337 — Synergistic Democracy and the Independent Movement
To be independent, I have to have an identity rooted in Unique Self, rooted in Eros, rooted in the Field of Value.
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 26, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni, together with Christopher Life, 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.
Speakers: Dr. Marc Gafni, Christopher Life.
Blessing of the Father
Dr. Marc Gafni
We are here in One Mountain.
We are in this moment poised between utopia and dystopia.
Several thousand of us have gathered in this community, where our commitment is no less than to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture, which is the evolution of love, and to articulate a politics of love in response to the meta-crisis.
In response to potential dystopias, we invoke the most stunning, good, true, beautiful world that our hearts and our bodies and our minds have always known is possible. Fragments and flickers of this vision live in the interior sciences of the great traditions, but — tragically — those flickering visions were often hijacked by their ethnocentric contexts. Now we are at a moment where they need to be reclaimed.
We cannot respond to dystopia without a vision of utopia. We cannot respond to the meta-crisis without a vision of what it would look like. At the Center for Integral Wisdom, we’ve been trying to articulate this new vision, to articulate this new possibility, to feel into what could be, and to articulate an evolution of the source code itself.
My dear friend just lost his dad a few hours ago, completely suddenly. We were in the middle of the normal intensities of life, and his dad passed away — so we’ve just been in that here for the last few hours. We were sitting, right before I stepped on the broadcast, deep in this space — holding life and death, and sudden death, and the death of the father.
Part of what we need to invoke today is what I would call the blessing of the Father.
The blessing of the Father is not just about the personal father. I want to invoke it in a larger way — because the Father is both the father that I was born to, my biological father, and the Father in culture.
We used to talk about the Father as our Father in Heaven. That was the Father —
- who was dissociated from the world,
- who was alienated from the world,
- who wasn’t invested in the world but had created it outside of himself, demanding, in some sense, its obedience.
We know that that’s actually a distortion of the Father, that’s a corruption of the Father: the Father is invested in the world, he is part of it, even as he holds it. We are used to talking about the Mother, but we’re not quite used to talking about the Father.
Our system of governance is the Father. It’s the vessel that holds us. That’s the Father in culture.
When we have a broken relationship with the Father, then there is no place for the Mother to emerge. We can do all of the Mother rituals we want — and many people on this call know that I’m madly devoted to She, to the Mother, to Ma’a — but the Mother doesn’t have a place without the Father. It’s hieros gamos. And our system of governance, which is the Father in culture, is broken — so we need to reclaim the Father, we need to resurrect the Father.
I’ve invited today, a very, very, very dear friend of mine, and of Barbara’s, Christopher Life.
Christopher was a key architectural visionary player in manifesting this iteration of One Mountain. A lot of the technologies that we created when we created the space of One Mountain, were created together with Christopher. Christopher is both a little brother, and a dear friend, and an evolutionary partner. He is dedicating his life to the blessing of the Father, both personally as a father, and collectively, working with this broken system of governance in the United States, dominated by a polarized win-lose metrics, in which democracy doesn’t exactly accomplish what it’s supposed to.
It becomes an aggressive win-lose metric, in which there is no synergy. We don’t have a vision of what a synergistic democracy would look like. It’s always that one half organizes, wins and the other half loses, so we have half of a country alienated in this tragic broken structure, devoid of intimacy and devoid of Eros, which is an expression of the broader global intimacy disorder.
Christopher is actually invoking a convention, here in Austin, Texas, to begin to articulate a new space in culture, what would it look like to move beyond that binary win-lose metrics, and see a third way, and see a new way, and resurrect the Father.
This is a day of the Father, and there are no coincidences in the Intimate Universe. The death of a father, the surprise, the shock, the beauty, the poignancy, the pain, the potency, the presence — it’s all one.
Christopher is going to do the major talk this morning, and he is going to talk to us about the vision of a new independent party, and what it means to him, and why it is important. He is going to also invite anyone who can come down, in a week, to be present with us, either on livestream or in-person.
