327 Part 2 — Love is a Perception. The CosmoErotic Humanism of Avatar: I See You = I Love You
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 15, 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 Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series. See Part 1 HERE
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
Evolutionary Love Code:
THIS WEEK’S 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.See what they see
We are going to go right into this code. This is week three of our conversation about Avatar, and I am madly delighted to be with you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
If you haven’t been with us and haven’t seen the movie, Avatar is a story about Planet Earth, which is in desperate need of minerals. Those minerals live on Pandora, which is another planet in the galaxy. The key mineral is called Unobtanium (meaning it’s not obtainable, which is not by accident). And Earth, which is more powerful technologically, goes to this other planet in the galaxy to extract their minerals against their will. There is this battle between the Na’vi people who live on Pandora and the human beings coming to extract their resources.
The Na’vi people to them are much like animals are to human beings on Planet Earth today: we use animals for our own means, but we don’t view animals as being fully human, because animals aren’t — but we overreach.
- It’s not that animals are human.
- Animals are animals, and they do deserve their dignity.
- But we turn animals into objects, we cause the torture and suffering on Planet Earth today.
We work with animals in factory farms. We create enormous, enormous suffering for animals — because animals exist to serve us. This human capacity to treat animals as animals, but in a negative way — the humans then take the same capacity and apply it, this time not to animals but to other species who are equally intelligent to humans. They are not technologically advanced, but they are equally intelligent, and, in many ways, much more evolved. That’s the Na’vi people. That’s just the backdrop, just to honor anyone who just came in and hasn’t seen any of the Avatar movies. That’s the context.
Within this context, there is a scientist named Grace, and there is Miles Quaritch, the colonel. The colonel’s job is to make sure that they can get all the minerals that they need — and if he needs to massacre the Na’vi people in order to do it, then that’s what he is going to do. Think about King Leopold of Belgium — a Western democracy, but just a hundred years ago — who goes to Congo, because they need rubber and other minerals from Congo, and they massacre, destroy, and butcher people in Congo to get those minerals. That happened, tragically, time and again. This is now Planet Earth, replaying that Belgium scene of King Leopold, but King Leopold of Belgium is now the Colonel Miles Quaritch. That’s the scene.
Jake Sully begins as a drunk soldier. He has his legs destroyed in a combat mission. He winds up replacing his brother who’s died in this Avatar project. And Miles Quaritch says: You be my agent, you get to know the Na’vi people. Tell me what their weaknesses are, so when the time comes, we can take them out and destroy them so we can get our minerals. That’s the story.
Dr. Grace is the doctor who is researching the Na’vi, and she feels and knows that the Na’vi have enormous depth, and enormous culture, and enormous heart, and enormous capacity, that every Na’vi person actually participates in the Field of knowing —
- and all of the trees,
- and all of nature,
- and all of the values,
- and all of the knowledge that lives within the earth
— lives within the Na’vi, and they are exchanging it all the time. It is this Field of Gnosis, it is this Field of goodness, truth, and beauty, this Field of Value that the Na’vi participate in.
Grace knows that, so Grace says to Jake:
— Don’t listen to Miles Quaritch, see what they see.
See what they see. Meaning — learn how to see. And that’s the Evolutionary Love Code we just read:
Love is a perception.
See what they see.
See what they see.
I see you means “I love you”
All through Avatar 1, the way to say I love you is I see you — because there is this understanding that love is not merely an emotion, that love is a perception. The way that they say I love you is I see you, because they have this deep understanding, which is at the core of our Evolutionary Love Code, that love is not merely an emotion (energy in motion), love means that I can see you:
— I see your value.
— I see your unique value.
— I see your beauty.
— I see your goodness, truth, and beauty.
— I see you.
— I see you through the outside, I see who you are.
So I love you — that’s our Evolutionary Love Code — means I see you.
In one scene in Avatar 1, Norm, a scientist who works on the team, together with Grace, says to Jake:
— I see you. I see you. But it’s not just, “I’m seeing you in front of me,” it’s “I see into you. I see you.”
I see your beauty. I see your value.
In another scene, Neytiri, this beautiful Na’vi woman, the daughter of the Na’vi chieftains, sees Jake in his human body for the first time. She has only seen Jake in his Avatar body before; she has never seen his human body. The way it works — for those who haven’t seen the movie — is that the human being goes into a chamber, in which you merge your consciousness to an Avatar body, and then you are able to walk in your Avatar body, your consciousness animates the Avatar body — and so, Neytiri has never seen Jake the human.
