Venus of Milos

373 — Barbie Got It Wrong: Love is Real

We — as a culture — still assume that love is always going to be real.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [December 03, 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 this episode (originally presented at Eros Mystery School 2023) we analyze the Barbie movie through the prism of two key songs, Ken song (I’m just Ken) and Barbie song (Closer to Fine by Indigo Girls). Even as modernity (and then postmodernity) implicitly rejected the reality of value, we — as a culture — still assumed that love is always going to be real. The point of Barbie is that it is not; Barbie is postmodernity on steroids at the very center of culture.

Barbie is an idealized world of the feminine

We are going to the movies. We’re going to Barbie.

Barbie is exploding all over the world. It’s getting rave reviews as this next step of the feminine.

We’ve talked about Barbie three times already. We said that the gender crisis is the meta crisis.

Gender crisis and the meta crisis are one.

We need to understand that before we walk out of this door. We are going to cultivate discernment. It’s wildly funny at certain times.

We are going to the movies, but it’s actually crazy deep. Once we are in, we are in.

Barbie is a movie about a doll. There is a Barbie world. There is a real world. Barbie is made by Mattel. Barbie is an idealized world of the feminine where Barbie reigns. Barbie is in charge. There is an early Barbie doll which is just archaic and ancient. And then the new Barbie doll comes online — that’s how the movie opens. Barbie is a doctor, and Barbie is a lawyer, and Barbie is a Nobel Prize winner, and Barbie Land makes the hero of all women.

That’s the story.

And then, at some point, something goes wrong. Barbie has these feelings and thoughts of death and of cellulite, which are quite related. And we realize, “Oh, someone who’s been playing with her in the real world — that must be that person’s thoughts.” There has been a malfunction. A leakage between the two worlds.

How can this be solved? Barbie goes to find that out from Weird Barbie who has been cast out of the circle, but actually has some wisdom. Weird Barbie says:

“We have to fix the rend — the rip in the fabric between the worlds. How do you do that? You go there and find that girl who was playing with you.”

“How will I know who she is?”

“You’ll know. What do you do? You’ll figure that out, but you’ll heal the rend, and then you can come back and go on living forever in Barbie land.”

Barbie goes to the real world. It’s not Barbie by herself. Because in Barbie land, there’s Barbie and Ken. There’s a whole Ken world. There’s a whole Barbie world.

It’s Barbie and Ken.

The point of Barbie is that love is not real

There is a line and a circle. And when I say a line and a circle, I don’t mean men and women.

Obviously, there is a light on the circle.

There is this deep allurement.

There is this sense of —

• Wow! I begin to appear in a new way in your gaze, which is the essence of what a love story is. When you look at me, something new emerges in me, I begin to live in a new way and some deeper part of me emerges in your gaze, and the relationship between us is not a social construction.

That’s the dance of allurement which is Cosmos itself. Reality is Eros all the way up and all the way down. The quality of Eros is desire, and it is the desire for greater intimacy.

Intimacy means more wholeness in the context of shared identities and [relative] otherness.

Evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies.

Evolution is a story of clarifying allurements, my Unique Self as my unique set of allurements, and there’s always the dance between line and circle.

Luria said, “Reality is lines and circles, all the way up and all the way down.” And lines and circles live in me. That’s my love story. When I am CosmoErotic Humanism in person, then I can engage the next love story. I can be a mad lover on all the levels.

That’s the core of Cosmos.

Now, along comes modernity and says, “No, value is not quite real.” Modernity doesn’t say it out loud. David Hume, if you read him carefully, was quite clear about it, but it’s hidden because that was too radical a thing to say.

For example, in the American Constitution, we say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” which is another way of saying, “We have no idea where these things are from. But this is how we’re gonna live.” That’s what self-evident means here. We can’t source these values. They’re not sourced in Revelation, but we are gonna live in them. We deconstruct the field of value, but we live in it anyways.

But the one value that actually still lives at the center is love. One way of saying it is:

• We killed all the Gods except for Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

When the World Trade Center was about to come down, what most people did was call one person to say, “I love you.” Aphrodite is still somehow there.

