movement of all of reality itself in a way that no other generation could, but we're literally at a pivoting point. So, if we don't enact this temple, if we don't recover... So, we've got to recover the old wisdom, then merge it with the new wisdoms. That's cosmo-erotic humanism, what we call the new story of value. So, we recover the temple at the core. And then like Solomon, we invite in all the deepest validated wisdoms of all the mystery schools. And then we merge into that complexity theory and chaos theory, and the best of evolutionary thought and the best of the 11 schools of psychology and then we turn it into a second simplicity, which embraces all the complexity, and it becomes a universal grammar of value. Whether that happens or not, is whether we're going to live in dystopia or whether we're going to live at all. Wow.

AUBREY: Amen. And what's interesting as well as us coming together is, you've spent the time in the lineage, in the books, in the study, and I have spent the time in the sacraments with equal vigilance and dedication.

MARC: Yes, you have.

AUBREY: And, integrity and faithfulness. And so, this is a time where both the Dharma, what you call, which is all of this information of cosmo-erotic humanism, and the medicine are coming together, just as you and I are coming together to weave something. So, let's go.

MARC: And that's how it happens by it. Just the last sentence in let's go is, it's always personal. And that's so important to understand. It's not just technical, structural. It's personal. It's when two persons are allured, which is the structure of reality, allurement, and they find each other, and it's not rational exactly. It's not like, oh, I can do this, I can do this, so he's bringing me this, it's not--

AUBREY: Yeah, we didn't actually figure that out for like a year. Not to be reductionist, that's the only reason, we genuinely love each other and enjoy many aspects--

MARC: A thousand things, right. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm hoping to drink with you one day but yeah, I'm sorry. Right, right, right.

AUBREY: Don't make me pull out what I just put out.

MARC: No, no, no, I'm not even going to let you. Okay, here we go. We dive in.

AUBREY: We dive in. All right, come from a restroom break. And one of the things that emerged as we were just chatting is, again, this is not a regressive move where we're saying let's be Quakers.

MARC: Right. In other words... I mean, I think you said it beautifully in the break, which is, there's good shit in that shiny room in hell. So, the idea is not to be a Luddite. There's lots of thinkers who talk about, well, it all went wrong in farming, right? And everyone tries to figure out where did technology take us wrong. Technology has always existed. Technology means that human beings enact tools, and tools always have values. Tools are never value neutral. Tools always have encoded, implicit values that are often broken. We need to download evolutionary love, download Eros, which really means, we're going to talk about today, to download the Temple of Solomon, into the new planetary temple. And so, what we're saying is, there is a planetary temple, it's already in play. It's going to get more and more dramatic. We don't want to not have technology, right? We don't want to not have AI. AI might be unimaginably important. But if we actually enact artificial intelligence, which is cut off from the field of value, meaning it's computational and it's not rooted in the field of Eros, then we will destroy reality. And here's just a good example. There's Aubrey, I'm sitting in front. He's got a beautiful head. Now his head, nice head, right? His head--

AUBREY: Few dings. A few dings mostly around the proboscis part of it.

MARC: Looking good to me.

AUBREY: Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. As much as we talk shit to each other, that was a surprising compliment actually.

MARC: There we go. That's the real thing, right? So, at Oxford, where I wrote my doctorate, you've got five men in front of the Bodleian Library from the neck up. But even those men from the neck up are ostensibly being just mind aren't because their necks are connected to their body. And my body, we actually know, the microbiome is the brain of the gut. We know that actually thinking takes place all through the body. And the body is based on this entire field of Eros, of allurement. And actually what micro chemical reactions are, what chemical reactions are in the body. The body is... I'm going to go slow in this one second. The body's metabolism. Metabolism is the sum total of all the chemical reactions in the body. That's what metabolism is. A chemical is a structure, a configuration of intimacy, a structure of allurement, in which there's allurement between two parts that form a larger whole, which as we'll see, when we get into the Temple of Solomon, is the structure of Eros. So, my entire body is muons, leptons, hadrons. Then I become subatomic particles, protons, neutrons, electrons. All of those are allured to each other creating larger holes. So there's the system of allurement moving all through the body, in the blood and all the systems of the body. Then that integrates with the nervous system. There are more neurons in the brain than there are stars in the sky. But that whole system is a system of Eros. So, my computation that I do, is in sonst, grounded in a field of Eros and value. Because there's an entire set of values that are alive in the body. The body is moved by value. Value means there's something that's better than something else, which yields more life than something else. So, value works all the way down in the body. So when I think, I'm never just thinking, I'm actually thinking, feeling, embodying, it's all happening. What AI is, is I'm doing computation cut off from all of that. All of a sudden, I have pure computation, which is not emergent from a ground to value. That's what Nick Bostrom calls, although he doesn't frame it this way, but it's what he's trying to say when he talks about the value uploading problem in AI. So when you build a temple, not grounded in the field of value, then you actually destroy the field. So, what we want to talk about today, was your suggestion to talk about, I'm madly excited, the Temple of Solomon. What is the temple of Solomon? And how does the Temple of Solomon and Solomon's vision of a planetary temple, what is that vision? Or said really simply, what the fuck is the wisdom of Solomon? IEveryone in the world knows the wisdom of Solomon, what is it? So, let's play.

AUBREY: Let's go.

MARC: Let's go. So, it's all about sex. And it's not about sex at all. So, I want to just start in a, and we're starting in the middle in a kind of crazy place and we got lots of books. We're surrounded by thousands of books here. So, on that shelf over there, kind of shelf three, book seven, there's a text, which says as follows. Dude's coming home, his wife wasn't expecting him. He was on a business trip someplace else. Gets home. His wife seems a little surprised to see him. Does also seem to be not fully dressed. This is a Talmudic passage in Aramaic. She doesn't seem to be fully dressed. She was a little surprised to see him, but he's happy to see her and looks like she's ready to play. So he's, it's all good. And then she's got his favorite biscuits out on the little table between them. He's about to eat a biscuit before he goes into play. And a voice comes out from the closet, tumbling out, the milkman saying, "Yo, those are poisoned, don't eat them." That's a case in the Talmud, literally. So, the Talmud then has the following question. Is this man in the closet considered an adulterer? Do we assume he was committing adultery or not?

AUBREY: Yes.

MARC: So, the standard assumption is, I think so. I think so, right?

AUBREY: At a moment of ethics. Struck him in the closet.

MARC: Right, right. So, that's the classical assumption. And then some voice in the study hall raises his/her hand and says, No, you don't get it. He doesn't want him to eat the biscuits. Because if he eats the biscuits that are poisoned, he'll die, then she won't be married. And he's only attracted to her when she's married. Because, then he cites a verse, stolen waters are sweet, right? And then the Talmud concludes [inaudible 47:55] And Rabbi Isaac said, from this we know [inaudible 48:00] from the day the temple was destroyed, [inaudible 48:06], the aliveness of fuck was taken from classical committed relationship, and then became more easily available, [inaudible 48:16] to those who are boundary violators. That's a very strange text. Because what is the text saying? It's saying something about the temple has to do with fuck and Eros, or fuck and sex. Let's keep the word Eros out for a little bit. So somehow, when you're in times of the temple, and we don't just mean historical times, the Talmud doesn't mean until the moment the year the temple is destroyed. The Talmud means when there's temple consciousness, then I can access the radical aliveness of fuck, of boundary-breaking sexuality within my committed relationship. And it's I can have the experience, in the best sense of the term, of committing adultery with my wife.

AUBREY: Which goes back to what I referenced earlier on, I'm marrying a new Vylana every time-

- MARC: I'm marrying a new Vylana, I'm breaking a new boundary every time. So, the Talmud is, this Aramaic text third century is--

AUBREY: It's like I'm having sex with a virgin every night, because we're on the path of transformation, and we're always transforming.

