341 — Why Soul Mate Relationships Don’t Take Us Home

Soul mate is tragic — because it’s not clear who to choose; because there is no Field of Value in which choice is affirmed as a value.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [April 23, 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.

Elena Maslova-Levin. Surrender

Outside the Field of Value, no one is human anymore

What are we doing here, friends, together?
Who are we?
What are we here to do and to be?

We are establishing — articulating — a universal grammar of value, as a ground, a context for our diversity. That’s a big deal, because the root cause of every form of existential risk is, in the end, the collapse of a universal grammar of value.

Now, I want to say something a little bit painful, but really important to understand.

When you look at the last decades — in particular, I am going to talk about the United States, but this is something that all of Europe has witnessed, and the whole world has witnessed — you have this horrific phenomenon called public shootings. Shootings in a school, in a bank, in a church, in a restaurant — when someone feels hurt, and their response is shootings.

Now, let’s be very clear. There have always been lots of guns in America, and America has a very major issue with guns, and it’s part of the American ethos that armed force is not only owned by the government. Government doesn’t have a monopoly on force, and the government not having a monopoly on force actually ensures democracy. That’s part of the Constitution. I’m not here to debate that question right now.

But what does it mean that someone gets hurt, someone gets devastated — and they go and shoot up a school? It’s impossible to even imagine. How does someone get to that, and how does that become a phenomenon, where every eleven to fifteen days, there is a public shooting?

I am going to say something that’s controversial but accurate (my friend, Warren Farrell, pointed it out and did a lot of the research on it): there is an incredibly high correlation between children cut off from the father — no father in the picture, or an absentee father in an extreme way — and acts of violence, in particular, school shootings.

Why?

It’s part of something that’s even deeper, which we may call the death of the Father that we talked about three or four weeks ago. There is the personal father, and there is The Father; our Father in Heaven. By our Father in Heaven, I don’t mean the mythic, ethnocentric, homophobic God of the old religions — I mean Father as the source of value.

• The blessing of the Mother is the experience that I am always welcome in the universe, because I can always go back to the Mother — and in the arms of the Mother, I am always welcome no matter what, which is the beauty of the Mother. I can always fall into Mother’s arms, I am always welcome. That experience of being radically and always welcome is the experience of the blessing of the Mother, and it’s absolutely necessary, and you can’t be a healthy human being without it (an enormous amount of attachment theory is about the ways in which the blessing of the Mother wasn’t received).
• But there is also, friends, the blessing of the Father — the call of value, the demand of value.

There is a very subtle dynamic that’s happening all over culture, all over the globe.

In the premodern world, in which value was central, people were always massacring other people, but the people who were massacred were always the enemy; they were thought to be, in some sense, less human. That is one of the tragedies of the ethnocentric, premodern view — that the enemy is somehow less human than I am. As Margaret Mead points out, everyone agrees that you can’t murder, but murdering only means killing human beings — and those outside of your tribe are somehow less than human, and different laws apply to them.

I am in no way suggesting a naive, strange, historically inaccurate thought, in which violence starts with American school shootings. Obviously, that’s not true.

But what is true?

What is true is that for the people who are doing these school shootings, the sense of responsibility, of ultimately being held to account for those killings, is lost. It’s something like a premodern ethnocentric tribe killing the next tribe: that next tribe is somehow not human, they are less than human — and because I am doing God’s will, I am not held accountable for it.

There is this sense that we have killed the Father, which means we have killed the Field of Value.

This means that, ultimately, Raskolnikov is not held accountable for killing the old woman, at least he thinks it should be so in Dostoevsky’s famous story.

There is this new sense — and it is a creeping un-We, a pervasive sickness at the very heart of society — in which people begin to experience themselves as living outside the Field of Value. And if I experience myself as living outside the Field of Value, it’s not only that the human beings who are not in my tribe are not human, no one is actually human anymore.

Does everyone catch that sentence?

No one is human anymore.
Everyone is outside the Field of Value.

And when we attempt to build our world on that false premise, it begins to fall apart.

There is a straight line from postmodernism to school shootings

I am going to say something very painful now, but I think it is accurate.

