Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. The bathing of the Red Horse. 1912

349 — Telling a New Story Equal to Our New Power (Part 2)

Power lives, uniquely, in my unique story.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [June 18, 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.

Evolutionary Love Code:

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
We live in a time between stories. 
We live in a time between worlds. 
We live in a time where we hold the power of ancient gods. 
We have the power to create worlds of unimaginable 
goodness, truth, and beauty — and we have the power to end
worlds, to end humanity or to end our humanity. We have no
story equal to our power. That’s what we call, in CosmoErotic 
Humanism, the second shock of existence.

We are here to tell a New Story of Value rooted in First Values 
and First Principles. 

This New Story is a New Story in which the cosmic story and 
the personal story are one. 

This is a New Story of power, a New Universe Story, a New 
Story of our identity, a New Story of desire, and a New Story
of communion. 

It is only the articulation of a New Story of Value that has the
capacity to respond to the meta-crisis. 

But it’s even more. The telling of New Story is the inherent
natural movement of Kosmos itself. The evolution of story is
the evolution of culture and consciousness, which is the 
evolution of love, which is the evolution of God, the 
manifest guide

Where were you at the moment of the Big Bang?

There is so much we can talk about in that code, but let’s pick up one piece. We are going to do a big piece this week, which we began to unpack last week.

We live in this world which is challenged by existential risk, and our way to respond to it is to tell the New Story of Value — and in these weeks, we are talking about the notion of story itself. Story itself, and a New Story, and particularly a New Story of Value, is the only effective way to respond to the meta-crisis, to respond to existential risk.

• All of reality arises within a story.
• All of technology is coded with the values of the story in which it arises.

The structures of the tech-plex, and particularly the structure of AI-directed social media applications, are coded with one value, which is: hijack your attention to allow for reality-mining, to allow for the creation of personality profiles, which allow for predictive analysis about what your next move is going to be — and those are sold to disinterested third parties. That’s what governs all of the first wave of AI technologies, which are called social media. That’s technology coded with value.

The people making the technology, the data scientists, are living in a certain story. That’s why they didn’t go work at a university and research data science — because they got a much better win-lose metrics job at Google, or wherever it was. They took that job, and then they created technologies which reflected the story within which they lived.

If we want to actually respond to the meta-crisis, we need to realize that everything happens within the meta-crisis is based on billions of human interactions, which are — as shown by Daniel Kahneman, cited by Alex Pentland in Social Physics — unconscious, habitual, not reflective, but reflexive, automatic, unthinking. That’s what society is made up of. If we can change those billions of interactions, and have them emerge from a different story, we create a new human and a new humanity.

We all live within inescapable frameworks. We all live within a story, and we generate reality from within that story, and that story is always a story of value.

We are going to take one piece of the story today, like we do every week.

Last week, we talked about the need to be power-hungry: there is actually a moral obligation, an ethical obligation, to be power-hungry. A person who is not power-hungry is, in some sense, in violation of their own nature and the nature of the Kosmos.

That’s what we are talking about. What do we mean by that?

That’s an intentionally provocative formulation, obviously. We don’t mean

• be power-hungry for pseudo-power,
• for pretend power,
• for power-over that gets gratuitous pseudo-joy from domination of others, in which the other is ignored, where their personhood is degraded, and they become extensions of my own egoic self.

That’s not what we mean. That is a pseudo-power. But there is a deeper level of power in Kosmos, which is why all the great traditions talked about the Divine as the Infinity of Power.

Why? Not because Divinity has gratuitous control over everyone, but because Divinity feels the Field, and can feel everyone. That’s what Christ consciousness means:

• I can feel everyone.
• I can feel the whole Field, and I can feel the force.

It means the capacity to feel the Field, and then to feel like I am omni-considerate (Buckminster Fuller’s term) and omni-responsible for the whole Field.

I am connected to the Field, and I am responsible for the Field, and actually — if I really get it — I generated the Field.

Because who do you think did it?
Where were you at the moment of the Big Bang?
Hello, where were you?

You were there! Of course you were there. Where else could you have been? So, actually, you did this whole thing. I did it. We all did it. There is no place else we could have been. We were there at the moment of the Big Bang.

