Toward A New Story: In Response To The Meta Crisis W/ Marc Gafni PHD | AMP #390

By Aubrey Marcus November 30, 2022

Toward A New Story: In Response To The Meta Crisis W/ Marc Gafni PHD | AMP #390

We are at a time in our world, where we need to birth a new story, and there is nobody that I know who has “felt and” thought through what this new story might look like, more than Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni.

How do we respond to the meta crisis of compounding existential threats? The answer that Dr. Marc Gafni PHD gives is that the “root cause of the meta crisis is a global intimacy disorder”.  As he puts it “Global Challenges require global coordination which in turn requires global resonance, which in turn requires global intimacy, which can only be sourced in a shared global story of value”. 

For this very reason, we must articulate a “shared global story of value”. This story. according to a set of compelling teachings by Dr. Gafni’s colleague Dr. Zak Stein,  is the “evolutionary love story of the intimate universe”. This claim is not causal, but rather based on a profound integration of myriad wisdom streams in what they call  “the interior and exterior sciences across space and time”.

But, and this is Gafni’s core point, not only must we be tellers of the new story, but we must also actually be the story. We must know that our personal story is “chapter and verse in the Universe: a love story”. And that story is a story of transformation.  And that therefore“Y/our transformation is the transformation of the whole.”

In other words, the change you are seeking in the world begins with changing the way you see yourself and your place in the world. You literally “become the New Story”. “You cross to the other side, awakening as the new human and the humanity.”

This series of podcasts under the title “Toward a New Story” is about building what Gafni and Stein call “CosmoErotic Humanism,  a shared story of value as a context to celebrate our diversity.” 

While Dr. Gafni began his path as an ordained Rabbi intimately versed in the ancient Aramaic texts, we recognize together, that this new story must include and transcend the validated insights from all the great religions, philosophies, and cultures from premodern, modern, and postmodern times. This is a historic moment, and for people who want to claim their seat at the table of history, this podcast is a resplendent invitation. I cannot imagine inviting you to a more important, heart opening, mind bending, and exciting journey than the conversations we are having in this podcast series.

If you are interested in hearing more about Marc’s story and why we are working together, check out our groundwork podcast with his beloved partner Kristina Kincaid | https://bit.ly/3gJhBOh
 
Download Chapter 1-4 of the award winning "Your Unique Self” Book + Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni:
 
Take the Free "Your Unique Self" Mini Course:
 
 
Marc Gafni:

MARC: We're talking about the failure of the past, the death of the present, and all the voices of the unborn future, that actually are in peril. And we're talking about the ability to actually see a way through, and to actually say we can actually avert that suffering and turn that suffering in into a potential utopia. Because we're not just poised before a potential dystopia. We're also poised before a potential utopia. We're between dystopian and utopia. We could actually create the most gorgeous world that's ever been created.

AUBREY: We're at a time in our world where we need to birth a new story. And there is nobody that I know who has thought through what this new story might look more than Dr. Rabbi Marc Gafni. We're going to go deep on a multi-episode journey exploring the big questions. Who are you? Where are you? What do you want? What can you do about it? And how we can all participate in a field of shared value, so that we can realize that truly, we're all on the same team, team Earth, team people, team cosmos, and we must come together to address the existential threats that are all around us. And also just live the most fulfilled, happy, flourishing, thriving, beautiful life that we can possibly live. So, it is with great delight and pleasure that I share the first of these episodes that are coming out with Dr. Rabbi Marc Gafni.

MARC: It's good to be here with you. It's so beautiful to open with chant, because it you notice a couple of things in chant. First is, our mind wanders, and we bring our mind back to center. Which is the act of meditation. The meditation, everyone thinks is I've fallen, I'm all the way in. But that's not meditation.

AUBREY: Eventually, maybe if you're lucky.

MARC: Maybe for a moment, and then you fall out, right?

AUBREY: Yeah, of course.

MARC: And so, it's the Nirvana of arriving at the falling in for a moment, or an extended moment. And it might be through psychedelics, it might be through meditation, might be through dance, and then we fall out again. And the act of in meditation itself, or in chant of non-judgmentally bringing my mind back to center as it wanders, in the eastern text is the act of meditation. So, in chant, I keep bringing my mind back to center until I kind of fall in. But then after the chant, when the chant is over, in the space between the end of the chant and before we start words again, or before thoughts flood in, that space in between, is in the language of the lineage where she lives. And that's the place I'm sure you noticed that your mind didn't wander at all. It was completely still, there was no wandering. In Kashmir Shaivism, they call that the space between the breaths. But it's also the space between the end of the chant and the words. It's the space in between. It's the liminal space when the illusions of reality are bracketed for a moment. And I can see clearly now, and I can hear the voice. So, what a beautiful way to start.

AUBREY: And, such a metaphor for life. I mean, in everything we do. Whether it's sport, you're playing tennis, pickleball, basketball. You're in it, you're in the flow, and then all of a sudden, you start thinking about what's the score? Are we going to win out? Did I miss that last shot? Did I let my team, whatever, any of those thoughts, then you're out of it.

MARC: You're out of it.

AUBREY: You're out of it. Or sexing. You're in the middle of making love to your sweetheart, whoever it is, and then it's, you're right there in the flow. And then all of a sudden, you start thinking, oh, was that weird? Oh, man, am I going to climax too fast? Whatever the thought is, and then you're out of it.

MARC: You're out of it. And then instead of being... People, then I'm out of it. And then people feel bad about being out of it. And then it creates a cycle of--

AUBREY: Nothing is better than shame to really drive you back to full present moment.

MARC: Exactly, right? There's all these hidden structures of shame in our kind of... We're just at the beginning now in our unfolding conversations. We need to do a whole couple of conversations on shame. But original shame is recapitulated in so many ways. So, the response is in the interior sciences, and by interior sciences, we mean, which is... Well, let's even go a step before. Because this is the first in this set, maybe we set an intention.

AUBREY: We set an intention, but our enjoyment of talking to each other is so great, that we're going to have to bring it back just like--

MARC: We will.

AUBREY: Because we're here for an important mission. And the mission is that we find ourselves, and we can feel it, and we know it, we look around and we can see it. We're in a time in between stories, and we have to transition from our old default story to a new story. And his new story has to be a true story, a story that actually abides by first principles, first values of the cosmos. And this is something that you've really driven home, and you explain it so beautifully. The necessity because of existential risk, and because of everything that's collapsing with the old story, now is the time. And what we're trying to do here is actually build the superstructure, like the scaffolding, and fill it all in for what this new story actually might look like. And then, how do we abide in that new story and participate in that new story?

MARC: I mean, exactly. And you touched on beautifully four or five of the key points in a gorgeous recapitulation. And so, we'll start with the recapitulation, which is now in the space and gorgeous. Now let's work backwards.

AUBREY: Let's go.

MARC: Let's unpack, okay? So, let's start with this idea that we're in a time between worlds, and we're in a time between stories. So, just to set our context, what do we mean by that? And we take nothing for granted today. So, we're in a time between worlds, we're in a time between stories. So, our rough analogy is the Renaissance. The Black Death is sweeping Europe, the pandemic rages in parts of Asia. There's no response, there's no response within a year, and our response may have been broken in many ways. That's an entire conversation, the nature of the medical industrial complex, and its structure, and the broken responses. There's some very real depth there. And, compare it to what happened 500 years ago, where you look at the texts which describe what the source of the Black Death was. And the suggestions were so absurd, they were superstition at its worst. So there was no response, people are dying in the streets. According to some estimates, half of Europe dies. And no one knows what to do. And the Renaissance is, it's kind of emerging out of the space when DaVinci and Florence and [inaudible 08:09] and the whole gang in the Renaissance realize, we can't get to every village and heal the Black Death and heal every person. And the old structures of the old world are breaking down the stories of God, the stories of man, the stories of woman, the stories of relationships between men and women, and the human being and the divine, and the infinite and the finite, and what is the source of value? And how do we gather information? And how do we make meaning? And what's our place in the cosmos? And what is the cosmos? All of those. And economics, how does economics work? And where should money go? Should go to the king or should be, something new called capital. And do people have rights or don't they? All these issues, all of this, the assumptions of pre-modernity were breaking down.

AUBREY: And one of the things that drives that is, you see something that you know is wrong. They're watching all of the people who suffered at the hands of the church, all based on these superstitious ideas, the inquisitions, the witch burnings, all of these things, and they're looking around, and they know it. They just know there's something--

MARC: There's something that's emergent in human spirit that says, this is a violation of the ought. In other words, there's an intuition that there's not just is but ought, yep, there's a way it ought be. And we didn't realize it, but this is wrong. We've always thought it was wrong, we couldn't articulate it. And the old structures that were foisted upon us in pre-modernity, with all of their dignities because they had real beauty, but they had great, great horrific shadow. And that shadow is now rising, the darkness is now recognized. And yet the new story is not yet here.

AUBREY: Yeah. And so, we're in a similar spot, because we now feel there's another ought. That which was tolerable 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, people starving and not getting access to clean water, and the way the discrepancies between just fairness of equity for all human beings. All of these different ideas are starting to feel like we can't do this. And there's something about not giving a shit about the environment, and just caring about the next election cycle, and the next shareholder profit cycle. There's something wrong, much like there was something even more egregiously wrong that led to that Renaissance. Now we're feeling it again, there's something deeply wrong.

MARC: There's something deeply... So beautiful, right? So beautiful, so tragic, so painful. And yet, we're going to move beyond the tragic. And we'll talk more today about the post-tragic. So, there's something deeply wrong. And we experience ourselves as they did in this time between worlds, in this time between stories, in which, and that's what DaVinci understood. Piecemeal is not going to work. In other words, a solution to this and a solution to this and a solution to that, and a solution to that is not going to work. There's something deeply wrong. Let's just feel the deeply wrong. You gave a couple of... Before we go on, we go slow today. But let's just take an example. You gave such a beautiful example. What does it mean that two billion people in the world, according to one set of intelligent estimates, don't have access to fucking drinking water? What does that mean? What does it mean that... I was just recently in India. I was going there actually recently a few years ago to see the Dalai Lama, and I had to get to Dharamsala. It's a long story, he had invited me there because he took something of mine and didn't give it back to me. And maybe we'll get to that story. But we went on the way through Calcutta, it's a little circuitous. And there you see nine people in a wheelbarrow sleeping. I mean, the level of deprivation, the level of starvation, the level of suffering. And then you think about, oh, I'm going to have a steak. And that steak, sorry if you're in to steaks. But that steak or lamb chops is from this lamb that was pressed into a cage for three months, and essentially tortured, because we've split the lamb out of our circle of intimacy. And so we're willing to torture the lamb, so we'll have this succulent moment of lamb chops. And 50 years from now, we're going to look at how we treat animals. We're going to be so shocked at the wrongness of it. So, the wrongness to humans, the wrongness to animals. But that's just the beginning. I mean, let's just take the United States, for example. In the United States today, most people have no savings. And people who've retired are living literally on subsistence jobs all through the country. There's tens and tens of millions of people that if they get cancer, they have no coverage. And yet, we go on with our lives. So, the notion that we can sequester ourselves from the whole... First off, from the perspective of ought, ethically, morally, we're realizing it's wrong. But that's because erotically we're realizing it's wrong. We're actually realizing that we're living in a planet that's one planet. We got to see it from space in 1969, when that boy from Wapakoneta, Ohio, Neil Armstrong, first walks on the moon takes pictures and sends them back and we see, wow, we have a visual image of the whole thing. There's one Earth, and there's one planet, and there's one love. And then there's one Eros, and there's one field of value. We get that sense, but that's just the beginning. At this particular time, it's not like the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, they couldn't destroy the planet. We're now at this place, and we're facing a meta crisis, which we have the capacity for the first time in the history of planet Earth, to actually end the story. And we call that either catastrophic risk, we end the story, for most of humanity who suffer unbearable suffering, or existential risk, the story ends, period. And Toby Ord wrote actually a very good book on existential risk. Toby is kind of one of the students of Derek Parfit in Oxford. Nick Bostrom, who talks about existential risk, Toby Ord. There's a whole gang there, the existential risk gang. They're doing a good job, actually. So Toby just wrote a book on existential risk, and he kind of crunched the numbers. Kind of a hardcore, numbers crunching book. It's real. Existential risk is real. 1-6, possibility of existential risk in the next 100 years, right? 1-6, would you go on a bridge that was 1-6 chance that it would come down? And over the next...

AUBREY: That's literally Russian roulette. It's literally spinning a revolver chamber and pointing it at your head. Except it's not your head. It's the head of the whole world.

MARC: I mean, it's the head of the whole world. And yes, yes, yes, let's play with it. It's actually, the head of the whole world in the present. So, it's the responsibility for all of the present, it's the head of the whole world for all of us. A genuine possibility of existential risk as the death of humanity. But it's also our responsibility to the past, meaning all future generations passed their baton to us. The incomplete work of all the generations, because actually, there's a covenant... The old religions talk about a covenant between the human being and God. So, we got to talk about what's a covenant, what's God, and what does that mean, what's the space in between? But let's just hold that image. When you read deeper the interior sciences of the great traditions, they talk about a covenant between the generations, which is stunning, that there's a covenant between the generations in which one generation is covenanted with the previous generation. So, all of the past literally looks to us and says, our effort, our sacrifice, our tears, our nobility are dying for the evolution of consciousness. I sometimes think of as good men do, "Braveheart". How can good men not think about "Braveheart"? Good men and good women, "Braveheart".

AUBREY: I don't trust a person who hasn't thought about "Braveheart"--

MARC: I mean, "Braveheart" right? I mean, oh my God, right? I mean, hold, hold, hold, till you see the white of their eyes, right? And he's gorgeous. William Wallace is quartered, stretched and quartered and killed in a horrific way for us. In other words, for the evolution of consciousness, for the evolution of the possibility of a new story. And every single person who lived and died passed the baton test. So the whole past is looking to us. And finally, the whole future. We're the only voice of the future. Just think about that. Trillions of unborn people. I mean, if you want to say it in kind of stunning terms, trillions of unsung orgasms. Trillions of love makings that didn't happen, trillions of mothers who didn't hold their child, trillions of integrities, and art, and creativity, and goodness, and truth, and beauty. All of the future, quite literally says that we've never been at this time ever in history, the entire future literally depends on us. And we're the only voice for the future.

AUBREY: Yeah, if it wasn't enough that the death of the world in the present wasn't [inaudible 17:42]. Now, we have this. And there's a couple of things I want to touch on. One, the evolution of consciousness. We have actually evolved in consciousness. There was a time where actually we treated people as if they were chattel. Like many times in factory farms were treating animals. And now obviously, for the most part in the world, I know there's 30 million slaves illegally being held in some estimates. I get it, there's still like criminal enterprises there. But the consciousness of the whole understands that's deplorable. Slavery is now outlawed. And now we're starting to look at animals and movements towards grass fed, pasture raised. Our friends at Whole Foods have done a really good job with animal welfare ratings on every piece of meat, one to four, depending on what the treatment of this animal was, where they were from. Now we're starting to see regeneratively grown eggs and different vegetables. So, the consciousness is moving in an encouraging direction. And some of the horrors of the past, we've actually have transcended. It's just now that there has to be something more, and it has to be faster, and it has to be more complete than what we're doing right now. Which is just a gentle evolution of consciousness contrasted and juxtaposed with this exponential growth of technology and existential risk. Energy crisis, etc.

