William Blake. The Last Judgement.

368 — From Horror to Hope: The Crossing from Failed Love Stories to Homo Amor

The only way to respond is the Crossing — from the repetitive memories of the past to the memory of the future — Homo Amor a new human and a new humanity.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 29, 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.

Summary: It is the fourth week since October 7, 2023, and we continue to focus our attention on what’s happening in Israel, and what our response should be — but we look at it through an entirely new prism. If we understand deeply that Reality is a love story at its very core, it becomes clear that the only way to truly understand Hamas is as a failed love story — and a failed story of desire. We cannot respond to it by secular deconstruction of value which denies the very existence of the Field of Value, the core quality of the Universe, and results in moral relativism. Our only hope, and the only way to respond is the Crossing — from the repetitive memories of the past to the memory of the future. This memory of the future is Homo Amor — a new human and a new humanity, a new world religion of love, rooted in the evolution of love, from which no one is excluded. To enact this, we need to articulate a new story of love — but also to expand our own capacity to feel, so that all children of the world are truly our children, wherever they were born.

What’s happening in the world today is failed love stories

This is an unbearably important week.

Notice how the extraordinary becomes ordinary. We’re in the fourth week — and we did four weeks of intensive conversation around the Ukraine in March 2022. By the fourth week, the tension begins to wander, and people move back to their lives. We are not quite sure — appropriately, understandably, and not because we’re villains —

• How do you sustain attention?
• How do you find your way?
• How do you find your way through?

What we need to do is to actually locate who we are.

Who are we in this moment, and what does this moment demand from us?

Today is going to be a day of joy. It’s a day of joy wracked with outrageous pain. We laugh out of one side of our mouth, just as people laughed in hell.

There’s a book called Laughter in Hell, about the jokes and the celebrations in the hardest moments in human history, particularly in the concentration camps. We are not in concentration camps — we are filled with privilege, filled with possibility, filled with potency, filled with the power of discernment, and the capacities of Homo Amor — and yet, our hearts are ripped apart.

We are not sure what to do and where to go.
We are disconnected from our bodies, from our sensuality, because we don’t know how to do sensemaking.
We can’t find our way — and we need to be able to, as Homo Amor — the new human and the new humanity.

I want to talk today about what Homo Amor is, and what it means to respond to this moment in time as Homo Amor.

We have such a wildly important, and wildly exciting, and almost exhilarating, and painful, but beautiful conversation to have today.

The conversation today is, what does it mean to create a world religion of love?

I am going to get very specific about it and very real — not just in broad New Age terms, but very specific from a policy perspective —

• What does it mean to understand what’s happening in the world today? What does it mean to understand what’s happening in the world today, from the perspective of The Universe: A Love Story, and to understand that what’s happening is failed love stories?
• What kind of failed love stories exist?
• How does understanding what’s happening today as failed love stories challenge us, and change our perspective, and change our policy?

It’s impossible, literally impossible empirically, to understand what’s going on, unless we understand it in the context of a failed love story, which is part of what we’ve called a global intimacy disorder.

Only an evolution of intimacy, based on a shared ground of value, will allow us —

• to respond — for real — to what’s happening today,
• and to alleviate suffering,
• and to create the one breath and the one heart and the one love and the one Eros that we all know is the true nature of Reality.

That’s our big conversation today. And I want to have a new, next step conversation — building on what we’ve talked about before, but really think about it in a whole new way.

You have to find trusted sources

Last night, I was reading about Ukraine, because Russia is using what’s happening in the Middle East, and Russia is complicit and deeply involved. Hamas leadership was in Moscow a couple of days ago. The axis of the Chinese Communist Party and Putin’s Russia and Iran, and Hamas is a very, very strong axis. Iran’s Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah, and versions of al Qaeda, ISIS, the Islamic Resistance, the Taliban — that axis of Iran is deeply aligned with, and controlled by, some very complex mixture of Putin’s Russia and the Chinese Communist Party.

The deep incapacity of serious swaths of leadership to make fundamental moral distinctions emerges out of a kind of woke-ism — incapacity to see atrocity for what it is, which has nothing to do at all with our hearts being ripped open for innocent victims. It rips our hearts apart — but it’s not what woke-ism is, and we talked about it in the weeks before.

It’s been an excruciating several weeks since October 7th. It’s been a time of little sleep. The ground invasion in Gaza is picking up steam. The tragedy of innocents killed — and the distortion of innocents killed that’s happening at the same time.

B’Tselem, Israel’s most significant left-wing, anti-Netanyahu, anti-government organization — the most significant pro-Palestinian voice in Israel — says that there have been 2,000 plus some people killed. Plus some is an important word. Killing of one person, of one innocent person is tragic. But there’s been 2,000 plus some — I don’t know the exact number — deaths of innocents in Gaza. This is, of course, very different from what was reported by BBC, or the New York Times, or Reuters. As a standard policy, they report the deaths that Hamas gives them.

I just want you to understand that for Hamas truth matters not one iota, and this has been established beyond any shadow of a doubt. Their headquarters is in the middle of a hospital, with intention. Their guns are on the backs of their own women and children. They’ve stated openly and clearly that their intention is to accomplish the goals of a culture of death, which is ultimately a worldwide caliphate in which any non-Muslim of a particular variety is annihilated — and these are the people giving the information about deaths, and that’s reported, without reserve, in the media.

