397 — Take Responsibility for the God Voice: Performing Evolution as Your Unique Story

We can only respond to the meta-crisis if we perform our humanity

Summary: A New Story of Value needs to be a story we all can access, based on the First Principles and First Values all can understand. First-person mystical experiences, important as they are, are insufficient basis for this story; it has to be a second-person experience. Ultimately, we all need to become first-person realizers, but this requires training and rigor in interpreting and disambiguating mystical experiences. This is the lesson of the story of the binding of Isaak in Chapter 22 of the book of Genesis. But every once in a while, the gates open so dramatically that the experience needs to be shared. In this episode, Dr. Marc Gafni shares such a first-person realization of the intense coherence, and resonance, and subtlety, and accuracy of the story that we’re telling. This story is evolving. Although we are making mistakes — that’s inevitable — yet we are making mistakes in the right direction.

We realize that the Universe is a love story, and your story is chapter and verse in this story, and a story has to be performed. We can only respond to the meta-crisis if we perform our humanity. At the pre-tragic level, when everything is clear, we perform not to be inauthentic, but to make contact with a wider field, with the hills alive with the sound of music. At the tragic level, the world becomes disenchanted, and the very word performance becomes pejorative, synonymous with inauthenticity and posturing. At the post-tragic level, we reclaim performance. We perform not to be non-real, but to elicit the Real. We realize that there is a script to perform, that the story is unfinished, that we are both actors and storytellers. There is no split between the personal and the cosmic, but no one holds the whole story. In a profound relationship — a Unique Self encounter — we each hold pieces of each other’s stories.

Marc Chagall. The Sacrifice of Isaak. 1966

We need a New Story of Value that we all can access

I want to open in an unusual way.

And I am a little hesitant. I’ll tell you a story, which will tell you why I’m a little hesitant.

There is a story about a master who passes away, and there is this argument about who the inheritor of the lineage will be. There are two competing masters, and each thinks that they are worthy and appropriate to inherit this lineage. One of the two young masters has a dream, and he says to the other master, “Our teacher came to me in a dream, and he said that I’m the successor.” Of course, the other competing master said, “When he comes to me in a dream and tells me that, then we’ll believe him.”

I don’t generally share my own inner landscape communications that come from the empiricism of worlds that are not readily accessible in this world. I don’t generally share my own interior mystical experiences, in part because of that story, and in part because it is insufficient basis to establish a New Story of Value. We have to establish a New Story of Value based on the intrinsic First Principles and First Values that we can access, and we can access directly in first-person, and we can unpack, and we can weave the story together. We want to access a story that’s not dependent on any person’s first-person.

In the Renaissance, they wanted a story that wasn’t based on one person’s first-person experience. As important as those experiences are, there was an understanding that the story that we tell has to be a story we can all access. We can all understand its principles, which come from multiple places. They come from physics, and they come from the interior sciences, but we can access that story, we can live that story, we can feel that story.

And for that reason, I don’t generally share my own experience.

The second reason I don’t share my own experience is because I shy away from those experiences. I happen to love to pray. I just love to pray, to be in direct, intimate communion with what we call in CosmoErotic Humanism — the name we’ve used to call to God — the Field of Value, and its personal face, the Infinite Intimate.

One of the reasons I pray less than I enjoy praying is because I love to pray so much. I could just spend the day praying, chanting and be perfectly happy. I have a tendency towards mystical experience that I’ve tried to curtail because it doesn’t feel helpful. It is easy to get lost in our own mystical experience. I want to try and articulate a Story of Value in such a way that we can all be da Vinci together. We can do deep work across the sciences — interior sciences and exterior sciences, and we can articulate the Story of Value.

But every once in a while, the gates open so dramatically!

Democratization of enlightenment

We have a huge day, an insanely exciting and important day in terms of telling the New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis, which is what One Mountain is about.

