315 — This Poignant Moment of Neuro-Cultural Plasticity: a Time between Worlds and a Time between Stories

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.

Edited by Krista Josepha with Elena Maslova-Levin, prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

Elena Maslova-Levin. January the first. Sunrise over Half-Moon Bay

We are music

It is fabulous and beautiful to be with you.

It is great to be with everyone.

What we are going to be doing in the live weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking broadcasts, is we’re going to begin 15 minutes before the hour, every week.

We are going to come together and just

• find each other in presence,
• find each other in chant,
• find each other in practice —

— so that before we get to the Dharma, to the new vision of First Principles and First Values embedded in a story of value, which is the single most important response to the Meta-Crisis — before we get to the Dharma every week, we will actually begin with yoga.

And yoga means practice.

Just like there are First Principles and First Values, there are First Practices.

And one of the core First Practices — in all of the great traditions of value, in the great interior sciences — one of the most important practices is chant.

Chant, music. And we are actually scientifically made of music.

We are music ourselves.

We are constituted by music. I gave a talk about it this summer, so I won’t unpack the science of it now. But science tells us that music emerges with spacetime, and the intervals in spacetime that create music quite literally live in us. It’s scientifically true to say that we, quite literally, are music — so when we chant, we find that dimension of ourselves that is music. Does that make sense?

I really want to invite everyone to be with us — if you can — every week. We are going to be gathering at about 15 minutes before the hour, and we are going to chant.

We are just going to do a little chant in the beginning, just to get started. We are going to pick up the pace of it a little bit, so we can just feel the feeling of chant, just for a second. I am just going to do it once, a little bit off-tune like I always do, and we will pick it up and open it up.

We are spontaneous, we are here, we are just delighted.

It’s Let The Way Of The Heart — and it’s got some energy to it:

Let the way of the heart,
let the way of the heart,
let the way of the heart shine through.

Love, upon love, upon love,
all hearts are beating as one.
Light, upon light, upon light,
all appear as the one.

Try it, wherever you are in the world.
Together, all around the world.
Everyone around the world, together!
The practice of chant — and the actual lived realization that there’s a way of the heart.

The world is not just a great thought, the world is a great feeling

The way of the heart includes the mind and the intellect — and often lots of footnotes, and rigorous thinking. Because the heart is both the organ of feeling and — and, as we know now, with an enormous amount of research in the last 20 years — the heart is also part of our cognitive function, and you cannot split those two.

Our ability to think and our ability to feel are inseparable.

The Universe feels, and the Universe feels Love.

I will tell you a little secret:

• I have, never in my entire life ever, like, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever had a good idea. I’ve never had a good idea, not once.
• I’ve had a feeling. I’ve had a feeling that arrested me, that engaged me, that I listened to.

Often, we cut our feelings off, we split our feelings off — or we have a feeling, and then we don’t feel the feeling through to completion. And then the feeling gets arrested. It gets arrested in trauma, or it gets arrested in the golden shadow of our unlived self.

It is an unlived feeling.

When you actually listen deeply, you realize that the world is not only a great thought — the physicist James Jeans pointed out a bunch of years back that when you look at physics carefully, the world seems more like a great thought — the world is a great thought, but it’s not just a great thought.

If you look a little more carefully at physics, the world is actually a great feeling.

• The Universe feels — that’s actually scientifically accurate.
• Reality is marked by — demarcated by — allurement.
• Cosmic allurement guides and animates Reality at every stage.

So the world is not just a great thought, my friends, the world is a great feeling.

The Universe feels, and the Universe feels love.

And that love is One heart, and it’s One love, and it’s One breath.

Let the way of the heart means,
— to feel the interior quality of Kosmos;
— to feel the allurement that draws us uniquely, and that draws us together to create the most beautiful world that we know is possible;
— and to know that the heart is real.

The heart is not a superficial function.
The heart is not extraneous to the real stuff.
The heart is actually the most real dimension of Kosmos.
Reality is, at its core, Eros. Reality is Eros.
Reality is one love and one heart.

Our minds speak the languages of Eros. Our minds unpack the dazzling cacophonies and symphonies of elegant order, and beauty, and truth, that are expressions of the feeling tone of Kosmos.

Kosmos is intimate. It feels intimacy, and it desires. Alfred North Whitehead — who wrote the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, together with Bertrand Russell, in Cambridge, between 1910 and 1913 — he talks about the appetites of Kosmos.

Kosmos feels hunger, and Kosmos is hungry for value. For the Good, the True, the Beautiful. For love, for delight, for joy. For a heartbreak that becomes transformation. Kosmos is evolution, and evolution at its core is a series of transformations.