Why would anyone know to find the right sources?

People think: I can trust my legacy reading, I can trust The New York Times, I can trust Reuters, I can trust The Guardian, I can trust the BBC.

Well, you can’t. You have to find trusted sources.

The first one I want to give you is an article by Dennis Ross.

Dennis Ross is a middle of the road, mainstream, policy person, who has 35 years of deep experience in the Middle East. He wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. I don’t agree with all of it, but it was excellent, and it’s critical to read. This is required reading. Dennis Ross is a trusted source. He talks about the utter tragedy of a ground war, and why he feels like it is an absolute moral necessity, and how the leaders from every Arab country and Arab group have called him and said that it must happen. They are saying one thing publicly, and another thing privately. Dennis is a well-respected figure who knows everyone in the region well for several decades. He talks about those conversations, and it’s an incredibly important article.

The second article is from The Atlantic magazine, which is a fundamentally liberal left paper. It is an article on the rhetoric of decolonization. It’s critical.

And three, an article by Michael Oren. Michael Oren was in-charge of trying to improve life in Gaza in 2017, in the Israeli government.

Those all three are worth reading.

Number four, I would encourage everyone to sign up for Bari Weiss. She’s a former New York Times reporter, an excellent reporter, who left The New York Times with a group of other people, to protest The New York Times distorting facts and not being an accurate and reliable reporter. She does something called The Free Press. You don’t have to agree with everything it says. Bari is all about objective reporting, that’s what she’s about. She’s not left or right. She’s a serious objective reporter, and she’s trying to provide something that the legacy institutions don’t provide.

If you want to just begin to understand what’s going on, I want to invite everyone to read these sources. All of these sources are middle of the road to left-wing sources.

Crossing from the memories of the past to the memory of the future

Our intention, our direct desire is to participate in the evolution of love, in some significant way.

We live in a world of outrageous pain, and we live in a world of outrageous beauty. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love, and the only response to outrageous beauty is Outrageous Love.

There are certain things that need to be done by the people who are on the ground at this moment. Those things need to be done, and they are tragic.

Some of them are about the heroic doctors operating under impossible conditions in Gaza at this moment. Others are about other people doing what needs to be done — 18-year-old Israelis, who are trying to ensure that there will be a state of Israel. We know that if Hamas is not dismantled — as leaders of Arab countries said to Dennis Ross — the entire region will self-implode in unimaginable suffering, which will then spread to all of the world.

There is a set of impossible choices. There are people on the ground who are doing impossible things, in an impossible system, in an impossible moment.

What do we need to do?

By we, I don’t mean ‘the rest of the world.’ I’m talking about what we, here in One Mountain Many Paths, need to do.

Who are we?
What are we here?

We started One Mountain Many Paths, with my beloved whole mate, Barbara Marx Hubbard, as a seed of the revolution, understanding that there is a crisis, and the crisis is a meta-crisis. The meta-crisis emerges from about ten different directions, and one of them is intense polarization.

In response to the meta-crisis, we need to do The Crossing.

We need to go from the crisis to The Crossing.

What does it mean, to go from the crisis to The Crossing?

The person who models going from the crisis to The Crossing is Abraham — an archetype, a force, a personhood in history who is madly beloved by the Christ traditions, by the Islamic traditions, by the Hebrew wisdom traditions, and who finds his place deeply in Eastern traditions. Of course, he appears more esoterically in Eastern traditions, but there are strong esoteric traditions that find a direct link between the lineage of Abraham and the East Buddhist lineages and Kashmir Shaivite Hindu lineages.

Abraham is this av hamon goyim, in the book of Genesis: he’s the father of many nations, in the best sense, in the sense of the blessing of the Father, and Sarah is the matriarch, the mother.

Abraham lives in a moment of crisis, a moment in which the shadows of his time need to be transcended: their trances need to be ended. The old ways of thinking and being are cause of unimaginable suffering.

Abraham understands himself as being in this time between worlds and time between stories, and he hears a call. The interior scientists talk about this call as a call that went out to every human being in Reality, but Abraham hears it, and he responds.

It’s not about who is called, it’s about who responds. We are all called.

To be able to hear the call and to answer the call — what does it mean, at this moment, to answer the call?

What does it mean to answer the call?

He hears the call, and the call is to move from the crisis to The Crossing. The very word, crossing, is Hebrew. Hebrew means ‘crossing.’

The second meaning of the word Hebrew, Aver, Ivri is past. Crossing also means past.

He moves from a memory of the past. He moves from the repetition compulsion (= we repeat the stories we were told in the past), he steps beyond all previous lineages, and he feels this emergence, this new possibility. He feels this evolution of love. He realizes, he feels, he intuits, he senses, he remembers the future.

To move from the horror to the hope is to be able to access a memory of the future.

Abraham is mired in the past. He goes forth. He goes forth to his deepest self.

There is a text: go forth to your deepest self. Lech Lecha (Lech ‘go forth’, Lecha ‘to your own deepest self’). To the deeper vision of self that’s coded in you.

Abraham is an early adopter, the very first incipient glimmering of Homo Amor, or one of them. One of the first incipient glimmerings, David Graeber would say in his book, The Dawn of Everything. He feels the crisis, and he responds to the crisis by becoming a Hebrew: a boundary-crosser.