We understand there is a meta-crisis, we understand that it’s real, and we understand that only a New Story —

• only the emergence of a New Human and a New Humanity,
• only the evolutionary impulse moving in us, generating the next stage of what it means to be a human being,
• so that we move from Homo sapiens to Homo amor, where I can feel the whole and I am in a relationship to the whole,
• where I understand that my transformation is the transformation of the whole, and I act for the whole; my circle of intimacy expands —

— only such a story, out of which we generate a new Reality, can respond effectively to the meta-crisis. Top-down infrastructure solutions, as valuable as they may be, or social structure solutions — new regulations — are insufficient. The meta-crisis will win.

We need to change the very fabric of Reality, which is the story that we live in.

We need to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture, which is the evolution of the story, which is the inescapable framework from which we generate a new Reality.

That’s our framework.

In that framework, the first-person experience matters enormously. It matters. But it’s got to be, ultimately, a second-person experience. As a community, we can all understand this together.

And we can actually see the Dharma.

We can see the First Principles and First Values.

We see the coherence of the story.

Premodern religion was based, to a large extent, on one teacher claiming a direct experience, which was often true (sometimes not true), and then sharing that experience. And that’s legitimate. That’s important. Buddha has his place, and Moses has his place, and Lao Tzu has his place, and even Ibn Arabi has his place. But in the end, we need to move to a place where we can participate together.

We can receive the deepest transmission that we can from first-person realizers. We need information from first-person realizers. And yet, we need information that we can access and check in ourselves, and find its depth, and find its goodness, and find its beauty.

We cannot rely on a first-person realizer.

We have to be able to then find some fragrance of that realization that lives in me. I’ve got to hear that realization and recognize it. Although I may not get myself to the fullness of that realization, yet I can access something of it. It resonates in me. I’ve got to find my resonance with that.

And then I’ve got to look for my own realization, I’ve got to become a first-person realizer myself. That’s why we have talked, for the last fifteen years, about the democratization of enlightenment — that we have to all become realizers. We have to all become artists. We have to all become Homo amor.

We can’t rely on the hero. We’ve talked about the democratization of the hero, which is in essence, the democratization of Homo amor — which is in essence, the democratization of enlightenment.

That’s all an apology. That’s all an apology for what I’m going to say now. This was a long apology, for just sharing a first-person moment.

We’re not basing ourselves on first-person realizing, but every once in a while, it seems important to share. I don’t want you to misunderstand that we are shifting to an authority of first-person realization. We are not. And yet, first-person realization is part of the story. It’s an important part of the story.

Stories are the ontology of Reality

For some reason, the last two weeks, the gates were very open. In other words, the membrane between worlds in my own life was very open, and I had a number of very, very intense visitations. I want to be precise. I don’t want to call them dreams. They actually weren’t dreams. In my own practice, I am able to distinguish between a dream and a visitation. These were more like visitations. I had the first one when I was sixteen, with my teacher who died. I had a very direct and very powerful experience with him. The last two weeks, I’ve had three or four visitations. And I haven’t had any for a couple of years, so it was a very intense experience. I apologize again for sharing this. This is not the kind of topic we talk about, but it’s important to know that it’s real, that it’s important, and that we need to listen to it.

This morning, the voice in the visitation was a student of mine whose name I won’t mention. He is a very well known professor today. He is someone who started studying with me when he was fourteen or fifteen. We parted ways at some point in 2006. He is deep in the Orthodox Jewish world at this moment. He is an excellent professor and an excellent thinker in multiple ways. He appeared in this dream, speaking for a whole currency of spirit, taking issue with four big pieces in the Story of Value, which is CosmoErotic Humanism. And I responded in the dream to the four pieces. I shared it with Zak, with KK, and we clarified some of the pieces very early in the morning.

I have to share that I was ecstatic — ecstatic and filled with the gravitas of responsibility. I am sure, my friends, that we’ve made mistakes here. We are all imperfect vessels for the Light. But I think I can, with tears in my eyes, tell you we are making mistakes in the right direction, in what we’re doing here every week in One Mountain. And what we are doing here is coming together

• to tell this New Story of Value,
• and to download it into the source code of consciousness and culture as the next great movement of She, the next turning of the wheel.

