318 — Mahsa Amini Did Not Die in Vain: Rewriting the Script of Desire “for Women for Life for Freedom”

Published in

Office for the Future

30 min readNov 18, 2022

A Note to the Reader

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. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

What is the revolution?

We’re meeting each other in this moment of revolution. I want to welcome everyone to this place.

Who are we? Who are we here?

We are the revolution, that’s who we are! We are the revolution itself.

And what is the revolution?

The revolution is the experience, the knowing that we are at this moment of meta-crisis. We are at this moment of meta-crisis — and we have the capacity, in this moment of meta-crisis, to be something more, to be something deeper.

To realize the deeper dimensions of our joy and the deeper dimensions of our power, which are rooted in the deeper dimensions of our identity — of the answer to the question: who are you?

And in this moment of meta-crisis, we are quite literally poised between dystopia and utopia.

— The dystopian possibility of extinction.
— The dystopian possibility of collapse of world systems in a kind of Mad Max way, if you remember that movie.
— A dystopian stagnation, in which the world turns into a caste system, which makes India look like Athenian democracy at its best.

Think Hunger Games, if you want to use a cinematic reference:

A tiny elite rules the rest of society.
Freewill and human choice and human self-creation and our inward spaces of meaning are crushed by a totalitarian order, which imposes its will through artificial intelligence, and which dominates in the planetary stack every dimension of our being, because we actually have to be on the system with our identity number to survive.
The emotional sensors of affective computing, which is called Emotional AI, literally read our every emotion, and if we don’t align with the larger system, we’re thrown off the system and we die.

And within two generations, the very quality of our humanity has been killed.

We are in this moment where we’re poised between dystopia and utopia.

The same world systems that, without First Values and First Principles, lead us to dystopia — can lead us to utopia if we invest that same world infrastructure with a new superstructure. And by superstructure, we mean — borrowing that term from Marvin Harris, the sociologist and historian — by superstructure we mean a New Story of Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values.

— At this moment of meta-crisis, when we are threatened by exponential technology, which animates a global civilization;
— At a time when every known civilization has crashed, and we haven’t solved the self-terminating structures that have crashed those civilizations, but now the civilization is global, and with exponential technology –

— at this precise moment, just like dystopia hovers, so does utopia.

There is actually a utopian possibly. And by utopian, I don’t mean la-di-da, I don’t mean fanciful, I don’t mean fairytale. I mean the beginning of a true utopia, of utopia grounded in Reality, which is the most beautiful world that we know, deep inside of us, is possible. And we can imagine that world, and we know that world. And that utopia also beckons at the door.

And for that utopia to happen, we need to change not just the infrastructure, we need to change the superstructure —

We need to be the storytellers of Reality, and to realize that we are the new chapter in that story, and to know that that story is a story of value.

That’s Revolution. Revolution: R/Evolution.

So, revolution, friends.

The murder of Mahsa Amini is the murder of Eros

Today, we are going to do something very special.

I am trembling a little bit because of the honor that we need to give to She,

— to Eros herself,
— to what the interior sciences called the Goddess,
— what David Bohm, the physicist student of Einstein, called The Implicate Order;
— what others have simply called Infinite Reality.

We need to honor Reality today. And particularly, we need to turn to Reality, to turn to a particular dimension of the meta-crisis, and we need to honor it and understand it in an entirely new way. To get beneath the headlines — and to understand what are the failed superstructures, the failed stories of value that are generating the action.

And everything we talk about today is really leading towards probably our last 10 minutes. And I want to just, again, welcome everyone. Like, huge, wondrous, gorgeous welcome!

Today, we are going to be talking about Mahsa Amini. Mahsa Amini, who gave her life as She.

We are going to be talking about what underlies the murder of Eros, which was the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran.

And we are going to be talking about how we honor Mahsa Amini as She and understand, in a profound and radical way, what’s actually happening here.

We shine the light of First Values and First Principles, of this New Story of Value, what we call CosmoErotic Humanism, on this moment, to participate directly in the evolution of the source code, the evolution of consciousness in culture.

Oh my God, so I’m trembling, madly joyous for the privilege of us being together today in this moment, and in this place, and in this time. So thank you, everyone, for being here. And let’s see if we can just drop in and find our way.

We are here not to be entertained, we are not going to do wisdo-tainment.
We are here because we are the Unique Self Symphony.
We are the band of Evolutionary Lovers.
We are da Vinci.

