Maurice Denis. The Story of Psyche: panel 3. Psyche Discovers that Her Mysterious Lover is Eros 1908.

370 — Singing “One Day” Together is Necessary but Not Sufficient: Only a New Story of DesireValue Can Take Us Home

We have to tell a new story of value, and this story of value must be a new story of desire

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [November 12, 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: If we have learned anything since October 7, 2023, it is that the atrocities in Israel, and the tragedy that ensued were unavoidable, including the horror of the moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, drawn all over social media and at the leading western educational institutions. This reality is created by the failed stories people live inside, the two failed stories of love and desire: the Barbie story (that is, the “woke” culture of so much of the liberal West) and the Hamas story.
The Barbie story doesn’t believe that value is real and disqualifies love and desire.
The Hamas story denies the value of life and demonizes desire.
As the tragedy unfolds, what is ours to do is easily as important as anything that needs to be done on the ground: we have to tell a new story of value, and this story of value must be a new story of desire. The heart of this story is a seven-fold realization: (1) Value is real. (2) Eros is a value. (3) Eros is the value of Cosmos. (4) Value itself is Eros. (5) We live in that field of value, and that field of value lives in us. (6) It lives in our bodies. (7) Desire discloses value. Therefore, when we listen to the murmurings of the sacred, we hear them in the polis of the body, in the body politic of a human being.

We create reality out of the story that we live in

We are enacting a revolution. Our premise is that we are at this time between worlds and time between stories, like da Vinci and his cohorts were in the Renaissance. We are threatened with the potential death of humanity — existential risk — or the second form of existential risk, the death of our humanity. We can only respond effectively and ultimately effectively in one way — by articulating a new story of value.

Yes, we need to work on infrastructure solutions and social structure solutions — reformulating law, working to deploy technology appropriately — but these solutions are insufficient.

If we’ve learned anything from the last 35, 40 days since October 7th, it is that the atrocities that happened on the southern border of Israel and the tragedy that has ensued since then were unavoidable. This reality was created by the stories that people are living inside of. These stories created the reality of October 7th and the reality of the response to October 7th, particularly in the Western world. All this comes from failed stories.

I want to recapitulate what we talked about last week and then expand, in a deep way, the third part of last week: What is the new story that we can live inside of?

Today, I am not going to enter into what actually is happening in Israel — what are the options, what the Israel Defense Forces are doing, why what’s happening is happening, the nature of the intense, tragic moral confusion. Just an hour ago, Israel tried to deliver fuel to a hospital in order to keep basic services going. Hamas refused the fuel, wanting the people in the hospital to die for the purposes of promoting the jihad agenda. If you can’t understand that, which is an absolute fact, you don’t understand what’s going on.

What does it mean when a jihadi culture of death meets a culture of life, and how do they interact with each other?

One has to look at an impossible set of questions. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it right now. I’m not a military commander. I don’t know if Israel has another option. We are in an enormously painful situation. There have been hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Arab world in the last several years in an internal Arab oppression. We don’t know how many people have been killed in the last six weeks. We don’t know simply because our information is coming from Hamas. But this is not a numbers game.

It’s not only about 250 hostages in Gaza. It’s not only about the innocents being killed. It’s not only about the level of human vicious sadism, intentional sadism directed against babies burnt in ovens, legs dismembered, breasts of women cut off in front of their husbands as their phalluses were cut off in front of their children — intentional horrific sadism as an expression of a jihadi worldview.

It’s not just that.

It’s that this worldview is holding the world hostage.

It is comparable to the moment in World War II where a nationalist socialist, Nazi worldview held the world hostage, and the Allies had no choice but to respond. There were innocent Germans held hostage as it were by Hitler — there was no place for them to go, as Gazans have been held hostage by Hamas, and have no place to go. Israel has tried — with incredible, incredible valor — to create humanitarian corridors, to create pauses in fighting amidst complete impossibilities.

I know people on both sides quite well. No one’s blood is redder than anyone’s blood. Let’s understand that. It’s a tragic situation.

