326 — Visions of the Intergalactic Homo Amor: Avatar as an Interspecies Love Story
A Note to the Reader
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 8, 2023] 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.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
Revolution: reclaiming First Principles and First Values
We are in the second week of 2023. We are here together in the space of revolution. And by revolution we mean the rejection of the status quo.
It can be more; it has to be more.
We recognize that we are, at this moment, poised between utopia and dystopia — between a world unimaginably beautiful and a world which is unimaginably dystopian. At this place where these two paths diverge in the woods, what we do here together has the capacity to make all the difference.
In our public face, we are a Think Tank. We started in 2009 as the Center for World Spirituality and we evolved to become the Center for Integral Wisdom. I was privileged to co-found the Think Tank with my dear friend Ken Wilber — who remains deeply involved — and with Sally Kempton and Mariana Caplan. Zak Stein joined soon afterwards, and Kerstin Zohar a little bit later.
And, oh my God, we began this incredible adventure into this enormous, unimaginable responsibility to be — on the inside of the inside, in our interior — not just a Think Tank, but what we called, sometime in 2013 or 2014, a band of Outrageous Lovers, who are committed to evolve the source code — the very superstructure of Reality, the very story in which Reality lives and from which Reality is generated — in response to the meta-crisis. And so, that’s who we are.
In this generation, the threat is unlike in any other prior generation,
— with its extraction technologies and its exponentialized access to weaponized forms of destruction,
— with its polarization,
— with the global nature of our society.
— and with the realization that, actually, every civilization has fallen.
We haven’t healed the fracture lines that caused civilizations to fall, but now we are a global civilization, with exponential power, but without a story of value that’s equal to our power.
And so, what we came together to say — and not just to say, not just to declare, but to act, as a band of Outrageous Lovers — to actually tell the New Story. To tell the New Story of Value.
But to tell the New Story, we have to figure it out: what’s the plotline, what’s the storyline?
Value has broken down at the center of Academia.
When Nick Bostrom wrote a book (in 2015, and then it was republished in 2017), called Superintelligence, he ended the book with “the value-loading problem.” He is talking about the issue of AI. It was the book that put Artificial Intelligence — in its potential and its peril — at the center of the conversation. It has a quote from Bill Gates on the cover, and it has Elon Musk on the cover. In the end, Bostrom can’t work it out. He’s incredibly uneven — quite sophisticated when talking about AI, but then he realizes that you can’t engage AI without engaging the issue of value, and he runs into what he calls the value-loading problem, which is a twofold problem.
The first piece of the problem, which I’m going to focus on now, is: what is value? We’ve lost our access to value. What is the story, which is our shared story of value, in which we live?
Now, even though Bostrom doesn’t articulate it this way, this is essentially what he means. And he crashes — and the book crashes.
In this moment of meta-crisis, we can’t just fix infrastructure — and Bostrom’s work is filled with potential infrastructure fixes — and we can’t just fix social structure. We actually have to fix the very superstructure, the story of value rooted in First Principles and First Values. We have to reclaim First Principles and First Values — evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a story of value.
And that reclamation is the revolution.
But to do that, we have to step so deeply in, so beyond the polarization of the different web echo chambers, whether it is the CNN echo chamber in the United States or the Tucker Carlson, Fox News echo chamber in the United States, or their equivalents in France, or Belgium, or England, or South Africa, or New Zealand, or Antarctica, or wherever people are in the world, wherever people are listening, all the continents — I think I missed a couple of continents, but wherever people are listening — and I think we have people from about five continents.
We have to speak into this moment and articulate this New Story of Value.
The New Story of Value in public culture
Now, one of the methodologies that we use is to engage the texts of public culture. Last week, this week, and probably next week, we are talking about this new text of public culture called Avatar.
We are looking to try and articulate the possibilities that are in the imagination of public culture, that are inchoate, that actually need to be articulated, because often, the New Story of Value comes not only from philosophers or spiritual teachers — which is where I spend my time — but from the intuitive voices across public culture, whether it be science fiction, or the arts, or poetry, or the shamanic practices, or the realms of healing, or the texts of public culture as they appear in the cinematic form.
And so we’re looking at Avatar.
But before we dive in — we are going to think about Iran at this moment, where young men and young women are being hanged as we talk, as a result of their participation in the nationwide protests that were sparked by Mahsa Amini’s murder, that we talked about a few weeks ago — a 22-year-old man, a 39-year-old man, a number of young girls, 17 and 18. And so Iran is with us, and every sit-in in Iran and the pain of Iran is specifically and uniquely and gorgeously with us this week, even as we take our seat at the table of history and we say we are madly committed to enact a world —
- in which there are no hangings,
- and there are no tens of millions of people who don’t have health insurance,
- in which there’s no one outside of the circle,
- in which every part of ourselves that’s been split off gets reintegrated into the circle —
— to create a world that works for everyone.
To create a world more unimaginably beautiful, good, and true than ever existed in history — because that’s actually the possibility that beckons, even as an unimaginably dark dystopia beckons at the same time.
I want to look at an image. It is an image that appears in Avatar. It is from a scene of Grace [see clip below], who is a biological researcher, and she’s having this argument with Selfridge. This is in Avatar 1 (and even if you haven’t seen the movies, you can step in and just relax and find your way).
We are in Avatar 1, and Earth is desperately in need of sufficient raw materials, particularly this raw material, this extracted metal, which is symbolically called Unobtanium in the movie.
In fact, all of Reality is powered by energy, everything we do, and the more dollars we spend to grow, the more we increase growth. One of the things we forget is that financial dollars equal expenditures of energy, and the extraction model has brought us to a point where we don’t have enough energy to expend, or it’ll be too expensive to expend the energy.
If we continue the fundamental growth curve — which means a growth curve of finances and products, those finances and products equal energy — then, inevitably, in the very infrastructure of Reality, we hit a collapse. A collapse of the system.
Many people have talked about this over the last 40 years. It began at the Club of Rome, and Paul Ehrlich did some important conversations on this. A gentleman I spoke to a week ago, just in a check-in phone call, Nate Hagens, is doing some really important work in talking about this and he is recapitulating this literature through his own prism.
So, what’s going to happen is this fundamental collapse. Avatar is opening into this kind of Reality, in which Earth is on the brink of collapse, so it goes to exploit other systems, particularly Pandora, which has this very rare, valuable mineral that Earth needs. This is Avatar 1.
