328 — Standing for Value: Avatar as an Intergalactic Love Story Pointing Towards Homo Amor Consciousness

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 22, 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 Week’s Episode is the 4th week of series of Episodes studying the movie Avatar and Avatar 2 as texts of culture. Links to other episodes here: Episode 325, Episode 326, Episode 327 Part 1, Episode 327 Part 2

Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.

Painting caption: Elena Maslova-Levin. Like as the waves (Sonnet 60).

Symphony of the revolution

Our symphony, friends, is the symphony of the revolution.

The revolution is about articulating the New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. We’ve done some great work this week on a brief explanation of the precise mission, the revolutionary mission of One Mountain Many Paths, so you can just read it and re-engage that energy. Because this is the energy of revolution.

Complete mad welcome, everyone. It’s so insanely great to be here!

This is our fourth week of reading the texts of culture, and particularly, we are reading the text of Avatar, and we’ve done three deep dive readings. Today is our last week, and you don’t have to have come to all the other weeks. I am going to recapitulate a little bit along the way, and we’re going to step in. And we want to love this open, we want to blow this open — but not for entertainment, although being in the depth of study together of goodness, truth, and beauty is wildly beautiful entertainment.

• We are not here to do wisdo-tainment.
• We are not here to accumulate likes, we’re not here to be in win-lose metrics on social media.
• We are here to be at the very heart of the revolution.

We are going on a wild ride, but a wild revolutionary ride. Our intention is to evolve the source code itself, and to actually move something in the very axis of Reality, to begin to shift our self-understanding.

We have done this very deep and beautiful and gorgeous dive together, and unpacked Avatar on so many levels in the last three weeks.

In this last week, I want to look at a couple of other ways to talk about the story. I want to particularly look at one way some theorists have approached this — not the public theorists in the public space, but more sophisticated theorists. It is in part right — and I want to share this partial truth, but then I want to go back to what we’ve said the last three weeks, and show a much deeper field at play here.

Love is a perception

Our code is the same as last week:

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.

Love is a perception. We spent last week on the theme of I love you, I see you — that’s what this code is about. Avatar talks about I see you — but I see you means not that I have merely an emotion (energy-in-motion) because I got hit by Cupid’s arrow. Oops, it hit the secretary, sorry.
No, it’s not just an emotion.
It is not just the social construct of an emotion.
Love is the feeling tone of Kosmos itself, as Kosmos sees, Kosmos perceives —

• it perceives new possibility,
• it perceives new potentiality, and
• it births new potentiality.

That’s what Eros is. Love is Eros, and Eros is the movement of Kosmos that sees the possibility of what can be born.

When I love you, I see you as you are, but I also see who you are yearning to be.

When I love you, I love you not just for the person you are, but for the person that’s longing to be born in you. Wow!

To love is to see. Love is a perception.

The need to stand for value is an essential human need

We are going to look at a clip.

This is a clip of Jake, and Jake is the hero of both Avatar 1 and Avatar 2. I am going to do a couple of little recapitulations to welcome people that are new, so that if you haven’t been here for the last three weeks, and you haven’t even seen the movie, you can still follow.

Jake is an injured Marine, whose legs have been blown out. His legs could be fixed, his spinal cord could be fixed, but he doesn’t have enough money to do it.

That’s an image of a broken system, in which only those with sufficient funds can get healed, which is where the world might be going. (That’s actually where the United States already is, with its broken system, in which you have 50 million people who are uninsured, and what does that even mean? That’s one of the places where the United States is far behind the social democracies of Europe.)

This is a story in which Jake is an injured Marine. He was a Marine because he wanted to test himself and to transform himself, and he wanted to stand for the good. He doesn’t know how to fix his legs. There is a particular scene in which we see Jake, and it’s a key scene. This is one of the scenes that was cut out from the Avatar movie.

Jake’s brother was in the Avatar program. The Avatar Program is a program run by Dr. Augustine Grace (played by Sigourney Weaver in the movie), which aligns human DNA to the Na’vi people on the Pandora planet, and allows a human being to enter into a Na’vi body and to function in that body. That’s the Avatar story.

Jake, in the end, becomes a Na’vi person — but let’s see Jake at the very beginning in one of the scenes that was cut from Avatar.

[Avatar 1: Movie Clip]

Wow. That’s one of the cut scenes from Avatar.

Let me just say, as a side point: how does the hero, Jake Sully, handle the impossibility of life? He laughs. You caught him at the end? You just lost a customer. These two guys come in, he says, you’re ruining my good mood. He is being ironic and funny, because laughter allows me to hold the impossibility and the paradox of Reality.

Reality is about live, love, and laugh, and laughter is one of the highest faculties of human perception.

We’ve talked about that before, and we’ll have to do an entire One Mountain on laughter, and what laughter tells me, and why laughter is a faculty of perception. But just notice that even in that scene, his ability to hold an impossible Reality and find this moment of liberation in that impossibility comes from laughter.

Now, it gets even more beautiful, it gets crazy beautiful now.

What does Jake say, what does Jake want?

You see him on Planet Earth.

You see the injustice.

He can’t get medical care. His spine can actually be rebuilt, but it’s only available to the wealthy, which is a kind of caste system on planet Earth — one of the potential catastrophic risks that could lead to the death of our humanity, in which augmentation, certain kinds of surgery, genetic modification are only available to a very elite upper class, so you have a 1%, which, for the first time in history, is actually smarter, more beautiful, more aesthetically and cognitively developed than the other 99%, because they are the only people who can afford those levels of augmentation. This Jake moment is just pointing, it is hinting at that possibility. That’s another side point.

But our primary point is, what is Jake looking for here? He says, all I’ve ever wanted in life is something worth fighting for. What he means is, I want to take a stand for value. And what he does is, he finds, in this bar, this battle for justice — and in that battle for justice, he’s enlivened. It’s beautiful.

The need to stand for value is an essential human need.