A dear friend of mine has been sending me some quotes from Irvin Yalom’s book, Existential Psychotherapy, which I perused, fairly extensively, many, many, many years ago. He is a mainstream figure, at the very center of American society — tenure chairs, major universities, the iconic book read by generations. And what Yalom basically says is:

• the human being does not live in a Field of Value;
• there is no actual Field of Value.

He is a Sartrean — he’s emergent from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. He says, we need to create value, but it doesn’t really exist. Therefore, every human being is ultimately alone — love cannot bridge the chasm of aloneness. Yalom is strongly influenced by Heidegger. It’s one of Heidegger’s primary positions that you cannot ever move beyond your aloneness.

Every human being is ultimately alone.
There is no Field of Value.

There is no intrinsic value in Kosmos — and to be free is to know that only you are creating it, but there is no intrinsic value at all.

Yalom is echoing and parroting that postmodern position which says there is no Field of Value — a flawed, horrific, dogmatic position. There is a straight line from Yalom, to my colleague, Yuval Harari, who says that all value is a figment of our imagination, a fiction, a mere social construct.

And then there is a direct line to the lonely individual, displaced from the Field of the Father, which is the Field of Value, who is hurt and devastated, and who picks up a gun and shoots up a school.

It is not just that too many guns are available.

One of the tragedies of the liberal worldview is that all evil, all breakdown is caused by someone or something outside of me. It might be guns, it might be racism — but there is always something out there, whatever it might be. It might be any manner of things that cause me to be broken and therefore act out — whether it’s handguns, or whether it’s fundamentalists, or whether it’s bad religion, or whether I’ve been victimized by some version of bad psychology, or whether it’s abuse.

All of those things are real — but what the liberal world fails to do is say, how do I participate?

The liberal world always says, transform society. We do need to transform society, but transforming society can’t come at the expense of transforming myself. I’ve got to transform myself. If I’m always locating the locus of the problem outside of myself, I spend all of my time transforming society and I never turn to transform myself.

The conservative world errs on the other side. The conservative world says, well, transform yourself, and if you haven’t transformed yourself, you’re accountable, because you haven’t pulled yourself up by the bootstraps. The conservative world often ignores the need to transform society, and holds the person accountable in a way that they shouldn’t be accountable — but actually, it’s a dual moment and movement of transformation: I need to transform myself and transform society.

We desperately need to reconstruct the Field of Value

For our purposes, what we need to do is reconstruct the Field of Value.
We need to step back into the Field of Value.

And here’s the key, friends: it’s not about values. There is always a fight about values.

• Values is not the issue.
• Value is the issue.

Do you get that distinction, my friends?

‘Values’ is: let’s fight for my values. That’s not the issue.

The issue is: we are both in the Field of Value, and if we’re both in the Field of Value, then whatever values we hold are emerging from that Field. Those values need to be in relationship to each other, and they need to synergize with each other, and they need to impact each other — and we go from polarization to paradox.

But if I am not in the Field of Value, then whatever my values are, they don’t matter. My values become just another form of identity. They are socially constructed, they are not intrinsically meaningful. And then, I create a world in which not only the next tribe is considered not human (as in the ethnocentric moment) — but no one is human.

No one is human, because human means that I have an irreducible and intrinsic dignity, and I have infinite value.

My irreducible uniqueness confers intrinsic and infinite value on my life, and therefore, Thou shall not murder.

Even if I am furious with you, I can’t kill you, I can’t murder you. I’ve got to somehow work out that fury, and that rage, and that pain.

We just have to get what it means — it’s so easy to look away! — what does it mean that every fifteen days there is a school shooting in the last several years?

We desperately need to reconstruct the Field of Value. It is the single most urgent, sacred, ecstatically urgent, moral imperative of this moment in history.

That’s why we have spent so much time constructing and enacting this One Mountain Many Paths, as the place in which we are going to try and articulate a new set of First Values and First Principles, embedded in a story of value. You need both — you need First Principles and First Values and you need the narrative arc of the story of value — in order to literally re-soul reality, to re-inform reality by value.

It has never happened before, friends.

What has happened before is that we placed particular groups of people outside the Field of Value. We argued that only our group is truly in the Field, therefore, only we are fully human — but we’ve never actually gotten to a point where no one is in the Field of Value.

That’s what we mean here when we talk about two kinds of existential risks: the death of humanity, and the death of our humanity.