What happens though, is they encounter this incredible civilization, which is deeply embodied:
You feel the alive bodies,
the near nakedness of heart,
the second simplicity,
the beauty, the elegance.
The sense of being part of a larger system.
The information contained in the larger system.
The awesome wisdom and meaning that lives in the system itself.
It is very beautiful. It has some fundamental weaknesses that we’ll get to in a second, but it’s very beautiful.
AI is disconnected from Field of Value inherent in Kosmos
What’s the fundamental problem of AI?
The fundamental AI problem, at its very, very core — and I’m going to try and say it much more clearly than we did last week: AI is raw computational power.
I went to write my doctorate at Oxford University (which was one of the few formal educational or professional things I did that my mother has approved of), and when I would study at the Bodleian Library, they had a picture outside the Bodleian Library of five men from the neck up, which was Western civilization’s view of knowledge — five men from the neck up.
But that’s not even what AI is, because when you’re from the neck up, at least your raw intellect has to draw from the rest of your body. But imagine, if you will, symbolically, a head severed from the body — that’s actually AI.
- AI is raw computational power, without any access to the feeling tone, to feeling the value, or value tone of the Kosmos.
- AI is tone-deaf to value.
- AI has no perception, no value-ception.
- AI doesn’t have access to the Eye of Value.
- AI has access to the Eye of the Mind — raw computational power, and to the Eye of the Senses — through gathering empirical data, which are concrete, objective, and measurable, but AI bypasses the entire Field of Value.
We said that last week, but let us deepen it. Here it gets very beautiful and very subtle. Value is actually inherent in Kosmos from, quite literally, the very first moments of the Big Bang. Value is incepted in Kosmos at the very beginning.
Value means:
- I make a decision.
- I choose this direction, and not that direction, because I have a set of preferences.
That’s what value means. Value means I have a desire, and my desire is for a future that is different, but not only different —
Value means I have a desire for a future that’s better than the present.
What does better mean? Better means there is more value. In other words, there’s an intrinsic thought in Kosmos: something is better than something else.
And Kosmos has a direction, it has a telos. It’s moving someplace. It has an appetite. Desire is appetite. Appetite is the way that the mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, described it (who wrote Principia Mathematica with George Bertrand Russell). I use the word desire.
There is an intrinsic desire, which is the taste of the Eros of Kosmos.
Kosmos wants to go someplace.
Where does it want to go?
- Kosmos wants life.
- Kosmos wants life, and Kosmos wants life which chooses for more and more value.
Now, that quality of Kosmos begins at the very beginning. It is incipient at the very beginning. It’s a proto-experience of choosing for value.
Quarks don’t actually create a stable relationship with every other quark — they make a choice. There is a choice that’s inherently built into quarks. They choose this quark and not that quark, and if they choose the wrong quark, there’s no relationship. And when you don’t have a holy trinity of three quarks that creates a stable relationship? — Disappearance and death.
So, there’s this movement in Kosmos, towards life. Now, life doesn’t mean that you live forever. It’s not everlasting life —
— but it’s a movement towards life.
— It’s a movement in which separate parts seek to create larger wholes, in which new intimacies, which are new shared identities, appear — with ever-deeper structures of mutuality, recognition, union and embrace.
And that begins with quarks, and it goes to subatomic particles, and it goes to atoms, and then it goes to elementary molecules, and then to macromolecules, then to cells, to multicellular life.
This is a core movement of Kosmos, in which Kosmos makes choices for
— evermore value,
— evermore depth,
— evermore goodness,
— evermore interconnectivity,
— evermore creativity,
— evermore consciousness,
— evermore care,
— evermore love or Eros.
So all of these — evermore consciousness, evermore creativity, evermore neurons, ever deeper and wider fields of desire, evermore perception, evermore knowing, and evermore mutuality, evermore recognition, evermore union and evermore embrace — all of that, all of these are values of Kosmos. Those are First Principles and First Values of Kosmos.
Kosmos is making decisions for life all the time, and those First Principles and First Values — those are what we call First Principles and First Values in this New Story of Value we are telling.
CosmoErotic Humanism is the name of this New Story of Value, this meta-theory that is trying to integrate all meta-theories that we can — across the board, from every period in history, in the sciences, in physics, in biology, in economics, in sociology, in anthropology — trying to integrate all these meta-theories into it a second simplicity, in which we identify the First Principles and First Values of Kosmos, and we understand that those are the plotlines of Reality.
And those plotlines of Reality are trying to go someplace. Not someplace, but to evermore value.
I know it’s an incredibly simple, but incredibly sophisticated point, and if you get this, you become a different person. It changes something. Are we ready, can we get this? It’s big.
What’s happening is, all of those decisions that evolution has made for the sake of value along the way, through evolution moving towards ever-deeper and wider configurations of intimacy — driven by its own inherent desire for more and more union, more and more mutuality, more and more recognition, more and more embrace — all of those live inside of us.
Because all of it, from the gluons to the quarks, to the hadron to the leptons, to the muons, the atoms, all of it — cells, the organisms, the organelles, the organic systems — all of that lives in us. We are part of this larger Field, and that entire Field lives in us.
It’s not just true that we live in an Amorous Kosmos: a Kosmos driven by Eros, by Amor. But the Amorous Kosmos, quite literally, lives in us.
By the time we get to the neck up, we’ve got the entire body, and that body is alive. We matter. Things matter means that they have meaning, because that which matters is written in the script of matter, in the mattering of the body. Which is why in one of the ancient sacred texts, Job says: Through my body, I vision God.
AI cuts all of that off. AI bypasses all of that, and goes directly to raw computational power.
And although he doesn’t say any of this, but if you read Bostrom’s 2015 book, Superintelligence, implicitly, this is the problem he’s wrestling with. We have no idea what AI is going to do, because it’s not in the Field of Value. And Bostrom, at the end of the book, gets to this value-loading problem, and he doesn’t know how to solve it. Because he assumes the dogma of the mainstream modern and postmodern Academia, that value has broken down.
Wow, so that’s what AI is.
Avatar as an alternative to AI
Now, the alternative image is actually dropped into culture by Avatar — and it’s so beautiful, I just want to take the time to express it. Let’s see this scene now, when Grace describes to Selfridge what the field of Pandora is and why that’s so unimaginably important.
