Auguste Rodin. The Kiss. (Image courtesy of Musee Rodin).

372 — CosmoErotic Humanism: Transitional Objects, Evolving Scripts of Desire, and the New Human and the New Humanity

To heal culture and address existential risk, we need to heal our broken scripts of desire.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [November 26, 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: In order to heal culture and address existential risk, we need to heal our broken scripts of desire. Only when I become a New Human can we create the New Humanity.

Desire is the very essence of who I am, and desire is always for value. To be alive is to access the unique quality of my desire — my Unique Self, the unique expression of the First Principles and First Values of Reality awake and live in me.

We lose access to the unique script of desire enfleshed in body sacred when — usually in early childhood — our very aliveness is shamed, and we lose trust in the body and in the goodness and dignity of our desires. “Transitional objects” of all kinds — from security blankets to ideologies — become our false scripts of desire.

But my unique configuration of desire is the plug that allows me to access the goodness and aliveness of Reality. We have to find our way back and re-access desire as it lives in the body. For that, we need a new narrative of desire, a new narrative of sex. Eros is ethos. Sex is ethics. Our Code of Ethos is enfleshed in our bodies. The new narrative of desire — Sex Erotic — is knowing that the desire that moves in me is the desire of Reality. Only Sex Erotic can heal the body politic, when we feel and honor the desire of its every member and every tribe.

At the core of the New Story of Value are scripts of desire

Last week we talked about scripts of desire in Reality, and the relationship between Eros, desire, and existential risk. This week, we’re going to talk about our own scripts of desire, and how healing my own script of desire (which has to do with my sexual narrative) transforms my life. We are going to talk about how the healing of my own personal script of desire also heals the meta-crisis and directly addresses existential risk.

• Healing the script of desire in my body is what heals the body politic.
• Healing the script of desire in my personal story is what heals culture.
• Healing my own stories of abuse heals the abuse in culture.
• Making myself whole makes culture whole.

But we are going to start a little bit differently today. We are going to drop into a chant song, Fall On Me, to set the stage and open our hearts. Just feel into the energy of Fall On Me. Don’t worry about the words. Just feel into the sense of it.

It’s about the blessing of the father, and the blessing of the father is about the healing of culture. The blessing of the mother is about my most personal healing, my own most personal scripts of desire. Today, we are going to do both the blessing of the father and the blessing of the mother. But we are going to start with the blessing of the father, with Fall On Me. Let’s enter and open our hearts, so we can actually do a healing on culture itself.

We are going to try and articulate the deepest understanding we can of the New Story of Reality.

What does it mean to become a New Human?

It’s only when I become a New Human that we can create the New Humanity.

Can everyone feel that?

We live in this time between worlds and this time between stories. We are threatened by genuine existential risk. There is a real meta-crisis. Existential risk means the potential death of humanity — and along the way, before that happens, the potential death of our humanity.

We could actually cross the planetary boundaries and degrade the substrate of Reality upon which life depends. This will cause the death of humanity, which is a genuine possibility. Or we could create control structures of surveillance and totalitarian control — hidden or overt:

• Chinese Communist Party — obvious control.
• TechnoFeudalism, using the web to control Reality without people even knowing it’s happening — covert control, in which we lose access to our free will, to our capacity to choose, to our capacity to actually find the best of who we are. We are trapped in a techno-bubble, and we are scrolling our way to death — thinking we are choosing, but actually being manipulated by these upgraded algorithms that produce downgraded human beings.

That’s the death of our humanity. To respond to existential risk — both the potential death of humanity and the potential death of our humanity — we have to tell a New Story of Value.

At the very core of this New Story of Value are scripts of desire — narratives of desire.

Last week, we talked about the scripts of desire in the biggest sense — the meta-scripts of culture, the meta-scripts of Reality. Today, we are going to enter personal scripts of desire:

What’s my personal script of desire, and how do I evolve it —

• to become whole, to become the New Human?
• to move from being homo armor: the armored human being who can’t access their script of desire, to becoming Homo amor — to becoming powerful beyond measure?

Because my own unique desire is the source of my joy, and the source of my power, and the source of my ethics, and the source of my delight.

We feel the agony and the ecstasy. We laugh out of one side of our mouths, and we cry out of the other side of our mouth. I just read this morning an incredibly painful story about two doctors who were killed in Gaza, trying to take care of their patients in an impossible reality. Every day, I feel and see the faces of young boys — eighteen, nineteen, twenty year olds — who are in the impossible position of protecting Israel after October 7th, which was probably the largest public rape, sexual abuse, murder, snuff film violence, publicly played out in the history of the world. And now Hamas is tragically holding the doctors hostage — the beautiful Palestinian doctors in Gaza, who died as absolute, gorgeous heroes.

At the core of Hamas is a failure of a love story. It’s a failure to access a script of desire that’s aligned with the nature of Reality — with goodness, truth, and beauty.

At the very core of the jihadi worldview is a degradation of desire, of the dignity of desire — the desire of the body, the desire of sexuality. And an incapacity to hear the murmurings of the sacred — the murmurings of desire — in the other, in the one who’s outside of the jihadi worldview.

