404 — Live Your Story: The First Commandment of Cosmos

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Bathing of a Red Horse. 1912

Summary: Story is not a human contrivance; it is a quality of the real. It is not a quality of the temporal; it is a paradoxical face of eternity. One way the story is disclosed is in the mathematics of Cosmos; that’s why the Book of Creation, the Sefer Yetzirah talks about Reality being both mispar ‘number’ and sipur ‘story’. The essential elements of the story are the same all the way up and down the evolutionary chain: causal connections between events, driven by inherent desire for more value, and some degree of freedom (or choice). Yet at the foundational levels of reality, choice, seen from outside, may seem mechanical, especially if we are blinded by the dogmas of materialism. But freedom evolves — from matter to life to mind, all the way to the experience of Conscious Evolution, when I see myself in the context of the larger story, and realize that evolution has never been just by chance. In Conscious Evolution, I realize that I am a unique chapter and verse in the larger evolutionary story, and therefore the ultimate command of my life is to live my story. To live your story means to embrace it fully and discover its unique invitation to transformation — your unique letter in the cosmic scroll — and, from that place of deep interiority, to offer your gifts. That’s what Dickens meant by being the hero of your own life, even if this heroism is rarely witnessed and celebrated by the whole world.

Story is a quality of the real

We’ve been talking for several years about the ontology of story. Now, ontology is a fancy word, but it means for realsies. Ontology means it’s for real; it’s not contrived. It is rooted in the structure of Reality.

Story is not just a random contrivance, but a quality of the real; the real is animated by intention, by infinite depth, by sacredness. There is a sacredness to the real, and sacred means that it’s not merely matter but ultimately matters.

When we say story is a quality of the real, when we say that it’s not merely a coincidence of matter, but that it matters ultimately, what we mean to say is that story is a quality of the Universe. It is backed by the Universe — and, like all qualities of the real, it is rooted in the fundamental matrix of cosmological value.

Human beings didn’t make up stories. Story is not a random expression of human life, which humans created as means of accomplishing some mechanical end of survival. There are many historians who view story that way — reductionist materialist historians, who recognize the importance of story because story is what coheres us. Story is how people created larger unions. The clan would tell a story, and the story was so compelling that it attracted people, and the clan became larger and stronger, or the tribe would tell a story and the story became a mechanism for political union, which increased the power of the tribe.

The implication — but often not only the implication, but an explicit claim — is that story is an accident of the cosmos, because the cosmos itself is an accident. In other words, we are living in a cosmos whose nature is accidental. It is non-purposeful, it lacks intention, it has no qualia. Even if there is some strange phenomenon of waking up to the inherent experience of qualia — you can meditate, you can feel this deeper location of Self — even this is just one of the epiphenomena, one of the haphazard, ultimately non-meaningful coincidences of a cold cosmos. We live in a cold cosmos. Even if there are ostensible feelings of warmth, it’s not a warm cosmos, it’s a cold cosmos.

This cold cosmos has a chilling effect on our psyche, both personally and collectively. That chilling effect — that freezing effect — is the root cause of every single personal crisis and of the meta-crisis.

We need to reheat the universe.

We need to disclose —

• that the universe doesn’t die in heat death,
• that consciousness, or value, is real — consciousness and value are the same thing — and value is heating up, value is getting deeper, value is evolving, value is expanding.

The expanding universe keeps expanding. I had a long conversation recently with my dear friend Howard Bloom, and we agreed that the notion of this inevitable heat death in which life disappears is absurd. It’s absurd on a number of levels, but the fact that it’s billions or trillions of years away, and yet it’s often used in writings on the universe to disclose that the universe is meaningless is absurd by itself.

Cosmos is inter-dimensional; we have an enormous amount of information across all of the interior sciences that indicates a multi-dimensional cosmos. We have beings in the world that are not only extra-terrestrial (of which there is an enormous amount of hardcore empirical information, pretty much irrefutable today); we also have beings that exist in extra-dimensional realities. This dimension of Reality is not the only dimension, and story is a quality of cosmos that is not just terrestrial, and not just in this dimension. Story is an ontology of cosmos. It discloses something essential about Reality.