I’m not going into all that now. That’s not our topic today. Right now, I want to focus on a deeper meaning. I want to think with you, and feel with you, and feel through what needs to be done now that’s ours to do.

I am completely and utterly convinced that what’s ours to do is easily as important, and as central, and as vital, and as morally urgent as anything that has to be done on the ground in Gaza, whether on the side of Israel or on the side of the heroic doctors in Gaza, incredible human beings, or on the side of the heroic people in Gaza trying to protect their families as they’re held hostage by Hamas.

Even as that is all happening, there’s something that needs to be done, which will ultimately affect the future of humanity more than anything else, in the long run. In the long run means the next months and years. As the black death was raging in Europe, and they had to do what they could to ameliorate the unimaginable suffering, what the Medicis, and the da Vinci, and Ficino understood is that —

• in order to create the future,
• in order to address suffering

— we need to tell a new story, because we create reality out of the story that we live in.

The story we live in is not just a social construction. It’s not just a contrivance.

Postmodernity understood that story was central, but it said it’s contrivance. It’s just made up. The world is really a tale told by an idiot, full of sounds and fury signifying nothing. We make up stories.

That’s not what we are saying.

Postmodernity got the centrality of story, but as a materialist contrivance. What we’re talking about is the ontology of story. The story you live in literally transfigures you. It recreates you. This is why we said last week that most of the people who committed the atrocities were not born evil psychopaths, but they were living in a failed story. They were living in a failed love story.

We are going to be revolutionaries today.
We are going to participate in the evolution of love.
We are going to try and add a new chapter to the new story.

And I am, friends, Romans, countrymen, beloveds, I am a thousand percent sure that this enactment, this engagement, this telling of the new story is the crucial new prism for understanding what’s happening.

Without this prism, we cannot participate in the evolution of love.
Without this prism, we cannot heal suffering.

Not all stories are equal

Before we begin, let us watch this clip for a second:

Here are the lyrics:

One day, one day, one day
Sometimes I lay under the moon
And thank God I’m breathin’
Then I pray, “Don’t take me soon
’Cause I am here for a reason”
Sometimes in my tears I drown
But I never let it get me down
So when negativity surrounds
I know someday, it’ll all turn around because
All my life, I’ve been waitin’ for
I’ve been prayin’ for, for the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more wars, and our children will play

One day (one day), one day (one day)
One day (oh-oh-oh)
One day (one day), one day (one day)
One day (oh-oh-oh)

It’s not about win or lose
’Cause we all lose when they feed on the souls of the innocent
Blood-drenched pavement
Keep on movin’ though the waters stay ragin’
In this maze, you can lose your way, your way
It might drive you crazy
But don’t let it faze you, no way, no way
Sometimes in my tears I drown (I drown)
But I never let it get me down (get me down)
So when negativity surrounds (surrounds)
I know someday, it’ll all turn around because
All my life, I’ve been waitin’ for (waitin’ for)
I’ve been prayin’ for (prayin’ for), for the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more (fight no more)
There’ll be no more wars (no more wars), and our children will play

One day (one day), one day (one day)
One day (oh, oh, oh, oh-oh-oh, one day)
One day (one day), one day (one day)
One day (oh-oh-oh)

One day, this all will change, treat people the same
Stop with the violence, down with the hate
One day, we’ll all be free and proud to be
Under the same sun, singin’ songs of freedom like
Wah-yo (one day, one day), wah-yo, oh, oh (oh-oh-oh)
Wah-yo (one day, one day), wah-yo, oh, oh (oh-oh-oh)
All my life, I’ve been waitin’ for
I’ve been prayin’ for, for the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more wars, and our children will play

One day (one day), one day (one day)
One day (oh-oh-oh)
One day (one day), one day (one day)
One day (oh-oh-oh)

Gorgeous. Right? Isn’t that gorgeous? It’s so deep, and it’s so gorgeous, and so beautiful.