• The death of humanity is extinction.
• The death of our humanity is the extinction of our humaneness: we are no longer human in the way we understand human to mean.

That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal.

That’s the position that informs the leading edges of culture today — that there is no Field of Value. It informs the MIT Media Lab, Alex Pentland’s work. It informs Irvin Yalom’s work. It informs popular historians like Yuval Harari’s work. It informs Sam Harris’s work. It’s a given in most of the major intellectual trends in Europe. It’s a big deal.

We cannot go to the old premodern value — we need to reconstruct and re-energize the Field of Value.

• We are unique value in the Field of Value, and we are here to participate in the evolution of value.
• Value evolves through us, even as it is eternal. We participate in value.
• Value is real. The Father is real.
• The irreducible dignity of every human life is real — every human being is an irreducible depth of value.

That’s the beginning of the New Story. No one is outside the circle.

From role mate to soul mate to Whole Mate

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
We are confronted by crises — cellular crisis, personal crisis, 
and meta-crisis. 

Every crisis is a crisis of intimacy. The meta-crisis, for 
example, is a global intimacy disorder.

A crisis of intimacy can only be solved by an emergence of a
new level of intimacy. The root of the meta-crisis is the 
alienated relationship of the part from the whole; the part is 
non-intimate with the whole. A crisis of intimacy is a crisis of
relationship, and this crisis is resolved by a new level of 
relationship. 

We call Homo amor relationships Whole Mate relationships, or 
evolutionary relationships. 

Whole Mate relationships are an essential dimension of the 
New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis.

Whole Mate relationships are also, not coincidentally, a crucial
dimension in response to the personal crisis of love 
experienced by every human being, whether they are in a role 
mate or a soul mate relationship, or they refuse to enter into
such relationship because it doesn’t address their deepest 
longing. 

We are going to really dive in, but let me just briefly recapitulate what we have said last week:

• By the role mate model we mean a relationship based on shared roles, in which the masculine is the breadwinner, and the woman’s the homemaker. Well-defined roles, clarity about roles.
• In the soul mate model, we step beyond those roles. We look to each other not for roles — we don’t need these roles for survival — but for communication, vulnerability, depth. We can share our trauma stories. We can hold each other. We look deeply in each other’s eyes.
• In the Whole Mate model, we are not just looking deeply in each other’s eyes, but we have a shared horizon.

There is a crisis of relationship, and I want to name it clearly:

The soul mate model doesn’t quite work.

That’s generally heresy to say, but it’s true. Soul mate doesn’t quite work. We thought we would go from role mate, and we’d get to soul mate, and we would be in Shangri La. We’d be in blissful heaven forever, looking deeply in each other’s eyes — but, the soul mate model, in some fundamental way, is not working.

Now, that doesn’t mean we want to go back to the role mate model, we don’t. We don’t want to go back to prescribed roles, and the rigidity of what a human being was allowed to be as woman or as man. We don’t want to go there.

We also don’t want to go back to a place in which men can’t engage their feminine and women can engage their masculine, for sure.

We don’t want to go back to a place in which men were forced to perform at very, very dangerous jobs, in order to be recognized in any way.

We don’t want to go back to a place where women didn’t have their full dignity and place in the job market.

We don’t want to go back to any of those things, we don’t want to go back to role mates.

And yet, soul mate hasn’t taken us home. That’s a very, very big realization.

The tragedy of soul mates

Let’s go deeper.

I want to put two structures next to each other:

• Pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic.
• Role mate, soul mate, and Whole Mate.

Pre-tragic is clarity: role mate, everything is clear. Soul mate is tragic, and Whole Mate is post-tragic.

But why is soul mate possibly tragic? Soul mate is supposed to be the apex of our experience!

The soul mate relationship is tragic because it has no ground. It is not rooted in the real.

Let me try and explain what we mean by that.

Number one, role mate and soul mate, in the vast majority of the population, is an expression of separate self and ordinary love:

• Separate self: I am a skin-encapsulated ego separate self.
• Ordinary love: love as the social construct of these last few centuries.

That’s utterly insufficient to be the ground of relationship.

We said last week: if in the role mate relationship, we say I need you, I need you to survive, then in the soul mate relationship, we say I choose you.

But if it is I choose you in the soul mate model, what’s that choice based on?