So we are going to chant every week. I am excited about that. That’s a big up-level, and that’s crazy exciting!

And if you’re here for the first week, welcome.
And if you’ve been here for 315 episodes, oh my God, welcome.
And if you’ve been with us for a decade, welcome.

Responding to the Meta-Crisis with Three Great Questions of Cosmo-Erotic Humanism

Let us set intention on where we are:

• Where are we?
• Who are we?
• What are we doing here?

This is not a place for casual therapies; it is not a feel-good place; it is not a Doomer place (Oh my God, the world is about to explode!) — although there are reasons to feel good, and there are reasons for therapy, and the world is about to explode.

We are doing something very specific though. We’ve got a very specific intention — and I want to set that intention really, really clearly, because it’s easy to lose. I am going to try and set it in a new way, with your permission.

Okay, are we in? Are we ready to go? Are we ready?

Here we go.

We live in this time between worlds; we live in this time between stories.

That is the sentence that — if you’ve been here before — you know, because we say some version of it every week. And we always point to the Renaissance, which was also, in its own way, a time between worlds and a time between stories.

When the premodern story was breaking down, when pandemics were sweeping Europe and Asia and people were dying on the street (almost half of Europe actually died), we understood then that we couldn’t use the old tools of pre-modernity, of the traditional world

• to heal the fracture,
• to heal the break,
• to heal the destruction,
• to heal the breakdown.

That in order to move from breakdown to breakthrough, we needed to articulate a new vision, to tell a new story — because it’s only a New Story, and a New Story of Value, that changes the trajectory of history.

So da Vinci, and Ficino (who I mention all the time), and about a thousand other people, gathered in Florence, under the patronage of the Medici’s, opposed by almost all the other families in Florence, and they began to think and to feel.

And they felt in art,
and they felt in science,
and they felt what is the feminine,
and what is Eros,
and what is sexuality,
and what is a relationship,
and how do we gather information,
and what’s the nature of who the human being is?

What are the answers to the questions of,

• who are you, and who are we,
• and where are we,
• and what’s there to do, or where are we going, and what do we really want?

And that new story of value, as we have shared many times together, was the story of modernity.

• And to the precise extent that the plotlines were accurate, modernity birthed what Habermas called — the philosopher Habermas, who’s still alive and philosophizing today, probably the greatest critical philosopher of the 20th century — it birthed, as Habermas called it, the dignities of modernity.
• But to the precise extent that they got the storyline wrong — which they did in the Renaissance, in major ways — it birthed the disasters of modernity. And those disasters have brought us to this moment in which we are quite literally not just poised before dystopia — we are poised before a potential extinction, the death of humanity, or a dystopian unfolding of humanity, the death of our humanity.

But we are also poised before utopia —

We have the potential to unfold a world of unimaginable beauty, of unimaginable depth, of unimaginable goodness, of ever-deeper and wider truths.

The world in which no one’s left out of the circle, in which everyone can respond powerfully and accurately to who am I, and who are we, and where are we, and where are we going — but not in a way that occludes the uncertainty, not in a way which dissipates the Great Mystery.

• The Great Mystery is there, and we always live at the edge of mystery, reaching deeper and deeper into the mystery and unfolding it into the light.
• Even as we reach deeper, in the same moment, the mystery itself deepens.
• We always hold uncertainty, and we always stand before the mystery.

And yet, we have the capacity to integrate, to weave together the validated insights from all the great stories of value, into a new Source Code tapestry, into a New Story of Value, rooted in what postmodernity denied — rooted in First Principles and First Values, embedded — again — in a story of value.

We have come to the conclusion — after decades of study, practice, and research — that actually, at this moment of Meta-Crisis, when everything is at stake, there is only response that will actually change the vector of history is a superstructure change.

• An infrastructure response is insufficient. Infrastructure would mean: let’s create new sources of energy. That’s critically important; renewable energy is critically important, but insufficient. Let’s find ways to check for waste in water to prevent a bioweapons attack — critically important, but insufficient.
• And a social structure change won’t do it. Social structure means: let’s revision maybe how democracy works, let’s revision laws that demand that X amount of data scientists don’t work for the Big Tech world, but actually work for the government, in order to be able to appropriately bind or monitor what Big Tech is doing. That would be a social structure; that would be a change in law. Those are important changes in law.
• But the only response that will change the vector of history is a superstructure change.

There’s infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure — these are the sociologist Marvin Harris’s terms, and we’re just borrowing his terms — but the insight is that only a superstructure change can change the vector of history, meaning only a change in the answers to the three great questions.

1. Who are you? Who am I? Who are we?
2. Where are we? Where am I? Where are we?
3. What’s there to do, or where are we going, which is really deeply related to, what do I really want to do, what’s my deepest desire?