Story never ends

Now, just to give you a sense of the extra-dimensional, and then I’ll bring it directly back to story — next week, here in One Mountain, we are going to do the first ever memorial for my dear beloved friend, Sally Kempton, a.k.a. Swami Durgananda, which was her name for a long period of time. In the last twenty five years of her life, she returned to her primary name, Sally Kempton. To my mind, she was the best meditation teacher we had in the world for a couple of decades. I think her book on meditation, Meditation for the Love of It, is the single best book ever written on meditation. And Awakening Shakti, a book about the Hindu goddesses, is filled with insight, and transmission, and goodness, and beauty.

Sally was a co-founder, a co-convener of the Center, which is the mothership of One Mountain, Many Paths; she was the most beloved friend, and held us, and held everything we did, and held a division of the Center, and held its depth, both its public mission and its esoteric dimension as a mystical society. Sally died a year ago; I remember the text I received that she was gone, and I was in the house by myself, my beloved Kristina Kincaid was out, and I just began screaming in the house. It was, and is, unbearable. And yet, Sally is obviously not gone. I want to give you just a transmission of a sentence, if I can with, your permission:

If Sally was ever here, here in Reality — if Sally was ever in Reality, if the encounter with Sally-ness was ever real — then it’s still real.

She is still here. If there ever was Sally, then Sally exists now. If Sally was ever here, she is here now. Don’t think about it. Don’t logic it. Don’t go to cognition. This is beneath cognition. If she was ever here, she is here now.

In other words, when I encounter Sally, and I encounter her directly in her depth, in her presence, in her qualia, in its infinite dignity and beauty — it’s not gone. It’s here. It can’t have gone anywhere. I spoke to her the night before, just a few hours before she passed. And then she passed from this dimension — this available dimension — into another dimension, because the story goes on, because story is real. If Sally would have disappeared, then she never would have been here, and story would not be real. But we have a direct experience of the utter and infinite Reality of a never-ending story.

Now, our Kashmir Shaivite friends (Kashmir Shaivism being the root tradition of Hinduism), they speak of this elliptically, indirectly, by speaking of these millions of karmic cycles of incarnation and reincarnation, reincarnating again and again and again. What they are pointing to is the never-ending nature of the story, and, although they often don’t even realize that they are doing it, yet they are pointing to the ontology of story — that it goes on.

Even Buddhism, which works so hard to tell us in its exoteric teachings — often misunderstood by the teachers themselves — to move beyond your story, then reintroduces story through the back end, and tell us about some form of reincarnation of some kind of unique pattern or configuration that is the human being, which gets somehow transmitted in reincarnation. In essence, story comes in through the back door.

Story is the disclosure of the inherent ErosValue of cosmos

Story is an ontology of Reality. Story is real. That’s critical.

One of the implications of this notion of story being real is that it’s not over when it’s over. It can’t be over, because story participates in eternity.

Story is not a quality of the temporal, story is the paradoxical face of eternity.

We think that eternity means that you leave story behind — no, no, story is the face of eternity, which is why the Book of Creation, the Sefer Yetzirah, talks about Reality as being

• mispar ‘number’,
• and sipur ‘story’,
• and sefer ‘text, the book’,
• which implies sappir, which is ‘sapphire’, which is the blue meditative light,
• and sapar ‘boundary’.

What this text is saying is that Reality is engraved with eternity, which is the quality of the real. Eternity is not everlasting time, but that which is beneath time and space. Eternity is engraved with the qualities of the real. One of the ways we experience —

• that Reality is not happenstance,
• that Reality is not merely random,
• and that whatever spontaneity and surprise exists in cosmos takes place within the context of a larger telos, a larger order —

— one of the ways we understand and experience that is through the mathematical values of Cosmos.