This is us.
This emerged from us.

You can feel related to the whole Field. You find, in yourself, this kosmocentric identity.

• I am not just ego: me, my peeps.
• Not just ethno: my tribe.
• Not just world: all human beings.
• I am connected to the whole thing. I manifested the whole thing.

Again, because who else could have done it? Where were you? You were right there. I’ve got this relationship that lives in me — to the whole thing, and I have this sense — inside of me — of power, and I want to get to this notion of power.

Power courses through me, and I have an enormous desire for power.

Every human being has a unique script of desire

If I don’t fulfill that desire for power with my own authentic power, with my own unique power, then I fill it with pseudo forms of power.

Again, what does that mean? Let’s go crazy deep. Anyone up for crazy deep here?

Here we go.

I know you guys, no one has ever heard of it, and certainly, no one at this very august gathering has ever seen it, but you may be aware — I feel bad to even tell you this — that there is this whole thing on the web called pornography. I’m sorry to be the person to break the news, but it’s out there, pornography.

Now, what’s the pornographic universe about? It is about hijacking — and actually blocking — your access to your own unique quality of desire.

Stay close, this is not a moralistic statement:

• Let’s not see men and women naked — it’s not about that.
• God doesn’t like undressed people — not about that.
• God doesn’t like people having sex in public — not about that.

That’s not the conversation. It’s a much, much deeper conversation, which is:

Every human being has a unique script of desire.

Your unique script of desire is the way that your desire plays. It’s your deepest heart’s desire, with your deepest body’s desire, with your deepest mind’s desire, all merged together.

But you have no access to that script of desire, because that script of desire gets hijacked in a pornographic universe, which blocks your imagination. You need imagination to fantasize, and pornography kills imagination.

Does everyone get that? It’s so subtle and deep, but it’s beautiful when you get that.

In other words, you happened to come across some pornographic site that had, I don’t know, a boy with red hair, or a girl with pigtails. Obviously, boy and girl above eighteen — so a woman above eighteen with pigtails, a boy with particular kinds of muscles and a certain kind of hair. Then what happens? All the videos on your feed that come up have women with pigtails and guys with a particular kind of physique. Why? Because in one moment, you chose that, then it chose it again for you, and then it begins to sculpt a particular profile of your own sexual desire, which is not your deepest sexual desire.

It’s not your deepest embodied desire.
It’s not your deepest heart’s desire in your body.

It’s your surface, lazy desires — and lazy desires have their place in the world, but that’s not who you are. You are not blown open out of your mind by your lazy desires — you are actually blown out of your mind by your deepest heart’s desire. Your deepest heart’s desire requires imagination. You’ve got to imagine, and then you begin to access your unique script of desire, and you begin to write that unique script.

The only sexual force in the world that can stand against the pornographic universe is your own unique script of desire.

It’s a very important sentence. Will power, all that stuff doesn’t work. The only thing that has enough power to stand against the pornographic universe and to locate yourself in the center is your own unique imagination, which generates your own unique script of desire.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

The pornographic universe kills my sexual imagination, my actual script of desire.

My life is a story of desire, and I have a unique story of desire, which plays out in sexuality in a particular way in the world of touch, and of course,

• it plays out in art,
• it plays out in commerce,
• it plays out in economics,
• it plays out in human relationship,
• it plays out in writing,
• it plays out in study,
• it plays out in play.

It plays out in all those places. I took particularly the unique script of desire of sexing — but it’s your unique script of desire.

That’s what Unique Self means — it is unique script of desires.

The story of my life, my sacred autobiography, is my mythic life. I live a mythic life — but not myth in the sense of not true, myth in the sense of my deepest truth, and my mythic life is my deepest heart’s desires, and my most unique and irreducibly me scripts of desire.

Those are plotlines in my sacred autobiography, plotlines in my story, and as we’ve said before, my story is a chapter in the story of the universe — and the universe needs my story. I’m an irreplaceable chapter in the story of the universe.

My unique script of power is the unique power in my mythic life

Now a second plotline, and here it gets really crazy.

There are also pornographies of power — when I haven’t accessed my own unique quality and scripts of power in my life.