When there is an obvious enemy — when someone is obviously in violation of value, then, in some sense, it’s easier.

There’s a famous movie with Robert Redford, many years back, called Three Days of the Condor, in which the CIA is shown to be corrupt, and the head of Redford’s division in the CIA turns out to be the person responsible for massacring the whole division. At the very end of the movie, Redford figures out what’s going on and has a gun trained on his former hero who is the chief of the CIA. And he says sarcastically, furiously:

“You probably long for the war, don’t you?”

He says:

“Yeah, I do, but not for the reason you think.”

“Well, why do you long for the war?” says Redford. He’s just completely disgusted with him.

And he says, “for the clarity.”

For the clarity, because in the war — he was talking about World War Two in that context — we knew who the enemy was. Hitler was the enemy, Mussolini was the enemy. When we don’t know who the enemy is, and we don’t have a sense of our own identity, then what we do is we create an enemy.

We manufacture the face of the enemy.

We place someone else on the outside, to give ourselves the illusion of being on the inside.

Evolution of value is evolution of love

The evolution of value is when we get to a place when no one is on the outside, everyone is in the circle.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who need to be challenged, it doesn’t mean that individual people can’t fall out of the circle. They can, and Hitler fell out of the circle, and Mussolini fell out of the circle, and Pol Pot fell out of the circle, and Mao fell out of the circle, and the list goes on.

However, there is no class of people who fall out of the circle.

• We don’t designate a class of people as the enemy and say that this whole group of people is out of the circle in order to give ourselves the illusion that we are in the circle.
• We don’t create an out-group in order to give ourselves the illusion that we are in the in-group.

The evolution of value is the evolution of love. Does everyone get that? It’s very beautiful.

The evolution of value is the evolution of love itself, in which everyone has a seat at the table. Every group has its own unique intimacy, and every group participates in a shared Field of Value, and yet has a unique expression of that value.

There are three huge developmental stages, three stages of evolutionary unfolding, which might be called traditional (or premodern), modern, and postmodern. This distinction exists across probably sixty or seventy different theorists writing in the last 20 to 30 years. These are three levels that exist both within a human being and in history.

Premodern value: value is real, but whose value?

The premodern (traditional) started about 500–700 years BC with the birth of the Axial religions, somewhere around the time of Jeremiah and Confucius, a couple hundred years before Buddha and lasted, let’s say, till the Renaissance. Basically, the great religions rule in the world, and the great religions are aligned with the different kingdoms all over the world, whether that’s China or Europe.

Now, this premodern world is a world of value. The assumption of all of the premodern traditions is that value is real. The assumption of all the premodern traditions is that value is real, but what they argue about is whose value is real. The traditional period is driven by a rivalrous conflict between different value systems. Everyone says:

• My value is real — and yours isn’t. In order to bring you to Heaven, not only can I massacre you, says the Christian Church, I’m obligated to massacre you.

Wow, that’s intense! It is a rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics — not between individuals, but between value systems.

The good news is, everyone agrees value is real.

The good news is that there are some shared deep values that people share, like love.

However, everyone limits their value to their in-group. We love our in-group, we don’t love the out-group. As a matter of fact, the way we love the out-group is by killing them, because they are rejecting the values of our in-group, and we only agree not to kill them if they surrender or convert to our in-group.

That’s premodern value.

But value is real, and that’s important.

That’s beautiful — and limited, because this realization that love is real is mediated through a prism, and that prism is premodern traditional. Great cruelties are inflicted. Even within a particular system, let’s say within a particular religion or kingdom, there’s also the in-group and the out-group, there is a series of nested in-groups and out-groups. That’s why when Voltaire begins modernity, Voltaire’s clarion call is: Remember the cruelties!

Modern value: the source of value is no longer clear, but value evolves nonetheless

Modernity comes along and modernity says: whoa, whoa, whoa!

All the stuff that value is real that you guys were saying — that was dependent on you guys saying that God spoke to you, or that reason led to your particular set of conclusions. That’s not true. So, modernity says, okay, let’s forget about all these sources of value in God, or in some objective Field of Value. Modernity actually says, human beings are making up value. But let’s assume some values, we have to all agree on them, and we will call them real, even though they’re no longer rooted in an objective source.

• It is really not anymore about being part of a big system, a big religion or a big kingdom.
• It begins to be more about being an individual, and the word itself comes into the dictionary for the first time in the Renaissance. It’s the birth of individuality.

It has older antecedents in the biblical texts, but now it is the center of gravity: the value is the individual, and although there is a group of shared values that people share in different parts of the world, yet the source of value is no longer clear.

What modernity does is, modernity borrows its social capital from premodernity, assumes value is real, but doesn’t really prove it, but act it — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And it also evolves value. Even though it doesn’t really know what the source is, value evolves nonetheless — because modernity realizes the premodern religions got it wrong, what unites us is far greater than that which divides us.

• In comes modernity, and all of a sudden, slavery is abolished.
• In comes modernity, and all of a sudden, there are universal human rights.
• In comes modernity, and all of a sudden, there’s the emergence of the feminine.

It’s a very big deal.

Postmodern value: value is deconstructed, but all of the excluded are included

And then along comes postmodernity, and postmodernity says: Oh, wow, modernity!

Modernity doesn’t have any real source for value, they made it up. All value is deconstructed, all value is subjective.

On the one hand, that’s what postmodernity does.

On the other hand, postmodernity itself, just like modernity did, evolves value and says: Wow, when you said everyone was equal in modernity, you meant “men who owned land in England.” But gay people, LGBT, women didn’t really have the right to vote, Blacks in America, racism. In other words, there were all sorts of excluded fringe populations, like people with sexuality that was alternative to yours. There were all sorts of hidden covert racisms, sexism, homophobism.

All of the excluded people need to be included and need to be given full rights — that’s the evolution of value in postmodernity,

even though postmodernity itself, like modernity, doesn’t actually believe that value has an objective source.