MARC: Yes, and beautifully said. So, let's just see if we can find this. At the leading edge, there is a shift in the center of consciousness and the evolution of consciousness, which we need to talk about is real. Consciousness evolves. So, 1000 years ago, democracy was an absurdity. It was a completely absurd notion. And although democracy is breaking down in many ways today, which is a different conversation which we need to have, and we need to go to the next stage of democracy towards a synergistic democracy. But the notion of democracy exists. The notion that we can talk about factory farms is real. The fact that slavery was outlawed in modernity and universal human rights came into being. In other words, a new story was told. In other words, in the Renaissance of that time between worlds and time between stories, they told a new story, and to the precise extent that they got the storylines right, that the plot lines were accurate. They burst what you were referring to as really the dignities of modernity, the stunning evolutions of consciousness, which are evolutions of love itself. And we'll talk about all of these ideas slowly, which birthed modernity in a stunning way. And to the precise extent that the plotlines were flawed, that there were missing pieces in the action, the inexorable and inevitable result of those flawed plotlines brought us at the apex of our exponentialized expressions of exterior technology, to the abyss, to the chasm. We actually exponentialize technology, which exponentializes damage and destruction. And we allowed a gap to happen, this inexorable horrific threatening yawning gap between our interior technologies, and our exterior technologies or said better, we didn't evolve the story. We told a new story in that time between worlds and time between stories in the Renaissance. Was a gorgeous, sacred moment. And yet we got some of the plotlines wrong and that birthed not the dignities of modernity, which is Habermas' phrase. But what Habermas, the great German philosopher who's still alive, I called him in his office. He's like 95 today, and he's still at his office in Germany kind of plugging away. Beautiful man. Habermas called the disasters of modernity. And the disasters of modernity are existential risk, and catastrophic risk, of two forms. We just talked about the first form, which is existential risk, the death of humanity. But there's a second form, which is the death of our humanity. There's the death of humanity, form one of existential risks. The second one is the death of our humanity. And that's no small issue. As you know, Aubrey, my dear friend Zak Stein and I are completing a book called "Techno-feudalism" on this, which is the notion of upgraded algorithms, and downgraded human beings. Where we actually begin to become bots on a worldwide web, and which we are part of, we begin to have a number, we can't access it without a number. And the web is based on the most sophisticated artificial intelligence that we've ever had exponentialized, increasing itself. Exponentializing, increasing itself by the day,. Artificial intelligence that's able to beat now without thinking as it were, a thousand of the best chess masters. All of that is now personalized meaning arrayed personally against you, in order to get you to make decisions that you didn't want to make. And you might think you're making free decisions. But actually, the web is split testing every second, sequences, to see which evoke a particular response from you. Those sequences are happening all the time. They're not monitored by any agency of any government, because government doesn't have data sciences available, because they're all working for the larger structure of the tech plex. So we're beginning to get to a place of the death of our humanity. I just spoke to a young man the other day, beautiful young man who spent the last eight years of his life, he's only 19, plugged into TikTok. Well, TikTok within the last few years, to high speed porn, to social media, and his mind was fried. He became a downgraded human. Now, this one young man is part of millions and millions and millions of downgraded humans we're producing. So that's the death of our humanity. So, all this is happening. Catastrophic risk, existential risks, the death of humanity, the death of our humanity, how do we respond?

AUBREY: And I think, one thing that I've been aware of for a long time is that consciousness is evolving much slower than these other processes. And that's partly because the structure, the superstructure that was in place, was actually suppressing the emergence of the intelligence of the pre-modern world, the indigenous First Nations cultures, which were largely wiped out. From the druidic cultures to the Native American cultures, whatever continent you found, we were wiping out the old wisdom that needed to be included and transcended. It wasn't all perfect, that's a fallacy.

MARC: Included and transcendent.

AUBREY: That was kind of wiped out. And other structures that gave advantage to what you could call capital E empire, in all of its forms. Whether it's church, or whether it's state, or whether it's war, or whatever it was, in all of its forms it was supported. And then the mitzvah, the practices that actually elevate consciousness, those things that can create exponential leaps in consciousness, were also outlawed and made illegal by Empire, which has been what I've been talking about for the last 23 years which is, my own path is psychedelic medicine. There's many, many paths, and that's not the only path. But one of the ways that you can actually exponentialize the growth of your consciousness is through these traditions which have their roots in pre-modern culture. I mean, my teacher, Don Howard, who we've been talking about a lot lately, revived the ancient Chavin tradition from thousands of years ago, where they served Huachuma to the pilgrims and it opened their heart and their consciousness, the Stele Raimondi, the centerpiece of their art was a smiling jaguar was seven dimensional layers of consciousness moving up, and his heart forward, and his head facing upwards. I mean, showing the spirit as his fangs went down, recognizing the animality of who he was, and his tusked feet dug into the soil. It was a symbol of okay, but no, we've fucking lost that. We lost that thing that could have advanced our consciousness in lockstep, in rhythm with the advancements of technology. But because Empire had the edge, a lot of that suppression happened. And that's at least one theory, one hypothesis, why this imbalance was created. But either way, here we are. And we have to create the new Torah, the new structure, the new superstructure, the new true story, and then the practices to help people evolve their consciousness to be able to actually access it, and live in it.

MARC: I'm with you in every word. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Let's play with it. So, you spoke to a particular dimension, a critically important dimension of what got lost in the great traditions, in other words. And your teacher, Don Howard, who we were talking about last night, because one of your close friends just passed.

AUBREY: Parker Sherry.

MARC: Parker Sherry, and we've been just saying his name as an invocation. Parker Sherry, who was close to you. And I was just so delighted to see Don Howard, and just to see his face and see the radiance of this wild man. And to have our lineage meet that lineage in this beautiful moment, not last night, the night before. But so, you're speaking about something critically important. And I want to just put it in a broader framework, which is, our response to the meta crisis. And I want to unpack for our friends what we mean by superstructure. So there's three basic ways to respond to this meta crisis, there's three schools of thought. I'm going to invoke our friend, Marvin Harris. He's a good sociologist. He talks about infrastructure, and about social structure and about superstructure. So, infrastructure means, and he's not talking about existential risk. He's talking about the three structures of society. But he's right about it. Infrastructure means the physical structures and how they work. So, for example, in responding to existential risk, infrastructure might mean we develop new technologies to find bio weapons, and identify bio weapons in the waste or in water. That would be a great infrastructure response to potential existential risk, which comes from weaponized exponential technologies available to rogue non-state actors. That'd be an infrastructure response. Social structure response might be maybe we pass a law that requires somehow the government to actually hire enough data scientists that can actually bind the tech plex. Because right now, the normal balance of powers is completely out of whack, because there's no one in government who actually understands the algorithms that are driving this techno feudalism.

AUBREY: So arguably, nobody in the government that's not captured by the money.

MARC: And that's not captured somehow.

AUBREY: the tech, pharma, war plex of all industry.

MARC: Completely captured, so there's no binding. That would be social structure. And what we're saying is, that's wildly important. We need to be doing infrastructure, we need to be doing social structure. We're saying what brings us together, and many things bring us together, but one of them in a deep way is, is that actually, the only way to ultimately be able to effectively motivate work in infrastructure or social structure, but to really the ultimate response, the direct hit if you will, and we'll talk a little bit about a direct hit in a second, is superstructure. And, superstructure means and this is a big breadth. Superstructure means, and Harris doesn't really explicate it well, but he's making mistakes in the right direction. But, superstructure means, if you think about it, and this took me a decade. It means a new story, but not a new story in the postmodern sense, not a new contrivance, not a new declaration, not a new claim. But what you mean by calling a true story, meaning a new story of value. So it's got to be a story of value, but that value can't be a postmodern social construction, meaning you just make the value up. So my friend, Yuval Harare, who I invoke sometimes as a foil because he's an unconscious parrot of the Zeitgeist. And he writes a book called "Homo Deus and Homo Sapiens" and he talks about value. And that book... Yuval is not a philosopher. What's important about that book is that it's defined or expresses the position of intelligentsia. So Barack Obama says, oh, great, best book ever. Bill Gates says, this is my book. Jeffrey, not Jeffrey, Mr. Bezos. What's Mr. Bezos first name?

AUBREY: Jeffrey.

MARC: Jeffrey, right? I call him Jeff. So Jeff, apologies to Jeff for the Jeffrey. You don't go by that, brother. So Jeffrey, when he does an interview a little while ago, the book behind him, during COVID is, is "Homo Sapiens". Sapiens, Yuval's book. And that's why the book's important is because Yuval is trying to tell a new story. He's a good storyteller, he's a good raconteur, bad philosopher. And he makes the claim, for example, and it's a shocking claim. Let's say chapter two "Sapiens", Libya's Gaddafi, right? Libya's ruler Gaddafi, who destroys and tramples human rights, and the modern notion of universal human rights, chapter two. Both of those are, no essential difference between them. They're figments of our imagination, this is a direct quote. Figments of our imagination, social constructions and fictions. And lest you think this was an accident, go to his second book, "Homo Deus". And again, I'm using Yuval here. Yuval, brother, total respect, love. Let's have dinner. Good, man. Yuval's a great guy, that's not the point.

AUBREY: Maybe. I like that you assume the best.

MARC: I'm assuming he's a good man. He's a good man, right? And Yuval, I think you were my son's teacher at Hebrew U. So, give him a good grade, man. But here's the thing. It's the position that actually undermines reality. There's too much talk of kind of this Kabbalah conspiracy of the evil ones. It's actually the structure of thought, which actually generates a collapse of value. So, Yuval in his second book, "Homo Deus" in chapter, I think seven, he gives this very, very insidious analogy about a kid from England, in the middle of the Crusades who goes to the Holy Land in order to slaughter Muslims. He says, wow, that's terrible. We all think that's terrible. Now you have the same kid, 800 years later, as it were, from the same place in England. There's another kid from England. He is now going to work for Amnesty International to save Muslims. And so, Yuval says, you barely catch it. You've got to read it very carefully. He says, and there's no difference between the two. They're both just fictions, figments of our imagination, and social constructions of reality. Now, let's get this straight for a second. Can you imagine that 100 years ago a president of the United States would say, this is my book, this is my story, man. That a major world entrepreneur would actually claim that as essentially, this is the book I'm reading, this is the book that does it for me. When the book basically says that value itself is a complete fiction. So in other words, we're in this moment when there's a fundamental collapse of value. So when we say a story of value, we don't mean contrived value. We don't mean Yuval's value which is a fiction. we mean value, a story, a value rooted in first principles and first values. And we're actually suggesting that there are first principles and first values that live in cosmos. And I'm going to talk about those a little bit. And that you have a new story of value that's rooted in first principles and first values, that actually becomes the intrinsic, shared grammar of value in the world. Not because you declared it, not because you dogmatically claimed it. But because it becomes self-evidently true that that's the case, and you can actually validate it in the best thought we have available in the world today. We actually bring together as you said, the best of indigenous thought, the best of pre-modern thought, the best of all of the deep structures of the interior sciences of the great traditions, the best of all the wisdom streams, all the validated insights of the wisdom streams of modernity, and all the validated insights of post-modernity because our friend Jordan Peterson is wrong when he just dismisses post-modernity as being just evil nonsense. No, Jordan, slow down brother. Principle of tantra, non-rejection. Post-modernity has important intuitions that need to be included. So, no one's not in the table. We bring everyone to the table, and we take the true but partial insights, validated insights, empirically validated insights. It's so exciting. Of all the great traditions, pre-modern, modern and postmodern, we weave them together into a new story of value rooted in first principles and first values that we can tell to school children, that we can study in the most sophisticated schools of learning, that we can share with barbers and doctors and truck drivers. And we actually begin to realize, oh, we're living in a shared story of value. Now we can respond to the meta crisis.

AUBREY: So we have already started reading and accepting applications for Fir For Service 2023. And I wanted to let y'all know we got confirmations from some of our guests who are going to be there, which if you're a fan of the podcast, you'll be familiar with these names. My brother Aaron Rodgers is going to come and participate and speak. Peter Crone, who's been a three-time podcast guest. If you haven't listened to any of those, definitely check them out. Dr. John Churchill, Dr. Kelly Brogan, there's Mateus de Stefano who we've done several podcasts with. Robert Edward Grant, who has been a two-time podcast guest. I mean, some of the most incredible individuals are going to be a part of this. And this is just the start of a very long list of people that we're bringing into this year long program. And maybe it's going to be the interactions with those people that will change your life. Maybe it will be with one of our coaches, myself, or Erick Godsey, or Caitlin Howe, or Vylana, or Kyle Kingsbury. Or maybe it will just be with the people themselves. I mean, this is a network of some of the highest performing, heart forward people that I've ever intermingled with. And some of my best friends have come out of this Fit For Service program. And every single member has some of their best friends coming out of the Fit For Service program. This is an alumni network that can help get you from where you are to that path, your dharmic path of where you want to go, truly, and be fit to actually walk that path. A path that you might not have even dared to dream, a path that might not even be available. But here it is, right here in front of you as an opportunity. So, if you're interested, definitely check it out. Go to fitforservice.com. Applications are only open up through December. And also, just so you know, this is an opportunity for a free call. Like you can join Fit For Service, have three months of coaching, come to a summit. And if you don't get out of it what we expect for you to get out of it, or what actually will serve your life in the best way, we'll give you all of your money back. Like, genuinely. There's no risk, and only the upside of what this could bring into your life. So take the chance, take the leap. Salta mortality, like this is your life. This is your one chance to live the life that you really dream. And potentially, this is the next best step to help you get there. And there's not a risk for you to try. So once again, if you're interested, just go to fitforservice.com. Applications are open now. And one of the things that I love when you start to talk about it, is this sense that this may seem all very complex, and also these stories that Yuval tells and postmodernity tells about the equivalency of stories, it may all be seductively sound right in our head. But we fundamentally know something is not true about it. So for example, "Avatar" is in the zeitgeist now. They just rereleased it in the 3D theaters. When you watch that movie being told, you fundamentally know that when they bulldoze the tree of life, and when they bomb home tree, you fundamentally know that that's wrong.

MARC: There's a violation of value.

AUBREY: You know it. You know it anthro-ontologically and you can explain that better than me, but you fucking know it in your body. And you know when Michelle Rodriguez actually turns to the other side and flies her helicopter against them, and you know when Jake Sally and the scientists go rogue, you know that they're the hero because you know they're acting in right accord. However, we don't fucking realize that we are not in that movie, actually participating in the whitewashing of propaganda that would have been present to convince all of these soldiers of the evil nature of the Navi people, and the necessity for unobtanium, without which billions of lives would be lost, whatever other contrivance. Or maybe even contrivance with grains of fact, or some kind of truth in there. So we know what's right. But then things get confusing in the details, in the propaganda structures that we're in. And I think we saw that during COVID, where it wasn't... People were so divided, and also in political. They're so divided that we just actually forget the humanity on the other side and are willing to launch any manner of insults and derision against our fellow brothers or sisters, because our mind has been shifted in an interesting way. So, it's both the truth of what we know which we know when our mind is clear from all of that nonsense, and also the slipperiness of getting stuck in a propagandized story that actually undermines these first principles and first values.

MARC: That's awesome. That's awesome, Aubrey. You make a whole bunch of points. I just want to pick up on two, because they're so perfect and important. One is movies matter. But what you mean by movies matter is, if I may, you mean that, and it's absolutely correct, that first principles and first values live in the structure of reality. And the stories we tell around the campfires, reflect and express, and movies are the stories we tell around campfires. I have to atone for many footnotes I've written. I've written a lot of, kind of long footnotes. But, I try and read everything and everywhere, right? From comic books, to kung fu movies, to every kind of music, to every kind of movie because she speaks. And by she, I mean the Eros of reality. We'll talk about what that means. Because again, we're doing this new thing just to share with people. Aubrey and I made a decision before we walked in today. We said we're not going to jump and leap and throw any term that we're not going to explain. So, even when I say the Eros, when she's the Eros of culture, we'll get to that in these dialogues. We're laying it down.

AUBREY: We'll do our best at least.

MARC: We'll do our best, we're laying it down. We're laying it down. But so when we're laying it down, she speaks in movies. Movies are stories of culture. I spent a night, one night, with Lana Wachowski. And I was at his house in Chicago with Karen. Lana made "The Matrix" and she did a gorgeous, gorgeous job. And she had just put out "V for Vendetta". And I was explaining to Lana what "V for Vendetta" meant. And Lana claimed, "Well, I made the move." I said, "Who cares?" And we laughed, we both agreed. Of course, in other words, she speaks in culture. And whether it's "The Matrix" or whether it's "Star Wars" or whether it's "Avatar", whether it's "Top Gun" which is just out right now. "Top Gun 2" and Tom Cruise is looking good at 60. Yay, Tom. We're not sure why or how but let's not go there. So, first values and first principles. The reason we resonate to the hero, is because the hero incarnates first values and first principles. And the slow deterioration of the hero in culture, watch the Marvel movies, is actually the grappling with first values and first principles. And in the latest "Thor" where Thor kills the gods, it's actually this postmodern moment, in which all the gods, all the first principles and first values are being killed. And the question is, after they're all killed, is there something which remains? Which is really what the new Thor is about. That's happening in the movie four, for those of you tracking.

AUBREY: Gods and Thunder or something.

MARC: That's right, which is in the theaters now. So, first principles and first values are real. They live in the structure of culture itself, and I think it's maybe worth it. Tell me if you're up for it, that we take a little dive into this story of value, rooted in first principles and first values, because really, what we want to do in these dialogues is lay down tracks for the great questions of what it means to be a human being. And if we don't line up first and set up the parameters of the conversation, then we're just declaring, we're just engaged in another form of dogma. So, maybe we spend a little time on first principles and first values and story of value, and what those are and how they work, and kind of reapproach that. And from there, we can start to talk about the big questions. Does that make sense?

AUBREY: Makes sense to me.

MARC: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So we've gotten to this place where we're filled actually with hope. Because what we're saying here is, the precise opposite of the position that lives in so many of the really smart leading intellectuals who actually are carefully looking at existential risk and books like "Overshoot" which is basically a Doomer position. Let's start to grieve it, because there's nothing we can do to change it. That's one major position of very serious people. And then the rest of the world is kind of looking away and ignoring it. And we're saying no, no, we have to look towards. You have to look towards. You can never look away. You can sometimes come closer. You can come sometimes step back, but you can never look away, so we're looking towards. We're actually facing fully. Robert Jay Lifton wrote a great book called "Facing Apocalypse". The willingness to look towards it, to look towards the meta crisis, but not to be disheartened, to actually be enlivened. And the reason we're enlivened is because we're saying, we're about to go deeper into it, I know, that you can actually identify the generator functions and the root causes diagnosis. What's that actor, Hugh Laurie, "House". That great show. Diagnosis. You read the contemporary media and the contemporary academic literature, there's virtually no diagnosis at all that's even vaguely accurate. So therefore, the treatment is a kind of global action confusion, or global action paralysis. We're saying no, actually, it's a failure of superstructure. It's a failure of being able to live in a story of value rooted in first principles and first values. And I know we're going to expand that and go into that, but that's radically hopeful. That's ecstatic. It's like, oh, there's a way through.

