381 — The Divine Delight and Devastation of Devotion and her Dignities
Visions of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 28, 2024] 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, we explore, and feel into, the quality of devotion. Devotion is the placing of attention, and it is intrinsically linked to Desire and Allurement. The evolution of Desire is the evolution of devotion, the evolution of devotion is the evolution of Love, and the evolution of Love is the birth of Homo Amor.
We trace the evolution of devotion from premodernity to modernity to postmodernity, and describe how this experience radically changes as self-perception progresses from separate self to True Self to Unique Self, and ultimately, to Unique Self Symphony.
Postmodernity deconstructed devotion, and it was right to do so, because premodern and modern was often degraded and pseudo-erotic. But now, we need to reclaim and resurrect devotion, because there is no joy without devotion.
You cannot live in joy without being in devotion
Welcome, everyone!
Cha!
Cha means cha!
Cha means the aliveness that words can’t capture. That’s cha. It’s the poignancy, it’s the potency, it’s the fullness of life that words can’t capture.
And when you really want to say cha, you say giga-cha.
I have a dear friend who I text with every day. We text, back and forth, the levels of cha.
Is it a giga-cha day?
Is it a mega-cha day?
Is it a regular cha day?
Cha is like yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
And the Yes! is not a bypass. The Yes! is not an override of the pain. It is not superficial, or flaccid, or insipid. Cha is yes. It is the resounding, unrelenting commitment to the fullness and goodness of this moment right now, in this very second.
So welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!
We have a huge topic today — devotion.
It’s a huge, wildly important topic.
How can you be fiercely independent, wildly autonomous and radically devoted?
That’s the question. You actually cannot live in joy — I cannot live in joy, we cannot live in joy — without being in mad devotion.
Devotion has its distortions, so it requires discernment. We need distinctions around devotion, but first, before we get to the distinctions, I want to just invoke devotion.
We dismiss devotion. Devotion is that which someone does when they’re not successful.
- We say about a man who is not successful, “But he’s a very devoted husband, he’s a devoted father.“
- And about a woman who doesn’t meet society’s standards of whatever society is expecting from her — whether in terms of success or Beauty and all of the tinsel expectations of a superficial society that hasn’t yet found its heart and soul, that hasn’t yet burst into Homo Amor — we say about the woman, “Yeah, but she’s a very devoted mother.”
There is something dark about devotion. You are somehow lost. Devotion is understood, in some sense, to be in opposition to dignity. And in modern therapeutic terms, devotion is connected to codependency, which is the ultimate sin.
We need to find our way to devotion that’s whole and powerful. Because — again — you cannot be in joy without devotion. Can’t be done. No joy without devotion.
- Step one, reality is desire.
- Step two, desire is about devotion. My desire means there is something that’s not yet here and I want it — but I’m actually devoted, in some sense, to realizing it.
But it’s more than that. It’s deeper. That’s level one of desire and devotion.
Desire is a quality of the wider Field of Eros. Desire lives across all fields of Reality. Reality is Desire, and sexuality models Eros.
- The sexual models the erotic; it doesn’t exhaust the erotic.
- Sexual desire models Desire; it doesn’t exhaust Desire.
When you are in desire, what is desire arousing in you?
What is the characteristic of desire?
The characteristic of desire is devotion. Whenever you are on your knees, you are always on your knees to God. It’s an act of devotion. It’s a servicing of, it’s a devotion to. There is an unimaginable quality of devotion in desire, in lovemaking.
We are going to need to understand devotion in a very deep way, but before we put all the distinctions on the table, let’s just invoke devotion.
Devotion and desire are fundamentally related to each other. And in the end, we’re going to understand powerfully that devotion is an expression of Homo Amor — and Homo Amor is Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony.
- There is no devotion that’s whole outside of the context of Unique Self.
- There is no devotion that’s whole outside of the context of Unique Self Symphony.
We need to get to a devotion that’s whole, and powerful, and potent — and we need to avoid the pathology of devotion.
But first, we need to take devotion back. Devotion is not per se a pathology. Devotion is a mad, gorgeous power of Cosmos. The very quality of Divinity, the very quality of the Infinite is the Infinite is the Infinite Intimate and the Infinite is in devotion to the finite.
The name of God is the Infinite Intimate. The Infinite is in devotion to finitude.