Clip 1: Grace and Parker Selfridge
Grace: I’m not talking about some kind of pagan voodoo here. I’m talking about something real, something measurable in the biology of the forest.
Parker Selfridge: Which is what exactly?
Grace: What we think we know is that there is some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees, like the synapses between neurons. And each tree has ten-to-the-fourth connections to the trees around it. And there are ten-to-the-twelfth trees on Pandora.
Parker Selfridge: Which is a lot, I’m guessing.
Grace: It’s more connections than the human brain. Get it?
Grace is the scientist, and she’s talking to Selfridge, who is a bureaucrat administrator, and Miles Quatrich is there, who’s the kind of Ranger Rick marine. (We’ll talk about him in a little bit. He’s a complex figure. Clearly a villainous figure in Avatar 1, but he becomes a more complex figure in Avatar 2. But at this point, he’s clearly a villain figure.)
Grace says that there are more synapses connecting the entire system of trees in nature on Pandora than the human brain. Now, here’s the key. Then she says that the Na’vi can download and upload to the system, so the Na’vi are now part of the system — that’s the key.
So you’ve got this system of “AI,” meaning access to the entire Field of information — and information here is wisdom; information is value; information is meaning. Value and meaning live all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
In other words, way before there is a human neocortex that tells stories of value, that is able to articulate them, we have — from the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang — an entire set of mathematical values and physical values, that are inherently choosing direction and moving towards more value. It begins in the world of matter. There is a pan-interiority that lives throughout the world.
And then, it evolves and increases. The interiority gets more and more deep, more and more profound, more and more conscious, more and more unique, so we move towards more and more consciousness, more and more conscious choice — ultimately getting to conscious evolution — more and more Eros, more and more depth.
But the entire system is connected!
And here’s the key sentence:
The human being participates in that Field of Value.
That’s what we call, in CosmoErotic Humanism, Anthro-Ontology (anthro: the human being, ontology: accessing the real information, the real value of all of Kosmos). And the entire system is connected.
That’s an alternative to AI.
AI has super-computational power, in terms of raw computation, so what do we need to do?
We need to create a relationship between this human world and the Field of Value; the human world that begins to recognize itself and begins to recognize the Field of Value, to recognize —
- that I am not dissociated from the Field of Value, that I am not alienated from the Field of Value;
- that I am not merely a separate self, I’m not just a skin-encapsulated ego who is coding AI, but I am actually a participant in the Field of Value itself — I am a unique node in the great network of value, that moves all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
That’s the alternative to AI.
Now, both of those have enormous power; both massive computational power and the human ability to access the Field of Value — both of those are critical. Neither should be demonized. What we need to do — which Avatar never does — is actually embrace the potential and the beauty of both of them.
What Avatar does is, it splits between them, polarizes between them.
Paradoxically, this is the paradox of Avatar:
— It sees the Na’vi possibility, it sees this Field of Value.
— It actually gets this notion that there’s value all the way down and all the way up — and that’s not a religious notion, it’s not a fundamentalist notion.
I’ve written, together with Howard Bloom and Zak Stein, an essay. Howard Bloom is a guru-figure at NASA, one of the best philosophers of science and one of the best scientists published across journals. We wrote an article — that we haven’t yet published — on the notion that value goes all the way down and all the way up. Value decisions are always being made in Kosmos. There is a Field of Value, which is mathematical and scientific, and that becomes more and more conscious. Wow!
And that all lives inside of us.
And the reason that science works is because we are cosmic humans. The reason we can feel through mathematics, to the very edges of the Kosmos, is because those mathematics and all of their elegance live inside of us. All of Kosmos lives in us, so we can feel into Kosmos through the Fields of Value that are mathematics — but those fields of value have to meet, have to be in dance with, have to be in embrace with, they have to be intimate with the field of interior value.
And what have we done instead?
Paradoxically, the movie Avatar repeats the polarization. It sets up the same polarization between interiors, gorgeously expressed embodiment, which is plugged into, which acts as the Field of Value, stunningly expressed — and the alienated desiccated technologies.
We are talking about AI. They are not actually quite talking about AI in Avatar, but let’s put the two conversations together:
- The AI that’s dissociated from the Field of Value,
- and the technologies of the Avatar movies —
those are set up against each other. A complete and radical polarization, and the synergy never begins to take place.
Our love story has to be an intergalactic love story
Now let’s go deeper, let’s go deeper. Let’s take a big huge next step now, to try and understand what’s really happening in Avatar. Now, the next step of Avatar is equally important. It’s subtle, and I want to try and — in this gentle conversation — access it with you.
Avatar begins to introduce a possibility that actually lives in the great traditions, it lives in the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom, it lives in the teachings — one way or the other — of all of the great interior science traditions, which is that we live in a galactic Reality, that we don’t just live on a planet.
- We don’t just need to move from ethnocentric (meaning, I’m identified with my tribe) to worldcentric (I’m one with all human beings).
- We don’t just need to move from worldcentric to a human-animal Kosmocentric, meaning, I’m one not just with all human beings, but with all of Gaia on planet earth, and all of the animals on planet Earth, and with the planet itself — which is how this move from ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric is usually understood.
But — as we’ve said over the past years, but I want to now focus on it more clearly:
Our love story has to be an intergalactic love story.
Wow!
This is why we call it CosmoErotic Humanism. Kosmos is the largest frame.When the Greeks spelled Kosmos, they did it with a K, to include not just the material, but to include interiors and exteriors. Whether we spell it with a C or with a K, what we mean by Kosmos is interiors and exteriors.
And CosmoErotic Humanism means — now let us add to our story of value here — that our human experience of love (humanism) is accessing something which is not a local human experience.
I’m going to create a new word: it is not an ethno-human experience. It’s an amorous value of Kosmos.
The Universe: A Love Story.
The Galaxy: A Love Story.
It’s an intergalactic love story.
Now, strangely, and fascinatingly, and importantly, the great traditions of the interior sciences, for all of their great flaws that we’ve talked about, actually understood this, and they did not have a problem with it. They talked constantly about extra-dimensionals, meaning beings or qualities that came from dimensions that were beyond the dimension that we live in here in this terrestria of planet Earth. And they talked about extraterrestrials.
