317 — The Nine Great Stations on the Journey of Transformation

A Note to the Reader

Published in

Office for the Future

35 min readNov 11, 2022

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 Elena Maslova-Levin.

Elena Maslova-Levin. Like as the waves (Shakespeare sonnet 90)

Evolutionary Love Code:
Human life is not an event; it is a journey.
In all of the interior and evolutionary sciences, the journey is 
understood to be a journey of transformation.
In the most advanced understanding of the human journey, there are
nine stations of transformation.
These are what we term the seven selves.
The journey through the seven selves, to the best understanding, is
the purpose of human life in the manifest world.

In the human journey, there are nine stations of transformation

This is an insanely exciting week in our evolutionary sensemaking that we’ve been promising for the last three, so I am madly delighted to be with you.

An insanely exciting and important week! We are going to talk about the nine stations in the journey of self. The seven Selves and the nine stations in the journey of Self, an answer to the question of Who are you?

We are going to dive in, and to look at: who am I?

It is my hope, my prayer, and my trust in our promise, that — in about forty minutes from now — we are going to have a sense of who are you that exponentially exceeds who we understand ourselves to be right now. Some of us have studied, and we have articulated and developed this understanding of identity — but what we are about to present is the best understanding of identity, I believe, that exists in the Kosmos today.

At least on planet Earth. And it’s our job in planet Earth:

The way we become a resonant beacon for the larger galactic unfolding is by evolving who we are, to the best, the deepest, the truest, the most good, the most beautiful that we can be.

Okay, so let us see if we can do this, and let us make da Vinci proud.

Because we need to be da Vinci in this generation — but we need to be da Vinci exponentialized.

We need to move way past Leonardo, and create this new Renaissance — because the alternative is dystopia, meaning: no future or a dystopian future.

Let us create the most beautiful world, the most good world, the most true world that we already know as possible.

So here we go. Okay, we are ready? Let us dive in. Let us see if we can set the tone and address together one of the key questions, which is the question of who are you, the question of identity.

We want to integrate the best leading-edge validated insights of all the wisdom streams. Premodern, modern, and postmodern will all be resonant in this unpacking.
We are going to unpack it at the level of second simplicity, meaning simplicity after complexity, in relatively clear terms.

We are going to look at these nine stations, which address the great question of who am I, who are you?

Are we ready to go, we have a drumroll? Drumroll in the house, drumroll!

Do we have a drumroll?

Station One: Pre-personal

Station one is what we might call the pre-personal. Before the self comes online, there is the pre-personal.

At the level of the baby, before the baby goes through what Margaret Mahler calls separation-individuation, the baby is fully absorbed, in some sense, in the mother, the baby is identified with the mother, and the baby doesn’t have any sense of being separate. That absorption, that oneness between the mother and baby — we would call that pre-personal.

That is a necessary and beautiful stage of life, in which the baby nurses at the breast of the mother and hasn’t yet individuated — but when you arrest on that pre-personal space, you get distortion. You get pathology.

The pre-personal space lives

not only in ontogeny, not only in the personal unfolding of human life,
but also in phylogeny, in the stages of humanity’s unfolding.

Because the who are you, who am I story of human being is also the who are you, who am I story of humanity. Ontogeny and phylogeny recapitulate each other. The story of the humanity unfolding and the story of the human being unfolding are embedded in each other.

So, the first station is the pre-personal.

Now, where would the pre-personal show up, let’s say in shadow form, in the unfolding of humanity? It might show up in a cult, in a pre-personal cult, in a negative cult; a cult in the negative sense of the word. In a cult where you have one person or a little group of people who are dominating the space, in which

there’s no sense of the dignity of the distinct separate personal self;
there’s no sense of autonomy,
there’s no sense of freedom,
there’s no sense of choice.

There is a complete absorption in the cult.

And there is something very powerful about that, and there’s something very attractive about that, and there’s something very alluring about that: I lose my sense of individuated self, I am reabsorbed in a cult — and that’s a great and tragic unfolding.

Now, it doesn’t mean that it’s a tragic unfolding to be absorbed in a beautiful, gorgeous community, and in a gorgeous intimate communion with a larger community where my identity is part of — and is, in part, defined by — the larger communion. That’s not pre-personal, that’s transpersonal. We are going to get to transpersonal later.

Pre-personal is when you haven’t yet individuated — or you regress. It’s a regressive move.

The pre-personal shows up in a cult, it can show up in a gang, and it can even show up in some moments of a company or a religion, where I become so entirely defined by the company, or the religion, or the organization, or the nation that I actually lose a sense of my individuated dignity and personhood.

That’s the pre-personal, that’s the first station. That station is important, and we are formed and shaped in a wildly gorgeous, stunning, beautiful, positive way in that station.

When Sinead O’Connor sings This Is to Mother You, she is talking about that experience of being held in the arms of the adoring mother before I am even conscious, and knowing I am welcome. Because that experience of nursing at the breast of the mother, before I am even conscious as an individual, downloads into the very source code of my being the experience of being welcome in Kosmos. And so, that pre-personal experience is critical and beautiful — but when it arrests or appears later in this arrested form, when we regress to it without any sense of the personal, it pathologizes.