Can everyone feel that? Let’s just stay inside here. Let’s stay on the inside of the inside. Let’s feel where we are.

Reality is Desire

Reality, at its core, is desire. That’s what Reality is. That’s how we begin.

At its very core, Reality has appetites. It has appetition. Alfred North Whitehead used the word appetition, although no one really noticed it. The lineage of Solomon uses the word teshuka — a central desire that throbs at the very heart of Cosmos itself. I was privileged, in a couple of academic works called Radical Kabbalah, to unpack the lineage sources of the wisdom of Solomon. There is a section in the first volume, on this throbbing, pulsing, dripping, tumescent teshuka, the desire at the very heart of Reality.

This is why Reality doesn’t stop with hydrogen. Oh, we’ve got hydrogen, let’s stop, in the first nanoseconds, in the first moments of time. But Reality desires more.

Reality has an incessant desire for more life, and more value, and more wholeness.

What we’re trying to do in order to heal culture — at this moment of meta-crisis, in this time between worlds and time between stories — is to actually access and articulate the intrinsic desires of Reality.

The desires of Reality are the plotlines of Reality — because my desire is the plotline of my life.

I am desire. That’s who I am. Desire is not extraneous to who I am. It’s not an accident. It’s my very essence. The emergent possibility of human consciousness that now needs to come online — in order to heal culture and respond to the meta-crisis — is to become aware that who I am is desire, that desire is the plotline of my life.

And what do I desire? I desire value. We always desire value. That’s what desire is. I desire a value that’s not here, that’s not available. I want that. And that want, that teshuka, that appetite is sacred. It is holy.

Eros is the experience of Reality desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.

That’s the script of desire that’s inherent in Reality itself.

At different points in history, different social groups — different communities, different churches, different religions — tried to articulate codes of Reality to create what they felt was the best possible world. But those codes were almost never the universal codes that live in the structure of Cosmos itself. Each religion intuited some value of Reality, and then built its system around that value. Christianity built its system around forgiveness, and that became its value. But there is a whole pantheon of values, which are all desired by Reality.

Those are the First Principles and First Values of Reality. Reality has First Principles and First Values that are desired by Reality itself. Those are the scripts of desire that live in Reality.

We need to heal the broken scripts of desire

Local religion by itself won’t take us home.

Local culture won’t take us home.

We are challenged by existential risk, which requires global coordination — because every existential risk is global. Global coordination requires global coherence. Global coherence means we’ve got to resonate with each other, like musical instruments resonate with each other. We need global resonance. To have global resonance, we need intimacy with each other.

We need global intimacy — and we’re now experiencing what we’ve called a global intimacy disorder.

How do we articulate global intimacy? In the same way we always create intimacy — in every couple, in every organization, or in every community. We can only create intimacy when we have a shared story of value. It’s only a shared story of value that generates intimacy.

If we don’t share a ground of value, then we can’t have a shared vision.

We cannot go to the same place together.
We cannot do sensemaking together.
We cannot evaluate. You can’t evaluate if you are not in a shared Field of Value. We can’t do a shared evaluation of Reality if we are not in a shared Field of Value.

If we are not in a shared Field of Value, we can’t have global intimacy, so we have a global intimacy disorder. We have no resonance with each other. We have no global coherence — and so the global challenges, which require global coordination, aren’t met. Millions of people unnecessarily died in COVID — a relatively minor catastrophic risk — because of our incapacity to create global coordination. Because we didn’t have a shared Field of Value, and so we didn’t have shared intimacy.

What we’re doing here at the think tank is articulating the plotlines of a Reality story, which is Reality’s scripts of desire. The clarified scripts of desire of Reality that we all share, that we all participate in.

At the global level, individual countries articulate false narratives — narratives of pseudo-desire, narratives of pseudo-eros, which are actually not erotic. They are dissociated or alienated from the whole: my country should dominate, whether my country is the Chinese Communist Party, or the original Mongol horde, or European colonial powers, or a particular tribe in Africa that brutalizes other parts of Africa.

We have win-lose metrics, in which every culture, every community, every nation, every religion is lost in its own ego self. It’s dissociated from the whole. It tells a false narrative about itself, which places itself at the center. It becomes a hungry ghost for its own fulfillment, and is unable to feel the whole. That win-lose metrics generates broken fragile systems, which are the root cause for existential risk. We need to heal the broken scripts of desire of culture.

And we need a way — shared by all of humanity — of healing our own broken scripts of desire.

• We need a way to heal our own broken scripts of desire, which means to create a New Human.
• We need a way to heal the broken scripts of desire of culture, which means to create a New Humanity.

The beginning of that healing is the honoring of desire.

That’s where it begins:

I’ve got to honor desire.
I’ve got to feel the goodness of desire.
I’ve got to feel the dignity of desire.
I’ve got to realize that Reality itself is desire, and that desire is a force that needs to be deeply listened to.

Desire is the language of the Divine. Desire is the language which discloses value. All value is disclosed by desire.