Our actual understanding is that we are here in One Mountain someplace in Florence, in the Renaissance. And it is a time between worlds, and a time between stories — literally. And the only way to respond to the intensity of the existential risk and the catastrophic risk is to tell this New Story of Value.

I’ve mentioned Nick Bostrom before. Nick Bostrom is the person who coined the term existential risk. He wrote a very, very important book called Superintelligence. He just wrote a new book. The book is utter insanity. It is rubbish. It is bad. It pretends to be philosophy, but it is trite. I was embarrassed by the book. We’re going to respond to it in our book, TechnoFeudalism. I have huge respect for Nick Bostrom. He did incredibly important work at the Oxford Centre for Existential Risk. But he literally couldn’t find his way to a new story because, in the end, Nick is a subtle materialist, and value, for him, is ultimately not real.

He ran into a value uploading problem: How do you actually engage the planetary stack and invest it with value when value itself is not real? He literally couldn’t get to this realization that Reality is stories, and that stories are the ontology of Reality, and that stories are stories of value. That Reality itself yearns for value, and that value is real. And the reason he couldn’t get there is because he was mired in the critique of value that swept the academy, which he took as a given. He hit the wall. I was shocked, not by how bad the book was, but by the beauty of Bostrom’s soul who is desperately reaching for something — and just cannot find his way.

I just had this intense realization of the intense coherence, and resonance, and subtlety, and accuracy of the story that we’re telling, which is evolving. It’s evolving. Every week, the story clarifies more and more. We come together, and we try and clarify another piece, and another piece, and another piece, and we speak it, and then it gets artistically laid out on the canvas of Elena, and then it gets recapitulated by Kristina, and gets resonated by David, and we all share it, and we all exchange with each other. It gets formulated, and then it’s going to find its way into volumes and into articles. And ultimately, we’ve got to deliver it into culture.

In the dream, last night, actually early this morning, I had this exchange with what we would call it in the lineage maggidim — voices in the subtle world who were objecting to four dimensions of the Dharma. Very specific dimensions, four specific dimensions. I responded to all four dimensions, and the responses were received. You could feel them being well received on high.

We’ll talk more about that at a different time, but I just wanted to share with you, in a very confessional moment, that these conversations, these dimensions, they are not just recorded on high. It’s hard for me to say this without breaking out crying. I can feel directly, and I know many of you can as well, that the membrane between the wider field and between this world that lives in One Mountain is thin, and that we’re in the right direction. So it’s a big deal.

I just want to hold that. I want to hold that.

Prophesy needs to be reclaimed

The New Age has trivialized mystical experiences, in some real way.

There are two movements that need to be made. On the one hand, we need to actually democratize enlightenment, and realize that everyone has access to interior mystical experience in some way. Prayer is a mystical experience.

On the other hand, there must be a great rigor in interpreting my own experience. This is precisely, for example, what Zen Buddhism was about: the deep rigor of understanding what experience is valuable and gives you, if you will, information and realization, and what’s not. If you would go to your Zen master, and you saw these dramatic, wild, colorful, ecstatic visions, he or she would say, “Sit on the cushion.” The same thing with the ancient schools of prophecy: they were very rigorous about mystical experiences. I’ve tried, over the last forty-fifty years, to train very carefully in how I listen to mystical experience, and how I interpret it.

By the way there are two great domains which we’ve lost our ability to access — deep mystical experiences and deep erotic experiences. Those two realms, which are unimaginably important, have become somewhat trivialized. Whether it’s in the mystical or in the erotic, we don’t easily distinguish between a pornographic mystical experience and a genuine mystical experience. This is why it’s very, very important not to build our Story of Value on first-person realizations — because it’s very, very hard to distinguish between qualities of realization. It’s a very, very deep process — to listen carefully and actually discern between the voices.

We have to make two movements.

On the one hand, we all need to become prophets, and I mean that very precisely. It’s a major and important theme. Prophecy needs to be reclaimed. Prophecy is my capacity to access the interior face of Cosmos. A true artist has to be somewhat of a prophet, and to feel the past, present, and future. Homo amor participates in some dimension of prophecy. Homo amor can feel some dimension of past, present, and future.

