371 — Eros and Gnosis and Ethics Are One: Reality Is Evolving Scripts of Desire
We only know what we love, and we only love what we know.
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [November 19, 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: October 7th became a watershed moment, because it exposed an utter breakdown of our capacity to make sense — to discern, to follow a storyline, to make distinctions. In this episode, we address the question underneath this breakdown: how do we know what we know? How do we access common sense? But sense is inseparable from sensuality. In other words, there is no split between Eros, gnosis and ethos: we only know what we love, and we only love what we know. The unmistakable inner experience of value lives in the erotic experience. We can only heal the body politic by healing the body.
The breakdown of sensemaking
There is no question in my heart, mind, body that there is a before October 7th world and there is an after October 7th world.
October 7th was the moment when the primary enemy of the Palestinian people, a degraded version of fundamentalism — Hamas — brutalized and tortured the feminine. Raping seven-year-old girls and cutting off their arms in front of their mothers — just to get a sense of what we mean, so we don’t turn away from it. The enemies of the Palestinian people, Hamas, who are holding the best of Palestinian aspirations hostage, performed acts of butchery.
But that’s not why October 7th is a watershed moment.
Tragically, there has been butchery in the world before —
- Unimaginable tragedy in Iran — the killing of girls by the Iranian regime, pulling girls out of high school (and of course, Iran is backing Hamas).
- Horrors on the battlefield in Ukraine, and Putin’s attempt to destroy Ukraine.
- Yemen, Sudan, Congo, child soldiers —
— all of this taking place in a larger context of a world that’s filled with beauty, and filled with goodness, and filled with Eros, and filled with wonder, and filled with delight.
It’s all happening at the same time.
But the reason that it’s a before October 7th and an after October 7th is because the utter incapacity to do sensemaking was radically exposed in an unimaginable way. It was an utter breakdown of the sensemaking apparatus.
When the Holocaust happened in Europe, it took decades for people to have the temerity to deny that it happened. After October 7th, we were experiencing denials within a couple of days. In the last week, the denials have picked up steam. And now the formal position of an unimaginable amount of people on various forms of social media is that these atrocities didn’t actually happen. The enormous amount of first-person and second-person eyewitness testimony and digital evidence are essentially dismissed. Denial is happening within a few weeks.
There is also an inability to discern, to follow a storyline, to make distinctions — not a primitive taking of sides, but discerning a hierarchy of value. There is a deafening silence of major Western universities all over Europe and the United States. The reporting of BBC and some of the French news outlets is so shockingly in violation of elementary sensemaking that it’s almost unimaginable.
I am not going to talk about Israel today, and I am not going to talk about Hamas today. I am not going to go into ten examples of where and why. I just want to feel it with you.
There is this breakdown in sensemaking, in the ability to make sense, in basic capacities to know, to make simple distinctions.
And so, I want to talk today about how we know, about how we make distinctions, about how we do sensemaking.
Because that’s everything.
The breakdown of sensemaking is but one expression of an utter breakdown in any kind of shared story of value in the world. And there is absolutely no question in my body, heart, mind that the future of Reality depends on our capacity to articulate a shared story of value, in which everyone is at the table. China is at the table, and Russia is at the table, and the United States is at the table, and Islamic fundamentalism finds its way to the table, and postmodern disqualifications of Reality find their way to the table.
We need a new story of value grounded in the nature of Cosmos itself.
We need a cosmic, galactic story of value, which is, to borrow the word from Aramaic and French, “unfuckable” — meaning it is so grounded. It’s so well-done.
It’s not declared.
It’s not dogmatic.
It’s not fanciful.
It’s not conjecture.
It’s the deepest voice of She.
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
A wise man once said:
What we think is less than what we know.
What we think is less than what we know.
What we love is so much less than what there is.
And to that precise extent, we are so much less than
what we are.
To be what we are, we need to love. We only know what we love.
We only love what we know. When we know, we can begin to feel.
And when we feel, we can begin to think.
And only then can we begin to engage in the sensuality of
sensemaking.
Love and knowledge are not separate.
Eros and gnosis are not separate.Without common sense, the meta-crisis will destroy us
How do we know anything? How do we know anything about anything?
What we think is less than what we know.
What we think — that’s my cognitive mind, but it’s much smaller than what I know.
What is knowing? What does it mean, to know?
What we’re going to try and look for here is the common sense of Reality. Declared dogmas are almost always strategies for the hijacking of power — dominator forms of power, not sacred forms of power, and they need to be rejected.