Somehow, even after we deconstructed all the values, we assume that love is real. We go to ChatGPT-4, the oracular structure of a new emergent AI, and we ask, “Is love real?” It says, “Not quite.” And there is this seeping influence that has existed in literature, and all over the place, which deconstructs value and deconstructs love with it.

But popular culture insisted love is real — until Barbie.

You get what a big deal that is?

The point of the Barbie movie is that there is no field of value, and there is no Ken and Barbie.

We are going very fast off a cliff

When I walked out of Barbie, my body was shaking. And everyone is walking around saying, “Yeah, fantastic, great movie. That was fun.”

I said, “Oh, my God. Did I read that wrong?” Then I went and collected the stuff. I looked at the songs that are played. I looked at the text of the songs that are replayed. There’s one song that’s replayed three times, “Closer to Fine” by Indigo Girls. It’s the theme of the movie; they put it in the trailer.

The point of this movie is Ken and Barbie, by their very nature, are an illusion.

It’s not just that Ken needs to develop himself, and Barbie needs to develop herself, and now they can get together at this deeper level of consciousness. No, that’s not what’s happening. There is no Ken and Barbie, meaning the entire structure of Cosmos that we’ve just described is an illusion.

That chills the very one heart of culture — and the chill enters culture, and you’re not quite sure why you’re chilled. But it’s an insidious undermining of literally the last bastion of value. We killed all the Gods, except for Aphrodite.

What remains? Ken and Barbie.
But Ken and Barbie is not real.

If I made that claim based on a line here and there, that would be a mistake. But if you read the movie — carefully read the movie like a text — it’s actually shocking.

It’s exactly where we’re going. The assumption we make is that love is always going to be real. But ChatGPT-4 together with Barbie — you begin to see where we’re going. We’re going very fast off a cliff, where there is no field of value.

There are two books.

One is “Walden Two,” written in 1948 by B.F. Skinner, who talks about putting the world into what came to be called a Skinner’s box. If you read “Walden Two” carefully, what he says very clearly is: love is not real, love is contrived, we will create invisible controllers behind the scenes to make the right matches and to split up the right people. They won’t even know what happened.

What’s the other book that was written six months later? 1984 by George Orwell. Written at the exact same time. Skinner, when he taught at Harvard, would assign 1984 and Walden Two. In Orwell’s 1984 Orwell there’s something called The Ministry of Love. The entire point of the book is to take the relationship between Winston and his beloved, and to get them to betray each other. And once they betrayed each other, they then realize love is not real.

The fear we’ve always had is a 1984 totalitarianism that betrays the structure of love — where we are forced to betray love. What Skinner said is:

• No, no. I’m not worried about totalitarianism. That’s not the issue. We can deal with totalitarianism. Totalitarianism got it right, said Skinner, but they did it the wrong way. They tried to coerce people, to force people, to enter into their bodies and minds and break them. And once they were broken, they would betray love. The reason totalitarianism did it, from its perspective, was to control society for the greater good.

(A more accurate view of totalitarianism is the Ring of Power, the ring of Sauron — the seduction of power.) But Skinner says,

• No, no, we do need to control everyone. And to control everyone, we do need to control all values, which are not real, including love. But the way we’re going to do it is, within the structure of Walden Two, we’re going to create invisible controllers. And our assumption is love is not real.

Skinner’s great book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which animates the entire web, because his book goes to the MIT Media Lab that animates the web, says that love is not real. We can invisibly guide people to what kind of person they should marry, who they should desire, and what they should like. We completely dissociate from our own script of desire.

Skinner’s assumption is this invisible control is never broken forth into popular culture. It’s got to be invisible controllers, so you would never say it out loud. But the entire Barbie movie is a devastating deconstruction of any relationship to the idea that love is actually real. The language of love is real in the movie is Ken and Barbie. There is no Ken and Barbie, they don’t exist.

The first scene I want to take a look at is this moment in which Barbie escaped, she’s in the real world. There is a whole dramatic chase scene. And then the question becomes, “Oh my god, so what are we gonna do with Barbie now?” Let’s take a look at that scene.

If you read the scene superficially, it looks like she says, “I don’t love this guy.” But that’s not what the scene means. She means, Barbie is not in love with Ken. She’s saying Barbie is not in love with Ken. Ken is not in love with Barbie. Love is not the goal. That’s not the ending.