On the other hand, we need to be enormously rigorous in training. I train for prophecy. I cultivate that particular Eye of the Spirit, that Eye of Prophecy. I listen very deeply in order to be able to distinguish and disambiguate the God voice.

We need a school of prophecy, and we need to learn to disambiguate the God voice.

Disambiguating the voice of God

Let me just give you an example. In the story of Abraham, in Chapter 22 of the book of Genesis. Abraham hears the God voice. And the God voice seems to say to Abraham, “I have to take your son, your only son, the son that you love. Offer him up there as an offering.”

It’s a very, very important sacred text. Kierkegaard — the Danish theologian, the great early existentialist, one of the greatest heart-minds of his century, an unimaginable being — wrote a book called Fear and Trembling about the binding of Isaac story in Chapter 22 in the book of Genesis. He is the apotheosis, the ultimate expression of the classical reading of the story, in which Abraham is so overwhelmed by the integrity of the God voice that he is willing to engage in what Kierkegaard calls the teleological suspension of the ethical.

Kierkegaard was wrong.

Let me get this straight. Kierkegaard says that the nature of the God voice is such that it brackets the ethical: The teleological suspension of the ethical. The ethical is suspended. Abraham goes to obey God’s voice and sacrifice his son. And once God realizes he’s willing to sacrifice his son, then the angel appears and says, “Don’t raise your hand against the boy. Here’s a lamb. Offer the lamb instead.” I am not going to go into a deep reading of this text now, but Kierkegaard’s reading is the classical reading: Be willing to sacrifice your child because you recognize the authenticity of the God voice so intensely.

But a deeper reading of that story (and one that we articulate in a book called Tears, about to be published) is the way the Zohar read the story. The Zohar is the most authoritative 13th century book of interior sciences in the lineage of Solomon that shaped Isaac Luria in the 16th century, who then shaped the mystery schools of the Renaissance. And the Zohar, in elliptical words — you could read the Zohar and not realize it’s there — if you read it very carefully, the Zohar distinguishes between aspaklaria de’nahara ‘the clear prism’ and aspaklarya de’lo nahara ‘the unclear prism.’ And the Zohar claims, elliptically, that Abraham is actually seeing through the unclear prism. When the God voice speaks to Abraham, the Zohar says, Elohim Da Yester Hara ‘God — this is the voice of the evil inclination.’

Abraham is unable to disambiguate the God voice. He hears the God voice saying, “Sacrifice your son.” And how many people hear a God voice saying, “Sacrifice your son”? You can’t even begin to understand the tragedy of hearing that voice, and identifying with the God voice. But it wasn’t the God voice. That’s the point.

Midrash tells a story about how Terach, Abraham’s father, brought his son, Abraham, to Nimrod, the local deity god, and offered his son up, in cruelty, to the deity king. Abraham himself has had an experience of being abused by his father, by his father’s religious ideals. He has an experience of him being sacrificed to the deity god by his father. That becomes internalized in Abraham in what might be called repetition compulsion, so that Abraham then goes to sacrifice his son. He identifies that voice of repetition and compulsion as the God voice. It’s big.

Abraham’s challenge as a prophet was to disambiguate the voice and realize who is speaking. Who’s talking? Is it God or is it the plumber? Abraham has to be able to realize who is talking here. The challenge of this penultimate story in the Western canon in Chapter 22 of the book of Genesis is for Abraham to take responsibility for the God voice. He has to take responsibility for his story. He has to disambiguate, but he has to be able to discern.

It’s so easy to confuse the voices of early trauma with the God voice.

This is why I’m so hesitant around first-person.

First-person realization is unimaginably important. It’s not true that the next Buddha is a Sangha, which is so often quoted from Thich Nhat Hanh: There are no more Buddhas, the next Buddha is a Sangha. That’s not true. The next Buddha is a Buddha and a Sangha. The Sangha needs to be a Buddha.