Imagine the Renaissance, the Renaissance which is the time between worlds and this time between stories — and we are in a similar moment.
We are in a moment of what we called a few weeks ago, neuro-cultural-plasticity.
We are in a moment in which it could all change.
There’s not yet a values lock-in.
We have the capacity to create the future.
And we need to create the future.

❖ We need to create the future as Homo amor.

Homo amor is the new human and the new humanity that emerges as the primary response to the meta-crisis. And one of the primary qualities of Homo amor, the fulfillment of Homo sapiens, is twofold:

Number one, Homo amor embodies in her very being, a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity. Homo amor is value; Homo amor is value incarnate. And Homo amor speaks this new language, this new universal grammar of value, which is a context for our diversity.
And number two, Homo amor is intimate. Homo amor is intimate with the past. Homo amor is intimate with the depth of the present. But Homo amor is also intimate with the future. And we can feel the cry and the call of the unborn, even as we feel the call of every human being on the face of the planet now, including the 2 billion who don’t have access to clean water on a regular basis. And we feel the demand of the past that turns to us and passes us the baton, and says, all of our unfinished business, it depends on you.

And so we are trembling, but we are trembling with joy, with a kind of ecstatic urgency at the privilege of stepping in in this moment in history. So we’re going to enter today, as best as She allows us. And I’m sure we’ll make mistakes, but we’re going to make mistakes, with Her grace, in the right direction.

We are going to enter into the honor, the dignity of Mahsa Amini.

Evolutionary Love Code:
Radical aliveness is life. We yearn for life.
But when we are deadened, we move to kill life as a shortcut to genuine 
aliveness. 
The Murder of Eros is sourced in the failure of Eros.
We cannot become Homo amor until we transcend the impulse to Murder Eros.
To transcend the impulse we must first fearlessly recognize it.
Reality is Eros. Reality is She.
Reality is He and She in all gendered forms.
Reality is She and He, uniquely - Krishna and Radha - in all of Her 
sacred wild expressions.

We are here to evolve the source code, so here we go. And thank you everyone for the depth of your presence in this Unique Self Symphony.

So here we go, friends. Oh my God — total joy, total heartbreak, but total heart open, total beauty.

Mahsa Amini did not die in vain

I am going to read a text that we just wrote spontaneously, yesterday morning. I want to just slowly and gently read that text for you, and we’re going to begin from there.

Did Mahsa Amini die in vain?
Mahsa Amini was killed on September 17th.

And Mahsa Amini was the Goddess; Mahsa Amini was Eros. And her murder was the murder of the Goddess; her murder was the murder of Eros.

She was arrested, my friends, for wearing her hijab — the Islamic head-covering mandated by Ayatollah Khomeini when he took power in Iran — for wearing it “improperly”, and for her pants being slightly too tight.

Mahsa Amini was not an activist; she was not involved — as her brother reports — in the political struggles of Iran. She lived in a small village. She was modest, shy, and inordinately good.

She had gone to Tehran to visit her brother and was arrested while with her family. And placed in a van, she was beaten by the police because she refused to accommodate, to bend, to be degraded by their insults.

Because somehow, she knew in that moment, that their offense to her offended She, offended Reality, offended Eros itself. She understood that their insult insulted value itself. That it insulted the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

And in that moment — according to the eyewitnesses that were in the van with her — she could have submitted, she could have bowed, she could have allowed the degradation and lived.

But she somehow, intuitively, magically, mystically understood — in a way that defies expression in words — that to allow the insult to her being in that moment was a violation of life itself.

And so Mahsa Amini paid the ultimate price.

She sacrificed her life for She, as She.
She sacrificed her life for Eros.
She sacrificed her life, and we’re going to unpack this today, for us.

Her death has rightly sparked explosions of sacred protest, all through Iran and around the world.
Explosions of value, explosions of Eros, explosions of human goodness, truth, and beauty.

The protesters are coming from all walks of Iranian society, and all walks of life, in every socioeconomic and cultural level from around the world. The protesters have been killed, beaten and tortured, hundreds, men and women, again and again and again.

And at this moment, friends, we are gathering today.

And we are gathering to honor the Goddess and to answer one question: Did Mahsa Amini die in vain?

And the answer, of course, is no, of course not.