Mathematics itself lives on the boundary between the interior and the exterior. Mathematics is the ghost in the machine. Mathematics indicates a coherent cosmos in which numbers themselves are intimately related to each other, and they are unfolding. As the numbers come together, they form coherent configurations of intimacy, which disclose the telerotic universe — the universe that is filled with Eros, with radical aliveness, seeking deeper contact, desiring deeper contact, and generating greater wholeness. That’s the nature of mathematics. Mathematical value discloses the intimate universe, which is a storied universe. All numbers are telling a story. Mispar is telling a story; mispar, which is ‘number’, is not separate from sipur, which is ‘story’.

Just like mathematics discloses value and lives at the border in the liminal space, the space in between interiors and exteriors, so too are the more classical interior sciences, in which we also have equations. In the new book, First Principles and First Values, we call them the interior science equations. We have formulated about eighteen interior science equations. There is an Eros equation, and there is an intimacy equation.

• Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever larger wholeness
• Intimacy = the experience of shared identity in the context of relative otherness x mutuality of recognition x mutuality of feeling (pathos) x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose.

These equations are disclosing value in Cosmos, the intrinsic values of Cosmos. And here’s the key. Value is real. Value is a real structure of cosmos.

Value is real.

I am going to scream this from the rooftops. Value is real, and story is a value of Cosmos. This means that the experience of Reality is most accurately disclosed as story. Story matters, because it’s not merely matter. Story is the disclosure of the inherent ErosValue of Cosmos.

There is an old fable about Truth that was running around naked, and everyone shied away from Truth, and Story was gathering all these huge crowds. And so one day Truth, naked Truth, walks to adorned Story, garbed Story, dressed Story, who is surrounded by crowds, and when naked Truth runs in, everyone runs away. So, naked Truth and adorned, garbed, dressed Story are left just with each other, and naked Truth says to Story,

• I am so devastated. Everyone is thronging and gathering around you, and when I walk in, everyone runs away.

And Story says to naked Truth,

• No, no, let me share with you my clothes. We’re not supposed to be separate, we’re supposed to walk together, we are inseparable from each other.

And from that moment on, naked Truth and dressed Story became one, and Truth and Story are inseparable. It’s deep.

Evolution of story and freedom

Story is the very structure of Reality itself. We talked about the elements of the story:

1. There are causal relationships between events. Reality is not just constant conjunction (things that happen to be happening); there is an inherent intrinsic relationship between events that form a thread, and that thread is called story.
2. What drives that causal thread is desire. There is inherent desire. Story is a value of cosmos, and all stories are stories of desire, and desire itself is a value of cosmos.
3. All desire is desire for value, for more value. Desire is a desire for a future that can be deeper and more than the present. I enter into the depth of the present, and from the depth of the present, I dream, I desire a better future. That is the voice of evolution. That’s the voice of transformation. It’s the developmental voice. It’s the yearning to be deeper, to be ever more present, to be ever more alive, to be ever more good, to be ever more true, to be ever more beautiful. It’s the storied nature of desire. Desire desires more value. It desires the story to unfold and disclose more value.
4. There is a quality of freedom, of choice. There is an early experience of choice, for example when a primeval organism turns towards a glucose gradient, but choice evolves. There is more and more freedom in the system, there is more and more awareness of the system. That’s the movement from unconscious to conscious evolution. Choice evolves, the clarification of desire evolves, and story evolves.

At the foundational levels of Reality, choice, seen from the outside, seems to be almost a mechanical function of Cosmos. Let’s say the world of matter — the quantum world, the subatomic world, the atomic world, the molecular world — we can only look at them from the outside, because although all those quanta, all those atoms, all those molecules live in us, but we experience them through a much later stage of emergence, the human stage.

We see the dimension of desire between, say, proton, neutron, and electron — the desire that forms an atom — but we see it from the outside. If we are blinded dogmatically, if we make a dogmatic, non-empirical, anti-empirical, dogmatic a priori statement and say the world is materialist, we could look at those early levels of Reality as being mechanical and miss their music, as Nietzsche correctly pointed out.