But before he begins, we are going to invoke the blessing of the father by watching a video. Just to say maybe the last thing — and Christopher, I’m going to pull age rank on you now — just giving you, my dear evolutionary brother, the blessing of the Father. I’m so insanely proud of you. I’m so insanely proud of who you are, and what you’re doing, and your courage, and your commitment, and your depth, and your integrity. I couldn’t be more delighted and more honored and more thrilled.
We are going to invoke a silence of presence for a second, and we’re going to play the video, and we are going to feel the blessing of the Father.
Do we understand that? Can we feel that?
That’s the blessing of the Father.
That’s what the convention next week is about.
It’s about reweaving that blessing of the Father in culture, this new vision of governance.
Towards a United Independent Movement
Christopher Life
Our crisis is birth
Thanks, Marc. Thank you, everyone, for being here together today.
I love that this Church allows people to come together and worship, and I’ve really enjoyed being a part of this community for three years now. Thanks to all the openings, the prayers and the remarks. They remind us of the spiritual reality of the moment of evolution that we’re all here a part of and participating in. I’m really moved by Marc’s remarks, and the mentioning of the loss of the father of one of his key people, and that video also was really powerful, as I reflect upon that sacred, beautiful lineage and relationship, being both the son of a father and the father of a son.
Barbara was a dear friend of mine, we met and came into a relationship late in her life. Her passing was a real shock to so many of us, myself included, because it felt like we were just activating a real synergistic roadmap together. Her age didn’t even cross my mind, because when I interacted with her, she just felt like she had the energy of a 25-year-old, so I imagined we were going to be at it for decades together.
I am the founder of the party, One Nation. The purpose of organizing that party was to create a political vehicle to help folks that are in this conversation, that know that we are in a meta-crisis but that, to use Barbara’s terminology, our crisis is a birth.
There is a crisis here, there’s an ambulance running down the road, the siren is on.
But it’s not a heart attack, it’s a birth, there’s something coming in this urgent moment of crisis.
The One Nation party was designed to help people who are oriented around systemic transformation, and moving towards holism, and synergy, and integrating diverse perspectives to create new and novel insights and new and novel solutions, to be able to become the mayors, and the state representatives, and the governors and the national congressional representative, and the presidents of the future.
I was really excited and grateful to be working with Barbara on that project, and to receive her endorsement was very humbling for me. And right when we were gearing up to really put a lot of things in motion, we lost her in this world. The only way that I could really make sense of all of that was that she was moving on beyond, to the spirit realm, to evolve that partnership in a broader, even more profound way than she would be able to do in the flesh. I don’t think she would have left if there wasn’t a greater positioning for her synergy in this moment in time, because she’s so for this moment in time. I feel — and I bet many of you probably feel that too — that Barbara is actually with us. Not just as a trite statement so that we feel better or something, but because it’s really palpable. Marc mentioned that Barbara even gave him some marching orders last night. I really believe and feel that she has such a powerful spirit that she’s really truly with us, and she is guiding us, and she is supporting us, and she’s helping to create the context for all the synergy, all the miracles, all the synchronicities, all the opportunities. What a blessing!
The world needs a coordination system for all independent parties
As I presented One Nation to our country and put a couple years into the development of this party platform, I had a very particular insight that helped me to evolve the brand and evolve the theory of change. It was that as an emerging new party, I was inadvertently in competition with dozens of other emerging small parties, who had a very similar ethos — to be able to move beyond the dominant hegemonic control of the two-party system in this country. Even the running candidates were then in competition with each other, competing against independent dollars and independent votes, which only reinforces the election outcomes of the existing two parties.
Once I really got that, I realized that I was no longer aligned with that. That theory of change had brought me to a particular junction point of the Dharma, and that produced a set of insights that allowed the next iteration to unfold. What I realized was that the world doesn’t need another new party, what the world needs is a coordination system for all independent parties — a coordination system for the hundreds of organizations that are working on democracy reform initiatives. A space for the millions of Americans who will never join a party to still be able to plug into a political vehicle as a context for collective actions.