MARC: Right. So the Talmud is actually pointing to that experience. Talmud is saying, that experience that Aubrey is having with Vylana, that's temple consciousness. And it's beautiful. That temple consciousness is the capacity to actually experience boundary breaking in what seems to be a relationship that has no boundaries. No, actually there's another boundary to break. So, temple consciousness is the ability to experience the full aliveness of sexing in the experience of a committed relationship, and the fall of the temple. The fall of temple consciousness is when you can only access that dimension, that aliveness of fuck when you're breaking a transgressive boundary. Only a transgressive boundary will give that aliveness, that's called the fall of the temple. So, to rebuild the temple, to access temple consciousness, that's a big deal. So that's one. That's source one. Source two. Our favorite source, "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Harrison Ford, who's gotten a little older. Yeah, there it is.

AUBREY: He's still got it.

MARC: He's still got it. He's still got it, right?

AUBREY: He's still got.

MARC: He's still got it, he does. So, KK, there's hope for me, right? Harrison Ford, okay? Like for the very first time, okay? So, here we go. So, "Raiders of Lost Ark" is the Ark of the Covenant. And the Ark of the Covenant is in the temple in Jerusalem. And it's in the Holy of Holies of the temple, which is the innermost sanctum of the temple. So, there's the outer courtyard, there's the inner place which is called the holy. And then there's what's called [inaudible 51:04] the Holy of Holies. Like we studied together, we studied what we call the Holy of Holies. That's from the temple tradition. The Holy of Holies. And the center of the Holy of Holies is an Ark of the Covenant that has tablets in it, and above the Ark are two cherubs. And those two cherubs are in the language of the Talmud, in the third to fifth century. Those two cherubs are [inaudible 51:29]. If you look at the English translation, it'll say something, very, very vague. They're clinging or they're... [inaudible 51:40] comes from the Hebrew word, air, which means aroused. [inaudible 51:45] which means either phallus or [inaudible 51:48]. So, [inaudible 51:50], they're sexually entwined. Then the text reads, numbers, and the voice of God emerges, [inaudible 51:59] I will speak to you, I will meet you, that the prophecy meaning the experience of actually participating in hearing the divine voice and having the divine voice speak through you, I will speak to you from between the two cherubs. So, you have these fucking cherubs gorgeously--

AUBREY: Literally.

MARC: Literally, that are literally making love. The voice of God emerges from between them, and that is the image... Imagine if your local priest, Imam, rabbi, puts cherubs in the middle of their synagogue church mosque. No matter how progressive they are, they'll be fired that week. It's not happening.

AUBREY: Right, now, I've heard you tell this story. It's never aroused this particular question to be asked directly.

MARC: I like the word aroused.

AUBREY: Why were they cherubs? Because cherubs are actually--

MARC: That's such a gorgeous question. I love that, so gorgeous.

AUBREY: Are young baby--

MARC: Cherubs have these baby faces. And by the way, the sense of the baby face is actually rooted in the lineage. It's not just in a Hallmark card. And it's about the second innocence of fuck. In other words, our sense of sexuality is such that it's this broken, degraded sense. That's why we tell dirty jokes. It's why we curse people with the word fuck. But actually, there's a dimension of sexing where I actually reclaim and heal that which is broken. I'm not going [inaudible 53:35] but just for a moment, let's say you weren't held the way you needed to be held and you weren't kissed or licked, in the best sense, and you weren't swaddled. And then when is that healed? And where's that healed? That's healed in a kind of healing sexing, where your partner gathers you up. So there's a dimension of sexing which has a purity. There's a purity of fuck. There's a goodness of fuck that we've lost. And so, the lineage captures that. I'm ecstatic that you inquired to that. And it's such a good intuition. The lineage is saying, second innocence, the purity of fuck, which is the fuck that is the architecture of cosmos. And so, there's this sense of these cherubs who are the second innocence of fuck. There's a first innocence, which is just there. When we're children, we don't know anything. Then we go to guilty--

AUBREY: It's figuring out how to... We spoke about this on a podcast recently, and Vylana offered, it was finding that the pool jets could actually arouse her when she was a little girl. Like the first innocence of that, she just liked to go swimming a lot.

MARC: Right? "Let's go swimming, mom."

AUBREY: "Are the jets on, mom?"

MARC: And then we get shamed for it. And when we shame, we're shaming our aliveness. And when we're very young, our goodness and our aliveness are inextricably linked. So the shaming of our aliveness becomes the shaming of our goodness. And then we get to, guilty feet, I've got no rhythm, which is "Guilty feet" which is a song about some violation of sexing, because we get guilty. But then we reclaim this dimension of sexuality, which is going to be the core of the Temple of Solomon, we're going to get to it. But just for now, we reclaim the second innocence. So, the cherubs, the face, the innocent face of the cherubs point to the second innocence. But now pulling us back to our thread for a second, with permission. So, the second source we just quoted, which is [inaudible 55:49] in the Talmud, page 54A, it's talking about these cherubs that are sexually intertwisted. So, in the first source, we've got the sexual story that's linked to the temple, in which illicit boundary-breaking sexuality is the symbol of the fallen temple, and temple consciousness is mad aliveness, adultery with your wife. Why is that linked to the temple? Number one. Then we have the cherubs who are sexually intertwisted that are linked to the temple. And I'll just do one more source just to be, let's just go wild for a second, okay? So there's another source in the Talmud. These are all third to fifth century Aramaic texts. The Talmud says the rabbis were having trouble because people were not sleeping with the right people. It was not going well. So they figure, let's pray. What are we going to pray for? Let's pray--

AUBREY: It's a little bit presumptive on the part of the rabbi. They were sleeping with the wrong person?

MARC: There were a little adulteries... It was getting hard, and not in a good way, and yeah, you got the idea. Let's not carry that through. Okay, so they pray. And what do they pray for? They pray that God will nullify, disempower the [inaudible 57:08], the drive for sexuality. God says in this mythic scene, God says, I don't think that's a good idea. And they say, no, no, please. God says, really? Don't do this.

AUBREY: Everybody fucking everybody.

MARC: Right, right. Everybody fucking everybody.

AUBREY: We're out of control.

MARC: We're out of control. We've got to stop this.

AUBREY: Have you been to Sodom, God?

MARC: Have you been... It's bad.

AUBREY: It's crazy. And Gomorrah, even worse.

MARC: It's bad there, and that's right, Thanos's daughter is named Gamora, right? That's a different conversation. Okay, so sorry about that. So, so--

AUBREY: No wonder Star Lord likes her so much.

MARC: I know, I know, I know.

AUBREY: That's the secret text of "The Guardians of The Galaxy" that we're going to have to talk about. Gamora has the codes of Gomorrah.

MARC: She does.

AUBREY: There had to be some good reason. I mean, I understand the book of Sodom, but I don't understand--

MARC: I am not going to let you seduce me into a "Guardians of Galaxy" conversation, although it's very tempting, okay? It's very tempting. So, God says, "Okay, I'll do it. You guys want me to do it? I'll do it." And then no one gets up the next morning. No one goes to work, no one plants, no one creates, no one paints. So, they realize this is not going well. So, they say to God, okay, can you cut it in half? We'll only have half we'll have enough desire for our partners, but we won't have illicit desire, boundary-breaking desire. And then the divine voice, which is the voice of the prophet. They hear this divine Shekhinah voice. The Shekhinah says, [inaudible 58:38], you can't split the [inaudible 58:40], the drive for sexuality, for fuck, can't split it in half. It's a whole package. It's all, you can't split them in half. So, then they see in this incredible medicine journey vision. They see two lions of fire leaping forth from the Holy of Holies in the temple. And one line of fire was the drive for fuck, the drive for sexuality. And then they're shocked. Because why is this line of fire, which is the drive for fuck in the Holy of Holies? What is it doing there? Now, the second one, which I'm not going to go down that road, but the second one was the actual drive for idolatry. So, that they actually... The entire biblical story is to actually attack and undermine paganism. But then you have this hidden text that says, oh, but actually, the actual drive for idolatry was a lion of fire in the Holy of Holies, meaning there's a holy spark to paganism, which is exactly what Solomon was saying. He's saying, let's bring everyone in. But now let's go back, let's step back for a second.