Miles Quaritch, in the last battle at the end of Avatar 1, goes to pull the plug on the chamber that Jake is in, so that he can kill him. Because he is in his Avatar body, he’ll be thrown out of his chamber (where he’s breathing), and he’ll suffocate, because he cannot access air. Human beings cannot breathe the air of Pandora, so a human being needs to be in an Avatar body to breathe on Pandora, he needs to be wearing a certain kind of mask.
Jake is thrown out of his chamber, Neytiri saves him, and literally sees him for the first time — but not just literally, she actually sees Jake in his human body, and what she says is I see you.
What she means by I see you is:
— I don’t need your Avatar body and your human body.
— I see your essence.
— I see your Unique Self.
— I see your soul.
— I see your beauty, I see your goodness, I see your truth.
— I see you.
That’s the second I see you scene.
The third I see you scene from Avatar 1 is when the human beings are about to attack and try to destroy the Na’vi people. Jake arrives, riding on this mountain dragon beast called Toruk Makto, which only the great warriors of Na’vi are able to ride. Jake is able to find Toruk Makto, this bird in the sky and ride Toruk Makto into the Na’vi camp. Because he is riding Tokuk Makto, they have confidence that he is actually with them — and Neytiri is blown away. She thought that Jake had betrayed her people. She now realizes that she didn’t see him — and before he’s about to give this major speech as a leader to her tribe, Neytiri says to Jake, I see you, and Jake says to Neytiri, I see you. It means I love you. But I love you not just as a feeling —
— I see you.
— I see who you are.
— I see who you truly are.
This carries through Avatar 2, and it’s crazy beautiful.
When the enemy is no longer the enemy: Spider sees Miles Quaritch
Spider, in Avatar 2, is the son of Miles Quaritch, the colonel who has been killed in Avatar 1.
Spider, his son, was a little baby when Miles was killed. Most of the people from Earth were sent off of Pandora, back to Earth, but Spider was too young, too fragile to make the trip, so he stayed on Pandora, and he has been raised essentially as one of Jack and Neytiri’s children.
He is completely loyal to the Na’vi.
He gets the Na’vi ways.
At the same time, his biological father is Miles Quaritch, the colonel.
Miles Quaritch’s memories have been downloaded into an Avatar body after he was killed, and we open up Avatar 2 realizing that Miles Quaritch is now in an Avatar body. You get how paradoxical that is — because the Avatar bodies are Na’vi bodies that can breathe Pandoran air. But of course, Miles Quaritch thinks that the Na’vi are sub-human — and all of a sudden, he is in an Avatar body. What that means and how that affects Miles Quaritch — we’ll talk about it next week.
But for now, Spider, Miles Quaritch’s son, is confronted with this Miles Quaritch in an Avatar body, who still is a bad man. And yet, there begins to be something of a relationship between them. The team of Miles Qualtrich in their Avatar bodies take Spider captive at a certain point. But Miles Quaritch in his Avatar body is not really Miles Quaritch, it’s his memories downloaded in the Avatar body. Something opens in his heart, and he takes Spider with him on their mission.
Spider doesn’t help them, he hates them. But even though they are enemies, he begins to get to know Miles Quaritch in his Avatar body, and he begins to see his bravery. He begins to see something beautiful in him.
There is a particular moment in Avatar 2 (and there’s a scene like this in Avatar 1 as well, when Jake gets his Ikran). Ikran is the mountain beast, the mountain animal that you learn to ride, like riding a wild horse in a Western rodeo. On Pandora, you have to get your Ikran, your mountain bird, and it’s very hard to do. And then, in Avatar 2, Spider explains to Miles Quaritch in the Avatar body this process of getting your Ikran, and then he watches Miles Quaritch in his Avatar body very courageously tame his Ikran and create this bond with this mountain bird beast, and there’s this moment in which Spider says to Miles Quaritch in the Avatar body, I see you — meaning, for a moment, he is not the enemy.
There is a moment when the enemy is no longer the enemy, and I can actually see you for a second.
It is very deep, it is very profound.
Sam Kean wrote a book called The Faces of the Enemy, and he pointed out that in all propaganda posters, the face of the enemy is blanked out. You actually don’t see the face. He did an entire book, maybe 25 years ago, called The Faces of the Enemy (it must be on Amazon), which is about the notion that you never see the enemy. The enemy doesn’t have a face.