We need the clarification of desire — knowing what I truly desire, both as a nation and as an individual — so we can actually share a global deepest heart’s desire, because we have a shared Field of Value. Then we can heal the global intimacy disorder, which then heals culture — because we create a sense of being omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.

• We can feel the whole. We’re not isolated. We’re not lost in a cancerous narcissism.
• We can actually feel each other’s desire.
• We can feel each other’s hunger.
• We can feel each other’s pain.

We can feel the two doctors in Gaza. We can feel the young Israeli boys. No one is split off. Everyone’s throbbing desire is for a shared Field of Value. Every religion, every country can be a unique expression of the Field of Value, a unique instrument in the symphony of value and ErosDesire — but we are all part of the same music, and the music of Reality is ErosDesire itself.

To be alive is to access the unique quality of my desire

What I want to turn to is a shared script that can be used by every nation, by all of humanity, by every human being —

• How do I heal my own personal broken script of desire?
• What does it mean to heal my own broken scripts of desire?
• How do I become the New Human?
• How do I de-armor?
• How do I take off all that is blocking my ability to feel the unique clarity of my desire running through me, which leads me to my value?

Value is the plotline of my life. To know the value that’s mine to pursue is to know the plotline of my life. I only know the plotline of my life if I can access the unique contours, the texture of my own desire.

We want to heal the broken narratives of desire in order to heal culture itself.

Desire lives in me. I participate in the Field of Desire.

To be alive is to access the unique quality of my desire.

To be in joy is a direct byproduct of accessing the unique quality of my desire. Not my pseudo-desire, not my surface desire — but my deepest heart’s desire, the depth of my desire.

Both my dignity and my divinity are dependent on my capacity to access my Unique Self.

My Unique Self is not my separate self. It’s not my broken skin-encapsulated ego. My separate self is caught in false narratives of desire —

• desires that aren’t mine;
• desires that were foisted upon me by algorithmic structures speaking to our lowest common denominator;
• desires that were thrust on me by broken church narratives;
• desires that were thrust on me by reductionist materialistic narratives of win-lose metrics.

All of these — combined with an unimaginable host of toxins, chemicals, pharmacology, broken environments, broken ingestions into the body of foodstuff that shouldn’t be in the body, either the distortion of the body or the malnourishment of the body — alienate me from my own script of desire. All of those together create a cultural trauma, which dissociates me from my Unique Self. I can’t find the voice of my Unique Self.

To find my Unique Self, I have to first step out of my separate self, step out of my skin-encapsulated ego, and feel the wider Field. That’s the first step — I feel the wider Field.

Feeling that wider Field was often called True Self, or the field of awareness. We were told, move beyond your story. And I’m guilty, I taught this for years in my mid to late thirties. It was wrong — or it was true, but very, very partial. But we are told, move beyond your story, and access the pure field of awareness that lives in you, the pure field of consciousness. To know that Tat tvam asi ‘Thou art that.’ You are pure consciousness. That’s precisely half true. It is true, gorgeously true. As Max Planck, the quantum pioneer said, consciousness is fundamental to everything.

But consciousness doesn’t live by itself. Consciousness has an interior. And the interior of consciousness is desire. It is Eros. There is no consciousness without Eros.

To move beyond my sense of being a skin-encapsulated ego, a broken separate self is to access this larger Field. But this larger Field is not just a field of awareness or consciousness.

It’s a Field of Desire.
It’s a Field of Eros.
It’s pulsing Eros. Eros is this pulsing Eros that desires ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.

Eros desires ever-deeper intimacies, which means

• deeper and deeper shared identities — not fusion, but unions, deeper unions.
• Deeper mutualities of recognition.
• Deeper mutualities of embrace.
• Deeper mutualities of value.
• Deeper mutualities of pathos — we feel each other.
• Deeper mutualities of purpose — shared purpose and destiny.

Eros moves separate parts into larger unions, with these mutualities, these ever-deeper, gorgeous and stunning intimacies. That is the Field of Eros.

I step in, and I realize I am part of this larger pulsating, tumescent, throbbing Field of Eros. That’s the story of value that I live in. That’s True Self. That’s the beginning of the story of value, the story we call CosmoErotic Humanism.

My Unique Self is my unique configuration of desire

Then there is the second step: I realize I’m not just living in this pulsing Field.

This Field is pulsing in me.

But this Field is not just pulsing in me. It’s not just throbbing in me. It’s not just tumescent and spreading itself open to receive the penetration of Reality.

No, actually, it’s uniquely tumescent in me. It drips in me uniquely. It pulses in me uniquely. It throbs in me uniquely.

I am a unique configuration of desire.

I am a unique quality of desire that generates a unique quality of intimacy in Reality, that’s unlike any quality of desire that ever was, is, or will be.

My story is not that which I move beyond.

I move beyond my pseudo-story, my surface egoic story, my story based on win-lose metrics. Beyond my story based on demonizing you —

• making you an other,
• seeking false forms of domination over you, false forms of status,
• placing you outside the circle, to give myself the illusion of Eros, the illusion that I’m inside the circle.