AUBREY: I'm very seduced to go into the holy spark of paganism.

MARC: I know you are. I know, I know, we're going to get there today.

AUBREY: But out of respect, all right.

MARC: We're going to get there today, we're going to get there today. So, now we just deduced three sources. We're doing the real thing now. We just deduced three texts that all identify sexuality with the temple. The drive for full fuck is a lion of fire that lives where? In the Holy of Holies of the temple. In the Holy of Holies of the temple, we have two cherubs above the ark, who are engaged in full Eros, full fuck. And that's source two. And then source three, this notion that only in temporal consciousness, you have full radical liveness of boundary-breaking fuck with your committed partner. Those are three sources that are never drawn together. This is a hidden tradition. And they're actually pointing to something. They're pointing to what? So, they're not saying that the entire temple is about sex. That's not what they're saying. They're saying something much more subtle, and much more interesting. They're saying the entire temple is about Eros. That's what they're saying. So the temple and we'll have to talk maybe in a few minutes, what's the relation between sex and Eros. Let's take that aside for a second. They're saying it's all about Eros. In other words, in the temple, the temple is the place where the Shekhinah lives. And the Shekhinah, the feminine goddess divine that lives in every man and every woman, the Shekhinah lives in the space between the cherubs, as it were. In other words, in the planetary architecture, the world stone, that's the center of the temple, is the energy of Shekhinah. It's the force that actually binds all things, as it were. And in this Shekhinah that we've talked about so deeply and Holy of Holies together in so many contexts, so let's be in second innocent, naïve children and talk about it kind of freshly, the Shekhinah in its deepest sense is Eros. And I remember reading, I mean, literally a thousand texts and talking to Moshe Idel, who's actually the kind of leading scholar of Kabbalah in the academic world, in 2002 in sharing with them that my reading of Shekhinah was Eros, and I was writing a book then called "Mystery of Love". We originally were going to title it on the erotic and the holy, and it got turned by the publisher into "Mystery of Love" and you suggest and we're going to reclaim the original erotic and holy in a new book. And we did a CD series called "The Erotic and The Holy" and Moshe, this Kabbalistic scholar who also became my thesis advisor later in Oxford, most of that is exactly right. And he said, he said, "Wow, I can't believe you're writing that. I'm writing on the same thing." So, I put out this book, this Erotic and Holy material in 2003-4. In motion, 2005, put out an academic book called "Kabbalah and Eros" which emerged from this conversation we had in a library, in Bar-Ilan University. But what I'm saying is, why am I mentioning that little segue? Not as an anecdote, meaning when I'm saying the Shekhinah is Eros, I'm not joking. I'm not making some kind of metaphor. No, actually the best read for the word Shekhinah, which is the energy that dwells between the cherubs, which is the energy of cosmos itself is Eros. Reality is, that's what the Temple of Solomon is saying. Temple of Solomon is saying reality is Eros. And Eros has this very particular quality, which is the quality of value in cosmos, it's all valuable, and it's all alive. And Eros is the experience, and I'm in a field of value, in which matter, the word matter is that it all matters. In other words, the word matter means, language is always... Matter means oh, it's matter. It's just physical. No, no, matter means it matters. That's the world made up of matter. And the world is made up of what matters. And they're the same thing.

AUBREY: It's almost like there's two ideologies, either matter matters or matter doesn't matter. And one is saying that the world beyond is the only world that matters, and one is saying that the kingdom of heaven is right here, and so matter fucking matters.

MARC: Matter fucking matters. In other words, the materialist says matter just matter. The transcendentalist says, no, only the future world matters. The Temple of Solomon says no, no, what matters and matter, are completely bound up. And it's actually sentient, reality is sentient all the way up and all the way down. It's why in a real battle, and "Lord of The Rings" which is another thing we're going to talk about, the trees participate in the battle. That's right. The hills are alive in the sound of music. Ah, right? In other words, it's all living. In Hebrew, the word for thing, is [inaudible 01:04:38] means speech, logos, meaning, so there's no split. So Eros means, and I've worked for the last couple of decades to kind of deeply formulate, and kind of, what we call interior science equations, this vision of the wisdom of Solomon. The wisdom of Solomon says, reality is Eros, all the way up and all the way down. And Eros is the experience that everything matters, we live in a field of value. And that field of value is doing something. So, Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring, moving towards ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. That's the Temple of Solomon. That's reality.

AUBREY: So, what I haven't actually fully understood yet in this conversation, and also I didn't understand necessarily, when I went to the temples in Egypt, is, I understand and you actually explained it again, impeccably, so I understand what the value structure of the temple is, and the temple that lives on, and the temple that's built in time, which is value, and that extends, but what were they actually doing in the Kodesh Ha-kodashim? What were they actually doing in the Holy of Holies, to actually physically embody, experience, have a gnosis of this Eros? What were they doing?

MARC: So, let's play for a second, okay? Beautiful. So, I'm going to take that inquiry, I'm going to hold it, I'm going to bracket it for a second, then we'll circle back to. We've got it there. It's like they're on the placards in front of us, okay? Because what will help us will be to understand Eros even more deeply, and then we'll be able to go to what was the action? Now, I want to just get Eros deeply, because I want to try and find our way. I was just thinking last night, I was thinking about Eros, thinking about a way to say it. And I remember, there's a movie about Isaac Stern, called from "Mao to Mozart" the violinist. And he goes... And Isaac Stern kind of comes out of the lineage, just he breathes it and lives it. He's in the Hebrew lineage. He goes to play violin, and he pours it all into music. And he's teaching these children who are the children of the Mao revolution, and they're technically unimaginably proficient. They know exactly how to play. So this girl plays a piece of Mozart, with technical unimaginable precision. And he says, "Thank you," and she gets a round of applause. And he says, "Let me play it for you." And he plays the same thing. And it soars and it moves, and it's just a totally different piece. And everyone's heart just erupts. And the place goes totally silent, just explodes. And she looks at him, she doesn't know what he did. And she said, "You think you play the music, but the music plays you." But it's actually even deeper than that. Something deeper than you or the instrument is playing you birth. That's Eros. That's Eros. So, Eros is this realization, this experience of being on the inside of reality. Eros is what reality feels like on the inside of the inside. So, you're in the zone in basketball. You're inside. Our friend Aaron, he's passing. He described to me the backfield, it's like, oh, in that moment, he can see everything. He's on the inside. You're playing basketball. I'll never play against you, because I'll lose that one.

AUBREY: Good idea.

MARC: Good idea, I know, But I've watched you play ball. You're on the inside, it's like boom. So you're not thinking. Something deeper is playing you. Something deeper is moving through you. I remember, 20 years ago, I was first writing notes, 23rd on this. And I remember there's a movie with God, dating myself, Dustin Hoffman, "Marathon Man" old crazy movie. There's this scene which he's jogging. There's a certain moment, and I used to jog all the time, like I would run, I was a big runner. There's a moment when you run which the scene in "Marathon Man" where Dustin Hoffman is running, running, running. And then he breaks through. And it's no longer running and annoying. You're the wind and you're the air, and you're the pavement, and you're movement itself. And that was the joy of running. "Chariots of Fire" the movie, has this great scene where Eric Liddell would run and he would break through. There's something that he could do, and he said, I'm running as God. So that's Eros. Eros is this experience, where I'm on the inside of the inside and on the inside of the inside, I'm filled with this unimaginable fullness. It's full. It's like that's Eros. When the fullness isn't there, it's pseudo Eros. That you can't tolerate the emptiness, you move to fill it with what we call pseudo Eros. So, the first quality of Eros is interiority. It's this living on the fucking inside of the inside, which is why the Holy of Holies has a second name. It's called [inaudible 01:10:13] to be on the inside of the inside. Now, that's not measurable for a Skinner's box. You can't commodify the inside of the inside. In other words, the entire movement of the World Wide Web is to actually manipulate through the lowest common denominator of a human being, in order to get me to respond to prompts and nudges that gives me egoic security because I feel empty. So that's exactly the opposite of Eros. The second quality of Eros is fullness, fullness of presence. When there's no fullness of presence, there's emptiness. When there's emptiness, I can be manipulated. What am I manipulated by? Any form of addiction. Any form of pseudo Eros actually addicts me. It's why social media is addictive.

