399 — The Dignity of Humanity: Being the Saviors of God
Summary: One of the First Principles and First Values of Cosmos is story: Story is the structural nature of Cosmos; any individual story is implicated in the evolutionary story, in every detail.
This episode unpacks eight aspects of this realization:
- I am the primary actor in the cosmic story; my story matters.
- My story is cosmic; I am the Universe: A Love Story in person.
- I have to become aware of this, that is, move from unconscious story to conscious story.
- I am the storyteller; my story deserves to be not just lived, but also told.
- My story deserves to be performed; by performing my story I elicit the most stunning and beautiful dimensions of myself.
- Cosmos needs my story; I am welcome in Cosmos.
- I am the playwright, a co-author of the story. There is no fixed script, and the story is unfolding.
- How I write the next chapter has cosmic significance — not only through public happenings, but through the most private, hidden moments of my life. When I take my unique risk and rewrite my story, Divinity evolves.
The promise of the Fourth Big Bang
We are in the second week of talking about story. We’re telling the story of story: about reclaiming the story, and about its nature as the ontology of Cosmos — the very structural nature of Cosmos.
You might say, “Really? Why does that matter?”
Of course it matters — inexorably, and unimaginably, and ineluctably. It matters enormously. It’s of enormous significance because the realization that story is real is what tells me
- that my story is personally implicated in the evolutionary story, in the cosmic story,
- and there is no detail of my story that is alienated from cosmic magnificence.
We are at a time between worlds. We are at a time between stories.
Every time is enacted by a story. Within a period of time — for example, today on the planet — there’s a number of stories that are happening at the same time.
Stories can become inaccurate.
Stories can become distorted.
Stories can become stories of power, as Foucault spent a lot of time pointing out.
Stories can become just stories.
Stories can be taken seriously, but we realize that they are just power drives, and they are just power grabs, and they are merely contrived, and they are fictions or figments of our imagination, or mere social constructs. They don’t actually point to anything real at all. That can be true about stories. That’s the postmodern insight about many stories, and that’s partially true.
But underneath stories that have lost their plotline — stories that are hiding baser motives of dominator power drives and other forms of pathology — underneath those, there is this deeper story, this deeper storyline, this deeper plotline of cosmos. That’s what we call a Story of Value. The Story of Value is what creates the generation.
If you are new to One Mountain and would like to understand the context, please read Love or Die and What is One Mountain? But in a word, we are deeply aware of the meta-crisis. We realize that we have crossed planetary boundaries in terms of the exterior substrates of Reality, and we don’t have principles to create interior coherence and coordination to respond to the crisis. If we don’t respond, Reality will devolve. This devolution will bring us either to a collapse of humanity itself, or to the death of our humanity — a world totalitarian state run by artificial general intelligence in which human freedom, and human dignity, and the human experience of being welcome in the cosmos, and human creativity, and the drama of human decision making will be effectively and benignly effaced by the smiling indifferent face of a totalitarian planetary stack from which there will be no escape.
What we’re saying here in One Mountain is that there is a third possibility. The third possibility is the dawn of a new era. We call it the Fourth Big Bang — after the First Big Bang (from no-thing to matter), and then the Second Big Bang (matter to life), and the Third Big Bang (life to the depth of the self-reflective human mind). The Three Big Bangs of Reality — from the physiosphere to the biosphere to the noosphere, the world of culture.
But the world of culture of homo sapiens won’t go on forever. We have crossed planetary boundaries, both physically, in the exterior and in the interior — the planetary boundary of dissolution of interiors, where we are left without anchors.
We are left without North Stars.
We are left without direction.
We are left without a Field of Value, without a field of meaning.
The response to this moment — in order to invite in the future that wants to be born, the most good, true and beautiful world that we can possibly imagine — is the ability to tell a New Story of Value. We are here to tell that New Story of Value, and we are telling it every week. We are engaged together in crossing over to the other side. We are here to do The Crossing.