That’s the contradiction in both modernity and postmodernity.

Postmodernity against modernity

Now, let’s take a look at something.

What happens is, whenever a new structure of consciousness comes onboard, it attacks the previous structure of consciousness: postmodernity attacks modernity, just like modernity attacks premodernity.

• Modernity says, religions, get rid of them. It doesn’t realize we need to include and transcend that which was good in the religions. It says, just get rid of the religion. It becomes very anti-religious, anti-premodernity, anti-traditional.
• And then postmodernity becomes anti-modern. Just like modernity didn’t see any good in the religions, it threw out the baby with the bathwater, so postmodernity becomes anti-modernity and doesn’t see any good in modernity.

Let me try and say this in a different way.

You might say that premodernity is ethnocentric, and modernity and postmodernity are worldcentric, meaning every human being is included.

But when postmodernity says that every human being is included, it does it in an ethnocentric way. The worldcentric move of postmodernity is: everyone is included, all human beings — but when postmodernity does that, it does it by attacking modernity in a way that doesn’t see the enormous goods of modernity. And that’s — as we’re going to see in a second — is something that Avatar actually does.

But I want to give you another example (that a colleague of mine pointed towards in one of his programs). It’s a great example. We are going to take a look at this book on skin (Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race, by Megan Madison and Jessica Ralli). This is a classical postmodern book, and I’m just going to read you four or five quotes from this book. This is a postmodern book that’s around today, and it’s about skin. And it says:

“Just by looking at someone, we can’t tell who they are on the inside. But sometimes, people try to anyway.”

“Skin color can’t tell you much about what people are like, what they know, what foods they think are yummy, what their favorite books are, or even where they were born.”

So far, that’s pretty good. Right, everybody? That’s pretty good. This is a worldcentric truth, this is postmodern value. It begins to be there in modernity, but it’s not fully there yet, because modernity still has lots of racism, there’s still slavery in some parts of the world, there certainly aren’t any civil rights acts all over the world, until very close to postmodernity. This is really a postmodern text here, and it’s beautiful. It’s telling us a great, beautiful, worldcentric truth.

But now let’s go to the next quote:

“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color, and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserved more than anybody else. When people believe this untrue story about race, that’s called racism. Racism is also things people do and the unfair rules they make about race so that white people get more power and are treated better than everybody else. Racism happens in lots of big and small ways, it’s all around us, even if we don’t always notice it.”

This text was sent to a colleague of mine that I haven’t talked to in about a decade, he shared it, and it’s a good sharing. It points to this great weakness.

What happens? This is a worldcentric truth. The first two quotes we saw were absolutely true. Judge people, said Martin Luther King, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That’s beautiful, that’s gorgeous.

But then what does it do? It then cloaks its worldcentric truth — and turns it into an ethnocentric attack. And what does it say? The bad white people created racism.

Of course, that’s utterly and completely not true historically. There’s not even a word of truth in that. Whoever created the notion of race, the phenomenology of racism was a given. Racism, or various forms of caste systems, existed all over Africa, all over Asia. As Paul Bloom writes in his book Just Babies: the Origins of Good and Evil, “[f]or most of human history, nobody saw anything wrong with racism.” It wasn’t formed by white people, in any sense, shape, or form — that’s actually a blatant lie. That’s tragic, and we’ve got to really understand this. What are we doing now? We’re now being racist against white people.

Do you get what just happened? We just expressed a worldcentric truth, and that worldcentric truth just went ethnocentric, and turned white people into bad, and said that white people created racism, which of course doesn’t even have a drop of truth.

Not only does it not have a drop of truth, but if you get the move of history, where did modernity take hold in the world? Modernity took hold in the world, in its center of gravity, in Western Europe. In Western Europe, groups of white people began to express modern ideas. They articulated the idea of universal human rights, which would eventually become the antidote to racism. Modernity was an interior transformation in the world of ideas, which for the first time in human history ended slavery — within a century after modernity took hold in Western Europe (in the mid-eighteenth century). Slavery was outlawed for the first time all over the world, and the feminine emerged all over the world, and new scientific forms emerged all over the world. That’s critically important.

On the one hand, postmodernity is pointing, importantly, to latent forms of blatant, horrific, terrible, unconscionable racism that still exists. That’s postmodernity’s great gift. And yet, it turns and blames the white people for them, when in fact, that’s not true.

Now, did white people participate in the racism that existed all through history? Of course they did. And was there colonialism that was horrific? Of course it was.

But that wasn’t an expression of white people. That was an expression of premodern traditional consciousness that exists all over the world. It wasn’t a white issue. Does everyone get that? It’s very deep. It’s very deep, and it’s really important to understand.

We need to realize that everyone’s got a seat at the table

Avatar 1 makes the same mistake. Not Avatar 2, but Avatar 1 makes this mistake. I pointed this out two weeks ago, where I said that Avatar doesn’t bring together the vision of the Na’vi people and the vision of the Earth.

The Na’vi People are clearly the colored people. They’re blue — but they’re the colored people. They represent indigenous tribes, they represent other races who are not white. They are the heroes, and in Avatar 1, the white people, bar a couple of notable exceptions, but the white people as a civilization are the bad people. That’s the setup of Avatar 1, and so my colleague basically viewed Avatar, both Avatars, as being an expression, in part, of the same phenomenon as the book about skin, in which all of premodernity, the blue people, the indigenous is praised, and modernity is not integrated.

Now, that’s true, and we said that two weeks ago, that’s true. But it’s limited. But it’s an important point to make, and I want to honor that point. Not Avatar 2, but Avatar 1 does suffer from this, at least a fragrance of this postmodern critique of modernity, which fails to integrate the values of modernity. That’s a critically important point.

Okay, now let’s go to the next step. Let’s go even deeper. We are going to go crazy deep now, it gets crazy exciting! We’re ready to go? Let’s go to the next step.