All of those are false narratives. They are false scripts of desire.

I need to realize I have a unique story. That story is my sacred autobiography. My sacred autobiography is my unique script of desire.

My unique script of desire is that which I desire. What I desire is the unique value of my life, the unique gift of my life. The unique expression of the First Principles and First Values of Reality, awake and alive in me — that’s my Unique Self.

That’s my unique configuration of desire.
That’s my unique pulsing and throbbing.
That’s my unique story.
That’s my sacred autobiography.

My sacred autobiography is the most true, and authentic, and stunning narrative of my life.

It is my unique story. It is my unique love story, which is chapter and verse in The Universe: A Love Story. My unique Eros and my unique desire is the unique chapter and verse in the Field of Desire.

See, not only do I live in the Field of Desire, the Field of Desire lives in me.

I live in the Field of Desire, the Field of Desire lives in me.

As I clarify my unique script of desire, I begin to realize my unique value, my unique gift, my unique ethos. And I realize, Oh, I am here as a unique expression of the aliveness of the whole. I’m filled with the desire to give my gift to the whole, to serve the whole, to be in devotion to the whole’s aliveness. I become omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.

But it all begins with clarifying my unique scripts of desire.

In the field of Mother

Let’s go deeper, and let’s feel the Field.

• When I am in the Field, and I have direct access to the Field, and the Field lives uniquely in me — that’s my Unique Self. That’s my unique configuration of desire.
• When I am blocked, when I can’t access the Field in which I participate, then I can’t know the plotline of my life. Because the plotline of my life is my unique script of desire.

In 1951, Donald Winnicott, an American theorist, wrote about transitional objects.

What are transitional objects?

I am a baby. I am held in the field of the mother. The mother is both the biological mother (there is an enormous need for the embrace of the biological mother) — and the mother is also Mother, the field of She, the Field of Eros that knows my name and holds me.

I feel at home at the breast of the mother. I feel at home when my body is enmeshed with the body of the mother, which is why early childhood matters so much. But it’s not dependent just on a biological mother. Even if my biological mother was imperfect, as all biological mothers are, there is a larger Field of She which holds me.

• It’s Mother Nature.
• It’s Mother as the Field of Value.
• It’s Mother as the Field of Eros.
• It’s Mother as the Welcome Home sign in cosmos. Mother is the experience that I’m welcome in Cosmos, that I’m needed.

The existentialists of the mid-20th century tried to express their experience that they were no longer welcome in Cosmos. Camus’ book, The Stranger begins with the lines: Mother died today, or was it yesterday? Meaning, there’s no mother that welcomes me, and the death of the mother doesn’t matter. The mother has died, and it doesn’t matter. Because there is no Field of Value, and there is no Field of meaning, and the world is random and happenstance. That was the existentialist travesty and trauma. All of existentialism was a failed — glorious, but failed — attempt to create meaning where there was none.

But it runs not just in Camus’ literature. The other day, I happened across a text of public culture. This was a text of public culture from maybe ten to fifteen years ago. Whenever you have texts of public culture, the Goddess speaks through them subtly.

This is a text of a show called The Sopranos.

Tony Soprano is a mafia boss, and he’s not a good man. He is not a good man, and yet he’s this strangely sympathetic character — because you feel his pain, and you feel that somewhere underneath, there is some goodness left. But he is a murderer, in a serious way.

There is this little moment where he’s talking to his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi. He took some peyote, some medicine, and he has this experience, and he calls it a cosmic experience. He says to his psychiatrist, he says,

“I get it, I get it!”

“What do you get?”

“This is going to sound stupid,” Tony Soprano says, “but I saw at one point that our mothers, they are bus drivers. They’re the vehicle that gets us here. They drop us off and go on their way, they continue on the journey. But the problem is, we keep trying to get back on the bus instead of just letting it go.”

Tony Soprano is this devastating figure. He’s got this intuition, for a moment, of the mother. But then he says, “No, no, but they just got us here. They’re just bus drivers.” He can’t really grasp the mother. We keep trying to find the mother, but we just have to let it go.

That is a strange text of culture.

But the mother is more than a bus driver. The mother is The Universe: A Love Story in-person. The mother is, for those moments between baby and child, Homo amor. It’s why breastfeeding is so important — I actually can feel the livingness of the Divine, which is why the Divine is often called El Shaddai. El Shaddai is the God who is the breast, in the lineage of Solomon.

I am held at the breast of the mother. My desire is honored. My body is polymorphously perverse, in a language of early psychoanalysis, from one of its best moments. This means my body is alive. My body is a personal incarnation of the Living Universe. And when I have that experience of the living, somatic goodness of Reality, when I feel my body pulsating Reality, then I feel completely alive, and Reality is self-evidently good.

Transitional objects become false scripts of desire

Then what happens?

The mother leaves. And when the mother leaves, I get desperately afraid.

So what do I do?

Winnicott says, I take on a transitional object.

A transitional object is something that I invest with the experience of being welcome in the universe.