That’s station one.

Station Two: Separate Self

Station two is the first emergence of separate self.

Separate self emerges — and separate self is not to be demonized, as in so many of the Eastern Buddhist and other mystical traditions in Judaism and Christianity and Hinduism. The mystical traditions demonize the separate self. Bad mistake. Separate self is a beautiful emergence.

It is an emergence in the history — the his-story, the her-story — of the individual, and of the story of culture. The emergence of separate self explodes in the world with the canon of Biblical thought, when the human being is addressed as homo imago dei.

Every unique individual human being is participatory in the image of the Infinite, in the image of infinite value, in the image of God.

That’s the notion of the dignity of the individual.

That notion is strong in Hebrew wisdom, but it doesn’t become utterly central in culture until Christianity and Islam, each in their own ways, liberate some dimensions of Hebrew wisdom and bring them into the world. And that ultimately comes together, in Europe at least, in the Renaissance — and really in the 16th century, for the first time, the word self appears in the dictionary. The word self doesn’t appear in the dictionary before the 16th century.

And self is separate self, rooted in the great traditions, but not fully crystallized. In Hebrew wisdom, not fully crystallized. In Christianity, in part. In Islam, in part. In part for a simple reason —

In Christianity, there is no dignity to the individual unless they accept a certain set of tenets. If you don’t accept Christ in a particular way, you are damned, and that doesn’t speak for the dignity of the individual.
It’s not sufficient either in Hebrew wisdom, because it is limited to too narrow a group of people, the chosen people.
In Islam, again, there is a sense of chosen people, it’s either us or them. There’s not the innate dignity of the individual per se.

But those are proto-versions of separate self. The full separate self appears in the Renaissance. Every human being has dignity.

Every human being, independent of the larger context, simply as a separate self, has dignity.

That’s the emergence of the modern citizen, the modern separate self. And separate self is real. I want to say it in classical nomenclature: separate self is a real construct in the mind of God.

Separate self is real.

Separate self is the moment in my life when I say,

this is my story and this is my life,
and my life isn’t anybody else’s life,
and I can’t be anyone else,
and I can’t be born at a different time,
and I can’t look a different way.
This is me, and I am embracing my story, and I am embracing the dignity of my separate self, and I am standing in that inherent dignity, and I step out of all co-dependencies. Not interdependencies, but I step out of all co-dependencies, and I feel the inherent dignity of me being a separate self.

Okay, wow, that’s a very big deal. Separate self is a huge deal, hugely important.

It is an evolutionary leap that cannot be ignored, cannot be pathologized, cannot be demonized — and yet, that’s only station two.

Because the separate self by itself, when that’s the end of the story — when the separate self or the ego self is the end of the story — then, by definition, I am going to be lonely and alienated, because I am in violation of my deeper nature.

Because separate self is a dimension of my nature, my ego self is a dimension of my nature, and I never want to evolve beyond it. You never want to evolve beyond ego. When I hear teachers teaching I’m going to teach evolution beyond ego, I get scared. Because

anyone that says they’ve evolved beyond ego is lying,
and anyone who says they’ve evolved beyond separate self is violating the structure in the mind of God, which is separate self. It is real.

So I never evolve beyond ego, I never evolve beyond separate self. But what I do is I have to evolve beyond my exclusive identity with separate self. Does that make sense?

I am not just separate self.
I am not just ego self.
I am something more.

Station Three: Social Self

Now, the third self I want to introduce is one attempt to talk about what that something more is, and it’s an attempt that has a partial truth. It’s true, but partial. But when it becomes the totality of self, it fails.

That third station of self is very, very strong today. It is being taught at the MIT Media Lab. It was taught by B. F. Skinner at Harvard for six decades. Chomsky and others rejected B. F. Skinner, the great behavioral psychologist (for good reason), but Skinner’s thinking has reemerged in what we might call — Auguste Comte coined the term — social physics.

Social physics is the theory that underlies the entire web-plex, that pretty much everyone on this call participates in. The social self, rooted in social physics, suggests that who I am is

the sum total of my social interactions,
the sum total of the social influences on me,
the social network incentives that actually shape and form me.

The web is built around those — likes, and views, and this complete bubble in which I’m defined by this very tight network of social interactions, which can undermine my sense of being a separate self and undermine my autonomy, undermine my free will. I actually become the object of manipulation through social nudges and social cues.

And that’s an understanding that lines the web-plex.

And Mark Zuckerberg pretty much believes this — if you study him carefully, it’s his default belief. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin over at Google pretty much believe this. And Nardella over at Microsoft pretty much believed this. And they are all influenced by a guy named Alex Pentland, in the MIT Media Lab, who very clearly believes this and has articulated it in probably two hundred papers, and he has dozens and dozens and dozens of doctoral students who have all achieved their doctorates and have started companies embedded in the tech-plex.

The sense that who I am is not a separate self — I am a social self. I’m the sum total of all my social interactions, and I’m defined by social cues and social pressure — that’s the social self.