Those essential questions: who, where, what?
Those are the questions.
That’s the New Story.

The potential future is vast and large

And we’ve got to answer those questions based on First Principles and First Values that are real.

We have to move beyond the postmodern deconstruction of value. We have to realize that value allures, that we are guided by value, and that value evolves.

• Modernity, and late modernity, postmodernity, were wrong when they said value is not real,
• and pre-modernity was wrong when it said value doesn’t evolve.

Value is real, and value evolves — that’s the post-postmodern understanding; that’s the New Story of Value. Value is real. And so we are working together to articulate 15 basic core First Values and First Principles, and to articulate the plotline of the story. And the story is a love story.

Now, I want to try and say in a new way today, why this insanely matters, as part of setting our intention.

A thought experiment: your actions taken now will affect all of your future lives.

• Imagine for a second, just imagine this for a second. Imagine that there are 100 billion people who have lived — which is about accurate: there’s been about 100 billion living people in the world since the beginning of time, since 300,000–400,000 years ago, when Homo erectus as it were stands on the Savanna of Africa, and becomes some version of Homo sapiens. Now, from that moment till today, about 100 billion humans.
• Now imagine that in some sense, you are every one of those people. Remember the chant which we started with: all hearts are beating as one. And in some sense, you are every one of those people. We all share the same essential quality of consciousness, we are all indivisibly part of each other in some fundamental way. But for now, let go of the ontology of it, let go of the reality of it. Just hold it as a thought experiment.
• Let’s say you live every single one of those lives consecutively, one life after the other. And in some sense, you are all of those people (and Andy Weir, in a little short story called The Egg, actually articulated some version of this thought experiment). Imagine 100 billion people, one after the other after the other after the other after the other — and you are all of those people — how long would it take for those people to go through their lives?

And so that means that…

You’re an early hunter gatherer,
and you’re at the beginning of agriculture,
and you’re a man, and you’re a woman,
and you’re a slave,
and you’re a boy,
and you’re a victim, and you’re an apex predator,
and you’re a murderer, and you’re the one who’s murdered.

Do you get that?

You’re everyone.
You’re the rapist, and you’re the one who is raped.
You’re the one who’s filled with joy and goodness, and you’re the one who’s filled with black melancholy, who can barely move.

Imagine that you are everyone. You’re literally all of those people, and all of those people live in you — that’s going to take about 4 trillion years. About four trillion years.

Now imagine, for a second, the future. If the average mammalian species lives about a million years, that means that at this point, 4 trillion years in, you still have 99.5% of your life left to live — meaning, if you unfold all of the future, you’ve only hit 0.5% of humanity. It means you have an enormous amount of life left to live.

Wow!

Now imagine, friends — imagine that human beings actually learned how to take care of themselves to at least survive in a way that earlier mammals are unable to do. And imagine we live more than a million years; we live 2 million, or 3 million, or 4 million, or we even live the fullness of the possibility of this earth and the star, until they burn themselves out — and we transmuted into the next possibility. Imagine you live all of that.

Then, within the framework of that thought experiment, which is real and valid, we would be literally at the first breath out of the womb; we’d have taken 20 breaths, or 50 breaths. We’re in the first seconds out of the womb right now.

And this is just to get a sense, my friends, the future is vast and large; the potential future is vast and large.

Trillions and trillions of people.
Trillions of boys, and trillions of girls.
And trillions of babies, and trillions of loves.
And trillions of pearls of laughter, and trillions of holy tears.
And trillions of transformation,
trillions of creativity,
and trillions of Godding
Trillions of unique expressions of Reality, each one more dazzlingly beautiful, with infinite value.

There are trillions of new emergence of self-evidently precious value, that matters immensely and enormously, yet to come.

There are trillions of irreducibly unique expressions of infinite value left to come, of infinite divinity left to come.

There’s more God to come.
There’s more value to come.
But infinitely more value to come, infinitely more God to come — not literally infinitely, but virtually infinitely.

Wow!

The future depends on what we do now

Now, go to the next level with me. Are you ready? Okay, friends? Go to the next level of the thought experiment.

And now you realize that your actions taken now will affect all of your future lives.

Do you get that? What you do now will affect all of your future lives; it will affect them in one or two ways.

One possibility is, it will affect whether you have a future life. In other words, you may behave in a foolhardy way now, which will ensure that you have no future life at all. Now, that’s kind of a shocking notion!

Meaning, imagine you’re a teenager, and there’s lots of things you do as a teenager.