All ethics are rooted in Eros

But there is only one way to make that knowing true, to answer that question, and that is to enter, together —

— into what the lineage calls umka d’umka in Aramaic: the depths of the depths,
— into Lifnai v’lifnim: the inside of the inside,
— into Sanctum Sanctorum, Kodesh HaKodashim in the language of the Aramaic lineage: to the Holy of Holies,
— into the Sanctum Sanctorum of human meaning, of human devotion, of human value, of human Eros.

And to understand what is actually at stake here:

What do we mean by the Goddess? It is not a mainstream word that we hear often. But without understanding that word, you actually cannot understand physics or biochemistry or molecular biology.
What do we mean when we say She?
What is this Eros we’re talking about, and what does it mean to murder Eros?

But perhaps, friends, exponentially more importantly — to ensure that this murder of Eros wasn’t in vain, that Mahsa Amini didn’t die in vain — we have to answer the question:

What does it mean to live in Eros and as Eros?
What does it mean that all ethics are rooted in Eros?
What does it mean that the clash between the erotic and the ethical, that’s assumed by all of society, is a false clash?

We assume that the erotic and the ethical oppose each other, that we need to curb Eros in order to be ethical.

Mahsa Amini’s hair, her embodiment is understood to be a threat by the Ayatollah’s, as though somehow it will undermine ethos. But actually — and we’re going to go so deep into this today on so many levels — the erotic and the ethic don’t oppose each other.

I was privileged, in 2003, to write an article on the cover of one of the leading intellectual magazines in the United States, called On the Erotic and the Ethical. There was a great cry attacking the cover, and the morality police, in their American and Israeli form, came out — not to kill me physically, but to murder Eros nonetheless.

But in truth, friends — and we’re going to unpack this today; I know this is just words now, we’re going to go so deep into what these words mean, but let’s get the meta-context together — in truth, friends, there is not only no split between Eros and ethics, but every failure of ethic — every murder, every contraction, every pettiness, every deceit, all acting out, all violation — all of it is a direct result of the collapse of Eros. This is one of the core principles of CosmoErotic Humanism:

All ethical breakdown derives ultimately from the prior breakdown of Eros itself.

And the only way, friends, to reclaim ethos —

— to reclaim goodness, and kindness, and sensitivity, and radical empathy, and open heart, and the sacredness of shared joy and tears, and the delight and wild gratitude for each other, for our eyes, for our hearts, for our souls, for our embodiment, for the wonder of being —

— the only way to reclaim that is to reclaim and know the wonder of being an embodied incarnate human; a unique incarnation of Eros, fully alive, fully awake, wildly good and wildly free.

And the only way to get home — and that’s the only home we have — the only way to get home to that place is to reclaim Eros as the nature of Reality and its deepest realization.

To reclaim Eros in its deepest expression means to reclaim Eros in its most profound, urgent, ecstatic meaning as the very source code of Kosmos, of the entire physical universe, of all of the exterior sciences, and all of the interior sciences.

To actually know that Reality itself is Eros.

That’s what we are going to talk about today.
We are going to talk about Eros.
We are going to talk about fundamentalism.
We are going to talk about pornography.
We are going to talk about violations of Eros.

We are going to talk about what it means to murder Eros, and how we engage in the evolution of Eros.

And we are coming together today, right now, right here, all of us from around the world, in a Unique Self Symphony of Eros.

And so tenderly, friends, with so much respect and so much honor, I want to invite you — we want to invite each other, as you and me and we — to come today, to be here today, knowing that you are bringing yourself as a unique incarnation of Eros.

That’s actually who we are. You are, I am, we are.

You are a unique incarnation of divine aliveness. You are a unique configuration of intimacy, a unique pattern of desire, that never was, is, or will be ever again.

We are going to spend today’s One Mountain talking about these sentences.

Your Eros and your aliveness and your intimacy and your desire is precious before She, is precious before the Divine.

But it’s not only, friends, that your Eros is precious before the Divine. It’s even deeper.

It is that in your Eros, in your unique Eros — in your intimacy, in your unique intimacy, in your desire, in your unique configuration of desire, in your aliveness, in your irreducibly unique aliveness — in that, She, Reality finds Her own self-fulfillment, Her own self-realization.

Quite literally — based on the best integration of the interior and exterior sciences — we can say this careful sentence in the New Story of Value:

She shudders in self-recognition, as She feels the shudder moving through your body, crying out Her name: Oh God.

So we come together, my friends, today, this Sunday in this moment, to know, to cry out, and to scream in pain, and to cry out in great joy, in gratitude on our knees in devotion to She.