No, there is music, the first bars of music — of choice. The first bars of music — of desire — but desire in the early stages of cosmos is so structural that we don’t have an interior experience of clarifying desire.

Story is the nature of what happens. We are seeing it retrospectively through our scientific instruments, our inductive and deductive reasoning that amplify our knowing, and we’re seeing it from the outside. It could almost seem mechanical until we go beneath the words, and we understand that when we’re talking about gravity, gravity is not mechanics, gravity is allurement. Electromagnetic fields are allurement; they are structures and configurations of allurement and attraction, balances between allurement and autonomy that generate new vectors of emergence.

But as we evolve, as Reality evolves, the proto-seedlings of choice, and story, and desire become more and more apparent. As we get all the way through the biological life and then into the human level, to the noosphere, as the early Russian cosmists called it — the world of mind and culture, the depth of the self-reflective human mind —

• we begin to see choice coming on board more clearly,
• we begin to see our capacity to clarify our desire, to move from pseudo-desire to authentic desire;
• we begin to see our ability to see the plotlines of our story.

Conscious Evolution: Live Your Story

As we move ever more deeply into the layers and the structures of unfolding consciousness — which are not linear, but more like waves of unfolding consciousness — then we begin to discern and experience more capacity for choice, more and more freedom. We begin to experience our capacity to clarify our desire, to move from pseudo-desire to authentic desire, we begin to see more and more of the outline of our story.

And then, as we evolve more deeply, and we transform more deeply, we begin to be able to hold a wider and wider story, until we have an experience of what was called Conscious Evolution.

My beloved whole mate, Barbara Marx Hubbard, spent her life championing some version of Conscious Evolution. And Barbara and I spent the last four or five years of her life clarifying together a new vision of Conscious Evolution. —

1. Conscious Evolution means that we can see the whole story of evolution; our capacity to see the wider story expands.
2. Conscious Evolution means our capacity to see ourselves within the context of the larger story. I don’t see myself just as me, my friend, my early childhood, my early trauma, where I live my socioeconomic status. No, I see myself, my unique personal self within the larger vector and storyline of evolution. I see myself as a unique emergent from the very first moment of the Big Bang, and from before the Big Bang, when the Infinite Intimate will of Cosmos intended the Big Bang, and then it unfolded through levels of matter and life to the depth of the human self-reflective mind, and ultimately came to Reality choosing, desiring, needing, love adoring, intending, recognizing me. Conscious evolution means I understand my own self as being personally implicated in the larger thread of evolution. My capacity to see that is the emergence of a new quality of consciousness, which we’ve called, in CosmoErotic Humanism, Homo amor. Homo amor is this capacity for conscious evolution.
3. In Conscious Evolution, I realize that none of it was ever by chance. It’s not as in the old version of Conscious Evolution Barbara used to talk about: before human beings, it was evolution by chance, now it’s evolution by choice.

As Barbara and I studied together, we realized that this early vision of Conscious Evolution was mistaken. It was never by chance. There was always an inherent set of plotlines in cosmos — but now, those plotlines are coming alive. The plotlines of Cosmos are the First Principles and First Values of Cosmos, and those First Principles and First Values are the plotline of the larger story. And they are the plotline of my story, because my story and the story of evolution are ultimately the same. They are following the same pattern. I am a unique chapter and verse in the larger story, which means that the ultimate command of my life — and it’s so freaking stunning — the ultimate command of my life is to live my story.

The great clarion call of Reality is live your story.

Live your story means clarify your story. That’s the word sappir. Sappir is sapphire. Sapphire is a description from what today people would call a medicine journey, but it’s not a medicine journey catalyzed only by the ingestion of substance (although sometimes that helped), but it’s a medicine journey catalyzed by a turn towards the interiors, when I actually experience myself in full play with Reality.