But underneath declared dogmas, there is a common sense.
Now, what does common sense mean?
Common sense means that there is a common field of sense between us.
Sense is sensual.
Sense means that underneath the superficialities and the vagaries of surface thinking, there is a deeper big mind, Daishin. A deeper big heart, big mind. There is a bigger mochin de-gadlut, in the Aramaic tradition: expanded heart-mind consciousness, which we all share. There is a common sense.
Our common sense is the beginning of our common sensemaking.
We live in this time between worlds and this time between stories.
In the space in between, there is a meta-crisis. The meta-crisis operates in about fifteen vectors: from artificial intelligence to methane gas under the tundra. Israel-Hamas is just one expression of that meta-crisis.
In order to respond to the meta-crisis, we need global coordination.
We can’t have global coordination without global coherence.
We can’t have global coherence without global resonance.
We have to resonate with each other, which means we need common sense. We need common sensuality. Common sense creates a sense of intimacy between us.
When we don’t have this shared intimacy and shared sensuality, we don’t have that shared resonance, we can’t create coherence and we can’t coordinate — and the meta-crisis quite literally destroys us.
The incapacity for common sense creates an intimacy disorder — a global intimacy disorder. It can only be healed through common sense, which is a shared story of value.
To sum up: In order to respond to this meta-crisis, we need common sense. Common sense means a shared story. A shared story has to be a shared story of value. A global intimacy disorder means there is no shared story of value.
But it has to be values that are grounded in Cosmos — not contrived values, not dogmatic values, not values claimed by the Shambhala masters or the Hebrew masters.
I love what I know, and I know what I love
Values that the greatest masters incarnated in their body, hearts, mind — in a democratization of sensuality, we can all access directly. We can directly and clearly access these values in our body.
The shared story of value is the structure of Reality.
The shared story of value is the sensuality of Reality in the narrative form.
The shared story of Reality is the story of Reality’s sense — the sensemaking of Reality, or the story of Reality’s sensuality.
You can’t split sensemaking from sensuality. Reality is a story, and we live in that story. That story is both sensible and sensual.
At its core, it is a story of desire.
A shared story of value is a shared story of desire. My script of value is my script of desire.
We are used to thinking of sacred texts as scripts of value. But underneath sacred texts at their best, at their very core, are scripts of desire.
We said sensemaking and sensuality are deeply related. Let’s just follow that in language.
To love is to know. To love God is to know God.
For example, when Maimonides and Aquinas and the medieval scholars talk about loving God, whatever that means, they directly link loving God and knowing God. There is no split between love and knowledge. I love what I know, and I know what I love.
There is a virtuous circle that moves between love and knowledge. If I don’t love you, I don’t know you. And if I don’t know you, I don’t love you.
In Hebrew, the word yada means ‘to know,’ as in And Adam knew his wife Eve. Knowing is carnal.
We call it in English, carnal knowledge. He knew her biblically is a phrase in English. I don’t know what the Russian or Italian or French or Dutch equivalent is — but to know is to know carnally. All knowledge is carnal knowledge — or, said differently:
There is no essential split between Eros and gnosis.
Eros — sensuality, the field of the sensual — is the place where I do sensemaking. It is the matrix of common sense. It’s the common field of the sensual, from which no one is excluded. Everyone is in the circle of the sensual. It is a common sense.
It is only common sense — or common sensuality, or common Eros — that can yield a common gnosis, a common knowing. That knowing becomes a new story of value, a new grammar of value.
Because Eros encodes itself in story. That’s the nature of Reality. Eros is always Eros in action. Evolution is love in action.
What is Eros?
Evolution is Eros in action, seeking, desiring evermore Eros, evermore sensuality.
Let’s understand this. We are just going to step in gently. I want to just understand this together, crazy deeply. We are not in a rush, we are relaxed. Have a glass of wine. Let’s lift our glasses. We are in Plato’s Symposium. The wine is flowing. We are delighted. Feel my body. Feel my belly. Feel my pulsing, feel my gentleness. Let’s raise our glasses. L’chaim! Salud! Cheers! We celebrate. We celebrate Reality today. Today is a celebration. Let’s go deep inside.
Reality is Eros. That’s what Reality is.
What is Eros?
Eros means something very, very particular.
Eros is a story. It’s a movement of Reality. It’s not static, it’s dynamic.
Eros is this deep ground of being — being at home. This essential being-ness of Cosmos. I am at home, I am grounded, I am welcome in Reality. Ah, I can rest.
And then, Eros is movement. It’s a becoming.