He breaks the boundary of the memories of the past, and he accesses hope, which is a memory of the future.

Hebrew means crossing, but it means crossing from the past. Aver, which is a three-letter Hebrew root. It means Hebrew, it means past, and it means The Crossing.

I move from the memories of the past to the memories of the future. It’s a moment of crossing.

Reality is Eros: its insides are lined with love

Now, what’s the nature of that crossing?

A prophet is one who is coded with memories of the future.

Each of us coded with this fluttering of Homo Amor, with this new possibility, with this memory of the future.

What’s the nature of this memory?

Isaiah calls Abraham, Avraham Ohavi ‘Abraham is the lover.’ He loves God, but God as Reality. Abraham loves Reality. He loves the Real, and he expands the boundaries of the Real.

Abraham is the lover of The Real. The lover not as a social construction, if you will (although the word social construction obviously didn’t apply in ancient Mesopotamia) — but Abraham was a lover in the sense that he understands that Eros — love — is the core nature of Reality.

And Abraham transmits this knowing, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, to Leah.

This knowing ultimately goes to Egypt, and then there is an exodus from Egypt, and there is an entering into The Land — the land that’s at the center of the Middle East conflict today. There is a first commonwealth in that land, the commonwealth of David. And David is Dawid, the lover.

He gives this transmission to Solomon, his son, and Solomon writes a book called The Song of Solomon, The Song of Songs.

The Song of Songs is the source of the Christ/Mary Magdalene tradition.

It is the source of the Islamic Sufi tradition in many, many different ways.
It is the source of some of the most important and stunning traditions of compassion in the East.
It is the phenomenological source — I am not talking about the precise historical source, but it’s the phenomenological source.
It’s the source in human knowing.
It’s the anthro-ontological source in the collective consciousness of humanity of this knowing —

• that Reality is Eros, or, as Solomon said, tocho ratzuf ahava ‘its insides are lined with love’
• that Reality at its core, its very, very, very essence, is a love story,
• and that it is not a fairy tale, but the true and a central notion of Reality itself in its deepest being.

With that in mind, let’s read our code for this week:

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
Moral complexity is the sign of Homo Amor. 
Moral equivalence is the failure of Homo Amor. 
The only way to move from the horror to the 
hope is the transformation from homo sapiens
to Homo Amor. Homo Amor means no less than a 
world religion of love, from which no one is 
excluded.

Reality is chemistry

I think we can be at the center of the center, and the deepest of the deep, on the inside of the inside, in this moment in which we are in this crucible of outrageous pain and outrageous beauty and Outrageous Love. I think we can actually evolve the source code.

Reality is a love story, at its very core. What drives Reality is a sense of Eros.

A core quality of Eros is intimacy, a movement towards intimacy: separate parts form larger wholes, shared identities. These shared identities are the movement from a separation to a larger union. Subatomic particles, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, create an atom, and unique atomic structures. Those are the chemicals of Reality.

But chemicals are not mechanical. When we think chemical, we think mechanical. No, no, Reality is chemistry. And just like there is chemistry between beloveds at the human level, there is, quite literally, chemistry between beloveds all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

When we say chemical compounds, it means there is allurement between different chemicals. Each chemical is a particular structure of intimacy. It’s a particular relationship between protons, neutrons, and electrons — particular numbers in particular configurations and arrangement. An atom, an atomic structure is a pattern of intimacy. When you take two different atoms — irreducible chemical elements — and you put them together, you create something which is undeniably new. Except you don’t put them together, they put themselves together, because they are allured to each other — they are drawn to each other by chemistry.

The same chemistry brought all of us together: we are here together because we’re allured to each other. It’s deeper than rational. It’s not a surface allurement. It is a clarified allurement. We sense something.

There is a sense of trust between us.
There is a sense of being drawn to each other.

There is a sense that there is a larger whole that we can create, which we can’t do individually. We come together to create a larger collective, intimate communion. That’s who we are, that’s what One Mountain Many Paths is. We are an expression of this chemistry that defined the cosmos all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

Reality is chemistry, and chemistry is allurement. A precise balance between allurement and autonomy (attraction and repulsion) is love.

And that’s the story of Reality: Reality is a love story.

We have to invade any part of our hearts that are not clarified, any part of our hearts that are lost in an ethnocentric or egocentric bias, in some vision of the world that keeps people out and excludes anyone from the love story.

We are engaged in a tantric act now. What does tantra mean? Non-rejection. No one is outside the circle.

We are going to invade the distorted versions of the Ground of Being with Aza. Gaza means Aza. Aza means outrageous audacity.

We want to invade, with outrageous audacity, any part of Reality, any part of the ground which excludes any human being from the circle of love and the circle of intimacy.

The breakdowns of reality are failed love stories

The way I participate in the evolution of love is: I recognize that Reality is a love story.

It means Reality is a story about intimacy. Reality is a story that describes the movements in an Intimate Universe.

Like any story, Reality has a plotline. The plotline of Reality, based on the deepest reading of the sciences — exterior sciences and interior sciences — is that Reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies. Another way of saying the same thing is:

Reality is relationships.

But then, it’s not just relationships. Reality is evolution. Evolution to higher and deeper unions, towards more intimacies, is the movement of Reality. Reality is evolution, and Reality is the evolution of relationships. That’s the ground of this New Story of Value — CosmoErotic Humanism.