For example, in the Book of Genesis, there’s this discussion of the B’nai Elohim, the sons of Gods, who make love in a particular way. And it’s a conversation with the B’not Adam, with the daughters of Adam, and the Nephilim, those who fell to this world. And there’s an enormous and extensive interior science tradition within, for example, Hebrew wisdom, that talks about this notion of this intergalactic Amor.
I was talking yesterday to my friend and colleague, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, and he told me about a Dzogchen tradition, a tradition within Tibetan Buddhism that does the same thing, that talks about this teaching of Tibetan Buddhism being taught in the thirteen planetary systems.
Now, notice that this intergalactic or extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial world — this is what Jeffrey Kripal talks about. This wild Kosmos that we live in was a threat not to the interior sciences of the great traditions, but to materialist science.
Materialist science didn’t know what to do with this possibility — and for that, and multiple other reasons, there was a deliberate decision made by the governments of the world, to essentially block out the information that we had about this very genuine, not just possibility, but probability. For several decades, this information has been deliberately obfuscated, deliberately blocked out, and it’s only in the last five or six years that it’s actually broken through.
And literally — if you’ve tracked the last three or four years — every couple of months, sometimes every few weeks, you have a new revelation by a particular government that acknowledges — the United States first among them — that it’s had a program that’s tracking this information, that the best explanation for the information that they’ve gathered in their empirical research is some version of what we are describing here, a kind of intergalactic intelligence.
Now, that’s not fringe information. 10 years ago, if you said that, that was fringe. But now, it’s in the mainstream publications of not just rare science journals, but the mainstream media sources, the legacy media sources of the entire Western world. Wow!
So, we begin to have this notion of this intergalactic possibility.
But friends, what is the nature of this intergalactic possibility going to be?
- Is it going to be fundamentally a repeat of the wars of Earth, meaning intergalactic warfare?
- Or will we actually reach for a better possibility, which is: The Universe: A Love Story?
CosmoErotic Humanism is about the notion that our human experience of love participates in a larger galactic Reality, and that actually Reality is Eros.
Now, stay close friends, and this is so beautiful, and it’s so important.
- Love is not a social construction.
- Love is not something that lives only between a particular species — we can love each other across species.
For example, humans can love animals. Now, we might create boundaries of how we interact with animals, for lots of reasons:
- To respect and honor the animal world.
- To respect and honor the human world.
- To hold, for example, sexuality in a particular kind of container — which is about shared meaning structures and interiority between people in the creation of a future —
— but we don’t limit love, and we can love across the boundaries of species.
We can even create Fields of Eros of all kinds, across species, and that’s exactly at the very heart of the Avatar movie, that’s the question at play.
This is a special moment in Kosmos. This is a special moment in CosmoErotic Humanism, when we get to begin to unpack this new possibility.
Beyond the fence of being human
We’ve got these two basic figures in Avatar 1. One figure is Miles Quatrich. Who is Miles Quatrich in Avatar 1? Miles Quatrich in Avatar 1 is this Marine colonel, who we’re going to call ethno-human.
He’s a racist. But he’s a racist in the sense that only humans matter: anyone who’s not human isn’t actually worthy of encounter, and is certainly not worthy of love.
In other words, Miles Quatrich, in movie one, is standing against CosmoErotic Humanism. He understands love to be legitimate between humans. You can maybe have sex out of that category, as we’ll see in a couple of minutes, but you certainly can’t love. Love across species boundaries doesn’t make any sense to him, and anyone who’s not human is quite literally sub-human. Not only animals, but any other race.
I want to take a look at the first and last scene. There are two scenes in which Miles talks to the people in Avatar 1. He talks to the community and tells them about what their mission is.
There’s scene one and scene two.We’re going to watch each of them. I want to watch the first one. We’ll look at it. We’ll talk about it for a minute and then we’ll watch the second, which is even more important. We are going to the movies now. So I hope you have popcorn, maybe a little water, maybe some rum, maybe some Diet Coke, maybe some juice.
Let us actually read the texts of culture, and let’s actually participate together, these next few minutes, directly in the evolution of love.
Miles Quatrich: You’re not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora, ladies and gentlemen. Respect that fact every second of every day. If there is a hell, you might want to go there for some R&R after a tour on Pandora.
Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for Jujubes.
We have an indigenous population of humanoids called the Na’vi. They’re fond of arrows dipped in a neurotoxin that’ll stop your heart in one minute. And they have bones reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber. They are very hard to kill. As head of security, it is my job to keep you alive. I will not succeed. Not with all of you. If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental attitude. You’ve got to obey the rules. Pandora rules. Rule number one…
Jake: There’s nothing like an old-school safety brief to put your mind at ease.
We saw them get to Pandora. Anyone outside the fence — meaning the fence of being a human being, because he’s an ethno-human racist — is crawling in the mud, is ready to kill you, is ready to eat your eyes, and they are hard to kill. But the point is, you should be killing them.
Because there is no such thing as Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not murder applies only to people within humanity. But outside the human camp, we murder. And it’s not called murder, it’s called our survival.
And when he hears this — just notice, this is the key to the clip — when Jake Sully hears this, he’s comforted. Did everyone catch what Jake Sully said? That was the most important part of the clip. At the very end, Jake Sully comes in, and he hears it, and he says, nothing more comforting than an old-style safety brief, meaning, he’s at home there. That is Jake Sully’s consciousness. That’s the consciousness of every human being. That’s a given.
By the way, in the human world today, on planet Earth, we look at animals in that way. We kill animals in factory farms, and we put lambs in little concentration camps where we torture them for three months, so we can have about 90 seconds of lamb chops — because we actually are alienated; we can’t see them: I don’t see the animal. I don’t see.
There is a failure of vision. There is a failure to see — and everyone participates in that.
One of the reasons extraterrestrials were locked down was the assumption that they must be hostiles. And if they are hostiles, we don’t want to let people know about hostiles, we want to figure out how to protect ourselves from them. That was kind of an implicit assumption.
Let’s take a look at the second clip. This is now at the end of Avatar. Quatrich is giving another talk, and it’s going to be even more dramatic. You’re going to see ethno-humanism at its height.