Let’s say, a teddy bear, or a security blanket. What’s a security blanket? A security blanket is this object that I’m completely attached to. I am completely connected to it. I am desiring that object. If I lose that object, my heart crashes. I scream with pain. All of my desire and all of my yearning is for that object — to hold that object and to have that object hold me. That’s a transitional object.

It begins as a teddy bear. It begins as a security blanket, or a puppy. But then, as I get older, that security blanket doesn’t disappear. It just changes faces.

That security blanket might become some version of my athletic prowess. It might be what I feel to be my beauty. My beauty becomes my transitional object, or my doctorate becomes my transitional object, or my relationship becomes my transitional object, or my child becomes my transitional object.

In other words, I hold on.

• I’m not actually present. I’m not here.
• I’m not actually desiring you.
• I’m not desiring knowledge.
• I’m not desiring.

Everything I desire becomes a desire for a transitional object that gives me the illusion of feeling welcome.

It can be ideology, any form of ideology. That ideology becomes my transitional object, whether it be my commitment to communism, whether it be my battle against sexism or classism. Even though those might be legitimate battles, but my battle against it becomes my transitional object. My ideology becomes my transitional object.

In other words, when we no longer feel the body — the body’s pulsating Reality that welcomes me into the world — then we create false certainties.

We create false transitional objects.

We create pseudo-scripts of desire.

These transitional objects become my new script of desire.

They overwhelm me.
They actually define me. They become a pseudo-identity.
They become a false narrative of my life.
They become a false script of desire.

These are the scripts of desire that animate my heart, my body, my soul. They replace my ability to have direct access to my own Unique Self, to my own True Self, to the script of desire which is the sacred autobiography, my unique letter in the cosmic scroll.

When aliveness gets shamed, we lose our capacity to trust the body

How do I access that unique letter — my unique script of desire, my sacred autobiography?

To know how to access that unique letter, I’ve got to find —

• When did that get ruptured?
• When did I alienate from that?
• When did I lose access to it?

Almost always, it happened at a moment where my very embodiment, my aliveness itself was shamed.

I had an experience of my own desire.
I had an experience of my Eros.
I had an experience of my aliveness — and that aliveness, in some fundamental way, was shamed.

Often, that shame incepts in the rejection of the embodied desire of a very young child for the pleasure of the body.

I have this experience of my body and my mother’s breast. Either I’m held by the mother, or I’m yearning to be held by the mother. I find my own body. My body seems alive. My body seems to be a gate to the intrinsic goodness of Reality. And as I reach for my body in one way or the other, I have an early fundamental experience, which virtually every human being has, of being shamed.

That shame creates trauma. And trauma is but a modern word for the original religious word sin. Trauma and sin are the sense that I’m not welcome in the universe, that I’m not okay.

Sin came to mean: I disobeyed God. But at its core, the original impulse was:

• I am not welcome.
• I can’t feel my goodness.
• I can’t feel the goodness of my aliveness.

In my earliest expression in the world, my goodness and my aliveness are completely connected, so my aliveness is shamed. I can’t feel my aliveness. My goodness is degraded. And so, I lose my capacity to trust my body.

• I lose my capacity to trust the living verse — the story of my goodness and aliveness that lives in my body.
• I lose access to my own natural, unique desire.

That unique desire is directed, restricted, denied, rejected, degraded — and so, I have this experience that I can no longer trust the pulsing, coursing, dripping, throbbing currency of Reality that lives in my body. It’s not trustable. I cannot trust my desire.

But remember, desire is not extraneous. Reality is desire, and I participate directly in the Field of Desire.

Who I am — my very essence — is my unique configuration of desire. My unique configuration of desire is the unique plug that plugs into the Field of Desire, and allows me to access the goodness and aliveness of Reality. That goodness and aliveness are fully identified with each other.

We have to find our way back to the body

And so, what happens?

I look for a transitional object, which begins as a security blanket, but that security blanket invisibly up-levels, and transposes, and shifts. Transitional object is a shapeshifter — it shifts and it shapes. Every person here can give it a different name.

Sometimes my son’s approval becomes my transitional object. How could that be? How can a mother be dependent on her son’s approval in order to live the fullness of her desire? But sometimes, it reverses. We start with wanting the approval of culture, of the parent — but often, the son or the daughter become the parent.

That’s one example. There are many examples, and we all know them.

What do I need to do?

I need to be able to re-access my own desire.
I need to first be able to re-access desire as it lives in my body, because my body is the Field of the Divine. This is critical.

We have four sexual narratives in Reality:

• Sex-negative: Sex is dangerous and gets you in trouble, stay away from it. Classical church narrative, that’s one script of desire.
• Sex-neutral: Kinsey, sex is basically like having lunch. How many people think that’s true?
• Sex-positive: Sex is positive and sweet, and it’s a panacea, and it creates good affiliation between people. It’s this nice biological force that we can use positively. Nice, but bland, and it doesn’t capture the throbbing gravitas of the sexual.
• Sex-sacred: Sex is sacred, because it creates babies, because it creates life. That’s beautiful, but when was the last time most people in the world had sexuality in order to create life? Most sexing in the world is not to create life. And much of the sexing in the world that does create life actually contradicts life, because overpopulation is a major existential risk — it crosses our planetary boundaries.