Now, that’s not wrong. I am absolutely impacted.

The social self is part of who I am.
I am not just a separate self,
I’m not just autonomy, my autonomous separate self.

The value of separate self is autonomy. The value of social self is communion. But they mustn’t ignore each other; autonomy and communion have to live together.

So let’s take a look. Our third station is what we are calling social self.

Social self exists throughout history, but it’s now becoming the dominant self in the tech-plex —

whether it’s in China — China’s social credit system is built on a totalitarian version of the social self,
or whether it’s the United States which has its own oligarchy of tech-plex, what I would call Techno-Feudalists, who are also selling a non-totalitarian, non-overtly totalitarian, a non-Orwellian version of the social self, but one that’s equally insidious, that equally undermines free will, that equally undermines the inward space of meaning in which the glory and nobility of self is formed.

Because the social self, especially in the tech-plex, speaks to the lowest common denominator.

The social self ignores intrinsic value.

The social self says that the only thing that really exists are loops and loops of social interactions, which are all in the end driven, as Skinner said and as Pentland writes, by survival.

That’s the social self.

Now, there is some truth to it. The truth is, we are social beings, we are embedded in social systems, we are social selves. But it’s just a piece of who we are, it’s far from all of who we are. We are actually something much deeper.

So let’s recapitulate:

We’ve got a pre-personal self, which exists, again, both in the human being and in humanity.
We then transcend (we end the trance of, if you will, speaking poetically) the pre-personal self. We get to separate self. Separate self is a reality in the mind of God. The dignity of separate self, the embrace of my story at the separate self level is critical. And yet, separate self doesn’t exhaust my identity, I’m more than a separate self, I’m more than just autonomy.
Third station: we have this realization of social self. That’s a true realization, but it’s true but partial.

When I actually embrace and apotheosize — I create an apotheosis and I make as it were godlike — the social self by itself, when I make communion the ultimate value, then I create a distortion. I create a pathology, and that pathology exists on the web today, and that sense of a social self which is the pathology also exists in some of the meta-theories of classical communism, in which only the social body exists — and the individual doesn’t exist at all.

That’s the social self, both in its beauty and its limiting pathologies. That’s station three.

Station Four: False Self

Station four, which I’m not going to spend a lot of time on — I’m just going to mention it, because it’s really the higher stations we want to get today, that’s where the game is. But we need to know the steps along the way, we are doing a full theory. We are going to try and articulate the best, most advanced theory and understanding and realization, embodied realization in our lives, of this experience of responding to the question of who am I?

And all of us, as you listen, if you can, friends, notice

Where are you in pre-personal self? Where are you being pre-personal? Where have you regressed, where you want to be just in the arms of the mother and actually give up that individuation? That’s beautiful, and that’s good, and that has a place, and there are places we should actually let ourselves fall into the arms of. It’s just insufficient. So, find the pre-personal self, and find it in yourself, and give it place, and give it honor.
And then, friends, find your separate self, your dignity as a separate self, your classical identity as a citizen, and see the goodness of just embracing your individuated story, and the beauty of that.
And then see in your life, where am I a social self, and to what extent am I a social self, what’s the truth of that? Where am I the sum total of my network of social influences, and why that’s beautiful, and why it therefore matters what social context I locate myself in. And why that doesn’t exhaust me, and why I have to be careful to find a deeper strange attractor, Northstar of value, so I don’t get ultimately defined by my social self — which would pathologize me.

Those are the first three stations of self: pre-personal, separate self, social self.

Four, which I think we’re going to talk about briefly, is false self.

False self is a distortion. It’s the distortion of either separate self or social self. So in some sense, we’ve already addressed false self.

When I’m only a separate self, when that exhausts my identity, that’s a distortion that becomes false self.
When the social self becomes — in the Alex Pentland, TechnoFeudalism, MIT Media Lab formation — when my social self becomes the sum total, when I am the sum total of materialistic social interactions — that’s a distortion of social self. That’s another version of false self.
The third version of false self would be when my attention fixates early in life in a distorted form. I come into the world, I experience the shock of separation. Here I am, and I have to find my way in the world, and I am shocked by my existence in this world. I’m shocked that the world is not attuned to me. I was in the mother’s womb and all Reality was attuned to me, and all of a sudden, there is this discordance between me and Reality. And very early on, I cannot blame Reality, because that will crush me, it will make me suicidal to Reality, so I, in some sense, fault myself, and I begin to live within a false core.

And that false core — because we live in a world of language — formulates itself in a sentence, so I will have a false core sentence, and the false core sentence might be:

I am too much, I am too much, I am too much.
I am not good enough.
I am ugly.
I am bad.
I am not lovable.
I am not safe.
I will always be alone.
I am not trustworthy.

Who can feel that? Who can feel those?

That’s a third version of the false self, and that’s when I generate Reality from the place of my false core, which formulates as a false core sentence.

As long as I am creating and generating my Reality from within that false core sentence, my Reality is going to be distorted, and I am going to generate a pathologized Reality.

