398 — God Is Real — God Is Story: Atoms Are Stories Too

Michelangelo Buonarroti. Adam and God (Sistine Chapel Ceiling).

Summary: The responsibility for telling a New Story of Value is an unbearable privilege. It calls for sacrificial tenderness and sacrificial fierceness; it calls us to be warriors together. In this episode, we begin to explore the notion of story as a fundamental constituent of reality — and the crucial question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Reality is stories and numbers, but numbers are stories, too. The universe is made up of atoms, but atoms are stories, too — they are vast open spaces and sets of relationships between parts, a precise calibration of allurement and autonomy. A story is not just adjacent facts; it has causal connections that desire fulfillment. It’s not just an exterior plotline, but also an interior; it involves desire, need, and telos (direction). The desire of Cosmos is for ever greater value. There is a degree of freedom in the story, a dimension of choice, of first-person. A part of the story is that the story itself evolves, and evolution often involves crises. Our relationship to the story evolves, too; it becomes conscious. We become aware that we are chapter and verse in the Universe: a Love Story.

The universe is not a fact, it’s a story. Not an ordinary story, a love story. Not an ordinary love story, but an Evolutionary Love Story. But even before evolution, the inception of this universe is part of the Divine story: God doesn’t just love stories, God is a story.

The unbearable privilege of radical responsibility

To open up the space, I want to invite everyone to read this book, First Principles and First Values, really, really carefully. We wrote it really, really carefully. I wrote the first draft of it, and sent it to Zak and to Ken, and then they worked on it, and they each added to it in huge ways. What came together was this insanely important book.

We made a commitment — we said that we are going to get to fifty reviews on Amazon, but I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. How many does it have? Thirty-nine. We’re 11 out. That’s not bad. We said we’re going to get to fifty. And from fifty, we’re going to make a big jump to one hundred.

Now, why am I even taking time to talk about it? Because it matters. It’s one of those things that we can do to give some message to the world that this matters. We are trying to penetrate culture with this New Story of Value, and this book is a first stage.

Essentially what we are saying is: this is ours, let’s partner together. The actual action that you can do, whether you live in Europe or in America — is: write a review. If we want to respond to the meta-crisis, but we can’t get it up to a hundred reviews, there is probably something wrong with the story. I’m going to be completely obnoxious about this. Why is he talking about this again? I am talking about it again because it totally matters to be able to convey the legitimate and true sense that we are on this, that we care about it enough that we’re writing a review, that there is this community around us that actually does something, that actually steps in — so super, super, super appreciating everybody stepping in.

Just one more introductory remark. In the dream that I shared last week, there were these four questions that were in play, but also a very simple truth, which, in the waking world, I don’t really have words to describe to myself, let alone to anyone else — the unbearable privilege.

It is an unbearable privilege of actually being healthy, healthy enough to function. Having energy to care —

• to care for the larger whole,
• to feel both the agony and the ecstasy of the world,
• to see the meta-crisis clearly,
• to see a way through, which is real: to tell a New Story of Value, to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture.

The source code itself is, at its very core, the story we tell about who we are, where we live, and what we ought to do. This story is the very essence of the source code. The evolution of a story — and a particular kind of story, a New Story of Value — has the capacity to respond to the meta-crisis and alleviate suffering it is about to bring. The suffering is unimaginable — in the present, and the potential suffering of the future or the stillborn nature of the future: the cries of the unborn, the trillions of unborn that turn to us.

Living in the New Story of Value has the ability to be a bottom-up self-organizing solution that literally reconfigures the nature of coherence. Coherence responds to a story.

I am going to talk about this more today when we talk about stories. The only point I want to make now is: to have the privilege to do this is unimaginable. It’s unimaginable.

We were born at this time, and each of us are born in such a place that we’re not in the middle of a battle on a street in Ukraine at this moment. I am profoundly worried about Ukraine, and I am profoundly worried about particular voices in the right wing of American politics, and people like Bobby Kennedy, who are saying things that are fundamentally wrong about Ukraine. I think we have to oppose Putin. Any notion that Putin was, or is, operating in good faith is tragic. That’s a war that we need to fight, and we need to win, and we need to support Ukraine — in all of its pathology, because the Ukraine is far from perfect, there is a million issues. Nonetheless, we need to be there, in some big and profound way.