That’s the paradox of the Infinite: the Infinite is all-powerful, radically powerful, radically alive, not in need — in any classical sense at least — of finitude of the manifest world. And yet, the name of God, the Infinite is the Infinite Intimate.
The Infinite is in devotion to her intimates.
Wow!
Anna Akhmatova as a symbol of devotion: where catastrophe led them, I was there
Let’s just feel devotion.
I want to read you something I was reading this morning.
I want to share with you something personal, something intimate that I was thinking about early this morning. I went to do my doctorate, essentially, so my mother would be happy. Jewish mothers, sons, academic degrees, you know how that works. I went to Oxford, so my mother could tell people, “Oh, my son, he’s in Oxford and he’s getting a doctorate.” I got some points with mom there. That was good.
When I was in Oxford, I was in the college that had the library of Isaiah Berlin.
Isaiah Berlin is one of the most fascinating and brilliant figures in contemporary philosophy, one of the great, great dons of Oxford, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. He was also very involved in politics. I was in the library in Oxford that had Isaiah Berlin’s books. Can everyone get the scene? I am in Oxford. I am surrounded by Isaiah Berlin’s books, which have his writings. And they’re crazy interesting and beautiful.
I happened across a book about how Isaiah Berlin went to Russia. He was working for the British government. It’s 1945, and he goes to Russia, and he wants to meet with a Russian poet whose name is Anna Akhmatova. They tell him that she is actually still alive, and so he goes to meet her. They have this mad night together — not a night of sexing, but a night of Eros. They fall madly in love with each other, I would say. It is this incredible meeting, which takes place in Leningrad.
The most important thing is to clearly understand who Anna Akhmatova was.
The way the West tells the story of World War II, it’s the Western allies who defeated Nazism. But for many years, they skipped over the incredible and unimaginable suffering of the Russian people and the Russian army, which participated, and was essential, in defeating Nazism — an unimaginable story of suffering, and heroism, and bravery. It was only after the Cold War thawed that there was some beginning of a realization of what the devotion of Russia was.
Russia was devotion. Russia literally became devotion.
Anna Akhmatova’s probably greatest poem is called Requiem.
I am just going to read you just a little piece of it. It opens with a four line poem:
Unmoved by the glamor of alien skies,
By asylum in faraway cities, I
Chose to remain with my people: where
Catastrophe led them, I was there.
She tells many stories, but included in them was her own suffering trying to protect her family in Leningrad. She writes, I’m going to read you directly from it,
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months queuing outside the prisons of Leningrad.
Just to get a little bit of her story, her first husband was executed by the secret police in 1921. Her third husband and her son spent many, many years in the gulag. And she would wait in these very, very long freezing lines trying to deal with an impossible gulag bureaucracy — trying to somehow protect them, somehow help them.
She writes,
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months queuing outside the prisons of Leningrad.
I just want you to get the image of devotion. This woman who’s been outside the prisons of Leningrad for seventeen months all day, all day from the beginning to the end, in line. Almost like in Kafka’s trial, these impossible lines in impossible contexts.
And then she writes,
On one occasion someone recognized me. It was a woman who was standing near me in the queue, with lips of a bluish color, and then, waking from that state of numbness which was characteristic of us all, she quietly asked me (for everyone spoke in a whisper in those days): “And can you write about this?” And I replied, “I can.” And then something like a smile flickered across what was once her face.
I’ve looked at the lines of Requiem, which are about suffering. They are about suffering. They are about the horror of Stalin, all mixed up with all of the brutality of this impossible hidden time.
She is in devotion, she’s for seventeen months in queue. Her devotion is to her son and to her husband, but her devotion is also to the writing.
She is going to write, and she is writing in devotion.
She is not writing because she is going to get published tomorrow.
She is in devotion to Goodness itself.
She is in devotion to Truth.
She is in devotion to Beauty.
She is in devotion to the Word.
And she has this trust that her devotion to the Word has dignity, and ultimately will bear fruit.
I came across her just sitting there, writing about Aramaic texts, all night and all day. I wrote the doctorate surrounded by Isaiah Berlin’s books — and Isaiah Berlin meets her in 1945 and spends a night with her. A night of Eros, not a night of sexing — a night of radical Eros in which Berlin is actually young and naive, and she is older and wiser. And yet, this impossible meeting takes place.
For me, she has always been a symbol of devotion.