This song is insanely beautiful. It’s this group of Palestinians and Israelis, coming together in a gorgeous moment, in 2018. Of course, it’s happening in Israel. The second this happens in an Arab country, there will be peace in the Middle East. That’s important. And it’s not happening. It’s happening in Israel. It’s got to happen everywhere. But it’s gorgeous. It’s stunning. It’s beautiful.

But this beauty is only real if it’s in the context of a new story.

That’s the big sentence. The beauty of these words is only true in the context of a new story of value. Without a new story of value, they don’t take us home, and the song ultimately falls flat.

I am going to look at three or four levels of consciousness.

Level one is: you take sides. We are the right ones. You’re the wrong ones. It is not based on information or facts. It is simply: “This is my group, this is your group.” In Western literature, they call it the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a fight between the two sides. In Shakespeare, the Montagues and the Capulets. These are the good guys. Those are the bad guys.

It’s a battle between good and evil, and I arbitrarily make the other side evil, and my side good.

Level two is: I’ve got to move beyond that. I’ve got to transcend that, I’ve got to end the trance of the arbitrary in-group, out-group. That’s the song we just heard; that’s the vision. We come together and we can feel each other. That which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us. We can take each other’s perspective when we can feel into each other’s story.

There are two things happening in the clip that we just saw. There are the words, and there are the faces of the Israeli children, the Israeli-Jewish children, the Israeli-Arab children, the Palestinian children — so beautiful. The faces. You get these are all faces of She.

These are all faces of god, goddess.
These are all faces of reality’s Eros, in the personhood of human beings.

The notion of this absurd battle between good and evil seems preposterous. Here we are together in this room, and we are holding this together, and we’re one love, and we’re one heart, and we’re one breath, and we’re one family.

Yes! Yes, that’s level two. We can hear each other’s perspective. We can hear each other’s story, and we can honor each other’s story. And that’s beautiful.

But now here we gotta get to level three.

Level three is: not all stories are equal. This is absolutely critical.

If there is value in the cosmos, if the good is real and truth is real, then it’s not arbitrary, it’s not made up — and some stories are better and truer than other stories.

The battle between good and evil

Let me give you a simplest example. The Allied cause and the Nazi cause in World War II were not simply two stories that couldn’t hear each other’s perspective. There was an actual battle between two different instantiations of value. Those values were not the same.

Does that mean that there’s an actual real battle, and it’s a battle between good and evil in some very, very real way? Yes.
Does that mean that all the Allied soldiers were good? No, it doesn’t.
Does that mean there wasn’t corruption on the Allied side?
Does it mean there wasn’t treachery?
Does it mean there weren’t egoic battles between generals? No, it doesn’t mean that.
Does it mean there weren’t Allied soldiers who committed some war crimes along the way in World War II that they need to be held fully accountable for? No, it doesn’t mean that.

Good and evil doesn’t mean my side is all good. What it does mean is that the core set of values that my side is standing for, and the way those are expressed, are of a deeper, more good, true, and beautiful nature than, for example, the values of the SS.

Now, were there good Germans in World War II? Of course there were. Start with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his gorgeous work.

Were there good men and women in German soldier uniforms? Of course there were.
Were there beautiful, innocent Germans all through World War II? Of course there were.

There was a beautiful scene in World War I which was captured in a movie, when the Germans and the French were fighting, firing at each other for five years, and five million people are killed. There is this moment on Christmas where they come together and they just start singing together and they just stop firing. They just say, “What are we doing here?” They just have this moment. and it goes on for more than a week.

We have to move beyond level one — my side, your side, to level two — we’re all part of a shared story, but that’s not sufficient. You got to get to the next level.

The next level is: now we need to clarify stories. The truth is that the people who were in that hall that we just saw singing, I would say virtually all of them had a shared story of value of some kind, which was critical.

It’s not true in the same way with the jihadi culture of death, which glorifies torture because it is an expression of the story it’s living in. A narrow, distorted love story, where Allah loves only a particular section of Sunnis and Shiites, and anyone else is Dar al-Harb needs to be destroyed by the sword.