Now it starts to get wild, and beautiful, and precise — and we are going to get directly back and find ourselves in the middle of the Land of Israel/Palestine again.

But let’s go slow.

Reality is not merely a fact. Reality is a story.
Reality is not an ordinary story. Reality is a love story.
Reality is not an ordinary love story, it’s an Outrageous Love Story, an Evolutionary Love story.

Love is the animating Eros of Reality itself. It is the plotline of Reality.

The plotline of Reality is the evolution of love.

What does the evolution of love mean?

The evolution of love means that I leave behind old versions of the love story, and new, more evolved versions of the love story emerge.

Reality is the story of Intimate Universe. That’s what it is. We live in an Intimate Universe. Reality is governed by tenets of Intimacy.

Intimacy is a structure of shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness, in which there are mutualities of recognition, feeling, value, and purpose.

That’s what intimacy means.

It defines the subatomic world. It defines the world of self. It defines the biological world and all of its facets. It defines the economic world. All of Reality is governed by the tenets of Intimacy.

If something is askew in Reality, if evolution is stalling, or unable to find its way forward, or if evolution is having a momentary regression — that’s because there is something askew in the plotline. There is what we have called a global intimacy disorder.

If there is a meta-crisis — because of an exponential increase in exterior technologies, which is not matched by an increase in our understanding of what intimacy means — it means something breaks down in the love story. Exponential technologies of power increase, and the love story stops short.

The love story doesn’t keep evolving.

The vision of intimacy breaks down.

There is a global intimacy disorder. We cannot find each other. We don’t have a shared Field of Value.

That global intimacy disorder becomes the root of the meta-crisis.

A dimension of the crisis today is directly related to what I would call failed love stories.

What I want to suggest is that —

• you cannot understand Hamas,
• you cannot understand the failures of the Chinese Communist Party,
• you cannot understand the failures of the world’s technocratic order, of the elites of globalism —

— you can’t understand any of them without an understanding that the breakdowns of Reality are failed love stories.

Now, I want to try and create a context for this.

All of Reality is a love story. That’s what Reality is. Love and power are intimately related.

My personal story is chapter and verse in The Universe: A Love Story.

What powers my life is a desire for connection, for connection to Reality. I want to make meaning of Reality.

I want to be aligned with the structure of Reality.

I don’t want to be separate from the Field of Reality. I want to feel not isolated from others, so I am allured to, I am drawn, out of my loneliness, to create relationship —

• with the Field of Reality,
• with the deeper visions of self that live in me,
• with other —

and all of those are beloveds. The Field of Reality is a beloved, my circle of beloveds are beloved, the deeper split-off levels of my deeper self are beloveds.

I am allured to create deeper knowing.

Knowing is an erotic word. Adam knew his wife Eve. Deeper gnosis, deeper knowing with my circle of beloveds. That’s the structure of Reality.

My personal love story participates in The Universe: A Love Story, and they are both governed in the same way. And the body politic is a love story, because the body politic is an expression of The Universe: A Love Story.

Just like a personal love story can be limited, abusive or pathological, so too in the collective, in the body politic — those love stories, too, can be either accurate or limited, or distorted and degraded. They can be abusive love stories, they can be pathological love stories.

The structure of Reality is a love story, and the plotline of the story is the evolution of love, the evolution of intimacy. And that love story can break down.

That love story can break down.

• The love story can break down because it doesn’t evolve and remains limited.
• Or the love story can break down because it gets distorted and degraded.
• It can break down because it becomes pathological, in that it acts out, and becomes destructive in a terrible way.
• Or it can be internally, in its own nature, abusive.

Three tracks of the evolution of love

What is a limited love story? We need to understand what a limited love story is, and how we evolve beyond a limited love story. What does that actually mean?

You can trace the evolution of love — at the collective level and at the personal level. Let’s just take a look at the last thousand years.

I’m going to give you two examples of the evolution of love at the human level. And then we are going to get to the wild, crazy, hard, painful, but also painfully beautiful stuff.

• At the human level, we can have an experience of being egocentric, which means that my circle of intimacy — the people I am willing to sacrifice for, that I care for, that I’m willing to bracket my ego self for, and to support in radical ways of devotion, that I have a felt sense of care and concern — is me and my survival people. That’s me and my immediate few people around me, my little hunting band.
• And then we can have an evolution of love, where I expand the circle and have a sense of felt care and concern for my larger group of people. I am with my family, my cohort, my tribe. It’s beautiful. My tribe might be my religion, and it might be my nationality. We have this sense of this ethnocentric intimacy.

There is a healthy and beautiful ethnocentric intimacy, and of course, there’s a shadow of ethnocentric intimacy. The shadow, the limitation is that I only feel a sense of felt care, love, and concern for the people in that circle. As to anyone outside the circle — either I don’t care about them, or I need to kill them or conquer them, or subjugate them until they agree with my vision of the nature of Reality. This is what much of classical traditional ethnocentrism was, as exemplified, for example, in the great battles of the Islamic and Christian movements called The Crusades, when they massacred and slaughtered each other, each for a sense that God is only ultimately concerned with our people.