AUBREY: And also, I think it's worth mentioning that there's a hypothesis that's actually somewhat prevalent. And that hypothesis is that actually, there's a small group of people with the plan, but that plan is so self-serving and despicable that they dare not express that plan openly. Except for some reason, they let out little leaks, like you will owe nothing and you will be happy. And we're like, "What? Explain please." But they don't. So, there's this interesting idea that maybe there is a plan, maybe there is a superstructure, but that superstructure is, I think we feel it. If there is, it's not something that we want because it is not rooted in first values and first principles and universal dignity, love, truth, beauty, ethics, virtue.

MARC: So, what you're saying is, just insanely important on so many levels. Let's just catch a couple of them. In other words, if we don't live within a story of value, rooted in first principles and first values, which is the nature of cosmos, and we're going to show that to be true. We're not going to make any dogmatic claims here. We're actually doing the DaVinci Renaissance [inaudible 47:08] move, right? We're being the new renaissance, we're going to tell the new story of value, rooted in first principles and first values. No declarations, no dogmas. But bracket that for a second. What you're pointing to is, beautiful eh? Is that in the absence of Eros, and the new story of value is Eros itself... And in our dialogues upcoming we'll talk about what Eros means, but just for now, let's talk about Eros as the structure of reality. Reality moving, the experience of reality is radical aliveness moving towards deeper contact and greater holes.

AUBREY: And the principle, the ethics is Eros, is something that took... I read that from you. It took me six months to actually understand a very simple, three words; ethics is Eros. It took me a long time to figure that out. We'll get to all that.

MARC: We're going to get to reality as Eros, and what that means. We'll get to all that. But just for now, let's just say simply, that the reason we're excited when we go to the movies and we feel radically alive, is we're stepping into story. So, part of the experience of Eros is you're in a story that's going somewhere, watching a story that's going somewhere, identifying with the characters enlivens you. Being in the fullness of your own story enlivens you. And we have a sense that reality must have a plotline. It must be going somewhere. We didn't just get from quarks to culture, from mud to Mozart, from bacteria to Bach, from slime to Shakespeare, that's as far as I can go.

AUBREY: That was pretty good. I thought you were done at two. You went to four. See, I underestimate you once again.

MARC: We were moving with that. I was looking for Shakespeare, man.

AUBREY: That was good.

MARC: I was looking for Shakespeare. But that movement, that inherent telos of cosmos, that cosmos is Eros, separate parts becoming larger holes, and it has telos. So, telos and Eros is the nature of cosmos. So we live in a... My friend, Barbara Marx Hubbard, who I miss dearly. She was co-president of the center and a great futurist. Bucky Fuller said that Barbara was the futurist of the generation. Barbara and I talked maybe five times a day until she passed a couple of years ago at 89. So Barbara actually coined the phrase and I'm so delighted to invoke her, telerotic. We live in a telerotic universe. Just telos and Eros. And I worked with Barbara deeply on, let's actually define Eros and let's define telos. But she had the intuition, and she coined the phrase which I love. I also love citing people. So, Barbara was great. So we live in a telerotic universe that has telos and Eros. It's going somewhere. Let's just drop into this for a second. And the pain of losing the thread of the story, and of being in all the action of our lives, but not being able to find the plotline. I'm in a story. Kafka wrote a book, "The Trial" where the major character doesn't even have a name. His name is K. You can't follow the plotline. And so, the character goes insane, until the knife is plunged in. But the pain of the character is that the character has lost the plotline of the story. So, we have this feeling is, if we don't have the plotline of the story, in that absence of Eros, we have the feeling, the knowing is, well someone's concocting a plotline. Something's happening. So part of our intuition that something must be happening is conspiracy theory in its shadow form, and there is conspiracy theory in its shadow form, which takes individual facts, links them together and false pattern recognition, and claims a story. So it's a form of pseudo Eros, but what's driving it is, the knowing that there must be a story and since I don't know the plotlines, no one's ever told me a universe story that makes any sense, and it can't just be random. And I don't want a fundamentalist non-randomness, so conspiracy theory. So that's one form of pseudo Eros. But the other form of pseudo Eros is the world in which people are stepping in and saying, wow, the world is empty of value. This is what we call the Thanos move. If we can borrow the Avengers and movies again for a second, the Thanos movies, I've got to take responsibility for the world because no one else is going to. Thanos in "Avengers", I think the last two Avengers movies, he read Sartre and being in nothingness very well, where Sartre says, it's only you. There are no values in cosmos that exist at all. That's the existentialist move that births postmodernity. So, you've got to do it all and you've got to make the hard decisions. Those hard decisions might include, in order to respond to existential risk, let's reduce human beings to nanobots on the web, let's upgrade the algorithms, let's create universal basic income to keep everyone kind of quiet. But actually, we're going to control the system, we're going to place all of reality inside of what the psychologist Skinner called a Skinner's box, and we're going to actually literally pull the levers. We're going to be the controllers. And that's the subject of an entire serious academic book I mentioned before, and I'm finishing with Zak Stein. But they're saying, there's no Eros, there is no real story. So, we're going to make the story up. So, on the one hand conspiracy theory contrives the story, puts together a lot of misplaced facts, argues for false pattern recognition. But they wouldn't be going there if there wasn't some spark. And the spark is, actually people are stepping in, and actually trying to organize reality without first principles and first values, in a way which actually is leading and will lead to the death of our humanity. That's a big deal.

AUBREY: It's a big deal. Let me go back a couple of places. So first of all, to understand that story is actually part of first principles, first values, part of Eros. Story is part of Eros. So, to understand that. Now, but not just any story. To actually participate in Eros, it has to be a true story. And a story that is actually rooted in some truth that we actually know to be true. For no other reason, there's other ways in which we can describe something to be true, but we just know it. And in the absence of that, another story like the false conspiracy theories, that's pseudo Eros. Which is the approximation of that feeling of story being important, of the devastation of not being a part of a story like Kay from the thing. It's feeling, it's intolerable. So we'll find any old story that will work, but that's pseudo Eros because it's not real. It's not a real story.

MARC: Yeah, and this is critical. And, with your permission, I'm going to allow myself because I can't resist, because you're a good seducer, to be seduced into this conversation for a second because it's so big and it's so important. So let's lay a couple of tracks, then go backwards. Okay, so here we go. So, what you say is, of course, gorgeous and critical. So, the deep underlying, and we're going to talk about this of course in future dialogues, but when we say reality is Eros, we say that reality has a plotline, and a plotline is part of a story. So, one of the first principles and first values of reality itself is Eros, In other words, Eros is a value of cosmos that we move from separate parts to larger holes is an actual first principle and first value of cosmos, one. But two, that it's not just a mechanical movement. It's a movement that has freedom in it, that has plotlines, that has threaded action, which are the three principles of story. In other words, story itself, is not just a human creation. Story is actually a core structure of cosmos. Story means there's a plotline, there's some measure of spontaneous freedom of will moving towards. And there's not just constant conjunction of events, but there's causal connection, there's threaded action. One thing somehow leads to another. Those three dimensions, and I sat and had a long conversation with my dear friend, the kind of Guru philosopher kind of Nassau, Howard Bloom, who's an excellent scientist. And we had this deep talk. And Howard vows to be a stone cold atheist. That's Howard's public position, of course. He's an atheist like I'm the Pope. Although, he's an atheist in the sense that he's rebelling against the caricatures of the old traditions. And he speaks in purely scientific language. But we actually concluded together, and I wanted to test this against Howard, that the story goes all the way down the evolutionary chain. So, story always exists. Even at the level of matter, there's a threaded action, right? As Richard Fineman, Stuart Kaufman the mathematical complexity theorist, Fineman the physicist, point out there's a dimension of freedom, even the world of matter. There's an evolution of freedom, that's a different conversation. There's an evolution of story. In other words, story itself evolves. But the core notion of a plotline, of direction, of Eros, of some degree of freedom, right? Of a threaded plotline, that's structural to cosmos. So what we're saying is, and this is a first principle and first value of cosmos that needs its entirely own dialogue. And the indigenous people knew this, they understood this. That's why they were so engaged in story. That was their intuition. They intuited and that's what you were talking about earlier, that we need to reclaim some of that wisdom. One of the most essential wisdoms we reclaim from the indigenous people is the ontology of story. And that's the precise opposite, the indigenous moves the precise opposite of the overly sophisticated and therefore shallow, postmodern move, which is that story is just a contrivance. No, the indigenous people understood that story is a first principle and first structure of reality. Together with Howard, we've actually established that scientifically.

AUBREY: And this is a topic that we must let people know, we're going to bracket this. Because it requires us to move from Newtonian causality, which has no freedom and has no actual autonomy, to this other kind of quantum understanding of reality that goes all the way down to particles and--

MARC: This experience of will, right? And, Stuart Kaufman has correctly pointed out, and Stuart Kaufman wrote, a number of really... He was key at the Santa Fe Institute, and he's an excellent scientist. And really, at the leading edges of science today, you have this understanding that causality is a truth of cosmos. It's what I would call a third person truth of cosmos. When I look at cosmos from the perspective of third person, I see causality and a mechanical cosmos, and that's real. But another first principle and first value of cosmos is that there are three primordial perspectives which disclose reality. And one is third person, oh, Newtonian causality. Another one is second person. It's between Aubrey and Marc, the space in between us. The space of Eros in between us, that second person space of relationality, of intimacy, which we'll talk about in great depth. And then there's first person. There's the first person experience of reality. What's going on? What's my interior experience of will, of aliveness? So, actually, to suggest that reality is only Newtonian causality is idiocy. And to dismiss Newtonian causality is idiocy. In other words, the first principle and first value of cosmos is first, second, and third person of reality. And from that perspective, story is the first and second person expression of reality, which is storied. There's a there's a plotline, there's a narrative arc to cosmos, and we will bracket this. This is a whole dialogue that we need to do, but just to kind of honor what you brought to the table. So we're saying reality is not just a fact. Reality is a story. It has direction. It's a story of Eros.

AUBREY: And the denial of reality being a story is another story, and It's actually one of the most disturbing stories that I feel, again anthro-ontologically in my own body that feels the worst to me. I had a lot of people who said that movie, "Everything Everywhere All At Once", what is it? Is that actually what it's called? "Everything Everywhere All The Time".

MARC: The de-storing of reality was that movie.

AUBREY: The de-storing of reality. I watched it. Yeah, right, there was funny, there was people fighting with dildos and whatever. Some slapstick humor and some things. But there was something deeply, deeply wrong--

MARC: There was a nausea.

AUBREY: I was literally nauseated in watching it because it denied what I know to be true, which is there is deep meaning. It's not that reality means that every multiverse exists, and all are equivalent, so nothing fucking matters. Might as well just dive into the bagel and destroy it all. Because it's this nihilistic approach. And it's like, no, no.

MARC: That movie is a beautiful invocation. This is how culture speaks through a movie. Your actual experiences, what Sartre called nauseam. Actually because you feel, as you said so eloquently, there's this violation of first principles and first values... Now, just stay with me for a second. So, those first principles and first values embedded in a story of value. So, it's first principles and first values embedded in the story of value. You can also say it in reverse. It's a story of value, but rooted in first principles and first values. You feel the violation of that, because it lives in me. And that's the key. So, when you refer to this word, which is a key word we made up two, three years ago, with my friend Zak Stein, we talked about anthro-ontology. And I said to Zak, he said, "How do you know this?" I said, "I know it anthro-ontologically." We were in the midst of conversation together. An anthro-ontological is a key term because it's a key epistemological, too fancy of a word. It's a key form of gnosis, too fancy of a word. It's how we know shit. I think we got it. It's how we know shit. How do we know shit? How do we know stuff? So, we know things in a number of ways. But, but the core of knowing is anthro-ontological. Meaning anthro, human being, like anthropology, anthropocentric. And ontology for realsies. It's real, it's not contrived. Anthro-ontology. Aubrey says, I know in my body, that it's not just nihilistic. That it's not just a tale told by an idiot, Shakespeare, Macbeth, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I know it's got Telos, I know value is real. So I know it anthro-ontologically. Not because I'm making it up. Because when I clarify my interiors, I actually then get really quiet. Or when I'm doing a journey, or when I can actually perceive, see and actually participate in value. Value lives in me. And it's not only do I live in the universe, the universe lives in me. Not only do I live in a universe which is overflowing with value. All of the value in the universe literally lives in me, right? So, we'll talk later about the intimate universe in one of these dialogues. But we say we live in an intimate universe, but the intimate universe lives in me. So anthro-ontology means the mysteries are within us. And the interior sciences, which is a word we used at the beginning of our conversation, which we promised to explain, and right as we threatened to explain it, we shifted directions. So, let's fulfill that threat. Interior sciences means and it's such a fucking big deal. It means we don't just know things through exterior third person analysis. Exterior third person analysis is critical, and Newtonian laws and Kepler's laws, which are critical. But both Newton and Kepler also understood that there were interiors, they were both radically committed to interiors. And interiors means we don't just know things through the eye of the senses, through sensory apprehension, which is quantified by measurement. Which modernity didn't. Modernity moved from classification to measurement. And that which was real was that which could be measured by the eye of the senses, or the eye of the mind that does mathematics, that does logic. Those are both real, but neither of those stand without a third eye. And I call the third eye, the eye of consciousness. The eye of consciousness. The eye of conscious is real, and it's empirical. And you can subject to experiment. The eye of consciousness has four plays to it. It has the eye of the heart. What I know in the heart. I can feel reality. Universe feels and universe feels in me, because the universe lives in me. So I can feel the interior of reality, or said differently, I feel the interior of God, of that which is real because God is the real. So, I can feel the interior of the real anthro-ontologically. My heart feels the heart of cosmos because it's one heart, and it's one love, and it's one Eros. So the eye of the heart. And then there's the eye of value which you are implicitly referring to. In other words, I can actually apprehend and discern value. So, when we saw George Floyd be killed, we said, fuck that. That was a violation. All the postmodernists in a liberal world took to the street, in the middle of COVID correctly. Because they said fuck that. We just saw a violation of value, and nothing else mattered. That was beautiful. And when we saw Russia, and all the complexity of the Russia-Ukrainian issue, but in the first few weeks of the war, we got oh my God, glory to the heroes. Ukraine is struggling to be a democracy, and Russia is violating. And with all the complexity of the issues, and they're enormously complex. And friends of mine very sweetly, just put out a book that I didn't really write. I just talked it, and they wrote it, from a bunch of talks on the Ukraine war. So, it's complex, and there's multiple issues. But in the bottom line, there wasn't a moral equivalence there. And I know people have argued that there was moral equivalence. No, actually, Ukraine and Russia, where all the corruption in Ukraine and all the agendas of the kind of Pax Americana, there still was a moral equation there, in which Ukraine is trying its best and struggling to be a democracy imperfectly, and Russia went to crush it. And we all rallied, we rallied because we saw a violation of value. So, there's the eye of value. There's the eye of contemplation. When I go inside, and contemplation might be through psychedelics, and might be through meditation, but it's what's revealed to the eye of contemplation. And finally, the eye of the spirit, which I reveal through ritual, through practice. So the eye of consciousness has these four eyes, which are the response to the Eye of Sauron.

AUBREY: Which actually comes through when the eye is closed. So the Eye of Sauron leads when the eye is closed.

MARC: "Lord of The Rings" everybody for the illusion. I have Sauron, "Lord of The Rings".

AUBREY: And this is where I think we get these ideas of awakened, which means that you're actually opening this third eye, this eye of consciousness that comes through the heart, means opening the heart. It means opening your mind, because so easily when that eye is closed, those Sauronic impulses can become easily incepted. I mean, think of Nazism, for example. Like where they actually thought you would assume that they were doing the right thing, and obviously, we weren't there, we weren't inside them. But ostensibly, a lot of the people who have done ill in the world, done evil in the world thought that they were doing good. Why? Because that eye was closed. Because actually, if they'd seen through their heart, they would have seen the wrongness of that. And that goes back to what I was talking about before. A lot of forces are trying to close that eye, so that people are controllable to actually do the bidding of Sauron which comes through the closed eye.