Eros is the spaciousness of being, and Eros is the ecstatic urgency of becoming.
What is Eros?
- Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever-deeper contact, ever-deeper touch, and ever-deeper wholeness — so that from that touch, from that contact, a new emergent, a new possibility, a new wholeness is generated.
That is Eros.
That’s the structure of Reality.
The interior experience of Eros is this desire for contact, ever-deeper contact, and ever-greater possibility, which is ever-greater wholeness. When we come together as separate parts and we form a new whole, that wholeness creates a new possibility.
- Sometimes that possibility is a baby.
- Sometimes that possibility is a manuscript.
- Sometimes that possibility is a new emergence, a new force.
- Sometimes that possibility is a phenomenology of Eros.
But when we come together, we create. Eros is creative by its nature.
All men and women are born equal.
All men and women are born erotically creative.
Eros and Intimacy
Eros is desire.
Now, this desire for deeper contact, and for greater wholeness, and for greater possibility, is really a desire for intimacy. I want intimacy.
Because what is intimacy?
Here is the 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.
- Intimacy means a new shared identity between the parts: Two people come together. They were living separate lives, and all of a sudden, they began to experience themselves as part of a larger whole, a new wholeness, which can have many forms. That’s a new intimacy.
- There’s a new shared identity in the context of otherness: I don’t disappear. You don’t disappear. It’s not fusion. It’s a union.
- We recognize each other (mutuality of recognition).
- We feel each other (mutuality of feeling).
- We have a shared field of value (mutuality of value).
- We have a shared purpose, a deep sense of a shared purpose (=mutuality of purpose).
Here is the Eros equation:
Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, moving towards, desiring, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
The script of desire of Reality is written in the Eros equation and intimacy equation. The Eros equation and the intimacy equation are scripts of desire.
The first script of desire is a script of Reality itself.
The sacred texts of the great traditions are later scripts of desire. They’re commenting on — and they have to emerge from, and they have to be aligned with — the script of desire of Reality itself.
Now, let me just say clearly: you cannot have ever-greater wholeness if your heart doesn’t break for every innocent person killed in Gaza.
You can’t have greater wholeness if you’re in an ethnocentric position, if you want to perpetuate your egoic ethnocentric entity for its own sake, independent of the scripts of Reality. An ethnocentric script of desire that views the other as outside the circle of Eros is a script of desire that violates Reality. It’s a false script of desire. It’s a pornographic script of desire. Shadow versions of ethnocentric consciousness, which are othering those that are outside of their ethnocentric circle, are pornographic.
And if I can’t condemn the horror of Hamas, which violates the scripts of desire of Reality Herself, well then, I’m not in the love story. I am lost in a pornographic narrative.
ErosValue
Reality is a field of Eros, or a field of Desire.
This field of Desire desires what? Evermore intimacy.
So, the story of evolution is:
- Evolution is Eros.
- Evolution is Eros in action.
- What is the action of Eros? Desire.
- What does Eros desire? Value.
Eros desires value. Or, said differently, Eros is value.
Eros is the desire for value, and value itself is Eros.
What is value? What does Eros want? What does Eros desire? Eros desires more wholeness, more contact, more shared identity, more mutuality of recognition, more mutuality of feeling, more mutuality of value, more mutuality of purpose.
Eros is the core value of Cosmos. That’s what Eros is — Eros desiring Eros, which is more intimacy, which is more desire, which is more mutuality of desire, and more mutuality of feeling, and more mutuality of recognition, more contact, which generates more wholeness (= more shared identities).
Do you begin to feel the loop? It’s so deep. It’s so beautiful.
Reality is ErosValue.
And ErosValue itself is the LoveIntelligence of Reality.
The word love itself is a desiccated word, which has lost its meaning.
We tried to have the word love stand independently of all words, and we thought it would survive.
We killed all the goddesses except for Aphrodite. But then we realized we didn’t know how to worship at Her altar. Because you can’t kill all the gods — meaning, you can’t kill the Field of Value — and then just leave love standing by itself.
Love is actually Eros. Eros is a value of Cosmos. That’s what it is. That’s its very nature.
And what is Eros? It is ethos. It is value. There’s no split between them.
Eros is the desire for deeper contact, and deeper contact means contact that honors, that has mutualities of recognition and mutualities of feeling and mutualities of purpose and mutualities of value. It’s intimate contact that generates new emergence. It means it generates greater wholeness.
It’s not just even that Eros speaks value. Eros is value.
You cannot split the words Eros and value.