That culture of death says:

• there is no shared field of value in this world,
• and there is no field of sacred desire,
• and there is no sacred body, which discloses to me the beauty and dignity of the human being who is in the image of the infinite intimate, the image of the divine.

All that is wrong. All that’s denied in the Hamas story.

That doesn’t get swept away in a one-day concert. You can’t just go to level two.

Yeah, we do need to go to level two, where there are no sides.

We need to get beneath the sides.
We need to get to that place where we are all part of something larger, and that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us.
Then we need to go to level three, and we need to re-engage the battle between good and evil because it’s actually real.

Lord of the Rings wasn’t completely wrong. Sauron needed to be defeated. Sauron and Gandalf weren’t incarnating the same field of value. That’s a very big deal.

It’s not a waste of time to talk about Hamas, my friends, because all over the Western world, we have a valorization of Hamas. We have a refusal to make moral distinctions between Hamas and a pluralistic democracy. It’s not about Hamas. It’s about the jihadi culture all over the world, and now we’re going to go the next step.

Everything depends on our capacity to make these discernments in a real way.

Two failed stories of love and desire

Evolutionary Love Code:

There are three universe stories.
- There is the Barbie universe story. 
- There is the Hamas universe story, or the
  fundamentalist universe story. There are different forms 
  of fundamentalism. 
- And then there is the Homo Amor, CosmoErotic 
  Humanism story, the New Story of Value.
Those are the three choices that we have today. It’s not a 
binary choice; we need to find a third way. We need to find
our way between the binary of Barbie and Hamas. Between 
postmodern, desiccated, empty materialism, and a 
pseudo-erotic fundamentalism which is wildly destructive.
The third way is the New Story of Value rooted in Evolving 
First Principles and First Values, CosmoErotic Humanism.

There are three universe stories.

• There is the Barbie universe story.
• There is the Hamas universe story, or the fundamentalist universe story. There are different forms of fundamentalism.
• And then there is the Homo Amor, CosmoErotic Humanism story, the New Story of Value.

Those are the three choices that we have today. It’s not a binary choice; we need to find a third way. We need to find our way between the binary of Barbie and Hamas. Between postmodern, desiccated, empty materialism, and a pseudo-erotic fundamentalism which is wildly destructive.

The third way is the New Story of Value rooted in Evolving First Principles and First Values, CosmoErotic Humanism.

We said last week that we’ve got these two stories that are happening in the world at the same time. You have the jihadi story, and you have the Barbie story, and those are happening at the exact same time. In the theaters, Barbie is playing, and the jihadi massacre is taking place.

This is an intimate universe. Things happen because the universe is speaking.

In both cases, there are failed love stories, and there are failed stories of desire.

The Barbie story

The point of Barbie is that there is no love story. There is no Barbie and Ken. The only love stories in Barbie are biological, between mother and daughter, between Sasha and Gloria, between Ruth Mattel and her daughter Barbara, after whom she named the Barbie Doll. Biological love stories work, but not love stories that emerge from Cosmos, people coming together as a structure of reality. What we’ve called the CosmoErotic Universe or the Intimate Universe is utterly denied by the postmodern dogma articulated in Barbie. There is no love story. There is no Barbie and Ken. That’s one.

Two: desire is not a category of divinity. Desire is not a category of value. Desire is a completely random and ultimately meaningless social construction. This is why when Ken leans over to kiss Barbie, Barbie’s like, “What?” And then when Ken says, “I’d like to stay over,” she’s like, “Why? It’s girls’ night, every night, forever.” Barbie is, paradoxically, utterly non-erotic. The only erotic figure there at all is Weird Barbie. She’s the only erotic figure and she has stepped out of the story. But all the classical Barbie Dolls are fundamentally non-erotic. The Kens are looking for Eros, but they represent patriarchy, and their looking for Eros is interpreted as a power play. It’s a classical Foucault reading of love. Love is a power play used by men to get women, but it’s not real at all.