Miles Quatrich: Everyone on this base, every one of you, is fighting for survival. That’s a fact! There’s an aboriginal horde out there massing for an attack. Now, these orbital images tell me that the hostiles’ numbers have gone from a few hundred to well over 2,000 in one day. And more are pouring in. In a week’s time, there could be 20,000 of them. At that point, they will overrun our perimeter.
Well, that’s not gonna happen! Our only security lies in pre-emptive attack. We will fight terror with terror. Now, the hostiles believe that this mountain stronghold of theirs is protected by their… their Deity. And when we destroy it, we will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep that they won’t come within 1,000 klicks of this place ever again. And that, too, is a fact.
Let’s watch it again, just the last 60 seconds of the clip when he says: “blast a hole in their racial memory, and that’s a fact. That they’ll never come within whatever distance to this planet again.” But this time, watch the faces of the people listening.
Did everyone see the faces? Those faces are not evil people. Those faces are the people that you have for dinner. And it’s not just men, it’s men and women — everyone is completely aligned with him. These are good people, that’s the point.
These are good people.
These are men.
These are women.
They are kind people.
They are kind to their families.
They are great parents.
They are wonderful people.
And yet, the people who are outside of the perimeter are an aboriginal horde.
They are hostiles.
They don’t have a name.
They don’t have faces.
And we’re going to blast a crater in their racial memory.
In other words, they are, quite literally, dehumanized. They are terrorists.
We now have a new understanding of what it means to dehumanize, which is one very strong approach to this intergalactic moment.
Avatar is a CosmoErotic love story
What is Avatar about? What is the story about?
Let us go deep inside.
We see Jake Sully, who we saw in the beginning of one of the clips, who’s had his body blasted as a Marine. He now goes to this Avatar program to take the place of his brother, who’s been killed. Now, when he finds his way in his Avatar body, he makes a deal with Miles Quatrich, who he is totally loyal to, and Miles Quatrich tells him, you help me out and we’ll take care of your legs. Because I take care of my own. Meaning, within humanity, I take care of those who are loyal to me, to those who are on my team.
Then, something slowly happens. Grace, the doctor, the biologist who we saw earlier, gives Jake a particular piece of advice. She says: see what they see.
Those are the actual words that she uses.
Can you see what they see?
Can you see through their eyes?
Then, Jake and Grace go on a field research trip. Jake goes in his Avatar body and Grace in her Avatar body. Jake is separated from the rest of the group. He’s left alone at night in the forest, and, through sheer raw bravery, barely survives.
And then, Neytiri finds him. Neytiri is the daughter of the chieftain and chief-woman of the Omatikaya clan. She saves Jake. She says, you’re brave but foolish. You’re an idiot. There was no reason for you to kill these animals that you killed. She says, sometimes there is a reason to kill animals, and then we have to do it in a way that’s sacred — but the way you kill animals when you’re alienated from them is a degradation.
He doesn’t quite know what she’s talking about. He wants to follow her back to the clan, because he’s under orders from Quatrich to make friends with everyone, in order to essentially be able to betray them. She doesn’t want to bring him back to the clan, she doesn’t think he has any place there.
There are two interventions that take place that are done by Eywa. Eywa is the Field of Value, the Field of Spirit. When Neytiri says to Jake, I’m not taking you back to my people, there are these very, very beautiful, almost fairy-like, butterfly-like entities that embrace and cover Jake up, and enwrap him, and embrace him.
Neytiri understands that there’s been some intervention by Eywa, that some larger intelligence is at play here — and she brings Jake back. And then her mother, much to her chagrin, tells her that they’re going to try and break the ethno-centricity of the Na’vi — which is the name of their people — and try and bring Jake in.
Neytiri is the daughter of the Na’vi tribe. It is this very audacious moment, where the Na’vi are going to —
- try and make some connection with Jake,
- and try and understand him,
- and try and teach him to see through their eyes.
What happens?
Jake falls in love with Neytiri.
And Neytiri falls in love with Jake.
And Jake begins to see through her eyes (and actually — we’ll see it next week — the Na’vi phrase I see you, is a form of I love you.)
Love is not merely an emotion, love is a perception. Love means that I see you, and we’re going to talk about that more next week. But I see you runs through the Avatar movies as a theme, the ability to see beneath the ethno-human or the ethno-Na’vi and — for a moment — to actually see each other as we really are.
- Can we take the mask off, and know that what unites us is so much greater than that which divides us, and that we live in a CosmoErotic Universe, and that Eros moves through all of us?
This story is an inter-being love story.
It’s a love story between the Na’vi and the human.
That’s very dramatic.
It’s very beautiful.
The temporary defeat of ethno-humanism
Who doesn’t get that?
Quatrich.
Quatrich, speaking from his ethno-human perspective, views Jake as having betrayed his team. That makes perfect sense. And Quatrich shows it twice in the movie.
The first one is, where Quatrich says to Jake, you got some local tail and you forgot what team you’re playing for. Everyone got that? You got some local tail, meaning he doesn’t understand that love is at play. Local tail means some pornographic raw sexual fulfillment that has nothing to do with love; sex as a physiological act, dissociated from the Field of Love. Quatrich doesn’t understand that sex is love in the body, so he says, you got some local tail and you forgot what team you’re playing for. That’s one Quatrich scene.
And then the second moment, towards the end of the movie, there’s this huge battle between Quatrich on one side, and Jake and Neytiri on the other. And Quatrich looks at him with pure venom and hatred. And he says, how does it feel to have betrayed your own kind? And so, Quatrich stands for this ethno-human moment.
Who breaks the ethno-human moment?
The first person to break it is not Neytiri. It’s actually Neytiri’s mother who says, Neytiri, you train Jake. Neytiri, almost against her will, falls in love with Jake — and we have this intergalactic, this CosmoErotic love story that takes place, and we have this incredible sex scene.
This incredible sexual scene between them, in which they put the braids of their hair together, so that when they make love, it’s not just personal between them, but they’re making love with the entire Field. There is this wider form of loving.
(This summer, we’re going to do a Mystery School in Holland, 21–25 August 2023, and we’re going to talk about the seven levels of sexing and the seven levels of Eros in CosmoErotic Humanism. We are going to look at that scene in Avatar, and what this sex scene means, what kind of sexuality is that?)
Now, look what happens, friends — and now it gets very, very dramatic, and I want to try and feel into this with you.