Really, at the core, that’s not actually what Avatar 1 and Avatar 2 are about. It has that moment, and we should point that moment out, but actually, Avatar 1 and Avatar 2 are about something else in their core, and Avatar 2 is in many ways a better movie than Avatar 1.

And by the way, these movies are important. Avatar 1 was the all-time box office highest economic performer in world history, so these are not side texts of culture. And Avatar 2 is right now ranking, I think, number six or seven, or something like that, in terms of all films in history. That’s a big deal! These are not side issues, these are at the very core of culture.

When we point out that Avatar 1 suffers from the same issue as the Skin book, and that it dismisses modernity, and doesn’t integrate the technologies of modernity and the goods of modernity with the insights of a multicultural postmodernity, the failure to do that integration is at the heart of the cultural wars.

That’s at the heart of the cultural wars, and we need to get over that.

We need to realize that everyone’s got a seat at the table.

We need modernity — and modernity has enormous goods and enormous dignities — and we need postmodernity.

We need to integrate the best of both, and not the weaknesses of both.

We need to articulate an intergalactic consciousness of Homo amor

Let’s take this deeper look at Avatar, at what is really going on in Avatar.

Avatar is not really about a worldcentric versus ethnocentric clash, it’s about something else. It’s about the emergence of a new structure of consciousness.

Now let’s dive in, everybody. Let’s dive in.

And what is this new structure of consciousness?

It’s what we call Homo amor, and Homo amor is a kosmic love story.

• It’s not about worldcentric.
• It’s about this notion of kosmocentric, and kosmocentric, or what we call Homo amor, is about an intergalactic love story.

Every race said, you can only love people of your own race, and if you marry out of your own race, there’s something fundamentally in violation. That’s ethnocentric, traditional.

Modernity says, in the Avatar version of it, as expressed by Miles Quaritch, the colonel, you can only marry, you can only love within your people. And if you love outside of your people, says Miles Quaritch, you’re getting some tail. It’s like you’re doing a physical pornographic act, because there can’t be any love there. Miles Quaritch says to Jake, you got some local tail and you started playing for the wrong side, in Avatar 1. Or he says to Jake, how does it feel like to betray your own people?

What we talked about last week is that in Avatar 1 and Avatar 2, but especially Avatar 1, there’s an ethno-humanism. There’s an ethno-worldcentric position, in which I’m ethno-human. I am a racist, but I’m a racist in the sense that I am for the human race, and all other races don’t actually play a role, all other races are in some sense sub-human.

They are, as Miles Quaritch called them, aboriginal hordes. They are hostiles, they are primitives, and we are going to blow a crater in their racial memory, a hole in their racial memory, says Miles Quaritch, that will force them off their planet, so we can take Pandora and use Pandora for the sake of humans.

Or we are going to hunt the Tulkun, in Avatar 2, the whale-like species who are far more advanced than humans. But since the Tulkun have this Amrita in a particular organ of the brain, we are going to kill them — because they can stop human aging, and we are ethno-human.

What Avatar is about is ethno-humanism, and what’s standing against the ethno-humanism is the possibility of a genuine intergalactic Homo amor.

That is to say, it’s the realization of what we call CosmoErotic Humanism:

• It is a CosmoErotic Universe.
• It is an erotic Kosmos.
• It’s what we call the Amorous Kosmos — we live in an Amorous Kosmos, and in the Amorous Kosmos, the actual structure of reality is Eros.
• The Kosmos is Eros — all the way up and all the way down.

It is this deep realization that reality is the infinity of divinity, it’s the infinity of consciousness (and by infinity, I don’t mean lots of numbers, I am not talking about infinite numbers; I am talking about infinity in the sense of that which is beyond spacetime, that which is infinity and eternity, using them as as synonymous words). Eternity is not lots of time, and infinity is not infinite numbers. It’s that which is beneath time and beneath space.

As Max Planck, the quantum physicist, said, consciousness is fundamental, and the entire Kosmos is an expression of consciousness.

The face of consciousness is intimacy, so consciousness is not just infinity of consciousness, there is an infinity of intimacy. Infinity of intimacy means that separate parts come together to create new wholes, and eventually, life is created — and that the Kosmos itself is not empty.

That would be an awful waste of space, as Jodie Foster’s father said to her in the movie Contact: Was the Kosmos empty, that’d be an awful waste of space, says her father, and then says Matthew McConaughey playing her boyfriend, and then she says to the children. It’s three times in the movie. Three times: it would be an awful waste of space.

All the great traditions had a notion of extra-dimensionals and extraterrestrials. We realize that it’s a kosmic Reality, that Reality is a love story. And that therefore —

• Jake can go from a human body to an Avatar body.
• Jake can fall in love with Neytiri.
• And they can create children together.

In other words, there is Eros that moves between species, it’s kosmocentric. We are unique configurations of love and Eros.

What binds us is that we are all expressions, we are all part of the fabric of love and Eros — and so, instead of generating a kind of Star Wars intergalactic war, we need to generate, at this moment in history, this vision of Homo amor.

Because Homo amor becomes a strange attractor for an intergalactic love story. And we are unquestionably at a moment in history where we are seconds before — and whether it’s seconds or minutes or decades or a century, that’s a detail in the timeline — but we are before an intergalactic world, so we need to articulate an intergalactic consciousness of Homo amor.

Homo amor is an intergalactic love story.

The structure of Kosmos is Eros and intimacy

I want to do something we haven’t done in years, something enormously special, and I am wildly excited. If you’re up for being excited with me, let’s be excited together.

We need to create new sacred texts that tell this intergalactic love story.

We are going to look at a new sacred text, which we just wrote in the last weeks. In this sacred text, I’m merging CosmoErotic Humanism with a text by one of the great interior scientists of the last century, and I am bringing the words together to write a new sacred text.

We need to write new sacred texts as part of our emergent world religion and world spirituality.

