323 Part 1 — Take Your Seat at the Table of History
This is Part 1 of two-part series. See Part 2 here.
A Note to the Reader
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [December 18, 2022] 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 and Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
We are not spectators
EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE #1
Your clarified heart's desire is the evolutionary impulse awake
and alive in you, as you, and through you. Your clarified heart's desire is
the tuning fork of your Unique Self. Your Unique Self is the invitation
and demand of the self-organizing universe that you choose joy, join
genius, and play your instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE #2
Are you ready to be evolution? Are you ready to participate in the
evolution of consciousness and culture? Are you ready to participate in
the evolution of love? Are you ready to love deeper and wider than you
ever have before? Are you ready to include something or someone in
your circle of love that has always been on the outside? Are you ready to
change, grow, and transform in the way that you have long given up on?
Are you ready to be a dreamer? Are you ready to activate evolutionary
love in you, as you and through you? Are you ready to be and become
more than you ever thought possible? Are you ready to awaken as
conscious evolution?This is a big day. We are celebrating Barbara Marx Hubbard, who was and is my and our evolutionary partner. We are going to be focusing today on the evolution of conscious evolution. I am going to introduce and talk about Barbara, and then Barbara is going to speak, in a couple of moments.
I just want to say a couple of things as we get started. I want to invite everyone not to come on late. Really be here if you can at one o’clock (Eastern Time), and if you can come at a quarter to one o’clock (Eastern Time), because at fifteen minutes before the hour, Krista is now beginning with fifteen minutes of chanting. Today we did a Happy Birthday song. But generally, we are going to be doing deep dive lineage chants, where you can enter into the space of the interior of Kosmos. You can have direct access to the resonance of Reality as Eros. Chant is a universal technology, which — when done with full intention — allows us to enter on the inside of the inside. I invite everybody to be there for fifteen minutes before with Krista. It is not a sing-along. It’s not, oh, let’s do some kind of Girl Scouts around the campfire songs. It is about actually entering into the technology of practice in the deepest possible way together, so that’s a big invitation.
Because there is a moment in our lives where we begin to take our seat at the table, where we stop being dilettantes and we stop being spectators to all time and existence, as the Greeks wrote.
We are not spectators — that’s the Hellenist or the Greek or the scientistic detachment perspective.
We are actually involved.
We are taking our seat in history, and what we are talking about today is the realization that me taking my seat actually has an impact, it actually does something!
Because what we are doing here —
- We are actually responding to the meta-crisis by telling a New Story of Value.
- We are actually realizing that we are in this time between worlds, we are in this time between stories.
And the question is not — and I mean this so gently, friends, brothers, sisters — the question is not: did they entertain me this week? No, that’s not the question, we are not doing wisdo-tainment here. Was I entertained? And I hope you are entertained, and I love wisdo-tainment — but that’s not what’s going on here.
This is the heart of the revolution.
Without a genuine story of value, the center doesn’t hold
We are in Florence in the Renaissance, faced by the same moment that Florence was, but much more intense.
Florence, pre-modernity. The old medieval world is dying, the Black Death, the pandemic, and multiple threats are sweeping through a collapsing Europe and Asia. Modernity with its dignities hasn’t yet been born. And a group of people in Florence, a very small group of people, my friends, in Florence and some other parts of Italy, about a thousand in total, get together and they say:
- We can see around the corner.
- We understand that as new forms of information, new technologies come online, that it won’t be enough to respond to the pandemics. It won’t be enough to respond to the Dark Ages. We won’t be able to say let there be light through technology.
- In order to even generate new information and new knowledge and new science, we need a New Story of Value.
- We need a new understanding of what the human being is.
- We need a new understanding of the human being’s relationship to Source and to the Infinite.
- We need a New Universe Story, a New Story of identity, a new narrative of desire, a New Story of power.
These new stories are not made-up stories; they’re not conjectures. They are not like, oh, let’s just declare something. But can we take together all of the leading-edge validated insights of all of the wisdom streams?
This is what da Vinci said, and Ficino. They said, let’s take everything we know — validated insights, not just declarations — let’s weave them together, and let’s tell the New Story of Value, which will raise all boats and respond to the crisis. And to the precise extent that they succeeded, they birthed what we might call — and Habermas calls — the dignities of modernity, which were:
- universal human rights,
- and the emergence of the feminine,
- and new ways of information-gathering, which birthed the scientific method,
- and the great abolition of slavery.
All of these came from these new ways of understanding Reality, these new First Principles and First Values embedded in a New Story of Value. To the precise extent that they got the storyline right, the story led in beautiful directions.
But they got some really key parts of the storyline wrong. And not particularly da Vinci and Ficino, but the people who came after. David Hume, dimensions of Immanuel Kant, Neo-Darwinism, logical positivism, contemporary existentialism — there is a thread, a direct line, through all those dimensions of thought, which were the very heart and center of modernity, which basically said:
- value is not real,
- value is only a social construction,
- the human being is a glorified animal.
And, of course, the human being includes animal, and should — but the human being is actually this momentous emergent leap. They misunderstood the animal world as well. They misunderstood the full beauty of the animal world and thought the animals were essentially almost the same as rocks.
They didn’t understand in modernity that we need a genuine story of value —
- which is not materialist,
- in which meaning is real,
- in which everything emerges from consciousness,
- in which value is real —
and without that, the center does not hold. Without that, you have emptiness, and in that emptiness, false stories emerge.