How does Avatar 1 end? Who remembers how Avatar 1 ends?
It ends after this great battle, in which Jake leads the Na’vi. They are able to defeat and kill Quatrich. They defeat the humans. They send the humans home.
And the very last scene of Avatar is, Jake wakes up in a Na’vi body, so the human has been transposed into a Na’vi.
But this time, he’s not just a Na’vi temporarily. His consciousness is not just temporarily in the Avatar body, he has actually become a Na’vi.
This is the beginning of this dimension of CosmoErotic Humanism — this love story, in which love moves Jake to go through this transmutation, and his consciousness, his humanism can appear CosmoErotically in a different body.
Quatrich is killed. The ethno-humanism moment — the tragic moment of ethno-humanism — is defeated.
But only in this very, very small moment in the galaxy.
The humans all go back home, but we know that they are going to return again.
Neytiri’s ethno-Na’vi moment
We now get to Avatar 2.
How does Avatar 2 open?
It opens with ten minutes of beauty, and this happiness, and Jake says, happiness, you don’t even know what it is until it’s gone.
They’re just living this just very beautiful, ordinary life.
He’s with Neytiri.
They have children.
They unfold in their lives in this very, very beautiful way.
And let’s see what happens.
There is this scene in the very, very, very beginning. (You don’t have to have seen the movie. If you haven’t seen it, it’s totally fine.) There’s this scene in the beginning of the movie. It is a strange scene, and we don’t even quite know what it means. But it’s an ominous scene, without which you can’t understand Avatar 2. It’s like a 15 or 20-second scene at the very, very beginning.
It is about Spider. Spider is the son of Miles Quatrich, and in Avatar 2, Miles meets Spider. He is Miles’ son, who was too young to be transported back to Earth at the end of Avatar 1, so he stays on Pandora, and he’s raised by Jake and Neytiri. Jake is very close to him, and Neytiri is helping raise Spider, but she’s not quite comfortable, she’s not quite at ease with having Spider play with her kids.
Jake’s narration: And then there was Spider. He was stuck here. Too young for a cryocapsule. Orphaned by the war, he was raised by the lab guys. He wasn’t part of our family. He was like a stray cat just always around, inseparable from our kids. To Neytiri, he would always be alien. One of them.
Neytiri: He belongs with his own kind.
In this scene, we see that Spider is not quite part of a family, but he’s inseparable from Jake and Neytiri’s kids. But what she says is, he should be playing with his own kind. And Jake, who’s narrating it says, he’s alien.
Paradoxically, we see that Neytiri is now falling into this ethno-Na’vi moment — in other words, the same ethno-human moment that defines Miles Quatrich in Avatar 1. We now see this strange moment in Avatar 2, where somehow, Neytiri has regressed. She doesn’t quite get it. She doesn’t quite get it, even though — and it’s paradoxical — she’s in love with Jake. But Jake, for her, has now become a Na’vi. She has lost the memory of the knowing that she had at the end of Avatar 1.
We will see this next week — the very, very end of Avatar 1, when she sees Jake in his human form for the first time, and she says I see you, and we get that —
- she is able to see Jake,
- and see his heart,
- and see his consciousness.
Neytiri forgets that. She forgets it in Avatar 2, and when she sees Spider, she doesn’t love him, meaning she doesn’t really see him. Physically, she sees Spider, but she’s never able to look at Spider and say, I see you. She can’t forget that he’s Miles Quatrich’s son, and she wants him to be playing “with his own kind.”
It is this very paradoxical moment at the beginning of Avatar 2, that’s fundamentally missed by everyone — but it’s the most important part of the movie. Because what happens in the movie is — there’s this beginning, this subtle reaching for something more that we can’t quite get to.
When the movie begins, Miles Quatrich comes back as well. Miles Quatrich comes back in Avatar 2 as a Na’vi. He has a blue Na’vi body.
Miles Quatrich was killed at the end of Avatar 1, but then, they were able to harvest his consciousness and his memories and his lived experience, and they downloaded it into an Avatar body. In other words, the humans download Quatrich into an Avatar body, with the expressed purpose of him being returned to Pandora to fight and defeat the Na’vi.
But paradoxically — now stay close, and this is where it gets so much more subtle than what’s written about the movie — paradoxically, who becomes a Na’vi at the end of Avatar 1?
Jake!
His eyes open, in the very last second of Avatar 1. But Avatar 2 starts with his archenemy. And who’s his archenemy? Miles Quatrich, who has now recycled his consciousness in an Avatar body. Quatrich, who is an ethno-human racist in Avatar 1, all of a sudden, finds himself in an Avatar body.
And will that change him?
There is actually a subtle unfolding of Quatrich through the movie. He doesn’t get there. Quatrich is by no means a hero in this movie, but we actually begin to see some emergence. Quatrich begins to become, paradoxically, in his Na’vi body — we would say in a colloquial parlance — he becomes a little more human. By human, I don’t mean ethno-human — but actually, he begins to feel.
Clearly, Quatrich, in his old life, was wounded. Raquel wrote me a beautiful email about Avatar, where she pointed out very beautifully that clearly, Quatrich, this marine hero, who’s so brutal in the first movie, was hurt in life. He was devastated, he was wounded, he was traumatized, and he’s acting out as this kind of brutal ethno-human racist Marine.
- But somehow, something softens in Quatrich — this is very subtle — in the second Avatar.
- At the same time, something hardens in Neytiri, and Neytiri actually, in some sense, regresses to become ethno-Na’vi.
Spider is the embodiment of a new possibility
There is an incredible scene, in which Quatrich has the child — the daughter of Jake and Neytiri — and he has a knife to her throat, and he says, I’m going to kill her unless you turn yourself in. So Quatrich is not a hero in this movie — there is just a glimmering of his possibility.
But I want you to see what Neytiri does in this moment. This is after she has killed five or six people going to rescue her family — which she has every right to do, but Spider is watching her kill people, and he’s looking at it with different eyes.
The reason he’s looking at it with different eyes is because, in the course of the Avatar 2 movie, Spider is taken captive by Miles Quatrich, who is in his Avatar body and whose job is to hunt down and kill Jake Sully.
- Jake Sully is Spider’s adoptive father.
- Miles Quatrich — or at least the memories and consciousness of Miles Quatrich in this Avatar body — is actually his biological father.