• You want to experiment, and you want to go deep inside, and you want to experience the pain and beauty of the world, and you want to get new fields of knowledge. Those are all teenage things to do.
• But you also have to be careful not to, as a teenager — and it’s the job of society, and parents, and your own internal learned, trained discipline — not to take risks as a teenager that will prevent you from growing up. You don’t want to take a risk where by that foolhardy act, you actually die; you actually never grow up, you actually never grow into the fullness of who you are. Wow!

And sometimes we don’t even realize we’re taking those risks.

I remember in Columbus, Ohio, Bexley, Ohio, where I grew up, we used to go jumping, building from building, and it was intensely dangerous. And it didn’t even occur to me it was dangerous; I was never hurt. But looking back on it, it’s like, wow, what was I thinking? We could have fallen. Sometimes you do it unconsciously — and sometimes, we’re actually aware that there is this immense risk in what we’re doing, but we split off the risk. Okay, that’s foolhardy. That’s foolhardy.

Now, we are not even close to the adolescence of our humanity. And at this moment, what we do in the next 20, 10, 40, 50, 100 years, 200 years from now — what we do in this immediate period of time, will directly affect the future — according to hard-crunched numbers, articulated carefully, and an entire set of writings on existential risk, by people like Nick Bostrom, the student of Derek Parfit, at Oxford, who’s at the Center, who coined the term existential risk, along with quite a few other serious hardcore investigators. Some of Parfit’s other students, Toby Ord, or Will MacAskill have done very, very good work, at least in this regard.

I think their work is deeply flawed in terms of how to respond to existential risk, but they did an excellent job in both coining the term, and articulating the possibility of existential risk, and bringing it deep into consciousness.

So that’s real. Existential risk is absolutely real. That’s the death of humanity.

What we do in this period of time could actually stop us from growing up. It could stop us from living all of those trillions of lives, in some fundamental sense.

Or it could cause the death of our humanity. And the death of our humanity means, we don’t actually go extinct, but we enter into a dystopian future.

Neuro-Cultural Plasticity

I want to try and take a look at what that means — because it’s a very, very big deal.

Right now, we are in a place, if I can coin a term — in conversations last week, this term just emerged — we are in a moment of what I would call neuro-cultural plasticity.

Plasticity is a term from the biological systems of the last 50–75 years. A brilliant brain researcher Metzinger — who coined the term, and whose material I’ve been reading for the last two to three years — his work talks about plasticity.

Plasticity means that we used to think that the brain — very, very early on in infancy, or a little bit later — is essentially ossified, or reified, frozen, and it doesn’t change. The brain is a given, and that had enormous implications. We now realize that that’s not true, that the brain is constantly rewiring itself.

For example, after you have an accident, and you lose, for example, one part of the brain’s hemisphere, then the other hemisphere will often rewire some of the functions of the lost part of the lost hemisphere. And that’s true not only of the brain, it is true of the entire body. The body is plastic. The systems of the body, including the brain, are plastic, and they have the ability, at certain moments of crisis, to rewire themselves, until they again get appropriately set in the mold or the pattern that they will be in.

That’s called plasticity.

But not only is there plasticity in, if you will, the biological system. There’s plasticity in the cultural system.

MacAskill, in a book that called What We Owe The Future, gives a very, very good example: in the 6th century, the Xiao dynasty ends in China, and then there is a period of 400 years of what was called The Hundred Schools of Thought. It was a 400 year period, in which you have major schools competing with each other: you’ve got Confucianism, and you’ve got Taoism, and you’ve got what was later called, retrospectively, Legalism, and you’ve got Mohism. You’ve got these major four schools of thought, battling for dominance — until about 400 years later, when Confucianism wins the day, and then — for a thousand years — Confucianism is set and dominates China.

He uses that as an example of these moments that are in between. That’s what we mean when we say, we are at a time between worlds.

When we say we live at a time between worlds and a time between stories, what we mean is that there is a neuro-cultural plasticity in this moment.

We are at a time between worlds.

We are at a time between stories.

This neuro-cultural plasticity means that in this moment, it’s not set. In this moment, it could go many different ways. That’s generally not the case.

Generally, we are in a world.

We are in a story, and you can’t really even think outside of that story.
You live inside of that story.
That story lives in you.
You can’t even see the story.
You can’t make the subject, object.
You can’t see the story. You’re just in the story.

But we are at this unique moment when, at least at the leading-edge, there are many of us who have stepped out of the old story:

• We realize that we are not just a place where we need to, after COVID, get back to normal.
• We realize, as I’ve been trying to say for a couple of decades, together with Barbara Marx Hubbard, our partner — with whom I founded One Mountain Many Paths, and who was the co-chair of our Center for the last few years of her life — we actually realized in some deep sense that this is a phase shift.
• We are at a phase shift in human history, unlike any that we’ve ever been in, in which everything is at stake, where all the old systems are breaking down, but the new system hasn’t emerged.
• And this space in between is a completely creative space.
• And in the space in between, the relationships between parts can be reconfigured.
• This space in between is this neuro-cultural plastic space, in which what we do affects everything.