The community needs to be a Unique Self Symphony, and move together as David J. Temple, which is this pseudo-anonymous figure who represents both the particular writers and all of us as a community, as a Unique Self Symphony. Marsilio Ficino’s Florentine Platonic Academy in the Renaissance is an early version of the Unique Self Symphony.

We are an intimate communion.

But at the same time, we honor the Buddha. We honor first-person realization.

Barbara and I used to have this teasing, where Barbara would say to everyone, “Everyone can create their own Dharma.” And I’d say, “Barbara, if we say that one more time, we can’t teach together.” We went deeply into this together, because of course we aligned on it. You can’t just proclaim a Dharma. You have to kill yourself for a Dharma. You have to kill yourself to be a great artist. You have to kill yourself to do physics, the way it really needs to be done. You have to kill yourself to be Tolstoy. (Tolstoy is a bad example for lots of reasons, but the point is, but you do have to kill yourself to be Tolstoy). It’s so deep.

I have to train the God voice in such a deep way, and step into this clarified Self.

Now, how do I do that? How do I do that? That’s a big question. What is the methodology of clarification? We will spend an entire One Mountain on this. We want to talk about that. The entire point of the binding of Isaac story is that Abraham is hearing a voice. That voice is understood by Kierkegaard to be a trustable voice. And what the Zohar, what the lineage of Solomon says is that Abraham is challenged to disambiguate that voice from his own repetition compulsion, from his own early trauma.

That’s what it means to become a prophet.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
The universe is not a fact, or is not merely a fact. It is a story. 
Not an ordinary story, a love story. Not an ordinary love story,
but an Evolutionary Love Story. And your love story, my love
story is a chapter in the Evolutionary Love Story. To know my 
life is a story is to know that the story must be performed. 

There are three levels of relationship to performance, and 
particularly to the performance of our story. Level one is
pre-tragic performance. Level two is when we meet the tragic
and stop performing. Level three is the post-tragic, in which  
we reclaim both the dignity and divinity of our performance.

A story has to be performed

The code reads, “The universe is not a fact, it’s a story. It’s not an ordinary story, but a love story. It’s not an ordinary love story but an Evolutionary Love Story — an Outrageous Love Story. And your story, my story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story.”

There is a famous American poet, Muriel Rukeyser, who says Reality is not made up of atoms, Reality is made up of stories. Our response to that poet is that atoms themselves are stories. The very structure of an atom is a story.

It’s a particular story of allurement.

It’s a story of reaching for value.

We are going to explore stories in the world of matter, atoms. We are going to explore stories in the world of life, and we are going to explore stories in the world of the self-reflective human. We are going to talk about the evolution of story. What I’d like to start with this week, though, is one dimension, which is:

If you understand that your life is a story, then you realize that you have to perform the story, that you’re an actor on the stage.

Next week, we are going to go deep into this realization that Reality is a story at its core structure, that everything is a story. I call it the ontology of story. The lineage would call it God loves stories.

Shakespeare says, “All the world’s a stage” (in As You Like It, spoken by Jacque). I don’t know what he meant when he said it, but all the world is a stage. What we mean by that is:

• the world is a story,
• and my life is a story,
• and a story has to be performed.

I want to go deep into this because performance is unbelievably important, and we’ve lost our capacity to perform. We can only respond to the meta-crisis with what I would call a performance of our humanity.

• We have to perform our story.
• We have to perform our humanity.
• We have to perform evolution.
• We have to perform our sexing.
• We have to perform our sacred autobiography.

Performance needs to be reclaimed

There is a level of pre-tragic humanity, in which there is an automatic understanding of the need to perform. This understanding actually begins even in the animal world. Animals have mating rituals. The bowerbird does an incredible dance. And then the animal sexes. The sexing itself in the animal world is generally short, a few seconds, but there is a performance that often leads up to the allurement, the mating ritual. But this notion of ritual takes a momentous leap forward in the human world. As we enter into the human world, the need for ritual and its performance becomes central to the human experience.