To Mahsa Amini, and to each and every one of the other men and women who died for us, for We, for She.

And to say to them, you did not die in vain; your death sparked Eros Herself. You aroused the Goddess, and She is here, and She is awake, and She is alive.

There is always a path home

And finally, friends, one more word to the police in the van who beat Mahsa Amini.

But the police is also just a tagline; we can’t see the faces of those boys.

So to those young men —
— raised on a deadening, degraded propaganda which was anti-life,
— raised in a propaganda which didn’t understand the Eros of goodness,
— which didn’t understand the value of Eros and Eros of value, — which didn’t understand the Eros of beauty and the Eros of truth.

Men who felt alienated from themselves.
Men who viewed their own sexing as a violation of She, because that’s how they were brainwashed; that’s what contaminated their psyche from their earliest memory.
Men brutalized by a teaching that was false and that took the name of Goddess in vain.
Men who were traumatized by their own experience of their own bodies.
Men who were shamed, at the very core of their being, and were tormented by the system that created and controlled them.

To those men, we say:

Brothers, there’s always a path home, young men!
There’s always a path to liberation.
We are not here to demonize you, we are here to demand your transformation.
There is always a path home.
Find, brothers, the goodness in your own hearts.
Find the kindness in your own hearts.
Find your way to understanding that your embodiment is good.
And that the feelings of Eros that pulse through you, if you trace them back to their roots, they are not in violation of the Prophet; they are not in violation of Islam. The deepest expression of allahu akbar, of the great surrender to the goodness which is Goddess — that’s what they are. They are the deepest expression of She.

I, we can’t forgive you young men. It’s not ours to do.

But you have to ask for forgiveness, and it will be granted.

You have to find your way home, and you can, and you must, and you will.

That would mean, in an unimaginable way, friends, that Mahsa Amini didn’t die in vain.

And to Mahsa Amini’s brother and to her father and mother, whose hearts are ripped out — and to the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters of every protester who has been killed in Iran in these weeks and in previous years — we are in devotion to you; you are our heroes, you are our teachers.

Go in peace to the next stage of your journey.
And be with us from the next world if you can right now, as we gather around the world sparked by your spirit, which is the spirit of She, sparked by the flame of Eros and ethics that lit up your heart, that now flames as unimaginable beauty and wrapping our world.

For that, we come together right now.

So let’s come together.

What is Baraye?

We’re going to play a song now. And the song is called Baraye, and it was written by Shervin Hajipour, and it’s become the anthem of this Mahsa Amini revolution. And there are three versions of the song, and we’re going to come to each of them.

The word Baraye means for: I’m doing this for.

So take us inside, Baraye. Let’s go all the way inside.

Just so everyone understands, these tweets that you see, they are going to show up on the text of the song, these are the tweets that Shervin, who’s the songwriter, received — these tweets of protest and outrage, and he turned these tweets into the song. The tweets will come up as he chants the song. Let’s go inside, friends. Oh, my God!

Baraye by Shervin Hajipour

So what is Baraye?

Baraye means for.

It is to be intimate with Reality, with her joy and her suffering, and to live for: for the great Eros of Reality.

Baraye, in one lineage tradition in the Renaissance, was expressed in the following way:

Leshem yichud: for the sake of the union of the coming together of He and She in all Her gendered forms.

Leshem yichud: that everything I do is for that great coming together.

Because — Baraye. Because Reality is Eros, moving towards its own evolution, to ever-deeper levels of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

So let’s go in deep, and we’re going to do this in three stages.

This is for you, Mahsa Amini. This is for Mahsa Amini, and this is for everyone, and this is for She.

And we are going to need each stage. We are going to do a stage, we are going to do a little Dharma, then we’re going to chant again in a new way. Then we’re going to do another Dharma, and then we’re going to chant again. Here we go.

The New Story of Desire

What is the story of value, the New Story of Value, which integrates the deepest validated insights of all the interior sciences and all the exterior sciences, premodern, modern, and postmodern, into a New Story of Value?

You could sum it up in three words — that’s in today’s code:

Reality is Eros.

That’s what Reality is.

At its very core, the nature of Reality is Eros.
We live in what I want to call a CosmoErotic Universe.
It’s Eros all the way up and all the way down.

And we wrote a sacred text, A Return to Eros, which tells the story. A Return to Eros, which I wrote with Dr. Kristina Kincaid, is about this realization that Reality is Eros, and that Eros drives Reality, it animates Reality.