And so, I founded an organization called the Independent National Union. That’s a union as a political concept, not like a labor union — but a union of political actors that
- don’t give up their brands,
- don’t give up their agency,
- don’t give up their audiences,
- don’t give up their own particular ideological orientations,
to create a context where they could all actually start to work together with a higher level of coordination. Like a board of tourism that represents fifty different restaurants in the city, and puts up a billboard that says, come to our city — and they come to the city, and then there’s more visitors to the city to be patrons of the restaurants. We need something like a board of tourism for the independent sector itself, to be able to concentrate resources — to put up that billboard, if you will. To be able to build a stronger narrative of what this moment in time really holds for us, what it means to be independent.
Because independent isn’t just a political identification, or even just a voter registration status.
Independence enables unity
To be independent is a very profound cultural concept.
To be independent means that we have gone on the journey of separating from the inertia of the status quo that impressed itself upon us, that told us what to think, and what to buy, and who to vote for, and what to watch, and what to say.
Instead, so many of us — I’m sure every single person on this call — have gone through multiple stages of declaring your own independence from the inertia of the status quo that tried to tell you what to think, what to speak, and how to act.
Independence, at the core, is really the cultural and behavioral ability to think, speak, and act for oneself.
Interestingly enough, this is not a selfish pursuit, or a self-centered pursuit, or a pursuit that allows the individual to just think about themselves. No, it’s when you have arrived at the ability to think for yourself, that you’re no longer manipulatable, that you’re no longer controlled, that you’re no longer tied into ulterior motives. From that vantage point, you now have the ability to be able to represent the entirety of your community — not just the blues or not just the reds, but the whole of your community. Independence enables a certain quality and capacity of authentic, responsible, mature stewardship.
Independence, ironically and counter-intuitively, actually enables and begets unity — because from that vantage point, you can represent the needs of different constituencies, and can better help to be able to stitch together those needs, and to be able to depolarize communities as opposed to increase the hyper-polarization. Independence is that deeper conversation of a practice of being an independent individual who then has the ability, from that vantage point, to carefully consider the well-being and the betterment and the improvement of quality of life of all they represent.
Declaring independence
The profundity of the concept of independence goes even further. Because at this junction point right now —
- at this phase change in the evolutionary trajectory,
- the phase change of human civilization,
- the phase change of the ecological and geological systems on this planet —
what’s happening is, people are just declaring independence like crazy.
They have declared independence, as I said, from the systems that they are no longer aligned with.
They are creating new media solutions, declaring independence from Fox and CNN.
They are creating new technology solutions like blockchain, to be able to create a new context of technology. We are holding space exploration and space commerce out of the control of national governments, and claiming independence, so individuals and individual corporations have access to rockets, and satellites, and space travel, and all those other aspects, and the list goes on and on and on.
There is this larger movement that’s saying —
- we are not waiting for permission,
- and we are not aligned with that system,
- and we are going to declare our future,
- and we are going to set our own trajectory,
- and we are in our own self-determination to actually direct where we go from here.
We can bring it back to the story of the colonies, the American colonies coming together to declare independence from the systems they were no longer in resonance with. They were no longer aligned with taxation without representation. They were no longer aligned with being controlled by a country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They wanted their own self-determination, they wanted their own self-governance, and they wanted to determine how they were going to govern themselves. And so, these colonies bound together, they came together, to do something that they could not do on their own. They came together to be more effective in their own declaration of independence.
Unfortunately — because at the time, violence was involved — we came together to marshal the resources and the manpower and the capacities to be able to run a Revolutionary War, and be able to assert their independence fully. And then, from that independence, they were able to write their own constitution, and institute their own national government.
Imperfect as it is, there is a beautiful prayer. The prayer was the prayer of governance of, by, and for the people, the ideal that governance of, by, and for the people could support the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness for all — that’s a very profound prayer, it’s a very beautiful prayer.