MARC: Totally, and Nazism particularly was a horrific expression of pseudo Eros exponentialized. Nazism actually intuited that the scientific worldview was insufficient. It looked for the current of Eros, but it couldn't open the eye of value. It closed the eye of the heart, it didn't do the eye of contemplation. It didn't do the eye of the spirit. So, consciousness got distorted, and Eros became pseudo Eros. And that's what Nazism was. When we actually get what we're saying now, I mean, it's so wildly exciting and hopeful and critical. We're saying, actually, we can... We live in the unknowing. Uncertainty is a genuine part of reality. We bow before the mystery, and yet, and yet, we can know things. We actually have gnosis and gnosis is carnal, is Eros. To know is carnal knowledge. It's Eros. I know, I merge with, I'm part of. So, I've got this eye of consciousness, that's anthro-ontology. The eye of consciousness expressed as the eye of value. The eye of the heart. The eye of spirit. And, the eye of contemplation. That's all part of anthro-ontology. Anthro-ontology, the mysteries are within us. We can know shit. That's crazy. That's a new world. So with that in mind, we can--

AUBREY: And the practices to open that fucking eye are here now, and actually becoming not only culturally acceptable, but legal in many cases, right? Definitely culturally acceptable. Like 10 years ago when I talked about ayahuasca, "Go back to the jungle, you fucking hippie." That was the general response. Now, I talk about it and they're like, "How cool. I want to go with you one day." And that's only 10 years where this thing has shifted in the cultural mores and ideas. And this is again, just one path. I talk about it, I reference it frequently because it's been my path. But nonetheless, these things have opened my eye in all of its different fourfold forms, opened all of them. When I think about hope, I think about, okay, not only can we build the superstructure from an open eye, but we can actually go through the practices that help open that eye for everybody.

MARC: It's gorgeous. I mean, you said it beautifully, if the new story of value is the dharma, using that Sanskrit word. Dharma, the best integration of knowing we have, then we need not just dharma, we need yoga. And at this moment, in this time between worlds, and this time between stories, as we're facing existential risk, the death of humanity, the death of our humanity, what appears is, what needs to appear is a new story of value rooted in first principles and first values, and first practices. And psychedelics, the fact that psychedelics has both emerged in culture technologically, because much of psychedelics is natural, but other important psychedelics are actually the emergence of human creativity. So, there's actually two forms of psychedelics. The traditions of psychedelics, as you've pointed to for a couple of decades were lost. Your teacher recovers one of the last lineages and you're now carrying on that lineage. So what are you doing? You're recovering a path of the eye of consciousness at a moment in which we need first practices in order to discern, articulate and tell the new story of value. And for the first time, that's now moving to the center of culture, precisely at the same moment as the realization of existential risk is moving to the center of culture. So, in the intimate universe, that synchronicity speaks from she.

AUBREY: Hallelujah.

MARC: Wow, right? It's like a big wow when you realize how the intimate universe is playing. So maybe, since we're just laying down tracks this week, maybe we go backwards for a second, okay? So, let's go backwards. But I think we got to stop and... I don't think we can do psychedelics right now. Maybe we can chant which is a Hebrew lineage form of psychedelics. Just to step back and chant a little bit and then we step back in.

AUBREY: Sounds good.

MARC: Yay, yay. So this is a chant, I mean you know it, we've done it together so many times. It has a set of original Hebrew words that come from David and Solomon, in the lineage of the temple. And the words are [inaudible 01:12:57]. Let's sing a song to the Sabbath. But Sabbath is not an old time ritual. Sabbath is a palace in time, where you actually, once every seven days, however you count them, and whatever time of the week that comes out for you. Once every seven days, you live the dream. That's what Sabbath is, right? In other words, you don't wait, you don't become a Doomer. You don't say, I'm lost in despair. Even as we're working to respond to existential risk, we've got to do it from a place of ecstatic urgency, a place of celebration. Which means once every period of time, we step into the Sabbath place, and we live the dream. Do you remember Langston Hughes? The black poet? What does he say, Aubrey? He says, in a poem called "Harlem". He says, what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? So if we defer the dream, and we work on existential risk, and we don't actually live the dream, meaning full pleasure, full Eros, full stepping into the utter gorgeous richness of she. And we actually put all of our energy into kind of almost frantically working on existential risk, when we stop living the dream, we dry up like a raisin in the sun, or actually collapse. So, as we respond to existential risk, we've got to do it paradoxically, not from the place of the Doomer, not from the place of grief, in the place of actually celebration. We live the dream. So this is a chant about living the dream. And in this chant, there's the sense of the personhood of cosmos that speaks to me directly. That second person we talked about, that holds me, that trusts me. And it's this trust that we can do this together. And so, it's where we are today. We're in this radically hopeful place. We're ecstatic, we're urgent, we're grounded, we're radically academic and radically pop-cultured. We're doing something new that's never been done. So the chant comes from there. And it goes it goes something like this. And we've done it together so many times. [chanting 01:15:10] Silence and speech themselves are first principles and first values of cosmos, right? They're structural. So, brother, to speak of your love in the morning, and to trust you through the night. It's a love story. And well, that's ahead of where we are now. But it is a love story. And that's real.

AUBREY: And we've got to tell that love story.

MARC: We've got to tell that love story. And, really that's what we came together to do over the next year, two years, is to chapter by chapter, to ground the new story of cosmos, right? Like wow, and we're in Florence, or Florence is here. This is the new Florence. And we're doing it in Austin. We're doing it from Austin. We're being Florence. We're in the Renaissance. And we're telling this new story of value. Today we're just laying down the first tracks. We're laying down the invitation, the crisis. What's the crisis? Because our crisis is a birth. Crisis is an evolutionary driver. Crisis presses us into service with ecstatic urgency from the depth of celebration. So the Sabbath chant is, we're urgent. And yet, we're filled with hope. And we trust but not naively. We trust the capacity of the evolutionary impulse awake and alive in us, the same evolutionary impulse that was there at the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, that generated all of the creativity of cosmos, that's living in us right now. It's between us. And then as we come together, as everyone, we all come together in this unique self-symphony, a word that will we'll come back to and unpack. We're filled with to speak of your love in the morning, and to trust you through the night. And then in the second verse to speak of your love in the morning and reality talks and says, I trust you through the night. Cha, cha. So, let's dive in.

AUBREY: Let's dive in.

MARC: Let's dive in. Come a little closer there, brother. Come a little closer there. I keep going back there.

AUBREY: You keep floating back?

MARC: Floating back there.

AUBREY: Keep that microphone nice--

MARC: Keep that microphone. Wouldn't want to get in trouble here. So, let's go to movies. Because you invoked movies, and we talk about movies being the unconscious voice of culture. So let's go to the movie of this time to kind of reenter this question.

AUBREY: And the interesting thing about this is that, the movies are getting something right that's beyond what even I think the authors, and that's what you mentioned with Wachowski. They're getting something right that's beyond what they even know, because the universe, the cosmos lives inside them, and it speaks through them. The muse comes through in ways, they're like, wow. And anybody who's written anything understands this process. We're like, how the hell did I write that? Where did that poem come from? In some ways, it came from you, yes. And from some other place of depth of wisdom and knowledge. So, the movies are getting a lot right, but also what I see in movies and I think you do as well is, there's ways in which the storylines also veer off and point towards old stories, stories that need to be written, stories where the tables of those temples, where the stories live need to be flipped. And that messianic consciousness of no, no, no, that's not the right story. Let's retell the story in a different way, or tell a new story that can actually guide in ways in which it's leading all of us towards greater truth, beauty, love, wholeness.

MARC: Totally. The tables need to be overturned. And the Bollywood temples and the Hollywood temples, absolutely, and for the most part, the storylines are wrong, and actually an expression of a broken culture. But every once in a while, something whispers through. In one lineage, in the Aramaic lineage which we're so deep in, it's called [inaudible 01:20:43] the whisperings, the glimmerings of the light, the whisperings of light, the whisperings of the pattern. And there are patterns written on the walls of nothingness. And once in a while, those patterns find their way through. Because, as you said, and as we've said so many times, the enemy universe lives in us. And so, it speaks through. And if you want to get a sense of how that works, think, Aubrey of, y'all just did an event a couple of months ago, a few months ago, I think it was in the summer, right? And so, think about, you're at that event and you're giving a talk on stage.

AUBREY: Arkadia.

MARC: Arkadia, you're at Arkadia. And as you're giving that talk, there's something that happens between you and the people there, that you're pouring into them, but they're pouring into you. And there's this field, and in that field, your mind clarifies. And you speak things that you couldn't quite have spoken that clearly without the Eros of that community. So, when a script writer is writing a script, which is actually financed and organized, actually the Eros of reality, the non-random universe, the intentionality of cosmos lives in that space. And when we don't have a sufficiently scientific formula to describe it, we call it magic. But magic is just unwritten science. In other words, she enters. And she plays and she dances and she configures. And the precise screenwriter, or script writer is allured through a series of events to a particular place and a particular time, to write a particular script. And allurement which is a structure of cosmos, which we'll talk about in a future dialogue when we talk about the question of where, where are we? So the cosmos is generated and animated by allurement, and allurement didn't stop at, I don't know, photosynthesis. Didn't stop at mitosis or meiosis. It didn't stop at the genome, which is all a structure of gravity or electromagnetism. Allurement brought us together. Why do we even know each other? So allurement brings a scriptwriter from a particular script, and a particular place, and a particular time, with a particular set of proclivities. And then what comes out is woven quite literally, by cosmos. And that's actually experience of creativity. You feel I'm being lived by a larger force, something open, something's moving through me. I'm in the flow, I'm in the zone, And even if I don't exactly know what I'm writing, something emerges. So, "Star Wars" which is probably the most watched story in reality, at least the universe as we know it, and certainly planet Earth, in the last, since 19 mid 70s when it came out. So, let's just freeze frame for a second on, maybe one of the most epic, and no one scene in "Star Wars". So we're in "Episode Six" movie three, in which we have to take down the Death Star. And that's where we are. And we got Luke Skywalker, who we know is actually Darth Vader's son, who's Anakin Skywalker. And there's no way to take down the Death Star. It can't be done. The Death Star is the culture of death, and the Death Star is existential risk and catastrophic risk. Catastrophic risk is death to billions. Existential risk, the death of humanity or the death of our humanity, that's the Death Star. So, culture puts in the center of culture, as existential risk is literally coming to the fore. This kind of adventure movie talks about the Death Star, which is this culture of death and the Death Star has planet destroying weapons. That's the point.

AUBREY: And the people who are running it and creating it are the Empire. No accidents in the wording of that.

MARC: And the tech flex, technologically enormously advanced, artificial intelligence driving huge parts of the system. R2-D2, and can that be animated? And that's a whole question that's at play in "Star Wars". And you've got the Death Star. You've got an impenetrable culture of death. You just don't have any possible forces to go up against it except for these few little fighter crafts, manned by a few good men and women, who actually realize there's a weakness in the Death Star. And there's a separate movie that's made about how they got those plans, an entire movie about how do they get those plans to the Death Star, which is a fantastic movie. And we'll talk about that another time, maybe, when we do movies. But now they have the plans. And the movie tells us again, culture speaking right through the movie, that the only way you can take down the Death Star is through a direct hit. But if you score a direct hit, you blow the whole thing up. And that's a big deal. And before we talk about what a direct hit is, let's just talk about the culture of death for a second. I mean, the Death Star, I mean, it's a shocking reality. Because the culture of death means, there's something that I like to call the first shock of existence. And the first shock of existence is when human beings realize they're going to die. But not like an animal does. It's the realization of the existential fact of death. And there's an argument of whether it happened in the hunter gatherer period, David Graber, or more classical historians, that it happened in the period of farming when there was surplus, which created surplus time, which allowed for the thoughts. However you want to tell that that anthropological historical story. We start contemplating our death, but it doesn't destroy us. The experience of the first shock of existence presses us into our evolution. In other words, when I meet death head on, whether it's in a psychedelic experience, or whether it's at the dawn of humanity, the first shock of existence, the experience of death presses me to antho-ontologically, not to contrive meaning as the post modernists say, but to actually anthro-ontologically go inside, and disclose evolving structures of meaning. That's a big fucking deal. That's what the first shock of existence does, the death of the individual human being. Then we go through all of culture, and all of its structure stages of development. And then holy shit, we hit this, and I want to call it, the second shock of existence. And the second shock of existence means not the death of the individual human being, but the potential death of humanity. But here's the thing that can either drive us to depression, doom, or to just kind of go on with business as usual, the "Don't Look Up" movie. Everyone just looks away. Or, just like the first shock of existence pressed us into the unfolding of the human spirit at its most beautiful, the second shock of existence, the death of humanity, has the potential to actually press us into giving birth to the new human, and then to humanity. So that's like, wow. So as we face the second shock of existence, we don't turn away. We look in, we face in, "Braveheart". Hold, hold, don't engage in a global action paralysis, don't be shooting blindly. Hold. Let's actually see it. See it so we can really clearly see it, and then be pressed into the most noble, the most wonderous, the most glorious, the most stunning acts of human creativity, which is the next great transformation. What we call in the new story of value, the birth of Homo amor. The birth of amor love, the birth of the new human, the new humanity. And that's, of course, its own full dialogue, what that means to move from Homo sapien to homo amor. But that's the direct hit. So, the direct hit is, here's the direct hit. The direct hit is telling a new story. In other words, the direct to the superstructure. Now we've come all the way back. What we're saying is, that the direct hit, yes, all the infrastructure work, critical. Oh, my God. Yes. Social Structure work, of course. Yes, yes, yes. And that's not the direct hit. To animate both the infrastructure work and the social structure work, you can't do it. It will all collapse. All the infrastructure work and all the social structure work will collapse, until we generate a new emergent order, a new cultural enlightenment, a new stage in the evolutionary story, a new human and a new humanity, which has to be rooted in a new story of value, rooted in first principles and first values. Wow.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's truly a revolution of thought. It's a new story on a different octave. Because what we've seen is Empire be replaced by another Empire, be replaced by another Empire, be replaced by another Empire, and it just goes on in perpetuity, but it's still actually Empire with a different face. And the story doesn't change. It's just the actors change. And whichever side of the line that you're on, maybe you're the victor, maybe you lose, either way, but it's still empire, in another form. And what we're saying is there has to be another type of story. And yes, we may use hierarchical structures as Empire did. We may use capitalism, which has definitely been capitalized on by Empire. We may use a lot of the things that Empire has built, the technology that Empire has built. But we're going to be organizing in a different structure in a different way entirely. It's a whole new story.

MARC: It's a whole new story, and beautiful. By the way, I just want to say something about beautiful for a second. We get to be excited. And it's part of the new human and new humanity. There's this illusion, that if you talk slowly, with many pauses, between your words, you're saying something profound. That's bullshit. Not only is it exciting, it's urgent, and it's what we call ecstatically urgent. In other words, we're talking about the failure of the past, the death of the present, and all the voices of the unborn future that actually are in peril. And we're talking about the ability to actually see a way through, and to actually say, we can actually avert that suffering, and turn that suffering into a potential utopia, because we're not just poised before a potential dystopia. We're also poised before a potential utopia, we're between dystopia and utopia. We could actually create the most gorgeous world that's ever been created. And so, when you say something, and you formulate it beautifully, of course, I'm going to say beautiful and be excited. And there's this this sense that, when I was with the Dalai Lama, I was in his room in Dharamshala, a story we'll tell another time. And I shared with him something about the nature of love. This dialogue is actually recorded on my website. He got, "Beautiful, beautiful!" He has this beautiful ability to be in that childlike delight. And so, we're in this childlike delight, but it's the child that lives hopefully in the suffering wise man and woman, right? But we're excited, because this is exciting. We're trying to articulate, if you will, and if I can be audacious, a new gospel. And a new gospel means the good news. And the good news is, it doesn't have to fucking blow up. We don't have to fucking die. That untold trillions. And unless you don't take that seriously, unless you're looking away, in which case, you can kind of look at two guys getting excited about actually being able to change the vector of the story, and say, "What are they so excited about?" Well, that's because you're asleep, brother, sister. When you actually feel the imminent suffering of billions of people, and the present suffering of billions, and we need to do the same thing to heal present suffering that we need to do to avert future suffering. Of course, we're excited. I mean, it's exciting.

AUBREY: And another thing too, is, I think, a lot of times people feel, well, somebody else is going to figure this out. And they place themselves in this kind of role as a non-player character as the term would go, which comes from video games, where there's little characters that are moving around and actually don't have agency, are not controlled by a player who has consciousness. But a lot of people feel like NPCs, non-player characters in this big landscape of a game that's being played by other people. But actually what we're going to be talking about, and our next dialogue is going to be about the importance of every individual understanding that they are, to use your language, chapter and verse in the new story. That each person, there are no non-player characters. That we're all contributing, and laying our energy into this new story to allow it to actually emerge from the field. And so, we're all going to be participating. We're all going to be players. It's not just Luke Skywalker with that audacity, or that wild hillbilly from "Independence Day" who finds the way up to destroy the spaceship. No, it's not one person. It's a sangha. It's all of us.