• It’s a world religion which is a context for our diversity — not a homogenizing world religion.
• It’s a world religion which is a Unique Self Symphony, and then every particular religion has a unique instrument in that Symphony.
• It’s got to be a Unique Self Symphony which is intergalactic — in which every civilization, and every galaxy and all of its civilizations, is playing a unique instrument in this Unique Self Symphony.

But the musical score of Unique Self Symphony is Eros. It is love, the value of love.

Here is the thing, love is a value.

That’s why when Jake wants to stand for something, he sees love being violated in the bar in the clip that we saw. What does he see in that bar? He sees a man violating a woman: he slapped her, he treated her horrifically. Jake is in his wheelchair, but he goes and stands for the Goddess, for She. Even though he’s crippled, he wants to be in that fight for value — but the value is love, it is Eros.

That’s the penultimate value. The penultimate value of Kosmos is Eros and intimacy.

Eros and intimacy are the structure of Kosmos — that’s the core of CosmoErotic Humanism.

All the way up and all the way down, the structure of Kosmos is Eros and intimacy.

What does Eros mean?

That’s why we have an Eros equation in CosmoErotic Humanism:

• Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, moving towards, seeking, desiring ever-deeper contact.

That’s the movie with Jodie Foster, Contact. The desire for contact — what drives Jodie Foster in that old movie is contact. The desire for ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness — that’s Eros. It’s a desire for even more than that — for greater intimacy.

And what’s intimacy?

We have an intimacy equation in CosmoErotic Humanism:

• Intimacy = shared identity (that’s a greater whole) in the context of otherness (we are distinct, we are unique) x mutuality of recognition (we recognize each other, that’s I see you in Avatar: I see you, I recognize you) x mutuality of pathos (I feel you) x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose.

What’s our shared value? Love, Eros. The value of Eros, the value of —

• caring, loving, pouring into each other,
• sacrificing for each other,
• being committed to each other,
• being in service to each other,
• being in devotion to each other,
• being in devotion to each other’s Unique Self gorgeousness,
• seeing each other’s beauty.

That’s a shared Field of Value, and that allows us to create intergalactically shared purpose (= mutuality of purpose). That’s intimacy.

The core values of Kosmos are Eros and intimacy.

In the first cut clip from Avatar, we see Jake wanting to stand against the violation of Eros, the violation of love, but he’s got a small view of it. His view is: Oh, this guy in the bar is violating this woman, I’m going to go attack him and stand for love.

And that’s beautiful, that’s who Jake is. But then in Avatar 1, when he gets to Pandora, he becomes ethno-human. In the beginning, he starts working for Quaritch, because his sense of the love and Eros that needs to be protected is, I’ve got to protect human beings. He doesn’t yet have a sense of the full value of Eros as a kosmic value, he thinks that value of Eros lives in that bar standing for that woman — but the Na’vi, we’re going to blow them out in order to get unobtanium, the mineral that we need for us to survive.

That’s how Jake starts — until Jake transforms, and he moves from being ethno-human to being an intergalactic lover, and he falls in love with Neytiri.

That’s what the story is about.

Avatar transcends the postmodern understanding and stands for kosmocentric vision of Homo Amor

Now, in Avatar 2, as we saw last week, Neytiri regresses to being ethno-Na’vi — and this is where Avatar transcends the postmodern understanding.

I am not talking about the filmmakers of Avatar, that’s not the issue, but about culture speaking through Avatar — whatever the intentions of the filmmakers are is irrelevant to us. The artifact, the text of the movie stands by itself.

In Avatar 2, there is a realization that it’s not that humans are bad (or white humans are bad) and the Na’vi are good. It’s a much more sophisticated realization, in which Neytiri herself regresses and she becomes an ethno-Na’vi.

She says at the beginning of the movie, I don’t like Spider (Miles Quaritch’s kid who got left behind on Pandora, who is then raised by Neytiri and Jake). I don’t like him playing with my kids. And then she grabs Spider, whom she has raised — later in the movie, when Miles Quaritch is holding her daughter with a knife to her throat, she grabs Spider and puts a knife to Spider’s throat and says, a son for a son. But her point is: Spider, even though I raised him, is not my kid. I’ll kill him if you kill my daughter, because it’s about blood. It’s about ethno-Na’vi.

That’s the tragedy of Neytiri, and it is actually Spider who sees through it most clearly. Spider is the heroic, emergent Homo amor.

Spider is the person, in Avatar 2, who loves Jake Sully, loves Jake Sully’s kids, loves Neytiri, and is willing to sacrifice his life and risk his life to save his sister — not blood sister, but Neytiri and Jake’s daughter — when he steps out and says to Miles Quaritch, who’s holding their daughter, which is his stepsister if you will, his emotional sister, and he says, don’t hurt her.

And at the same time, Spider recognizes Miles Quaritch. Miles Quaritch, whose memories have been now downloaded into an Avatar body, who is a key figure in Avatar 2. Spider says to Miles Quaritch, when Miles Quaritch succeeds in riding the mountain Banshee (and he’s very heroic), I see you.

And I see you is I love you.

I see you — and he actually saves Miles Quaritch at the end of the movie. He doesn’t stay with him, doesn’t subscribe to his values, but Spider is the person who is holding this possibility of this intergalactic Homo amor. We actually see this possibility that, perhaps, Miles Quaritch in his new body, in Avatar body, can evolve beyond his ethno-humanism.

And Jake and Neytiri have to evolve themselves, and not regress to their own ethno-family, which they do in Avatar 2 — they regress to their ethno-family moment, and they endanger all of the Water People.

So, it is a much more subtle and beautiful field.

We begin to understand that what Avatar is pointing towards is not ethno-human or ethno-Na’vi.

It is standing against ethno-human and against ethno-Na’vi.

It is standing for a kosmocentric vision of Homo amor, a kosmocentric love story.

Homo Amor Love Song

Now we are going to read the text.