Our country has failed in pretty much every imaginable way of fulfilling that ideal — but because we set that trajectory as our ideal, every failure isn’t for naught. Every failure is learning. It’s a scientific experiment, to determine how we do governance of, by, and for the people, that supports life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
Now we have a moment in time to declare independence even from this last 250-year cycle of a national experiment, so that we can inventory all the lessons learned, and from that, integrate that into directing the future from here.
The first Independent National Convention
The punchline of all of this is, I believe that there is this trend for individuals to declare independence. Gallup polls say, 20 years ago, 25% of Americans were independents, then 30%, then 35%, in the last couple years, 40%, 45%, and last year, 50% of Americans identified as independent. What’s actually happening here is, in a distributed fashion, individuals are intuitively participating in this collective process of declaring independence again — but this time, it’s not against King George III’s Great Britain. It’s against the two-party system and the entire gestalt of systems tied to that system that have extractive, manipulative, abusive implications around every corner that we look.
We have this movement — a real movement. Not just like, hey, let’s have a movement — no, there’s a real movement. A hundred million Americans are saying, I am independent. We now have the opportunity to be able to crystallize, and ground, and solidify —
- what these hundred million Americans are actually moving towards,
- what they are standing for,
- what are the narratives and the stories that are most effective at helping to be able to galvanize that potential into an actual effective, formidable, political alternative.
As the Founder of The Independent National Union, the first act of our organization is to run the first Independent National Convention. It juxtaposes the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention. We are saying, this is a space
- to support the unification of the currently and hitherto fore fragmented and siloed independent sector into something more like a united independent movement,
- to be able to identify our common ground,
- to be able to stitch together roadmaps and joint action, so we can actually work together effectively,
- to ensure that we have the systems and processes in place —
— to be able to make sure that we have independent election outcomes happening in mass, that city council people, and mayors, and county commissioners, and state reps, and governors are all starting to be moving into the independent sector —
- whether it’s the existing elected officials, like Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who are declaring their independence from their previous party affiliation while in office, which we’re going to start seeing more and more of,
- and/or we are electing people in the office that got there through an independent platform.
Then we are also able to really rev up the democracy reform activities that upgrade the technology and the standards and the protocols of government, so the government itself evolves into becoming something extremely transparent, extremely accountable, really baked in to the participatory engagement from the communities, in the sensemaking process, in the joint action process, so that government can achieve its ideal of being a system of collective coordination that effectively and efficiently improves quality of life for everyone who touches it.
And that’s where we go from here.
That’s what this synergistic democracy is that Barbara has been prophesying for decades — that government becomes a vehicle for the thriving of all, in its full evolution from the caterpillar to the butterfly.
If any of what I shared is inspired or interesting to you, then it may be inspiring and interesting for you to mobilize and join us at this upcoming convention. It’s April 3rd through 5th, it’s right around the corner.
It’s in Austin, Texas, at a beautiful venue called the Palmer Events Center.
It’s a convergence of hundreds of leaders from organizations that represent social movements, that represent all different types of brands and companies and political bodies, that are coming together to discuss the topics of assembling a United Independent Movement.
We have 45 different focus panel conversations on all these different topics, so we can stitch this movement together more effectively, and set a really powerful trajectory of where we go from here.
I believe that if we focus on building this national event platform, and building this national narrative, and building local organizing systems for this United Independent Movement, and we do this consistently and effectively over the next several years, we are going to see a fundamental center of gravity shift from the two-party system being synonymous with American government, to that system collapsing, imploding, corroding, losing power, losing influence, losing control, and this rising independent sector of our country actually becoming the prevailing presence of leadership and stewardship in our country, with that energy, that ethos and that culture further spreading around the world.
Thank you very much for giving me a moment and time to share some of those thoughts, and to make that direct invitation. Everyone is invited. Thank you, Marc, for your time.
Independence emerges from Eros
Dr. Marc Gafni
Christopher, that was fantastic! Most important response, gorgeous and beautiful. I think everybody could feel Christopher, could feel the vision, could feel Barbara.
We were here deep in the middle of this moment of life and death, and stepped out of it because it was equally important to actually be here in this moment, and I couldn’t not be here. It’s so, so wildly important.