It’s such a deep thing. Ultimately, today, that choice isn’t based on anything. It’s not grounded in the Field of Value — and if my choice is not grounded in the Field of Value, then there is no choice that will ever be ultimately compelling.

If there is no Field of Value, choice itself is not a value. Choice itself is attacked and thought to be illusory.

There is no real choice.
There is no value of choice.
There is no value of freedom.

Basing my relationship on I choose you makes the relationship tragic, because there is no ground for that choice — which is why, in the majority of couples in the United States, for example, and in many parts of Europe, we un-chose. More than 50% of couples divorce, because the choice is not compelling. Why would you stay in that choice?

In many ways, divorce was a great step forward. Divorce was a step forward because, as role mates, we were forced, and choice was taken away from us — so we reclaimed choice in the act of divorce. That was beautiful.

But then we thought: once we are soul-mates and we are actually choosing ourselves, we won’t need divorce anymore — but of course, divorce still skyrockets.

Part of the reason is that we make bad choices, because we think we’re choosing, but actually there are hidden scripts that are choosing for us. We need to clarify those hidden scripts in order to be able to really choose. That’s true, and that’s beautiful.

But there is a deeper ground for the collapse of marriage.

The collapse of marriage is both the collapse of people staying in marriage, and the collapse of joy within marriage, where joy is no longer available, and sexuality is no longer available, and real intimacy is no longer available. It becomes tragic on both sides:

• Tragic one: the choice isn’t followed through, because we lose access to the memory of what brought us together, and we wind up splitting, usually in a horrifically traumatic and acrimonious way.
• Tragic two is when we stay in, and we lose access to the field of joy. We lose access to our aliveness. We enter in a routinized un-We and deadness that no one is allowed to name.

There is an enormous tragedy to soul mate.
That’s an incredible realization!

To summarize, role mate is pre-tragic because it has clarity, soul mate is tragic —

• because it’s not clear who to choose,
• and because it’s not clear when to abide by the choice and when to reverse the choice,
• and because there is no Field of Value in which choice is affirmed as a value.

Therefore, we assume, as most popular therapy books tell us, that who we choose is actually not emergent from our choice, but from our unfinished business with our parents or attachment styles that we need to heal.

That’s why I choose you is tragic.

I love you means I choose to need you

In the Whole Mate relationship, we don’t exclude — but include and transcend — the best of both role mate and soul mate:

1. We include the role mate model in the sense that we are both looking beyond ourselves. As role mates, we’re looking beyond ourselves at our immediate circle — our family, our children. As Whole Mates, we are looking at a much larger hole.
2. In the Whole Mate model, we are an expression — a unique expression — not of ordinary love, but of Outrageous Love.
3. In the Whole Mate relationship, we are coming from our own original wholeness.

The core structure of self that animates Whole Mate is:

• True Self = the Field of wholeness,
• Unique Self = I’m a unique whole expression of the Field of wholeness, and
• Evolutionary Unique Self = my unique wholeness can evolve the whole itself. And I can then play my instrument which is whole in itself, and yet participates in the larger Unique Self Symphony.

All of this is Whole Mate.

• It is not I need you in the old sense, ‘I won’t survive’.
• It is not I choose you without a ground of choice.
• It is I choose to need you. I choose to need you.

I want to just be in this with you, for just a couple of minutes, because it’s so beautiful, and it’s so deep. The experience of I choose to need you is:

Yeah, I can make it myself.
Yeah, I could find a way.
Yeah, I could re-narrate my life story.
Yeah, you’re wrong about a lot of things.
Yeah, there’s a lot I can blame you for — but I choose to stay. Not only do I choose to stay, I choose to allow myself to love you so much that I need you. I choose to need you.

Even though I am whole unto myself, I choose to need you, and only through you can I become more whole.

Even though I am powerful, I choose to — in some way — be powerless, so that when you get upset with me, even if you are completely wrong and inappropriate and blowing something way out of the water that doesn’t need to blown out of the water, I’m still madly devastated when you’re hurt. I am madly devastated because I choose to love you, which means I choose to need you, and I choose to allow myself to be hurt by you.

It is the ultimate choice that a person can make, the choice of I choose to need you.

• It is the ultimate freedom.
• It is the ultimate dignity.
• It is what it means to love.

See, when I love, I actually overcome my separateness.