But we are not fighting in Ukraine, my friends. We are supporting it. We wrote a book on it. We talked about it, but we are in our homes.

We are not in Rafah or in Israel, we are not in other parts of Gaza, we are not in Sudan — and the list goes on. I can go through the list. We are not in Angola. There are tens and tens of thousands of people who are amputees because there are 100,000 uncleared mines in Angola. Those uncleared mines in the world will probably take us a few centuries to clear. Every nineteen minutes or so, someone gets a limb blown off in the world, because we haven’t turned our attention to clearing the mines that could easily be cleared.

I’m not even going there. There is so much I could say, but 99 percent of us — we are not there. We are living lives of unbearable, unimaginable privilege. And so we have two jobs:

• To celebrate. To be unimaginably celebratory, unbearably celebratory. We’ve got to be in mad gratitude.
• And we need to turn towards the meta-crisis and take radical responsibility upon ourselves.

Let’s be warriors together

We’ve got a huge Dharma today, and I am so crazy happy to be with you every week. It brings me great joy, and it is a great privilege, and it is an insane responsibility. What I’ve been trying to tenderly say to myself, and I say to everyone else, whoever is willing to listen and doesn’t hang up the phone is: this is not a hobby. It’s not a hobby. This has got to hurt. We’ve got to approach this with sacrificial fierceness and sacrificial tenderness.

In Hebrew, the word for sacrifice and the word for intimacy are the same. It’s a three letter root, korban, karov. To be intimate and to sacrifice are the same. You cannot be intimate if you’re not willing to sacrifice. To sacrifice might be something as simple but profound as to bracket myself to hear you, and give up being right. That sacrifice allows us to be intimate. That’s one level of sacrifice. To be intimate with another human being, that’s essential.

On the world stage, on the global stage, we have to also get over polarization and hear each other. But even more deeply, or more immediately, or more concretely — we have to act. And to act doesn’t mean we have to go fight in Ukraine, although some really good people have done that, and that could be a beautiful thing to do if it’s appropriate. But minimally, it means that we feel the whole. We take responsibility for the whole, and we resource in every way we can —

• with our time,
• with our funds,
• with our energy,
• with writing a review,
• with our participation in a great Unique Self Symphony that’s trying to generate a New Story of Value.

We say: this is ours. This is not Marc’s project, not in the slightest. This is ours. We are a Unique Self Symphony. We are going to do this together. We are committed to this. Blood on the ground. All the way. We are going to take this all the way home.

It’s scary to hear anybody talk like that because we think that sacrificial fierceness and sacrificial tenderness must be limited for the one person I am close to (if I have one person at all, which most people don’t). If I have one person, which is gorgeous, I limit it to them — or this notion of sacrifice is a scary notion. That’s what the old pre-modern religions wanted us to do, and we’re not going to do that. We need to address our commitment to the whole.

I just want to hold with everybody this sense of the unbearable privilege — that we can actually be warriors. I don’t mean that as a metaphor. This is not a metaphor. I’m asking everyone to be a warrior. If you can resource more, and it takes a fight with your partner, have that fight in the best way you can. Take a stand if you can give more time, if you can give more resources. If you can stand in any way to make this work, be a warrior. Be a warrior. And I promise you, I will meet you there. I press myself every day in exhaustion to do another hour of work, and another hour, and another hour — because I believe that only clarifying this great library can respond to the meta-crisis — writing it, publishing it, and then delivering it into culture, which are three distinct and separate stages, we have to do all of them. I think it’s going to be a solid decade full on.

The invitation is be a warrior. Let’s be warriors together, all the way.

Evolutionary Love Code

The universe is not a fact, it’s a story. Not an ordinary story, a love story. Not an ordinary love story, but an Evolutionary Love Story.

And your love story is a chapter in the Evolutionary Love Story. To know my life is a story is to know that story must be performed. There are three levels of relationship to performance, and particularly to the performance of our story. Level one, pre-tragic performance. Level two is when we meet the tragic and we stop performing. Level three is the post-tragic, in which we reclaim both the dignity and the divinity of our performance.