I want to just share a couple of things about what Christopher said. Let me just see if I can frame this a little, because it’s so important.
First, we talk a lot about what we call one world — and ultimately, one galaxy — so a whole bunch of people texted me:
Why are we talking one nation? Are we going back?
No, we are not. That’s a great question, I really appreciate the question. The way we get to one world is we first reconstitute the one nations: every individual country has to evolve its source code, so that they become units of coherence, and intimacy, and Eros, and integrity — that can then become part of one world. There is no bypass road. You have to first do one nation before you do one world, and you have to first do one world before you do one galaxy. That’s one, that’s critical.
Two is, Christopher has made a very, very deep shift in his sacred strategy, which is a mark of maturity. It’s a mark of maturity and depth and wisdom, a leader who’s able to make that kind of shift. He began running One Nation as a political party. I think there may be a place for One Nation to come back in the future. I, for one, think it’s still important, it has value.
But this in-between step is unbelievably important, this coordinating function. You become a coordinating function by actually creating the space, the ground of being, in which becoming can happen. That’s a visionary move: I am going to create the ground, I am going to be the space in which emergence can happen. That’s a shockingly beautiful, and stunning, and utterly necessary move, which requires a bracketing of self for this larger self to emerge.
That’s number two, and that’s wildly important. I think it’s a sacred strategic movement, which is brilliant in the sense that it’s filled with radiance, it’s filled with light.
Three. This notion of being independent is unbelievably important. And you remember, we talked about polarity and the causes of polarization, it’s been a major topic of ours. Let’s just talk about this notion that Christopher spoke about so beautifully, this notion of independence.
I just want to say this deeply, and I am going to try and give you a different image which will bring us back.
Take the notion of a secret. When someone says, I’m going to tell you a secret, and then you say, Yeah, totally, I’ll totally keep a secret. What most people mean when they say they’re going to keep a secret is, they’ll only tell two other people. That’s generally what it means: I’ll keep a secret, let me tell two people.
Now, in all the lineage traditions, there was what was called the baley hasod: those who could keep the secret. Why was it that a requirement of an initiation into a great interior science was this capacity to keep the secret?
The answer is very subtle, it’s very beautiful: because you can only keep a secret if you can give up the hit of egoic attention-energy that you get when you share the secret. There’s this moment when you go share the secret, where everyone’s like, tell me that! And you get that moment of attention, and we feel sometimes so empty inside that we betray a confidence because in that moment of pseudo-eros, I get that hit of attention-energy, I am alive for a second.
You become an initiate into a great tradition when you don’t need that hit of superficial attention-energy, because you are so deeply grounded in your own independence — in your own interior sense of identity and self. You have a sense of who you are.
What that means is, to be independent, I cannot conflate my inner integrity, my being-ness, my inner quality of self with a particular political position.
What people do today is, the reason we have polarization is that we have conflated identity with political position. Wherever you are, when you identify with a political position as a way of having an identity, you can never give up that position. Because that’s your identity, and who gives up their identity?
To be independent, I have to have an identity rooted in Unique Self, rooted in Eros, rooted in the Field of Value.
That’s why the word independence in the original Hebrew is very beautiful. It’s a gift to brother Christopher. The word independent is atz’maut. And atz’maut means ‘inner full essence’.
It’s only when I have inner full essence that I can be independent, because then my independence emerges from my Eros. When I don’t have inner full essence, I cover up the emptiness with pseudo-forms of political identity.
Virtually no one espousing those positions (and I’ve read position papers on both sides) has actually investigated deeply. They have, in a kind of knee-jerk way, identified with a position in order to have that position be a pseudo-eros of identity. That’s why Christopher and I came together in the beginning, it’s why Barbara was so interested, and it’s why the three of us were interested — because you can’t have independence without a New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values.
We desperately say, I love you is I need you. And I love you, I need you means:
We need Christopher to be doing this work.
We need this to be happening.
He needs us. We love each other. We love each other. We need each other.
We’re holding hands.
And we’re making this revolution together, so thank you.
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