So, we don’t have a script of desire in culture to meet our own experience of desire. And our personal experience of our script of desire was degraded or rejected. Those two come together and traumatize the body, so now I don’t have direct access to a basic experience of my own goodness.

Does everyone feel that?

I don’t have direct access to a basic experience of my own goodness, and the goodness of my own story. And so, the pornographic universe enfolds me.

The pornographic universe might be algorithms of pornography that direct my script of desire and hijack it. Or that might be the pornographic universe of culture, in which I’m motivated by every buffeting sensation — in my drive for status, in all of the disguised forms of my transitional objects, and I can’t find my way back to the body.

We have to find our way back to the body, and to the dignity of desire that lives in the body.

The Song of Solomon is Holy of Holies

All of the sacred texts are holy — but they are not Holy of Holies. They are not the Temple. Holy of Holies, in the lineage tradition of Solomon, is the place of the Temple.

The unpacking we’re about to do is lost. It is not available, it was hidden. But it’s so deep, and it’s so true. We need to reclaim it, and then evolve it, and merge it with the evolutionary sciences and with systems theory and complexity theory.

But for now, I just want to give you two texts.

Text one. All of the books are holy, all of the sacred texts are holy. But the Song of Solomon is Holy of Holies.

What’s the Song of Solomon?

I’ll read you one fragment:

“The fig tree puts forth her green figs. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come with me. His left hand is under my head, his right hand embraces me, they’re lying down. Drink of the juice of my pomegranate. How beautiful and pleasant and gorgeous and stunning you are, oh loved one, with all of your erotic delights. Your stature, your throbbing is like a palm tree. Your breasts are like its clusters. I will climb the palm tree, and take hold of its fruit. May your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, your mouth and your kisses like the best wine. I am my beloved, and her desire is for me.”

Can you feel that? The text of the Song of Solomon is called Holy of Holies, which is the inner sanctum of the Solomon Temple. The text of the Song of Songs is a text of desire. That text of desire is the very nature of Reality Herself. The Song of Songs reads Tocho ratzuf ahava “its insides are lined with love” — with fuck, with Eros, with tumescence.

It’s the nature of Reality itself.
It’s the dignity of my desire.

I want to read you, just for a second, from this book, A Return to Eros, which is about these new texts of desire: The text of ethos is written in the body sacred. That’s the new script of desire. Not “sex should be ethical.” Of course sex should be ethical. But sex is ethos.

Eros is ethos.

In other words, the quivering tenderness and the fierceness of the sexual desire contains within it a complete Bill of Human Rights.

• Sex is ethics means our Code of Ethos is enfleshed in our bodies.
• Sex is ethics means that the ecstatic urgency of the sexual contains within it all the principles of virtue and integrity.
• Sex implies human rights.

The exquisite beauty of the moist feminine open to penetration, the rawness of desire, the yearning to touch and be touched, to ravish and be ravished, to hold and be held, are all radical screams of cosmos, of our intrinsic dignity, of the essential truth that we are welcome in the cosmos. The radical pleasure and beauty of throbbing phallus and dripping yoni are democratized pleasures available to every human being, written in the script of every body sacred.

These erotic capacities are not limited to the wealthier or the aristocratic or the particularly intellectual. Every human being is personally addressed by an intensity of pleasure that cries out in affirmation of our infinite worth in dignity. The Bill of Rights is encrypted in the script of desire that is our unique body.

The democratization of dignity has its source in the democratization of the dignity of desire.

Can you feel that, my friends? Can you feel that?

In another text, the lineage writes that if all the books of wisdom would not be given, the Song of Solomon would be sufficient as source for all governance, for all politics, for all economics, for all wisdom.

The Bill of Rights is written in the body sacred. The belly holds within it all ethos. The taut nipple, received in the mouth of the beloved, holds in it the infinity of the Divine. The dance of Yin and Yang, of Shiva and Shakti, of lines and circles — enfleshed, encrypted in the body sacred.

We all long to be poets. But we forget that we are already poems.

I don’t really long to be a poet, I long to know that I am a poem. I am a sacred text. And I am a unique sacred text, because I have a unique story.

The unique sacred autobiography, the unique narrative of my life, comes from my capacity to trust the direct knowing of my own intrinsic worth, which comes from my own anthro-ontological knowing. Anthro: my human body. Knowing is ontology.

• I have direct access to the very goodness of Reality.
• I have direct access to the full field of ethos.
• I have direct access to the full Field of Value.

The entire Field of Value is written in the giving and receiving that is the play of the sexual — the play of embodied desire.

Sex is divine desire in the body, uniquely expressed.

Ending the trance of the pornographic universe

I can only transcend the pornographic universe —

• when I begin to heal the trauma of being unwelcome in the universe, and I begin to feel and listen to the depth of my own unique experience of desire,
• when I begin to locate myself as CosmoErotic Humanism in-person,
• when my body is aflame.