I want to begin with that kind of devotion. We’ll get to the later stages of devotion, but I just want you to just feel devotion. I want to just feel devotion with you.
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
Reality is Desire.
Desire is devotion.
Devotion is the placing of attention.
Homo Amor is devoted, but the devotion of Homo Amor is
fundamentally different from the devotion of homo sapiens.
Devotion shows up in one way in the premodern period, then
there is the devotion of modernity, which is followed by
postmodernity’s deconstruction of devotion.
The New Story of Value — CosmoErotic Humanism —
reclaims devotion at a higher level of consciousness.
Devotion shows up differently as separate self, as True Self, as
Unique Self, as Evolutionary Unique Self, and in Unique Self
Symphony.
Devotion shows up differently at each of the Three Stations of
Love.
Indeed, evolution is the evolution of Desire. The evolution of
Desire is the evolution of devotion, the evolution of devotion
is the evolution of Love, and the evolution of Love is the birth
of Homo Amor.
Devotion is an expression of the depth of desire
We are going to hear, just for three minutes, Sally Kempton. The great teacher Sally Kempton, Swami Durgananda, is a powerful feminist, a powerful voice against abuse and for the dignity of the feminine. Sally writes and talks about devotion. Let’s hear, for three minutes, an incredible little piece from Sally Kempton, our dear, dear friend and one of the powerful women who stood with the Center for so many years.
This clip is called My Life of Devotion.
If anything characterizes Homo Amor, it’s devotion.
The first quick move we make is: I am devoted to me. I get that, and that’s important. As I said earlier, true devotion lives in the context of Unique Self. Sally’s life was a journey towards that realization, and Sally and I spent many, many hours deepening this Unique Self realization together.
But let’s get there first.
First, let’s first claim devotion. Okay?
Let’s claim devotion and not be afraid of devotion.
Devotee is a word that we today associate with the cult, with a pre-personal abusive cult. That’s where you are a devotee. That’s tragic and not true. Of course, you can pathologize devotion. Of course, there are degraded forms of devotion, but that’s not what devotion is.
Devotion is stunning.
My life is devotion, and I am in devotion.
I’m in devotion to everyone that’s in our circle.
I’m in deep devotion to She, and in devotion to our mission, and in devotion to the community, and in devotion to individuals in the community.
Not “I am committed to” — “I am in devotion to.” I want to feel that quality.
Devotion is not in contradiction to my autonomy. It’s not in contradiction to my fierce sense of irreducible uniqueness, nor should it be in contradiction to your fierce sense of irreducible uniqueness.
What’s the quality of devotion?
Let’s describe it together.
Devotion is an expression of desire, the depth of my desire — the more I desire, the more I’m devoted.
- The more I desire to be in union with the Good, the more I’m devoted to the Good.
- The more I desire to be in union with She, the more I’m devoted to She.
- The more I desire to be in union with the True, the more devoted I am to the True.
For example, I once read a beautiful set of paragraphs written by Steven Weinberg on muons, these subatomic particles. Weinberg was in devotion to muons — the radical devotion of the scientist to Truth, to the quality of Truth.
The devotion to Beauty — but not Beauty as a tinsel Beauty, not Beauty as pseudo-eros. Not devotion to pseudo-eros, but devotion to Eros itself, to the Beauty that includes all contradictions.
I remember my friend Mori, a woman I was madly in love with. We lived together in the same house in separate apartments. We did dinner together every Friday night, but we never had any physical contact. When I met her, I was about thirty one. She must have been eighty or eighty five. She was this very old Moroccan or Yemenite woman who had come to Israel when the state was founded. Her children had abandoned her, and we happened to be living in adjoining apartments. Her wrinkled face was the most beautiful face you could imagine.
I was in devotion to Mori.
Devotion means I show up no matter what.
Devotion means —
- I arouse myself out of my torporific slumber,
- and I find my aliveness,
- and I place my aliveness on the altar of She for the sake of a greater wholeness, for the sake of manifesting the most beautiful good world and true world that we’ve always known is possible.
The pure joy of devotion, the trembling aliveness of devotion, the showing up, just to feel that — let’s just feel that quality of devotion, and the mad delight.
And there is a steadiness to it. It’s steady. I show up even when I don’t feel like it. It’s steady. It’s consistent.
When someone experiences devotion, when someone in relationship to you is in devotion, you can rest in that devotion.