The question is: am I willing to cross over in this lifetime, and to move from being homo sapiens to becoming, incarnating, being the New Human and the New Humanity, living — generating Reality from — from this New Story of Value? We need to generate Reality from this New Story of Value —
- not as one person or two people,
- not as an elite that is imposing a Reality structure on the majority,
- but a New Story of Value rooted in the exterior sciences and in the interior sciences,
- a story that we all recognize as true in our deepest interiors.
If we begin to live from it, and it spreads like a virus — like a positive and wondrous virus, then an entirely new expression of Reality emerges, an entirely New Human emerges, a New Humanity emerges. We begin to birth a Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies. It is a Planetary Awakening in Love because we birthed a New Human and a New Humanity.
The very core of birthing a New Human and a New Humanity is to tell a New Story of Value.
Last week and this week, we are dealing with one piece of the New Story, which is the nature of story itself. Last week, we showed that story is a quality of Cosmos — the very core of Cosmos itself. Cosmos itself is a story. Story is not a human creation. Reality is a story, all the way up and all the way down. That’s its nature.
Evolutionary Love Code.
The universe 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 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, 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 the divinity of our performance.
Recovering the lost storyline
We are trying to gather a group of us who are revolutionaries, evolutionaries. We are reenacting, if you will, the Florentine Platonic Academy. I often say we are da Vinci and we are Marsilio Ficino, but we are actually more Marsilio Ficino than da Vinci for lots of reasons. Marsilio Ficino, who ran the Florentine Platonic Academy, was a student of Plethon, a Byzantine scholar of antiquities, who had tried to integrate Plato and Aristotle. He had this vision of a universal Field of Value. Out of his conversations with Cosimo de’ Medici, the Florentine Platonic Academy was created, and it birthed modernity.
To the extent they got the plotlines right, the beauty and dignity of modernity was birthed. But to the extent they got key plotlines wrong, modernity went off course. Evolution didn’t keep growing. Evolution began to meander. Evolution took some very, very painful side roads. Something of the thread of the story was lost. Franz Kafka picks up, in late modernity, the sense that we’ve lost the plotline. K, the protagonist of his novel, The Trial, can’t find the plotline of his own story. He doesn’t understand how things relate to each other. The whole notion of there being a coherent story is lost. That’s really what Kafka is writing about. Shakespeare, every once in a while, has a moment where he feels the lost plotline. You feel that in Shakespeare, that sense that we might have lost the thread. Maybe there is no thread or have we lost the thread? And then Shakespeare moves to other voices.
We have lost Ariadne’s thread. We went to slay the Minotaur, as Theseus did in the great myth. We created the industrial revolution. We created the scientific method, but then we got lost in the labyrinth, and we lost our relationship to Eros — Ariadne and her thread — which would lead us out of the labyrinth.
That’s the tragedy of this moment. We’ve lost the storyline. That’s what Kafka is talking about.
But it is not just a lost storyline. A particular dimension of the storyline can be twisted, distorted, or is just read out of the story. What was read out of the story was value itself — that actually we are following a North Star, and that North Star is value. We are going somewhere. There is a set of First Principles and First Values that are the plotlines of the story, and that story actually lives inside of us.
We recognize that story. We know that story because it actually lives in us. And that story itself is one of the core values of cosmos.
In the First Principles and First Values book, we talk about eighteen First Principles and First Values of cosmos. I really invite everyone to read it, as a core background text to this One Mountain Many Paths, to our revolutionary, subversive undertaking.
What we’re trying to do is reanimate the plotline.
We are trying to get the thread back.
We are trying to find our North Star.
I am a primary actor in the story
One of the First Principles and First Values is story itself: story is an ontology of Cosmos, meaning it’s for real. The fancy way to say that is that phenomenology is ontology. Phenomenology means the recursive recurrent pattern of my own deepest experience of my own experience. That’s phenomenology.
Phenomenology is ontology.
Okay, what does that mean?
That means that the mysteries are within us, that my own deepest experience tells me something about the nature of Reality, because my own deepest experience participates in the Field of Value.