But aflame can mean the most tender and gentle. My body is aflame with a desire to kiss my partner’s shoulder, and that’s enough. Sex doesn’t look like one thing. The Field of Desire doesn’t have one script. It’s my unique script of desire.

When I access that unique script of desire, I transcend (I end the trance of) the pornographic universe.

And by the pornographic universe, I mean not simply Pornhub, the actual incarnations of algorithmically generated scripts of desire — but the pornographic universe of culture, which is filled with the transitional objects that alienate me from the true desires of my life, from my true gifts, from my true joy. Because my joy is a direct byproduct of my true gift.

Only when I access the unique script of desire, I can begin to heal the broken narrative of the abuses.

• It can be the abuses of culture that shamed me, which is one form of abuse.
• It can be the abuse which comes from the degradation of my unique desire, and my unique sense of being able to trust my body. That’s another form of abuse, and that’s abuse of the sexual.
• Or it can be classical sexual abuse.

And what is sexual abuse? It means that somebody else made me an object in their own degraded script of desire, which was based on the violation of my script of desire. I became an object in someone else’s degraded story, and then I can’t access my own story.

When I become an object, when I can no longer feel the dignity of my unique desire, when my unique desire is violated in sexual abuse, then I can’t find my voice.

Desire is the language of the Divine

And then we violate the desire of culture.

• The desire of culture which is the desire for a shared Field of Value.
• The desire of culture is the desire for global intimacy.
• The desire of culture is to transcend (= to end the trance of) the global intimacy disorder, and to begin to experience ourselves together in a Field of Value.

How absurd it is that we live in a world that is entirely global — and yet, we don’t have a shared Field of Value —

• that we can live in together,
• and love in together,
• that we can feel each other in together.
• where we can actually experience the depth and dignity of the desire of every human being on the planet — and ultimately, the desire and dignity of the planet itself.

When we split off the other, when the other becomes an infidel, when the other becomes one who is tortured and raped and murdered in order to fulfill my script of desire — then we live in a world which is about to fall apart at its very, very seams. And its very, very fabric is ripped apart.

A materialist world is also a violation of the script of desire. We talked about it a few weeks ago:

• There is the degradation of the script of desire by Hamas, which creates the jihadi culture of death, whether that was in Iraq with ISIS, or in Syria with ISIS, all having nothing to do with Israel. Or in Gaza, when Hamas dominates the beauty of what should be a thriving Palestinian people.
• And there is a Western degradation of scripts of sacred desire, which is Barbie, where there is no love story, there is no intrinsic script of desire. Desire itself is a social construction. There is no Ken and Barbie. It’s all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. And Mrs. Mattel says to Barbie, humans just make up value, and then they die.

No!

No, desire is the language of the Divine, and desire is enfleshed as you and as me. Through the enfleshment, desire embodies in you and me. Through my body, I vision God, writes the lineage. Mi’besari echazeh Eloha.

My body is the script of desire.
And what do I desire? I desire value.
And what value do I desire?

I desire to come close to you. I desire to make contact with you. I desire to gift you the lover who is in the full thrust of intense desire. She doesn’t want to rape her beloved. She wants to ravish her beloved open to God, or open himself or open herself to be ravished open to God. Not fuck you as degradation — but fuck you as let’s fuck each other open to God.

Let’s love each other open to God.
Let’s ravish each other into rapture.

That’s the desire that lives in the body sacred. This Field of Desire is the place in which I know with absolute certainty that I am welcome in the universe. I can feel the Welcome sign, literally scripted in my body.

Only Sex Erotic can heal the body politic

My body is unique, and my desire is unique. And my unique desire is my message.

But we are messengers who forgot our message.

And what is my message?

We are all messengers of the Divine. I am a messenger of the Divine through the unique script of my desire, where I let my transitional object go. I de-armor, and I begin to be able to hear the unique voice of Homo amor, the New Human.

It is only through healing our story of desire, through enacting a new narrative of desire — Sex Erotic — that we can heal the body politic.

And what is Sex Erotic?

Sex Erotic is the knowing —

• that the sexing that moves in me — the desire that moves in me — is the desire of Reality;
• that urgency that moves in me is not some pathology, or some violation of my good citizen self, or of my chaste religious self.

No, my religion is my religare. My religare is my connecting, my enfleshment with all of Reality itself, in which my body participates in the body politic. We need to democratize knowing. Every human being has direct access to the knowing that Reality is good, and that they are welcome in the universe.

If I listen in, what does it mean to torture someone? What does it mean to rape someone, as we saw on October 7th? What does it mean to not feel the abject pain of two beautiful men, doctors who died in Gaza? To cut myself off from that pain, to cut myself off from their desire?

To know you, to be a great lover is to witness and feel your desire. And I am a great lover, because with my eyes closed, I can feel where your desire is moving, and I can ride the Field of Desire with you, together.

Because I feel you, and you feel me.
And I feel you feeling me, and you feel me feeling you.
And I feel me feeling you feeling me, and you feel me feeling you feeling me.