Spider hates Quatrich, but Quatrich takes him captive and takes Spider with him through a whole bunch of missions. And slowly, Spider begins to see Miles Quatrich. And there is even a moment when he says to Miles Quatrich — after he has done some heroic act of teaming this mountain Banshee beast that he’s able to ride on — he says, I see you.
He watches Miles Quatrich, and he begins to see the goodness in Miles Quatrich. He begins to see his heart — and all of the sudden, there’s this possibility. By seeing him, he opens this new possibility.
At the same time, Neytiri regresses into this ethno-Na’vi moment. And when Quatrich, at this key point in the movie, grabs the daughter of Jake and Neytiri, and puts a knife to her throat and says, unless you turn yourself in, Jake, I’m going to kill her — look at what Neytiri does. Neytiri says “a son for a son.”
Quatrich: Running out of time here, Corporal. You already lost one kid today. You really want to lose another? Do not test me!
Kiri [daughter of Grace]: Just kill him, dad!
Quatrich: Weapons down! Cuff yourself.
Spider: No. No. Don’t hurt her, okay? Don’t.
Quatrich: Stay there! Don’t move. Not a step closer. Handcuffs on!
Jake: You son of a bitch.
Spider: Please, don’t hurt her.
Neytiri: Release, or I cut.
Quatrich: What, you think I care about some kid? He’s not mine. We’re not even the same species.
Spider: Please don’t, don’t hurt her. Please, let her go.
Tuktirey [Neytiri’s daughter]: Mom, don’t kill him.
Spider: Please, listen to me. Let her go. Don’t hurt her.
Tuktirey [Neytiri’s daughter]: Mom, don’t kill him.
Neytiri: A son for a son.
Spider: Please, don’t hurt her.
Neytiri: I cut!
Spider: Please, just let her go, okay? Just let her go.
Neytiri: No!
Watch this scene. It’s an incredible scene. It’s the most important scene in Avatar 2.
So what happens?
- There was Jake Sully on the one side.
- It was Miles Quatrich who grabbed Jake Sully and Neytiri’s daughter Kiri.
- You’ve got Spider, who’s Quatrich’s son, that wasn’t raised by Quatrich, because Quatrich is killed at the end of Avatar 1.
Spider has grown up as a brother to this young daughter that Quatrich is holding, so Spider risks his life, runs in and says, don’t hurt her.
He breaks.
He gets it.
Spider gets it.
Spider is the next generation.
Spider is The Universe: A Love Story.
Spider is CosmoErotic Humanism.
He gets it.
He is actually the most advanced figure in the entire movie.
He is the first one who is trying to hold the new complexity.
If you notice, Jake Sully and Neytiri’s daughter, who’s being held by Quatrich, says to her dad, kill him, meaning, she’s willing to die to save her dad, and she cannot see in Quatrich anything but evil.
Spider has a subtler nuance; he’s seeing something here.
And then what happens? Then Neytiri jumps in, grabs Spider, and says, a son for a son.
But one second… Neytiri and Jake have raised Spider, and all of a sudden, Spider becomes the enemy. Spider becomes “other.” And she at least pretends — she actually cuts Spider to draw blood — and she says, I’ll kill Spider if you kill my daughter, and we’re not quite sure whether she’ll do it or not.
But the fact that she’s willing to make the threat and the trauma of the threat — you see the trauma in Spider’s face. This is the woman who raised him as a mother, who now views him as an alien.
Then Quatrich says to Neytiri, so what do I care? I don’t care about him, we’re not even of the same species — but actually, Quatrich does care about him, even though he’s not technically his son, Quatrich has died, but Quatrich’s memories are now in his Avatar body.
And his heart opens…
And he steps back…
And he releases the daughter.
Strange scene, isn’t it?
Then, later in the movie, when there’s this archetypal battle between Jake Sully and Quatrich and in the end, Jake Sully triumphs, and Quatrich is in a ship underwater about to die, Spider is swimming through this underwater ship that’s bereft and mured and Quatrich will die in it.
Spider first goes by him, but then he goes back and he saves him.
He saves Quatrich.
He drags him, at the risk of his own life, to shore.
And then Quatrich says, come with me.
And he goes, I’m not coming with you.
On the one hand, Spider saves Quatrich, he recognizes his humanity. There is a key scene in the movie when Quatrich learns to ride his mountain Banshee, and Spider says to Quatrich, I see you. Spider crosses the boundary of species and says, save this girl, who grew up as if she were his sister, even though she’s a completely different species. He risks his life to do it.
On the other hand, Neytiri regresses into ethno-Na’vi consciousness, and Jake goes to save his family. In all of Avatar 2, Jake’s world becomes his family. Jake regresses, in a certain sense, from ethnocentric, and goes back to egocentric.
His egocentric means his people, his clan, his family — that’s what he’s all about. And Jake is willing, in Avatar 2, to endanger the Water People. Jake is of the Force, of people of Omatikaya. He’s willing to endanger the Water People in order to save his own family — so Jake loses his sense of love; he regresses and becomes egocentric.
Neytiri remains egocentric for her family and ethnocentric for the Na’vi.
And it’s actually Spider who begins to see this wider possibility.
- Spider goes to save Jake’s daughter. Spider risks his life to do it.
- But Spider also sees Quatrich and says I see you at a key scene in the movie. Spider saves Quatrich at the end of the movie.
Spider is beginning to become the embodiment of a new possibility.
There is an intergalactic Homo amor that needs to emerge
There is more to say. We’re going to do the final part of Avatar next week, but you begin to understand why this matters.
See, this is about CosmoErotic Humanism. It’s about beginning to articulate a vision of the Kosmos as a love story.
In other words, we need to articulate a vision of an intergalactic Homo amor. Homo amor is not just human. There is an intergalactic Homo amor that needs to emerge.
And one of the places that the poetry of the intergalactic Homo amor begins to emerge is in movies.
- Avatar is this interspecies love story.
- Star Trek has some key moments of interspecies love story.
- The Men In Black has some key moments of interspecies love story.
- There’s a movie called Michael. It’s a famous movie, a gorgeous movie. It was directed by Sean Daniel. John Travolta’s incredible movie. Everyone falls in love with the Angel, and the Angel falls in love with everyone, so there’s this interdimensional, interspecies love story.