That wasn’t true 200 years ago, and it may well not be true 200 years from now. It may not be true 100 years from now, it wasn’t quite true 100 years ago.

This time between worlds, this time between stories, is this space in between.

And in this space in between —

• we are either going to do a reset by telling a New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values,
• or something else is going to happen: there’s going to be a tragic dystopian value lock-in.

Value are not merely pragmatic

And here is where MacAskill, and Ord, and Bostrom go wrong. They are essentially beautiful people, highly moral, highly principled in their own lives. And yet, despite the fact that they come out of a what I would call Derek Parfit’s moral realism, they can’t quite articulate a genuine theory of value. Value, for them, is, in one sense or another, consequentialist: value is based on its utilitarian effect in the world.

Once you try and do consequentialist ethics, they always break down, as the critics of consequentialism have pointed out, and they can’t ultimately motivate you — because we are motivated by an intrinsic sense of responding to value that’s real. You cannot deconstruct value and say that value is a mere fiction.

This is the way the circle of postmodernity talks about value: value is a mere fiction, value is a figment of our imagination, value is a story, value is pragmatically consequentialist.

No.

Value is real, value is an intrinsic structure of Kosmos.

And so we need to actually create not a world in which you just keep open, competing values — which is what MacAskill suggests. No, we actually have to download into Reality a vision of a set of First Principles and First Values that are evolving.

• One of those First Principles and First Values is that those values themselves evolve.
• Those First Principles and First Values form a Universal Grammar of Value.
• And that Universal Grammar of Value is a context for our diversity. It is a context for many plural, various, subtle and nuanced understandings and applications of value.
• But at the center, there has to be a shared sense of Evolving First Principles and First Values that are rooted in a story of value.

We need to know that uniqueness is a value, and that truth is a value, and that peace is a value. But those are real values, but not pragmatic values; they are not just: we made them up because it seems to be good for our ability to have a good meal today.

No, no, we are actually feeling and knowing that value lives in us —

• That justice is a real value.
• That kindness is a real value.
• That Eros is a real value.
• That sensuality is a real value. Sensuality means it’s worth being sensual with someone, that’s a value.
• That the exchange of pleasure is a value.

In other words,

• that there is a set of First Principles and First Values that actually animate Kosmos, and that move all the way up the evolutionary chain, and very far down the evolutionary chain.
• that in matter, life, and mind, there are evolving expressions of the same Field of Value.
• And one of the values is mystery, it’s not all worked out. And one of the values is, part of mystery is uncertainty — but that these are real, and that what we do matters ultimately.
• And that our lives are part of the Field of Value, and that our lives are not over when they are over.
• That we participate in the Field of Value, and that value is eternal — not in the sense of unchanging, but in the sense of that which is beneath space and time. We participate in the Field of Value which is beneath space and time.
• And we need, in this moment of plasticity, to actually download those values.

Because the alternative is a value lock-in.

And that’s what MacAskill talks about accurately. A value lock-in means that at this time between worlds and time between stories, at this moment of what I’m calling neuro-cultural plasticity, if we don’t actually download First Principles and First Values — which are valid, which integrate the best of premodern, modern, and postmodern validated insights into a new Evolving Perennialism — if we don’t do that, the alternative is a tragic dystopian value lock-in.

In response to nihilism, you get closed societies

If we don’t articulate a Universal Grammar of Value, then the first country that achieves technological supremacy, will dominate the world

And I want to explain what that means — and this is a big, big, big, big, big deal — I want to try and articulate for you what that means. And this is the key of everything today, this is the key of today.

People always, before they emerge in their fullest and most noble selves, go through certain stages. Often, people never get past going through what I’m about to describe before they die. Some people do transform. But not just people, but humanity as a whole goes through these same stages.

These are stages in which there is a seeking of dominance: we want to dominate, we want our vision of the world to dominate:

• Alexander the Great wanted Hellenism to last forever.
• Hitler wanted there to be a thousand-year Reich.
• Chinese emperors, who reigned only 15 years, spent the 15 years planning for their dynasty to last forever, which of course it never did.

But there is a sense that we want our vision of the world to last forever. That’s a big deal, because we are in a world today in which there is an enormous battle between open societies and closed societies.