MARC: Absolutely. And again, beautiful, right? It's beautiful. So, the new cultural enlightenment is rooted in what we're going to call in future dialogues, the democratization of enlightenment, which is the democratization of greatness. And it's in that, actually human beings have unique gifts. When I'm giving my unique gift, when I'm Robert Redford in that movie, "The Natural" and I'm up to bat, right? And that's what I'm doing, and I'm in my story, I hit it out of the park. I have that capacity to actually be called to give my gift, and my gift is my greatness. And we need to democratize enlightenment and democratize greatness, and move from a place when basically there's just a few players in the field. And everyone else is in the stands. And the image of Homo amor, the image of unique self-symphony, the split between the players and the stands is obliterated. We begin to get a self-actualizing cosmos, a self-organizing universe, which organizes in accordance with the inherent principles of cosmos, and literally generates a new human and a new humanity, which has freedom, which has diversity, but there's a shared story of value rooted in first principles and first values as the context for our diversity. So, that's where we want to go. But let's go back to our Death Star. We've got our culture of death, we've got our first shock of existence, our second shock of existence. And we know that we need a direct hit in order to respond to the meta crisis. And a direct hit means a new story. A new story of value rooted in first principles and first values. And I know we haven't explained those words quite yet. So I just want to fill in one piece in, and throw it back to you. So, what's the present story? And, it's if you want to understand how we got to existential risk, we need to understand what's the story we're in that we need to change. And this is just laying down tracks in the first conversation. So, the present story itself is the generator function for existential risk. And therefore the changing of the story, you just begin to see how coherent this is. These are not dogmatic claims. This is the coherence of cosmos. The present story is the generator function for existential risk. So therefore, changing the vector of the story actually allows us to avert existential risk. But not only that, to actually generate, the new human, new humanity to generate a utopia. And by the way, the one thing I agree fully with my friend Yuval Harare on, is that in fact, the one thing that changes history, his story, her story. The one thing that changes history is a new story. And Yuval correctly summarizes the anthropological literature. It's only a new story of value, that actually changes the vector of history. It's only the telling of a new story. So, what's the present story?

AUBREY: Well, the presents story definitely has a myth of separation deeply woven in. And I think that's a great gift that Charles Eisenstein gave us in writing his book, "The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible". He really elucidates the nature of one aspect of this story, which is this belief that we're all individual skin encapsulated egos, a phrase you're fond of using. And that we're all completely separate and disconnected from everybody and everything around us. That is one part of the old story that needs to be included and transcended in that, yes, we are separate, but no, we're fucking not.

MARC: Beautiful. Beautiful. Let's start there. I don't know the book, and I look forward to meeting Charles. But his point is absolutely correct. And you just capitulated it beautifully. And that was really the realization of the great traditions. When Albert Einstein says that separation is an optical delusion of consciousness. This myth of separation is core to the present story. And let's see if we can see what's the story. So the separation is an ontology. It's not only is that separation is the false ontology. It's actually a value. You're supposed to be separate. So, it's an ontological myth, and it's become a value. But let's see, what's the story it generated? So, the story it generated is a success story. The success story is, reality is driven by rivalrous conflict based on or governed by win lose metrics, all the way up and all the way down. I haven't quite said this out loud before. We talked about it spontaneously yesterday, I think with Erick, that wonderful man I was so delighted to meet. I just saw the movie "Top Gun" because you have to track culture. And there's this incredible scene where Tom Cruise, Maverick, is a brilliant test pilot, test fighter pilot. And he defies the kind of powers that be, incarnate in Admiral Cain, and drives his plane to Mach 10 In order to stop Congress from removing funding. And the admiral is furious with him but has this kind of grudging respect, calls him in and he says, "Let me ask you a question, Captain. Why are you a captain?" And he goes through his record. Distinguished, distinguished, distinguished, this medal, that medal. "Why are you a captain?" He says, "You could be an admiral. You could be a senator. What's wrong with you?" And, Cruise is kind of funny, and he says, "Well, I guess that's one of the mysteries of the universe." And the admiral says, shut the fuck up essentially, just, why are you a captain? The implication of the question is, is it's a win lose metrics. You could have climbed this a million times over, what's wrong with you? You're somehow sick. And Cruise has this great response, which I think part of the next dialog which he says, and he gets soft for a moment, he says, "I'm where I'm supposed to be, sir." I'm in my story. The Eros of being in my story is actually the new story of value. And Cain is representing the classical story in culture, which is rivalrous conflict, you get ahead, you get major, and then you get colonel. And then you get general, and you get five-star general, and everyone, every company, every corporation, every family, every nation, every set of ideas, division and--

AUBREY: Every Instagram account.

MARC: Every Instagram account, every bank account, social media itself.

AUBREY: The only way the ego knows itself is in comparison to the field. And so, the only way that the ego actually advances is to place itself above another, and compare itself to another. How do you know if you're a good basketball player? Well, you play people, and then you determine whether... And that's the healthy way for the ego to get exercise. You go out there with your buddies, you talk a little shit, you play some hoop. And your ego gets to live and thrive, and also the Eros of the experience and the flow of it. But you're actually playing with the ego in a healthy way. We're not trying to eradicate the ego that says we're separate, that says I'm going to fucking take you down, I'm going to go left and you're not going to be able to stop me. Then you go left, and you spin right, and you laugh in the person's face, and you're like, hell yeah. And then they do the same thing to you. And there's a beautiful place for that. But it cannot be the only story that's being told.

MARC: Gorgeous. In other words, separation is not quite a myth. And this is where I'll have to read Charles. But let's just talk about the great traditions. Great traditions make a mistake when they say separation is a myth. Separation exists in the mind of God, and that's essential what you just intuitively and beautifully said. Separation is real in the mind of God. We never evolve beyond ego. We never want to evolve beyond ego. What you just said implicitly, complete correctly is, we evolve beyond exclusive identification with ego. So, the ego has a play. The ego prefigures, which we'll talk about in future dialogues, we're going to call unique self. So, the ego is real, but it's just a small piece of the story. And so, when the story is rivalrous conflict, governed by win lose metrics, then we generate extraction models, then we generate exponential growth curves, then we generate races to the bottom, then we generate multipolar traps which generate artificial intelligence that shouldn't be generated. In other words, every single existential risk is based on a rivalrous conflict, governed by win lose metrics success story. One, which generates the second generator function of existential risk, which is fragile systems. The systems that are complicated, fragile, in which the parts don't even know each other. And everyone is operating in their own silo of a win lose metrics. Now, this is a very big deal, because again, we just identified two core generator functions for existential risk, which are the false story, the pseudo story, which apotheosizes, makes separation the only reality instead of just a partial reality, which ignores the shared ground, and which makes competition zero sum instead of healthy. But that's not minor, that generates existential risk. It's shocking. So, that's as far as we got, Aubrey, maybe two, three years ago, four years ago. So wow, we've diagnosed and we're feeling pretty proud of ourselves. And then we realized, it's actually, we've got to drop in one step deeper. And this will take us, I think, close to home for today, which is, there's actually a deeper root cause, which is critical, because hope's based on an appropriate diagnosis. We're opening up the field. There's a deeper root cause than even those two generator functions. That underneath those two generator functions, there's a deeper root cause, which we want to call a global intimacy disorder. And the global intimacy disorder is actually another name for the meta crisis. It's not a meta crisis. It's a global intimacy disorder. We need to do an entire dialogue about intimacy and the intimate universe, but just one sense, there's an intimacy equation, where we're creating equations of interior sciences as we're writing this new story. And one of them is, I'm just going to give you one snippet of one. One snippet of one equation. Intimacy equals shared identity. Intimacy means we have shared identity. So, if I'm in a win lose metrics with you, which is zero sum, means we don't have shared identity. It's rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics, which becomes zero sum, and it's totally fine if two billion people don't have drinking water. And it's totally fine if tech billionaires build bunkers to protect against that day. And that's what the strategy that's happening now. It's totally fine if, wow. In this very moment, in the United States, there's 50 million people without health care. Because it's rivalrous conflict, governed by win lose metrics. We don't have shared identity, we're not intimate with each other. And two, that rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics generates fragility. What Nassim Taleb accurately calls a fragile system or a complicated system. complicated meaning the parts don't know each other, they're not intimate with each other. There's no shared identity between the parts. So if Bear Stearns office in the Far East generates a new financial instrument, that then goes to America, then that might participate in generating the mortgage crisis and meltdown, even though the person in the far east office who generated the new financial instrument had no intimacy with what was going on in Idaho. So, the fragility of the system. So, those are expressions of a global intimacy disorder. And this is where it goes home. It gets crazy exciting now. So, we have a global intimacy disorder. But one second, all of our existential risk problems, challenges are global. So we have global challenges, which require global solutions. Global solutions require global coordination. And global coordination requires global residents who have to resonate with each other. And global resonance requires global intimacy. And global intimacy is based on direct hit Death Star. Global intimacy is based on a shared story of value. Wow. It's just like, it's so structural, just like between a couple. If Lady V and Lord A are trying to create intimacy, or Kristina and I are trying to create intimacy, we need to know, what are our values? And if we don't have shared value, we can do all of the relationship acts in the world, our intimacy is going to break down. So intimacy as shared identity, it's only when we have a shared story of value rooted in first principles and first values, that we can actually establish global intimacy, which then creates global resonance, which then creates global coherence, which then creates, oh, global coordination. That's the direct hit. The direct hit just ripples through the system. So you actually see structure. We're not making this shit up. Actually, the direct hit is actually to tell a new story of value, which then generates a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity. And we don't run into the utter idiocy that we saw, for example, in COVID, which was a dress rehearsal, for existential risk and catastrophic risks. It was just a dress rehearsal. It was a minor dress rehearsal, in which we have this virus that doesn't respect national boundaries. And yet, each country is fucking making policy independently of other countries for a global problem, which resulted in, it was one of the causes, for millions of unnecessary deaths, when clearly you can only respond to a virus, however you should respond to it, whatever your response should be, however one puts together that information, clearly, it's a global response. That's clear. And we all don't remember the global conference that took place in the beginning of COVID, where we saw on global communication structures, all the world leaders get together and say, fuck national boundaries, we're part of a global intimacy, we feel each other, we recognize each other, which is part of what intimacy means. We have shared identity, we feel each other, we recognize each other, we have a shared field of value. That didn't happen because there's no global intimacy. So, that was just a blip expression of how actually, the breakdown happens when there's a breakdown in shared story of value. Wow, so that's direct--

AUBREY: And, I think people are accurately terrified that the people who are trying to create some kind of global intimacy, it's going to be imposed top down, authoritarian, totalitarian, control.

MARC: Based on contrived value. It's not intrinsic value, it's contrived value. That's why I will never say, brother, the phrase, a universal grammar of value, unless we say as a context for our diversity. It's a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity. It's not value what someone declares, or makes up. It's actually, when we actually... This maybe brings us to the last part of our conversation.

AUBREY: So, one of the aspects of rivalries conflict, win lose metrics, this is something that James Carse describes in his book, "Finite and Infinite Games". And it's this idea, and if I bring it back to the basketball playing analogy. Fundamentally, we know it's wrong when you're out playing pickup basketball or actually any type of basketball. If you make a move to undercut somebody while they're in the air because you want to hurt them and take them out of the game, we know that that's fundamentally wrong. However, it ascribes to those values of rivalrous conflict, win lose metrics, like take them out. But we understand implicitly that if you keep doing that, if you put your feet underneath somebody when they're taking a jump shot, and sprain their ankles, all of a sudden, you have no more players to play your game. And so, while we're in a finite game with a scoreboard, with a terminal decision about who won or lost, we still have a deeper understanding that we're all playing the infinite game. And the infinite game is we want to keep playing, we want to keep playing basketball. And so, what we're talking about is that some of these rivalrous conflicts, and win lose metrics can be played, but they must be played... The finite game can be played, but it must be played within the context of the understanding of the infinite game.

MARC: Beautifully said. In other words, what you're saying is, and perhaps what James Carse is saying, I don't know, I haven't read the book. But what you're saying is, and I think is completely right. I just want to add one piece, which is, one of the expressions by a particular Dutch thinker, whose name I can never fucking pronounce, is that the human being is Homo ludens. And Homo ludens is the human being who plays. And that play discloses something about reality. Play is actually a trace of the Divine. Now, when we play sports, for example, when we play, there are rules that govern the game. And those rules are the values of the game. Now, if we violate those values, because we're in rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics, you point out that we're allowing the finite game to trump the infinite game.

AUBREY: Indeed.

MARC: And, now I'm going to say a bump, and I'm going to say and, because I don't know how he unpacks this, so he may unpack it this way. So, I'll say it as an and, not as a but. The reason we want to play the infinite game, and the reason the violation of value is problematic, that's a better way to say it. The reason the violation of value is problematic is not just because if we take out a basketball player, and that becomes a norm, we stop playing basketball. Even if you could meta theoretically construct a reality in which you would take out three, and somehow it wouldn't exponentialize, if you could create that trolley car problem, it would still be a violation. The reason it's a violation is because it's a violation of value. That's what you're pointing towards, and we know that. We actually experience--

AUBREY: And also, it points to the fact that actually, every interaction of play that you have with another player is a unique experience of you playing with that other unique person playing, and there is actually no replacement. This is not like number 25. This is Jonathan Thomas, or whoever the fuck that is. And you and Jonathan Thomas getting to line up and play against each other is not replaceable.

MARC: And it's gorgeous. So play, and we're going to explain what we mean by first principle and first value, but just for now, we'll say, play itself is a value of cosmos. The individuals, the unique individuals, are values of cosmos, because we're going to see uniqueness as a value of cosmos. And when I violate the rules of play, the deep rules of play, because the deep rules of play are not the contrived rules that are made up for that specific game. But there's a shared set of rules of play which are the fairness of the play, the integrity of the play, which is the field of value, which underlies the field in whichever sport is played. There's a field of value that underlies all the fields. And that value we experience in us intrinsically. It actually discloses itself to us and when we're not in the field of value, then the field of play breaks down. So beautiful, beautiful. So, let's get to value, because we really have to get here. And this is in some sense, we've been moving towards this direct. We said a direct hit, which takes down the Death Star is not just first principles and first values. It's first principles and first values rooted, embedded in, a story of value. So what the fuck do we mean by value? What are first principles and first values? Are we really just fundamentalists in disguise? Speaking for values, the fundamentalist world says we're for values. And the postmodern world says values are relative, and we're really fundamentalists in disguise, who happened to dress a little bit differently, and do a little bit different lifestyle? No, no, we're not. Although fundamentalism has something important to offer, because everyone has a place at the table. And fundamentalism intuits that value is real. That's what they're standing for. And that's a right intuition. And post-modernism intuits that the way fundamentalism expresses value is flawed. And that's problematic. And that's a correct intuition. So, both the pre-modern fundamentalist view, when I say pre-modern, it lives in the pre-modern period until the Renaissance, but it lives all over the world today. All three periods, pre-modern, until the Renaissance. Modern, let's say, from the Renaissance to the late 70s. And postmodern, which starts to sweep the world from, let's say, the 80s till today. All those three structures of consciousness are in the world today. They exist at particular periods in history, but they're all in the world today. So, fundamentalism today all over the world is a pre-modern consciousness. Modernity is modern consciousness. And then postmodernity, postmodern consciousness, but all three exists. And by the way, all three exist in us. All three of those are intuitions of reality that live in us, and they're all true, but partial. So, let's see. We're not fundamentalists. We're actually seeing something which is novel, which is emergent, which is evolutionary, which is the root of this new story, this direct hit on the culture of death. And here's where it gets crazy exciting. And here's where the academy broke down. I spend time in the world of the academy in Oxford, I wrote my doctorate there. My co-President did Harvard. I've explained to him that Oxford is a much better school, he doesn't quite get that problem. So, great honor to the academy--

AUBREY: Great example that shit talking still exists in the new--

MARC: Total. And rivalrous conflict based on win lose metrics, totally. So, we need to articulate what we mean by value. And what are these first principles and first values? Why are they not fundamentalist? And why do we decry and reject the postmodern deconstruction of value? And essentially, what we need to engage in now is, after all the deconstruction of postmodernity, that Harare, who we cited before, parrots and epitomizes, what we have to engage in is the reconstructive project. So, this is the reconstructive project happening right now in the last part of our dialogue. So this is evolution of consciousness. You brought evolution of consciousness to the table earlier on. So the sentence is, every generation participates in its evolution of consciousness, which is the evolution of love. And in this generation, if we don't participate in that evolution, we generate dystopia in the forms we've discussed. Death of humanity, death of our humanity, or catastrophic risk. So we have to participate, we're compelled. We're coerced by she herself. She demands we participate. So let's do this right now, and see if we can really take seriously the objections to value, and then just blow it open, love this open, and actually see value emerge before our eyes. So, here we go. Let's do a history of value. Let's just play for a second, okay? So, if we did a history of value, a short history of value, we'd say what does value mean in the pre-modern world? Let's say, until the Renaissance, you've got all the great religions. Each great religion says we stand for value. And in part they do. They intuit real value in cosmos. They get a little confused because they think that their cultural historical power drives for triumph and hegemony are also values, and they don't distinguish between real depth structure values intrinsic to Cosmos, and values that are really power drive disguised as values. So, the great religions engage in rivalrous conflict, governed by win lose metrics, but not between individuals, but between religions. And religions then represent themselves in kingdoms. But basically, the pre-modern world is straight on rivalrous conflict, governed by straight on win lose metrics, and everyone's arguing whose values are right, and it's a triumphalist world. My values are the best values. And the best vision of the end of days is, I fucked you over and I won, and you're now bowing before my vision of value. So, in pre-modernity, there's a correct intuition that values real, number one. Pre-modernity uses indigenous cultures, eye of consciousness, eye of the heart, contemplation. They use good methods of the interior science to discern that value's real, and yet, consciousness hasn't yet evolved. They get really confused thinking that triumphalist, mutually exclusive systems of value. My value is really real. Yours is much less real. And as a matter of fact, I should probably convert and kill you to my value. And if you don't, if I don't, I'm somehow flawed. So, there's this ethnocentric chauvinism. There's this triumphalism, there's the sense of mutual exclusivity. There's this rivalrous conflict based on win lose metrics, which causes modernity to come along and say, "Fuck that."