The only appeal to the dignity of desire and to the reality of the love story is placed in Ken’s mouth, in Ken’s song, and Ken is representative of a patriarchy that is using love for its drive for power.

That’s the Barbie story. It’s a story which denies that there’s a love story in the cosmos and denies that reality is desire and that desire is a category which takes us anywhere, which should be listened to. That’s one.

The Hamas story

At the exact same time you have Hamas, which is a failed love story.

Love is this very limited ethnocentric love between Allah and this extremely small group of people. Anyone outside of that group should be brutalized, tortured, and murdered.

At the core of that story is a denial of desire. Desire is not neutral, as it might be in Barbie. Desire is demonized. Desire is monstrous.

Therefore, for example, the boys and men of Hamas, when they actually do experience desire in their bodies (as men do, and as women do), that desire is demonized, it’s evil — but you can’t hold evil in yourself, so you project it on the other.

What emerges from a failed story of desire, which demonizes the body and its desires, is torture. Torture is the opposite of lovemaking. Torture is the opposite of Eros.

Those are our two stories.

Love is not about abandoning discernment

We want to get to that clip — that gorgeous clip of One Day — because that clip is right. But we’ve got to get to it by actually articulating a shared story.

What would the shared story be?

Only a new story changes reality. Only a new story evolves reality.

Only a new story — because story is the ontology of reality — changes reality, but a new story of what? Only a new story of desire.

Barbie is a failed story of desire.

Barbie is the postmodern woke-culture position which caricatures the masculine — as this brute power-driven figure, with some poignant pathos occasionally along the way. It’s a postmodern materialism — a brutalized desiccated masculine with no love story. That’s the core of contemporary woke culture.

I just want you to notice that the Barbie culture — all over campuses, all over the world — doesn’t know how to condemn Hamas. The Barbie culture is the postmodern culture, which says there is no field of value, and there is no field of Eros, and there is no field of love (because love is a value). Ruth Mattel says to Barbie, “You die in the end.” Meaning and values are all made up.

Since value is not real, I have no way of doing evaluation.

If there is no field of value, I don’t have the capacity to do evaluation.

There is a hierarchy only if there is value. Hierarchy simply means something or someone expresses more value:

• an atom has more value than a proton because it has more capacity to manifest life,
• and a molecule has more value than a proton because it can manifest more life,
• and then a macromolecule, and then a cell, and then a multicellular organism have more and more value.

An organism is not morally superior, but it incorporates more value. It incarnates more life than proton and electron. This is why if you rip an organism apart, a dog, you should go to prison, because you’ve been brutal to animals. If you break a rock, you don’t go to prison because complex multicellular structures have more aliveness, more value than rocks do — but they are part of the same continuum of value and aliveness.

But if I say the universe is desiccated postmodern (= no field of value, desire isn’t real, there’s no love story), then I don’t have the capacity to make an evaluation that allows me to respond to jihad and say No to it.

Most of liberal democratic Europe is in the Barbie camp, meaning Europe is unmoored, and disconnected, and dissociated from its own ground and value. When it confronts a population that’s utterly committed to a set of values, even if they are jihadi values,

• they don’t take them seriously (because they don’t take value seriously), and
• they are not willing to make a demand that in order to become a citizen, we have to have a shared story of value — because that would be violating the one value left, which is diversity and pluralism.

But pluralism has to be a principle of pluralism. Pluralism cannot become an idolatrous value. Diversity cannot become an idolatrous value.

Diversity has to be in the context of a shared story of value.

A universal grammar of value is a context for our diversity. But what social democracy in Europe is saying is, there is no shared grammar of value. There is no context for diversity. The only value that remains is diversity itself. Therefore, when huge populations with jihadi sympathies become part of Europe, they will vote Europe out of existence. That is not fanciful. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is probably the best sociological reading of where Europe is going right now. That’s a very, very big deal.

The former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, on Free Press, sent reporters to rallies all over the Western world, where people would say, “No, we won’t condemn Hamas. No, we can’t do that. Go Hamas!”