Playing with all you’ve got

Last night, we watched a new movie, Challenges, by a favorite director of mine, Luca Guadagnino.

It’s the story about a tennis player, a woman, Tashi, who’s a fantastic tennis player, and two men who are the love interests of her life. In the beginning of the movie, there is a set that she plays, and she completely trounces, smashes her opponent, who throws her racket and seems to be this bitter loser. That night there’s a party, and these two guys, who have never met her before, come to the party. She is this up-and-coming college tennis player, and the three of them are talking, and this is the beginning of a lifetime of love interest between the three of them. And there is this moment when she turns to them and says, I’m a tennis player.

What she means by I am a tennis player is: I am an artist on the inside of the inside of life. She said there was a moment in that game that she had played in the morning, about 15 seconds in the game, when they were totally together, where nothing else mattered, where they were playing on the inside of the inside. She doesn’t use these exact words, but you can go watch the movie. It’s in the first third of the movie. She says, there we were together, and the whole world disappeared, and we were in complete intimacy; we were in love. It wasn’t about who won and who lost. It is: we were in the depth of the story together. We were there together, and it wasn’t about what our parts were. That’s what it means to be in your story.

It is not about whether you are a captain, or a prince, or a pauper, or a general, it’s about how you play.

• Do you play with everything?
• Is there a depth of an encounter when you are with each other, and you are deep in relationship with life itself, and you are at your best, and you are meeting in the depth of ultimate encounter?

And she describes it. And one of the guys, Patrick, doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and the other one, Art, says, Oh, that’s when you screamed. And indeed, we remember from that morning there’s this moment when she just screams as if in the throes of sexual ecstasy.

She looks at him, and she realizes he gets it. Ultimately, they marry, but the three of them continue to have this complex relationship. There is this long, twisted, tortured, tempestuous love triangle, which, many years later, brings them back together.

Patrick has become a very, very low ranked player, and Art has become one of the highest ranked players, but he has lost some of his game. He is now married to Tashi, and somehow Tashi arranges so that they play each other. They have this very intense game, which begins another arc of the story, in which they wind up moving through game after game, until finally they are playing each other in the final. And there is a whole web of signals that take place. What had happened the night before is Tashi had gone to Patrick, and asked Patrick to throw the game, so that Art could regain his confidence. Patrick agrees, but then, on court, reneges on the agreement, and makes a signal with his racket to his friend Art that he actually slept with Natasha the night before.

Art is stunned, doesn’t allow Patrick to throw the game, allows him to catch up, and then something happens, and they start volleying back and forth. That’s the end of the movie. They start volleying back and forth, and they start smiling. They are smiling, and then Tashi wakes up. She is watching the game, and she sees them both. Now, they are playing. Now, they are on the inside, and all anger has disappeared, and all pettiness has disappeared, and all of the contraction has disappeared, and they are in their game, which is their story. And they realize that they are actually loving each other, the two men are loving each other, and they are loving Tashi, and Tashi is loving them. And then, there is this moment where they both leap for the ball, and they wind up embraced in the air, both leaping for the ball, and then Tashi gets up, and screams in ecstasy with them.

That’s it.

That’s what it means to be inside of your story.

It means you are playing with everything you’ve got.

It doesn’t mean the plot doesn’t matter. There is a way you enter into your story, and you realize that the whole thing from beginning to end is about: are you living your story?

Beyond the impersonal

The commandment of Cosmos is to live your story because Cosmos is made up of stories. That’s what Cosmos is. Cosmos is story. That’s what the Sefer Yetzirah is saying: there is the mathematical value of Reality (mispar ‘number’). But mathematics itself is disclosing sippur ‘story’. Number and story are the same. There are the mathematical values of the exterior science equations, and then there are the values of the mathematics of the interior science equations. Both are mathematics of intimacy. The nature of intimacy is story.