AUBREY: Yes, all that yes.

MARC: That's just the beginning.

AUBREY: And also, that's not the only aspect of pre-modernity that was troublesome because there were some more animistic First Nations cultures pre-modern, that understood their interconnectivity with everything around them.

MARC: And even they, even though they got it metatheoretically, they slaughtered the next tribe virtually always.

AUBREY: Many times, many times. Or if they didn't, like the culture Chavin that I mentioned, which did a lot of things--

MARC: There were moments.

AUBREY: Really beautifully, where they served Huachuma to all the pilgrims that came, they didn't have... There was actually no evidence of war for 800 or 1000 years, archaeologically, in any records or in any stories. However, in El Brujo, which was a which is a coastal city, they would sacrifice humans to the weather gods, to keep the rains and floods and everything working in right order. So yes, they got a lot of shit right, then stuff that we can include and learn from. But still, there was these superstitions, which is a clear violation. You cannot sacrifice a human being for the fucking weather. One, doesn't work. Well, I guess, I suppose in some magical blood, magical idea--

MARC: And even if it does work.

AUBREY: And even if it does work, it's so fucking wrong. It's wrong.

MARC: This is really important. So, you said two different things, and I want to honor both of them, because they're both really important. One is, everything that I'm talking about, as I describe value, and we do this short history of value is about the general centers of gravity and culture. And there were moments which were foreshadowings. And so, there were great emergencies. And David Graeber points this out in his book that he wrote right before he died, I think. He died young at 61, where he talks about this history of everything. And he points out that the general notion of this linear progression of history, is actually inaccurate. And that's core in the lineage that you and I have been studying together, is this notion that there are moments of great realization that actually live in a particular culture that don't spread, that are actually foreshadowings of a possible future. And what you described to me, the lineage that Don Howard resuscitated seems to be pointing to one of those moments. So there are clearly are moments of great value. There's proto moments, but the centers of gravity, whether in Peru or the United States or the Americas, your centers of gravity are rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics. My value trumps yours. And as you say, your second point, deeply flawed values. That is to say, I mean, the great Aztecs and Incas, the New Age world so valorizes, in so many places, actually ripped out the hearts of 10,000 women. Literally ripped out for the sake of sacrifice, no anesthesia. Let's start there. Everyone kind of leaves that out of the story. The great mother religions were soaked in cruelty, barbarism, and blood. And there were great and beautiful holy moments, but the centers of gravity were very clearly A, flood values, B, confusion between surface structure power moves, that were then claimed as values and the actual depth values. But, this is important, although there was always an in group and an outgroup, which is true, there was always an in group and an outgroup. But there was always this notion that in the in group, you really got to treat people well. Now, they got the boundaries wrong of the in group. Whether it was within a kingdom, or between kingdoms, they placed the boundary in the wrong place. But everyone got that there's a notion of value, and value's real. That was the importance of pre-modernity. History of value part two. So, along comes modernity. And modernity says, you guys, what were you thinking? I mean, and David Hume epitomizes the major stream of modernity, although not the only one, but the major stream which says, value is made up. David Hume is a proto postmodernist, proto Harare's parrot expression of postmodernity. David Hume, the great philosopher, precursor to Kant, that Kant took so seriously, David Hume basically says one way or the other values are made up. They're actually not real. And actually, pre-modernity, Voltaire, who leads the great revolution of modernity says, remember the cruelties. Remember the cruelties of pre-modernity. Value is made up but we can't quite say that, says Rousseau. So we need a kind of civil religion. And we need to act as if value is real. But no one says that out loud. And so, modernity borrows social spiritual capital, from pre-modernity. And although philosophically, it undermines value in most of its expressions, although not all, what it does is, it articulates because it intuits value. Philosophically, it undermines it. But it still intuits that it must be there. So, modernity expresses what I call common sense sacred axioms of value. That's really important. And there's about 15 of them. Common sense sacred axioms of value, in which basically, modernity says, skip the philosophy, man. We live our lives this way. So choice is real. Fairness is important. Effort matters. Goodness is a real category, But you don't work it out. You just say, it's important to be fair, choice is real. Effort is important. And there's about 15 common sense, immediately available to people, and their sense making which are essential, common sense there. You can feel them in your body. Through my body I envision God, says the book of Job. Meaning in my actual first person experience anthro-ontologically, I feel this is true. Philosophically, it's been undermined, who gives a fuck? And the philosophers themselves are in this contradiction. They're philosophically undermining value. And yet, they're articulating positions that embrace values. So you might call them self-evident values. We hold these truths to be self-evident in the American establishment of values, so we're not going to prove them, we're not going to root them and everything. We're just going to say, you think that that's what the deists were doing. There was a little bit of a sleight of hand. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, meaning there's value. We can't prove it. We're not sure what it's rooted in, but we know it's there. Common sense sacred axioms of value.

AUBREY: So, how is that different than anthro-ontologically?

MARC: So, actually, this was an early form of anthro-ontology, but they didn't wreck... They didn't resolve the internal contradiction between value's is not real, because philosophically, we've undermined it. So from David Hume to Kant, a close reading of Kant, to logical positivism, to existentialism, to postmodernism, neo-Darwinism along the way, there's a straight line. And that's a straight line of the deconstruction of value. And in some senses, Habermas realized, actually post modernity that deconstructs value, and we used Harare as the example of value's just fiction, just a social construction of reality, just a figment of your imagination. Really all postmodernity is, is modernity on steroids, that actually reveals its true position. And now there's that position really is rooted in modernity. Now, it's not all of modernity, there were theorists in modernity, who opted for a different position. Comenius was one of them. Adam Smith was one of them. Adam Smith was actually deeply rooted in Islamic mysticism. So there were key thinkers that actually believed value was real. They were the minor motif in the symphony of modernity. The major motif is, value's not real, but we feel it. We're going to behave as if we build our lives on it. So, we're going to articulate a series of values of on which we base our lives, and we're going to ignore the logical inconsistency. We're going to hold them to be self-evident. So I call those common sense sacred axioms of value. And they dominated reality for most of modernity, and everyone thought they'd go on forever. Until surprise, along comes postmodernity and says, "Fuck that. You guys are lying." That produced World War Two. Are you for real? All these values are really power games. No one's actually been willing to say that value is just made up. There are no grand stories of value. It's all completely contrived. And only if we just deconstruct all deconstruct all false values will we get to somehow a world without suffering. Postmodernity wasn't entirely wrong. It was true, but partial. They actually got a lot of these narratives--

AUBREY: They were calling the bluff.

MARC: They were calling the bluff. Exactly. I mean, Sartre... I mean, basically what happens is, Nietzsche starts to call the bluff. Nietzsche says, this thing that Rousseau said, we can behave in our civil religion as if it was a religion, which he says in his book, "The Social Contract". I'm calling the bluff on this. We can't do this. We've got to deconstruct. And Nietzsche is the father of postmodernism in some real sense. And Nietzsche is awesome. I mean, Nietzsche is... There's a text in one of the masters who says that there's heresy, which is faith, and faith which is heresy. So Nietzsche, Nietzsche is a beautiful heretic, but he's ripping apart the structures of the bluff. He's saying, no, no, we've got to get really honest. You guys are making this up. You're pretending like there's value. And then you build edifices based on this value which are imperialist, which generate World War One and World War Two. We've got to take down all value, there is no value. It's all a fiction. And when Harare expresses this, and that's why I said, I want to have Yuval over for dinner. He's trying to express I think, the best intuition of post modernity. Which is, let's deconstruct all the values. Because then we can start from the beginning and try and create the best story. And even though story is made up, it's going to be okay. Now, that's a disastrous position. It's a disaster. But it comes from, there's a spark there. There's an intention. So these common sense sacred axioms of value get destroyed by postmodernity. Postmodernity rips them apart, engages in this massive, heroic, deconstructive project of Nietzschean proportions and infused by Nietzsche. But it forgets to do one thing. It forgets to engage in the reconstructive project. It basically left everything destroyed, so we literally destroyed reality. And to destroy reality is to destroy reality. They thought, okay, we can just say it's all a story, and stories aren't real. And somehow it's going to be okay. Because what they thought is, we'll never lose contact with the common sense sacred axioms of value. They didn't call them that. But they kind of thought those would go on forever anyways. We just have to say that they're subjective. So we're being more honest. So no one will create a false grand narrative that then destroys reality again, that'd be bad. And so, all of postmodernity is to make sure that no one, the guardsmen of postmodernity to make sure no one will ever express the grand narrative. And if anyone tries to actually weave the pieces together, they get destroyed. They get destroyed by postmodernity that views itself as righteous guarding against the intrusion of fundamentalist value, whether of pre-modern or modern form that will intrude on society and again, destroy it.

AUBREY: Yeah, except then different ideologies weave their way through postmodernity, because there's no structure to defend against these ideologies, like woke ideologies really, which is just one example.

MARC: Yes, yes. So when Eros collapses and Eros is value. When the Eros, the feeling of aliveness, the feeling that I'm living in meaning structures that have telos, that have direction, the feeling that I'm living in a story, which itself is a value of cosmos. When that collapses, then you have this gaping void. And reality is aghast at a void, because reality is reaching for its own nature. So, reality reaches when it can't find Eros, when value is deconstructed, and value is Eros, and Eros is value, that experience of aliveness and meaning, and value's deconstructed. So, pseudo Eros enters in, and then every manner of regressive pre-modern ideology begins to take hold, which is why we're seeing the emergence of strongmen all over the world. Whether it was Marcos originally in the Philippines, and now what's happening in the Philippines, or it's Brazil or it's Turkey, what's happening in Sweden. Or it's the far right in France, or it's the far right in Belgium, or in the United States. When you create this mythos, "Make America Great Again" which is a great idea. It's a beautiful idea, but make America great again, in a semi-ethnocentric, chauvinistic, slightly racist, kind of contrived way. Well, we do want to make America great again, for sure. But when it becomes a false mythos, a mythos that's not rooted in first values and first principles, when you can have a person get up and say in a debate with Hillary Clinton, who's herself a complex figure, but she's being debated by Donald Trump and Donald Trump says, in the presidential debate before he was elected, he says, "I run a business." And Hillary says, "But I hear you don't pay your workers. That often people contract with, you don't pay them, because they've got to sue you in order to get their money." And Trump said in public, I saw it myself, he said, "Yeah, that's good business." So one second, did you just say on national television, it's good business to fuck people over? I mean, and did one person even vote for you the next day? That can only happen in a context of the deconstruction of all value, which the only thing left is rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics, the success story.

AUBREY: Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why people did vote for him is because they recognize that actually, on the other side, people were still getting fucked over. They just weren't being honest about it. So, they intuited like, alright, well might as well have the enemy who admits that they're going to fuck people over. This is the enemy who will not admit that they're fucking people over.

MARC: You're absolutely right. There's a number of reasons people voted for Donald Trump, but one of them was, what you're pointing to, which is there was a sense that he does represent one value, which is often authenticity. That value they thought he represented, because they said, oh my God, he's the one person who's off-script. Every other president is completely on script, it's all completely scripted. We sense it's completely scripted. We sense we're living in the simulacrum, right? And all of a sudden, this guy's off-script, and I can actually feel him. And they said, there's this value of authenticity, which was so seductive, that actually swept people. That's very, very important. So, what are we saying? And this is where it gets crazy exciting. So we're saying, okay, let's really get why did postmodernity take down value. And why did modernity take down value. Because modernity and postmodernity had a point, they got something right when they challenged pre-modernity, which had its vision that value is real. They got something right when they took it down. And the entire academy, universities all over the world, all came to a similar conclusion, which was true but partial, ultimately fatally flawed, which we need to correct. And here's what they thought. And my friend Howard Bloom wrote this wrongly in his book, "The Lucifer Principle" which actually Harare cites in "Sapiens". So Howard, let's use Howard as a good example of postmodernity, and I love Howard. And Howard, if you're listening, you know I love you. He's a key dialect partner and a best friend, and I'm in mad devotion to his particular brilliance and science. But Howard, brother, you got this wrong. In "The Lucifer Principle", Howard expresses the basic position of postmodernity, and here's what he says. And this is a rough summation in two minutes. He says, don't tell me loves real, you motherfucker, essentially. I mean, 1500 years ago, to love someone meant, wow, I am an ancient Chinese patriarch and I love my wife. And so she disobeyed me by siding with my son against me. So, instead of putting her to death, which I should do, according to the false value of the time, I'm just going to slap her 10 times with a hard cane and scar her back because I love her. So, I'm not going to punish her with the full weight of the law, because I love her. Whoa, that's love? You call that love 1500 years ago. Today, if you did that, you would correctly go to prison. But we still call loving my wife love. So clearly, the word love doesn't mean anything real. That's the basic point. In other words, the claim that there's eternal and preordained value, that's eternal in the sense of unchanging, the sense that there's unchanging and preordained value, which is the nature of reality is clearly not the case. And that's the correct and brilliant insight of reality that realizes, here we go, drumroll, evolution. And although evolution of the biosphere is only validated in a deep way by Darwin, but there's a thousand years of prior thought, which intuits the sense of, oh, values are evolving. And as that thought gets more and more powerful in the Renaissance, its core of the Renaissance, and it moves into modernity, the notion that there are eternal and preordained values just doesn't work. It only worked in a pre-modern world, which there was no social mobility, in which time didn't move very fast. Things stayed the same for hundreds of years. And in that notion, you could claim eternal and preordained value. But as everything's changing all around you, there's this huge attack on value, because we see that value is always changing. So, this is where it gets crazy exciting, and crazy important. So the notion of the eternal Tao... Let's use the word Tao from the Taoist tradition. But what the eternal Tao means is, it's misrepresented. True Tao means there's a field of value. We're all in the Tao means we're in the field of value. So, modernity, postmodernity said, there's no eternal Tao. That's bullshit. There are no eternal, read, unchanging and preordained values. That's actually true. However, this is the key. The eternal value, the eternal Tao, is the evolving Tao. In other words, and it's very beautiful. One of the values of reality is the evolution of consciousness which you brought to the table. So, one of the values of reality is that reality goes through a series of transformations. That's a value of reality. That's absolutely true. So there's an eternal Tao. But eternity doesn't mean unchanging. And, Wittgenstein, the logical positivist got this when he said eternity's not unchanging time, right? That notion of eternity is just everlasting. That would be eternity as everlasting time. But I mean eternity means lots of time. Eternity doesn't mean lots of time. Eternity means what you experience at the height of a psychedelic journey when you get underneath time. You get beneath time, it's the timeless time. It's the spaceless space. When I get underneath time and space, I can actually access the eternity that resides underneath the moment. That's eternal value. In other words, there's a field of value, which is absolutely real. And one of the qualities of that field of value is that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao. Let's make that super real for everyone. Let's make it super crazy real. So, love is real. And love means that I take care of in the best way I know how, those that are close to me. And then, as value evolves, I expand the circle of those who I consider close to me. So, in premodernity, those who are close to me might be only those people in my religion, okay? So, love's real. I only take care of those people in my religion. Then I expand, so, no, no. Actually, all human beings. All human beings are actually included my circle of love. Love is evolving. So love is real. Or, love is real means I take care of you by not putting you to death, but only slapping you because that's a limited version of love. Now, I deeply love and I take care of you by nurturing you, by making sure you realize your deepest dreams, right? So, I expand what love means. I deepen what love means. But the basic construct of love, which means that we have a shared identity, we're part of each other, we feel each other, and I want to nurture you and take care of you, because you're in my in-group. You're connected to me, you're part of my identity. That's an eternal value. That value itself evolves. So, we move from only loving my circle of intimacy and my tribe. I expand that to involve, let's say, the whole world's my tribe. I evolve by not just making sure you don't starve, but I want to make sure you flourish, right? So, in other words, what love means, how we express love, we evolved the way we love. We've become better and better lovers. We expand our circle of love. But love is real. No, it's actually stunning. What it means is that there's a perennial philosophy, perennial meaning, there is actually a shared set of eternal values. And those eternal values are evolving values. So, in other words, it's very, very, very beautiful. In other words, reality is actually a field of value. So, Eros itself, for example, the movement of separate parts to become larger wholes, that's a value of cosmos. So, cosmos is value. And what value means, let's get what value means. Value means is that reality is not just is, reality has an ought. It means, I don't just want to stand still. I have a desire. So, value's disclosure of my desire, for a preferred state that should be. Reality is not just is. Reality is ought. There's a way it ought be, and I desire the way that it ought be. Now, the deeper I clarify my desire, the deeper I move from surface to depth of desire, the deeper I clarify my egoic structures, the deeper I engage in the yoga of clarification, what we've called [inaudible 02:23:17], the clarification of desire, the deeper my desires express wider and wider fields of intimacy. Deeper and more gorgeous forms of loving. Absolutely. So, I've got to clarify my desire, but desire discloses value. And desire is the very beginning of cosmos. In other words, intrinsic and cosmos itself is, there's an ought. Reality is going somewhere. Reality is seeking... In evolutionary psychology, they say, it's all about survival, which is a bullshit sleight of hand move. Because survival, evolutionary psychology is very important, where it's important, but it's paper thin, where it's paper thin. Survival implies life. When I want to survive means life is a value of cosmos. Yes, life is a value... Uniqueness is a value of cosmos. Transformation is a value of cosmos. More and more care and concern, these are values of cosmos. So, cosmos has first principles and first values, A. B, they're eternal. They're beneath time and space.