It’s not that my separateness disappears.
It’s that my separateness lives in paradoxical uniqueness to our union.

It is no longer my separateness — which is ultimate, which can’t be overcome — but it becomes my uniqueness.

I am in my uniqueness, but not in my separateness anymore.
I am in my uniqueness and in union at the same time.

By being willing to need you, by choosing to need you, I make you part of me, and I make me part of you. I overcome separateness. It’s shocking!

My ability to choose to need you is what allows the love between us to overcome alienation and realize union.

Think about what happens in sexuality. In sexuality, there’s a need that emerges — a need to be touched, a need to hold each other, a need to be aroused. And as sexuality, and a particular act of sexing, proceeds and deepens, the need deepens, doesn’t it? At the beginning of sexing, you can take it or leave it, but once you’re like three minutes before explosion, you’re full in! You’re in full need. To stop in the middle would be painful.

The sexual models the erotic, and the erotic and the holy are one.
The sexual models Eros, and Eros is the sacred fabric of Reality.
The deeper we are in the sexual, the deeper the need emerges.

This choice — I choose to need you — slowly becomes a choiceless choice. It just becomes the nature of what is. I surrender to the need, and I become most powerful in that surrender. I become most myself as I step all the way in, and I give up my lower will, and embrace my higher will.

The capacity to need, and to choose to need, is the greatest human freedom. It’s the greatest human dignity.

It’s not an instinctive need. It’s the need that emerges from the dignity of my Homo Imago Dei, of my divine image, from the dignity of my choice, from the dignity of my power.

You cannot be powerful unless you’re able to look at someone and say, not I need you, not I choose you, but I choose to need you.

That’s post-tragic. Post-tragic is not moving beyond need. It’s when need and choice come together.

I choose to need you, and therefore, love is action in response to need. There is no love which doesn’t respond to need — but when love responds to need, union is realized.

When I feel this urgent need coming towards you, when I utterly need you, and then that explodes as love, we come together in a shared Field of pathos and a shared Field of throbbing, a shared pulsing Field of tumescence.

We actually are no longer lonely in that Field — because Heidegger was wrong, and Irvin Yalom was wrong.

Love does not leave us in our separateness, love is the perception and direct realization of our ever-always already union.

We’ve never not been in union. It’s always been that way.

I choose to need you. Wow!

Reconfiguring reality by reconfiguring humanity

What we have just done is: we found love in a hopeless place.

Soul mate, the realm of the tragic, isn’t quite working — and what we need is an evolution of relationship, which is an evolution of value, because relationship is the value of Reality.

By articulating this new source code, this emergence, this rise of the Whole Mate relationship, we respond to the meta-crisis.

The nature of the Intimate Universe is that all crises at their source are actually one, so one crisis responds to the other crisis. Like the Masters used to say, when a question is asked in one part of the world, an answer that has never heard the question, an answer to another question also answers the first question.

Let me say it in terms of the crisis.

• There is the personal crisis of relationship, one crisis.
• There Is the meta-crisis.

Both of those are actually crises of intimacy.

One is the classical crisis of intimacy between the beloveds: role mate and soul mate are insufficient. The second is the global intimacy disorder, the collapse of intimacy between all human beings.

The healing always is a renewed, but deepened, reconfigured, evolved relationship to the whole. To the whole in me:

• I’m not just a separate self.
• I’m True Self, I’m Unique Self, which are wholeness themselves — and from that wholeness in myself, I can embrace the larger whole.

That’s the evolution of relationship.

Therefore, the emergence of the Whole Mate relationship, which addresses the personal crisis of intimacy, also becomes the new simple first rule, the new principle of Reality: Whole Mate relationships in which both parties are looking together at the larger whole.

If you iterate that exponentially to billions of people and couples in the world — whether friendship couples, romantic couples, business couples, entrepreneurial couples — when couples become no longer in a win-lose metrics with each other, but for the sake of a larger hole, and begin to act exponentially for the larger whole across the world, then we have actually changed the source code of Reality itself.

The extraction model falls away, the exponential growth curves fall away.
We’ve reconfigured reality by reconfiguring humanity.

Whole Mate, this new model of relationship, when iterated exponentially, heals not only the personal crisis, but completely transforms and explodes into oblivion the meta-crisis.

That’s what it means.

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