Just from my perspective, I’m devoted to people and people know they can rest in my devotion. As long as I’m alive, I will try and show up, and be committed forever in mad devotion. Even when it doesn’t make sense, and when it’s politically inappropriate, and it economically borders on ruinous — but we are devoted.
We are devoted.
We show up.
We are in devotion.
When you cook food, you can taste food that was prepared in devotion. You can taste food that was prepared efficiently — or the food that’s prepared in devotion.
We are in devotion to each other. We are devotional beings.
Yes, I need to be discerning about where — on what altars — to place my devotion. Yes, that’s all true. Because after all, isn’t jihad a false devotion? Of course, it is.
We’re going to need to make distinctions around devotion.
But first, my friends, let’s breathe in that quality of devotion.
Devotion means we keep our commitments. We keep our word in the best way we can, if we don’t, we notice it, then we recommit.
That’s devotion.
Devotion in premodernity, modernity and postmodernity
Let’s go deeper.
Let’s look at pre-modern devotion, modern devotion, and postmodern devotion.
Premodern devotion is generally devotion to a religion — a religion in which there’s a god or a religious authority at the center.
At its best, I’m fulfilled through my devotion. But often it meant giving myself up. It meant an abnegation of self. It meant a degradation of self. In the best situations, it didn’t. But for the masses, devotion was part of the unfulfilled realization of the human potentiality of a fully dignified self, independent of what were often superficial and misplaced devotions.
Devotion was a beautiful quality of premodernity, but also a quality that was often pathological because the self wasn’t realized.
Anthony Storr is a British psychoanalyst, a very good British psychoanalyst, a very good thinker. He wrote a book, which I must have read decades ago, called Solitude. There is a section of the book where he traces the word self. It first appears in the dictionary in the Renaissance.
To have real devotion, I first need to be a self.
Devotion to king, to country, to kingdom, to empire — those are the loci of premodern devotion. Devotion to a god who is dissociated from, or at least separate from, Reality. God is outside of Reality, and I am in devotion to that god.
That’s not wrong. It’s just limited.
You’ve got to begin with understanding that this pre-modern notion of devotion wasn’t just a deception. It was also speaking to a very deep realization, deep inside the anthro-ontology of the human being, in the human knowing of the nature of existence — the realization that we are in devotion.
In the text of the Western canon called Genesis, there are Adam and Eve, who are archetypal, mythic figures, and then there are Cain and Abel.
Cain and Abel go to offer sacrifice. In sacrifice, I’m offering something up, I’m in devotion. If you read the text, you notice there is no command to sacrifice. Why are they offering sacrifice? No one asked them for a sacrifice.
The impulse to devotion lives deep inside of me.
The word for sacrifice in the original Hebrew is korban. It means intimate closeness and sacrifice, intimacy and sacrifice, because there is no intimacy without sacrifice. There is no intimacy without devotion. You can’t be intimate without being devoted.
In modernity, the locus of devotion shifts to the physical world, and to the knowing of the nature of the physical world. It is a new devotion.
We shift to measurement, which is a desire to know, to understand. There is a devotion to Truth.
I want to know the Truth.
I don’t want dogma, I want to know the Truth.
Science is animated by the Eros of this new devotion, this devotion to Truth, this devotion to facts. There is this devotion to facts — to the stories of science, the factual stories of science.
And there is a devotion to my own interiors that’s called psychology. I want to go inside myself and know what’s going on inside of me.
That’s the devotion of modernity.
Postmodernity deconstructs devotion, because postmodernity says there are no stories that are true. There are no values that are real. They are all socially constructed. There is no essence to be devoted to. That which I was in devotion to is really an ephemeral myth, a figment of my imagination, a social construct, a fiction. Those are the words used by postmodernity.
Postmodernity says, deconstruct your devotions. Your devotions are degraded.
And therefore, postmodernity says, your devotion must be some power move someone is making. You’re naive. Someone is taking advantage of you. They’re exerting power over you by demanding your devotion. If you would actually grow up, and be mature, and go to therapy, you would actually liberate yourself from these degraded devotions.
That’s postmodernity. Postmodernity deconstructs devotion.
We need to deconstruct devotion in order to resurrect it
We need to go post-postmodernity.
The breakdown of devotion creates the meta-crisis. Meta-crisis is an expression of the breakdown of devotion. The opposite of devotion is the generator functions of the meta-crisis.