So, here is this moment for Spider, who is totally loyal to the Na’vi, he’s been raised by Jake and Neytiri — but nonetheless, for a moment, Miles Quaritch in the Avatar body stops being the enemy, and Spider says, I see you, and he teaches him how to say I see you in the Na’vi language.
Lo’ak, the renegade son: seeing through the otherness
In another scene, we see Lo’ak, Jake and Neytiri’s second son.
The first son, the oldest son of Jake and Neytiri, he’s the model son, the apple of his father’s eye. But Jake doesn’t really understand Lo’ak. Lo’ak is the renegade, and Jake, his father, is always disappointed with him — and Lo’ak feels like his father doesn’t understand him and doesn’t see him, meaning he doesn’t love him.
There is a moment at the end of the movie when Lo’ak saves Jake.
Lo’ak is the one who’s able to make friends with the Tulkun. The Tulkun are great sea beasts, but these great sea beasts are not beasts, they are actually more evolved than the humans. They do complex mathematics and philosophy and music, and they have great love stories that are far more advanced and far more evolved than humans. Lo’ak, Jake’s son, can actually see the Tulkun, and he understands who they are.
There is particularly one Tulkun that the other Tulkuns don’t understand — and Jake actually sees this ostracized Tulkun, and makes friends with this ostracized Tulkun. There is this love story, essentially, between Lo’ak, Jake and Neytiri’s son, and this ostracized, banished, exiled Tulkun — and out of the love between Lo’ak and this Tulkun, this Tulkun aids Jake and Neytiri at a critical moment in their battle against the humans, that actually turns the tide of the battle.
In essence, what Lo’ak is saying to this Tulkun, this sea whale that has been thrown out by the other sea whales that misunderstand this particular Tulkun, he’s saying, I see you. And at the end of the movie, when Lo’ak saves his father Jake and rescues him, all of a sudden, Jake gets who his son is. And he turns to his son and he says, I see you.
And finally, the very last scene: Tsireya, this young girl who says to Lo’ak, again, I see you.
Tsireya is the daughter of Tonowari and Ronal, the head of the Water People, they are called the Metkayina (and Neytiri’s tribe, the Na’vi, are the Omatikaya, the Forest People).
When Jake and Neytiri want to escape the humans who are hunting them, they go to ask for shelter, for refuge with the Water People, the Metkayina. And the daughter of the Metkayina, this beautiful, beautiful girl, Tsireya, she sees Lo’ak — even though the Water People and the Forest People are different, and there is great clash between the sons. Ao’nung, the son of Tonowari and Ronal, almost has Lo’ak killed because of the competition — because he can’t see him.
But Tsireya — Tsireya can actually see him. Tsireya sees him, and says, I get who you are, I see you. She is able to see through the fact that he’s from the Forest People, and see his heart.
So, I see you always means, I love you.
I see you means I love you.
The Kosmos: A Love Story
We are just going to talk just about what this means, I love you, I see you, because we are at this moment in which we are about to step into an intergalactic world.
We are going to step beyond the human world, and into an intergalactic world.
Fifty years ago, when we first started getting sightings of extraterrestrials, we thought that they might be real, and there was a real conversation in culture. And then the culture stopped the conversation, it was too dangerous to the materialist paradigm of science. The notion that there were other tribes, other peoples, life all through the galaxy, became a crazy idea. When I was growing up, if you talked about UFOs, you were crazy. That was a fringe phenomenon.
But in all of the great traditions, there was always a knowing of a broader sense of life all through the galaxy. In the lineage that I grew up in, it was a given that there were interactions between the galaxies. There is a text in the Book of Genesis which talks about love making between the daughters of men and the sons of gods who fell to the earth, and there are many other sources.
I mentioned last week that my friend Sean Esbjörn-Hargens has done work on this from his perspective, in the beautiful work he’s doing about the Exo, the Exo world, and I grew up in the lineages that talked about the intergalactic love story. Together with my beautiful partner, Zak Stein, we are talking about Homo amor as an expression — not of a universal love story, it’s not just The Universe: A Love Story — it’s the Kosmos: A Love Story, which is why we call the New Story of Value CosmoErotic Humanism. CosmoErotic — it is an intergalactic love story.
This is critical.
We have two choices before us. As we expand into the new world —
- either there is going to be intergalactic war (think about Star Wars, which is science fiction portraying intergalactic war),
- or we are going to realize that the force of Eros actually animates all of Kosmos, and that we can see each other. We can live in a world that’s filled with life.