We begin to get these rivulets, these cycles, these spirals of ever-intensifying and deepening desire. And when we come to the ecstatic explosion of desire, we scream out, oh God! We scream out the name of God, because we are in the Holy of Holies.

I’m going to tell you something wild.

I was in Dharamshala, and I had a deep dive meeting with my dear friend. We sadly don’t talk often these years, because of the nature of where life is, and its intensities. But I was with the Dalai Lama, and we were in his back room. And he asked me how the lineage of Solomon survived the trauma and the degradation of the exile.

When the temples of Tibet were destroyed, the Dalai Lama was — and remains — beside himself. How do you perpetuate, when the temple is destroyed, the ethos and Eros of your culture? So he asked me, how did the lineage of Solomon do it? And I cited to him the texts that we just studied together. All the texts are holy, but the Holy of Holies is the Song of Solomon. The Holy of Holies is no longer the physical temple in Jerusalem, but it becomes the bed of desire. The bed of the lovers is the new Holy of Holies.

The people practicing the lineage of Solomon, even though they were degraded, and abused, and reviled, and trampled on, and therefore should not exist, yet they kept coming back to the marriage bed.

They kept coming back to the dignity of desire.
They kept coming back to the utter goodness of texts of desire written in the body sacred.

They did it imperfectly, and they did it in all sorts of ways that were complicated. But at the core, something kept them alive.

Desire desires value

And now, that narrative of desire —

• that lives deeply in the Song of Solomon,
• and in the intuitive knowing of the Yab Yum in the Indian traditions,
• the dance of Shiva and Shakti,
• the yearning of yin for yang,
• the allurement that complexity theory understands to be at the heart of Reality, that desire which brings protons and neutrons and electrons to come together —

— all of this has to form and articulate a New Story of Desire in its dignity.

And what’s the core dignity of desire?

Desire desires value.

My deepest heart’s desire is, I want to feel your desire.

Isn’t that true? The greatest gift you can give me is to let me see you in the quivering of your naked desire. I am not talking now here specifically about sexing, I am talking about Eros:

Let me see your open heart.
Let you see my open heart.

To be a beloved is to witness the quivering desire of my beloved.

We — all of us, every one of us in the world — have to understand it in order to create a new body politic.
We have to honor the quivering desire of every member and every tribe in the body politic.
We have to feel into the desire of every human being. And how do you torture a human being that you just witnessed in the convulsing explosion of them entering heaven on the chariot of desire’s dignity?
We have to heal.
We have to heal and create a New Story of Value. And that New Story of Value is Sex Erotic. Sex Erotic says that the sexual models Eros — and Eros is the field of ethics.
We have to reclaim the body in its goodness, and let the body mediate it through the prism of the value which it desires. That’s what the lover desires.

The lover always desires ever-deeper contact.

When I am filled with desire for you, I am filled with devotion for you.

I want to serve your pleasure.
I want to serve your wholeness.

Every touch, every gesture, is alive and replete with meaning and infinity. And I always scream your name, and then the name of God, and then Yes!

In every culture, we always say three things in the explosion of desire. We say yes, we say the name of the beloved, and we say the name of God. Because the yes is the body sacred telling me that I am welcome in Cosmos, and that every human being is welcome, and that we have a shared story of value. And the name of the beloved and the name of God — I realize they’re the same name; there is no split between them.

To be filled with desire is to see my beloved with the eyes of She.

This is the New Story. This is beyond the transitional object. This is the new narrative of desire.

We can’t bypass the story of desire.
We can’t demonize scripts of desire.

We need to recognize that every human being is a Unique Self, and a Unique Self is a unique script of desire.
We need to be in devotion and service to the emergence of the unique story, which is the unique value, which is the unique script of desire of every human being.

And from there, we create a Unique Self Symphony, where our scripts of desire come together in a common story of value, omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.

We understand that that what unites us is so much greater than that which divides us. We are fierce, and tender, and quivering desire. My deepest heart’s desire is: I want to make love with every human being on the planet. Not actually physically, that would take a while.

But I want to have that experience of the Divine, and the divine Field is personally addressing and making love with every human being. That divine Field lives in me. I’m an erotic mystic. I want to make love with every human being on the planet. Not to enact that in physical sexing, but to be in mad devotion to every human being on the planet.

• I can feel their pain, and I can hear their desire, and I can taste their quivering.
• I honor — full honor, mad devotion — the divinity and dignity of their unique script of desire, and the unique script of desire of their people, and their unique instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.

That’s the beginning of a new world. That’s the beginning of the healing of culture.

When we bypass desire, we create abuse. Sexual abuse, and political abuse, and racial abuse. We create all sorts of ideologies, and all sorts of others that we place outside the circle, to give ourselves the illusion of being alive.

Aliveness lives in us directly. It’s available immediately. It’s the democratization of greatness, which is the democratization of desire, and the democratization of the dignity of desire.

That’s the beginning.

Accessing my Unique Self is accessing my own unique script of desire, and knowing that my desire is desired by All-That-Is.

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