What is One Mountain? Part 3: Digital Intimacy

In Digital Intimacy, we have to engage technology and download value and Evolutionary Love into the tech-plex itself.

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [June 18, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.

Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

Pavel Filonov. Faces. 1940

We are creating the space of digital intimacy

Look at the screen for a second.
We are looking at a screen. Here is a screen.

We’ve been told that the screen is somehow non-intimate, that intimacy happens in person, but the screen is somehow problematic, the screen has somehow reduced us.

Now, that’s not entirely wrong. There is something enormously important about the exchange of embodied presence with each other, and we absolutely need to create embodied presence. Imagine if Facebook were optimized not for stealing attention, not to fuel what’s called the attention economy — to engage a person for as long as possible (and engagement is a euphemism for addiction) — but for getting people involved in embodied meetings in their local communities. Facebook could easily do that. Facebook is not just a tool, it is not value-neutral social media (which is essentially AI, an early form of AI). It could be optimized for creating beautiful embodied online engagement, or beautiful embodied in-person engagement. Facebook can optimize for whatever it wants, so technology is not value-neutral. Technology is coded with value. If Facebook optimized for in-person meetings, that would be fantastic and beautiful.

There is a great beauty in embodied meetings, and embodied meetings are necessary, and the web absolutely cannot replace them — I want to take that as a given. Part of the revolution is to get out of the screen, and into embodied presence with each other, holding each other, hugging each other. A hug is the beginning of any real revolution. If we cannot hug each other, revolution doesn’t work. If we cannot touch and feel each other, and smell each other, and be in the space together, and gather around the table together, then we cannot respond to existential risk. That’s all true.

But there is a second notion of intimacy, which takes place on the web: we can be online in front of the screen, and be intimate. We don’t need to be reduced — we don’t need to be downgraded human beings controlled by upgraded algorithms. We can actually meet here, like we do every week in One Mountain — in this online church, synagogue, mosque, civic center, Buddhist Zendo — and be digitally intimate. We can be intimate with each other.

Let’s just take a look.

First off, we are focused on each other. You feel the absolute focus? We are actually looking right at each other. We are in the screen together, we are in the space together. There is another kind of subtle energy that lives in the space that’s actually real, and we can actually find each other. If we open our hearts, and we let the value, or the Tao of Reality come alive, we can find each other on the screen, and we can begin to create participatory communities that are real.

Because we are having real conversations, we are committed to real value, and we are actually loving each other. We are finding each other — in sound, and in heart, and in subtle energy, and we can actually feel each other in our bodies. We can literally reach in. See if you could just feel the Field — and let’s feel it all over the world. We are literally coming together around the world, and we are feeling each other, and we are holding each other — we are creating the space of digital intimacy.

You can look, by the way, on the website of the Center for Integral Wisdom, and there’s an entire section called Digital Intimacy, about the need to create intimacy within the structure of the world wide web, to use this modality

• to actually upgrade,
• to actually pay attention,
• to actually step in,
• to focus on each other,
• to bloom each other open with our intention,
• to look in each other’s eyes,
• to feel each other.

Let’s just feel each other.
Just feel each other, just imagine.

Just link hands, hearts open, around the world — we are finding each other. This is actually a deep part of our home. On the one hand, this doesn’t replace embodied somatic presence with each other, where we can hug each other. On the other hand, this is also not a booby prize — a second-order, essentially inadequate, broken, tragic circumstance. Not at all.

We are in community because this medium allows us to be, and —

• we are going to invest this medium with Evolutionary Love,
• we are going to invest it with value,
• we are going to invest it with digital intimacy.

You can feel the unique focus we can have on the screen, you can feel our unique presencing of each other in the screen, in a way that sometimes doesn’t happen in in-person conversation, where the attention leaks or escapes.

And just look what else can happen, this is really crazy. Watch!

As we talk to each other here, there’s a chat box. We can have a chat box which allows people to both be in the conversation, and also add their Yes, or add their open heart rate, or add just a couple of words, so that there is now a second strain of conversation taking place between hundreds of us around the world. As I am talking, or whoever is talking, there is this second strain of conversation taking place in the chat box at the same time. Focus on the Field, stay in the Field.

This is digital intimacy.

We are around the world. We can find each other. We can look at each other.

This is a big deal. Digital intimacy is a big deal.

We have to really focus and pay attention to One Mountain in a big way. There is a desperate need to create, in online spaces, genuine digital intimacy, which then becomes the ground for revolution. In other words, we cannot just get offline or reject the tech-plex. We have to engage technology and download value and Evolutionary Love into the tech-plex itself — not in place of embodied communities, but co-important, co-valuable, wildly important. In other words, we need to hijack the web from the webmasters.

This is digital intimacy. It is a wildly important and beautiful space. And actually, that’s what we have been doing the whole time. That’s what we are doing right here. What we are doing right here is — that is what this is.