• Of course, even in the midst of that, there were voices — like Saladin, like the King of Jerusalem for a short period of time — who saw beyond that. They began to vision a deeper, a better and more beautiful world, the world of worldcentric intimacy, worldcentric love. I actually have a felt sense of care and concern for every human being on the planet. We Are The People, 1985, Live Aid concert. That’s worldcentric intimacy. That’s an evolution of love.
• And then I begin to also include the animals. I stop eating factory farmed meat from animals that are radically abused. I have a sense of identity with the cosmos itself, so I’m actually identified with the evolutionary impulse of the cosmos moving through me, and I begin to feel a love for cosmos, a love for all of Reality, a love for all the different peoples that might exist in cosmos. I might make a movie called Avatar about a love affair between a marine and a Na’vi priestess living on a planet in a different part of the galaxy. Epics of culture, like Star Wars, or Star Trek, or Avatar, and the entire world of science fiction is envisioning that cosmo-centric world.

That’s an evolution of love on the collective level.

On a personal level, I may have a very, very limited, primitive sense of love with my family, because I just identify with them, they are part of my Reality. But I might deepen that love —

• by dis-identifying with them,
• and individuating,
• and then establishing a much deeper relationship with my mother, with my sister, with my brother, with my father.

In other words, within my family system, I can have an automatic relationship, a level-one identification, and then I can developmentally dis-identify with my family and individuate. I have a sense of my own autonomy, and then I can re-integrate with my larger family system and develop a deeper sense of love with everyone in the family.

Same thing is true about my relationship to myself. I can be in a relationship to myself and be committed to my own survival, but I don’t love myself, and most of the parts of myself are split off. I can’t actually feel them, and I can’t live them, and I can’t breathe them. They are in exile. And then I deepen my relationship to myself —

• by bringing back home split-off parts,
• and getting to know them,
• and becoming friends with them,
• and becoming intimate with them.

I re-establish intimacy with split-off parts of myself. I intensify the depth of my love with my overall self by intensifying my intimacy with those split-off parts. That’s an evolution of love that takes place within myself. It’s the work of a lifetime.

We have just charted three evolutions of love: one that takes place in the collective, one that takes place in a family system, and the third takes place within the self system. Three tracks of the evolution of love.

Arrested development: a limited love story

Arrested development is —

• when I get stuck in an evolutionary level inappropriately,
• when I freeze-frame at that level,
• I pathologize at that level,
• I can’t move beyond that level.

Much of Freudian thought is about how you can freeze-frame at a particular level. He talks about the Oedipal level, or he talks about the anal level, when a person becomes obsessive-compulsive. I’m not going to go into Freudian thought, but Freud was about how you get stuck, moored, stuck biologically, in your biophysical organism. Evolution stalls in your own personal development, and you get stuck at a developmental level. Although you look like you’ve grown beyond, you haven’t. It distorts your ability to love yourself, to love others, to be in relationship to Reality.

Freud looked at it in a mechanical way. To be more precise, there were many different strains of Freud’s writing — his early writing, his later writing, his middle writing — and he often self-contradicts in the middle of one essay. But in his stated position, he was a materialist, and he understood the human being as a kind of mechanical system. He was shaped and formed by the Descartes tradition, which was so dominant in the West and that defined the Zeitgeist of Freud. But if you understand more deeply —

• that Reality is a love story,
• that Eros is the quality of Reality itself,
• that I am participatory in that Field of Eros,
• and that every individual and every collective are expressions of that larger Field of Eros,
• and that the Field of Eros is a story —

— then you realize that evolution (both personal and collective) is a love story, and it has a plotline. In that plotline, there can be arrested development.

Arrested development can take place in multiple ways.

It can take place in my personal love story, when I am unable to move beyond a certain version of love — a certain very childlike version of love. I love my parents because they bring me candy on Christmas and Hanukkah and Ramadan (or on a particular Buddhist or Kashmir Shaivite holiday or Native Indian holiday). If they don’t bring me candy, then I don’t love them anymore. I love my parents because they take care of me — but if it seems like they’re not taking care of me the way I should be taken care of, I don’t love them anymore. That’s a primitive love — linked to primitive conditions that are completely context-dependent, conditions which my parents often can’t control.

I can arrest my love at that development. But another place I can arrest my love is at the ethnocentric level (my love is only for my people, and I don’t know how to love beyond my people) or at the egocentric level (I only love — absolutely, loving, caring, nurturing — my son or my daughter).

I want to get really, really clear here. It’s completely legitimate to have ethnocentric love, it means I love my people. That’s beautiful. But if my love arrests there, then ultimately, I’m no longer in The Universe: A Love Story. My love story is now decontextualized from the larger plotline of Reality. The plotline has become degraded; the plotline has veered. My sub-plot has optimized itself in such a way that, instead of working together with the larger body, I work to only proliferate myself or my tribe, and I don’t understand that I’m part of a larger plotline of a larger love story. Then I get cancerous cells: I get cancers in the body politic. Again, ethnocentric love can be beautiful, but it has to be in the context of a larger love story.

They are all our children

As for the love of my son, I want to really understand this deeply. I love my kids madly. I love my son Zion deeply, and my son Yair, and my son Eitan, and my daughter Rachel. Each of them has their own life, and each of those stories is — like always — a story. But I want to say something dramatic. I don’t have the right to love my son in a way that would cause me to educate him to act as though only his life, or those of his contemporaries in his tribe, mattered — as though he had a right to abuse or violate the lives of others. That I can’t do.