What are the generator functions of the meta-crisis?
- Rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics, which is the polar opposite of devotion, which is why anyone who is devoted is considered a fool.
- And then rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics, which governs all of the relationships in society — economic, political, social, psychological, technological — generates fragile, complicated systems.
A complicated system means that the system is fragile. It can break down. It’s optimized for efficiency, not for resiliency, because there is only resiliency if there is devotion. The parts have to know each other, and they have to be in devotion to each other.
When I create a financial instrument someplace in the world and it ripples through the world markets wreaking destruction, it’s because the people who created it are non-intimate with the broader swaths of reality that they are impacting. They are operating based on a rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics. There is no devotion.
Those are the generator functions for the meta-crisis, and underneath both of them is a collapse of intimacy.
Intimacy arouses devotion. The meta-crisis is an expression of a crisis of devotion.
But there is a reason there is a crisis. It is for good reason, because devotion got pathologized. Devotion got hijacked, both in premodernity and in the success stories of modernity, where I am devoted to science and to my inner psychology, and then devotion becomes pseudo-erotic:
- I am devoted to success.
- I am devoted to my own emergence for its own sake.
It’s a separate-self devotion, which actually has a bad fragrance.
I become egoic, not in a healthy ego sense, not the healthy ego that differentiates and that has its own sense of parameters and boundaries. I am in service to one thing only — to my status, to my power, to my superficial expression, not to my authentic expression. I become devoted in a pathological way.
We need to reclaim devotion.
Postmodernity comes along, and it deconstructs the absurdity of the personal devotion of the success story. It also deconstructs the systemic devotions of kingdoms, and religions, and philosophies, and ideologies.
Postmodernity is important. That’s why I consistently disagree with my colleague Jordan Peterson, who mocks postmodernity. No, we need to deconstruct devotion. We need to deconstruct devotion in order to then resurrect devotion at a higher level of consciousness.
Devotion is the placing of attention
The nature of devotion is the placing of attention. When I am devoted to you, I place my attention on you. Devotion is a quality of love, it is a quality of Eros. The nature of Eros, the nature of love, is the placing of attention. That’s why the sexual models the erotic — because the essence of the sexual is the placing of attention. In the sexual, I place my attention. That’s why we are excited by the sexual.
The hijacking of the sexual — the movement from the erotic universe to the pornographic universe — is the movement from Eros to pseudo-eros, and it’s the hijacking of attention. The pornographic universe — whether it’s in sexuality or in social media — is hijacking my attention, which deconstructs my capacity to have devotion.
The reason social media demarcates the postmodern world is because the postmodern world has deconstructed devotion, and the postmodern world has deconstructed attention. For the postmodern world, there is nothing to place attention on.
- In the premodern world, we place attention on the Divine.
- In the modern world, we place attention on psychology and science, on the inner workings of the factual realities.
- And the postmodern world says there is no Field of Value, so there is nothing to place attention on. Devotion expresses itself in attention, but postmodernity says there is nothing to be devoted to, and nothing to place your attention on.
The exteriorization of the interior experience of the postmodern mind is the internet, where there is constant interruption of attention. Attention is constantly being hijacked. It is constantly being stolen. The internet is the structure for the scattering of attention — but if you scatter attention, you can’t be in devotion.
You can’t be in devotion to Truth, and you can’t be in devotion to Goodness, and you can’t be in devotion to Beauty.
This is why people jump from teacher to teacher, from project to project, from cause to cause, from reading to reading — because I can’t actually stay. I can’t focus. I can’t stay inside.
One of the things we say to each other when we start a real process of being together, let’s say in Holy of Holies, we say, we are here forever.
We are here forever. As long as you’ll be here, I’ll be here. We are here forever together. Whatever that means — and of course, forever means you can leave whenever you want. Anyone who wants to leave can leave whenever they want, but I am here forever. We are in devotion. I am in devotion. You choose your devotion — but there is a forever quality. You can step in, step out in different ways, but if you’re really inside, there is a fundamental forever quality.
Whenever devotion is placed, there is got to be a forever relationship.
By the way, I’ve written about sexuality and people assume I have a liberal position on sexuality. I do not. I don’t think there should be sexuality in the world unless there is some sort of forever commitment. That forever commitment might not be marriage, but sexuality is not casual. The second I’m devoted to you, and I’ve placed my attention on you, that means there should be a connection of some kind between us forever.