The Universe is made up not of atoms, but stories

We have talked around this many times. We have done a few One Mountains on this topic of story. There is an essay that we are working with on what we call The Ontology of Story. But I want to start from the beginning, and at least lay out the core of why this matters.

I mentioned, in a video that we made about a week ago, the poem by Muriel Rukeyser, who died I think in 1980. She wrote before World War II, during World War II, after World War II. She was, if you will, the best of liberalism in the United States at a certain moment. She wrote different kinds of poetry. She wrote erotic poetry. She had a sense of the practice we call Outrageous Love Letters. A subsection of this practice is writing Outrageous Erotic Love Letters.

An example of an Outrageous Erotic Love Letter in the biblical text is the Song of Solomon. In the canon of Western literature, and particularly Western mystical literature, it’s considered the single most sacred text. The single most sacred text of the Western mystical canon and the Western biblical canon is an Outrageous Erotic Love Letter, which is almost explicitly pornographic — not in a negative way, but in the sense that it’s explicit. It’s not general. It’s not elusive. It describes very specifically the experience of Eros in all of its physical, most potent manifestations. Of course, it uses, for its analogies, agriculture, because it’s written into an agricultural society: V’diglo Alai Ahavah ‘his staff upon me was love,’ Yishakeyni Minshikot Pihu ‘Kiss me from the kisses of your mouth.’ And then it describes the different fragrances of the kisses. There are descriptions of breasts, and descriptions of yoni, and descriptions of phallus, and descriptions of how they come together. And this song is considered the ultimate sacred text.

Muriel Rukeyser is, in some sense, in the Song of Solomon tradition, quite explicitly. She is very familiar with that text, and it directly impacted her. She writes a number of poems, in a number of quite important books. One of them, which appears in a collection called The Speed of Darkness, is an erotic poem. One stanza is:

Lying
blazing beside me
you rear beautifully and up —
your thinking face —
erotic body reaching
in all its colors and lights —
your erotic face
colored and lit —
not colored body-and-face
but now entire,
colors lights the world thinking and reaching

The poem is about Eros, and in this poem, she says, famously:

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

She says, I am working out the vocabulary of my silence, and then, The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

She is saying something important. Now, it’s very easy to mock. A contemporary cultural critic cited Rukeyser, and essentially mocked her, and mocked the need for a new story, in a kind of “chess move” and said, “Well, the universe might be made up of stories, but it’s made up of atoms too.” Of course he is not wrong. The universe is made up of atoms. There is a physical concrete reality to atoms. So, you might say, “Well, the universe is made up of atoms and stories.” That’s not quite true though.

The universe is made up of not atoms, but stories. And atoms are stories too.

That’s where I want to start: atoms are stories too. That’s a very big claim.

Any good mystic and any good magician know that that’s true. How many people have seen Harry Potter? Harry Potter and Star Wars are the single most watched narrative structures in the world by far, the only two major global stories of the last fifty years. If you’ve seen Harry Potter, you know something about nine and a half. Nine and a half is how you go to Hogwarts — for an education.

And what is the first notion of education? It’s that atoms aren’t just atoms. If you place your attention closely, it actually reconfigures physical Reality, and you are able to find your way through nine and a half into this magical kingdom, this world of Hogwarts, this other world of education.

It’s not by accident that at the center of both Star Wars and in Harry Potter is education. In Harry Potter, it’s a school. It’s about the transmission between the generations — one that we’ve lost in this generation. One of the greatest existential risks is the interruption of the transmission between generations. My friend, Zak Stein, talks about this a lot, importantly. He wrote a book called Education in a Time Between Worlds. He is really focusing on this education issue, and he is correct. I am focusing on it from a different perspective, the perspective of the lineage.