I’ve heard all these conversations this week, different people chatting, and we almost forget what we are doing. We are in this notion of digital intimacy — and the web doesn’t dis-intermediate intimacy, it actually creates intimacy. There are people in One Mountain that I’ve never met, that I feel enormously close to. I’ve only met them on the screen, and I feel actually infinitely closer to them than lots of people that I had been in many, many rooms with over many years. Isn’t that wild? That’s just an actual fact. I feel more intimate, closer to, heart more open, shared values, shared vision, with dozens of people in One Mountain that I’ve never met.

Now, is that an illusion? No, it’s not.

It’s real digital intimacy.

So, that’s one.

Digital intimacy itself is a new structure of Reality

Two is, we are a synagogue, and we are a secular humanist center, and we are a church, and we are a mosque, and we are a bar, and we are in Haight Ashbury, and we are high-end restaurant, and we are kind of a dorm room late at night — we are all those things together. This is church space, meaning it’s a sacred space. It’s real space. We pray in the space, and we up-level what prayer means, we evolve what prayer means.

We are doing this revolutionary act, we are telling this New Story of Value in this place. Each week, we are articulating a new chapter in that story, and then we write it up, and then we share it, and we get feedback. We are here together as revolutionaries, writing a New Story of Value, telling the New Story, gathering around the campfire at this moment of meta-crisis, at this moment in which we are poised between utopia and dystopia, at this moment in which there’s an imminent sense of catastrophic risk and existential risk:

• Risk to our very existence as human beings: literally, will there be people on Earth?
• But equally dire, perhaps more dire, to our very humanity?

What we need to do is, we need to recover —

• What does it mean to be a human being?
• What does it mean to be a baby-face Divine?
• What does it mean, in the tradition, in the lineages, what does it mean to be Metatron? What does it mean to be Metatron? Metatron is the human being who knows that she is held by the Infinite, and she participates in the Infinite at the same time.
• What does it mean to know that Reality is the Infinity of Intimacy that knows my name — not as a declaration, but an actual lived experience of what Reality is?

Do you remember, there was a captain in the Revolutionary Army, John Paul Jones. His boat is sinking, and the British say, yield, surrender! And he says, we have not yet begun to fight!

• We have not yet begun to fight.
• We have not yet begun to love, we’re just getting started.
• We have not yet begun to build One Mountain Many Paths, which people can join all over the world and find each other in the Field of Value, and find each other in the Field of Eros.
• We have not yet begun to love. We have not yet begun to unleash the commitment, the ecstasy, the depth, the reason, the deep still voice, the reaching, yearning, the longing, the togetherness, the intimate communion.

We haven’t even yet begun, we have just barely started.

So, who’s ready?
Are we ready, friends?
Are we ready to play a larger game? Are we ready?

That’s what we ask every weekend. I come every week to One Mountain to find my own center — that’s why I come. I come to find my own center, and the center is this moment.

There is a person I studied with in Holy of Holies, a beautiful, beautiful young man, and he’s a sports figure, he is a quarterback. He described to me, very beautifully, how when he steps back to pass, he falls into complete center, and he can see the entire field. You can feel everyone in the field, and you know where everyone is. That’s the experience of being in One Mountain.

In One Mountain, we feel each other.
We are in the field together.
We see each other.
We are at play together.

We realize the simple truth that we are already intimate, we are already wildly connected, we are already wildly together. We’ve not yet begun to love. That’s what we’re up to here, we’re up to a big game.

Imagine, just imagine for a second, that One Mountain just explodes, and people come from all over the world, and that the New Story of Value begins to expand and to spread, and we move into all of our circles, and we take on particular causes — but there is the center.

What animated the Civil Rights Movement in America, Martin Luther King? What animated the Civil Rights Movement? The Gospel Church. It was not NGOs, it wasn’t anything else — but the Black Gospel Church. It was the Black Gospel Church that animated the entire Civil Rights Movement.

At this moment, we don’t need a Civil Rights Movement.

We need a movement of becoming human.

What’s going to animate this movement to become human in the world? This Gospel Church, and we don’t want to be embarrassed and say: It’s not a church, it’s just a podcast.

No, it’s not just a podcast.
We are in a sacred space.
We are loving each other.
We are in digital intimacy — and we are unabashed, and we are proud of it.

This is not an automatic thing we do every week.

We are trying to create a new space.

We are trying to step into the digital, and actually disclose its inherent nature, which is intimacy. We are in this screen together. We are in this screen together means we are in this room together. It means we can touch each other.

• We can feel each other.
• We can hug each other.
• We can talk to each other at the same time.
• We can play music and be in the same space, and not have to leave the space.

That’s all possible here. That’s all a wild innovation.

Yes, we have to take on lots of huge challenges, and we are going to do it through creating new structures in Reality, and one of them is digital intimacy. Digital intimacy itself is a new structure of Reality. That’s actually what we are doing.

It’s become such a given to us that we forget that we’re doing it — and we are innovating together this wild, unbelievable thing.

Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday in One Mountain:

Join Dr. Marc Gafni and the entire community in an evolutionary celebration this and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.

Evolutionary Spirituality | One Mountain Many Paths