AUBREY: I have to go back. So, one thing that you said is that being on the inside of the inside cannot be measured. And there is a fairly famous study that was cited by a variety of individuals who you've named previously on this podcast who were in this kind of Pentland mindset. And it's a study of whether the phenomenon of being in the zone is a real phenomenon. So, they tried to computationally analyze this by whether if a basketball player made the last two shots in a row, whether their third shot would go in which to them was saying, if you made two shots must mean you're in the zone. Meaning that if that's a true phenomenon, rather than just your next shot is statistically going to be the same as your shots before. So they tried to measure it. But the thing is, any real basketball player knows, you can hit two shots and be completely in your head, and completely fucked up, and not even anywhere close to the zone. You can miss two shots and actually be in the zone. You can't actually measure it unless you're inside the inside of the person who's playing. And at the moment they went to tell you, "Hey, I'm in the zone," you're out.

MARC: That's right. The moment you become aware of it... So, actually, it's gorgeous. Wolf of Zhitomyr, a major master in Hassidism, he says, if you're speaking can hear yourself talking. Sit down.

AUBREY: Yeah, you're out of the zone. Which actually denies the possibility of measurement and computation of Eros.

MARC: That's exactly gorgeous. Stuart Kaufman wrote, or worked on with a guy named Perry Marshall who's a great guy, an article about, publishing a formal journal about biology transcending computation. That biology actually literally mathematically, Stuart's a mathematician, among other things. So, biology literally transcends computation. And if you really understand quantum indeterminacy, and the deeper you understand chemistry... Roth Stein, actually Zak Stein's father, our partner at the center, writes about the inability to even reduce chemistry to computation. So in other words, Eros is not reducible to computation, and the planetary temple of Moloch, the planetary temple of Sitra Achra, the other side, which is based on computation is actually the death of our humanity. Quite, quite literally. And so, Eros is this experience of being on the inside on the inside. The old religions were about the journey to God. That God was out there. Now, there is a divine energy and intelligence that envelops us and holds us. But ultimately, the journey to God is over. The journey in God has now begun.

AUBREY: I mean, was it even a journey to God? It just seems like obeisance to God.

MARC: Well, there were holy sparks of the journey, which is a journey to God, which was beautiful. And then there were corruptions of it. But there is a second, a different conversation. There's a deep sense of a personhood of cosmos that I can actually speak to that holds me, that's actually real in a different conversation. But really, religion as the journey to God is over. A new world religion is the context for our diversity as the beginning of the journey in God has begun. And it's why the Masons who were emergent from the temple, the doors in the Mason temples would be open from the inside. You're opening it from the inside, because that's the point. In other words, it's what... And every mystic understood and every interior scientist understood it. How did Rumi write it? I'm living on the lips of insanity. I knock, I wonder. And then I realized I had been knocking from the inside, right? In other words, the realization that, value lives on the inside and value is unfuckable. It's not commodifiable, it's not reducible, it's not measurable. It's the beginning of the immeasurable. It's the reclaiming of the immeasurable, and it's about fullness. Now, addiction is pseudo Eros. Addiction is the opposite of fullness. It's the opposite of Eros. There's an absence of Eros. When there's an absence of Eros, then ethics breaks down. So we think we're going to get to ethics by the right rules, by the right systems of obligation. They always break down, they never work. Actually, all ethical breakdowns, actually a prior failure of Eros. I'm not in the fullness, we can find it in our own lives. I'm not in the fullness, I feel empty, I can't tolerate the emptiness, right? And so, I move to fill the emptiness. That filling of the emptiness is what we call pseudo Eros. Pseudo Eros is the design imperative of the Skinner's box. It's like wow, the prompts and the nudges that Cass Sunstein likes so much, that Pentland builds in his book, "Social Physics" right? 2014 MIT Media Lab. It's built on pseudo Eros. But the assumption of Pentland is that Eros isn't real. So he's got no choice. And by the way, I don't demonize Pentland, nor the MIT Media Lab. I mentioned them in a dialogue in passing with our friend Paul Chek, and Paul is awesome. And thank you, I met him actually through your friend Kyle, so it's really through you, right? Paul's awesome. And he was like, oh my God, these guys... He's like, take no prisoners.

AUBREY: Take them out.

MARC: And Paul's beautiful. But we had this beautiful conversation, I think that's actually not quite... He's actually, I'm sure he's a great guy. But he actually--

AUBREY: Maybe. I'm somewhere between you and Paul.

MARC: I know you are. And I think Yuval is a good guy also, and we've had that argument. And a whole bunch of people on your thread said, "How could you say that?" No, that's not true. He's actually operating on the assumption... Yuval takes existential risks here. Yuval and I are from the same neighborhood in Israel, the same hood as it were. Yuval takes existential risks seriously, just like Skinner did. That's the paradox. But what they're saying is wrongly, because they're actually popularizers in the realm of deep thought. Yuval is a decent historian. Alex is a good data scientist, but they're not doing deep thoughts. So they're taking for granted that Eros is not real, and Eros is value. Eros is the primary value of cosmos. The value of cosmos is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. That's the structure of cosmos. Can we go crazy for a second?

AUBREY: Yes, I also want to tell a story.

MARC: Tell the story.

AUBREY: So, through this last year and a half-ish of time that we've spent together, I've clarified my understanding of the Divine, which of course, experientially through all my medicine journeys, and through my study of various sources, I had a good sense of the Divine, and actually could feel the voice, the presence, the emergence of my state with the state of the All That Is. So, I had some good seeds and good foundations. But as it's clarified, I've also clarified my purpose to be fully all in for all life, which means I'm on God's team. And I understand God as Eros, as Shekhinah, as that's at least one of the primary faces of--

MARC: That's been our dive.

AUBREY: That's been our dive. And I was in a medicine journey recently, and it was actually after Montana. I went to Montana, I went to the hot springs that were coming, which is volcanic waters that are coming out and collected in different pools, and there's cold pools and hot pools. And it was after that experience, and I actually went into a journey, and I got in this dialogue with what felt like the god voice. It was like me and the god voice. And I was like, "Whoa!" It's not the only time that that's happened, but I felt like there was an opening, there was an opportunity. And I started to show God all of the things that I wanted to do. And I showed him, I was like, I want to build temples with hot springs, and the hot springs have water that cascades off of citrine crystals, and it moves down and on the other side is an aquamarine pool that's chilled to 36 degrees, and you can move from one to the other. And then there's erotic chambers where you can make love. I was thinking all of these things. And this is what I want to support in the world. I want to support this drive for value, this feeling of actually reclaiming our sovereignty and standing together casting nobody on the outside, everybody on the inside, I'm going through this. And I could feel God going, "Yeah, me too. I'm into it". And I was like, "You're into it?" And God Shekhinah was like, "Yeah, I'm into it." I'm like, "Fuck yeah, let's go." And I felt really for the first time in my life, that even though my own personal desires, and yes, I would benefit from the citrine waters and amethyst pools and all of that. But God wants that too, and included me and transcended me and everything that I wanted and everything that the world wanted, it was all yes, let's do this. Let's do this together.

MARC: That's so gorgeous. And let's stay with the story. And then we'll go wild in another way, we'll come back to the wild thread in a second. In kind of New Age literature, there's a deep, there's an attempt to kind of access cheap grace. And the cheap grace is, I am God. I kind of say to people, just relax.

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure.