Intimacy means story. ‘It’s an Intimate Universe’ means ‘it’s a storied Universe.’ And the tragedy of postmodernity is the de-storying of Reality, when you can’t follow the threadline of your story. Story matters.

If you want to get how postmodernity went wrong, I’ll give you just two texts. One text is from Carlos Castaneda, from Journey to Ixtlan. He puts it in the mouth of Don Juan. This is the moment of Don Juan’s realization, where Don Juan says, I had a terribly strong attachment to my personal history. I honestly felt that without my personal history, my life had not continuity or purpose. I don’t have personal history anymore, I dropped it one day when I felt it was no longer necessary.

That is precisely wrong.

At the level of separate self, there is a grasping ego which gets lost in the recursive loops of the old stories; it needs to drop the pettiness and contraction of dimensions of the ego story. That’s true. There is a separate-self level of story where I’ve got to drop the story, where I get lost in the obsession of story.

I always remember a couple who came to me when I first became a rabbi, back in the day; I was in Florida, in Palm Beach, at this congregation, Palm Beach County, and this couple comes in, they are in the middle of this fierce argument. And it takes me about 20 minutes to realize they’re arguing about something that happened literally 43 years ago, and they are stuck in what happened then. So, there is a story you’ve got to drop.

And then, I get to True Self. True Self is the Field of Value. I realize value is real. True Self means there is a Field of Value that we all live in.

Notice, I am not calling it a field of consciousness. Consciousness is a confusing word. There is a Field of Value. It means there is a realness to the universe. There is a quality to the universe, and consciousness is too elliptical a phrase. There is a concrete value realness. Reality matters ultimately. It matters ultimately. That’s True Self, which we are now redefining in CosmoErotic Humanism. We are not calling it the field of consciousness. We are calling it the Field of Value, the Field of ValueDesire, or if you will, the Field of ErosValue, which is really what consciousness means.

And then, I go from True Self to Unique Self, and Unique Self is when I reclaim story. I reclaim the ultimate and infinite personal dimension of story. I reclaim the infinities of personhood.

This is the personal beyond the ostensibly impersonal.

This is the music that animates the mechanics.

This is the ultimate intimacy of personal story, which is constitutive of the nature of Reality itself.

Reality is story.

De-storying Reality destroys Reality

The breakdown of Reality is always the breakdown of story. The person who felt this breakdown of story, in this proto-postmodern moment, was Kafka. My favorite book of his is called The Trial, and the plot of the novel is an intentionally impossible path. At points, when the storyline seems in reach, it slips out of grasp again, like a lure drawing the reader along.

Frustration, anger, and a radical hopelessness gradually build in the reader as Kafka subjects us to the very feeling that his protagonist K undergoes as he is arrested. For what and by whom he doesn’t know. Every time K detects a glimmer of sense in the proceedings, it vanishes into nonsense. K is overwhelmed and incapable of making sense or telling his story, tortured by a nonsensical system of bureaucracy and human inanity. In an all too apt passage, Kafka captures how we all feel on occasion about our lives, but more importantly, how the postmodern predicament has colonized our lives. We’ve actually lost the plotlines of our story. What postmodernity has told us, which is taken to be a given in the academy, is that no stories are real, that value is not real, and therefore there are no stories of value that are backed by the universe. And therefore, we cannot be sane, because sanity is to know my true nature, and my true nature is to know that I am a unique storyline in the plotline of cosmos, I’m a unique expression of the cosmos’s plotlines that live in me uniquely.

Kafka writes about the collapse of the modern human being. He writes about K, the protagonist in the story: “He was too tired to survey all the conclusions arising from the story. The simple story had lost its clear outline. He wanted to put it out of his mind.”

Kafka is living in this explosion in which value is said not to be real because modernity rebels against the distortions of value in pre-modernity. Pre-modernity got that value was real, but then value was hijacked by various fundamentalist groups.

• If I say my particular form of Christian fundamentalism owns value, then I am not in the Field of Value.
• If I say my particular Sunni or Shiite form of value owns the Field of Value, and no one else is in the Field of Value, I’m not in the Field of Value.