The lineage talks about a man, in Chapter 5 of The Book of Genesis, whose name is Hanoch or Enoch. In the Ethiopian Solomon lineages, the Book of Enoch is the primary book. It’s a book of the Apocrypha in the mystical tradition of the great lineages of Solomon that shaped Christianity, and Judaism, and in many ways some of the most important strains in Islam. It is a story about a human being who becomes a God-man. That’s the purpose: a human being is supposed to become a God-woman, a human being is supposed to become a God-man. That’s what it means to be a human being — is to know that I am a unique participatory expression of the Field of the Divine, which is the Field of Value, which is the field not just of matter but of what ultimately matters. The actual word is Hanoch, which literally means education in Hebrew.

In Harry Potter, the whole story is about education. It’s about teachers and students, and the relationship between teachers and students, and the relationship between peers who are students and the appropriate nature of the transmission, and the charlatan teachers, the pseudo teachers, the demonic teachers, and the great teachers, and what it means to be Dumbledore. What does it mean to be a teacher? Isn’t it wild, my friends? This myth that’s sitting right in front of us is about education. That’s what it is about.

And of course, Star Wars is about a particular relationship between a teacher and a student. The teacher is Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan has a teacher, Qui-Gon Jinn. And Qui-Gon Jinn has a teacher, Yoda. And Yoda has a teacher. It’s unclear who’s Yoda’s teacher is. It is about the relationship between Anakin Skywalker and his teachers, Obi-Wan and then Yoda — and it is their inability to hold him as a student that introduces the false teacher, Palpatine, who then seduces Anakin to the dark side.

Both stories are all about education, the entire thing. The teacher function is critical — knowing and understanding the teacher function. These two stories at the very, very center of culture are about education.

Atoms are stories, too

Let’s follow our thread.

When Muriel Rukeyser writes, “Reality is made up not of atoms, but of stories,” and this cultural critic mocks it and says, “No, no, no, there are atoms also,” he is not engaged in education. He is playing chess. But there is something deeper that’s happening. It’s not about mocking an idea, and scoring a point in a public display of virtuosity on the internet.

It is about education.

Let’s be educators. An educator is a lover. To be an educator is to be a lover. You have to decide in life: is life a chess game, or is life a love story? And of course, when you tell someone who thinks that life is a chess game that life is a love story, he thinks you are making a chess move. No, it’s not a chess move. It’s about ripping our hearts open.

We need to understand that yes, the universe is made up of atoms, but atoms themselves are also stories.

How do I know atoms are stories? Well, that’s the point of nine and a half.

I am going to give you three ways that we know that atoms are stories:

• First, nine and a half. The first educational point is that those firmly constructed structures of matter that you think are implacable and immovable — pay close attention and you can walk right through them. That’s not wrong. It’s not wrong in terms of magic. We do believe in fairies. We do. We do. That’s true. Peter Pan got that right.
• Secondly, it’s also true in terms of mysticism — the interior sciences.
• But three, it’s also true in terms of the exterior sciences.

If you understand the nature of Reality, you understand that Reality has two components, and one component is story. And atoms participate in the story function of Cosmos.

And what is a story? Let’s just figure out together what a story is.

What are we saying? We want to demonstrate that not just mysticism and magic, but also the classical sciences understand that Reality is a story, all the way down and all the way up. The notion that an atom is a thing is ridiculous in science today. I could give you ten quotes right now from various leading edge scientists (but I won’t). An atom is not a thing. And the lineage already understood this. The lineage in Hebrew has a word for a thing, davar. It’s a thing, but davar also means a word. A thing is a word, and a word is the semantics of Cosmos. A word is the linguistics of cosmos. And language is not a thing. Language is a self-organizing code, as Elena said it to me in a passing text. She didn’t use those exact words, but language is a code that writes itself out of the Field of Eros of Reality, and language holds interiors. That’s the whole point of language. Language doesn’t just communicate exteriors, language holds interiors. It’s a big deal.

A davar — a word (or logos) and a thing — in the original Hebrew are the same because you can’t ultimately split between them. An atom is not just a thing; although an atom does have a thing-y quality, but an atom is vast, spacious, open space, and an atom is a set of relationships between different parts. That’s what an atom is. An atom is a set of relationships, and those relationships are animated by allurement. There is a set of allurements. We begin in a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang with these sets of allurements between up and down quarks, and then between protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons come together. And then electrons, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, are uniquely introduced into the story, and the play of allurement shifts, and the proton, neutron, and electron together form this new whole called an atom. In other words, there is a placing of attention between the proton, neutron and electron that then generates an atom, which itself then has a new capacity to place attention.