MARC: Just relax, everyone. You know what I mean? Really, you motherfucker? First, there has to be a sense of, I'm enveloped in this field that holds me, that speaks to me. That's not a regressive, small god. It's the personhood of cosmos. Whose will I do. And yet, in the deepest clarification of my own will, I realize, oh, my God, me too. I want what she wants, and she wants what I want. Me too. And that's a good elevation of some of the shadows of me too. That's a bracket. So, now here's gorgeous. Solomon writes the whole, the holy of holies, enacts, builds the Holy of Holies. And Solomon also writes the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs. And the Song of Songs is this erotic slash pornographic, and when I say pornographic, I mean, it's pornographic in the sense that it's explicit. It's not elusively sexual. It's explicitly sexual. All the imagery is sexual, right?

AUBREY: I mean, pomegranates may stand for something else then pomegranates.

MARC: You've never been a farmer. It's explicit in farming language, that's absolutely true. And [inaudible 01:22:32] his staff is on me in love. In chapter, I think eight, of "Return to Eros" where I wrote with KK, we write a chapter called The sexy Song of Solomon, where we unpack the song. But it begins with [inaudible 01:22:47] draw me after you. [inaudible 01:22:51] and I will run to you. So the image is, the lover says to the beloved, seduce me. It's not about consent, consent is a given. Consent is like the lowest bar. No, no, seduce me. Then after you've seduced me, you've drawn me in, drawn me in. And then something takes over. We all know that moment, where there's no choice anymore. And I step inside and I run towards you. So, that's either in the 90 seconds before explosion or the hour before, the three hours before. But the word is, I'll run towards you is, ratz, I run, which is the same roots, this core word of the word, will, ratzon. So, will, the experience of will is that moment in sexuality when I give up my lower will, but I haven't abandoned myself to something which is lower. I've actually embraced my higher knowing. Which is why, when I look at you at the moment before explosion, I say, oh my God, I love you madly, I see you, that's actually true. And that's because I can see more clearly than I've ever been able to see before. So, will is the experience of divine Eros moving in me. So, the word for will, for Solomon is a word which means, the word will means the moments before sexual explosion, where the lower will of the egoic Skinner's box is abandoned. And that dimension of humanity, which is irreducible and immeasurable emerges, and I'm taken over by this field of the Divine, and I open into the, my baby face, but in other words, my child purity and second innocence, that's the will. So that's the experience you had, where you actually [inaudible 01:24:40], my will is not narcissistic, it's not egoic, and it's not just God's enemy. No, in other words, my will is antically merged. There's an antic merger between my will and the divine will, and there's no split between them.

AUBREY: Yeah. And we talk about this as the clarification of desire bearer, and this is all through "Radical Kabbalah" and we've studied with this. But it was actually the first point where I felt okay, here we are, we're in... I've clarified for this moment, and it's not like I'm there all the time, and everything I'm thinking is exactly what the divine will--

MARC: This is true.

AUBREY: It was like, but for that moment, as I was going through the fantasies of what I wanted to help birth into the world, not just for me, but to really birth into the world and imagining a world where people don't have the same jobs they used to, because maybe Bobby Kennedy becomes president and he dismantles the war machine, bracket for another category. He dismantles all of these other things. And we need things to do, so we build art and beautiful things. And we turn hot springs into these crystal pools and we make--

MARC: We become wildly creative.

AUBREY: Wildly creative.

MARC: Eros unleashed.

AUBREY: Eros everywhere, an invitation, a living invitation.

MARC: And we have to talk about what that world would look like. That's unimaginably important, because when Marc Zuckerberg describes what will happen when people don't have jobs, there'll be in the metaverse. What will happen? Everyone will do their art project. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this wild profound realization of unimaginably beautiful individuated creativity, in which your unique gift actually downloads into reality and matters. And actually, every person... There was a movie, I don't know 10, 15 years ago called "The Truman Show" where we're everything revolves around this one person. So, there's a notion in cosmology of multiple centers. So the new world, this world of Eros, in which every human being is the center of the story, every human being stars, and everyone else is a supporting actor, but there's interlocking films and reality is seven billion interlocking films, that are part of this magnificent, unimaginable, unique self-symphony, which there is irreducible value in personhood to every individuated expression of the divine. That's shocking. Wow. So, we have these two faces of Eros. Eros is interiority, being on the inside of the inside. And Eros is fullness, this radical fullness. Pseudo Eros, addiction. And by the way, the best definition of addiction is, you can't stop doing it. But you want to, because the emptiness is too painful. Now, you just introduced gorgeously the third phase of Eros, desire. Let's just maybe for a second because I know we've studied this, but it's just so beautiful to share with people. So, on our screen in front of us--

AUBREY: What used to be on the screen.

MARC: What used to be on the screen--

AUBREY: And what will soon be on the screen in front of us.

MARC: Cha, and let there be light.

AUBREY: And Derek makes the name of God appear.

MARC: Derek makes the name of God appear.

AUBREY: That's what Derek means in the lineage. Derek, it's De-re-k, meaning the name of God appears.

MARC: The name of God appears. And by the way, Derek in Hebrew is derekh, which is the way. So, that's what Jesus said. Jesus said I am the way, there we go.

AUBREY: Are you full of shit, or are you serious?

MARC: True, means the way. Derekh is the way.

AUBREY: I got really lucky.

MARC: It's good, you did good. This is awesome. So, you see on the screen. That's the four letter name of God. And the name of God is the atomic structure of interior reality. So there's exterior sciences in which there's the structure of reality, which is not really atoms. The structure of reality in exterior reality is actually meaning or information. But an interior reality, and interiors and exteriors are tightly linked. It's not that there's exteriors, and then you had interiors, inner stuff up there. Everything's interior and exterior all the way up and all the way down. We call it in cosmo-erotic humanism, pan interiority. Everything is interior and exterior, there's no interior without an exterior. So, for example, the fact that we can trace cocktails of neurochemicals when I'm in love, doesn't mean that love is neurochemicals. It means that there's an interior and an exterior. So, this is the name of God, the four letter name of God, which is understood in the lineage to be the actual molecular, or the DNA code of reality. So, it's Yod, Hei, Vav, Hei. So, we go from right to left, we read it from right to left. So Yod is the divine point of Eros, that enters, that's the line quality, the thrusting quality that tenderly fiercely enters the Hei, so Jah. So, Leonard Cohen's song, where he brought that name of God into consciousness, "Hallelujah" is Hallelu, Jah. So the first two letters of the name of God is Yod Hei, and Yod Hei is called in the lineage [inaudible 01:29:52] two lovers that never stop making love. So, that in the physical field would be the four forces, the strong and the weak, nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitational. Those four forces that are animated by Eros, that never stop. They're in every second of reality, madly alluring reality rooted in this allurement between the Yod and the Hei, which is the actual structure of the four forces animated by Eros. That's [inaudible 01:30:21]. Partially in the two lovers, the Yod and the Hei are always together. Then you get to the Vav, the third. Now, if you notice the Vav is a Yod, the first letter pulled down. So, the Yod pulled down is the phallus. It's an obvious phallus. And the phallus that lives in the masculine and the feminine. The Vav again enters the Hei. So that's a second erotic union. But the Vav entering the Hei is, and this is crazy shocking. That's what we call today in thought the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene means conscious evolution, meaning where we participate in creating the design structure of reality. Where for the first time, evolution and its direction, we co-create with the divine. What we do determines in some sense, some dimension of the future. So that's called in the lineage, [inaudible 01:31:16]. It's two lovers who can separate and need to be aroused towards union, and who arouses the lovers towards union? The union, the Eros that takes place in my interior. That takes place between me and my friend, between me and my beloved, between me and every action that I do. That literally every action that I do, quite literally, is for the sake of the uniting of the Yod and the Hei, and the Vav and the Hei. So, I participate in both supporting the structure of reality, the constant structure of, the electromagnetic, but I also participate in the Eros of reality that causes the Vav to enter the Hei. So, when I'm broken, so I'm in an argument, and I'm in an argument with KK. You're in an argument with Vylana, right? And when I can't reach into myself to find that place to go deeper, the Vav separates from the Hei. But when I go inside, or Vylana goes inside, or KK goes inside, whatever... Any reality, I'm talking to the waitress, and I ask her name, and she lights up because we're not just function, we're not just I it, in every dimension of every moment of my life, every feeling and every action in reality, the divine name is either being spelled erotically, hallelujah, ecstatic praise. There's a blaze of light in every word. It doesn't matter which I heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah, it's all hallelujah. That's exactly every second. Or when I'm not in Yehud, I'm not in my own sense of my inner and outer self being one. When there's an exile between the inner and the outer self, when I'm alienated from my words, I'm alienated from my will, I'm alienated from my deepest heart's desire, then the world falls into disrepair, and we move into existential risk. So, what animates that name of God? Desire. The Yod desires the Hei. The Vav desires the Hei. The Hei devours the Vav. So, in other words, the name of God is desire. So, the third quality of Eros is desire, that reality is desire, all the way up and all the way down. Desire is not the enemy. Desire itself is the actual quality of reality. And here's the crazy thing. Desire is a face of Eros, and the interior face of Eros is pleasure. It's pleasure.