I’m not in love with Ken. The very structure of Barbie and Ken actually doesn’t exist.

Ken’s Song: I have feelings I can’t explain

Let’s play the Ken song. I am trying to find the essential piece that you need to see to actually get what’s happening here. There is a song that Ken sings. Let’s start there. Let’s take a look at the Ken song.

It’s an incredible scene.

• Step one, Ken in the movie stands for love. He’s standing for love is real.
• Step two, the insidious move that the movie is making is Ken is patriarchy, so that which stands for love is real is patriarchy.

Patriarchy is saying love is real. That’s actually a strategy of patriarchy. That’s the line the movie is making. All the reviews just missed it or ignored it. It’s blatant.

Now, listen to the lyrics. Let’s just read the text.

Doesn’t seem to matter what I do.
I’m always number two.

That starts with caricaturing the male as someone who is, in rivalrous conflict win-lose metrics, always number two. The entire scene is a caricature of male violence.

If you look at the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, as guys are mowed down on the beach, this is a beach scene — men on the beach — but of course, the beach is the place that men have died. Millions of men died on beaches. But what does Ken say? I just want you to catch the resonance: I beach. And what is beaching?

This beaching is this great war between men, and it’s a war — if you remember the plotline of the movie — over perceived egoic insults from the feminine. We feel slighted, and so we actually create a war over those trifling contraction insults. This is men beaching — male violence caricatured as inanely stupid on the beach. But then the lyrics of it are (and it’s shocking):

I’m always number two.
No one knows how hard I tried. Oh, oh.

That’s the first three lines. And now listen to the second and fourth line. And this fourth line is mocked in the movie. You don’t even catch it. Listen to the line:

I have feelings I can’t explain.

But those feelings, as explained by the movie, are just the social construction of a sick patriarchy. But what he says is — and the Goddess finds her way in it:

I have feelings I can’t explain.
They’re driving me insane.
All my life’s become so polite.
But I’ll sleep alone tonight.

Critics read it: the guy always needs a babe in his bed. That’s not what he’s saying. Despite their best effort, the Goddess found her way here. I have feelings I can’t explain. How do I know what I know? Anthro-ontology, human ontology — it lives in me. The mysteries are within us. I have feelings I can’t explain. They’re driving me insane.

The normal consciousness of evolutionary psychology of win-lose metrics is that I’m supposed to be completely satisfied in the polite place — all my life I’ve been so polite. I’ve operated in that system, it’s driving me insane. And I’ll sleep alone tonight.

And then the next line. Why?

Because I’m just Ken.

Then he reverts back. There are multiple voices of I’m just Ken. I got it. Let me push that down. I’m just Ken. Got it. Patriarchy.

I’m just Ken,
Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.

He reverts back into the other voice. As my friend Dick Schwartz described in Internal Family Systems, there are different voices. We see his different voices here.

And then he says this incredible line. It’s really beautiful that he says this gorgeous line, he says:

Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?

Ain’t that a gorgeous line? And they wrote it cutely, slapstick, but She found her way into the line.

Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blond fragility?

Shakespeare couldn’t have done that much better. It’s a gorgeous line, but gets completely lost, it hasn’t been commented on by anyone. Is it my destiny?

And then he says, I’m just Ken. Here’s the key line:

Where I see love, she sees a friend.

But he’s not talking about their relationship. That’s a complete misreading of the movie.

Then he says:

What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?

Is that male ego? There’s some of it. Some male ego is there for sure. But is that male ego at its core? No. What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan?

Now, does he have a huge responsibility in the level of superficiality? Of course he does. That’s a given. The opposite of the sacred is the superficial. That’s a given. We get the critique of Ken, that’s a good critique. It’s a good critique of patriarchy. Received.

But he is saying something here. He’s saying, I want her to see me. I’m actually desperate for her to see me. What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?

You have to understand, these are the lyrics to that scene on the beach, that caricatured scene on the beach. These are the actual lyrics to that, which you don’t quite catch.

And then he says:

I want to know what it’s like to love, to feel the real thing.

These are the caricatured lyrics. And then the next line is literally straight out of 1984. He says:

Is it a crime?