And the way MacAskill tells this story, although he clearly comes from the open society side of the world, but he refuses (in his chapter four on value) to say that one set of values is actually better than any other set — because he has no ultimate basis to say that other than consequentialism, which doesn’t give you a ground in intrinsic value — and over the long term of history, we are actually not sure what works better. China is making a case that ultimately, over generations and generations, their system is going to work better.

So MacAskill cannot actually create a hierarchy of values. Nothing can ever be better ultimately than anything else, although there is lip service paid to that kind of claim — and beautiful lip service. And read Derek Parfit, his teacher, he is stunning. I have all of his books upstairs; I’ve been reading through them the for last six, seven, eight weeks. They are gorgeous.

But ultimately, we need to be grounded in the Tao, and the Tao is a Field of Value.

Once we step out of the Tao, we step into the abolition of man, as C. S. Lewis said it. The Tao is the Field of Value. Once we step out of the Field of Value — even if we have a couple of generations of benevolent articulators of culture, like Parfit, like Bostrom, like the young MacAskill and Toby, and blessings to you guys — ultimately, that’s not going to hold.

Once you step out of the Tao, once you step out of the Field of Value, you are ultimately in the realm of nihilism. When you are in the realm of not standing for actual value, then the nihilism emerges. And in response to nihilism, you have various forms of closed society.

That’s what China is. That’s what Russia is trying to be. It’s what Hungary is becoming. That’s what the Philippines is becoming. It’s where Brazil is going. It’s where Sweden — strangely — is going. It’s where Italy is going. And France has very strong movements in that direction. And the United States has strong movements in that direction — movements towards some version of closed society.

Now let’s take a closed society, for example, from the perspective of China. Let’s track this for a second. This is a big, big deal. A closed society responds to this breakdown of value, responds to the sense that the West is not standing for value, and says: no, no — we are going to superimpose values from above, and those values are going to be totalitarian.

• And those values are going to create concentration camps around China.
• And those values are going to create a total surveillance system, without First Values and First Principles, in which there is no value to the individual.
• And there is no value to unique human personhood, and there is no sense of Unique Self.
• And there is no sense of the intrinsic value of goodness, truth, and beauty.
• And there is no sense of human personhood.
• And there is no ultimate sense of universal human rights, let alone governance through more advanced forms than top-down totalitarian, brutal, murderous dictatorship.

And the Chinese Communist Party today is essentially a mafia. It’s a brutal mafia, which engages in the most brutal tactics of murder and mayhem. Let me just say that clearly. Anyone who has studied and read seriously about what the Chinese Communist Party is, knows it is a degraded expression of what humanity needs to be.

The death of our humanity

Let’s say we don’t manage to articulate a universal grammar of value.

Let’s say we just go about our lives, and we do our little projects and our little New Age engagements, and we do our transformation — but we actually ignore the day. We ignore the fact that we are at this moment of neuro-cultural plasticity, and we don’t download a compelling vision — a vision that’s compelling to the people of China, a vision that’s compelling to Russia, that actually begins to emerge as a Universal Grammar of Value.

What’s going to happen is that the first country that achieves technological supremacy, for example, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) — according to multiple estimates, there’s a significant possibility in the next 20 to 50 years, a significant possibility that that could happen — if that country is China, what China will seek to do is to lock in its values.

Artificial General Intelligence means not local artificial intelligence, in which you can do one particular action exponentially better than humans, but you actually can do everything. Right now you have an artificial intelligence that can do one thing. It’s really good at chess and at playing Go, but it’s not good at ordering groceries. You have very, very localized, exponentially developed, local artificial intelligence. It’s not general.

But if you get to an artificial general intelligence, and that general intelligence is owned by a closed society or a totalitarian state, that artificial general intelligence will — watch carefully here, friends — within six months to a year, two years, the rate of productivity, and economic explosion, and military power explosion generated by the artificial intelligence that will be achievable by that country will make them the dominant force in the world, in a very, very, very, very narrow window of time.

In other words, the country that achieves that will dominate the globe. And when I say dominate the globe, it’s not an old world. It means they dominate all of the planetary stack, all of the computational infrastructure. The planetary stack of Reality is completely dominated by that country.

Wow!

• And that country then goes to download their value structure into the whole world.
• And in order to get food, to get a job, to participate in any way in society, you actually need to be part of that what China today calls Social Credit System.
• You’ve got to be part of that world infrastructure.
• If you are not part of the world infrastructure, essentially, you die.
• And you only are allowed into the survival infrastructure if you assent to the imposed superstructure (world view, value structure).
• So within a generation or two, that dystopian downgraded value structure becomes the value structure of humanity.

Wow! That’s what I mean by the death of our humanity.