In other words, I love my son madly and insanely — but I cannot say that my son’s life is more precious than the life of another family in my tribe, or the life of another family’s son outside my tribe.

One of my teachers, one of my masters who died about 150 years ago, said on his deathbed: I want to atone for the sin of loving my son more than any other son. This is what he meant.

I can have a more felt sense of my son.

I can be more responsible, in an immediate way, to make sure that he can make a living. And if he wants to come spend a month with me, oh my God, he can come anytime he wants to, day or night. I’ve got an immediate obligation of care for him, and I have a direct line to him, and a felt sense of care. That’s beautiful. That’s fine, that’s beautiful.

But ultimately — I’ve got to be madly committed to my biological son, or to my tribal son, but I can’t arrest my love there.

If I arrested there in a passive way, then I’m just an ordinary human being and it seems okay — but in a global world in which we are intimately connected with each other, that kind of passive, ordinary limitation of love can become lethal.

I actually have to have a felt sense of love inside of me for the child of a Palestinian mother held hostage by Hamas (hostage meaning just by living in Gaza). I have to feel her son like I feel my son. That’s what it means to be Homo Amor.

That means that I need to teach my son that he has to be not just ethnocentric, but worldcentric. That’s my obligation to my son. I’ve got to teach him that you have to have a felt sense of love, care, and concern for every human being on the planet. You have to have a relationship to every human being on the planet.

That doesn’t mean that we obliterate tribes. Tribes are beautiful. But tribes operate in a Unique Self Symphony, and the Unique Self Symphony implies the intrinsic value of every human being, and that no one is outside the circle.

• If my politics are going to be a politics of love,
• if we’re going to actually enact a new world where we moved from homo sapiens to Homo Amor —

— this means that we actually want to enact a world religion of love.

A world religion of love can’t be just a world religion of love, because that can be ethnocentric love. It’s got to be a world religion of worldcentric and cosmo-centric love. I have to be willing to love my son madly, but not exclusively.

A couple of people wrote to me this week, dear friends of mine. They said: Oh, we get it, you’re a father, you’re a grandfather. Your son’s life is in danger, so the way you think about things must be shaped and formed by that.

First off, everything is shaped and formed by our biographies, of course it is, so yes.

And no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The whole point of being Homo Amor is that I have to love your son like I love my son. That’s what it means to be Homo Amor. It’s big. There is nothing more dangerous than a distorted love story.

They are all our children — and I need to be able to feel it in my body.

We need to evolve our capacity to feel

Derek Parfit (a moral realist, a philosopher at Oxford) pointed out that when I think about where I distribute my income, where I distribute my resources, I cannot distribute my resources just to my biological family.

If you have $100 of resources, and your plan is: when I die, I’m going to leave $95 up to my kids, and $5 to the rest of the world, then you are egocentric in a bad way. Yes, my job is to do my best to enact beautiful possibilities for my children. Yes, I should do that. I should take care of my children. I should invest in my children, and help them get an apartment if I can, and create relationships for them to find their own Unique Self creativity. That’s all good. But if I have significant resources, I want to look and ask: where can I distribute those effectively in the world to make the whole world a better place? Because I love the whole world.

Emergent from Derek Parfit’s kind of moral thinking is what came to be called Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism said:

• Wow, let’s try and think, if I am standing on the side of life, if I am all in for all life, what’s the most effective use of resources to save the most lives? That might not be my local charity. Maybe getting malaria nets and deploying them in particular places in the world will actually alleviate more suffering and save more lives than anything else.

Effective Altruism is not entirely correct, but they are raising important issues. And Peter Singer, for example, is a moral philosopher who’s raising these kinds of issues.

The question is, how do I actually become Homo Amor?

It’s not that I should make a rational calculus without feeling or desire. That’s one of the mistakes of Effective Altruism — that they dissociate from the felt sense of desire and love, and they try and operate based on Derek Parfit’s moral realism. It’s a moral realism which takes feeling out of the equation, and tries to make a scientific moral calculus. That’s the weakness of that way of thinking.

• You actually do need to take feeling into account.
• You do need to take proximity into account, and you do have a different relationship to your son than you do to other people.

That’s all true, that’s good. Effective Altruism went too far, because they took feeling, and desire, and Eros, and allurement out of the equation entirely, which you can’t do.

Having said that, they were pointing to something important, which is: you also need to evolve your feeling.

• I need to evolve my capacity for allurement.
• I need to evolve my capacity to feel.
• I need to be able to feel wider.

I need to be able to feel not only the roads of the Hebrew settlements in Judea and Samaria, which I know well. I also need to feel the beautiful Palestinian towns, like Qalqilya, which I know very well, on the West Bank, right near Kfar Saba.

I used to walk around the streets of Qalqilya, one of the four major centers of the West Bank, just to get to know everyone, and talk to everyone, and go to weddings, and go to my dentist there, and have friends there. I walked around without a machine gun, intentionally, although I was told by the security officer at the settlement where I was a rabbi that that was insane. But I said, no, I’ll be insane. Let’s be insane.

We have to feel each other, and we’ve got to evolve.

Totalitarianism is a distorted love story

What’s a distorted and abusive love story?

