This is an almost unedited and unplugged version of Dr. Gafni’s conversation from the previous weeks of One Mountain, Many Paths broadcast. Thus, the style of the piece is the spoken word and not a formal essay. Dr. Marc Gafni transmits the Depth Philosophy of the Intimate Universe as "Welcome Home".
Let me share a few sentences, sentences that I have one way or the other meditated on, practiced, researched, and ecstatically realized over several decades of life.
“Desire drives evolution. The interior of Reality is not just consciousness; it is consciousness and desire. God is desire. Reality is desire. My clarified Deepest Heart’s Desire is the unique desire of Reality incarnate in me. I am evolution’s leading edge. Evolution is the desire for a new future. Evolution is the desire for the creative advance of novelty, new structures of interiority, new structures of Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Evolution is the desire for new movements from simplicity to complexity. Evolution is desire. We are the leading edge of evolution’s desire. My Deepest Heart’s Desire is God’s desire”.
Moreover:
“Desire is always a desire for ever more intimacy. Intimacy means ‘you feel me and I feel you.’ ”
For example, I remember one night that I was up at one in the morning. I was crying - tears rolling down my cheeks, asking myself one question:
Do you feel me? Do you love me? Do you care about me? Do you burn as I burn for you? Do you burn for me? Does all of you want my deepest freedom, my deepest fulfilment? Are you pouring blessing into me because you feel me? Does all of you desire me as I desire you? And by desire I do not mean just sexual desire. But erotic desire. Eros in all of its forms? Do you desire to touch me, emotionally, spiritually, ethically, psychologically, existentially, aesthetically, politically, do you desire to touch me in every way?
This is the quality of the desire for intimacy.
CosmoErotic Humanism
One of the cores of the new school of thought that can become the ground of what we term a universal grammar of value, is what we call CosmoErotic Humanism. At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is the understanding that reality is not merely the movement from simplicity to complexity, but the progressive deepening of intimacies, which is the arc of the moral universe. For the moral universe and the Intimate Universe are one. In their clarified depths there is never any split between ethics and Eros.
Here is a phenomenological description of intimacy; meaning this is what intimacy feels like in the first and second person experience of our lives.
You feel me and I feel you. You feel me feeling you. I feel you feeling me. You feel me feeling you, feeling me. I feel you feeling me, feeling you.
That’s what it feels like to be intimate. And it is only intimacy that liberates us from loneliness.
The Intimacy Formula
The universe feels and the universe feels intimacy. Let’s move from the feeling of intimacy to a more precise formula. Just as there are formulas in exterior science - think of Einstein's relativity formula e=mc2 - there are formulas in Interior science. This is the science of interior physics. But this formula is not a reductive materialist data science equation like those coming out of the MIT Media Lab, which desperately try and imitate the exterior sciences, attempting to reduce the human being to behaviorist measurements.
While exterior science formulas are appropriately evaluated by their capacity to measure, the formulas of interior sciences are evaluated by their capacity to describe the immeasurable in a way that we understand reality and ourselves more intimately, more humanly.
So let’s begin.
Intimacy = shared identity. That is the beginning of the formula. We share identity in the context of otherness. We are distinct and we are unique, but we share identity. We’re part of the same musical score. We are unique notes in the symphony.
Intimacy = shared identity in the context of [relative] otherness. We seek union but not fusion. Autonomy and communion always dance together in Kosmos. Opposites are always joined at the hip.
But then we must add another dimension to the intimacy formula, + mutuality of recognition, we recognize each other. This is the core formula we’ve articulated in the interior sciences. This is the true notion of genuine social physics. The physics of what it means to be a human being, which is not actually physics, measuring the world, but rather describing the interior magic of Reality. This is phenomenology at its best, which in its deepest depth yields ontology. Let’s bring it together even more completely.
Intimacy = shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness x mutuality of recognition x mutuality of pathos (feeling) x mutuality of purpose x mutuality of value.
Mutuality of recognition is only possibly in the context of mutuality of pathos, value and purpose.
But all of this is not merely in the realm of the human. We are Kosmic humans. Ontology lives in our phenomenology. And the personal is then naturally the ground of the political and the moral. For both the political and the moral must be rooted in the evolutionary truths that emerge from the Kosmic patterns of reality. We are not merely constructing our social world, we are disclosing our social world, which is an evolutionary emergent of Kosmos. It is for that reason that we can be at home in the universe.
It is only when we have mutuality of value, when we have a shared grammar of value, that we can address the Global Intimacy Disorder. We can only address the global challenges, if we have global coherence. We need a common story. Our common story is that we share value. We have a shared story.
Reality needs my service
To be intimate with Reality means that I share identity with Reality. It means that I know that every muon, every quark, every hadron, every atom, and every molecule in all of evolution lives in me. I share identity with Reality.
I am evolution in person and, therefore, I know that Reality needs me. I’m not extra. I’m uniquely needed. Reality needs my service. To be intimate with Reality means to live in social synergy. Social synergy means intimacy. It means to desperately care and desperately partner with each other, with the radical joy and mad love of being evolutionary whole mates in Unique Self Symphony.
This is just the beginning of this conversation, but I was so ecstatic and privileged to start this conversation together.
In the fall we will be publishing a book, which is part of the Great Library that unpacked these themes of CosmoErotic Humanism in depth. Together with dear friend and colleague Zak Stein and the entire gang of thinkers, scholars, creators, and ontological activists, each more profound and wondrous then the next, the men and women that form the Office for the Future, and it’s sister structures, One Mountain, The Center for Integral Wisdom and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Foundation for Conscious Evolution, we are deep in this conversation together. Join us please. Here is how you do it.
[This blogpost is almost all direct quotes from Dr. Marc Gafni collected from the raw transcript of the featured clip below, which is created from the free weekly broadcast of One Mountain, Many Paths, happening live every Sunday at 10 am PT]
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