AUBREY: One of the big movements that's alive right now, that my wife Vylana is deeply right participating in with Mama Gena and with Leila, and with Emily--

MARC: And we're studying every one.

AUBREY: And you guys are studying every week is the reclamation of feminine desire, because it seems like culturally and societally, of course, the Yod desires the Hei, the Vav desires the Hei, the masculine desires the feminine. We understand that and we make space for that, and actually we demonize it as well. But at least we at least we established that yes, that men have a desire for pleasure. But there's been this kind of false narrative that there's no desire from the feminine for the same ravaging, and there's just this huge reclamation. I mean, Mama Gena, Regena Thomashauer, pussy reclamation, right? It's like, no, fuck y'all. We want this back too.

MARC: Quality of [inaudible 01:34:50]. First of all, I actually apologize. I stepped in too quickly. It was just, I was excited, and I said Vy and I are studying every week. Actually, we're not studying. That topic which she's studying with Mama Gena, and I think with all the other beautiful people you mentioned, we're studying the dharma of pleasure. This is a different dharma, so I stepped in inappropriately. We're studying a different dharma. But let's focus on what gets a pleasure in a second, and just focus on this for a second because it's unimaginably important. So, there's a set of surveys that were done in 1978-79, they were replayed in a lot of places, that basically asked the question, would a man have sex with a stranger on campus? And a huge amount of men said yes. And almost no woman said yes. And so that study, which has been replicated in many places has been cited in many, many ways to argue for a different quality of masculine and feminine desire. But that's actually a misreading of the study. Because first of all, women don't go home with strangers because it's not safe. That's number one. But number two, if you'd ask the same group of women, would you go home with, and name some wonderful rock star that everyone loves? They all say yes. Because that's safe. In other words, so the feminine knows something unimaginably important. We have to do an entire podcast on it at some point. The feminine understands something of what it means to be aroused by love. So, feminine desire is the capacity to be aroused by love. And that feminine desire can of course live in a man and a woman. And one of the things with KK and I as we were getting closer and closer, we began to experience like radical arousal, through like radical moments of love. When we move into the space of radical love, it would completely translate into radical desire and all the objective measurements of radical desire. And that feminine desire has that key. And imagine what would happen to reality if actually men would be aroused by love. We would actually live in a different reality.

AUBREY: It's interesting that you say that because there's two types of dirty talk that bring Vylana into a state of ecstasy, One is classic dirty talk. Like classic power exchange polarity dirty talk, that works. The other is just radical, outrageous, mad love, where I just keep saying over and over how much I love her andhow crazy I am about her. And that will similarly bring her into states of--

MARC: They're both wildly arousing.

AUBREY: Ecstasy and climax.

MARC: And actually, they're deeply... We're working deeply together with KK on the phenomenology of sexuality with you. So the three of us are deep in that... I think we've all finished like 16 volumes that we're preparing. So, there's an entire section as you know on this topic, so we won't be seduced to go down that drawer. But just one second, because you've seduced me already slightly. Which is, they're the same. When I say I fucking own you with my heart wide open. If I say it with my heart closed, then it's a complete violation. When my heart's wide open, and I move to this kind of utter demand of surrender, I can only surrender if I trust you so fucking deeply, and I want you to own me. And then I have this unimaginable desire to be owned by you, fucking own me. And so, they're deeply intertwined.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's true. It's the divinity that makes the wickedness safe and hot.

MARC: That's right. My heart's wide open. There's one moment of not trust you fucking own me, call the fucking police. And if there's like radical trust, then fucking own me, and I won't settle for anything less than you completely own me. And I feel one inch of me not owned, and that can work with the masculine to the feminine, and the feminine to masculine. We want to be actually owned. So that's the third phase of desire.

AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, for the masculine, she can seduce me into a state of madness where I lose myself entirely, which is the same as owning me, because she actually owns me. I'm actually surrendering my agency.

MARC: Hello, right? I remember talking to you one afternoon, you talking to me one afternoon, both sides were like, oh my God, Vylana is not in a great... And oh my God, like complete deflated. Marc, complete deflated, well, that's ownership. In other words, if the change in someone's mood can completely undo your Eros and you're desperate to recreate that union, you're owned.

AUBREY: No doubt.

MARC: So, this third face of the erotic is the sense of radical desire. And there's actually 12 faces of Eros, but let's see if we can bring it home now. So, now, so the temple is Eros, not sex. But if that's the case, so why don't we have a guy running on top of the Holy of Holies, Baba jogger? On top of the Holy of Holies. Because he's breaking through. We could have... We could have Aubrey in the zone, right? Aaron in the zone on top of Holy of Holies. We could have KK when she's teaching, she's like, unimaginably on the inside of the inside. Vylana singing with the bowls. But that's not what we have. In other words, the imagery is sexual. It's not an artist painting. It's not running. Not the runner, it's not "Marathon Man". It's not Aubrey in the zone. It's not Marc's at the height of writing when I just fall inside, and like, oh my god, time, right? No, we have two people fucking. Mad love, mad arousal. So why? And this is a crazy gorgeous thing. So, I want to just take this slow for a second. I want to take this slow. So, we have our question. I just want to make sure our question's. I know we're moving towards closer. We probably what, we probably have 15-20 minutes, something like that?

AUBREY: Something like that.

MARC: Okay, so the temple's the place of Shekhinah, of Eros. The fall of the temple is there for the fall of Eros. That's called in the lineage [inaudible 01:41:21] the exile of the Shekhinah, the exile of the Goddess, the exile of Eros. So the fall of the temple, which is not the physical temple in Jerusalem, it's the fall of temple consciousness. Now stay close with me. Your pagans are coming back in. Paganism had an intuition of temple conscious. This is so deep, and it's so subtle, so we're going to go really careful here. Paganism intuited, oh my God, she lives under every tree. She lives in the Astarte, in the Asherah tree, and the Asherah tree needs to be in the Holy of Holies. Paganism had the sense... There's no place to devoid of she. Paganism had the sense of wholeness. We've got to be part of the wholeness of reality. And the fourth face of the erotic is actually wholeness. Interconnectivity of the all with the all. So the four major faces are being on the inside, fullness of presence, radical desire, and wholeness. And paganism has the sense of wholeness. But paganism says, and Jung had a sense of the pagan in him, both positively and tragically, It's why he aligned with the Nazis for a short period of time. It was a tragic story. Jung says I'd rather be whole than good. He's quoted.... It's a direct quote, but it's also a major... wholeness. Now, wholeness can be scary, because you can have a sense of pseudo wholeness, the sense of it is very scary. And Jung was actually enamored originally by the Nazi [inaudible 01:42:54], the sense of the enormous Germanic spirit. I'd rather be whole than good. The prophet says, no, no, no, Eros and ethics are one. There's no split between wholeness and goodness, you cannot make that split. It can't be made. The dark side of the force says, I go for the radical aliveness of Eros, and I put goodness aside. The Jedi says, I go for goodness, and I leave the whole Eros thing out. The Christians called that agape. Agape means actually ethics without Eros. So agape actually, it's a bad split. The split between Eros agape is the broken heritage of Greece through Christendom. Eros and agape are completely one.