What we then do is, we then cover up our false core with a false self. Let’s say my sentence is, I am not safe. What I will do is, since I am not safe —

I will take unimaginable and foolhardy risks, because I am not safe anyways — so it just doesn’t matter,
or I will do the opposite: I’ll retreat so deep inside that I’ll never take the appropriate unique risks that I have to take, because I’m so trembling and fearful because I’m not safe.

There are a lot of strategies to do it. And there is an entire week in the Unique Self Course that’s being offered now by Claire, together with her two honourable and esteem-able assistants, David and Kristina Amelong. They are doing this Unique Self Course, and they did a week on false self, which is unbelievably important, where we unpack this in great depth. So that’s false self. That’s the fourth station, and it’s the fourth self.

Puzzle Pieces without Original Puzzle

Now, if you would imagine this for a second, see if you can picture this for a second.

Imagine that the separate self is a puzzle piece.
The puzzle piece is looking for the puzzle, but the puzzle piece is told that there is no puzzle. There’s no puzzle, not at all. No puzzle, it doesn’t exist.

That’s the separate self — so the separate self walks a little funny. Because if you are a puzzle piece, it’s hard to walk. It’s very idiosyncratic — look at the edges of a puzzle piece! It wants to fit into something but there is nothing there to fit into. That’s the experience of a puzzle piece.

The separate self is experiences itself as a puzzle piece.

The social self experiences there being lots of puzzle pieces, lots of puzzle pieces, tons and tons and tons of puzzle pieces — but when those puzzle pieces come together, they don’t form the true wholeness of an original vision of a puzzle. They just randomly fall together, they shape together, and however they happen to fall together, that becomes the puzzle. There is no original puzzle, there is no intrinsic vision they are trying to fill. However the puzzle pieces happen to fall together, that’s the puzzle.

To recap:

Pre-personal, that’s pre-personal self.
Then separate self is now no longer in the pre-personal, separate self is in the personal. It’s the personal. It’s the personal, though, which isn’t related to a larger field. So it’s the puzzle piece with no larger puzzle.
Then you go to social self, and social self is still the personal, but it’s the personal social. So it’s not the individual personal, it’s the personal social. It’s lots of individual personals, coming together in the social. It’s lots of individual puzzle pieces that do not cohere in the vision of an original puzzle that’s intrinsic to Kosmos, that seeks to emerge. They are going to randomly fall together with each other, and however they fall together, they’re going to call that the a puzzle. That’s social self.
False self is still in the realm of the personal. It’s a puzzle piece, but it’s distorted. It’s been twisted. It’s been mis-shaped. It is a mis-shaped, twisted puzzle piece, still in the realm of the personal, is the false self. That’s the fourth station.

Those are the first four stations — and now, massive takeoff!

Station Five: True Self

Now we are going to take a momentous leap into the fifth station, and the fifth station is this dramatic, exponential up-leveling of self, where something new happens.

Let’s have a drumroll. Do we have a drumroll in the space?

We are laying down, we are evolving the source code of consciousness in culture itself right now.
We are literally participating in the evolution of love. We are doing the hard work — but it’s ecstatic work.
We are putting together, weaving together, the deepest validated insights of premodern, modern, and postmodern. We are weaving them into a larger whole, which is a full vision of self.

Now that’s going to translate in lots of second simplicity ways, we have to download it into culture. But first we have to get it. Let us see if we can get this, if we can access this. So this huge leap, are we ready?

We are now getting to station five, which is the fifth self, which is the leap beyond the personal into the impersonal, or we might even call it the transpersonal.

We’re moving beyond the personal. We’re moving from separate self, social self, false self, that cluster of selves — they’re all in the realm of the personal.
We’re moving to the impersonal, to the transpersonal, and it’s a more true. It is a deeper version of self. And it’s called actually True Self.

True Self is wildly important, and it’s also been misunderstood even by the great traditions that talked about it. We are not restating ancient truths — we are drawing from ancient, modern and postmodern, but we are evolving them, so let us say this in the evolved and the deepest way it can be said:

True Self is the Field of Consciousness, but it’s not just the Field of Consciousness.
It’s the Field of Desire.
It’s the Field of Value — in which everything is connected to everything else.
True Self is the Field of intimate consciousness. It’s the Field of intimate value. It’s the Field of intimacy with all things.

I just had a beautiful conversation this morning, with a beautiful new friend, if I can be so bold, who is a profound teacher in the Zen tradition, and we were talking about this statement by Master Dogan, great Zen master, Enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And we were looking together at the original Japanese, which I wanted to do for a while to make sure that was a correct translation. And this notion of enlightenment is intimacy with all things, that’s True Self.

But it’s not just that there is a Field of Consciousness.

There is a Field of Consciousness in which —

I’m completely lost — and completely found.
I’m completely deconstructed — and I’m completely reconstructed.
I’ve given up all of my self — and I’ve found all of my self, and my self is not separate from the entire Field.

And that interpenetration, that interdependent co-arising of the correct form that happens in True Self — that is the deepest sense of who I am.