There are at least three vectors of distorted or degraded love stories.

• There is a distorted collective love story, which can arrest at the egocentric level, where I only feel and I only sacrifice for my child.
• There is a distorted or abusive or degraded or pathological personal love story. For example, I love my mother and hate my father, and my mother hated my father, so I internalize my mother’s hatred of my father. I hate my father, and my relationship to my mother is based on us hating my father together. I can’t see my father. I internalized my mother’s pathologized relationship, and together with my mother, I hate my father, and my mother smothers me. And I actually can’t breathe, and I can’t find my autonomy, and I can’t find my own sense of choice. My mother is actually degrading my own sense of selfness. But I feel like only if I give her that level of loyalty and obedience, will she live. She is holding her living as a threat to my very heart and soul, but I surrender myself anyways because I’m afraid to be the cause of her death — so I join her in the hatred of my father. That’s an abusive love story. I’m madly in love with my mother, but actually, it’s an abusive love story. There are many forms of abusive love stories and personal love stories.
• I can have an abusive love story, a pathological love story, a distorted love story, a degraded love story, vis-a-vis myself, because I’ve split off essential parts of myself. The part of myself that I’ve split off is essential, and I’ve degraded that part of myself, I’ve distorted it, I’ve split off my relationship to it. Therefore, I have lost my ability to trust myself.

Within that context, one essential part of myself that I split off is my own sense of desire — the feeling of allurement and desire that runs through my body. If I split off my relationship to my Field of desire, to the allurement that runs in me, it means I can’t trust myself anymore. It is the beginning of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism, at its core, is a distorted love story.

Central to Orwell’s novel 1984 is what he called the Ministry of Love, because 1984 totalitarianism is a distorted love story. Mussolini was writing about distorted love stories. Most forms of fascism and totalitarianism are distorted love stories — failed, distorted, pathologized, degraded love stories.

• If I am in Israel, and I have a sense that Messianic politics should determine the course of my policy, that is a distorted and degraded love story, for sure.
• If I am a senator from United States, and instead of basing my backing of Ukraine against Russia on a shared ground of value that we all share, I am basing it on a sense that since Putin is the Antichrist, and this particular set of prophecies will be fulfilled if we back Ukraine in a particular way, then I’m involved in a distorted love story.

We should back Ukraine in a way that’s fantastic and beautiful. I’m completely in favor of backing Ukraine, I think Ukraine and Israel need to stand together — but I can’t be using Ukraine to fulfill my Christological anticipation, because then I become not trustworthy in policy. That’s a distorted love story.

Hamas: a pathologized love story

A healthy love story is when I understand that Reality is a love story.

We are all in a shared Ground of Value. There is a shared Field of Eros. Eros itself is value: Eros is ErosValue. No one is outside of the Field. Ukraine is in the Field, and Russia is in the Field, and China is in the Field. There is no one who is intrinsically outside of the Field.

• It’s not a Christ Field that everyone’s going to come to Christ.
• It’s not an Allah Field that everyone’s going to come to Allah.
• No, it’s not a Tibetan Buddhist Field that everyone’s going to come to Tibetan Buddhism.
• And it’s not a Hebraism Field that everyone’s going to come to Hebraism.

If you really want to understand what’s going on now in Israel, all of the above was to get here.

In Israel, there is tragedy all around, and we hold our hearts shattered for anyone, any innocent civilians that are killed, despite very real huge efforts. I was involved in, directly and indirectly, in Gaza in 2014, where Israel made tens and tens of thousands of phone calls on people’s cell phones, asking them to evacuate. There is an impossible situation. According to B’Tselem, more than 2000 innocents have been killed in Gaza, which is tragic beyond imagination.

And as Dalai Lama pointed out when we talked about it, there is no moral equivalence here. Israel is responding to targeting civilians in the most brutal atrocities possible, by a group that does not represent the Palestinian people, that holds Palestinians hostage. Hamas killed the naturally chosen Palestinian leadership, and 62% of the Palestinians in Gaza wanted Hamas not to attack Israel. Let’s understand that.

But I want to look particularly at the Hamas issue right now. I want to look particularly at the Hamas issue, and just try to understand what’s actually happening here. I want to play you a clip. There are no visuals in this clip. I think we shouldn’t be showing painful visuals all over the web. This clip only has a voice. But I want you to listen to the voice. It takes about two minutes.

Start video at 1:24:47

Listen to that, my friends. This is a boy — 20 years old, 25 years old — who’s calling his dad saying: I killed 10 Jews, God’s grace! We would expect him to be unbearably ugly. But he is not even unbearably ugly. There are no words for it. He says: Dad, will you be proud of me? Mom, Mom, will you be proud of me? Dad?

It’s like, oh my God! Oh my God, do you feel that?

This is a distorted love story.
This is a failed love story.
This is an abusive love story.
This is a pathologized love story.

It’s a pathologized love story in which killing Jews with my bare hands, brutally, is love of Allah and love of my particular people. It earns me the love of my mother and the love of my father. And the father says, did you kill 10 Jews? And he says, return, return. And the mother is just crying.

I talked about what my colleague, Marianne Williamson, the left-wing social writer, called the pure evil of Hamas. Marianne is of course right in terms of their actions. And I compared, in that sense, Hamas to orcs in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Tolkien has different understandings of the origin of orcs — the beasts of Sauron who commit these mass atrocities, but in some sense, the orcs are actually distorted versions or expressions of the original elves.