AUBREY: Into puritanism.

MARC: Into puritanism. So Eros and ethics are one. So, the prophet says, no, Eros and ethics are one, because remember the Eros formula? Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. What's wholeness? Wholeness in contact is relationship between parts. That's ethics. That's what ethics is. The notion that the erotic and the ethical are split is a lie. They're one. I did a cover story once in a magazine called Tikun called The Erotic and The Ethical. And actually what precipitated a whole series of attacks, it's a long story, but I got wildly attacked within the community for that article, because what I was saying was, which is absolutely correct, is that what the temple is saying is, the breakdown of Eros creates the breakdown of ethics. So, in certain sense, the masculine God says, we're going to create ethics by demanding justice, and we're going to see what's the right system of law. And that's important, we need law. The Goddess says, pleasure is the source of ethics. But not surface pleasure, not pseudo pleasure, not pseudo Eros, I can actually go inside and access, is this deeply pleasurable? Pleasure is not ice cream. Although it's not [inaudible 01:44:57] ice cream, depends what kind, but pleasure is. There's levels of pleasure. There's principles of pleasure. There's the pleasure of power. Clarify power. There's the pleasure of relationship. There's the pleasure of meaning. There's the pleasure of creativity. Pleasure is a very, very multivalent beautiful expression, which is a different conversation. That's what Vylana and I are studying, that topic. So, actually, the goddess says, pleasure is the source of all ethics. And actually, if you would summarize all of good evolutionary theory today, and really get the edges of evolutionary theory today, implicit evolution evolves, because it feels good.

AUBREY: Alright, so let me challenge.

MARC: Go.

AUBREY: Let me challenge. So I became enamored with the culture of Chavin as transmitted through my teacher, Don Howard. And in the culture of Chavin, they actually held peace in Peru for an astounding period of time, like something estimated, like 800 years where there's no sign of warfare. And one of the reasons why they were able to do that is they served Huachuma, which is a very serotonergic, kind of heart opening medicine to all the pilgrims who came by. And it was actually this massive temple of Chavin, which at the center was a Lanzón and the Stele Raimondi, which actually is the inspiration for the sculpture that's at our farm that you saw, the Stele Raimondi, 3000-year old piece of art that we turned into 3D, thanks to Daniel Popper, a whole other story. So I was really enamored with this culture. And I was like, aha, they did it. They made it. And then, Don Howard explained, well, the Chavin culture at a coastal town called El Brujo would participate in human sacrifice to control the weather. That's also I--

MARC: That's exactly, you just hit it. Oh, my God. That's exactly it. In other words, you can have an experience of Eros that's divorced from ethos, which is why the hieros gamos, the marriage of the god and the goddess is between justice and pleasure. They have to marry each other. There has to be a yehud, a union between those two, between the line and the circle. And actually, pleasure creates ethics. But pleasure means not just the experience of wholeness, it's actually an Eros that is utterly inseparable from ethos. In other words, if there's a lack of... If there's not right relationship between the parts... Now, for example, sacrificing a living person as the Aztecs did, ripping out... The Aztecs, the New Age valorizes ripping out 10,000 women's hearts. That would seem to be a wrong relationship between the parts. In other words, Eros and ethics are one means, and this is very important. There's level one Eros which is Eros that is the experience of radical aliveness that doesn't move towards the right relationship of contact between the parts, and doesn't create wholeness, which is when every part synergizing becomes part of the larger whole. That's what Eros is. When you actually have level one Eros, that's just Eros by itself, pretty tragic. It's like full Eros, that leads you--

AUBREY: Which is like a [inaudible 01:48:20] but dark revelry of sacrifices, in blood and--

MARC: And it can make it for a while--

AUBREY: Orgiastic, yeah.

MARC: Makes it for a while, but then it collapses. Why? The Great Mother societies were based on... And that was the weakness of paganism. It's why the Prophet fought with the pagan, because the Prophet said to the pagan, you're doing this beautiful Eros, but you're doing child sacrifice, you motherfucker. That was exactly the point. Now, you just got it. So the Prophet says to the pagan, you can't split between being whole and good. You have to be whole and good and they're inseparable from each other, just like a child's goodness and aliveness, we said earlier, are inextricably linked. The Prophet was radically filled with Eros. The Prophet was not this ethical teacher. The Prophet was full Eros. In the prophet's realization, the prophet's medicine journey, the prophet has the realization that ethics and Eros are inseparable. That's the fucking essence of the temple. It's unbelievable, which is why in the temple, the [inaudible 01:49:22] which was the court was adjacent to the Holy of Holies. Generally adjacent, right? Because the Holy of Holies, Eros, and the court needed to be linked to each other, because Eros and ethics are one. So, you can't say I'd rather be good than whole, because if you say I'd rather be good than whole, you go for goodness, but actually, you're missing wholeness. So, your goodness collapses. Because whenever there's a failure of Eros, you feel empty. Pseudo Eros enters, and it becomes addiction, and it becomes fascism. Fascism is a form of pseudo Eros. And it becomes child sacrifice, which is actually a form of pseudo Eros. You need genuine Eros. Genuine Eros means there's a right relationship between all the parts, which is ethics. Right relations between all the parts only comes when I actually honor the personhood, the value of personhood, of all the parts. That's a value. It's what the Skinner's box doesn't understand. And the Skinner's box, there is no personhood. Personhood is a value. Personhood doesn't exist. Jaron Lanier correctly pointed out in his book about gadgetry, 15 years ago, that personhood is written out of the tech plex. Personhood is the irreducibly unique personhood of every piece of the puzzle, and that every puzzle piece is needed for the whole. Let's go back to the Eros formula. This is the essence of the Temple of Solomon. Eros equals radical aliveness, doesn't stop there though. Moving towards desiring, clarified desire, ever deeper contact, an ever greater wholeness. The second I alienate you, now you can be sacrificed. That's not ever greater wholeness. So Eros and ethics being one is the whole thing. We're allured to each other. If I'm allured to you, I can't rip your heart out.

AUBREY: Yeah, of course. And if you actually recognize the connection that every person has to you is you basically living a different life, a uniquely different life. But it's you. It's you.

MARC: Right, it's you. In other words, so here's the paradox. So, contemporary woke liberal thinking that deconstructs the field of value, stepped out of the field of Eros because it reduces the human being to an exchangeable commodity, which means we sacrifice human beings in all sorts of ways, the death of our humanity. But regressive fundamentalism that says only we are fully human, only those who accept Christ in a particular way are fully human, no one else is, and therefore, only we who are particular kinds of Sunnis, or particular kinds of Shiites, or particular kinds of Jews are fully human, no one else is, that's also outside the field of Eros. So, the field of Eros means every unique irreducible being has infinite personhood, infinite value. Eros is value. And the unique quality of my interiority is Eros. So if I sit with Aubrey in silence, we sit in deep silence together, there's going to be a particular quality to that silence. If you sit with Aaron in silence, there's going to be a different quality of that silence. That's interiority. You sit with Vylana, different quality of that silence.

AUBREY: Oh, much different quality of that silence

MARC: Completely different quality. But then you sit, let's say with your sister, Caitlin, different quality of that silence. It's like, wow. Because that's my interiority. That's immeasurable. And that demands ethics. That means that I'm in devotion to that unique quality of infinity, of the infinity of intimacy and that name of God that we just saw, the Yod, Hei, Vav, Hei that we're looking at right now, what I would call that name of God is, we can give it a new name, we gave it an cosmo-erotic humanism. That's the infinite intimate. The new name of God is the infinite intimate, which is infinity desiring intimacy uniquely with every irreducible unique self, which then creates a new possibility for wholeness. When Eros and ethics become one, you have a new planetary temple. It's like, cha.