So there are two possibilities:

1. There’s the death of humanity: extinction.
2. Then there’s this other dystopian possibility, which is a second form of existential risk, which I’ve been talking about for last couple of years. Together we’ve been talking about it, in our Unique Self Symphony. It’s not the death of humanity, it’s the death of our humanity.

Up till now, we have not presented a coherent system of value in the world

What we’ve been saying, week after week — but sometimes it’s easy to lose what that means — we are at a time between worlds, we are at a time between stories.

We are at this moment of maximal neuro-cultural plasticity, when what we do can affect the future.

That’s a very rare place to be in history. There is no generation that’s ever been, in all of history, at this place, where what we do can affect the future.

Imagine we’ve lived for four trillion years, 100 billion lives. But we’re just at the first 0.5%. That’s what we said earlier. If humanity lives, like most mammalian species, a million years, we are at the first 0.5% of all of our future lives. And what we do could actually cause us to suicide; we could have no future lives, meaning we will have essentially left in non-existence, essentially murdered trillions and trillions and trillions of gorgeous, irreducibly unique expressions of LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty. Boys and girls, and babies, and old men and old women, and wise ones. All of it!

Or we can actually engage in this great project, this overwhelming moral imperative of this time, and articulate a New Story of Value — First Principles and First Values, Evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in New Story to value — and have the audacity to say, we want to download this, and we want to engage the world. And we want to talk to China and talk to Russia, and talk to every closed society, and invite them into this possibility, so that they see that we actually are standing for value.

• We are not in a nihilism. We are not in what Putin thinks is a kind of postmodern weak and broken West.
• We are actually standing for value, and we’re standing strong for that value, and we’re aligned with value in a deep way. And it is evolving value. And it’s a story of value that we are willing to place everything on the line for. And it’s a coherent system of value.

But up till now, we have not presented a coherent system of value in the world. We haven’t. Putin, Xi, Orban, they’ve looked at the West as a kind of postmodern breakdown, no longer standing for value in any genuine sense.

There was a moment where the West came together around Ukraine, which was critically important, and we’ve talked about that here (and Elena has done a beautiful job of bringing those talks together, and we’re going to share them shortly with the world) — but that’s broken down in many ways.

We have to come together and stand for value. But we can’t do that, because

• we actually don’t have a theory of value.
• We don’t have a vision of First Values and First Principles.
• We are stuck in all the postmodern critiques of value, which are valid, but we haven’t moved beyond them.
• What we’re here to do is to tell a New Story, because to tell a New Story of Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values, at this time of neuro-cultural plasticity, is the single most compelling moral act, with most consequences.

With most consequences, with most effect. Because what we do at this moment of plasticity, what we do at this time between worlds and time between stories, will affect everything.

It will affect everything.

What we need to do is we need to give new answers. But not declarations, not made-up answers — the deepest, most beautiful, most gorgeous, most grounded, most validated answers we can — to the great questions of:

Who am I, who are we?
Where are we, what kind of world do we live in?
What’s there to do, what’s our deepest heart’s desire?
What does it mean to be a man and a woman?
What does it mean to be in a relationship?
What does it mean to create an economy?
What does it mean to create politics?

All of that depends on these basic questions: who, and where, and what.

So that’s what we are going to be doing. We are in this revolution, and our question is, are we ready to play a larger game?

Are we ready to participate, at this moment of maximum neuro-cultural plasticity, in the Evolution of Love?

And to be brave enough, to be courageous enough to create a Universal Grammar of Value — even a world religion, but a world religion as a context for our diversity. Not a one religion: we own truth, you don’t — but a universal grammar of value, as a context for our pluralism, as a context for our diversity.

Literally, the future of Reality depends on it. The suffering, catastrophic risk, existential risk, the death of humanity or the death of our humanity — all depends on what we do at this moment in time.

Placing our lives on the altar of history

The rare privilege of being those people, born at this time, to have that privilege — and of all the people on planet Earth, somehow, we, and colleagues of ours around the world, but we’ve been granted this privilege.

We have the capacity to be here together on Sunday, to be participating in evolutionary sensemaking projects, and in editing projects, and writing projects, and funding and resourcing, in order to make this true.

In order to make this true, wow!

And we’ve got to take dramatic steps.

And what I am asking is,

• What does that mean for each of us?
• What are we doing to show up, to wake up?

— so that we can actually light this moment up with our mad commitment, our mad joy, because we can see it.

And I want to tell you something.

There are days when I wake up and I’d rather not see it, I’d rather be blind. I’d rather be blind. Because if you don’t see it, you can just engage your life. But once She opens your eyes, once you can see it — if you could see it today, that means you are in. That means you have a place at the table of history.