It’s not that Eros is a value. It’s that Eros is value, and value is infused and flamed with Eros. It’s ErosValue.
Value arouses will
How do you know value is erotic?
Because value arouses our will. We are moved by value.
We are in the middle of COVID, and the entire liberal community is in the classical vaccine narrative, and everyone believes that to leave our houses could endanger millions of people. And then George Floyd is killed, and the entire liberal community spills into the street to protest for George Floyd. And they should have, and that was good, and I joined the protests. Those are good protests.
But why? Because we were aroused by the violation of the value, which aroused our will. Eros arouses our will, we throw everything else to the side, because that’s what we do when our will is aroused.
Will is ratzon.
Ratzon comes from the Song of Solomon in Chapter 1, Verse 3 and 4, ‘Seduce me.’ Na-rutzah ‘I will run after you.’ I will run is rutz, which also means ratzon, which means my will is aroused. My higher will, my essential will is aroused — and I throw to the wayside everything which is ancillary, everything which is superficial, everything which is exterior.
When I cross the certain moment in sacred sensuality, and I am now all the way inside — I am in the experience of value, I am in the experience of Eros. There is no difference between them.
When I have crossed that place, Mashcheni Acharecha ‘Draw me after you,’ the beginnings of coming together in Eros. Then you cross that line, na-rutzah ‘Now I’m running towards you.’
When I am with the right person, in the right place, in the right context, I don’t stop and ask, “Is there value in the world?” No, this is value. Eros and value are one.
Value is erotic.
Value arouses my will.
It aroused our will to protest for George Floyd.
- Value arouses our moral will.
- Value arouses our political will.
- Value arouses our economic will.
And it’s only value that is arousing. That’s critical to understand.
[By the way, this is something that Techno-feudalists, who want to create a Techno-totalitarian world in order to protect humanity against existential risk, don’t understand. They think value is not real. And because value is not real, you have to control the whole world. You cannot let anyone know you’re controlling them, or they’ll rebel. Give them an illusion of freedom. Put everyone in a Skinner’s box — a box in which you pull the levers on the web, and undermine people’s free will, and control the masses of humanity.
They do it not because they’re evil. I reject the demonization of Techno-totalitarians that appears all over the web. That might be part of the story, but it’s far from all of the story. All of the story is: they feel that value is not real. Since value is not real, it’s not arousing. We can’t appeal to a new story of value, we can only control.]
The experience of value lives within the experience of Eros
Eros means contact, deep contact between us — I’m kissing my beloved’s shoulder, we’re holding hands, just that simple moment of contact, because Eros and sensuality is not some sort of caricatured penetration of a particular kind.
Contact of the heart, contact of the body, contact of the mind. Desire means I desire to make contact. When I make contact — let’s take the sensual image of the Song of Solomon — it’s that moment in which I’ve crossed the line. I am on the inside.
I don’t ask, “Is value real?”
I don’t have to make anyone realize value is real.
I realize it directly in my body in this moment.
I don’t stop and say, “What’s the value of the world?”
I don’t stop and say, “What’s the meaning of life?”
When I am in those two minutes before the ecstatic explosion, and I’m all the way on the inside. You’ve drawn me after you, in the language of the text of the Song of Solomon, now I’m running towards you. Stay with me. I’m running towards you.
Just find that. Stay in that. Don’t let your mind wander. Stay in that. Find that one time in your life when you were on the inside, when you crossed the line, and stay inside of it. Stay inside of it. That one time in my life where I was on the inside, I had crossed that line in sensuality, and I was moving towards expression, towards fulfillment. I was on the inside.
That was value.
Don’t let your mind wander. That’s a lazy mind. Stay centered. That’s the experience of value right there. I know it in my body. I know that that’s valuable.
That experience of intrinsic value lives in the experience of Eros.
Eros is value, and value is filled with Eros. There is no split between them. They are one.
Because, again, what’s the Eros equation? Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever-deeper contact.
Now I am desiring ever-deeper contact. I am coming closer, closer. I am desiring greater wholeness, which means I am desiring more intimacy. We are going to come together. We are not going to disappear, we are not going to fuse — but there is going to be the sense of shared identity in the depth of our conversation, in the depth of our lovemaking. And the depth of our lovemaking might be me kissing your shoulder. It might be the depth of our eyes locked in each other.
Oh my God! That’s it, right there. That’s it. That is value. That is the experience of value right there. Done. Story over. End game. I’m enlightened.
That’s a direct experience of value.