If your experience of Reality is a liberal, secular experience, and you’ve never actually experienced the passion of feeling the love story of the universe, then you can’t even begin to understand this. Then you might think, well, okay, if this is what it leads to, that would be better not to ever feel this.

But that’s not the case.

The position that says that there is no love story and no Field of ErosValue creates a world of ultimate relativism where there is no Field of Value at all.

Communism was an expression of that, and communism created its own pseudo-passions. Between Russian and Chinese communism, by far more people were killed in the 20th century than all of the religious wars put together — so collapsing the Field of Value doesn’t work.

• You cannot collapse the Field of Value. Communism became a secular, materialist, distorted love story, and it was the love of the state.
• You also cannot pathologize a love story and say the love story is for a particular people who have a particular set of beliefs, and anyone outside of that set of beliefs is to be destroyed, which is the position of Hamas, which is why Hamas’s culture is the love of death. They actually say: we love death like you love life. Their love story is death and martyrdom in order to serve this particular vision of the Divine.

Here is the reason we did this whole thing:

What do we need to do?
What’s our response to this?

Our response to this cannot be a postmodern deconstruction of value.

Modernity, and postmodernity in its wake, responded to the premodern savageries by saying, let’s destroy religion. Those love stories were so bad, let’s actually deny The Universe: A Love Story, and try and understand the universe based on self-evident truths.

But self-evident truths don’t cut it. Why are they self-evident?

• The desiccation of the Field of Value, which was modernity and postmodernity’s response to the excesses and brutalities of the traditional pre-modern world, doesn’t work.
• And return to fundamentalism is a degraded and disastrous form of love story.

So, what do we need to do?

A new love story rooted in evolution of love

There is only one move that can be made — and it’s got to be made so passionately, and so beautifully, and so wondrously — the move of telling a new love story.

That’s the point.

We have to tell a new love story, rooted in an evolution of love.

That love story has got to be filled with passion, and filled with that felt sense of aliveness in the body. That love story has got to be for every human being on the planet.

I’ve got to love not only my son, not only my grandchild — but your son, your grandchild, and your granddaughter, and your place and your people.

And I’ve got to not just love, but I have to care for them, and I have to pour myself into them. I have to feel my relationship with every human being, and I have to feel my relationship of lived passion and love with every living being on the planet, and then with the planet itself. Those are the fields of the evolution of love. That’s the movement from homo sapiens to Homo Amor.

Eros — the movement towards separate parts becoming larger unions — that’s the plotline of the story. The plotline of the story is to realize that the whole thing is a love story.

If the plotline of the entire thing is a love story, then the only way to evolve beyond pathology, beyond breakdown, beyond crisis, is The Crossing.

And what’s The Crossing?

It’s the crossing to the other side.
It’s the memory of the future.

And what’s the memory of the future? Homo Amor. And Homo Amor is a world religion of love —

• Not a world religion of ethnocentric love.
• Not a world religion of secular humanist love, in which love is a social construction dissociated from the Field of ErosValue.

Those won’t work.

When the fundamentalist looks at the postmodern desiccation of the Field of Value and the Field of Love, the fundamentalist feels like there’s no place to turn.

We are responsible for fundamentalism, because we haven’t articulated a new love story worth its name.

To articulate a new love story is not just a declaration. We have to actually sit and articulate a vision of a Field of Value, and a moral theory, in which no one is excluded. We need to understand that Reality is Eros, and that Eros includes every living being on the planet.

It’s all alive. It’s a living universe, and it moves through me.

And the plotline of the story is the evolution of love.

Ethnocentric love, which is pathological and abusive, doesn’t work.

The first step is to reclaim the Field of Desire, to be able to trust my own body. This is why a sexual ethos, a phenomenology of Eros, is essential. This is why a denial of the Field of Desire, as it lives in the individual person, is at the center of most forms of fundamentalism.

Clearly, Shiite fundamentalism, in which the young men of Hamas brutalize their own desire and brutalize the feminine, through sexual abuse, and honor killing, and rape, is the shadow expression of the dissociated Field of Desire.

• When we write about Homo Amor in philosophical terms,
• and we write about a new phenomenology of Eros, a New Story of desire,
• and we write about Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self —

— we are actually telling a new vision of The Universe: A Love Story that’s never been articulated before.

At this time between worlds and at this time between stories, the crisis needs to be responded to with a crossing, which is a crossing to a new and momentous leap forward in the evolution of love, in which I become Homo Amor.

• I feel the goodness of my desire.
• I feel the Field of Eros and desire living alive awake in me.
• And it includes everyone, and no one is excluded.

That’s where we are going.

I love my son madly and insanely. But I will not ever, ever, ever, suggest Dharma based on the love of my son, or suggest policy based on the love of my son, which is ethnocentric in its violating form. I’ve got to love your son, and you’ve got to love my son. It’s like wow, cha!

We looked at this through an entirely different prism:

Hamas is the story of a failed love story, and a failed love story is a failed story of desire.

Our response has to be to articulate a new love story, which is based on a Field of ErosValue. That’s The Crossing. That’s what The Crossing is. No one is excluded. No one is excluded. That’s the movement from the crisis to The Crossing.

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