Is it some violation? What am I doing wrong here?” What he’s saying is, actually: what everything is telling me is there is no Barbie and Ken. It’s what Barbie is saying. It’s what culture is saying — I am just Ken. That’s the name of the song, “I’m just Ken.”

Is it a crime?

Then he says:

Am I not hot when I’m in my feelings?

Can I trust my feelings? All of culture is telling me I can’t trust my feelings.

The surest way to control you is to tell you you cannot trust your feelings

Now I want you to get it really clear, friends. I take for a given the feminist critique of patriarchy that’s in the movie, I take that as a given to be correct. There’s obviously a huge critique of patriarchy. I think we all ican take as a given that there was something to critique in patriarchy, that feminism did a good job of critiquing part of it. That’s a given in the room. That’s our structure. We’re starting from there.

But that’s not what the movie is doing.

What it’s saying is: there is no Barbie and Ken.

And is my moment finally here or am I dreaming?
I’m no dreamer

Can you feel KENergy?
Feels so real, my KENergy.

But then he realizes:

No, I’m just Ken.
Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.
Where I see love, she sees a friend.

And then there is resignation at the end of the song, complete resignation. He says:

I’m just Ken,
And I’m enough.
And I’m doing great stuff.

Wow. Complete resignation.

So, hey, check me out, yeah, I’m just Ken
My name’s Ken and so am I
Put that manly hand in mine
So, hey world, check me out, yeah I’m just Ken
Baby, I’m just Ken.

That’s a suicide note. Do you get that? And that this was written is not the problem. The problem is that this was written and completely missed by culture — when actually it’s a complete indictment of the very notion of Barbie and Ken.

If Ken actually matures and wakes up, he doesn’t awaken to love. His waking up is the realization that love is not real, that there is no Barbie and Ken.

Now, this is not me reading you a text of a postmodern Derrida text or early Foucault. I am reading you the text that’s at the center of culture now. And no one bothered to read the song. And the critics who did read the song, read it as a male ego song. That’s how they read it.

It’s not a male ego song. This is a plaintive cry of a human soul. It’s not a male issue. That’s now a man/woman issue — that’s the line, whoever the line is. This is the line saying, Oh my God, love is real. And I want her, I want him to see behind the tan and be willing to fight for me. But where I see love — I can’t trust my feelings.

Now, the surest way to control you — whether by overt Orwellian totalitarian control, closed society, China, or by open society totalitarianism, BF Skinner, Walden Two, MIT Media Lab — is to tell you that you can’t trust your feelings. If you can’t trust your deepest feelings — if I can split your own trust of your feelings — I’ve got you. Wow.

And, here’s the crazy thing:

There are no demons in the story. If I brought Alex Pentland into this room, and the entire staff of the MIT Media Lab, you would not meet people with horns. You’d meet fantastic people who you’d love to have dinner with, you might want to sleep with. Great people, great men and women are running these things. The existential risk is not from a conspiracy theory. There is no conspiracy theory.

It’s the structure of the system itself. It’s an inexorable movement of the system itself. That’s actually what’s happening.

Barbie’s song: take my life less seriously

Here is another song, the song of Barbie.

Now, you might say, he’s just making that up. Well, I’m not. It happens three times in the movie. And then they put it in the trailer of the movie.

The song seems to be this very sweet song.

First off, the last scene. They just got interrupted. This is Sasha and Gloria, daughter and mother. We think, in the movie, that it’s Sasha playing with Barbie dolls, but it’s actually Gloria. Sasha’s dolls have been put away. It’s Gloria who took the dolls out, and who is having irrepressible thoughts of death, and thinking about cellulite. It’s the bond between Barbie and Gloria that begins the movie.

The love story in the movie is between the mother and the daughter. You see that little moment when she looks over to her mother. There are six scenes in the movie showing the gradual falling in love of Sasha with her mom. So there is a great love story in the movie, but it’s a biological love story between Sasha and Gloria. That’s the real love story.

Again, this happens three times in the movie, and they put it in the trailer without talking about it, meaning it’s the anthem. It’s not that they fully understood what they were doing. That’s not the point. As we always say, this is culture speaking.

And just watch this. What interrupts the song? Ken. Oh, Ken songs are coming on. The truth of this song is interrupted by Ken. Ken is patriarchy. And what’s Ken going to be arguing for? Value and love is real.