I can only create one love and One Day in one song in that stunning scene in Haifa if we are part of a story of value. The Barbie story of value (in which there is no value) cannot evaluate, and therefore cannot figure out a simple moral equation, which is:

Atrocities are wrong and you have to condemn Hamas.

Love is not about abandoning discernment. Love is a perception. I hold everyone accountable, but I cultivate discernment.

Desire discloses value

What do we need to do? How do we get to level three?

First, we make discernments.
And then — from our discernment, from our ability to make moral distinctions — we articulate a new story.
The new story is a new shared story.

What is the new shared story? That’s the most important thing.

What’s the new shared story of value?

That new story has to be a new story of desire.

We have to own our ideas — and not let ideologies own us.

When an ideology owns us, it means that we are trapped in a story from which we generate reality.

• If the story is a destructive story,
• if it is a failed love story,
• if it’s a failed story of desire —

— we generate horror. To move from horror to hope, we need to come alive in a new story.

What is this new story?

At the core of the new story is the realization that reality is Eros.

• There is a field of value.
• Eros means something. What does Eros mean? Eros means that there is a desire in Cosmos — a radically alive desire — for ever deeper contact and ever larger wholeness. Eros is the experience of reality desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That is the Eros equation that governs reality. That’s the structure of reality.
• Eros is a value of Cosmos. It’s not just a jargon description. It’s actually the value of Cosmos. Cosmos values Eros.
• But it’s not just that Eros is a value of Cosmos, it’s that value itself is Eros. Value is Eros.

Value is the movement of reality towards ever more Eros, so Eros is value and value is Eros. They’re the same. There is no split between them. There is no such thing as Eros and value. It’s ErosValue.

Reality is ErosValue, all the way up and all the way down.

That’s what it is. And reality is the evolution of Eros and value. The ErosValue keeps evolving and deepening — but it is the core structure of reality.

One of the core properties of Eros is desire, and particularly desire for intimacy. Eros is desire.

We don’t just want to be static. I don’t want to just be here. I desire.

I desire more value.
I desire more Eros.
I desire more coherence.
I desire more intimacy — more shared identity, more mutuality of recognition, more mutuality of feeling, more mutuality of value, more mutuality of purpose.

Eros is the desire for evermore intimacy, and we have an intimacy equation:

Intimacy = shared identity in the context of [relative] otherness x mutuality of recognition x mutuality of feeling x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose.

Reality is quivering with desire, and it desires more and more intimate communion, more and more coherence, more and more mutuality of recognition, more and more capacity to feel each other, to know each other. That’s the structure of reality itself.

Now, if I can actually find that and feel that, what I begin to know is that desire discloses value. This is where it gets really subtle, and really deep, and really beautiful.

To desire means I desire something I don’t have and which I value. I want that, but not in a superficial pseudo-want. It’s not a pseudo-desire. It’s a desire of Cosmos.

Cosmos has a desire for life.

Protons, neutrons, and electrons come together because they share value. And what’s their value? They value life. They value increasing intimacy — increasing mutualities of recognition and increasing mutualities of feeling and increasing mutualities of purpose. Protons, neutrons, and electrons have a shared field of value that moves them to come together to create greater life.

The value of reality, the ErosValue of reality is life. It’s the intrinsic dignity of life, and it’s the intrinsic experience of being all in for all life.

There is one side, and it is the side of life. It is the side of ErosValue life. Desire, when it’s clarified, reaches for life. Clarified desire reaches for value, and value is Eros. Value is life. Value is the experience of ever deeper intimate communions. That’s its nature.

Another way to say that would be that gnosis — knowledge, knowing — is always erotic. For example, the word knowing in English in the sense of carnal knowledge. To know is to be bound in Eros.

He knew her.
She knew him.

To know, biblically, is to be joined in intimate communion. Knowing is an erotic act. To know is to know erotically. It is to feel. To participate in this shared field of intimate communion. In Hebrew, yada — the word to know and the word to love — is the same because love discloses gnosis.

Through my body I vision God

How do I know what’s ethical?
How do I know ethos?
How do I know that a love story is filled with ethos?