I live in a Field of Value. Value is real, and the Field of Value lives in me.
One value is my story.
I am always thinking about my story — not because I am a narcissist, but because I’m eavesdropping on a current of divine conversation, which is itself thinking about my story. My storyline matters. We call that, in CosmoErotic Humanism, my sacred autobiography. In the book called Soul Prints, there is a section called Live Your Story — as an injunction, a categorical imperative of Reality. Live your sacred autobiography — your letter, my letter in the cosmic scroll.
Notice, we are using the image of language. Language is the code of Reality. My letter in the cosmic scroll, which is my story, is its own unique code that was intended by Reality. It is a unique piece of code written by Reality, encrypted in my experience. A unique dimension of the story of Reality is encrypted in my flesh. We are messengers. We are carrying code. But we’re messengers that have forgotten our message, and so we have forgotten that we are the code. The code is my story, and my story matters.
By the way, the last hundred years of work in the Western world on trauma, and recovering from the voices of trauma, and healing the past patterns of my story are a recognition and disclosure that my story matters. The weakness of the trauma movement is that it focuses only on one part of my story — the past.
The enlightenment teachers focus on another part of my story, which is the present, the Eternal Now, which explodes the movement of story. The story disappears. The story becomes the disappearance of the story. For the enlightenment teachers, the goal of my personal story is to “disappear story.” And that’s also part of my story.
But then there is a third part of the story — the future. My future story: where I am going, my deepest heart’s desire, my unique gifts.
- My irreducible uniqueness doesn’t get exploded in the now.
- My irreducible uniqueness is not defined by the past.
- My irreducible uniqueness moves towards the future. It reaches for a memory of the future, and has unique gifts to give, and unique poems to write, and unique paintings to paint, and unique breaths to take, and unique relationships to have, and unique transformations to transform.
There is this realization that my story matters. Through the prism of my story, I am personally implicated in the cosmic story. The cosmic story is incomplete without my story. That’s a very big realization.
How do I know that? Well, I know that for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because phenomenology is ontology — because story is a value that lives inside of me. And I am tracing and always trying to understand the nature of my story not because I am pathological. No, no, no. Mythologize, don’t pathologize. Don’t reduce your deepest experience to pathology.
Understand that your deepest experience points towards your mythic life, and your life is mythic because your life is holding chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story. In other words, when I actually live my story, I become the Intimate Universe in person. I become the CosmoErotic universe in person.
I am a primary actor in the story.
My story is Cosmic
I want to move from an unconscious to a conscious story.
I can be the primary actor in my story, but not realize it. I am going to think —
- that my story is simply personal,
- that my story is simply psychological,
- that my story is simply communal — in a tribal sense, or in a clan sense, or in a corporate sense, or in a neighborhood sense, or in a religious sense.
No. Although those all might be true, my story is cosmic. No detail of my story is alienated from cosmic magnificence. Every detail of my story matters. Paying attention to details of my story is not neurosis, although it can be: I can be involved in recursive loops of story that I should move beyond. Definitely, I need to bracket some dimensions and move beyond them. But deeper than that, I disclose, in the details of my story, my directional signals, my orienting North Stars. I begin to understand the tidbits of telos, which are the telltale signs that awaken me from my torporific slumber and point me towards my destiny.
I realize that the path itself is part of my destination. How I walk, and how I live the story changes Cosmos itself. Cosmos is reformulated. Cosmos is reconfigured by how I live my story.
To sum up:
- One: I am the story. I am the story in person.
- Two: I am the Universe: A Love Story in person. It is not just that personal is political — the personal is cosmic. My personal story is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story.
- Three: that has to become conscious. I move from unconscious story to conscious story. I become aware of the fact that I am the Universe: A Love Story in person.
My story deserves to be told
Four, I am the storyteller.
I am responsible not just for living my story, but for telling my story. My story deserves to be told. As Laura Riding writes, until the stories of our lives are told, we go on desperately craving it.
We have to tell our story.
We have to give dignity to our story.