This new wholeness emerges from a story of allurement. It’s allurement —

• towards life,
• towards ever deeper uniqueness,
• towards ever more wholeness,
• towards ever more creative possibility,
• towards ever more value,
• towards ever more transformation and capacity for transformation.

All of these are First Principles and First Values of Cosmos, and the First Principles and First Values of cosmos are the plotlines of the cosmic story. Reality is not merely a fact. Reality is a story. Atoms are stories too.

The beauty of a story is in its capacity to hold opposites

One of the principles of Reality is that Reality is relationships. It’s relationships between parts.

Another way to say it is Reality is intimacy. Reality is a set of intimacies, when parts come together to form a new wholeness or a new shared identity.

And another way to say it is that Reality is evolution. It’s stories.

And what is evolution? Evolution is a series of transformations.

Those are the plotlines of Cosmos.

It is not a static cosmos, but it’s more than just a dynamic cosmos. It’s not just a randomly dynamic cosmos, although randomness is also part of the plotline in the story. There is a dimension of openness in the story. I wouldn’t quite use the word randomness, but there is a dimension of openness.

There is randomness in the context of a storyline. There is randomness in the context of a set of First Principles and First Values that are going in a particular direction, that have a telos.

It’s not just an erotic cosmos. It’s a cosmos with telos. That’s why my friend Barbara liked to talk about a Telerotic Universe, and that’s correct.

Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. Reality is not an ordinary story, it’s a story of allurement. It’s a love story.

But a love story doesn’t just have allurement. A love story also has autonomy. It’s not just I am allured to you, I also want to be me. Love is the right balance, the respect that lives between the lovers. That’s why intimacy is shared identity in the context of otherness.

Love is the precise calibrated balance between allurement and autonomy.

If we think love is allurement, the relationship collapses. And it’s not just autonomy either. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” — that’s one of the dumbest lines ever written. In Love Story (1970), Jenny says this to Oliver. Dumb! Of course, you say you’re sorry. Of course, you apologize. What kind of crazy thing is that? Of course, you do. You are not just autonomy. You are autonomy and communion. You are autonomy and allurement. Love is the precise balance between autonomy and allurement.

Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. Reality is not merely a story, Reality is a love story.

That’s not a mere metaphor. That is a precise metaphor. That’s a scientific metaphor, if you will. It reflects facts. But facts come together in a story. This is the nature of Reality. This is backed by the universe. This is not fanciful.This is fundamental to Reality. Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. Reality is not just atoms, Reality is stories — and atoms are stories too.

In the ancient book, Sefer Yetzirah, the book of creation it says that Reality is constituted by sipur — story — and mispar — number. Atoms also have valence, which has to do with the number of electrons and their relationship, an atomic number has to do with the number of protons and their set of relationships. There is a number dimension to Reality — Reality is also numbers. But numbers are also stories. Numbers are also stories. Numbers are going someplace — one, two, three, four…

When we say Ramanujan is intimate with every integer in the universe, it’s not a mechanical intimacy. A number is telling a story. Mathematical values are part of the story of Cosmos. Story itself has the same root word as number. The reason story and number share the same root word in the original Hebrew is because they are actually different faces of the One.

Reality is number and story, and number is also a story.

It’s an incomplete story. It’s an ever evolving story. One of the qualities of eternity is evolution. The story is a story that holds paradox, because any great story has this capacity to hold paradox. If you read The Kabbalistic Tree of Life or if you read Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, they are both saying something very similar — that the beauty of the story is its capacity to hold opposites, to have as many opposites as possible in the sets of relationships in a way that those opposites generate a larger whole.

Ten dimensions of story

Reality is not really a fact, Reality is a story.

And there are ten dimensions to story.