For example, the success story, that virtually every single person on this call, myself included, is enculturated in:
- Am I successful?
- When I look in the mirror, am I successful?
- Am I beautiful in a particular superficial way, which is part of my success?
And Reality began to be governed by this success story, which is rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics, because there was no better story being told.
That failure of Eros — the failure to articulate a story which is equal to the depth of our own self-knowing, which is equal to the depth of our own experience — is the root cause for existential risk and catastrophic risk.
The yoga of becoming the New Story
There are two kinds of risks, to the very existence of humanity and to the nature of our humanity. the actual death of humanity, extinction, which is quite a real genuine option — or the death of our humanity, when we upgrade algorithms and we downgrade human beings.
And I want to really set our intention on this first night — tonight is Hanukkah Festival, the Festival of Lights, and we’ll light candles together next week, and we’re moving towards Christmas and New Year’s. I love Christmas, and I love New Years, and I love Ramadan, and I love Hanukkah — but in this moment, let us reset our intention, as we enter into the depths of winter, and love it open, and into this new 2023.
Let us understand: everything is at stake. You can, if you want to, turn back to your life and say,
— let me just do my spiritual transformation usual work,
— and do my usual meditation,
— and do my usual trauma work.
— And I’ll go listen to Gabor Ma Tei (which is a great idea. Love you, Gabor.)
And it’s all good, you can do that,
and close into your particular world,
and basically commodify your own psychological development as part of your own success story,
and actually not understand yourself as part of the whole, and not feel the whole,
and not feel the pulsing meta-crisis that’s emergent in the very fabric of Reality.
You can look away.
You can bury your head in the sand, as 99% of humanity is doing now.
Or, you can decide:
- No, I want to actually cross to the other side.
- I want to participate in the emergence of the new human and the new humanity.
- I want to actually transform from being Homo sapiens to Homo amor — and Homo amor is the new human and the new humanity who’s omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.
That’s why I’m inviting you to come at the beginning at one o’clock. Because what Kristina Amelong does is, she takes the First Principles and First Values of the previous week — spends hours, takes the exact quotes, but reorders the sentences — to give us a second experience of those new dimensions of the New Story of Value that we did in the previous week, to allow us to experience them and to understand them more deeply, and to have them become who we are.
What we are doing here is: we are in this depth of practice, we are doing the yoga of becoming the New Story.
The yoga is telling the New Story and becoming the New Story, articulating the First Values and First Principles and becoming the First Values and First Principles.
Kristina Amelong’s Dharma recapitulation in the beginning is critical to that, as is Krista’s opening the space with chant before, as is Tom or David’s resonating the code. And we could spend the entire day just on today’s two codes, or thinking about the Dharma recapitulation — but those are not informational.
Building the infrastructure so we can vision the new world
I’m sorry, am I too serious this week, who thinks I’m too serious this week? Oh God, we should have sent the other Gafni. I’m sorry, I’m very serious this week, so I apologize — but I am feeling serious. But with mad joy.
And when Krista today invited people… — and it’s Krista’s birthday today, together with Barbara Marx Hubbard — when Krista says: Hey, sign up, become a member — she’s not pushing some commodity. This is not a for-profit venture.
This is about: can we generate the resources to generate the revolution? — number one. But number two, it’s about you and I.
- Am I just a spectator here?
- Am I just observing?
- Or am I a stakeholder, a part of the story?
And Barbara would always call me and say, let’s make sure to invite people to become members this week, to contribute this week. Because people need to know that we can only create this revolution if we resource — and Barbara always said re-source: we enter into source, and we give generously.
So become a member! The point is, it’s yours. It’s not mine. It’s not Barbara’s. It’s not Tahelie’s. It’s yours to the precise extent that you want to get involved and become a stakeholder and become a partner.
You know, our parents and grandparents — if I can just say one more thing, it is important — our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, lots of them built churches and built synagogues. Most of us are not doing that. We are doing podcasts, we are showing up online — but we are not taking the responsibility of actually building the infrastructure so we can vision the new world.
That is very often why the classical religions, even when they don’t have good leadership, they keep moving on — because there’s the sense in at least part of the population, that we’ve got to make sure that the church has a roof, that it’s got good heating, and that we pay our dues because we need that.
Well, we desperately need One Mountain, Many Paths.
We need this evolutionary synagogue, church, mosque, which is trying to articulate a new world spirituality as a context for our diversity, a new world religion as a context for our diversity, a universal grammar of value as a contract for our diversity.
So I want to, just with total tenderness, invite you to really show up and be there at the beginning, and hear Kristina Amelong, and hear Krista Josepha, and hear Tom or David resonating the code.
Each one of these people, as you know, we’ve been studying together, all of us, for years. I mean, Tom and I, Tom, when did we first meet? In 2009, we did our first seminar of study together, and we’ve been deep in since. There is a deep commitment, and you can feel the goodness of these stakeholders.
I just want to invite everyone to step in, there’s such joy in stepping in, because that’s how it’s going to happen.
Take your part, take your seat at the table, begin to play your instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
You can be in touch with Krista (support@centerforintegralwisdom.org), and you can find a way to step into editing with Elena, in the evolutionary sensemaking editorial group. You can decide you want to resource a book or a project — but however you want to step in, let us know.
This is ours.
This is our revolution.
Oh my God. So thank you, thank you.
This is Part 1 of two-part series. See Part 2 here.
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