My story of power is also a plotline in the story of Reality at play in me, in my sacred autobiography.

I have a unique story of power, because power is a quality of Kosmos. Again, this is why the Divine is called, in all the great traditions, the Infinity of Power.

Now, as a Unique Self —

• not a separate self, not a skin-encapsulated ego,
• not just a True Self where I’m part of the Field of the one,
• but a Unique Self, a unique disclosure of the Field of Consciousness —

— I have a unique story of power, and my relationship to power is enormously important.

One of the greatest shames we feel in the world is the shame of feeling powerless. There is a shame of finitude, where I feel powerless.

That’s a big topic, but I want to just focus just on this very narrow dimension of it now: that I have a desire to be powerful, but my desire to be powerful — if I access it in its authenticity — is going to have a unique and stunning script of power.

Just like I have a unique script of desire, I have a unique script of power, and that unique script of power is the unique power in my mythic life.

I called this, many years ago, the school of personal myth. My personal myth is the realization that, in reading the story of my life, I have to mythologize, not pathologize.

No, don’t reduce to mythology — find the sacred spark of mythology: what’s the great myth of my life? The great myth of my life is unique, and the great myth of my life plays out in an entire set of feelings: laughters, tears, silence, yearnings, longings, great loves, broken hearts, and gifts.

It’s the unique poetry of my life.
It’s the unique music of my life.

But not only in and of itself, but in intimate communion and devotion, omni-considerate and omni-responsible to larger and larger circles of Reality.

To be powerful is to be uniquely powerful in my unique story. To be powerful doesn’t mean: Okay, I’m going to run for Prime Minister. Maybe I should run for Prime Minister, it’s a thought, maybe I shouldn’t — but I should be powerful.

And powerful means to be in full — embodied, minded, heart madly open — living my unique story all the way, crying deeper than than anyone can cry, but crying authentically. Not tears of resignation — but tears of joy, tears of heartbreak, tears of longing.

I am fully in my tears, and I offer my tears up for the sake of the all.

And when I laugh, I laugh with all my heart and soul, and the angels start to laugh with me, and Reality laughs with me, because my laughter holds the paradoxes and nullifies the pomposities, and cuts through, and touches the very heart of enlightenment itself.

When I am silent, my silences aren’t silences of absence. They are silences of presence, when all of Reality becomes quiet, to feel the sound and the depth that emerges from the silence.

This is the stuff of my story, this is the poetry of my life — my life lived in relation to my own unique depths, claiming my power.

Claiming my power means:

• I claim my power to act,
• I claim my power to give gifts into Reality,
• I claim my power to show up in my unique circle of intimacy and influence and transform Reality.
• I claim my power at the unique edge in my life to stand at the edge of darkness and say, let there be light!
• I claim my power.

I step into my power — and I realize that my power is not public power, that my power at its very core is the intimate power of me engaged with my life, making the most powerful choices —

• getting up after I fall,
• transforming after my heart got split open,
• turning breakdowns into breakthroughs,
• and never losing my connection to the whole — being omni-considerate and omni-responsible for the sake of the whole.

Because you know who does that? God does that.

That’s what God does.

God laughs and God cries, and God is lonely and God yearns, and God never turns away.

She stays utterly connected to the whole, even when She is invisible, and warping and woofing and weaving the invisible lines of connection. She does it not from outside the universe, alienated from it — She does it as the LoveTruth, and LoveDesire, and LoveIntelligence, and LoveBeauty that suffuses all of Reality —

• and I am a unique expression of that LoveTruth,
• and I am a unique expression of that LoveDesire,
• and I am a unique expression of that LoveIntelligence,
• and I am a unique expression of that LoveBeauty.
• I am a unique configuration of Eros, and I am a unique configuration of value.

But Eros and value are not separate words, it is one word, ErosValue. I am a unique configuration of ErosValue. Value is Eros, and Eros is value. And living in that story is my power.

Here is the key: Power lives, uniquely, in my unique story.

• To the precise extent that I am living my story, power is available to me.
• To the precise extent I am an imposter, speaking with someone else’s voice, living in their story, I cannot access power.