It is the first time that we’re presenting a new form of sacred texts. These are the sacred texts of Homo amor.

We are going to read this text together, this is a fabulous text. This is a new text, we are creating a new lineage together.

This is a lineage in which everyone has a place.

This is the emergence of CosmoErotic Humanism.

It’s the emergence of a new Unique Self Symphony, in which every religion, every system has a place. A kosmocentric vision, and this is the emergence of a new sacred text.

This text was written originally by the great interior scientist, Abraham Kook, and I rewrote the text and interpolated CosmoErotic Humanism. Let us call it A Homo Amor Love Song.

A Homo Amor Love Song — and this is what Avatar 1 and Avatar 2 are about.

It’s not about premodern, modern, and postmodern, although there is a moment like that. It’s about this emergence of Homo amor, of a kosmocentric, intergalactic love story — but it’s about the importance and reality of all the levels.

What do I mean by all the levels? Here we go, it’s going to take us just five minutes. But it’s crazy beautiful. Maybe seven minutes.

Egocentric intimacy

There is a one
who sings the song of his soul,
and in her soul, she finds it all,
full, complete spiritual satisfaction.

I move back and forth in this text between his and her, all through the text.

This is the first level, I’m going to call this egocentric.

Egocentric means, there is a one who sings the song of his soul, or her soul — meaning, it’s about me, and my transformation, and my development, and my family. It’s egocentric.

It’s not negative — it’s beautiful.

It’s beautiful to sing the song of your soul — and in her soul, she finds it all.

I would say, most Human Potential Movement Americans are in this category:

• It’s about their transformations.
• It’s about their hero’s journey.
• It’s about their story.

And that’s beautiful, that’s a beautiful level of consciousness. That’s a great emergent:

• I am not just living a rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics life, I am going deep.
• I am on the journey — but my journey is my journey, it’s my personal transformation journey.

And Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is very much about my personal transformation journey, and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is about my personal transformation journey — and it’s beautiful, and it’s necessary, and it’s important.

That’s level one, that’s egocentric.

Ethnocentric intimacy

But then there is a second level.

And there is a one
who sings the song of the tribe.
She leaves the zone of her personal soul,
which she doesn’t find wide enough.

It’s not enough, just my story. I’ve got to be part of a larger story: my tribe, my nation, my religion. And this is beautiful.

She leaves the zone of her personal soul,

which she doesn’t find wide enough,

and not settled in ideal serenity.

Meaning, I cannot rest just in my personal transformation story.

And she attaches herself with tender love

to the totality of the congregation of her people.

Italians, and Germans, and Israelis, and Saudi Arabians, and Americans, and French, or Catholics, and Jews, and Sunnis, and Shiites. That can be beautiful: I am connected to my people, and my people — whether it’s my religion or my tribe — whatever tribe I’m part of, I am part of that tribe. I am willing to live for that tribe and to sacrifice for that tribe.

Now, I have to tell you gently, the New Age world doesn’t know this well. The New Age world is very, very unwilling to sacrifice for anything other than their own personal transformation. For a week, we can get together in Burning Man — but we do it for a week, and then we go back to the win-lose metrics. To build a structure where I sacrifice all year to create a tribe — it’s very rare that the New Age does that. The capacity to be ethnocentric is a very beautiful capacity.

Let’s read it again.

And there is a one
who sings the song of the tribe.
She leaves the zone of her personal soul,
which she doesn’t find wide enough,
and not settled in ideal serenity,
and she attaches herself with tender love
to the totality of the congregation of her people —

which might be, in Avatar, all of the Na’vi (which is Neytiri), or all of the human beings (which is Miles Quaritch). Neytiri is very ethno-Na’vi. It’s only her parents (in Avatar 1) who force her to engage Jake and say, teach Jake our ways. They see what she doesn’t see. She falls in love with Jake, but it’s a one-time falling in love, and then she reverts to ethno-Na’vi. But —

• she loves her tribe,
• and she feels her tribe,
• and she can hear the voice of the ancestors.

It’s very beautiful. Neytiri is a very beautiful example. Neytiri is a gorgeous example of ethno-Na’vi.

This is something that Avatar 1 doesn’t get clearly, but Avatar 2 gets much more clearly. Avatar 1 is very, very much a New Age, the postmodern attacks the modern, the blue people are great, the white people are bad. Avatar 2 gets it much more clearly.

Yes, Neytiri is a beautiful example, but she’s ethno-Na’vi.

She is a beautiful example of tribal.

She is a beautiful example of indigenous people.

But indigenous people are ethnocentric. The shamans have one tribe, they work with their tribe, then they master the next tribe. There is a moment in the history of people on Pandora where the tribes come together, but only within Pandora, so there is ethno-Na’vi or ethno-Pandoran.

But it’s a beautiful level.

And there is a one
who sings the song of the tribe.

She leaves the zone of her personal zone, Neytiri, which she doesn’t find wide enough, and she’s part of the Na’vi. She attaches herself with tender love to the story of the Na’vi, to the totality of the congregation of her people, the Na’vi.

And together with her
she sings her songs, she suffers her pains,
and she takes delight in her hopes;
she ponders high and pure ideas
about her past and her future (she can hear the voice of the ancestors),
and she investigates
with love and the wisdom of the heart
the inner content of her soul.

This is a view of either ethno-Na’vi, or it can also be ethno-human. The human, Miles Quaritch, views humanity as his tribe, because once you get into an intergalactic world, your tribe is not your nation or kingdom on Earth. The human beings themselves become your tribe.

Worldcentric intimacy

But then there’s a third level.

And there is a one
who widens her soul even further
until it expands and spreads beyond the boundary of tribe
to sing the song of humanity.

Again, this was written originally in 1920, and I have adjusted it. I’m still in the middle of adjusting it and adding to it.

To sing the song of humanity means I’m worldcentric.