In the last five years, the realization that the world is filled with life has entered mainstream culture. The New York Times has run a dozen stories. Mainstream presses all over the world are running stories about the genuine reality or genuine possibility of their being a world, not just this world, but galaxies teeming with life.
That’s the best explanation we have for the data, and the amount of data is unbelievable, it’s undeniable, and it’s entered the mainstream — if you follow these kinds of things. In the last five years, there has been a major shift, so we are preparing for a galactic world.
The galaxy is a love story, and if you think that’s ridiculous, that means you are not following the data. That means you are lost in superstition. The empirical data very clearly points in that direction.
Cleansing the doors of perception
We need to create a world in which human beings model not ethno-humanist racism, not humanity as ethnocentric — we need to see beyond ethnocentric, we need to be able to see each other. Jake and Neytiri can look at each other in this intergalactic love story — and it is all about intergalactic love stories.
- Take a look at the movie called Starman with Jeff Bridges, 1984. It’s an intergalactic love story.
- Take a look at the movie called Michael, produced by Sean Daniels. It’s a beautiful movie. It’s an intergalactic love story.
- There is a key Star Trek movie, which is the story of Spock and Kirk when they’re young, and how they meet and how their children meet. If you read the story carefully, it tells the story of Spock’s father who marries a human — and it’s an intergalactic love story.
And last week, we asked everyone, if you can, take a look at all the literature and send us examples that you found of an intergalactic love story.
To be kosmocentric means, on the one hand, that human beings turn to the animal world and say:
— Oh, there is love between humans and animals.
It doesn’t mean that humans and animals are the same.
It doesn’t mean humans aren’t more evolved than animals. They are.
And yet, take a look at the movie My Octopus Teacher, which is about how human beings and animals can love each other in a very particular way. We don’t marry each other. It’s not about sexuality — but it’s about love between those two worlds.
But, on the other hand, human beings and other species, human beings and Pandorans — wow, they do make love. And the Jeff Bridges story, Starman, where Jeff Bridges is an ‘alien’ who comes to earth in this beautiful love story, there is this beautiful lovemaking scene on a train, which births their son who will become a teacher.
We need to begin to think about this intergalactic love story — and to do that, we need to be able to say to each other, I see you, I love you, I see you.
We’re in the revolution now. We are in the revolution.
Let us just understand: what does this mean, I love you, I see you?
Let us think about it deeply together. What does it mean to love?
Let us feel deeply.
To love is to see through God’s eyes — that’s what it means to love. And to love God is to allow God — or Source, or Infinity — to see through your eyes.
To love God is to allow God to see with your eyes, to uniquely see what can be seen from your perspective, with your unique depth and your unique qualities. From that place, you say, I see you. That’s what it means to love God.
Self-love is to see yourself, to know your own nature, to see your own Unique Self — and self-love is enlightenment.
The nature of the universe is that it evolves. Life forms differentiate from earlier life forms, and evolve in ever-increasing order of complexity and consciousness. We know that complexity and consciousness are intimately related, they are the inside and the outside of the same evolutionary unfolding. The more complex the physical organism, the more evolved are the inner capacities of consciousness of that same being:
- A rabbit is more materially complex and more conscious than a snail.
- A human being is more materially complex and conscious than a dog.
Each original form provides the original being with the unique experience of itself. Let me say that again:
Each original form provides the original being, God/Source, with a new unique experience of itself, because each original form can see in a new way.
An amoeba serves the Divine with a particular experience of Itself, a butterfly with another, a fish with yet another. A bird and a horse provide yet another experience through which the Divine sees or experiences Itself.
But the human being is a quantum leap forward in consciousness. The human being, a complete human being, is a place in which the universe wakes up in this new way, because when the human being loves, the human being is seeing consciously, in a new way, through God’s eyes.
That’s what it means to love.
To be a lover is to see through God’s eyes — and when you see through God’s eyes, then God can see through you. Wow!
This requires you to shift perspective from that of your separate-self ego, to your infinitely expansive Unique Self. To love God is to let God see through your eyes. The truth of love is that you can only love God or another human being through your eyes, your Unique Self, which are the eyes of God.
It’s this realization that you have a unique perspective, a unique way of seeing, a unique I see you, that obligates you to cleanse your doors of perception and let God see through your eyes — because only you can open that particular love in the world.
You see with and as the eyes of God —
- only if you clarify the pettiness of your small self,
- and you uncoil the self-contraction of the ego
— it’s only thus that God can see through the prism of your unique eyes.