Who am I? I am essence.
Who am I? I am True Self.
Who am I? I am inseparable from the Field of Consciousness.
Who am I? I am indivisible from the Field of Value.
Who am I? I cannot be in any way disambiguated from the great Field of
Desire.
I am desire, I am consciousness, I am value.
I Am that I Am.

All of us participate in the same one True Self. The total number of True Selves in the world is one. True Self is the singular that has no plural.

I am speaking to you, friends, not from the constructs of the mind — but the constructs of the lived realization of my own body, heart, and mind, and the lived realization of the most subtle and speculative minds, hearts, and bodies, if we integrate all of that knowing, the best understanding we have at this level, station five.

Now, many of the great traditions, if they get here (and they usually don’t get here), they get to True Self as being one with consciousness. We just did a much deeper vision of True Self.

And they stop here:

This is the accomplishment, this is enlightenment.
This is the mystical realization, this is attainment.
This is Satori, this is it.

No, it’s not. This is a critical station. It’s the momentous leap. It’s the beginning of the change that changes everything.

But we are not home yet.

Because True Self is the experience — in terms of the puzzle piece image — that there is a puzzle, it is one whole — there are no separate puzzle pieces.

One second, you think there are puzzle pieces, you see these lines separating, there seem to be puzzle pieces?

That’s an illusion.

Die on the cushion, sit, meditate, or however you practice, whirling dervish, and you will realize that there is no separation at all, it doesn’t exist. And there is no distinction, there is no uniqueness. Those are all illusions, we are all part of the same one self, one Field of Consciousness.

That is precisely true and not true. And when you claim it as a whole truth, you devastate the human body, heart, and mind, which is what mystical traditions have done forever.

Because actually, friends, there is no True Self anyplace in the manifest world — it doesn’t exist. Every True Self sees through a unique set of eyes, and uniqueness is not separateness.

Station Six: Unique Self

Separateness is a Reality of Kosmos, we are supposed to have an experience of separateness. Separateness is a true Reality, a real experience — but ultimately, separateness dissolves. Ultimately, Einstein wasn’t wrong when he said separateness is an optical delusion of consciousness.

But after separateness dissolves, and I realize I am indivisible from the Field of True Self, and the Field of one consciousness, and one heart, and one desire, and one love, I then individuate not into separation, I individuate into uniqueness.

I actually am an irreducibly unique expression of True Self.

There is no True Self in the manifest world, and the attempt to locate True Self in the manifest world is doomed to failure — because every one of us is an individuated expression of True Self. Every one of us is a distinct expression of True Self.

True Self is the realization that we are all part of the seamless coat of the universe. But the seamless coat of the universe is seamless, it’s not featureless. And you and I are its distinct features. Actually, the experience of my enlightenment is not True Self. It’s stunning, my friends! The experience of my enlightenment is Unique Self.

Who are you?

You are an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty and LoveDesire that’s the initiating and animating Eros of All-That-Is that lives in you, as you, and through you, that never was, is, or will be ever again, other than through you.

Can you feel that?

And as such,

you have an irreducibly unique perspective,
and you incarnate an irreducibly unique quality of intimacy,
that comes together to foster your unique gift,
that allows you to respond to a unique need in your unique circle of intimacy and influence.

That’s Unique Self.

There is a beautiful apocryphal story of a child. The teacher asks the children to draw trees. And the teacher comes over and looks over the child’s shoulder and says,

“You didn’t draw my tree, you are drawing a purple tree.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“But there’s no purple trees.”
“Yes, there are, I just drew it.”
And the teacher says, “But I can’t see it.”
And the child looks and says, “Isn’t that a shame?”

Everyone’s got a purple tree.

Everyone’s an irreducibly unique expression — and that irreducibly unique expression is not your talent.

It’s not your talent, it’s not your gift.
It’s not your Myers-Briggs test.
It’s not your personality test.
It’s the Field of Value, the Field of Consciousness, the Field of Desire. That’s the Holy Trinity: value, desire, and consciousness. Those fields, uniquely individuated in you, as you, and through you, as the intention of Kosmos — that’s your Unique Self.

Your Unique Self, my friends, which is the sixth station, the sixth expression of self.

Your Unique Self is a puzzle piece that completes the puzzle.

The puzzle piece that completes the puzzle is located, it is home, the puzzle actually holds the puzzle piece, and the puzzle piece intimately fits gorgeously and perfectly. And as the puzzle and the puzzle piece merge, there’s this gorgeous explosion. Oh my God, oh my God, yes, yes, yes! I’m completing, I’m needed.

Only my idiosyncratic puzzle piece can complete this puzzle — that is the experience of Unique Self.

So we have:

the first station is: pre-personal self,
the second station: separate self,
the third station: social self,
the fourth station: false self,
the fifth station: True Self,
the sixth station: Unique Self.

Station Seven: Unique Shadow

Now, the seventh station I am going to talk about just for a moment. And it’s not a quality of self, it’s actually a quality of consciousness. It’s a distortion, if you will, of self. It’s a distorted quality of self, and that’s what we call Unique Shadow.