1. There are causal connections in a story. Things are intimately, integrally, and inexorably related. There is not just, as David Hume would say, constant conjunction — not just adjacent facts, there are adjacent possibles. Adjacent possible is a technical term, but I am using it to mean there is a casual connection. One thing (or one word, because there is no split between a thing and a word) leads to another. The resonance of one note of music inextricably leads to the next possibility in music. There is great openness, there is great possibility, but that possibility is within a context, within a Field of Value. This is why this Reality produces a world in which we reflect on the nature of the world, on the meaning of the world, on the invitation of our own being. As we move up the evolutionary chain, the depth of that reflection becomes more urgent and more pressing. The reflection evolves, and it deepens.
2. And we keep coming — from different lenses and different doors — to this understanding that somehow Eros is central to the whole story. That’s not an accident — that’s because it’s an erotic story, because it’s a love story, because Eros is backed by the universe. There is a level of interiors in a story. It’s not just atoms. It’s not just a thing. But just like atoms are not just things, things are not just things. Things are stories. Atoms are stories. There is a story dimension. Things are not just numbers. It’s not just mathematics. Mathematics is inexorably inseparable from the quality of story.
3. That interior involves desire. There is desire in the story. Desire is an essential part of the story.
4. There is need in the story. The story is animated by need. Evolution is love in action in response to desire. And evolution is love in action in response to need.
5. The story has telos, it has direction. That is what desire means, but I want to say it in a different way. It has telos — the story is reaching for something. There is a plotline to the story.
6. The plotline of the story is value. The story is reaching for value. Reality has an appetite for value. We always cite Whitehead for that, but its original source is in the interior sciences. There is a book that I was very, very privileged to write. I don’t even know how I did it back then. When I look at it now, there is no way I could do it, but it’s called Radical Kabbalah. There is a chapter on desire. The desire of Cosmos is for value. Cosmos reaches for value and for ever greater value.
7. There is a degree of freedom in the story. The story is not a mechanical manual. There is some degree of first person in the story. According to Stuart Kauffman, a mathematical complexity theorist, there is free will all the way down to the world of matter. According to Richard Feynman, the physicist, there is some dimension of aliveness, some dimension of proto-choice all the way down. However we tell that story, freedom is a key dimension to the story.
8. The story itself evolves. Part of the story is that the story evolves. There is an evolution of the story. For example, justice is a First Principle and First Value; it appears as justice at the human level, but it appears in the world of matter as harmony. I shared this with Howard Bloom, and he was very excited about it. Justice, as we know, is very beautiful — it’s harmony, and harmony evolves through the animal world and ultimately appears as justice and fairness.
9. A story often involves crises. There is often a crisis, which generates the next dimension of the story. For example the Oxygen Crisis was destroying prokaryotic cells, and that led to the emergence of aerobic eukaryotes (they could breathe oxygen) and, ultimately, to multicellular life. That movement comes from a crisis; there was a crisis that generated a momentous leap in the nature of relationship and the nature of intimacy, and we generated multicellular life that enabled oxygen to be generative of life. The relationship between oxygen and carbon changed. But that notion of crisis being an evolutionary driver, it happens all the way up. There is always a crisis. That’s part of the plotline of the story. The crisis is always a crisis of relationship or a crisis of intimacy. And the crisis of intimacy generates a new dimension of the plotline, which is the evolution of intimacy and the evolution of relationship as a core part of the storyline.
10. Our relationship to the story evolves; it becomes conscious. There is a set of First Principles and First Values, which is what the story desires. The story is reaching for the First Principles and First Values. Let’s say, uniqueness. The experience of uniqueness in a particular chemical element of the cosmos, like helium, is what it is. But a human being, to the best of our understanding, has a more conscious experience of their uniqueness. The experience of my uniqueness unfolds, so there is both continuity (uniqueness all the way down and all the way up), and an evolution of uniqueness (discontinuity). That’s true of all the plotlines of cosmos, they evolve. But even deeper, there is an evolution of our relationship to the story. We become aware that the story of Cosmos is living through us.