That is the ErosValue of Reality that moves quarks to come together and create a proton or a neutron. It moves protons, neutrons, and electrons to create an atom. Atoms desire each other, and they create a molecule. There are unique configurations of desire and intimacy, which are unique elements. Macromolecules emerge from molecules, because there is a desire for molecules to make contact, to touch each other, to love each other, and to create a larger whole. And then, when you intensify the intimacy of macromolecules, they become cells.
Find it in yourself.
When your desire intensifies, you are throbbing. Your heart’s throbbing, your body’s throbbing. You’re quivering open. Your heart, body, mind — any one of the three or all of the three, take your wish — is quivering open, is throbbing open, is pulsing open. Your desire intensifies — your artistic desire, your creative desire, your embodied desire, your tumescence, your throbbing, your pulsing. You step inside and you’ve got value.
It’s value. Can you feel that? It’s value.
In the ecstasies of desire, there is no split between autonomy and communion
And in that value, I have this huge devotion to other.
Other cannot be brutalized.
Other cannot be tortured.
Other cannot be excluded.
Other cannot be indiscriminately ignored in any way — because my desire is to make contact, and to experience intimacy, which is mutuality of pathos, and mutuality of purpose, and mutuality of recognition. We recognize each other, we feel each other, and we have the shared value — more Eros and more intimacy.
There is this implicit devotion in desire.
Desire is both —
- the healthiest form of narcissism: I’m fully alive with myself. It’s the healthiest form of autonomy. When I’m filled with desire, I am most in myself.
- And it’s the healthiest and most whole form of devotion: I’m utterly devoted to you.
In the ecstasies of desire, the split between autonomy and communion disappears.
There is no ethnocentrism.
There is just the field of Eros.
There is just the field of Desire.
That’s the script of desire of Cosmos. That’s what Cosmos is.
I am that desire.
Not tat tvam asi ‘thou art that’, in the sense of I am just awareness.
No, no, no. That’s a mistake. It’s why I’ve argued against that for the last 20 years. I am not just awareness. I am the field of ErosDesire. And ErosDesire is the field of ethos.
I know that because I am madly loving you. I know you. I recognize you. To recognize is to know. I know you. I see you.
LoveEros is a perception. That perception arouses my love, and my love then arouses my perception. Love and knowledge become a circular movement. Eros and gnosis, yada. Yada ‘to know’ and ’to love.’
It’s so deep. Reality is a script of desire. That’s what Reality is. The Eros equation and the intimacy equations are scripts of desire.
The Name of God
What we’re doing together in telling this New Story of Value.
What is a New Story of Value?
It is the best narrative of desire, the best script of desire that we have available, based on the best sciences in Reality today.
The great Islamic thinker, Rumi understood this so well, and Hafez understood this so well. But I’ll give you a text from the 13th century from the Zohar. The Zohar says, Istakel be-’oraita u-vara ‘alma ‘She gazed (that’s an erotic gaze) at the Torah (the sacred text), and she manifested Reality.’
And what is the sacred text?
In the lineage tradition of Solomon, the sacred text is the names of God, writes Nachmanides in the 13th century. All of sacred text is nothing more and nothing less than a particular script of the names of God.
Now what’s the name of God? Let’s take a look.
This is the name of God. The first letter in the name is Yod. Yod, Hei — Yah, as in Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah. Hallel is the ecstasy of Yah — of the Yod entering the Hei.
There is a dimension of the divine that’s beyond all names. But then, Infinity, the infinite no-thingness, discloses as the Infinite Intimate. Divinity is not only witness and aware of all. Divinity is the stirring of desire. One of the qualities of the Infinite is the desire for intimacy with the finite. So the Yod enters the Hei. The Yod enters the Yah.
Breathe it in. I breathe in.
Then, on the out-breath, Yah! That’s the breath of Reality. Breathe in. Yah! The Yod enters the Hei — and that is the constant Eros of Reality.
That is Reality that is intimacy, that is the Intimate Universe. That’s the field of electromagnetism. It’s the strong and the weak nuclear. It’s the gravitational, all of the Higgs boson fields. It’s all the leptons, hadrons, and muons. It’s the whole thing, pulsing in Reality in this very moment.
And then, the second two letters of the four-letter name of God is Vav, Hei. The Yod pulled down is a Vav, and the Vav enters the Hei. The line enters the circle, the Vav enters the Hei.
That’s the arousal of the Field of Desire.
That’s my participation in the script of desire.
That is Conscious Evolution.