And what is Eros?

Eros is the core pulse of evolution itself, that seeks, that desires — because Reality desires — ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.

And that Eros animates the four forces of Reality: the strong and the weak nuclear, the electromagnetic, the gravitational.
And that Eros drives Reality towards ever-deeper and newer expressions of value, of goodness, truth, and beauty.
And that Eros is desire, that Eros is animated by desire itself.

That’s why Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote Principia Mathematica with George Bertrand Russell, talks about the appetites of Kosmos — because Kosmos desires, and desire can’t be split off.

And Kosmos moves us all the way — through the world of matter, and the world of life, and the world of mind, the self-reflective human mind — through the impulse power of desire: for more value, for more goodness, for more laughter, for more truth, for more beauty.

That desire awakens in us in an irreducibly unique way, and that’s what we call Unique Self. That’s why Claire Molinard founded, together with the Think Tank, a Unique Self Institute.

It is the teaching that –

Every human being is a unique incarnation of Eros.
Every human being is an irreducibly unique incarnation of desire — an irreducibly unique incarnation of desire, which is value, because desire itself has value.

That’s actually the very nature of Reality.

Now let’s go deeper, friends. Now it gets wild, and beautiful, and gorgeous, and crazy, and stunning. So are we ready? We’re ready, everyone? We’re going to jump in now.

So what does that have to do with Mahsa Amini?
What does that have to do with a hijab?
What does that have to do with pants that are too tight?

We need, friends, a narrative of desire.
We need a story of desire.
We need a story of sexuality.
We need a sexual narrative.

We have, in Reality today, four sexual narratives. And we talk about these the four sexual narratives in A Return to Eros.

1. One, held by the morality police in Teheran: sex-negative. Sex violates the Prophet. Sex violates ethos. Sex is somehow the great cosmic violation, and we need to split off the sexual in order to get to the ethical.

And is sex dangerous?
Are they right that sex is dangerous?
Of course they’re right that sex is dangerous. But they go from dangerous to evil, where the physical incarnate embodiment of Eros that lives in We, in She, in Thee, in me, is viewed as evil, and only the splitting off of that unique desire allows me to be purified. That’s sex-negative.

But we haven’t responded to that in the rest of the world with anything compelling. We reject sex-negative, but what do we replace it with?

2. We replace it with a second narrative of desire or of sex, which is sex-neutral. Alfred Charles Kinsey, the sex researcher: sex-neutral. Sex is just like having lunch. But that’s not true, sex is not like having lunch. It’s not mere biology.

3. Then we have a third sexual narrative or story of desire that goes through the world, which is: sex-positive. The sexual revolution, sex-positive. Sex is a positive social force. It breeds satisfaction and cohesion, and makes you feel better, and have more balance in your life. Well, that’s just too bland, that’s too weak, that’s too insipid. Sex is more than merely positive.

4. Well, then there’s the fourth sexual narrative, which says: no, sex is sacred when you’re having a baby. And there’s some version of that narrative that appears sometimes in fundamentalism, it appears in many places around the world. But again, it’s not quite right. Because we live in a moment of population explosion, and 99% of sex that happens in the world is not to have a baby.

How many people here, the last time you had sex, you actually engaged sexually in order to have a baby? I would wager, almost no one. And babies are gorgeous, and babies are important, and babies are stunning, and I have four most beautiful kids in the world. The moment of their birth and the moment their creation are wonder of wonders and miracle of miracles. But sex is not limited in its sacred to procreation.

Sex is not sacred because it creates life. It’s much deeper.

❖ Sex is sacred because it is life.

And that’s the New Story of Desire that emerges from this integration of all the great truths in the world.

**We call it, in CosmoErotic Humanism, sex-erotic.**

Sex-erotic understands that the desire that rises in me uniquely, is rooted in the field of desire.

Sex-erotic says that the Eros

— that drives Reality, from the very inception, from the first Big Bang, from the very explosion of the original singularity,
— and drives all of the world of subatomic particles,
— and drives all of gravity and all of electromagnetism and all of the strong and weak nuclear,
— and moves through the entire biosphere, the entire world of biology,
— and moves into and then emerges in the depths of the self-reflective human,
— and then drives all the stages of human evolution and transformation…

— that Eros, the Eros that moves the Sun and other stars, as Dante once wrote, that Eros is not mere human sentiment. It’s the heart of existence itself.