We become aware that we are the Universe: A Love Story in person. It’s not that there is a Universe: A Love Story over there. I become aware that I am that story — I am the Universe: A Love Story in person.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

I want to get just that last point, which is the evolution of story means we begin to become aware that we are enfleshed by Cosmos as a story waiting to be told. That realization is core. Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. And we say Reality is not an ordinary story, Reality is a love story. And then we say, Reality is not an ordinary love story, Reality is an Evolutionary Love Story. All of evolution is a story — but even before evolution, the inception of Reality is part of the Divine story.

How do I know there is a Divine story? Am I just making that up? Is that just a dogma?

No.

I was reading Wittgenstein on Friday morning. And I was reading John Leslie, a Canadian writer and philosopher (actually quite a good philosopher). Wittgenstein says, “In the end, when I step into eternity (which for Wittgenstein means to be beneath time and space, and not everlasting time), I cannot help but be dazzled at how extraordinary it is.” Meaning, it’s not ordinary in any logical way that there is anything here at all, which is what Fichte and Schelling are talking about when they ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It’s not just their question, it’s the question that every great human being has to ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

And there is only one realization, only one way to respond to that, which is that Infinity is not an unmoving eternity. It’s not an unchanging eternity. Infinity desired intimacy.

Infinity desired and desires finitude.

Doesn’t that sound remarkably like a story? A story has desire, a story has a plotline, a story has freedom, a story desires more value. Story has both interiors and exteriors. There is a causal connection between the events in a story. In other words, the inception of Reality itself is part of the Divine story. And Goddess herself is not merely a thing. She is the logos, the word. She is a story.

God doesn’t just love stories, God is a story.

In the Tree of Life, Eser Sefirot are translated usually as ten luminations. But ten luminations is really ten stories. Sefirot is a story at its core. Divinity discloses herself as a story and she incarnates — he incarnates — the same First Principles and First Values that are the story of Reality.

Infinity desires finitude. Infinity desires finitude, because finitude is intrinsic and ultimate value, because the nature of the story is the desire for more value. That’s one of the qualities of story. And ultimate value is Divinity. There is no split between them. Infinity desires more value, which is finitude. Finitude is you and me. You and me, we are unique expressions of finitude. That’s what we are.

We are unique numbers and unique stories.

We are unique numbers, and we are unique things, and we are unique stories.

We are going someplace.

Our days are not only numbered in the sense of mortality. Our days are intrinsically unique numbers in the great mathematical calculus of Divinity, unfolding mad love and an erotic cosmos.

Doing the math of our life makes sense. We’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to make our calculations, but not in a calculating way. It’s not a rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. There is only one question I ever ask myself. “Am I in full integrity?” If I am in full integrity, I am in my story, and I am in delight, and I am enjoying, I am in pleasure — no matter what’s happening. My story matters. That’s the end of the realization.

Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. Reality is not an ordinary story, Reality is a love story. Reality is not an ordinary love story, Reality is an Evolutionary Love Story.

How could anyone ever tell you that you are less than whole?

The last piece is: your story, my story are literally chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story. Literally. Not metaphorically. The way they say it in the lineage texts of the 19th century is mamash. Mamash is a great word. In Hebrew, mamash means ‘ontologically, literally.’ Chelek Elohah Mi’ma’al Mamash ‘I am a part (chelek), I participate in the Field of Value, which is the Field of Divine, that is everything (Elohah Mi’ma’al) literally, ontologically (Mamash)’. It’s the ontology of our story.

My story really is a chapter in God’s story. And God gets unbearably depressed when we rip out pages in God’s book of life. I am a page in the Divine book of life. That is the only accurate self-conception that is possible for a human being. That’s what we call Homo amor. That’s the move from Homo sapiens to Homo amor. It’s the realization that my atoms are stories as well, and there is no split at all, ultimately, between interiors and exteriors.

It’s all a love story for real.

That’s why we look at each other and we say,

How could anyone ever tell us?
How could anyone ever tell you?
How could anyone ever tell me that you are anything less than beautiful?

It’s not just a song.

How could anyone ever tell you that you are less than whole?

But you are not just autonomy. You are not whole by yourself.

How could anyone ever tell you that our love is anything less than a wild miracle of we, the creation of an irreducibly unique intimacy that never was, is, or will be ever again?

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