Any group that claims that to murder someone outside of my group is not murder, that there is something fundamentally, qualitatively different about murdering someone who’s outside of my group, then they are not in the Field of Value. Anyone who steps out of a universal grammar of value that applies to all of the things is not in the Field of Value.

Pre-modernity recognized that value was real, but then it said: it’s owned by me, and value is commanding me to ultimately subject you to my interpretation of value. That’s false.

Modernity screamed against that. Modernity screamed for a possibility of articulating a world not based on these hijacked, ethnocentric, homophobic, anti-body, anti-art, anti-human reason modalities, but then, modernity itself stepped out of the Tao (in our reading, the Tao is the Field of Value). And modernity said there is no value that’s real, and then, the plotline got lost. We de-storied the universe. When you de-story the universe, that’s the disqualification of the cosmos — we destroy the universe. The de-storying of Reality destroys Reality. Reality is story.

In certain stories, with all their complexity, there are still good actors and bad actors. I’m going to say something unpopular. There’s a lot to say about the complexity of the United States and about the complexity of Israel. That’s for sure true. And yet, in the Middle East today, there is zero, zero, zero moral equivalence between Hamas and the pluralistic democracy called the State of Israel which empowers women, and 20% of its population is non-Jewish and is integrated in every dimension of daily life, in the army, on the supreme court, in the parliament, doctors, nurses, hospitals, grocers, farm keepers — an integration unlike any that’s ever been achieved in world history, despite pressures on this tiny little state that are unimaginable.

To suggest some sort of moral equivalence between that position and Hamas, which is basically a philosophy of death, to have that misunderstood and endorsed by professors at American universities, along with upper middle class kids all over the world who basically don’t get that the Field of Value is real, and can’t follow a storyline, and can’t track what’s happening is the breakdown of story — it’s a big deal. Conflicts like the one that’s going on in Israel today, or like what’s going on in the Ukraine are like canaries in the mineshaft. In that image, in that metaphor, you put a canary down the mineshaft to see if the air is poisoned. When the canary becomes sick, you know the mine is filled with poison.

It has always been true. There are certain conflicts that disclose where Reality is. In this particular moment, these are those conflicts. I am going to do an entire One Mountain on Israel, and I will back this up, sentence by sentence. But if we can — and I stand by this a thousand percent, I stake my life on it — if we actually can compare a pluralistic democracy defending itself with Hamas, and if we’re confused about that, then there is something fundamentally wrong.

Mythologize, don’t pathologize

Let’s bring it back to the center now, my friends: live your story! That’s the commandment of Cosmos.

Why is that the commandment? Because the outline of my story is everything.

What does it mean to live my story?

To live my story means, first, to embrace my story. I’ve got to embrace it. I can’t try and be in another story. For whatever reason, cosmos placed me in this story. Two, from the place of embracing my story, what is the heroic transformation that I can accomplish in my story?

Within my story, there is a transformation.

Within my story, there is a journey.

Within my story, there is a heroic invitation to transformation, to deepening, to becoming whole. There is a heroic invitation —

• to weave together the split-off parts of my story;
• to take my fate and turn it into destiny;
• to take my brokenness and let it break me open;
• to realize that there is nothing more whole than a broken heart and a broken story,
• and to turn my story in all of its pain into something that’s potent and powerful.

Now, that’s a big deal. That’s the move from victim to player.

So, the first step is: I embrace my story. I recognize the pain and the beauty in my story. I recognize the gifts and the God-awful travesty. I recognize the places I’ve been hurt and bullied, and the ways that I’ve been blessed and held.

I hold those together, and then I go on a journey. Life is not an event, life is a journey. It seems like a simple statement, but it’s not. Life is a journey — it’s not an event, it’s not a series of events.