When desire, and sexual desire, arises in me — yes, it needs the right context, yes, it needs the right place and the right person, of course — but at the core, that actual experience of desire is the desire of Reality arising in me uniquely.

Until I know that, I am shamed.
Until I know that, my experience is of radical shame.
And shame means not that I made a mistake, not that I did something bad. The experience of shame is that I am bad, that I’m broken, that I can’t be fixed.

That is the experience that arises in the entire leadership of fundamentalisms the world over, which is why fundamentalisms always become cruel in some way. They become cruel because the leadership of fundamentalism are fundamentally shamed in their very experience of their own being, in their very experience of their own desire. Because they don’t have a story of desire equal to their experience.

And so, the first response to promise Mahsa Amini, that She, the Goddess didn’t die in vain — that Eros is not murdered, that Eros is evolving and is resurrected — is to tell, at the very center of the New Story of Value, a New Story of desire, and of the inherent and intrinsic and wild dignity and Divinity of desire.

Let’s go back to our chant for today.
Let’s go back to Baraye, for the sake of it all.
We are now going to see another version of it.
We are not going back to where we were — we are evolving together, we’re participating now in the evolution of Eros. We’re going to see another version of it.

I stayed up last night till maybe 2am searching the internet, until this appeared to me. And I wanted to bring it to you today. I want to ask you — if you can — look at the faces in this clip, of the men and the women, and they are singing Baraye. Take us inside.

Music: Baraye by Shervin Hajipour (Music Video)

Who could feel that? If you could feel it, just explode it! For the sake of it all, baraye! For the sake of it all. We can feel. And the depth of this knowing of the interior and exterior sciences, you can express in one sentence:

The universe feels, and the universe feels love. The universe feels, and the universe feels Eros.

Let’s see if we can find this.

The universe feels, and the universe feels uniquely through me, in a way that it doesn’t feel through anyone else that ever was, is, or will be. And we can feel each other, and the way we feel each other is through our unique incarnation and shudder of desire. That’s how we find each other.

Uniqueness is not separation.
Uniqueness is the currency of connection.
It’s what creates the Unique Self Symphony.

There are two ways to murder Eros

If you are ready, let’s go one step deeper. Are you ready? We’ve got to go one hard, deep, huge, momentous, unimaginable step deeper.

Because in order to know that Mahsa Amini didn’t die in vain, we have to go beyond the local experience of that particular tragic moment, and we need to place ourselves in the world context — and to understand that there are two tragic responses. There are two ways to murder Eros.

One way to murder Eros is through the morality police.

When you murder Eros through the morality police, then you have those same police who rape women who are in their imprisonment, who rape young girls. Because they are split off from their own Eros, and they’re shamed by their very existence, they’re shamed by their very existence, they experience themselves as being fundamentally bad.

And once you experience yourself as fundamentally bad, there’s no constraint. You’ve lost hope, you’ve lost a memory of your own future. And so, paradoxically — and we’ve seen it in these protests — the morality police become the rapist. Wow!

That’s one tragic failure of Eros — and every breakdown of Eros brings a subsequent collapse of ethics.

But that’s not enough, friends.

There is a second failure of Eros, which brings its own collapse of ethics. And we are not complete, and we haven’t honored She, unless we actually address that. And I want to say something here, and I want to go slow.

It’s deep and it’s hard to say, but it needs to be said.

The secular liberal response, not the sex-negative response of fundamentalism, but the kind of bland sex-positive, or the sex-neutral response, that generates what I would call the pornographic universe is equally — but in a completely different form — a murder of Eros.

This is not a moralistic position. I want to understand this really deeply. It’s an understanding. It’s not about nakedness, it’s about something much deeper.

Stay with us, friends. Let’s go deep inside, let’s go really deep inside for a second.

The tragedy of the secular liberal order is that it has deconstructed value, and when I say liberal, I don’t mean liberal as opposed to conservative, I mean the secular postmodern Western liberal order that includes the preponderance of the mainstream, of the intellectual and media and social and entertainment establishments.

And when we deconstruct value, we fail to realize the central value of Eros. Eros is no longer a value, because value doesn’t exist, and desire is no longer a value, because we can’t locate desire as a value. Desire becomes a random accident, engendered by random evolutionary survival, which is an embarrassment to our attempt to be a good citizen.