I move beyond the Na’vi, I’m now worldcentric. I’ve moved beyond Estonians, or British, or American, or Catholic, or Jewish, I’m worldcentric. In the context of Planet Earth, I am worldcentric. This is what worldcentric consciousness is, every human being.

This third song is:

And there is the one
who widens her soul even further
until expands and spreads beyond the boundary of the one tribe
to sing the song of humanity;
her soul is continuously enlarged
by the genius of Man
and the glory of her divine image,
he aspires towards Man’s universal purpose
and anticipates her higher wholification,
and from this living source
does she draw the entirety of his thoughts and explorations,
Her aspirations and his visions.

That’s worldcentric. Classical worldcentric, every human being. That’s the third song.

So —

• The first one is the egocentric intimacy, or egocentric consciousness.
• The second is ethnocentric consciousness, tribal-centric consciousness.
• The third one is worldcentric consciousness.

What I was pointing out today is that when you’re talking at an intergalactic level, then being just for humans becomes a form of ethnocentric consciousness — but when we’re talking just about Planet Earth, then being for humans is worldcentric consciousness.

Kosmocentric intimacy

But that’s not enough. Worldcentric consciousness is not enough.

I need to move beyond worldcentric consciousness.

In the context of human beings, I need to move beyond worldcentric consciousness — and actually feel beyond.

I’ve got to include animals, and even beyond including animals, I’ve got to include all of existence in its totality.

I’ve got to go from worldcentric to kosmocentric.

And there is a one
who rises even further than this in expansion
until he joins herself in unity with all of existence in its totality,
with all creatures
and with all worlds,
and together with all of them she gives forth song;
and this is the one
who “engages daily in a chapter of song”
who is promised that he lives in the emergent world.

Begin to see that vision — Na’vi. Contact, Jodie Foster. Star Wars, Star Trek. Starman, Jeff Bridges, 1984. Michael. A beautiful movie, Michael, with John Travolta — this anticipation, in literature and science fiction, and in the great traditions, of this much bigger world.

That’s the kosmocentric song.

Every song has a place in the Unique Self Symphony

• There’s an egocentric song, egocentric consciousness, egocentric intimacy — just me and my personal transformation.
• There’s ethnocentric intimacy — in the context of Planet Earth, my tribe, my nation, my religion.
• There’s worldcentric intimacy — every human being.
• And then there’s kosmocentric intimacy — intergalactic Homo amor.

And all four of those matter.

But here’s the key: the highest level is when I value every level.

Every song has a place in the Unique Self Symphony.

• My story of personal transformation, that song is beautiful.
• My ethnocentric, my tribe, that’s beautiful, whether my tribe is the Christians, or the French, or the humans in a broader intergalactic world.
• My worldcentric song, all of humanity, if I’m on Planet Earth, is beautiful.
• And my kosmocentric song — intergalactic — is beautiful.

All of those songs matter. I need to be egocentric and ethnocentric and worldcentric and kosmocentric.

All those songs come together, that’s the last piece.

And there is a one
who rises with all these songs
together in one Intimacy,
and all of them send forth their voices,
all together they play their melodies,
and each pours vigor and life into the other,
the sound of jubilance and the sound of joy,
the sound of celebration and the sound of exultance,
the sound of rejoicing and the sound of holiness.
The song of the soul
the song of the tribe,
the song of humankind,
the song of the cosmos,
all flow together within her
all the time, at every moment.
And this completeness, in its fullness,
rises to become the song of the sacred:
the song of God,
the song of humankind,
the cosmic song
the evolutionary song
the intimate song
of all kinds
in her mighty glory and beauty,
in her mighty truth and magnificence.
Israel is Shir El, the Song of God,
Israel is all nations and all galaxies
Dancing with She
As She
a simple song,
a double song.
a three-fold song
a four-fold song.
A Homo amor Song
The Song of Song of Solomon,
to the King
to Whom wholeness belongs.

Here I’m using Israel in the old lineage sense. Israel is Shir El, which means the song of God.

The Song of Songs of Solomon, friends, to the King to Whom wholeness belongs, that phrase at the very end, a Homo amor love song. Like, wow! That very last phrase, The Song of Songs of Solomon, that’s from Kook’s original text, and he’s referring to the lineage text of The Song of Songs, which says, Tocho ratzuf b’ahava: the inside of all Reality is lined with love, is lined with Eros, meaning —

All of Reality is a love song, and that love song of all of Reality is the story of the evolution of love.

Love song of all of Reality is the story of the evolution of love.
Love evolves, it’s not static.
Love is the value.

Human being becomes divine when no one is left out of my love story

Let’s put this together.

Love is the value. Eros is the value of Kosmos.

We start with Jake in a bar, and he wants to stand for love, but in a very narrow way, in a bar — in a beautiful way. He’s willing to stand for love and to stand for the Goddess who has been violated, but he needs to expand that story. Jake needs to expand the boundary of where we place love.

Love is not just the in-group, and I create an out-group to give myself an experience of being an in-group, so that the in-group is me and my people, everyone else is out.

That’s how most of the New Age world lives.

That’s how most of the Human Potential world lives.

We don’t sacrifice our money, our real money, our real resources. We spend 98% on our family, and for 2% we do a little philanthropy, because what we really care about is — we are egocentric. We pretend, we write a few checks to be a little bit bigger, but basically, it’s about me, my family.

• That’s where we spend our money.
• That’s where we spend our time.
• That’s what we think about.
• That’s what we dream about.

And we place everybody else on the outside, even though we don’t say we do.

That’s a narrow egocentric intimacy, it’s not healthy egocentric intimacy.

We need egocentric intimacy.

We need to prioritize our family in particular ways, but then we need to go deeper:

• Ethnocentric intimacy, the whole tribe.
• And then worldcentric intimacy, worldcentric consciousness, worldcentric song, all of humanity.
• And then an intergalactic song.

That’s where we need to go.

That’s the possibility, and that’s the evolution of love.