One of the most upsetting columns I have ever read was by William Safire, who was a brilliant thinker. He was quite aware of his brilliance, thought much of himself, and partially deservedly so. But he really missed the point when he wrote something like, “Why are all these people writing autobiographies when they really have nothing to say?” And Anthony Storr, British psychoanalyst, cites this column in his book on self. They write, implicitly, about the indignity of having common people write autobiographies. Safire wrote a book called Great Speeches in History, which are all speeches by famous men and women.
But both Safire and Storr are actually an affront to human dignity. Every human being has a story worth telling, a story that needs to be told, that has dignity, that needs to be acted out on stage. It’s not just the biopic of the famous singer or sports star that deserves to be told. Every human being has a story that’s filled with dignity, and filled with beauty, and filled with ontological gravitas. We live in the unbearable gravitas of being, not the unbearable lightness of being.
Every story deserves to be told. Every human being has an autobiography worthy of the pages. Every human being’s autobiography is a sacred autobiography. It’s a letter in the cosmic scroll.
My story deserves to be told. My story has dignity.
The performance of my story is the intention of me being alive
Five, my story deserves to be performed.
I have to perform my story. The whole world is a stage. I show up at Cirque du Soleil as a performer, with the best of myself, and I elicit the most stunning and beautiful dimensions of myself.
We have pseudo performances. People dress up for the ball, and we make fun of the ball as in the story of Cinderella. But even Cinderella wants to dress up for the ball. Although there is pomposity at the ball, there is falseness at the ball, but underneath the pomposity, underneath the falseness, there is this sense that life is a performance.
In the world of Netflix, there is a series called Bridgerton that many, many people are watching. It is a contrived reality, which is about the performance of courtship. This court with this imaginary, fictional queen (who is this complex figure, and there is a hidden love story between her and her husband). All of Bridgerton is about love stories, and it’s about the performance of the love story.
On the one hand, there is much to be mocked in story. And there is a Lady Whistledown who becomes this voice that mocks the story, but, on the other hand, even she understands that the story actually matters, that the story has to be performed.
We can perform a story in a way that violates our authenticity, or we can perform the love story of our lives in a way that elicits our authenticity. Bridgerton is this incredibly, shockingly elite story about the elite, wealthy upper class who have the spare time to enact their stories. But, of course, we have to democratize Bridgerton. The democratization of Bridgerton is that everyone has the capacity to live their stories, and to play out their great love story.
We have to perform.
We have to perform our story in a post-tragic sense.
We have to realize that my love story is cosmic Eros performed in the personal details of my life — that the drama of my life is the stage for cosmic Eros uniquely performed in me. There are no repeat performances, and every performance is unique, and every performance was intended by Cosmos. Cosmos spent decades, and centuries, and eons putting together the set necessary for every particular performance.
I’ve got to perform my story and the performance of my story is worthy.
It’s dignified.
It’s desired by Cosmos.
It’s needed by Cosmos.
The performance of my story is the intention of me being alive.
That’s when I begin to realize I am welcome in Cosmos. I am welcome. My story has dignity. My story matters in some ultimate sense. Cosmos needs my story. The story of Cosmos is somehow incomplete without my stories. That’s number six.
I am a co-author in the story
Number seven: I am not performing a fixed script. There is no fixed script. The story is unfolding.
The story of Cosmos, the story of humanity, and my particular human story — as a set of nested Russian dolls — that story itself is unfinished.
I am not only a primary actor in the story.
I am not only the storyteller.
I am not only the performer of the story, but I am the playwright.
That’s number seven — I am the playwright. I am writing the story. I am actually writing the next chapter of the story. The story is unfinished. I am co-authoring this story with the Universe. I am a coauthor of the story of my life at the universe.
I am not the only author. I didn’t decide where to be born, or when to be born, or to whom to be born, and with what proclivities to be born, and what genetic structure to be born, with what interior potentialities to be born. I didn’t decide any of that, so I’m not the single author of the story. It’s not quite my life. That’s not quite right. But I am a co-author in the story, and I have freedom — this unimaginable freedom to participate in writing the next chapter. That’s number seven. Number seven is that it’s an unfinished story.