There are those who date the emergence of Homo sapiens with the emergence of trade. Matt Ridley talks about that quite extensively, citing many anthropologists. But there is another anthropological school, which I think is in part more accurate (although they’re obviously mutually supportive in certain ways), which actually dates the emergence of humanity with both language and art. Language and art — or performed rituals, artistically performed rituals, moving from paintings to religious rituals.

There are proto-experiences of religion in the animal world — early experiences of awe. The literature of animal research in the last fifteen years is disclosing this, but already in the lineage there is a book called The Book of Song, which talks about the unique verse of awe expressed by every animal. But it becomes central and apparent, and it takes this momentous leap forward in some way in the human world. There is some emergence in the human world that’s very dramatic, where we begin to perform. We perform at the pre-tragic level.

The pre-tragic level means that everything is obvious and clear. So we perform.

Why do we perform? Because there are gods and goddesses.

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music, if we can jump forward to a song — to the sound of music — of the mid-20th century. The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music is the experience of the pre-tragic world. The hills are alive. “I do believe in fairies. I do. I do.” The Celtic sensibility of the living universe is self-evident across the traditions. Everything is alive. There is a coherent field, and there is this interaction and relationship. That relationship works between the human world and the broader field — and so we perform. The stage is obvious. Maybe we are performing for the gods and goddesses, maybe we are performing for the one God — that’s not our conversation now, but performance makes sense. Ritual makes sense.

I am not performing to be inauthentic. I am performing to make contacts to connect with the wider field. Whether it’s to propitiate the deity to ask favor, or to locate myself in the wider field, or to feel the Eros of the wider field, or to give praise or offer sacrifice — I am performing. I am in ritual. I understand performance. It’s a natural place to be. I make contact with the wider field through my performance.

Then, at some point, as we go through all the stages of human development, we get to the modern world and the postmodern world. The world becomes disenchanted. We forget that the hills are alive. Descartes can no longer hear the sound of music living in the animal. We have dualism — from the 17th century to the 19th century — which said, “Yeah, God is over there someplace, but the universe is purely material; God might enter and act in the world.” Then two centuries later, in the 19th century, materialism said, “Yeah, the dualists got one half right, the material part, and the God thing they were making up.” The dualism was like a circle where the top is God and the bottom is material, and the materialists of the 19th century lopped off the top half of the circle, and they said, “We live in flatland.” It’s a flat world. It’s a world ultimately without depth — without the depth and dimension that you would need to actually access the hills being alive with the sound of music.

That’s the tragic level.

At that tragic level, what we say is: Stop performing. The word performance itself becomes almost pejorative. Why are you performing? Just get real. Stop performing and just be authentic. But authentic means: why are you performing, when there is nothing to perform? There is no one to perform for. There is nothing that you are actually eliciting — so you are actually posturing. And the words posture and imposter are etymologically related. The imposter postures. So what are you doing? Stop it. Just get real.

There was an entire movement both in philosophy and in art, about just getting spare and simple. There’s nothing out there. Stop it. Stop the performance. And that’s tragic. There is this tragic moment. There is nothing to perform.

Don’t perform your sexuality, just have sex.

Don’t perform your life, just live your life.

On the one hand, there is a rejection of the inauthentic artifice of performance, which is positive. But on the other hand, there is a rejection of the idea that there is anything to perform at all. That’s the tragic level, which rejects performance: There is nothing to perform.

And then we go to the post-tragic, and we reclaim performance. I begin to realize:

• There is a Field of ErosValue. There is a cosmos that’s a living universe. There is an Infinite Intimate in which everything arises. The Field of the Divine is not merely the Infinity of Power, but the Infinity of Intimacy, so there is a second-person relation.

We started today with this first-person that dances in me, which wants to emerge. And as we said, we’ve got to cultivate the emergence of first-person. It’s not obvious. I need to disambiguate between the authentic God voice and the inauthentic God voice.

I’ve got to perform my prophecy, and I’ve got to learn my lines.

There are actually lines in the universe. There is a script that’s mine. I am a unique letter, a unique script in the cosmic scroll. There are lines that are left by eternity for me to read, and for me to evolve. Those lines are both already a given, and they are emerging. They are contingent, they are radically surprising, but the general invitation of my life and its scripts was intended by Reality.