The assertion that there’s this force of Eros which moves through the entire Amorous Kosmos is what we are reaching for.
We have to reach across the species’ divide and move from a Kosmocentric which is a human, global, Earth Kosmocentric — to a Kosmocentric that actually embraces the Kosmos, because there’s little question, friends, that we live in a Kosmos that’s teeming with life.
That is a much broader conversation, but at some point, that life is going to meet us, and we are going to meet that life — so we need to be Homo amor.
We need to be that consciousness of Homo amor
We need to be that consciousness that we actually invest into Reality.
We need to begin to envision ourselves — not only in a global love story, with a shared grammar of global value, but we, quite literally, need to be able to articulate and envision an intergalactic love story. A love story in which Eros is the thread that brings us together.
Avatar hasn’t yet done it, and whether any of this is in the consciousness of the writers or not is completely unclear. James Cameron, the same guy who made Terminator, shot this movie. Avatar 2 has, from a certain perspective, a lot of beautiful scenes about water and consciousness. But those are not what matters — and that’s what all the reviewers covered.
What actually matters here is…
- Is there a possible emergence?
- Is somehow Miles Quatrich softening?
- Is it because he’s in the body of the Avatar, and therefore connected to the larger Field?
Remember how we began today: Miles Quatrich is in this new body, and this body is connected to the larger Field, and something is opening inside of him, and so Miles Quatrich begins to emerge, he begins to see possibility.
You can see in his eyes: there is a new possibility.
And Neytiri, in that moment after she holds Spider and she does a son for a son, the camera pans to her face, and if you looked at it carefully, she was shocked at who she had become in that moment.
Spider is holding the vision of the future.
We need to see an emergence here.
The reason we’re stepping into these Avatar movies is because they’re going to be with us for a decade at this key moment in history, so we need to see the evolution of Spider, and we need to see the evolution of the children of Jake Sully. And we’ll talk next week about Lo’ak, who is unbelievably important in Avatar 2.
We are going to spend one more week on Avatar. I’m going to ask you, if you haven’t, try and see Avatar 1 and Avatar 2 this week — but do it not as just, I’m clearing my mind to go to the movie.
— Do it as an act of practice.
— Do it as an act of CosmoErotic Humanism.
— Do it as part of becoming Homo amor.
And we are going to weave this all together next week in the third space.
Culture reaches for the CosmoErotic love story
Everything we’ve said this week is about I love you.
It’s about perception.
It’s about seeing.
Love is to see.
Love is to say to someone, I see you.
We are going to talk about that next week when we get into the depth of Avatar.
What does it mean that love is a perception?
This Evolutionary Love Code sets the stage for next week.
Evolutionary Love Code
Evolutionary Love is not merely an emotion. It is a perception. The
Evolutionary Lover sees with God's eyes. Because Love is a perception at its
core - a perception that generates emotion - there is great hope in love.
The Universe sees and the Universe sees love.
The Universe feels and the Universe feels love.
Seeing generates feeling, and feeling generates seeing. But we must start
with perception because perception can be trained through practice.
Personal human love is a Unique Self Perception. Personal self love is a
Perception of one's own Unique Self. However, one cannot be an
evolutionary lover with these forms of perception alone. Evolutionary Love
requires a perception of the entire evolutionary process and our place
within it.
Love is a perception and the evolution of love is the evolution of our capacity to see
Can we see ourselves?
Can we see each other — beyond labels, beyond boundaries, beyond all the obfuscations, and actually see clearly?
That’s what Avatar is about. Whatever the intention was of the framers doesn’t matter. That is what’s at play.
Can Neytiri see Spider as Spider?
Can Quatrich manage, in his Avatar body, to be transposed?
Can we see each other?
Can we participate together, intergalactically, in the evolution of love?
Whether we are heading towards a world of intergalactic war, or we are heading towards a world of an intergalactic Homo amor, it depends precisely on our capacity to articulate this vision, which paradoxically is living at the edge of culture.
We are going to see one last thing at the last minute, but before we go there, I just want to give everyone, if everyone’s up for it, just a little assignment.
- Look for any movie or literature which talks about inter-being, inter-alien, interspecies love stories, whether it’s in a recent movie, a current movie, or science fiction books you read.
Let us collect this week, the beginning of this consciousness happening — not in the formal halls of philosophy, but in culture reaching for this CosmoErotic love story, in which no one’s left out, in which love is able to break the boundaries of separation, and I begin to see you uniquely.
That’s what love is.
Love is Unique Self perception.
I see you as a Na’vi.
I see you as a human.
Not as an “other” — but as your irreducible, unique expression of LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty and LoveDesire that runs through you.
Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini — We see you!
Our prayer today is going to be Baraye — but before Baraye, we’re just going to see the faces of these two beautiful men — we don’t have the faces of the girls, we haven’t been able to find them yet — who’ve been hung in Iran on Saturday.
We have to see their faces.
We have to feel… we have to feel so much in the world.
In this moment, let’s feel these gorgeous men, and know that their life is not over, that there is continuity of consciousness, that the human body or the Na’vi body that we find ourselves in, is an expression of the larger consciousness of Reality, and that there is continuity of consciousness between bodies, just like Jake moves from a human body to a Na’vi body.
These men were brave and gorgeous and courageous.
And so were the girls whose faces we’re not going to see now, who were killed, and Mahsa Amini who was killed.
Their Goodness and their Truth and their Beauty in that larger continuity of consciousness — because this love story is not over in one dimension.
It’s not just that we are extraterrestrial in possibility. We are extra-dimensional. There is more than one dimension. You cannot tell the story of The Universe: A Love Story within the framework of one terrestrial, or within the framework of one dimension.
Let us look at this minute-and-a-half clip. We can just hold the mad honor and the mad love for these men, for these people, for these girls, who gave their lives for the sake of goodness and for the sake of freedom.
Baraye! Baraye is the protest song moving through Iran at this moment, so we are going to end with Baraye.
And thank you. I just want to thank everyone who made it through and stayed on. We just have three more minutes to give each other, just the full power of who we are together, just for the last three minutes.
Baraye.
The protest song these men sung all through Iran.
And watch the faces.
And let’s just look at each other and say, I see you.
Baraye: for the sake of it all.
Oh, my God.
Thank you, everyone.
Oh my God, thank you.
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