AUBREY: So, this is where I'm having trouble following here. It feels to me like there are eternal values. That actually those things that we call love, we're not participating wholly in the eternal value of love. But the eternal value of love is actually not evolving. This is what my mind would be thinking. And to think that it was evolving is just to say that it was evolving within the human, within human consciousness.

MARC: Gorgeous. So, let's move into the Garden of Eden. And we were talking last night with your... Actually it was delightful to meet your insanely awesome team. And we talked about being in the Garden of Eden, and we said The Garden of Eden wasn't paradise, it was paradox. And actually my lived experience of reality is, that actually eternity and evolution are not a contradiction. They're a paradox. Which is what you're pointing to. In other words, values are eternal and evolving. In other words, the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao. And the evolving Tao is rooted in the eternal Tao. So, what the academy got wrong is, it didn't get that value was real, that value is eternal. Love is an eternal value. And in the manifest world, love evolves. That's very beautiful. And actually, once you get it, it's actually obvious. Love's an eternal value. Love animates all of reality. There's an infinity of intimacy that births reality. Absolutely. And then, reality is the evolution of love. So, love is an eternal value that inheres in all reality in every second. It holds together all molecular structures, all atomic structures, gravity, electromagnetism are love, at the level of matter. Eros, the level of matter holds together, brings separate parts into larger holes. It's love all the way down. And, stay with me, in the interior sciences, we talk about what was before the Big Bang. The interior sciences of all the great traditions, from indigenous to Hebrew wisdom to Kashmir Shaivism, which is original Hinduism, to certain forms of Buddhism talk about, what's eternity. So, there's a quality of eternity. And that quality of eternity, the interior sciences is animated itself by Eros itself. So, love is an eternal value. Love incepts reality. The infinite desires intimacy. Love incepts reality. The unmanifest becomes manifest, and then the entire story of the manifest, evolution: the love story of the universe. And it's the unfolding, it's the evolution of love. So paradox, not contradiction. In other words, the inability to move from contradiction to paradox is the symbol of the base or uninvolved mind. And we actually know that in every system of thought, whether it's Western psychology, whether it's good Buddhism, whether it's good Hebrew wisdom. So, in the contradiction world, either value is eternal. But they misread, internalize unchanging. Or value's evolving. No, it's actually both. Value's eternal. There is an eternal sense of value, and in the mind of the eternal, the love that we experienced today was always there.

AUBREY: So, let me give you a proposition, whether it's true or not, use it as a thought experiment. In this proposition, there's a class of beings, call them the Arcturians. Arcturians developed on a planet very much like Earth. They evolved, evolved, evolved, evolved. Reached a state of consciousness, which we would call angelic in this [inaudible 02:27:54] ascended master level of consciousness. And they were a being that went through the evolutionary state of actually revealing the eternal nature of love through the evolution of love from their perspective. Does the fact that this has already happened in the evolution of the consciousness of beings who were actually incarnate, does that change the idea of love actually evolving as we're evolving, because it's already happened?

MARC: That's a great inquiry. So, Aubrey, what you just did is you made the move, which is very important. To make the move from what I would call the cosmic to the galactic. In other words, we think in terms of the universe, and we actually need based on the empirical sciences today, meaning not based on some fanciful conjecture, not based on some fringe set of thoughts. There's an actual enormous amount of empirical science, which talks about the galactic, which talks about multiple dimensions, which we might call extraterrestrial, we might call extra dimensional. That's now moved into the mainstream. In other words, you would talk about that 20 years ago, that was fringe. Now, you're actually non-empirical not to recognize that there's there are dimensions, there's a multidimensionality to cosmos. And there's clearly an extraterrestrial extra dimension to cosmos, based on the empirical evidence. We need to do an entire dialogue based on that, which is critical. So, what we can see which is more than enough for constructing the great reconstructive project, really reclaiming value. We can see that there's eternal value, that love exists all through time as we know it. And we know that love evolves, expands its boundaries, it deepens its nature. So, we know eternal value is evolving value. Now, what seeded the Big Bang? And, how did this particular snapshot of eternity take place? Well, it's a good question. So the great traditions go different ways on it. Science stands before the mystery. So, how that actually happened, is it the story of a Creator God? Which is a very legitimate possibility in the cosmic genesis of the Big Bang. Or is it the story of actually a prior civilization that went through great eons of evolution, that then seeded this particular phase in the great galactic story? Those are both legitimate empirical possibilities that both have expression in the interior sciences. And by the way, in the thought experiments of people like Nick Bostrom, and simulation hypothesis, the notions of simulation hypothesis, and the great traditions actually come together in fascinating points of interphase, which is the subject of a different dialogue. So, how that incepted is a very important question, but not nearly as important as the realization that value is real. In other words, in order for us to actually respond to the meta crisis, we need to go to the next step. And the next step is, which is post postmodernity, which is the new story of value. Which is the realization that we can actually say again proudly, value is real. We can actually solve what's considered to be, and I want to get the momentousness of this. In other words, the entire academy got frozen in its own refusal to break with the mediocrity of interpretation, which basically said, oh, my God, Howard Bloom, "Lucifer Principle". And Howard was beautifully expressing that classical, commensurate understanding which moved to the academy. You can't say love's real, because the way we interpret what love means changes in every generation. Legitimate critique, I want to take that seriously. That's right. What it says is, when we say there's eternal value, it doesn't mean preordained and unchanging. It means there's a dimension of evolution to it. They got that right.

AUBREY: And it's paradox again.

MARC: But what they thought was, it's because value evolves, it's therefore just a social construction of reality. And here, it's very beautiful to get it. It's kind of like people say, God's a figment of our imagination. So, I'm going to tell you a secret, Aubrey, just between us, okay? God is absolutely a figment of our imagination. That's true. But our imagination is a figment of God, right? So, yes, value is a social construction of reality. But the social constructions of reality at their deepest are expressions of value, right? In other words, the evolving value is an expression of the impulse towards value of the field of value that is cosmos itself. Cosmos is value, and it's the unmanifest infinity values the expression of finitude. So reality is, by its nature, valuable. We live in a field of value. You don't have to search for meaning, you don't have to search for value. It's all valuable. It's all meaningful. There's a field of value. And there's a set of first principles and first values, which are the nature of cosmos itself. It's the structure of cosmos. So, one example would be love, would be Eros. Eros is value, and value is Eros. You actually can't separate those two. Eros and value are actually deep in their interiority. They're the same word. Meaning Eros is the movement of reality, which experiences itself as radical aliveness, which is self-evident value. Self-evident, meaning moving towards ever deeper contact, ever more intimacy, and ever greater wholeness. That is the central movement of reality. That's the value of reality. Reality has, Whitehead said, an appetite for value. Meaning, it's gorgeous. Reality desires value. Desire discloses value. Desire means there's something that doesn't exist that I want to bring into existence, and that ought exist. It ought be there. In other words, I ought have an erotic relationship with reality. I want to have Eros with my partner, Lady V. And I have Eros with my work in different ways, with my creativity and with my beloved's and life with my brothers. Eros means I want to experience radical aliveness, I want deeper contact, and I want greater wholeness between us. And I want that with myself. I want more aliveness, I want deeper contact with all the split off parts of myself. And I want greater wholeness. That's value and that value evolves. Yeah.

AUBREY: I appreciate you allowing me to explore this, as I try to get this straight in my mind. Because we've talked about a lot of stuff, but this is at a level of, this is new stuff that we're in right now. So, one of the things that I think I'm correctly assuming is, postmodernity says context is everything. And that's one of the issues. In some ways, this is actually... In a way like reifying--

MARC: There is no value without context.

AUBREY: There is no value without context.

MARC: Which is true but partial.

AUBREY: True but partial. So, let's take someone like Marcus Aurelius, for example. Many of us have great admiration for Marcus Aurelius. And no one is going to try to efface statues of Marcus Aurelius.

MARC: Not happening.

AUBREY: Not happening, and--

MARC: Ryan Holiday would get upset.

AUBREY: Right. But he's also very eager to efface other statues, and take them down. Now, Marcus Aurelius was over there in Germany, wiping out the indigenous people of the Gauls in France, and the Germanic people. Just putting them to a fucking sword constantly. And so, it's saying, ah, well, that was just the time, that was the context of then. And Marcus Aurelius was in his Eros, and in this idea of Empire, the glory of Rome, and he also had a lot of great stoic philosophies. I guess the point is that there's some inconsistencies there. Because then there's other people who say, well, that was fucked up, because maybe there was a closer proximity, or they didn't contribute in a way that you find valuable. And it's not to say that any of that was ever right. But it's also to say, it's difficult to both judge the past, without the context of the past, and decide, and be the one who says, this was good, this was bad. It all gets a little messy, even though they all may have been violating the eternal value.

MARC: This is gorgeous. This is why we need a new story of value. In other words, the kind of postmodern popular writers that take someone like Marcus Aurelius, and set him up as the icon. That's the same fundamentalist move in postmodern sophisticated guise, which is accepted by the public, the kind of intelligencia public, because no one has a knee jerk reaction against Marcus Aurelius. No one grew up in a Marcus Aurelius church. But actually, it's the same move. In other words, dimensions of the human potential movement, dimensions of the New Age dimensions, of kind of sophisticated postmodernity, make regressive moves. They take a particular expression of value, which is real, there's something real in Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius spoke some beautiful words that are actually reflecting some important first principles and first values of cosmos. However, he was locked in a very particular position, in which the boundary of who deserved to be embraced in those beautiful stoic philosophies was very limited. It was limited to Romans, and in particular, Romans who had particular status. And it allowed for the slaughter, the complete slaughter of all of the magic cultures of the world, the complete slaughter of all the indigenous peoples. And Marcus Aurelius didn't understand it. He literally viewed those people in some way as we view lambs, that make lamb chops. So the evolution of love would be, not to dismiss Marcus Aurelius. He got something right. Love was real there. But the boundary was wrong. The in-group was too small, and the nature of what love meant was too narrow. So, do we need to go back and include the indigenous people? Yes. Do we need to include the best of stoicism? Yes. But we can't make a regressive move. This is the key. We've got to make an evolutionary move, which is to articulate a new story of value, which has never been done, which is that there's a shared story of value, in which everyone has to play to the table, every different system of gnosis gets to contribute something, but no one gets to be entirely right. Everyone's true, but partial. We weave the validated insights of all the great systems of value into a new story of value, the regressive fundamentalist move. Whether it's to Marcus Aurelius, whether it's the indigenous people, whether it's to early Christianity, or early Judaism, or early Islam, or only Confucianism won't work. We've got to take the best truths. That's how we started. Of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern with their value propositions, and literally tell a new story of value, which becomes the context for our diversity. And that's DaVinci. What he did in the Renaissance, that was a proto attempt to do that. And he got some of it right. We're now at this new time between worlds and time between stories, and we've got to really get this right. But we can't do it by declaration, we can't do it by dogma. We have to actually show there's an intrinsic dharma to reality. And there is. There's actually a story of value rooted in first principles and first values, that actually go all the way down the evolutionary chain, and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We'll maybe talk about that as the last point before we finish. But this was so important, because the temptation to make the regressive move, whether it's in the sophisticated guise of reclaiming the Marcus Aurelius as the ultimate icon, or you go back to early Christendom, or you pretend like you're going back Confucius, as she's doing in China. Or you pretend you're going back to a great kind of Christ vision in Russian Orthodoxy. The regressive move doesn't work. You've got to go back to the value itself, which is love, which is eternal, which is Eros. And, you've got to take the best expressions of Eros that were validated, and then see how they evolve and participate in their evolution.

AUBREY: And it seems to me we have to avoid this kind of fetish, this existential kink that we have for judgment of some past person, place, thing based on the current field of value, as it has evolved in our collective consciousness. And I think we find abhorrent when someone does something that was actually an aberration, an abomination to the field of value. That's why we root for Wallace against Longshanks. It wasn't that there was a king of England who had empirical desires. It's that he was violating something that in the field of value, everybody knew was wrong. The rights of prima nocta, to fuck someone's wife on the first night. And this goes back to old story, to actually tell another other story. We'll bracket that. But nonetheless, it was like, no, no, that was fucked up even for that time. And so, therefore, we root for that thing, but it would be weird. So, let's say we have, as our consciousness evolves, and we understand the horror of factory farming, right? We can't go back, we're not going to go back. It would be, I think, a shame to go back to, I don't know, let's say Michael Jordan, who was eating McDonald's or something like that, and say like--

MARC: And say he's committing genocide, and he's evil.

AUBREY: He's evil. He was a speciesist, who had no concern. It would be, and in some way with our new field of value if we judge, but it's really like the fetish of judgment that's excluding the field of value. It's a very interesting and complex--

MARC: You just added this crazy important point. In other words, postmodernity, in its woke expression has stepped out of the field of value. When you step out of the field of value, you're without Eros. You don't experience Eros of value. But no one can live without the Eros of value. So, you create pseudo Eros. Pseudo Eros is when you judge, right? Pseudo Eros is when you create a circle, you're in the inner circle of Eros, and you place everyone else on the outside. Meaning, the way I do that is, I judge everyone outside of my circle to be flawed, genocidal, in some sense, evil. So, I get involved in this kind of new puritanism, this new righteousness, that creates a pseudo Eros. I'm the one person right on the inside, everybody else is evil. And therefore, they should be in some sense damned. They should be canceled, they should be damned. So, woke culture, which has stepped out of the field of value, it's postmodern in its essence. But you can't survive outside of the field of value. So, what it does is, it engages in a pseudo Eros by placing everyone else outside the field of value to give itself the illusion of being inside some field of value, even though value doesn't exist. That's the absurdity of woke culture. And its tragedy. It's why it's eating itself up from the inside. Because it refuses to stand for first principles and first values. It only stands for the exclusion of those who violated its own ethos, which it's now claiming as value, even though there's no value. So it's lost in a hopeless contradiction, which is based on basically defaming people, and making them to appear horribly degraded. Now, William Wallace, our "Braveheart" hero, held a whole series of beliefs that we would today considered to be backwards, and profoundly unwoke. It's a major in understatement. So, is the woke world pointing to some important values? Yes, but now claiming those values, and stand in them. Once you claim values and stand in them, then you have room for... You're in the field of value. When you're not in the field of value, when you've stepped out of the field of value, then the only way you can get ahead of Eros is to polarize, is to say those people are evil, those people are bad. They're outside the circle that gives you an illusion that you're inside the circle. Notice what we've done. I mean, we've actually participated in the evolution of consciousness. We've said there's a perennial philosophy. The perennial philosophy goes through the ages. Ah, perennialism got dismissed by the academy? Yes, because perennialism claimed it was only eternal and not evolving. So what we're introducing is an evolving perennialism as the core of world culture. Well, that's a context for diversity. There's actually a shared field of value. love is real. Care is real, and it's beautiful. Transformation is real. Creativity is real. Uniqueness is real. All of a sudden you can feel we can look at ourselves again in the field of value. And all of these values are shared values. They're part of a universal grammar of value. I'll go even one more step. Past, present and future are first principles and first values of cosmos. Actually, we have to honor the past, we have to honor the present, and we have to actually honor the future. And when you are no longer intimate shared identity, intimacy equals shared identity with the past, you become irreverent, and you become unmoored. When you don't honor the present, you get lost in the past, or you're reaching for the future. You become a kind of techno humanist, transhumanist, who kind of ignores the present. And then when you only reach for the future, you ignore the past and present. Actually, past present and future are first principles and first values. First, second, and third person, we talked about before. First person experience, second person experience, third person experience, meaning Newtonian science, and the experience of reality is a story. Wow, first person, second person and third person. Those are primordial perspectives. Those are first principles and first values. And if you're doing only third person, you're violating cosmos. But if you're doing only first person, you're only meditating and you're ignoring Newtonian science, you're violating cosmos. So first, second, third person are first principles and first values. Story, the telos, that it's going somewhere, that's a first principle and first value of cosmos. So, we begin to see the emergence of this new story of value rooted in first principles and first values. That's gorgeous. And it's not enough, last sentence, to have first principles and first values. They need to be embedded in story. In other words, reality is a story. It's actually not just a fact, it's not just scientific facts. It's not just a vestibule, a kind of passthrough place for eternity. Actually, we've got to honor reality. The most beautiful world we could possibly create is here, because reality is a real value. Reality has value. That's gorgeous. And its value is in its storyline. There's a narrative arc to reality. So, story itself is a first principle and first value of cosmos. All of a sudden, we can breathe again. And so, we're in reality. Reality is animated by first principles and first values. And there's a story of value. And it's going somewhere. And it's not just a tale told by an idiot, full of sounds and furies, signifying nothing. And Faulkner, the existentialist, picks up on it, and calls his book, "Sound and Fury" and talks about Quentin Compson, who sees the broken face of a clock that's tick, tock, tick, tock, time, which has no meaning, which isn't going anywhere. The face of the clock is defaced. That's postmodernity's response to Newton, who made the clock the central metaphor. Quentin Compson's wrong. It's not just sound and fury, there's direction, there's telos. Story matters, my story matters. And I know that my story matters, that's intrinsic to me. And now, we can breathe again in cosmos. Now, we can have a universal grammar of value. Now we can actually value each other intrinsically. Now we can honor past, present and future. Now, we can honor first person, second person and third person perspectives. We've now begun to engage in the great reconstructive project. We've done it seriously. Now, we have hope.

