This is a raw transcript from our weekly broadcast of One Love, One Communion: Many Paths, One Mountain. It speaks about the politics of pleasure as the crucial response to the root causes of catastrophic and existential risk.
"The only response to plague and pandemic is the promise of pleasure. It’s only a politics of pleasure that will keep the promise of the prophets.
So why in this moment are we choosing to talk about pleasure? Because it is only a politics of pleasure that can move us beyond pandemic.
Pleasure itself and how we understand pleasure is a First Principle. First Principles express the underlying, eternal yet evolving, universal principles of value that need to be the rudder of civilization’s next stage. First Principles are the First Values that actually drive and animate Kosmos.
Pleasure is a First Value. Human beings are motivated by pleasure, but not only are human beings motivated by pleasure. Reality itself is driven by pleasure.
Atoms are allured to each other. Atoms are pleasurably allured to each other and there is what we refer to as a quantum hedonism that drives all of reality.
By hedonism I don’t mean the superficial search for the most vapid and vacuous of material pleasures but rather that material pleasure points towards the deeper inner core of reality itself.
You have to cultivate discernment around pleasure. What truly creates pleasure with this stunning aftertaste? What pleasure actually blows your heart open and makes you feel like reality has self-evident value?
There are three litmus tests, to know if it is a genuine pleasure.
One, it is self-evident, self-validating. When you’re in that pleasure it’s obvious you’re participating in reality that is intrinsically meaningful, that is intrinsically good. You are no longer searching for purpose. That moment is purpose by itself.
Number two, it leaves this stunning aftertaste. You feel great afterwards. It glows. It unfolds. It gets deeper. It’s more beautiful in the memory often than it even was in the realization. The memory gets deeper and it shimmers and it gets more and more gorgeous.
The third litmus test of the genuine value of pleasure is: when I am in my pleasure, I deeply desire to pleasure you. When I am in a genuine value, I don’t want it for myself. I want to give it to everyone.
You deserve pleasure. Reality wants to pleasure you and you have the capacity to pleasure reality uniquely in a way that no one else can.
We’re not going to heal the pandemic through political deals. We’re not going to heal it by demonizing the other. We’re not going to heal it by throwing other people outside of the circle.
It’s only when we realize that the dignity and divinity of pleasure, the cultivating of discernment around pleasure, the knowing of the levels of pleasure, and the evolution of pleasure, that is what drives the whole thing.
You're driven by pleasure on every level and there is no distinction at all between the highest level of pleasure, what seems to be the most exalted and what seems to be the most basic primal pleasure.Knowing that truly brings your pleasure, is not a casual gnosis. It requires all of us - demanding radical clarity of mind, body and heart.
The clarified pleasure of the five senses opens into the highest pleasure of radical enlightenment, and radical enlightenment incarnates in the most direct pleasure of the five senses. It's one pleasure. It's one pleasure all the way up and all the way down."
This blogpost is a direct quotation from Dr. Marc Gafni from our weekly Live Global Communion Service on Sunday at 10 am PT.
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