I want to place my attention on my allurement
Now, let’s resurrect devotion.
Let’s reconstruct devotion.
Let’s evolve devotion.
Devotion is a quality of Homo Amor.
What is the realization of Homo Amor?
- I am not just separate self, and my devotion is not just a psychological devotion of separate self, which is very easy to hijack, and distort, and manipulate in abusive ways.
I go from separate self to True Self. The devotion of True Self is the realization that we live in the Field together. There is this devotion to the Field itself. It is this devotion to awareness, to the realization of my true nature as awareness.
In the devotion of True Self, I place my attention on my awareness.
I placed my attention on consciousness, and I realized that my true nature — Tat Tvam Asi, thou art that — my true nature is consciousness. I placed my attention on the quality of consciousness. That’s the quality of True Self.
It’s beautiful. I am in devotion to the field of consciousness, but that’s just the first step of resurrecting devotion. If you stop there, devotion wilts and dies.
Because we are more than conscious. Consciousness is the beginning of the inside, but it’s not the inside of the inside.
If there is Sat and Chit and Ananda — the terms from Kashmir Shaivism, from Hinduism —
- Sat is being and Chit is consciousness, so the inside of Sat is Chit. The inside of being is consciousness.
- Then, the inside of Chit is Ananda, and Ananda is allurement. It’s the play of allurement. It’s the play of Desire.
And this is when I am going to place my attention not just on awareness.
I want to place my attention on allurement.
That’s the move from True Self to Unique Self.
Move from True Self to Unique Self is not a regressive move. I’m not moving backwards to separate self.
Separate self is level one.
Level two, I have a healthy separate self which I’ve now transcended — I ended the trance of being just separate, the optical delusion of consciousness, which is the thinking that I’m separate. I realize I am True Self, the singular that has no plural, that I am actually not separate from the Field of consciousness and awareness.
And then I realize — level three — I realize that I am actually an irreducible, unique expression of that Field of Consciousness, and that Field of Consciousness is not just a Field of Consciousness, it’s a Field of Consciousness, Desire and Allurement.
And I place my attention on — I am in devotion to — my allurement because I realized that my Unique Self is my unique set of allurements. And I clarify my allurement.
What the internet does is it distracts you from your allurement. You can’t get allured.
You can’t find your way into your allurement.
You can’t find your way into your Desire.
You’re constantly distracted.
You have to place your attention on your Desire.
Desire and devotion are inextricably related, so I have to place my attention and be in devotion in order to know who I am. I do need devotion to myself, but not devotion to me as a separate self. I am in devotion to my Unique Self, and my Unique Self doesn’t separate me from the whole.
Unique Self is not the coin of alienation. It’s not the coin of separation.
Unique Self is the currency of connection.
Unique Self is the electricity of allurement.
Unique Self is the highway of Desire. It’s the pathway of Desire.
It’s the Desire that moves me towards destination.
I need to be in devotion to my unique set of allurements, and my allurements allure me to you.
My allurements allure me to that which is not merely my separate self, but to you, to She, to my communion, with my community, to my communion with teacher, to my communion with family, my communion with beloveds, my communion with the larger Field.
Homo Amor is in communion with the larger whole.
I don’t only feel my local community. I feel the whole.
Homo Amor is omni-allured to the whole. Therefore, Homo Amor is omni-responsible for the whole. Therefore, Homo Amor is devoted to the whole.
I have a devotion to the whole, which means, at a moment of meta-crisis, when I have an experience that the whole is breaking down, then I need to find a way to be in service and devotion to the whole. And if we come together and realize that only a New Story changes the vector of the whole, we might then become devoted — radically devoted — to enacting a New Story of Value for the sake of the whole, in mad devotion.
That’s an example of a Unique Self in devotion, but I’m not doing it myself. We’re all together in devotion to that vision. And we each have a unique instrument to play in the Unique Self Symphony of that vision of allurement.
Devotion means I move from being separate. I’m not separate. Uniqueness is the currency of connection. Uniqueness means I have music to play, and I’ve got a unique piece of music to play.
Devotion beyond Unique Self
Let’s go deep for a second.