That’s why we are obligated, responsible, and it’s our great wild joy to clarify our doors of perception — because any lack of wholeness on our part, any blindness on our part, any blurring in your unique perspective and perception, obstructs the vision of God.
If you cannot see clearly, you literally blind God, so your job, my job is to become Unique Self, a clarified Unique Self.
Our job is to make ourselves so transparent to the Divine, so open to the LoveIntelligence that sees through us, that God can see with our eyes.
This is our gift to God.
To be loved by a human being is to have your true nature seen
Last step, my friends. This is the revolution. We’re laying it down together, friends, heart open.
Love, at its core, is not an emotion. Love, at its core, is to say — and we’re going to see the song in a second — I can see clearly now.
Love, at its core, is not an emotion, love is a perception.
Love is the ultimate verb.
Love is not a noun.
Love is a faculty of perception that allows you to see the inner nature of All-That-Is.
To love another human being is to see their true nature. To love is to perceive, to see the infinite specialness and divine beauty of the Beloved — whether they’re from the Na’vi people, whether it’s the Starman of Jeff Bridges, whether it’s any other intergalactic love story.
We need to lay the ground of the intergalactic love story that’s coming.
To be a lover is to see beyond the limited and distorted vision of your separate self contraction, or of your human contraction (Miles Quaritch, the colonel, in Avatar 1, has a human contraction, he can’t see).
To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes.
When we say God is infinity — infinity is all the galaxies. That’s why the great religions understood that the galaxy is teeming with life — because the galaxy has infinite divinity. It is the infinity of divine intimacy, so how could it not be teeming with life?
To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes. Your beloved is both your lover and All-That-Is, and to be loved by another human being is to have your true nature seen, and your true nature is your Unique Self — whether you are Neytiri, or you are Spider, or you are Jake, or you are Lo’ak, or you’re Ao’nung, or you’re Tonowari, or you’re Ronal, or you’re Selfridge, or you’re Miles Quaritch.
To be loved by a human being is: your Unique Self is seen.
To love God is to let God see with your eyes
Let’s go one last step, my friends.
- To love God is to let God see through your eyes.
- To love God is to empower God with the vision of your unique perspective.
We live out of a passion for the Divine, and the Divine says, let me see through your eyes.
Remember, Grace says to Jake:
— See what they see.
Infinity says,
— There’s a way where I can see through you, let me see through your eyes.
We are called to see with God’s eyes, and God says, I want to see through your eyes.
We want to act with God’s eyes, to react with God’s eyes.
To write your book of life with God’s eyes, as God would see from your perspective.
And if you are successful in your life, success is not win-lose metrics, it’s not rivalrous conflict —
Success means that your perspective becomes available to God. Your perspective, your seeing finds God and feeds God.
It gives God strength and joy. And you must consider, my friends — we must consider together — that being in devotion is nothing but actually being God from a distinct perspective. Oh, my God!
There is no true individuality which is independent from the context of union. Mature individuality — to be a Unique Self — is not about being separate. Unique is not separate.
To be a Unique Self is about having a distinct way of seeing in the context of union with the Divine.
And to be responsible for this perspective, for the seeing, is to declare the truth from this vantage point, but without making it the only perspective.
I declare the truth from my point of seeing, but I don’t make it the only point of seeing.
I am not attached to my point of seeing.
I know the truth of my point of seeing, but I can actually take your perspective, and I can feel you and you can feel me — and then we move beyond polarization.
That’s what it means to be a lover. To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes. To love God is to let God see with your eyes.
That’s it, my friends. To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes, and to love God is to let God see through your eyes. This is what we’re doing. This Dharma is the revolution. I can see clearly now.
Let’s go on to a prayer now, and we’re going to do a unique prayer this week. This is our code today:
— 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.
That means that to come awake is to say, I can see clearly now — so the prayer we’re going to do this week is the song, I can see clearly now. That’s our song — and as we play the song, I’m going to ask, if we can, that we pray together.
And we pray —
- for the ability to to see each other,
- to see ourselves,
- for humanity to actually embody Homo amor: kosmocentric love that would begin to set the tone for a memory of the future which is an intergalactic love story, where we look at every species, and we look at each other — between nations, between every human being, no one is a stranger, no one on Planet Earth is a stranger, and no one in the galaxy is a stranger.
We begin to articulate CosmoErotic Humanism: an intergalactic love story.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series. See Part 1 HERE
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.
Evolutionary Spirituality | One Mountain Many Paths