I know because my body keeps score as my friend Bessel van der Kolk said it, or as the Book of Job said it, Through my body I vision God.

Now, what is my body?

My body is a field of life. It’s a field of desire.

I listen to my body. My body desires contact. My body desires to be in devotion to you. When I am in desire, I am in devotion to you.

My body desires to know you. My body desires to feel the quivering tenderness of your touch, or to feel the fierce penetration of your presence with an open heart.
My body desires aliveness.
My body desires to move beyond loneliness into a wider field of shared vision and value.
My body desires to be creative. My body desires to hold and to be held.
My body desires truth. The body of the scientist is passionately alive — in the most molecular and cellular way — with this passion for knowing, this passion for truth that drove Steven Weinberg to know everything you possibly can about elementary particles. Weinberg spoke about his passionate desire for this value of truth.

We are driven, we are animated, we are urgently aroused in this field of desire (which is the body) to incarnate more and more value —

• more and more life,
• more and more holding,
• more and more intimate communion.

That’s the nature of desire. That’s what we mean when we say desire is the name of God. It’s what one text means when it says that if all of wisdom would not be given, we could govern all of reality by the Song of Solomon.

We can feel this together.

If I am in the Barbie movie, and I am dissociated from the dignity of my desire, then I am dissociated from the field of value. Then I’ve got a postmodern emptiness of the kind that B.F. Skinner thought was the nature of reality.

In his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, where he essentially described six decades of work at Harvard University, he wrote how we needed to turn the world into a version of totalitarian control — with no one realizing they’re being controlled. Because for Skinner, love is not real, and value is not real, and freedom’s not real. Skinner was a good guy. He thought that in the face of the existential risk we need to control the whole thing and enact an invisible totalitarianism. It will be run by upgraded algorithms, and will produce radically downgraded human beings.

That’s what emerges from Barbie.

And there is this incapacity to evaluate.

For example, Skinner, or the MIT Media Lab that’s patterned after Skinner’s work, are they worried about removing free will from people? No, because freedom is not real, and free will is not real, and freedom is not a value of Cosmos — so it doesn’t matter.

This is very, very, very important. I cannot make an evaluation if I am not in the field of value, or if I am in a culture of jihad — a culture that denies the value of life and the value of desire.

Without a shared grammar of value, existential risk will rip reality apart

Why does Hamas deny many of the atrocities?

It’s not just for propaganda reasons, but because that field of life of course continues to live in the body of a person inside Hamas. Yet that intrinsic relationship to the field of value gets dissociated, and a failed love story, a jihadi love story takes over. That’s tragic.

The ability to access the field of value lives in everyone, including any member of Hamas, like the son of the founder of Hamas, who has made an incredible amount of courageous videos, and wrote an incredible book. He stepped out of that and said, “Whoa! You all are unable to make distinctions between the complexities of Israeli Zionism, and Hamas. You are lost.”

The ability to access the field of value is not racial. It’s human. There is a universal grammar of value, and there is no one who is excluded from the circle. Anyone can participate in this universal grammar of value. Anyone can to be in that auditorium in Haifa, and say,

• We are expressions of the universal love story,
• and we honor the dignity of desire,
• and we honor the currency of desire that moves through every human being,
• and we honor all of the diverse expressions of the dignity of desire within a shared grammar of value, within a shared grammar of life, within a shared grammar of universal human rights, within a shared grammar of truth and goodness and beauty.

We don’t live in a world, my friends, where we can actually survive without a shared grammar of value. Without a shared grammar of value, existential risk will rip reality apart.

And part of that shared grammar of value is a shared field of Eros.

Is the death cult exclusive to Hamas?

Of course it’s not. Of course there are other expressions in the world who have deployed death indiscriminately. However — and this is a big however — there are two reasons you can do that. You can do that because you believe there is no field of value — or you can do that because you deny the value of life.