Widening my field, looking at the whole, feeling the whole, allowing myself to take in the whole — it’s beautiful. If I try and embrace much more of the whole, I move out of my specialization and I want to take the whole, and I become a generalist. In that sense, I spread my attention around and embrace the whole, that’s beautiful.
Scattering of attention is something else. It’s not a decision I made, it was made for me. And I jumped from thing to thing, and I never actually placed my attention with any level of depth.
On the one hand, I want to expand my attention, and I want to expand my devotion, and I want to embrace the whole, and I want to almost swallow the whole.
And yet I want to — not scatter, I want to specialize.
I want to go deep.
I want to read every word that Tolstoy ever wrote, and I want to paint a painting for every one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
I’m going to go deep in.
And from that place of depth, from that devotion to my unique set of allurements, I’ll come and I’ll become an artist.
I’ll create this new artistry in the great library.
I’ll tell a story.
My devotion might be, “I’m going to do this particular piece, for example, of the great library that no one else can do.” I said, “I’m going to sharpen it, and make it noble and beautiful.” And I’ll do a piece, and Elena will do a piece, and Ken Wilber will do a piece, and Zohar will do a piece. In other words, we’re going to come together. And Krista will do a piece, and Jamie will do a piece, and Jacqueline will do a piece, and Kristina Amelong will do a piece, and then Chahatie will do a piece, and Claire is going to do a piece. And of course, Dr. Kincaid is going to run the entire phenomenology section.
Wow! That’s my allurement. I’m going to do that. We’re going to do that together.
We need to come back to devotion. We need to reclaim devotion.
Devotion to She, to the Field of Eros.
Devotion to the Field of Eros as it lives in me.
Devotion beyond my egoic and separate self. Sometimes devotion is even somewhat beyond my Unique Self. Sometimes, I need to evaluate where we are at this moment in time, and what my unique contribution has to be at this moment in time.
In Israel, when Israel was first established, the land was filled with malaria, and you had doctors coming over from Europe who were like expert doctors and philosophers, and they became farmers. They became farmers because they were devoted to this vision, and that vision required something. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.
I have a friend whose name I can’t say. He’s a brilliant doctor. And he was offered major fellowships in Western universities, but he returned to Gaza, knowing full well the horror of Hamas that was oppressing Gazans. He returned in order to take a job at a local medical clinic in a particular place in Gaza because that was his devotion. He let go of a certain dimension of Unique Self.
I often feel like, “Wow, what’s my Unique Self?” I actually want to write philosophical poetry about laughter, and philosophical poetry about all sorts of dimensions of the human experience. Story of Value — no time for that.
But there is a meta-crisis. And what we need to do in a meta-crisis is —
- take everything we have,
- and come together in devotion to the whole,
- and articulate, and write, and share the New Story of Value,
- and be together, and be in Unique Self Symphony,
- and be in devotion to each other.
The musicians are in devotion to each other.
My Unique Self has to meet both my unique needs and the unique needs of the moment. Both. And of course, the Story of Value would benefit enormously by the poetry of laughter, and by the poetry of tears. Somehow it all comes together in the paradox. When we hold it all together, and we weave it all together, we get wonder and paradox — and we don’t get polarity.
What a crazy pleasure, my friends!
What a crazy pleasure, what a crazy delight it is to be together!
I’m Your Man
We’re going to step into prayer now, to Leonard Cohen.
Leonard Cohen has a song, which is called I’m Your Man. He’s talking to the feminine and he’s saying, “I’ll be anything you want me to be.” Let’s play that as our prayer.
But I want to tell you what the song’s about. He’s playing with sexuality. He’s saying, “I’ll be this for you and I’ll be that to you.” There is one video of Leonard Cohen doing that song, and he’s like 75 years old, 77 years old, and maybe close to 80. And he’s wearing a pinstripe double-breasted suit with a hat. And you can feel his devotion. It’s the reason the song is not felt to be offensive to the feminine: the feminine feels he is in devotion. “I’m your man. I’ll be anything you want me to be. I’m in devotion to you.”
That’s how we turn to She.
We turn to She and we say, “I’m your man.”
When Anna Akhmatova falls in love with Isaiah Berlin that night in Leningrad, when they fall in love that night, they didn’t have formal sexuality that night.
They fell in love.
They made love.
They saw each other.
They recognized each other.
I’m Your Man is the song we sing, it’s the chant we chant in devotion to She. It’s the chant of devotion. I’m your man, I’m your woman.
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