And this system that we are in, it’s not an old style system. It’s not somebody downloading dogma. We are together as a Unique Self Symphony, creating this New Story of Value, resourcing it, visioning it. And placing our lives on the altar of history and saying, we are here!

We are here to do this.

Wow, that’s a big deal. That’s a crazy big deal.

And next week, the code is about the nine stations of transformation. We looked at it carefully, and we broke it down into nine — the nine stages of transformation that are the most potent answer to the question of who are you, who are we. That’s what we’re going to do next week.

We are going to actually step into articulating this grammar of value.

And we want to weave it together in a way that

• it’s going to actually land in China.
• It’s going to land in Moscow.
• It’s going to land all over Africa.
• It’s going to land all over Asia.
• It’s going to land all over Europe.
• It’s going to land over all over the Americas.
• It’s going to land in Greenland.
• It’s going to land in Iceland.
• It’s going to land in Australia.
• It’s going to land in Africa.

And I missed a continent, Antarctica.

We want to articulate an evolving shared grammar of value that calls us to the best of who we are.

Not to our lowest common denominator, which is how the web is architectured (the web-plex appeals to the lowest common denominator of human being), no —

• We want to call forth our nobility.
• We want to call forth our beauty.
• We want to call forth the capacity for the fullness and gorgeousness of what a human being, a Homo sapiens who’s becoming Homo amor.

Homo amor, meaning the fulfillment of Homo sapiens.

Homo amor, who is omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.

Homo amor, who is an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty, who is giving his or her unique gift, who participates in a planetary awakening in love through Unique Self Symphonies.

That’s what we’re here for. That’s what next week is about.

Turning to the Divine to partner with us

I cannot say thank you enough. We are going to finish today with a prayer, like we always do. And just thank you madly for being with us. We are going to finish with a prayer, which is Leonard Cohen.

Prayer is not an old idea. It’s not a premodern idea. Prayer itself is a First Principle and First Value of Kosmos, and it’s the First Principle and First Value of second person —

• There is not just first person, my experience with myself.
• There is not just third person, me observing Reality, looking at it.
• But there is second person; there’s the space in between us. And that second-person is relationship.

There are very serious writers in quantum physics who actually understand that its essence is the understanding that Reality itself, at its core, is relationship. Reality is relationships, that’s what it is. And it’s relationships between us. There is a relationship between me and myself. But there is also a relationship between me and you. There are I-Thou relationships. But our relationships are reflective, they participate in the larger field of relationship.

Reality is not just third-person, objective fact. And it is not just my own internal experience. Reality is personal. There’s an infinite Field of personhood. Reality has a personal face.

• There is not just God as an Infinity of Power, all of the dazzling complexity and energies and forces of Kosmos.
• There is a second quality of Kosmos, which is a First Principle and First Value, which is personhood. There’s a personal face to Kosmos that knows my name. And we call that by many names — the Gods and the Goddesses of every tradition were an attempt, sometimes primitive — but it was a valid, correct intuition, that there is a personhood to Kosmos that knows my name, that’s holding me in every second.

And Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah, has more covers done of it than any other song, because it speaks to that intuition. Leonard Cohen stands before the Lord of Song, the personal face of Kosmos, and says, Hold me! Hold my holy and hold my broken Hallelujah. Because I know that There’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah.

So we turn to the Divine, and we say, partner with us.

• You live in us, as us, and through us.
• But you also hold us, and you are also manifested in us.

Those are somehow both true, paradoxically, so —

Partner with us. Hold us in our holy and broken Hallelujah, and hear our prayer. Hear our prayer, even as we human beings hear your Divine prayer.

Because in the great lineages, humans respond to the prayer of the Divine. And God says:

I need your partnership.
I need you to hold my hand.
I need you to walk with me in history.
I need you to partner with me in creating the new world.

And we turn to the Divine, and we ask for everything.

• We ask for health, and we ask for longevity, and we ask for energy.
• And we ask for goodness, we ask for joy.
• And we ask for ourselves, and we ask for our neighbor, and our family member and our child and our cousin, and then people that we’ve never met.
• And we ask for the goodness of the whole thing; we are omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.
• And we bring it all — nothing is left out. Every place we go, we fall into Her hands, into the hands of She, who hears every note of our holy and our broken Hallelujah.

We move into prayer, and as we hear Cohen, who’s very, very loving. He comes to us, to One Mountain, every week, and he plays this chant, this prayer.

It is a mad joy to be with you, with all of the urgency! The urgency is also lined with joy at the privilege. We feel infinite concern — and yet we celebrate, and yet we’re alive. We are filled with joy in every second. And so what a joy, what a delight, and for me at least, the great honor of my life to be with you.

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