That’s actually the structure of the movie.

How does the song move?

I’m trying to tell you something ‘bout my life.
Maybe give me some insight between black and white.

So, I am trying to discern, trying to understand my life. And —

The best thing you ever done for me,
is help me to take my life less seriously.

Now, first blush. Great. Let’s take our lives a little less seriously. Does that sound good? Sure it does. What’s the point here?

Less seriously means here with less gravitas.
Less seriously means it doesn’t matter.

Why do you think this whole fucking thing matters so much? Relax, the thing doesn’t matter at all. That’s what the song is saying. Listen to it. It’s only life after all.

This is one of the themes of Barbie.

You cannot understand the world in terms of value if this life is all there is

One of the themes of Barbie is when Ruth Mattel (=“God”) says to Barbie, “You want to become human? They just live and die. And they make shit up along the way because they’re uncomfortable. So they make ideas up.” That’s an exact quote. And then you die. Why would you want to do that?

Barbie in the beginning of the movie is doing this all-girls night dance. And then she says, and you know, and then I’m thinking about death. I am thinking about dying — the music stops — I’m dying to dance more. It’s the irrepressible thoughts of death that Gloria has in the real world, which then leak into Barbie. Now Barbie is thinking about death.

Thinking about death ruins the story. That gets in the way.

Because we actually want to live in this illusory world where we ignore the question of meaning.
Because our assumption is, meaning is not real.
Because value is not real. And value is not real because you live fucking once, and then the whole fucking thing is over. Mother Teresa, Hitler — nothing actually matters.

We are not gonna say that overtly, but basically, there is no field of value. There cannot be a field of value because you cannot understand the world in terms of value if this life is all there is. I want to make that very clear.

In his Red Book, Jung writes, “I cannot establish mental stability in a patient unless I can give them access to the realization that there’s life beyond the boundaries of this life.”

The religions hijacked that:

• Oh, sure, there’s immortality. And we happen to know the way, and there is a cost. And the cost is you do it our way. If you don’t do it our way, you have no immortality. And it looks exactly like this.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong. But what do we do in this massive, correct rebellion, in this evolutionary thrust forward, where we rejected the caricature versions of harps and heaven? We actually rejected our innate knowing: Harry Chapin, I have this funny feeling that we’ll all get together again.

It’s why when you fall in love with someone, when you really fall madly in love, what do you say? I’m going to love you forever.

Now, forever doesn’t mean everlasting time. It doesn’t, by the way, necessarily mean that we’ll ever meet again, in the way we met in this lifetime. But it does mean that the essence actually continues, that there is a continuity of consciousness.

You know, Bertrand Russell, the great atheist of the 20th century, says, Where I run into trouble, I just can’t get beyond it, I don’t know how to work out value theory. This is a direct quote, he says, I can’t see my way against the arguments for the subjectivity of human values. Russell, who is not a philosopher, gets caught in the assumption that value is not real because it reigned in the day. He wasn’t able to think his way out of that. But, he says, I can’t bring myself to believe that the only thing wrong with the mass murder is that I don’t like it. That’s a direct quote from Russell.

There cannot be just one lifetime

In my body, I know that fairness is real. We all know fairness is real. We have cross-cultural information that one of the loudest cry of a child is “It’s not fair.” That’s pre-culture. It’s the beginning of language. When you feel fairness has been violated, there is this scream, this primal scream. There’s an enormous amount of developmental literature about this — across time, across cultures.

Okay, so we know fairness is real. It means justice is real, in some fundamental sense. Justice is a real category.

There are perversions of justice, there is law that’s a social construction — I get all of that. But the idea that it should be fair is a fundamental structure that lives in us.

Yet there is no question that, for the majority of human beings, it’s not fair in one lifetime. That’s just true. Unless you are a radical, egocentric narcissist (if you are, then just own that, that’s fine). If your self-perception is “I’m a radical, egocentric narcissist. I don’t give a fuck if it’s fair for everyone. I’m going to work out my own little life and it’s fair for me.” — great. But I don’t think that your self-perception or mine is that we are radically egocentric narcissists.

We are actually not, but that’s how we live.