That’s why this text ends with Kook saying, This is the Song of Songs of Solomon, meaning: that’s the love song, which Kook is now saying is the love song of Kosmos. Do you get what just happened? And Kook and I wrote this text together, what a delight and honor!

The King to whom wholeness belongs is a phrase in the lineage, which means Metatron.

Metatron is the name in the lineage for when the human being becomes divine.

The human being becomes divine when no one is left out of my love story — that’s called Metatron.

Metatron: the human being becomes divine when no one’s left out of my love story. There is no one on the outside.

The human being becomes divine —

• when no part of myself is left out of the love story,
• when all the split-off parts of myself are integrated,
• when all my shadows are integrated,
• when all of me is in a love story.

When no person, no animal, no thing, no people, nothing’s outside the love story, I realize all of Kosmos lives in me and I affect all of Kosmos.

Wow, that’s unimaginable!

No one is a stranger to the Divine

I once had a conversation with my friend, Terry Nelson.

Terry talked about this intuition that existed in a piece of work that he was doing, where someone comes late to an event and you say to the person who’s late:

“Wow, why are you late, take responsibility.”

But then you turn to the whole group, and you say,

“We are all responsible for that person being late.”

Why? Because ultimately, it all lives in me.

• I affect the whole thing.
• I affect the whole system.
• I can actually change the direction of the system.
• I can impact the whole thing.

It might not be immediately visible, but whatever I do ripples through the system and creates multitudinous effects, butterfly effects (using that new language of physics) all over Reality, it ripples through eons of space and time.

I know that’s true, because I feel that it all lives in me.

The definition of enlightenment is that I am CosmoErotic Humanism in person.

It throbs in me.
It pulses in me.

That’s the true enlightenment experience that very few people have. The enlightenment experience is where I experience that I am CosmoErotic Humanism in person:

• the whole thing moves in me,
• I impact the whole thing,
• I affect the whole thing,
• I have unimaginable power.

That’s Metatron. That’s when there is no longer a boundary.

• It’s not I am powerful in my life — where I am in power in my life. Yes, that’s good. That’s an egocentric transformational journey, that’s beautiful.
• And then I am empowered, and I stand with my tribe, and that’s beautiful. I affect the whole tribe, and the whole tribe affects me.
• And then I am part of worldcentric.
• And then I am part of kosmocentric — and I realize it all lives in me, and there is no boundary.

There is no one to be divine, to become Metatron, to be the baby-face divine, to be the human being who becomes God — and God becomes the human being.

That’s the Christ intuition.

The human being becomes God and God becomes human being, there is a blurring. The human being and God inter-include with each other.

That happens when I realize there’s no one outside the circle. No one is a stranger.

No one is a stranger to the Divine.

And so I can actually meet you and fall in love with you in one moment. It doesn’t mean we move in together, but I can actually fall in love with you in one moment, because I see you.

That’s what Avatar is about, I see you.

I see your beauty, and your beauty lives in me, and my beauty lives in you, and I can be in devotion to your beauty, and your beauty is utterly unique, unlike any other at the same time.

But no one is outside the circle.
Every unique expression is part of the Unique Self Symphony.
No one is a stranger.
No one is a stranger to the Divine.

Are we willing to cross to the other side?

When you become that kind of human being, that’s called The Crossing. That’s what it means to cross to the other side.

Abraham is in Hebrew, and the word Hebrew means “the crossing”.

Abraham crosses to the other side, and he begins to tell the story of a universal human. That’s why Abraham is called Av Hamon Goyim: the Father of Many Nations.

He is pre-Judaism.

He is the father of Christianity, and Islam, and of Judaism itself, and in many traditions, Abraham sends his children eastward, so he is related to Buddhism.

Abraham is pre-Jewish. Ibrahim is pre-Jewish. The father of many nations.

Abraham is called chesed: he’s called Eros, love. That’s what the great master Isaiah called Abraham.

He’s the principle of love in which no one is outside the circle.

Wow, can you imagine that?

Abraham is told by God, go to the land of Israel. Abraham goes there, stays for two minutes and leaves. You cannot be limited by any ethnocentric identity. When nothing and no one is outside the circle, that’s God consciousness, for real.

• That’s Homo amor.
• That’s the awakening of the new human and the new humanity.
• That’s Metatron.
• That’s a potential utopia.

That’s what Avatar is pointing towards. Avatar is pointing towards that intergalactic love affair.

That’s the Song of Songs, and that is the evolution of love: from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric, to kosmocentric. No one is excluded, everyone is on the inside.

That’s the possibility of possibility, and that’s the new consciousness that needs to be born right now.

Our crisis is a birth.

• You might think we cannot do this.
• You might think this is fanciful.
• You might think this is pie in the sky.
• You might think this is pollyannaish.

That’s exactly not true. The only thing that is constant in the galaxy is change.

Consciousness always evolves. Becoming, not just being, is the movement of Kosmos.

It will change. Just like a thousand years ago, no one could imagine democracy, and then a few people came and said: let’s imagine this, let’s articulate it.

Let’s be the poets.
Let’s be the revolutionaries.
Let’s paint this vision.
Let’s become this ourselves.
So who’s willing now to play a larger game?
Are you willing to play a larger game?
Are we willing to play a larger game?
Are we willing to participate, friends?
Are we willing to participate in the evolution of love?
Are we willing to cross to the other side?

Are we willing to articulate, to incarnate in our bodies, to write in the body sacred of who we are, a new love story, a new love song? A four-fold song, a five-fold song? The Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, in which no one is on the outside? In which Jake can marry Neytiri, and Spider can include all the possibilities?

Let us be the avatars of the New World, friends.
Let’s create this together.
Let’s be the revolution.

This Weeks Episode is the 4th week of series of Episodes studying the movie Avatar and Avatar 2 as texts of culture. Links to other episodes here: Episode 325, Episode 326, Episode 327 Part 1, Episode 327 Part 2

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