Life is not a series of numbers. Numbers are story. And when I connect the dots of the numbers, I disclose the story. I understand that there is no event in my life that stands independently. What we do is we freeze frame on a particular event, and then we keep reliving that event, either positive or negative, again and again. Life’s not an event, it’s a story. I’ve got to connect the events, which are the dots, if you will, the numbers. I connect those dots, and I disclose the pattern, the direction of my story. Once I connect my story, then I begin to embrace my sacred autobiography, the unique story of my life. When I embrace the unique story of my life, then I can begin transformation.

What’s the unique transformation that’s mine?

What’s the unique tikkun, the unique fixing that’s mine?

How do I turn pathology into mythology? How do I realize that my story is a great myth?

But myth not in the sense of untrue, but it’s my mythic life, which is my storied life, which is the unique story of my life. And then I engage in my unique transformation, my unique tikkun. The key to that story, the key practice is mythologize, don’t pathologize. That phrase, which comes from the literature of heroes’ journeys, is the realization that there is a great life that I have to live, that my life is called, in the text of the lineage of Solomon, my unique letter in the cosmic scroll. That’s my myth, that’s my mythology.

It’s my unique letter in the cosmic scroll. It’s a big deal. It is the great story of my life in which I realize I am a king and a queen, I am a prince and a princess, I am a lord and a lady, I am literally royalty. If I don’t experience myself as royalty, I am in self-delusion. I am literally, ontologically royalty. I am a good child of the universe. I am a good child of the king and queen of the universe. And the king and queen of the universe are not regressive fantasies, they are the ontologies of Reality in which the Divine, or the Field of Meaning, is the infinite personhood of Reality. That’s what we talk about.

It’s the good king and the good queen. It’s the goodness of Reality itself, and I am a good child of the good queen. I am a prince and a princess, and I am royalty, and I experience myself as royalty.

Be the hero of your own life

From that place of a deep interiority, a deep privacy with my own internal heroism, I turn to the public, and I offer my gifts.

I am committed to loving.

I am committed to giving my unique gifts.

I am committed to living my unique life.

I am committed to being a unique vector of radiance.

I am committed to walking in the world by the very being-ness in the depth of my story, calling people to the depth of their story.

My goodness calls people to their goodness.

My beauty calls people to their beauty, my truth calls people to their truth.

My entire life is about being a radiant being, whose radiance allures and attracts — and I do that within the context of my story, whatever my story is. Wow! Wow!

Live your story is a command. There is a command: Live your story! That’s what I am commanded to. There is no guru. The guru is the Field of Value, and the Field of Value incarnates uniquely in your story, and your story embodies value uniquely, and you and I have an ability to evolve value uniquely and beautifully.

That’s what Dickens meant, I believe, by being the hero of your own life.

Sometimes, that heroism is witnessed, and recognized, and celebrated by the whole world. But often, it’s not; usually it’s not. Usually, it’s celebrated and witnessed by perhaps our community, but often not even that. There is a band around us that we gather, and that band witnesses us, and it might be a friend or two friends, it might be a band of Outrageous Lovers, it might be a mystical society, which is what we are in some sense, and we witness each other, we hold each other, we call each other to the best and deepest fulfillment of this command of Cosmos to live your story.

To live your story is not to get lost in narcissistic revisiting of wounds again and again. It’s not a denial of wounds, but the wound becomes the ground for my greatness.

The wound becomes the warp for my wonder.

The breaking becomes the breaking open that invites me to the possibility of my life.

And my life is always about devotion. It’s always about: oh my God, how can I be devoted to you? How can I love you?

How can I love you open?

How can I receive your love more deeply, so that you’ll know that you have the capacity to love?

How can I bring more beauty into the world?

How can I bring more radiance into the world?

How can I bring more art into the world?

How can I shine a light into the unique dark corners and crevices that live in my circle of intimacy and influence?

How can I stand on the abyss of darkness and say, let there be light?

And how can I take my holy and broken hallelujah, and know that it doesn’t matter what you heard, there’s a blaze of light in every word.

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