AUBREY: All right. So, as we move to close here, let's bring out some sparks of actual actions that we're taking inside the Holy of Holies, because we've never closed that bracket. And then as we're rebuilding the temple, holistically, and also individually, what can we do to like make this actionable? So let's learn what they did back there in the Holy of Holies. And then what can we do in our own temple that we're building together at a time to actually worship and build this temple together?

MARC: Gorgeous. So, that brings us back to our last open thread. And we don't want to leave open threads. Sure don't want to do that, okay? So, what's the relationship with sex to Eros? So we said the temple is Eros, and we had an open question. Why don't we have a runner on top of the Holy of Holies or Aubrey in the zone? Why do we have sexuality? Because the sexual models the erotic. There's 12 billion years of Eros until sex appears, and then sex appears, and the sexual becomes the most powerful model of Eros. So, being on the inside, fullness of presence, desire, the experience of wholeness, these are all modeled in the sexual. And the experience of Eros, which is the experience of the holy, to experience all these dimensions of the erotic in every dimension of life, not just in sexuality, but the sexual itself becomes the practice of the Holy of Holies. In other words, the practice of the Holy of Holies, the practice of Holy of Holies is [inaudible 01:55:14]. Now, in the Holy of Holies, in the temple, the high priest enters, and the high priest actually has erotic union with the Shekhinah. It's a sexual, but enacted right on the interior plane. But the lineage says, is that the temple is not destroyed, that the essence... This is how you began today, the Romans destroyed the temple and we said, but it wasn't destroyed. Why? Because the lineage of Solomon that goes right to Akiva, and then goes to Shimon Bar Yochai, and goes to Luria, and goes to Leiner in "Radical Kabbalah" and comes to us, the lineage says, when the temple is destroyed, the place that the Holy of Holies is reenacted, is in the sexual bed. The sexual bed becomes in the lineage, the Holy of Holies. Quite literally. The sexual bed becomes the place where in the democratization of enlightenment, the high priest and the high priestess enter into sexual union, and sexuality becomes the source of all ethics. Every dimension of ethos I mean, the way you touch the body of your vulnerable beloved, and how you touch with such fierceness and tenderness, how could you violate that body? The experience, for example, that giving and receiving are one in the enacted economic world, in the world of Empire, you're either taking money out or you're putting money in, and it's all an economic commodified exchange. When you're pleasuring your beloved, you're giving pleasure, and you're receiving the biggest gifts in the world. So, giving and receiving become one, a new dimension of ethos. You have fantasy, you know how to fantasize about a new world. You can access in fantasy worlds and worlds, and then you begin to access political imagination. At the end of our conversation, we're at the beginning of a new one. But the enactment of the Holy of Holies was the erotic merger with essence, which was a model, this erotic merger was understood to be modeled in the sexual, right? And so, pilgrims would come to Jerusalem on the three great festivals. And actually, in this moment, right now when we're talking, we're on the beginning of one of the third pilgrim festivals in this very second. And when you come to Jerusalem, there's this enormous experience of Mardi Gras. I'm borrowing the term Mardi Gras, but it's an experience of festival. And the experience is of a field of Eros and a field of love. An experience of a command to radical joy, and a command to sexing. And, so the festival, the pilgrimage festivals and Sabbath, were both places which enacted the Holy of Holies, and which a central primary injunction was sexing. Radical, mad, wild, tender, quivering, fierce, raw sexing as an ultimate practice. An ultimate practice. Now, Nietzsche wasn't wrong. Nietzsche intuited this in his own weird brilliance. He said, the summit of a person's spirituality is the summit of their sexuality. That who you are in fuck is actually who you are, which means you want to become unfucked, something bigger, something deeper, something wider, something more spread, and more dripping, and more throbbing. Because you can actually learn, engage, practice the art of holy fuck. Because when we saw the name of God, we said the name of God is desire. If we said it more accurately, we'd say the name of God is fuck. The Yod enters the Hei, and the Vav enters the Hei. The name of God is fuck, it's fuck all the way up and all the way down. And so, the sexual models the erotic and the erotic, the temple is called the holy place. So, the holy place is the place of Eros. So, the erotic and the holy are one. So the place that I practice the Holy of Holies is sexing. It's the central practice of the new temple is fuck, but not a fuck which is pseudo Eros. And here's the thing, here's maybe the last sentence, I give it back to you, my brother. I'm so happy to see you.

AUBREY: Yes, indeed.

MARC: Madly happy to see you. So, here's the thing. So there's always the Skinner's box, which is the pseudo temple. It's the broken planetary temple. And then there's the actual planetary temple. So, in the broken planetary temple, which is driven by pseudo Eros, the internet is animated by bad pornography. It's not by accident. In other words, the pornographic in its broken form, not beautiful erotica. And by the way, pornography is not, and this is very important. There's a difference. Pornography is not visualizations of intense sexuality, which is how it's described when you look up pornography. Visualization of intense sexuality, that is not pornography. Pornography is visualizations of intense sexuality out of the context of the narrative of your life. So, if you would watch a three-hour beautiful movie, and it had 20 minutes of intense sexuality, or 10 minutes, you wouldn't say that's pornography. It's in the context of a narrative, and it wouldn't become addictive. It's not addictive. The addiction of pornography is when you decontextualize radical intense raw Eros from the story of your life. That's pornography.

AUBREY: Yeah, which is why erotic fiction, for example, you always imagine yourself as one of the characters, and so it becomes a part of your story in a way that actually watching other people do things...

MARC: Erotic fiction is the reclaiming, exactly. In other words, in the planetary temple, which is the opposite of the Skinner's box, where we have enacted the Temple of Solomon, and enacted all the mystery schools and all of the best scientists is interior and exterior, the planet will be lined with Eros, but actually, the erotic. And actually, when you think about it, what tells us that we're not alone? What tells us that we need to be connected? We have this inexorable, unimaginable need, a raw need to actually make contact. Sexing. And it's why masturbation, self-pleasuring in all of its beauty, and it has it has enormous beauty, but it's insufficient. Self-evidently, right? Because there's no contact. Eros is contact. So imagine if we live in a world in which we actually understand that the erotic and the holy are one, and the sexual models the erotic, it doesn't exhaust the erotic. Now, we're in the temple. That's the practice of the temple.

AUBREY: Let's go.

MARC: Let's go.

AUBREY: Let's go.

MARC: Let's go.

AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about the revolution needs to become irresistible, well, here we go. The revolution is to restore temple consciousness and temple consciousness is the restoration of Eros, and the sexual models the erotic. Congratulations, you just made the revolutionary irresistible.

MARC: Right, we made it irresistible. And, here's the beauty of it is, so we might think, oh, just go fuck, no. To go fuck with grace, with elegance, with fierceness, with quivering tenderness, with radical devotion knowing that desire and devotion are one, that is the great art of a lifetime. I don't want to be the lover today like I was 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. I want to everyday be a lover in a complete different in new way. You want to remarry Vylana, every day. I want to remarry KK. Every day. In other words, sexing is, it's why most married couples stop having sex. Because sexing is actually quite difficult.

AUBREY: It requires some education and technology, which has been broken because temple consciousness has been broken, and this is a whole other story to tell.

MARC: That's right, and what you mean by technology, you don't mean technique. You mean interior technology where I can be aroused by the rawness of fuck and the rawness of love that are one.

AUBREY: And that's the phenomenology of Eros that's we're working on.

MARC: That's what we're working on. Oh my God, what a crazy pleasure.

AUBREY: What a ride.

MARC: What a ride. Cha!

AUBREY: Mad love to all of you. Have an erotic day. We're going to erotically eat Chef Donny's food.

MARC: We are, oh my God. Cha!

AUBREY: Cha! Thanks for tuning into this video. Make sure you hit subscribe. Follow me at Aubrey Marcus, check out the Aubrey Marcus podcast available everywhere. And leave a comment. Let me know if this video resonated, or what else you would like to hear from me in the future. Thank you so much.