• Reality intended me, and Reality chose me to play that part.
• Reality recognizes me as the primary actor in that dimension of Cosmos.
• Reality needs my script.
• Reality desires my performance.
• Reality love-adores my performance.

There is something to perform.

We perform to elicit the Real

In the post-tragic, we recognize that, in the Field of ErosValue, we are actually the storytellers. There is a story here — a story to be told. Reality is not merely a fact to be described mechanically. Reality is filled with the sound of music — and it is the music, it is the melody of the story.

And a story has to be performed. Story is art. We go to movies because we’re in love with stories. I have to perform my sacred autobiography.

I begin to realize that sexing is not a mechanical act in the world of the tragic, but sexing is cosmic Eros performed in the flesh. And when I’m engaged in sexing, or when I’m engaged in realizing that evolution moves in me in person. Conscious Evolution is the realization that I am the performance of evolution. Conscious Evolution means that I awakened to the realization that the evolutionary impulse moves uniquely in me.

And I both realize that that evolutionary impulse moves in my first-person and I am able to watch and see, “Oh, that’s me performing.”

When the witness to my performance (second person) and my performance (first person) merge into one — that’s the greatest performance.

When the musician becomes the music, that’s the ultimate performance. When the artist loses himself or herself, and She begins

• to paint through her or him,
• or to write through her or him,
• or to sex through her or him,
• or to talk through her or him,
• or to weave strands together, majestically and artistically (the Vishnu function in Hindu mysticism to organize) —

when my witness and my first person synergize into one, that’s the ultimate performance.

I went with Kristina and Zion to Cirque du Soleil. Somehow we wound up just about in the first row, right next to the stage. We were riveted. You’ve got this group of kids — and they must have been 18, 19, 20, 25 — and they are performing.

• They are performing their bodies.
• They are performing motion itself.
• They are performing movement.
• They are performing the musical play.
• They are performing the synchronies of coordination that are shocking and dazzling in their beauty.

And as they performed, they became more themselves than they ever were. It wasn’t a performance that was inauthentic. It was a performance that disclosed their ultimate realization in first person. The performance potentiated, or realized the potentiation, of their fullness. That’s what practice is. I perform in order to become myself.

I don’t just make love personally, because part of the realization of the story is: When I perform the story, my story is not separate from the Universe: A Love Story. There is no split in the story between the personal and the cosmic.

And until I realize there is no detail of my story that’s disconnected from cosmic magnificence, my mind can never feel any sense of ease. Until the story of my life is told, Laura Riding wrote, I will go on quietly craving it. But Laura Riding just got a piece of it. No — until the story of my life is told and I realize that my story is part of the story of cosmos.

Cosmos is a story and I’m a chapter in that story and I’m a necessary chapter in my story.

We talk a lot about the meaning of life. We should talk less about the meaning of life. You don’t have to search for the meaning of life, because life is meaning. Life is meaning, and meaning always discloses itself in story. A value is a desire for realization in the course of a story.

The universe is story. The universe is semantic. And the universe is made up of stories, and stories have grammar. There is a story of value, and the story has a grammar of value.

Our chromosomes themselves are tomes. Our atoms are already encyclopedias. But they are not just encyclopedias of facts. They are great encyclopedias, which are great biographies telling stories of movements of allurement moving towards ever deeper contact and ever larger holes.

There is no search for meaning. There is nothing to search for. We are meaning. We articulate meaning in every breath. All of our stories have plotlines. And our story, our individual story, our individual saga is not separate or distinct from the magnificent and sprawling saga of the universe. And all of it is performed.

To know that my life is a story is to know that the story must be performed. And there are three levels of relationship to performance, and particularly to the performance of our story.

• Level one is pre-tragic performance. It’s clear. We perform. We are in some version of pre-modern performance in our tradition. Gorgeous. It’s fantastic.
• And then we get to this tragic place of postmodernity where we stop performing. And performance becomes a pejorative word. It becomes identical with the inauthentic, with the not real.
• And then we go to the post-tragic and we realize: No, we perform to elicit the real.