Unique shadow is related to unique wound, but they are not the same. Every person has a unique way in which they are wounded, and everyone has a unique expression of shadow. The way my story wounded me, the trauma of my life — that’s my unique wound. That’s one part of this next station, of this seventh station.

And then there is my unique shadow.

People usually understand shadow as being, like Robert Bly defines it in his book called The Little Book of the Shadow, which gets it exactly wrong, in which shadow is your jealousy, your rage, your contraction, your anger. That’s not shadow. Those are shadow qualities.

Shadow is the part of your light which is not visible.

Light — your light, or your illumination, or your enlightenment — is the expression of your unique expression of True Self, your Unique Self, your unique story. Now your story is coming on board again. Now, in this place of Unique Self, we are not in just the personal.

Now, stay close for a second, we are in this new structure of consciousness.

Pre-personal is where we start,
then we get to separate self which is personal,
then we get to True Self, which is normally understood as impersonal.
Then when you go to Unique Self, now you are the personal beyond the impersonal. You are back at the personal, it’s the personal again. Unique Self is absolutely radically intimate and personal, but it’s the personal after the impersonal.

Your Unique Self personal is your light — ner Elohim nishmat adam: the candle of the Divine is the soul of the human — that’s why light is such an important image. The sense of being enlightened, the sense of being illuminated, means I have a unique frequency of light. I am a unique frequency, I have a singular frequency of light.

Imagine there is a circle, and in that circle is the uniqueness of my life that participates in the larger Field. In that circle, to the precise extent that I cut off a quarter or a half — or most of us, four fifths of the circle, I cut off four fifths of the circle of that light. And it’s shrouded, it’s obscured, it’s not realized, it’s in darkness. That’s called shadow.

Shadow is the part of my Unique Self that’s in darkness. It’s the part of my Unique Self that’s un-lived or distorted.

My Unique Self distortion, or my soul print distortion, or my un-lived Unique Self — that’s shadow.

But of course, it’s unique. There’s no such thing as generic shadow, it has to be unique because it’s a distortion of my Unique Self. My unique shadow is a distortion of my Unique Self.

If you would look for the place, friends, where you — or I — you always mess up.

It is a place you always get caught, you always mess it up, you always fall, you keep effing it up again and again, and again and again — that place is a confluence of your unique wound and your Unique Shadow. It’s not just your woundedness — it is also that there is a particular dimension of your light that’s un-lived and you keep blowing it again and again.

But in the unique way you are blowing it, you are actually expressing, or showing, or disclosing the pathway back to your Unique Self. Because you follow your unique shadow all the way home to your Unique Self.

Why should you integrate your shadow?

I’m going to give an example, because that we have to get this. And we have afterwards only two more stations. But I’ll give you an example, this is a true story.

I was in Germany, and I had just begun to teach this idea of unique shadow, and it’s a critically important idea. Because the entire conversation around shadow is distorted, in a very, very tragic way, in which shadow is understood as your rage or anger. And when everyone tells your anger is your shadow, then why should you integrate your rage and anger? I mean, you want to be aware of it, but why should you integrate it into your wholeness?

Inappropriate rage and inappropriate anger, you should work with.
There’s appropriate rage and appropriate anger, that has a place.
But pathological rage and pathological anger — which is what shadow is — why would you want to integrate that?

And that’s what the shadow world teaches. And it is, of course, a mistake. Because those are your shadow qualities.

Your shadow is your un-lived Unique Self.

It’s your Unique Self distortion that you have to integrate, because that’s your light that’s been placed in darkness and has to be integrated in order for you to be whole — and uniquely whole, because you can only be uniquely whole.

I’ll just tell you just a very brief story. It’s a true story. I was in Germany with my friend, Diane, and we were teaching this Unique Self teaching, Unique Self and unique shadow, and it was maybe 2010. And there was this very, very lovely man, a German man, at the event.

We are teaching this Unique Self idea. And this guy was this charismatic and attractive personality, and he was with us. And as soon as I started talking about Unique Shadow, he clearly got agitated. He raised his hand and he says,

“This is ridiculous, this notion of unique shadow! I’m a therapist and I work with shadows, this notion of unique shadow is just not true.”
I said, “Okay.”
He says, “Just okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Well, talk to me about it.”
“Okay, we can talk about it. You are a therapist, so what would you say your shadow is, what I would call your unique shadow?”
“Well, if I would think about that, I would say I do an enormous amount of meth and fisting. Meth and fisting.” (And fisting is a quite graphic experience in which an entire fist is inserted into an orifice as an expression of sexuality.)
So he says, “I do meth and fisting.” And here is this very urbane, refined person. And there is a big shudder in the room, as I’m sure there is now in the chat box, big shudder.
He says, “If you want a unique shadow, that’s my unique shadow.”
I said, “Wow!”
He says, “What does that have to do with my Unique Self? That’s got nothing to do with my Unique Self. Okay, it’s my unique shadow, it’s the way I mess up all the time.”
So first off, I said to him, I said, “Why is that a shadow?” Everybody laughed, and he laughed too, and we softened a little bit. He said,
“Well, it’s a shadow because I do too much of it. I do too much of it, I don’t want to be doing that much.”
I said, “Okay, so you’re a therapist, so what do you do as a therapist?”
Now he gets really open and he says, “I hold people.”
I said, “Wow, that’s fantastic. You hold people, that’s a great thing to do. But what if the person has a really challenging issue, do you challenge people as well?”
“I think therapists challenge people too much, I really hold people.”
“Wow, that’s great. You hold people, that’s so beautiful. But what about when some issue needs to be broken up and someone needs to be kind of penetrated, we need your penetrating insight?“
“Nah, my job is to hold people.”