This is why the liberal social order is producing a new puritanical culture that only understands violation of desire, that seeks to identify the great violators of desire, which, in part, is important:

We should identify, for example, sexual harassment, and have no tolerance for it, of course.
We should identify the rape of men in prison and the rape of women all over the world, and have no tolerance for it, of course.
We should step up and stand against any violation of Eros.

But the liberal social order has just stopped there.

We have identified the violators of Eros, but we don’t have a story of desire. We don’t understand sex-erotic.

Therefore, we don’t know how to Return to Eros, because we don’t actually understand that Eros is a value, and that we live in a CosmoErotic Universe.

Let me try and show the way that happens, in three steps.

The sex-neutral, and the bland sex-positive narrative, or sex is only sacred when we’re procreating — that becomes the narrative of the liberal social order. But actually, sex is, desire is the currency of life itself. Desire is value.

Pornography decontextualizes sex from story

I want to try and understand it, and go deep for a second, on three levels.

One, what is pornography?

Pornography is the decontextualization of radical sexing from radical living.

We generate a pornographic universe, and in this pornographic universe, we decontextualize sex from story.

That’s at the very core of a piece of writing we are doing to honor all the Mahsa Amini’s in the world, called The Phenomenology of Eros. And in this Phenomenology of Eros that Dr. Kristina Kincaid and I are working on, we understand that pornography is not graphic sexual images.

If you look up pornography in the dictionary, you’ll see pornography is graphic sexual images. No —

Pornography is graphic sexual images that are isolated from the deep and gorgeous textured story of human desire.

And human desire means my whole life — my children, my values, my creativity, my ethos, my economics, my kindness, my goodness, my truth, my beauty.

If you decontextualize sexual desire from the larger Field of desire…
If you take the graphic wonder of the sexual and you isolate it from the larger context of life, of a full life aflame with desire in every dimension of Reality…
When you do that isolation, when you exile graphic sexuality from the larger story of a rich, textured, radically alive, dripping with desire — sacred autobiography in every dimension of life…

— that’s pornography.

Pornography is the decontextualization of radical sexing from radical living.

Wow, step one!

And when we do that, we murder Eros.
When we do that, we kill the Goddess.
When we generate a Reality in which 10-year-olds are plugged in to high-speed internet pornography — before they even can understand the softness, the gentleness, the quivering tenderness, the fierceness, the goodness of Eros, as part of the larger life, the life of full desire in every dimension of life — we violate the Goddess, we murder the Goddess, we murder Eros.

But let’s take it another step, and this other step is critical. What is pornography in its next stage?

And again, pornography is not graphic sexuality. Pornography is addictive and destructive because it’s isolated from the larger context of life.

Imagine you have a three-hour-movie. A three-hour beautiful movie about depth and life and kindness and goodness and sensitivity and complexity and the agony and the ecstasy of a human life. And in that three-hour beautiful movie, you’ve got four minutes of radical sexing.

Is that pornographic?

No, of course it’s not, and it’s also not addictive — because it’s sexing in the context of a life lived, pulsing with desire, in which Eros and ethos are one.

It’s only the decontextualization of those four minutes which exiles radical sexing from radical living — that’s the pornographic, and that’s the murder of Eros.

And let’s go two more steps, and these two steps, they are so deep and they are so holy.

Pornographic totalitarianism

The second step is really to understand that there are two forms of totalitarianism in the world. I want to make a big and a huge leap here.

There is a fundamentalist totalitarianism that seeks to eradicate all scripts of desire. All scripts of desire are eradicated, and Mahsa Amini is murdered because her hijab is tilted, and because the young men who murder her are shamed in the very depth and core of their being. And that’s one kind of totalitarianism.

But stay close to me, friends, for a second, and this is so deep.

There is a second kind of totalitarianism, which is a kind of pornographic totalitarianism.

Now stay close.

In pornography, you don’t actually access the depths of your own desire. Your desire is determined by commercial commodified scripts of desire that have been written for you.

These are not your stories.
This is not your imagination.
This is not the sacred imagination of She living as Thee.
This is not your unique depth of desire.
This is not the unique texture of your configuration of intimacy and desire.
None of this is you.
All of this is a violation of your Unique Self.

This is where the algorithmic structure of society sends you… You go to pornography, you watch one video, then the algorithmic structure of machine intelligence identifies your first kink. And then it sends you to a second one that looks like that, and to a third one, and then to a fourth one, and then to a fifth one. And you get completely hijacked, you get completely drawn in — out of yourself, out of your essential self, out of your inward space of desire — into scripts of desire that have been written for you.