When the script of desire of Reality becomes uniquely conscious in me and in my life, through my script of desire and my conscious ability to up-level, and evolve, and deepen my own script of desire, I participate in rewriting the script of desire of Reality.
- The Yod enters the Hei — the electromagnetic field, all the four forces.
- The Vav enters the Hei — the field of Eros, the field of Desire, desire for intimacy, come consciously alive uniquely in the human field. Both personally in my life, in my scripts of desire, and in the cultural scripts of desire that define the polis, that define the politics of Reality.
And of course, we need politics of Eros. We need a culture of Eros — and a culture of Eros means a culture rooted in a shared script of desire.
The field of Desire lives in me
We have this Aramaic text that says istakel be-’oraita u-vara ‘alma ‘ ‘She gazes at the Torah, and She manifests Reality.’ And what’s the Torah? Names of God. Torah is the name of God. Wow! Just feel that with me for a second. Feel that with me.
But the Torah is one particular script of desire. It’s one particular way of writing the name of God. There is no split between me and the text. I am the Torah, and I am the great literature of the Sufis, and I am the great literature of the best of the Jesuits and the Desert Fathers. My I is a unique script of desire that participates in the script of desire of the whole.
Let’s see the name of God again, but this time embodied in the human being:
That’s a human being, person. In the lineage masters, the Yod is the head. The head enters the upper carriage, shoulders (the Hei). The Yod enters the Hei. The Vav is phallus or yoni — that dimension of the human being, which is phallus, yoni, line, circle that lives in every human being. It enters the Hei, the lower carriage of the human being. The point of the image is that I am the name of God, which means I participate in the field of Desire.
I am not separate from the field of Desire. There is a field of Eros, there is a field of Desire, and I don’t just live in the field of Desire — the field of Desire lives in me.
I am the field of Desire. My script of desire influences the entire Field.
That’s what we mean by Conscious Evolution. It means the field of Desire becomes awake and alive in me. My journey of transformation is a journey to rewrite my unique script of desire, which is my Unique Self.
My Unique Self is my unique Torah. My unique Torah, my unique Rumi poem, my unique letter in the cosmic scroll of desire. My Unique Self is my unique script of desire. My unique script of desire is evolution becoming uniquely conscious through me. That’s what Conscious Evolution means.
Let’s step out of our heads. Just feel it in your body, because the script of desire cannot be disembodied. The body is insufficient, but the body is absolutely necessary. The body is a quivering, pulsating field of Desire. That’s what the body is.
The early psychoanalysts pointed out what all of the great wisdom traditions knew, what the great Islamic mystics knew, and the great Hebrew mystics knew, and at their best, Magdalene mystics knew. The body is polymorphously perverse, and polymorphously perverse means the body is a field of Desire. The baby desires to be held in the arm of the mother. The baby desires to touch, and to be touched.
When we can live in the goodness of that field of Desire, we have direct access to knowing — to truth.
Your unique name of God
Sometimes I’m going to create my field of Desire by painting a painting for every sonnet of Shakespeare. That might be one way in. Everyone’s got their own unique configuration of desire. But I’ve got to be in the field of Desire.
When I am in the goodness of that desire, I realize there is no split between love and desire. And there is no split between love and intelligence, because intelligence is not technical.
Intelligence is the omni-considerate movement of Reality towards ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
That’s intelligence. Intelligence is the depth, the unimaginable, stunning, erotic beauty of a proton, which is not three quarks, although three quarks become a proton. But a proton is an entirely different field of intelligence.
But it’s a field of ErosIntelligence.
It’s a field of ErosValue.
A proton is a new quality of Eros that can potentiate new Reality that is potent erotically in new ways, that can generate new possibilities of life. That’s the intelligence of a proton.
It is a LoveIntelligence, but that LoveIntelligence is bound up, intimately and intricately inter-included in a LoveDesire. The proton desires the neutron, and together, they desire the circling of the electron. That’s how atom comes into being.
That LoveDesire and LoveIntelligence are filled with mad beauty that includes all contradictions, because that’s what beauty is. All opposites become woven together in a larger paradox of intimacy: shared identity in the context of otherness. That’s the ultimate paradox, which is the ultimate beauty — because beauty is the holding of paradoxes.
Read Whitehead, Process and Reality. An unreadable book, but read it anyways. He understands correctly — and I’m with him, I’ve always understood beauty that way — that beauty is all of the contradictions woven together into this stunning whole. That’s beauty.
The LoveIntelligence and the LoveBeauty and the LoveDesire of Reality — that’s ErosValue. It lives in me, as me, and through me. That is the name of God.