And gradually, the room got quiet, and he got quiet. I said,

“Wow. So you are a therapist, your Unique Self is being a therapist, people come to you and trust you, and they desperately need your penetrating insight, and they need you to challenge them. And you just hold them, and you refuse to penetrate their consciousness with the depth of your insight. Wow, you are a brilliant therapist. But your Unique Self, your penetration, your ecstatic penetration to illuminate something is in shadow. And so it emerges as your unique shadow, meth and fisting.”

He started crying, and we all got quiet, we could see it.

So everyone has a place, which is not just shadow, it’s unique shadow.

And that is, my friends, that’s the seventh station. It’s not a self, but it’s a distortion of self. It’s like false self in that sense, so we could call it a self in the same way we could call false self a self. It’s a particular expression of self. It’s a quality of consciousness. Let’s call it a self the same way we’ve called false self a self.

Station Eight: Evolutionary Unique Self

So we’ve got pre-personal self, number one. Number two, separate self. Number three, social self. Number four, false self. Number five, True Self. Number six, Unique Self. Seven, unique shadow and unique wound, which constellate together to form this distorted expression, this shadow self, this unique shadow self. That’s station seven. Okay, here we go. Everybody ready? Drumroll, we’ve got two more, two more to go!

We are actually re-sourcing Reality.

We are participating together, in this moment, in evolving the source code in response to the meta-crisis, in generating the best and deepest vision of self, weaving together the valid insights of premodern, modern, and postmodern, in a New Story of Value.

And a story has to address three questions:

Who am I, who are you? Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? That’s all part of the same question.
Where are we, and where are we going?
What’s there to do? What do we desire?

We are looking at the first question here, and we are now at station eight. And station eight, my friends, is Evolutionary Unique Self.

Evolutionary Unique Self is Unique Self in an evolutionary context, where I experience that I am a unique and irreducibly unique expression of the evolutionary impulse itself.

I’m an irreducibly unique expression of the evolutionary impulse itself, that lives in me, as me, and through me. I am no less than the personal face of the evolutionary impulse. And evolution is desire. And the desire of evolution lives uniquely in me, as me, and through me.

So who am I? I am evolutionary desire.
But I’m not just generically an expression of evolutionary desire.

I’m an irreducibly unique expression.
I’m an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveDesire of evolution.
I am the love story of the universe, incarnate in person in me.
I am the personal face of The Universe: A Love Story.
I have evolved from Homo sapiens and I’ve become the new human. I’m crossing to the other side, I become Homo amor. Homo amor is when I’ve crossed to the other side, I am now Homo amor.
I am an irreducibly unique expression of the evolutionary impulse itself. All of evolution throbs in me. All of evolution pulses in me.

Your desire — your clarified desire, your my surface desire, what we call, together with my evolutionary partner, Barbara Marx Hubbard, your Deepest Heart’s Desire — is the desire of evolution awake and alive in you. That’s why you can’t tell it, that’s why you have to listen to it. That’s why we have to listen to the murmurings of the sacred that live in the whisperings of desire, that call us to live and incarnate Evolutionary Unique Self.

Evolutionary Unique Self is not just a puzzle piece that completes the puzzle. Evolutionary Unique Self is a puzzle piece that evolves the puzzle.

There is more puzzle, the puzzle expands, it gets deeper, and wider, and more good, and more true, and more beautiful. That’s Evolutionary Unique Self.

Evolutionary Unique Self stands for the core equation of the New Story of Value, which integrates the best of premodern, modern, and postmodern. And that core equation, which we talked about last week: infinity plus finitude equals more infinite (finitude is the manifest, this world, the evolutionary world, the world of becoming).

Infinity plus finitude equals more infinity.

Now, the rules of logic can’t wrap around it — but actually, trans-logic does.
It’s a lived realization.
It’s the truth of paradox that — in some paradoxical sense — you can realize in your own body, you can actually find this in your own body literally right now.

Find your own sense of yourself.
Do you matter? You do.
What do you think about all the time? Yourself?
Why, because you’re a narcissist? No, because when you are thinking about yourself all the time, you are eavesdropping on Infinity thinking about you.
Because you are Infinity becoming more of itself. God plus you equals more God.

There is literally more God to come.
Infinite value plus your unique incarnation of value equals more value.
You are, quite literally, more God to come.
You’re more value to come.
There is more goodness and more truth and more beauty when — when what? When you clarify.