The cosmic significance of taking your unique risk
And number eight: how I write that next chapter in the story — the lines that I pen, the plotline that I unfold — has cosmic significance. It doesn’t just affect my story, but quite literally ripples throughout Reality:
- what I do,
- and how I do it,
- and who I decide to become, within the context and constraints and potentialities of my unique circumstance.
There is this window of choice, the point of choice that I have —
- in which I take my unique risk,
- and live my unique story, my unique sacred autobiography,
- and give my unique gift into my unique circle of intimacy and influence.
I become this unique quality of intimacy, I incarnate my unique set of allurements, I be the unique desire that courses in me, and I liberate myself from surface scripts of desire.
I identify my unique script of desire, my letter in the cosmic scroll, my deepest heart’s desire. To the extent that I do that, I not only fulfill the purpose of my existence, but I rewrite the cosmic tale.
There is a way in which my instrument in the Unique Self Symphony — moving from the image of writing to the image of music, being in that space in between them —
- my letter in the cosmic scroll,
- my note, the melody, the music that I play in the Unique Self Symphony
— changes the quality of the entire symphony and resets the direction of Cosmos itself.
That’s number eight.
The cosmic significance is not set merely by public happenings, by the public events of my life.
It’s set by the private moments, the hidden moments, the texts, the understandings, the moment in which I decide, “No, I’m not a princess. I’m a queen. I’m not a prince. I’m a king” — and a new quality of intimacy is created.
And Krishna meets Radha, and a new world is birthed.
And I become something that’s unimaginable, that’s unbearable in its unique beauty.
But I can only become that through my unique risk, and my unique risk is generally not played out in the public. It generally is deeper than that. It’s this unique, deep interior moment where I risk my very existence in order to be born, in order to exist.
Reality demands that. It demands the passion of that unique risk.
I don’t know quite how to say this. But there’s this moment or the series of moments in which I show up so entirely that I become fearless.
Rewriting Divinity
A few weeks ago, I was reading pieces from Hannah Arendt’s doctoral thesis, which is about Augustine’s theory of love. Arendt wrote this when she was still passionately in love with Heidegger. Her love letters to Heidegger were published. That didn’t go well. It’s never good when your beloved turns out to be a Nazi. That’s a problem.
But Hannah Arendt writes very beautifully about how all love is conditional. It is conditional in the sense that we can’t really live the love because we are afraid to lose it. She says true love is the place where I step so fully into the moment for its own sake that I become completely fearless. The moment is so self-justifying, so filling, so full, that fear falls away, and I just am, and I’m loving for its own sake.
That’s where my unique risk comes from. My unique risk comes from this place that I so love the world, and I know that the world so desperately needs me, that I am willing to step in and live fully —
- in a joy that’s unimaginable,
- in a trembling that’s unbearable,
- and in a goodness that’s undeniable.
That’s the unique risk in which I begin to live this new chapter in the story — and that story rewrites not only my autobiography, but God’s autobiography. That’s what I’m going to pick up next week.
What does it mean that we rewrite God’s autobiography?
It’s much more dramatic. It’s not poetry.
- You can’t actually understand the Renaissance…
- You can’t actually understand Renaissance humanism…
- You can’t actually understand what a New Story of Value might look like…
- You can’t understand how to respond to the meta-crisis in a way in which we heal a planet drenched in shame…
- We can’t restore human dignity…
unless we can actually understand the following sentence:
- When I rewrite my story, when I take my unique risk, when I become a unique letter in the cosmic scroll, when I play my unique instrument in the Unique Self Symphony — I reconfigure the music of the divine personhood.
Divinity is rewritten. God is rewritten in some way. For real, ontologically.
And I have a direct personal realization and experience of my capacity to actually rewrite Divinity — and that actually Divinity is waiting desperately to be rewritten, to be evolved by my story.
That’s the piece we’re going to pick up on next week.
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