For example, the Chinese Communist Party believes there is no field of value. Therefore, the Cultural Revolution killed indiscriminately, and viciously, and cruelly because the only thing that exists is the state, and there is no value independently of that state. There is a fundamental disqualification of the field of value that lives deeply in Marxist theory in its desiccated forms, and it got adopted by communism in a horrific and terrible way. That’s for sure. True.

There are also corrupt expressions of democracy. For example, there could be arms merchants trying to push democracies to war for the sake of profit, in which case those arms merchants would be violators of the universal love story and purveyors of death. They would be in violation of the norms of the field of value. Of course, that’s true.

Nonetheless, there is the fundamental distinction that needs to be drawn:

Do I, at the very core of my being, affirm life and the value of life?

Once I affirm life and the value of life, then I am faced with an impossible question:

Are there situations where, in order to affirm life and the value of life, I need to go to war?

Yes, there are. Because I need to take responsibility not only for life in this moment, I need to take responsibility for life in future generations. This is why we couldn’t be pacifists in World War II. The commitment to life and to the future generations of life required us to stand for the field of value and the field of life.

These are fundamental discernments. Without these discernments, society crumbles.

And these discernments are no longer self-evident, they need to be made. Making them is utterly, utterly critical. That’s what we’re doing here.

Value itself is Eros

Zion will be liberated through justice.

In this world of holy and broken hallelujahs — because none of us here are making policy decisions, neither in Gaza, nor in Israel, nor in the United States, nor in Yemen, nor in Iran — justice has to mean what we can do here.

• We can actually tell the new story of value.
• We can write the new story of value.
• We can do the da Vinci move and download it into the source code of culture, and evolve love in some dramatic, and beautiful, and gorgeous way.

That is what we are one billion percent committed to do.

But justice has to include not just justice for this person in front of me — justice has to include the widest field of justice for the widest possible field of people.

For example — and I want to say it one last time — when I make a decision to drop a bomb in World War II in order to take down a particular bastion of Nazism, that’s a very painful decision to make. A decision obviously needs to be taken individually in each case. But it’s not a given that you shouldn’t drop the bomb because there will be an injustice in the moment — because some innocent people will be killed. That is not the decision that can be made.

I sat with the Dalai Lama, and we talked about this together in Dharamsala. We both agreed to this wholeheartedly. That’s tragically not a possibility because I have to take responsibility for the next four generations, and the next five generations, and the next ten generations. There is a moment when I say, well, Nazism actually can’t triumph.

Those are unimaginably painful, unimaginably impossible decisions, but they do need to be made — and they need to be made with mad love.

We want to go back to One Day.
We want to go back to one love.
We want to go back to one heart.

And we want the holy and sacred spark of every man, woman, and child — in Africa and in Asia and in the Middle East and in in Gaza City and in Tel Aviv and all over reality, and all over the world — we want literally everybody to be in the field, and we want to cultivate our ability to love.

Love is not merely an emotion, a feeling, it’s a perception. It’s our capacity to see. It’s our capacity to cultivate discernment.

We need to cultivate a story of desire in which the body keeps score, in which I listen to the knowing of my body.

I get quiet enough, I meditate, I chant.
I practice. I listen. I study.
I study the sciences. I study the interior sciences.
I listen, I hold, I touch, I feel, and I live and I be that love story, and I participate in the evolution of love.

That’s what we’re here to do. That’s the new story. That’s the universal love story in which the value of Cosmos is ErosValue all the way up and all the way down. With this, we close.

To sum up:

1. Value is real.
2. Eros is a value.
3. Eros is the value of Cosmos.
4. Value itself is Eros.
5. That value lives in us. We participate in that field of value. We live in that field of value, and that field of value lives in us.
6. It lives in our embodiment.
7. Therefore, when we listen to the murmurings of the sacred, we hear them in the polis of the body and the body politic of me as a human being.

We’ve got to honor that. We’ve got to respect that — and that immediately tells me there’s no place for torture. There’s no place for sadism. There’s no place for wanton brutality. When these are at play, we know we’re not in the field of value. We know we’re not in the field of Eros, one love and one heart.

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