I was talking to my friend and partner Zak this morning. I said to Zak,
When there’s more Zak-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
Or when there’s more Kirsten Zohar-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Suzette-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Jamie-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Krista-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Benjamin-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Claire-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Chahat-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Jacqueline-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Kristina Amelong-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Terry-ness in the world, there’s more God to come.
When there’s more Tom Ronen in the world, there’s more God to come.

Does everyone understand? That’s actually, quite literally, how it works — when I clarify my story.

This is now not my story at the level of separate self, which is the level of the personal.
I get from the personal to the impersonal, and at the impersonal, I’m True Self, where I leave my story behind.
And then I rise to the personal beyond the impersonal, which is my Unique Self — and then my Unique Self in the evolutionary context. Then my story comes back online, roaring back online, and I realize that my story has ultimate dignity, because my story is chapter and verse in the sacred autobiography of the Infinite.

My story is chapter and verse in the sacred autobiography of the Infinite.
My story is chapter and verse in the sacred autobiography of the Divine.
My story is chapter and verse in the sacred autobiography of God.

Station nine: Unique Self Symphony

And from that place, my friends — and here we crescendo — we get to the ninth station.

The ninth expression, or quality, where Self plays, which is Unique Self Symphony — a new structure of intimacy, which responds to the root cause of the meta-crisis.

The root cause of the meta-crisis is global intimacy disorder. And global intimacy disorder expresses itself as rivalrous conflict win-lose metrics. It expresses itself as complicated systems in which the parts don’t know each other, and therefore the system becomes fragile. But these complicated fragile systems, and this rivalrous complex success story win-lose metrics, those generator functions of existential risks are rooted in a deeper root cause, which is the global intimacy disorder.

We have to respond to the global intimacy disorder, which splits us off and blocks us from achieving what we need — which is global intimacy, which achieves global resonance, which achieves global coherence, which achieves the possibility of global coordination, which allows us to respond to global challenges.

How do we actually get to that place, how do we realize that? We have to overcome, we have to solve, we have to resolve at a higher level of consciousness, the global intimacy disorder.

This means we need to generate a new structure of intimacy, and a new structure of intimacy can only come from the deepest new structure of Self. Because intimacy means intimacy between selves.

Now, here’s the last step.

Separate selves can’t create intimacy, because they’re ultimately separate.
False selves are too distorted to create intimacy.
Social selves create pseudo-harmonies, pseudo-intimacies of the hive mind, which is depersonalized and degraded.
True Self — the total number of True Selves in the world is one, part of the one Field, so there’s no intimacy; there’s no intimacy with the one.
True intimacy begins at Unique Self. Unique Selves create Unique Self coherence.
Evolutionary Unique Selves: I’m not just intimate with my own uniqueness, and my uniqueness resonates with your uniqueness. I am intimate with the entire evolutionary context. I realize evolution is moving uniquely through me, we are Evolutionary Unique Selves, and we come together in a new structure of intimacy, in an evolutionary intimacy, which we might call Unique Self Symphony.
Unique Self Symphony is the political social structural image which responds to the meta-crisis. It’s the deepest response we have to the meta-crisis.

Imagine an anthill, in which everyone knows what to do. How do they know? Because maybe pheromones are exchanged, we are not sure scientifically. That anthill is, in some dramatic sense, pre-personal. Imagine an anthill or a beehive, but exponentially more conscious at the human level, in which the strange attractor to perform my great mission is my uniqueness. It’s not pheromones that are being exchanged between the ants, but it’s every human being actually listening —

to the deepest desire,
to the deepest unique desire,
to their own unique set of allurements,

and going to enact goodness, truth, and beauty as an expression of their unique gift, their unique qualities of value, and qualities of intimacy. That’s what it means to play your instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.

When I am in the Unique Self Symphony, there might be seven or eight of us, or a thousand of us, each uniquely play the same instrument. But we each have a unique take on that instrument, and it’s a Unique Self jazz symphony.

And there is a moment in time in my particular corner of Reality where I can look into un-love, I can look into the eyes of un-love, and I can say, let there be light! And I can give a unique gift that no one that ever is, was, or will be in the history of Reality can give, in the unique way that I can give it.

That’s what it means to play my instrument in the Unique Self Symphony: I am listening to the score of music. There is a shared score, and we each have our own jazz section in that shared score. We need all the other instruments, and we are all moved by the original Eros of Kosmos, the original love, Evolutionary Love and Outrageous Love of Kosmos that lives uniquely in us.

The vision is a planetary awakening in Eros through Unique Self Symphonies, a planetary awakening in love through Unique Self Symphonies.

Can you feel that, my friends? That’s my last sentence, it’s our last sentence just for now.

Can we feel that together, a planetary awakening in love through Unique Self Symphonies?

That’s the ninth station.

That’s the new emergence.

That’s Homo amor.

That’s the new human.

That’s the new humanity.

We just evolved the source code. Thank you so crazy much. I’m so — tears in my eyes — grateful. Thank you for your presence, your instrument in the Symphony, your listening, your participation, your joy, and your beauty.

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