Now, once the script of your desire is written for you, we are at the door of totalitarianism.

Freedom means you can trust yourself. Freedom means you can trust your body. Freedom means you can trust your desire.

And the second that you cannot trust your desire,
and the second you cannot trust your body,
and the second you cannot trust your Eros —

— you have to give over authority of that Eros to someone else.

That might be the morality police — or it might be a digital totalitarianism that imposes upon you, beyond the pale of awareness, the script of your desire that you naively claim as your own. But actually you have been, through machine intelligence, defined by a set of statistical regularities of people watching the same kinds of porn, and we keep sending you invitations to something which will take you deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole — and farther and farther away from yourself.

In other words, friends…

Both the morality police and the pornographic universe are rooted in the exile of desire, which is the exile of She, which is the exile of what the lineage calls the Shekhinah: the Goddess, Eros.

When you exile She, when you exile desire, when you don’t have access to your own desire which you can trust — to your own quality and configuration, to your own gorgeous queerness, to your own idiosyncratic story of desire — when you can’t find that, but actually the script of your inner desire is written for you, we have already stepped into totalitarianism.

Wow!

The only response to pornographic totalitarianism is your own unique desire

Let us go the last step, friends, and it’s so deep. It’s so deep, and let’s be in this together.

The only response to the pornographic — whether it’s the pornography of the morality police who are pornographic in their very being, or it’s the pornography of a pornographic universe which is devoid of Eros — the only response is your own unique desire.

The only thing more powerful than the impersonal pull of depersonalized pornographic universes is the depth and intimacy of your own irreducibly unique story of desire. Your own story of desire.

Imagine if you can, for a second, if you want to get the depth of this Reality construct, this New Story of Value.

Imagine a cord, an electrical cord.

The end of the electrical cord is a plug.
That plug is your unique Eros.
That plug is your unique configuration of desire.
That plug plugs into the Eros of Kosmos, the CosmoErotic Universe.

That’s the actual scientific structure of Reality: through your irreducible uniqueness, you plug into the socket, if you will, of Reality’s electricity, Reality’s electric Eros. And that electric Eros pours through your unique desire.

But as long as you are imitating, as long as you’re what the MIT Media Lab calls Homo Imitans, you are imitating others. And for the MIT Media Lab, that’s how you are supposed to be, and they’re the people who are defining the Internet today.

As long as you’re imitating scripts of desire that have been provided for you, that are in violation of your unique Eros, which is your Unique Self, you have no energy — your energy is hijacked. You feel pallid, and insipid, and empty, and devastated, and depressed.

The only antidote to morality police, to the pornography of morality police and their murder of Eros, and to the pornographic universe which is split off from its own Eros, is the full power of your unique desire —

which is your unique protest,
which is your unique joy,
which is your unique configuration of intimacy,
which is your unique configuration of desire.

That’s the New Story of Value.
That’s the New Story of Eros.
That’s the promise we make to Mahsa Amini — that you didn’t die in vain.

Baraye: protesting for the sake of the All

And so, one more time, friends, we are going to go back in a third version to our chant, Baraye.

We live for the sake of it all.
Because we are omni-considerate for the sake of the whole. Because we are Homo amor.
Because we’re intimate with the whole.
Because we’re intimate with all of the future, and we’re intimate with all of the present.

And Mahsa Amini died with us and for us.
And in Iran, they’re protesting — and we’re intimate with everything happening in Iran every single day.
And we are intimate with the tragedies of young men around the world who can’t access their own powerful erect expression of Eros.

And women who cannot access the dignity of their own desire — because they were trained in the murder of Eros, which is high-speed internet porn from age 10, and cannot access the goodness and self-evident aliveness of being alive that the sexual actually gives us in her greatest and most wondrous expression.

So we are going to now protest one last time for the sake of the all, Baraye.

And I invite everyone, as you listen, to pray.
We’re going to actually pray, and our prayer is Baraye.
Here’s our prayer.

Baraye, means for, so for what are you praying?

For the sake of all the broken women, and for the sake of all the broken men.
For the sake of my Uncle Henry who is having surgery.
For the sake of health.
For the sake of goodness.

Baraye, for the sake of it all.

For the third time — the holy trinity.

Take us inside a new version, a new way, all the way home.

Here we go, let’s pray together.

Baraye by Rana Mansour

Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday in One Mountain:

Join Dr. Marc Gafni and the entire community in an evolutionary celebration this and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.