Rabia, the great Islamic mystic, says, One day He did not leave after kissing me. Rabia is an erotic mystic.
There’s a place where she writes that everyone has to find their own name of God. I am a unique configuration of desire, and that means I am a unique name of God. I have a unique way to call God.
Can you feel that?
Rabia writes, Would you come if someone called you by the wrong name?
When we are about to explode, after we’ve crossed that line in sensuality, and we call our beloved’s name and our beloved calls our name, would you come if someone called you by the wrong name? You can understand and feel the textured nature of that writing:
I wept because for years he did not enter my arms.
Then one night I was told a secret:
Perhaps the name you call God is not really His, not really Hers.
Maybe it’s just an alias.
I thought about this, and came up with a pet name.
I came up with a pet name for my Beloved I never mentioned to others.
All I can say is, it works!
Your pet name for God is the name for God that moves out of and emerges from your unique configuration of desire — as a unique name of God that never was, is, or will be ever again. This is your direct participation in the Field of Value, where you know value to be true, and value knows you.
That’s your unique script of desire. Your unique name of God, the pet name that you call the Divine, your own nickname given to you by She that loves you so — that’s your unique script of desire.
Your unique script of desire is the unique name of She, of He, that lives in you, as you, and through you.
The only sanity is to love madly
A wise man once said, what we think is less than what we know, and what we know is less than what we love.
Loving is a deeper form of knowing.
That’s the point. Here he’s playing. What we love is so much less than what there is, and to that precise extent, we are so much less than what we are. To be what we are, we need to love. We need to love every moment open.
And I can only love the moment open through my unique script of desire. In other words, my unique script of desire is my unique gift to this unique moment. And it’s only me in this moment that can love this moment open within my circle of intimacy and influence, that no one else in the world can love open.
I am living in my unique circle of Eros, my unique circle of desire, my unique circle of intimacy and influence. And my unique circle might be my immediate family. It might also be my place in the Unique Self Symphony here in One Mountain, Many Paths, to participate in the evolution of love.
My unique script of desire is my unique capacity to love this moment open, in a way that no one that ever was, is, or will be can do. My name is a unique name of God, and my name participates in the name of God. The name of God is misspelled if my name, my letter is not in the name of God. It’s distorted. I have a unique gift to give to She.
Raba Emunatecha, the text of the lineage, is usually translated ‘great is my trust in you, God.’ It is more accurately translated as ‘outrageous great is your trust in me, God.’ She, the name of God, trusts me to live my name.
This is why when we make love, we call the name of the beloved. And again, making love doesn’t mean a formal act of particular kind of coitus.
Making love means I’m kissing your shoulder.
Making love means we’re looking in each other’s eyes.
Making love means you’re kissing my belly.
Making love means just kissing your hand in that one moment.
Making love means we are deep in creating Reality together — heart to heart — in the palace of Holy Imagination.
To be what we are, we need to love — and love madly. Because we only know what we love madly. The only sanity is to love madly.
We only love what we know. And when we know, we begin to feel. Because the Universe is LoveIntelligence. The Universe feels, and the Universe feels love. It’s only when I know that I can begin to feel. When we begin to feel, we begin to think.
A scientist can’t disclose the intelligence of Reality unless they’re madly in love with truth. There’s a wild, ecstatic love in science. Wow! Steven Weinberg talks about how he cannot find the point of the universe, and then, in the next sentence, he talks about how he is madly in love with knowing the truth of muons.
When he’s looking for the point he can’t find, he is thinking about the point — and he is rebelling, correctly, against old fundamentalist religions. What he didn’t realize when he wrote that is that there is actually a deeper cosmic story of value, which is a story of desire. It is his, Steven Weinberg’s, desire to know the truth of muons, and to uniquely contribute it to physics, in a way that no one else that ever was, is, or will be could.
I have a unique gift to give, which is my unique script of desire.
We are radically unique, and we are the same
To the precise extent that I am alienated from my script of desire, I’m taking the name of God in vain.
I am a sacred text. A sacred text is a script of desire.
But I have to be constantly rewriting my sacred text, constantly evolving my sacred text, constantly evolving my name. Only then we can begin together to engage in the sensuality of sensemaking.
Love and knowledge are not separate.
Eros and gnosis are not separate.
We have unique scripts of desire, and yet we participate in the one Desire.
We are radically unique, and yet we are the same, which is why we can talk to each other. It’s why we understand each other now. It’s why we have the shared field together. It’s why we are not ultimately lonely — because there is a one Eros in which we all participate.