The only true pleasure is living in the full power of my life

Power has many distressing disguises. It doesn’t look the same in any person’s life — but taking your power is your and my unique risk, and only you know what that actually means. A teacher can help you look towards it, but there are no gurus. We are anti-gurus. Gurus don’t exist.

• We are each other’s guru together.
• We are in a Unique Self Symphony.
• We are all self-responsible,
• We are all self-authoring.
• We are all intimately connected to each other, even as we are all captains of our own ship.

And so, you’ve got to find your power. Find your power!

And you know what your power feels like? It feels fucking powerful.

It’s not weak.
It’s not insipid.

It’s alive.
It’s throbbing, it’s pulsing, it’s tumescent.
It’s embracing. It’s driving, it’s thrusting.
It’s completely encircling and enfolding.
It’s powerful.

It pulses in you.

• When you transform something inside of yourself,
• when you step up in a way you’ve never been able to step up before,
• when you cry all the way,
• when you laugh all the way,
• when you give all the way,
• when you love all the way,
• when you’re ready to go all the way in this lifetime —

— you are in your power. That’s power.

Power is not an exterior structure of pseudo-eros, where you’ve dominated a bunch of people for your own gain. That’s the old success story. That’s rivalrous conflict, governed by win-lose metrics, that generates complicated fragile systems. When you are in your power, you are antifragile. Does everyone get that? Incredible sentence: when you are in your power, you are antifragile.

One of the plotlines of Reality is more and more power.

It’s an evolutionary plotline of Reality: there is this explosion of the Big Bang, and then power kind of disappears and goes, and power incepts itself in the very fabric of Kosmos, and then power drives the whole thing.

What moves evolution?

Power. Evolution is moved by power.|
Power moves. There is a power of Reality that moves evolution.

And what is power seeking? Power is seeking pleasure.

And what’s pleasure? Pleasure is me uniquely appearing at my unique nexus in the larger system, and showing up, and loving it open.

That’s what power is.

• Someone else’s story — there is no power.
• My story — all the power in the world is there.

There is a pleasure to power.

• The only true pleasure is living in the full power of my life.

Like, wow!

Okay, that’s exciting.

Power-hungry — you have to be power-hungry. But you don’t want to eat the food of the person who’s sitting at the next table, because you’ll throw up and get nauseous. You’ll get sick.

Eat the nourishment.
Consume what Reality is pouring into you.
Take it all in, don’t avoid it.

We take all of the fate that we are confronted with, and we turn it into destiny, and the destiny is filled with power.

The embrace of power is utterly essential to being Homo amor. Homo amor is powerful.

We need to embrace power at all the levels: political power, economic power — but it has to begin with the most elemental personal power of Unique Self, which is my actual Eros, and then I am not seduced by the pseudo-eros of the success story.

See, when I am not in my unique script desire, the pornographic universe overwhelms me, and I can’t access my desire unless I can access my imagination. The same is true about power. When I am in my unique script of power, then all of the seductions of pseudo-power are uninteresting — but I have to access my imagination to imagine the full nature of my power, and then we get to bow before each other’s power.

• We get to be devoted to each other’s power.
• We get to be delighted by each other’s power.
• We get to realize that we all have superpowers, because that’s what it means to be a Unique Self.

And none of this has anything to do with motivation, none of this has anything to do with psychology, and none of this has anything to do with spirituality. I don’t even know what that word means.

It’s interior science. It is the nature of Reality. This is the immeasurable. If spirituality is anything, it’s the immeasurable. True power is not measuring. Spirit seeks to point to the invisible, to allow us to see the invisible, to make the invisible visible, to make the inconceivable conceivable.

That’s the New Story.

The New Story is the story of my power.

I need to claim the story of my power. And by the way, there’s nothing more dangerous than a person who says: Oh no, I have no interest in power. Those are the most dangerous people in the world. They are lying — to themselves and to you. Their power is split off, and usually, that drive for power grabs the steering wheel of their life. Everyone is interested in power, and everyone should be interested in power — your power.

Be power-hungry for the power that belongs to you.

The Infinity of Power that is God incarnate — in you, as you, and through you.

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