Because the truth is, it’s not fair for the majority of the world. One lifetime does not create fairness. There is no equal distribution of talent. There is no equal distribution of wealth. There is no equal distribution of possibility. There is not equal distribution of joy. There is not equal distribution of sexuality. There is not equal distribution of beauty. The list goes on and on and on. (And yes, I know you can wrestle meaning out of any life, of course you can. I work with myself and with people all the time, day and night, I got all that. I got all that.)

So:

• One, fairness is real.
• Two, for the majority of human beings, fairness does not happen in one lifetime.

But if I know absolutely in my body that fairness is a real category — that reality demands fairness, and I know that fairness has not worked out in one lifetime, then what else do I know? I know that there’s a continuity of consciousness. I know there cannot be just one lifetime.

Now, I didn’t resort to any of the evidence of reincarnation, of which there is an enormous amount.
I didn’t resort to the philosophical analysis of materialism and dualism.

I left that off the table. I didn’t go for any of the other kinds of empirical evidence that David Ray Griffin writes about, all of which are real.

I just talked about what lives inside of you. It’s a big deal.

The movie says, “No.”

That’s the post-modern assumption.
It’s a dogmatic assumption. It’s literally a dogmatic assumption.
I talked to a very, very famous scientist, an excellent scientist. And he says:

“I’m a stone-cold atheist.”

I said, “Okay. Let me go to the evidence. I will walk you through one piece of evidence at a time. And I will show you that based on every way that you evaluate evidence, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that there is a continuity of consciousness.”

“I’m not going through the evidence with you. I know what I know.”

I know this guy for years. He would not have a conversation with me.
That’s dogma. It’s complete dogma.

The movie adopts that assumption. And God says to Barbie, “Why would you want to become a human being? You live and you die. And they get uncomfortable, so they make up meaning. Don’t do that, stay in Barbie land.”

And yet — just like Arwen in The Return of the King who wants to become mortal — there is something in Barbie, who holds the best of humanity and has this yearning to become human in a way that Ruth doesn’t quite understand.

This was all the explanation of the line: It’s only life after all.

Post-modernity on steroids

Now we’re just gonna finish the song. Just check it out with me. Here it gets crazy.

And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.

Meaning, forget about gravitas. There’s this call for Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being.

And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear
And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it.
I’m crawling on your shores.

I’m going to actually lose myself in the lightness of being. These are lyrics, I’m not making any of this up. I didn’t do this. This is in culture.

And then it goes.

And I went to the doctor,
I went to the mountains.
I looked at the children,
I drank from the fountains.

Then what does she say?

There’s more than one answer to these questions…

— meaning pluralism, meaning a rebellion against one answer. That’s good. We should rebel against one answer. But what she’s actually saying is:

There’s more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in a crooked line.

This is the line. Whenever something is true, it’s written all over culture. It’s pointing me in a crooked line — lines are crooked. Answers are crooked.

Here is the next line.

And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine, yeah.

Definitive meaning anything that’s intrinsically so. Definitive means definitive. It’s real. The less I seek my source in anything that’s real.

I actually acknowledge that there are lots of answers. And the point is, none of them actually matter. You live once, it’s all made up. We make them up because we’re uncomfortable.

This is the central lyric of the song.

• Love Story is not real.
• There’s no Barbie and Ken.
• Value is not real.
• The field of value is not real.

There’s no definitive answer. You live once, it’s over. The whole thing’s made up.

The best thing you ever done for me to take this life less seriously.

There’s no gravitas in this life. Don’t try and look for it. And the more you get that, the closer I am to fine.

Now in case you think I missed this, just take a look. This is what happens when you go look for some depth.

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me.

You know who Rasputin was? Rasputin was this demonized figure who’s manipulative and controlling and destructive for the sake of power. So the doctor of philosophy has a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knees, which is obviously not sexy. He never marries. He doesn’t know anything about that stuff. And never saw a B grade movie. You wouldn’t want to hang out with the dude. He graded my performance. He is all line. In other words, it’s mocking it.

I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper, and I was free.

And then I realized, no, no, no, these answers to these questions, it’s all a crooked line. We read the Bible, that didn’t work. Or we did the workout thing, that didn’t work. We read up on revival, that didn’t work. Oh, there is more than one answer to these questions, pointing me to a crooked line. And the less I seek my source for some definitive in the real, the closer I am to fine.