AUBREY: Yeah. This is such a provoking, provocative conversation. I'm still grappling with the paradox of evolving value and eternal value, and how that's not a contradiction. And the way that I'm trying to grapple with it is thinking about how the ego is a construct, but it's also real, and it needs to be included in also, what you would call the true self, which is the connection to the eternal self, the eternal field.

MARC: Right, and we'll do a whole dialogue on the selves.

AUBREY: We'll do that, we'll do the dialogue on the self. So the ego is included, and also transcended by the true self and combined into making what we'll call the unique self. And we'll go through that whole model.

MARC: That's a big conversation, we just did a lot there.

AUBREY: Big conversation.

MARC: Yeah, we'll get there.

AUBREY: But what it seems is that the field, the field upon which a value participates is what evolves, and it's evolving, approaching a perennial value, which, are you saying that ultimately, the perennial value is evolving with the field? Or is it just the field evolving towards the eternal value?

MARC: Let me give you an example. Let's give two examples. Let's take uniqueness as a value, okay? So when does uniqueness start scientifically? That's a very good question. And it probably starts, and this is Howard Bloom's insight. We had four dialogues we were kind of pressing. We were trying to press, and I'm in a series of dialogues now with my dear friend, Ken Wilber, and with Howard Bloom. And we're actually writing kind of a first volume of this. It's going to come out in the next few months, and a deeper volume a few months later. And we're actually examining the first principles and first values. And this one we haven't talked about yet. So, let's maybe... We need to bring this to the table to kind of get this. So you're intuiting that we're missing a piece from the table. There's one last piece that you're brilliantly intuiting that we can't get there without it. So, when we talk about value, we're saying value is not just a human contrivance. It's all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. Number one, premise one. Premise two. There's continuity and discontinuity all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. So, for example, let's say you have uniqueness as a value, okay? So, the first wave patterns in cosmos, and the first seconds after the Big Bang when you have wave patterns, those wave patterns are distinct, they're unique. They have a unique quality. Now, as you go through the world of matter, let's say you get to galaxies, stars, planets. Planets, literally are as unique as a fingerprint. They're absolutely unique. You move into the world of life, cells, you get uniqueness in cells. You've got 12 billion years of Eros, in which uniqueness is evolving. Until Eros explodes a sex. We move from asexual to sexual reproduction. And sexual reproduction is the commitment of a cosmos to unique self. In other words, sexual reproduction generates exponentialized uniqueness. We're no longer asexual carbon copying, we're moving to kind of an exponentialized uniqueness. Now, as you move through the human world, we get from matter to life to mind. We'll talk about that in later dialogues. When you get to the world of self-reflective human mind, uniqueness evolves and evolves and evolves and evolves and evolves and evolves, until you finally get to the enlightenment, where the word individual appears for the first time in the dictionary in the western enlightenment. 16th century, the word individual appears. Because this notion of individual gets sharper, though it existed before. But it gets sharper and sharper, until we finally get to this notion, which we haven't talked about yet, and we're not going to talk about now, but of unique self. Which is that I'm an irreducible unique expression of the seamless code of the universe with intrinsic value and intrinsic gifts that need to be honored. So, there's this evolution of the uniqueness. So there's a value of uniqueness, which appears in the first waves, that exist at the very beginning of the world of matter right after the inception of the Big Bang. And the entire history of cosmos is the evolution of this value of uniqueness, as uniqueness deepens and deepens and deepens and deepens, until we finally move from unconscious uniqueness to this glorious, stunning explosion of conscious uniqueness, where I'm not only aware that I'm unique, I'm aware that my uniqueness has value. I'm aware that my uniqueness is needed by all that is. I'm aware that my uniqueness is right is the currency of connection. So there's this value of uniqueness that's an eternal value. It's there from the beginning. And then cosmos moves towards the incessant creativity of cosmos, the evolutionary impulse, the divine impulse, which animates cosmos. Moves us towards the evolution of uniqueness, all through cosmos. Now, every single one of the first principles and first values, and there's like 15 of them. Every single one of them evolves. They're eternal. They exist, one might argue, and realization, interior science argues they exist eternally. And, you can actually access in practices of the interior sciences, of which psychedelics is a critical one today. You can actually access the eternal nature of love, love as an eternal value, which then incepts reality. But even if you're not doing the yogas of the interior sciences, you can actually access empirically that Eros is an animating Eros of the manifest world from the very beginning. So, Eros is a value, Eros is love. Love is what we call evolutionary love. Eros, outrageous love. Meaning the love that moves the Sun and other stars, Dante's phrase, the love that drives cosmos. And that love that drives cosmos, that exists between subatomic particles that come together to form an atom, they could form a new shared identity, that love that brings them together in a union, that love evolves all to the world of matter, and generates more and more complex interconnectivities, more and more holes. The entire world of matter triumphs in life. We go through all the stages of life and love evolves. Eros evolves all through the stages of life. Then we explode, human beings walking on the savanna, stand in a particular way, and they begin to get this deeper depth of self-reflective consciousness, and love's moving in them. And then love evolves all through the state structure stages of human evolution, until we finally get to a place where we're madly in love with each other, whatever our race or creed is. We move beyond egocentric. We're madly in love with every human being, and with every animal, and we're in love with life. And we're in love with cosmos itself. We actually experienced that. We are unique expressions of that love impulse. That's love is become aware of itself in us, but love is eternal. So in other words, we didn't make up love. It's not a social construction of reality. Love is eternal, and incepts reality. We can access it through the interior sciences. But even if you don't use the interior sciences and their yogas, you can access it empirically through the essential structures of the four forces of reality that are animated by a deeper Eros that animates all four of them. What Stuart Kaufman calls the incessant ceaseless creativity of cosmos, that moves us from quarks to culture. Yes, mud to Mozart. Yes, Curie to Bach. What was it? Slime to Shakespeare. So, that's the movement of the evolution of love. So it's eternal. It's a structure of cosmos. It exists, it animates all of reality. And it evolves.You understand we're in a new world. I mean, it's actually shocking.

AUBREY: And I think, the correlation between uniqueness and evolution was actually the piece that I needed in my mind, to understand that evolution is creating new uniqueness, which is a phrase that you've told me which I understood. I felt it. That there's more God to come. I think people think of God as the eternal God. Well, no, God is actually living through us at all times. And we'll talk about all this too. These are many whole things that we could spend many hours on, but that's because of our uniqueness. Because God is having an Aubrey experience, a Marc experience, a Christian experience, a Matt experience, a Ryan experience, a KK experience. It's all happening where God is having that unique experience. And so, it's evolving in that way. And so, that's why there's more to come. And so even God is evolving, as the uniqueness plays itself out into the cosmos.

MARC: Right. So, you just recapitulated our next two dialogues, we got those covered. And you got it exactly right, and beautifully. In other words, two things. One is, one of the core phrases in, and here we can maybe drop something in the space at the very end. We call this new story of value, cosmo-erotic humanism. That's the name we give to it. And in cosmo-erotic humanism, one of the key, let's use that word from Sanskrit, one of the key mantras, one of the key epigrams is there's more God to come, which you just invoked beautifully and in a beautiful and gorgeous way. And more God to come, is let's just say it this way for now. Let's say that God is value. Let's say that God is transformation. Let's say that God is love. Let's say that God is uniqueness. Let's say that God is personhood. Let's say that God is intimacy. So God has all of those values, and more. So there's more God to come. Meaning if Aubrey a unique incarnation, a unique quality of intimacy, there never was, is or will be ever again. So Aubrey, is a unique incarnation of the god field meaning reality, which is God. God is the real. Reality is having an Aubrey experience. So the precise extent that Aubrey becomes more Aubreyness, there's more God to come. And more than that. If Marc gets to fall in love with Aubrey, and Aubrey gets to fall in love with Marc, because there's a unique quality of intimacy between us as brothers that never existed before, right? So, we actually didn't even know each other existed a year ago.

AUBREY: Truth.

MARC: Truth, right? And then all we meet, and there's this new quality of intimacy that's created, which is not two separate selves finding some pragmatic, shared language, which can help us to win in the rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics. No, no. It's actually a new quality of intimacy that never existed in cosmos before. So, if God is the infinite of intimacy, and we're each God's unique intimacies or eternities or realities, unique intimacies, and there's a new space of intimacy between us, so we are literally more gods to come.

AUBREY: And I think one of the blasphemous tenets that we talked about, like in the movie that I referenced, "Everything Everywhere All at Once" is this idea that in the multiverse, everything has happened in every infinite way already. So it's already, already done. And so nothing fucking matters.

MARC: So there's no more God to come.

AUBREY: There's no more God to come, so nothing fucking matters which is like the ultimate blasphemy to the uniqueness, and the unique expression of all of us participating in the divine and the divine desire for us to actually flower into our fullest potential.

MARC: Yes, yes. To flower, to flourish and implicit in what you're saying, a thousand, billion, quadrillion percent. To flower and to matter. In other words, my life matters. I anthro-ontologically know that my life is significant. My life is significant because I'm omni considerate for the sake of the whole, and I impact the whole. Because the whole lives in me and I live in the whole. And so therefore, when I become more of myself, more irreducibly unique, more in my authenticity, more in my goodness, truth and beauty, then that goodness and truth and beauty will be in devotion to the whole, because that's how goodness and truth and beauty evolves. I'm in service of the whole in a way that no one ever was before, in a unique way that no one else can be. So, I'm impacting the whole, I'm changing the whole. My life matters. I'm actually bringing emergent novelty in the world, which is emergent godness in the world, which means that we're participating quite literally in the evolution of God. And God's eternal. That's where you can see it, right?

AUBREY: Yeah.

MARC: God's eternal, and yet God's evolving. So God's absolutely eternal, beyond the manifest world, the pure unmanifest. And yet, infinity, desired finitude and infinity desired to in some sense, paradoxically. Paradoxically. You can feel it in your body, you can feel it in meditation, you can feel it in prayer, you can feel it on a medicine journey. Eternity desired to become more through us, in us, as us, and through us. Oh my god, I mean, there's nothing that can give you the intrinsic sense of your life mattering than actually knowing that you're actually participating in the evolution of God, which is the evolution of value.

AUBREY: And it seems like in this other story, one of the ways that this other story is damaging, if there's only God that matter and we don't matter, because we're not God, and God is the only thing that matters, then, well, fuck it. Might as well just try to maximize your pseudo Eros to all of the pleasure that you can maximize and all of your win lose metrics, because it doesn't fucking matter anyways. There's an insidious way in which when we're not participating in the evolution of God, it actually degrades the field of value. And so--

MARC: Degrades our humanness.

AUBREY: It degrades our humanness, and degrades the humanness of ourselves, which degrades the humanness of everyone else.

MARC: That's right. And that's what DaVinci and [inaudible 03:01:38] got right. It's what the Renaissance understood. And it's why the art of the Renaissance redrew the human being. In other words, as long as we caricature God, as a creator God, but who's external to reality. Meaning there's no actual godness in reality. God's out there, and manifested here. And our job as Spinoza characterizes pre-modernity is to be obedient, and our own creativity, and our own sense of value, and our participation in the field of value is absurd. In modernity, there was an evolution we got. That's not right. Actually, there's dignity to our discernment. And there's dignity to our capacity, and there's dignity to our goodness, to our truth and beauty. And we actually are held by the divine, but we're also coextensive with the divine. So it's not just New Age, I am God. No, relax, everybody. You're not God, God's God. And you are. Right?

AUBREY: And everybody else is too.

MARC: And everybody else is too. And that's the paradox. So, when I realized there's more value to come, and that we participate in the field of evolving value. Not because, and again, here's where postmodernity got something right. They said, the field of value can't have been frozen. And if that's the only way you can see value, then value must not be real. But they were heretics who were actually expressing a deep truth. But they only got halfway. Yes, we need to deconstruct the old field of value in which value is only unchanging, eternal in the sense of unchanging and preordained. No, value's evolving. Yeah, they got that right. Value is evolving, but it's also real. It's also eternal in the sense that it's beneath time and beneath place. And now we get it. God's eternal. God holds us. And yet God lives in us, as us and through us, and anthro-ontologically, opening up the eye of consciousness, I can actually feel the deep truth of that. I am held in the field of value. And yet, I participate in evolving the field of value. That's not a contradiction. That's a paradox. And actually, in human development today, as we map human development, empirically in about 100 different thinkers, one of the common characteristics of the highest levels of development, which sometimes is called a second tier is the capacity to hold paradox. It's that exact capacity, which demarcates our evolution. And that's what laughter is. Laughter is the capacity to hold paradox. And so, we laugh. There's a great laughter in this, there's a great joy in this. And this allows us to respond to the meta crisis. This allows us to articulate, to live again in the field of value, and to actually then begin to create through a shared story of value, global intimacy. And from there, global resonance. And then from there, global coordination. Then from there, we can respond to the global challenges actually with ease and grace.

AUBREY: Well, this is one hell of an intro.

MARC: Wow.

AUBREY: We really did it here today.

MARC: Wow. What a delight.

AUBREY: Absolutely, absolutely.

MARC: Mad delight, mad laughter.

AUBREY: And so much love and gratitude for everybody who's stuck with us through this journey as we've kind of--

MARC: Oh my God.

AUBREY: Laid out a map for so many places that we're going to go and explore. And I know, I'm sure there's a lot of questions that are arising in people's minds and curiosities. And we're going to, we dedicate and pledge that we're going to unpack all of these things with careful patience, and explore these all together as we try to lay out this new story.

MARC: Totally, totally. And that that was the conclusion. So please place what I'm about to say before the conclusion, okay? Because you just did the conclusion. So conclusion is done, I'm just going back one step, because there's people who are going to be listening who are going to miss two sentences. So I'm going to give him those two sentences. Because when you think this through... So, I just want to say last 90 seconds. Aubrey and I said before, we said that there's continuity and discontinuity at every level. So, matter, all the stages of matter. Life, all the stages of life. Mind, all the stages of life. So at each one of those stages, there's continuity, meaning Eros, or love weaves all the way through. And there's discontinuity, meaning at every level, there's a new expression, the new emergent expression of value. So, story as a first principle and first value, means one thing for molecules, means something else for lobsters, which actually have a real story. Which means something else for human beings, which means something else for human beings, who are expressions of conscious evolution can actually grasp the whole evolutionary story, and grasp the fact that they participate in telling that story, and that their story is part of that story. So there's the value of story, which has a real meaning, it has no components that we talked about earlier. But story evolves. There's the same thread of story all the way through. So, there's continuity, and there's discontinuity. There's momentous leaps in the expression of story. And you can trace all of human thought by people who over emphasize the continuity. So it was all the same eternal value the whole time. And people who said the discontinuity means there's no connection in the world, it's all made up. Every new stage makes new things up, it's not really one world. Human beings make up story. It's just a social construction. No, there's continuity, and discontinuity, all through the story. There's a paradox, there's a threat of continuity. And there's new chapters, discontinuity. That allows you literally to hold a new story. Cha. I love you madly.

AUBREY: I love you madly as well. And love all of you so much. Thanks for tuning into this video. Make sure you hit subscribe, follow me at @AubreyMarcus. 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.