In Cirque du Soleil, they were performing to elicit the real.

When we do ritual practice, we do enlightenment practice. We perform to elicit the real.

When I perform —

• when I am reading my lines,
• and they’re the lines of my unique sacred autobiography that can only be spoken by me,
• that all of Reality, and all of eternity, and all of evolution waited for me to speak —

— then I become me. I become me because I now become the primary actor in the story.

We hold pieces of each other’s stories

To sum up:

• We realize Reality is a story — number one.
• Number two: we realize that it’s not an ordinary story, it’s a love story. It’s a story of Eros. It’s a story of allurement.
• Number three: we realize that our stories, our personal stories, are chapter and verse in this great story.
• Number four: we realize we are the storytellers of the whole story. That’s what Conscious Evolution means. We are not just the storytellers of our story. We have to be the storytellers of the whole story.

We begin to see the storyline. We begin to see: Oh wow! There is a movement from matter to life, to mind, and there’s a plotline. There is a set of First Principles and First Values that are emerging and developing. There are discontinuities, but there are also these long continuities, this evolution of these First Principles and First Values through matter, life, and mind. I see the sweep of the universe story. I become the storyteller of the universe.

• Five: I realize I am an actor in the story.
• Six: my story is a chapter in this larger story. There is no split between the personal and the cosmic. In early feminism, they said the personal is the political. We now realize, no, the personal is the palace of the cosmos. The personal is the cosmic.
• Seven: we realize that the entire story is unfinished. It’s an unfinished story. And then I participate in taking the story forward and evolving the story. It’s not just that my story is a unique chapter in the story — but my story evolves the story. It’s an unfinished story, and my story evolves the story. Wow!
• Finally, number eight: When we meet someone and we have this profound new relationship with them, which is unusual, we say, “Wow, we always knew each other.” That rare moment, with those rare meetings — while we always knew each other. And we realize that we are each holding a piece of each other’s story.

In a genuine Unique Self encounter, we each realize we are holding a piece of each other’s story and we can only complete each other’s story with each other. We need each other.

No one is holding the whole story. Our stories evoke each other. We each evoke each other’s story. But more than that, we each have a piece of each other’s story that we can return to that person. In a real Unique Self encounter, we realize you have a piece of my story that you’re returning to me.

There are three distinct points in part eight:

1. I can live my story. We create the possibility of each living our unique stories that are inter-included and overlapping, one.
2. We evoke each other’s story. When you are living your story, you evoke my story. Your authenticity evokes my authenticity. Your performance of your story evokes my performance of my story.
3. You are actually holding a piece of my story that you can return to me. You recognize a piece of my story in a way I don’t — and you are holding that piece for me, and you return it to me.

That’s what it means to love each other madly.

So, let’s perform our stories. We have to perform our authenticity.

Let me end with something silly: put on a nice shirt, even when you’re at home by yourself. Maybe that’s not the way you perform, but however you perform, you’ve got to always be doing ritual.

• You can’t just say it.
• You can’t just think it.
• You have to perform it.
• I perform my Unique Self.
• I perform my unique story.

It’s dramatic. Chogyam Trungpa, an Eastern master in a particular lineage, who founded Naropa University, was a wildly realized master; he was always also drunk most of the time and pretty much slept with every student in Naropa. It was the early ’70s, and crazy stuff was happening. He was a crazy wisdom master, not to be imitated in any way, to be clear — but he would always perform. Literally, all the time. He’d be the captain, or he’d be the general, or he’d be the king, and people would have positions in the court, and they’d perform all the time. And people are like, “What is he doing?” And today they still think, “Well, what crazy thing was he doing?”

But from his heart to my heart, from my heart to your heart — our hearts together — we perform.

One Mountain has to be your performance, but not inauthentic.

All great art is performance, and life is great art. Life is a great art and it requires performance.

We’re always on. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Even when we are relaxing, we are totally spatially relaxing.

We are witnessed.

Our story is fabricating the world’s story.

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