This, my friends, is postmodernity on steroids at the center of a central movie and culture. And no one even realizes that this is the text.

The reason there’s no Barbie and Ken is because how could there be Barbie and Ken? To say that there’s Barbie and Ken would be to say —

• that there is a value at the very center of Cosmos,
• and that value is Eros,
• and that Reality is lines and circles all the way down and all the way up,
• and that Reality is a love story.

Someone said to me last night — it was a very beautiful thing:

• Wow. In my generation, no one does sex, no one’s interested. Yeah, there’s some sex happening. But basically, the sense of Eros, the sense of sex, is not interesting. It’s not happening.

And so Barbie and Ken don’t have genitals, and certainly, their genitals don’t point them to each other.

At the end of the movie, when we have established there is now no Ken, now Barbie is going to go to the gynecologist but it doesn’t have anything to do with Ken. And Ken could be, you know, Barbie and Cindy, that’s not the point. The point is, there’s no love story at the center.

The only love’s right at the center — the one that you can’t deny — is the biology of my daughter. We can hold that one because she’s my daughter. You can somehow hold that. And of course, the other love story in the movie is — Barbie is named after Ruth Mattel’s daughter, Barbara. These are the two mother-daughter moves in the movie.

Your need is my allurement

I just touched the bare surface of this. We could go on for about four hours, without hyperbole, and take you through scene after scene after scene after scene.

I’ll just give you the last image.

There’s this moment in the beginning of the movie, where there are flat feet, cellulite, death.

I’m just gonna pick this one because it’s so innocuous — so subtle, so easy to miss. What’s the response of the other Barbies to this? “That’s disgusting.”

What are we disgusted by?

Mortality.

We are shamed by our mortality. And the reason sexuality, and sex, and death are so intimately related is because they both take us back to this animal dimension that, at least from the perspective of this world, dies. We are shamed by our mortality.

We are shamed by three things:

• We’re shamed by humiliation, when we attempt to get our basic needs met.
• We’re shamed by death, by our mortality.
• And we’re shamed by our powerlessness.

But it’s all about the shame of powerlessness at its core. If you actually listen, Barbie says, “I woke up, and I was thinking about death, and I was ashamed.” Shame.

This is this quality of shame that we’re trying to avoid at all costs. But the only way to transpose shame is to realize that, in the depth of my being, my needs are filled with dignity. My needs are not shame and powerlessness.

When we love each other madly, we look into each other’s eyes, and we say, Your need is my allurement. Ain’t that beautiful? Lovers look at each other’s eyes, and they say, Your need is my allurement. And the actual of sexing is when the lovers say to the Beloved, Your need is my allurement.

It’s why in sex can heal the shame, which is the original shame of being humiliated in having my basic needs met. But when I enter the world of sexing, and if I am madly on the inside with my beloved, I have this insatiable need that would cause me radical shame anyplace else in social discourse, and my lover looks at me, and she/he says, without words, Your need is my allurement.

Ken and Barbie, all the way up. And all the way down.

Now imagine my friends, if we said Your need is my allurement not just to our one beloved?

What if we moved beyond our one beloved, and we included the family, or the whole egocentric circle of intimacy, and said to our whole egocentric circle of intimacy, Your need is my allurement?

And what if we expanded that circle, and we said to everybody in our gang and our nation, or whatever it is, whatever our larger gang is, Your need is my allurement?

And what if we went to world-centric intimacy?

Do you see the line moving, and the circle expanding?

And if we said to every human being —

• If you’re hungry, I’m hungry.
• And if you’re ripped apart, I’m ripped apart.
• And if you have no drinking water, I have no drinking water.
• And if your children are malnourished, I’m malnourished.

I was talking to my dear friend the other day. Someone close to him is dealing with a particular issue. And he was talking to me about medical care. And I said to my friend, how stunningly beautiful that they can go from this best doctor to this best doctor to get the best medical care.

Now, how much of the rest of the world has that available to them?

Your need is my allurement.

I can’t sleep at night if people are hungry.
I can’t sleep at night if 2 billion people in the world have no access to drinking water.

Your need is my allurement.

We are in the same circle of value.