Everything we’ve talked about today, we recognize it inside of ourselves. There is not one word I shared today that was new, that you — we — didn’t recognize living in some way inside of us. Even though each one of us might have heard this Dharma uniquely, we come together in intimate communion, because we also heard it together. Because even as we are all unique, we are all the same.
That’s one of the First Principles and First Values of Reality, which is why we can have common sense — because we have a common sensuality. Because there is actually one Desire, and one Eros, and one value, and one breath, and one love.
We need to heal the body, and we need to heal the body politic
Now let’s go to the last step, and with this we finish.
To heal Reality, we have to heal our narratives of desire or our stories of desire. And we can’t split desire from sexual desire. The desire of the sexual is the model for Eros.
The sexual models the erotic. It doesn’t exhaust the erotic, but it models Eros.
When we have broken stories of desire in the sexual, then we have broken stories of desire in the political and in the economic.
Just like we need to heal the abuse of the sexual — the sexual abuses that have run rampant in the world, which are the abuses of desire, distorted and degraded scripts of desire in the personal — we need to heal the abuse of sensual and the abuse of desire, the degradation of our shared scripts of desire in the political and in the economic.
We need to heal the body, and we need to heal the body politic.
We need to evolve the quality of Eros and Desire as it lives in me, as me, and through me.
I need to go back and recover the native innocence of my desire. Not a first innocence — but after I’ve gone through everything, all of the complexity, all of the guilt, I get to a second innocence. And I know that I am ever always already pure and beautiful.
After I’ve gone through all the tragic, I get to the post-tragic, and I feel the beauty and the wonder of my inflamed desire.
Just as I do that in the personal, I need to do it in the political. The early feminists weren’t wrong when they said the personal is the political. We’ll just add that the political has to be the cosmic. We can only have a politics today that is a politics of Eros, rooted in a realization that there is a shared field of Desire, and the shared field of Desire is a shared field of Value, and that we all can access it.
The brutalized men of ISIS, the Islamic State of Jihad, which denies the field of Desire, and the men of Hamas, who were brutalized by a degraded script of desire had to be given particular kinds of amphetamines in extremely large doses — their pockets were filled with them, both the ISIS people and the Hamas men.
Why?
Because the body is good. The body is a script of desire, and it is a script of sacred desire. In order to be butchers, the body had to be distorted through this lethal destruction of ethos and Eros, which massively up-leveled aggression, and down-leveled, and destroyed, and turned off all of the em-pathos in the body. Because otherwise, the body rebels.
The state of the body is always mediated through its story of desire. But even when you raise these kids in an utterly degraded story of desire, the body still rebels. It’s not enough. Then you have to enter the body, and degrade it, and distort it even more — through amphetamines overdosed in the extreme.
The reason that Hamas today denies having committed the atrocities is not just because it’s politically appropriate. Actually, they cannot own it, because when they are not in that state of body distortion, their bodies themselves know that it’s a great violation. There is an implicit common sense that still lives in everyone.
That’s the beginning of hope. Hope is a memory of our common sense, which is our common Field of Value. Hope is a memory of value that lives already, ever already in us, as us, and through us, in our bodies themselves.
It’s only when we are not listening to the murmurings of Eros, which are the murmurings of the sacred in the body — which is the story of value, the script of desire intrinsic to Cosmos — that I have to write false scripts of desire.
Every form of degraded ideology is a false script of desire.
Every sacred text that speaks against the intrinsic nature and Eros of cosmic value and cosmic desire is idolatry. Idolatry is false scripts of desire.
There is no love story without the transformation of trauma
Everything we are doing is about scripts of desire. The more I rewrite and evolve and clarify my own script of desire, the more I can participate as da Vinci. We can be da Vinci together.
The lead author of all of our work is David J. Temple, a pseudonym we created. We can be David J. Temple together, and we can write the new library. We can write the Great Library of value because we become clarified value. We become clarified desire.
What we’re going to do next week is:
How do I, in my own life, clarify my own script of desire — erotically, sexually, creatively?
The script of my body: my body’s psyche, and my body’s drama, and my body’s history, and my body’s trauma.
Because there is no love story without the transformation of trauma. The transformation of trauma is core to the love story. This is why in the lineage, we talk about the shattering of the vessels, the breaking of the vessels, which precedes the Eros of manifestation The Universe: A Love Story.
We are going to talk about how we go into our own scripts of desire as Homo Amor, to participate together in writing the new scripts of desire at this moment, at this time between worlds and time between stories.
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