Outrageous Acts of Love

You might say, “Okay, that’s too fucking big. What can I do with that?”
So here it is. We are going to close with this.
Why do we close our hearts?

If we are emerging as Homo Amor —

• I am a love story,
• I’m CosmoErotic Universe in person,
• I realize reality is a love story,
• your need is my allurement extends to every human being on the planet,
• and maybe I go to cosmocentric intimacy feel every animal, and I feel actually the cosmos itself, and I feel the past and the present, the future or awake and alive in me —

— if I feel the whole thing, then what do I do with that?

As my best friend said to me yesterday, “How do I feel this much?”

When I feel too much I close down, because I can’t hold it. It’s not because I’m egocentric or narcissistic. It’s because the gap between my ability to feel and my ability to heal is too great. In that gap, I close my heart out.

So, how do I open my heart?

I can only open my heart if I close that gap. Homo Amor has to know how to close the gap. So here it is, and this is where we conclude:

I say:

• I am in relationship to the whole thing. I am willing to feel the whole thing — not every minute of every day, but I’m going to be in a relationship to the whole. The meta-crisis is a crisis of intimacy, and intimacy is our capacity to feel the whole.

Now, a thousand years ago, a very narrow band of enlightened people could feel the whole. But now, the notion of locality literally doesn’t exist anymore. A virus infects the entire world. The notion of local literally does not exist. It’s not just one love — it’s that one love is instantiated in a reality that’s completely interdependent. So I’ve got to be in a relationship to the whole. We see a picture of planet Earth, from Apollo, and oh my God, that’s us. To be Homo Amor is to be in a relationship to the whole. I experience the entire field.

Now, I cannot heal the whole.

My next step is:

• No, no, I’m not just the True Self, I don’t just feel the whole. I am Unique Self, and I don’t need to heal everything. That is not my responsibility. I cannot do that. That’s not mine to do.

So what is mine to do?

What’s mine to do is who are you? Who am I? (I apologize for using the you but by you, I mean, me and we.)

Who are you?

You are an irreducibly unique expression of LoveIntelligence, and LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire of All-That-Is that lives in you, as you and through you that never was, is, or will be ever again, other than through you.

And as such, you, me, we, Unique Self Symphony have the capacity to stand on the abyss of darkness and say, “Let there be light.”

How? Through living in my unique perspective and my unique quality of intimacy that come together to form my unique gifts that address a unique need in my unique circle of intimacy and influence.

That’s what’s mine to do. To be a Unique Self means I have a unique set of allurements. It means I have a unique set of Outrageous Acts of Love that are mine to do and no one else’s. That’s it.

I commit my Outrageous Acts of Love, but I can’t do it myself.
So I look for others, because I am in a Unique Self Symphony.
I am going to find the others.
I am going to create the relationships that allow us to come together as Unique Self Symphonies, and commit Outrageous Acts of Love — not as a top-down organized surveillance structure, but as Unique Self Symphonies.

We begin to experience a planetary awakening and evolutionary love through Unique Self Symphonies all the way up and all the way down.

Wow. That is a valid, compelling and actually pragmatically available social vision. We enact a world where I know who I am.

I am Unique Self.
I have a unique set of allurements.
I am a unique expression of the whole.
I have a unique gift to give to my unique circle of intimacy and influence.

It’s at the core structure and fabric of the education system itself.

Who are we? We are Homo Amor.

Homo Amor is the LoveIntelligence of Cosmos arising in me as me and through me — and then as we find each other in Unique Self Symphonies.

So what do I do? I do only what’s mine to do.

But when I do what’s mine to do, I love it open, I give it all.
It’s mine and no one else is going to do this. I can’t turn away. I step in.
To be a Unique Self is to be an Outrageous Lover. It’s to feel Outrageous Love moving through me.

What does an Outrageous Lover do?

An Outrageous Lover keeps all the boundaries that should be kept and breaks all the boundaries that should be broken — and she commits Outrageous Acts of Love.

And then I realize, oh, that’s why I’m here. It’s my greatest joy.

• I commit Outrageous Acts of Love for myself.
• I love myself madly.
• I love you madly because the whole thing is a love story.

Barbie and Ken are real. It’s real. It’s the most real thing that exists.
Let’s hold that.

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