What is One Mountain? What are we doing here? (Part 2)
One Mountain Many Paths is the revolution. We tell the New Story of Value based on the actual First Principles and First Values of Kosmos.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on “What is One Mountain?” See Part 1 here.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 19, 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.
We live in a Field of Value
Every week we reset our intention — and let’s see if we can find it, because in finding it, we have enacted reality anew.
We have reset reality.
We are reborn.
It becomes the birthday of reality.
Let’s feel this. This is the birthday of One Mountain Many Paths. It’s the birthday of the revolution.
And what is this revolution? We’re poised, in this moment, between utopia and dystopia, and we need to change the very vector of history. We are not just poised before dystopia — we are also poised before utopia, before the ability to enact the most beautiful world that we could ever imagine possible,
- and with the most beautiful Unique Self Symphonies,
- and the most beautiful kindness,
- and the most beautiful goodness,
- and the most beautiful love,
- and the most beautiful Eros,
- and the most beautiful art,
- and the most beautiful words,
- and the most beautiful set of relationships.
It is not by going back to ancient shamanism that we’re going to get there.
It’s not by going back to ancient magic that we’re going to get there.
We are going to get there through evolutionary shamanism and evolutionary magic, through Evolutionary Love Codes that are rooted in the deepest understandings of the sciences, both the exterior sciences and the interior sciences that are telling what we call a New Story of Value.
A New Story of Value — with the realization that value is real. Just like there is space and time and motion in the manifest world, there is value. It’s at the same level.
It’s not about values.
It’s about value. Value is underneath values. We have to realize we live in a Field of Value. We need to tell a New Story of Value that integrates the best codes of the premodern traditional ancient world, and the best codes of the modern world, and the best insights and codes of the postmodern world, woven together into a New Story of Value, based on the actual First Principles and First Values of Kosmos itself. (For a more detailed unpacking of this, please read What is One Mountain? What are we doing here? Part 1).
We are the imaginal cells of the new humanity
Imagine for a second — just to set our intention really clearly — a caterpillar that’s bloated.
Society — a caterpillar — bloated, ingesting, feeding what we call pseudo-eros: the pseudo strategies of Eros, not real Eros, which we use to cover the emptiness. All forms of addiction, all forms of breakdown. Everyone is engaged in some version of this. All forms of covering up of the traumas, all forms of covering up the sense of un-We, the fundamental discontent, and dis-ease, and aching, and agonizing emptiness.
We are bloated, bloated, bloated, and the caterpillar just can’t move in it. Everything is upside down, so it hangs itself upside down on a branch.
And then within the caterpillar — this is biology — new cells begin to emerge. Biologists call them imaginal discs, or imaginal cells. They are actually offering new codes. That’s what they are — new codes. But the old order, the mainstreams of society, go to kill these imaginal cells. They murder them — Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Gandhi. There are all sorts of murders of Eros — attempted social murders, attempted political murders. We go to murder Eros, we go to murder these imaginal cells — and some of them get murdered, and sometimes we suffer attempted social murders that take place on Wikipedia or all over the internet. It’s real.
But then what happens in the caterpillar is that the imaginal cells begin to find each other — and that’s us. Every single person who’s here in One Mountain Many Paths, all of us are imaginal cells. We are here because we are finding each other. And when we find each other, we get strong, and we actually write, and we resonate with each other in a new set of codes. We are calling those Evolutionary Love Codes, which are expressions of both Dharma — the First Principles and First Values of Reality — and yoga — first practices.
We come together here every week as a community in order to explode Reality to its next step — not violently, but with an outrageous energy.
Systems theory tells us that when a system is far from equilibrium, and it’s about to fall apart, a minor fluctuation point can jump the entire system to a higher level of order. That minor fluctuation point is the imaginal cells in the caterpillar finding each other and telling a New Story of Value. They are quite literally new codes that recode reality.
This is project recode. It’s the reconstructive project. After all the deconstruction of postmodernity, there is this huge reconstructive project. It is the telling of the New Story of Value. It is the writing of the new codes.
And that’s what we come together for. We are the new codes, it’s us.
We are the writers of the codes, we are the codes.
We become the codes.
We live the codes.
We cross to the other side. We literally become, together, the new human and the new humanity.
And what emerges out of that bloated caterpillar is a butterfly. Beautiful, free, soaring, filled with unimaginable delight. That’s who we are. That’s the new human. That’s the new humanity. That’s what we call Homo sapiens becoming Homo amor.
I can’t tell you how many people have come to me, even on our Board, and said, why do you spend so much time on One Mountain? It takes all of Sunday in preparation, and it’s a few thousand people. We’re trying to change the source code of the world. That’s not right. See, when we find each other close every week — and each week we deepen the story, and each week we write new Evolutionary Love Codes, and each week we dance together, and each week we pray together — then we become the New Story ourselves.
To be alive is to be on the inside of Goddess’s face
There’s a great book written by Thomas R. Rochon, Culture Moves. I love this book. It proves sociologically, based on an enormous amount of information, the intuition that we are based on, which is, the way you change the mainstream is you operate at the periphery. You are not concerned with becoming famous.
I want to read you something that a dear friend of mine sent me the other day. I was thinking about this last night, just this exact thing — and literally, as I was thinking about it, I opened my text, and I saw a note that had actually come in earlier, but that I hadn’t read it. They write, there is a poem by Pasternak, the great Russian poet. And it talks about — I’m quoting now — it talks about the indecency of being famous: ‘this is not what uplifts you.’
Isn’t that a great phrase? I love that phrase, the indecency of being famous.
And it talks about the depth and the joy of ‘obscurity in which you hide your steps, as terrain hides in a fog.’ It talks about living simply and humbly, so as ‘to ultimately attract the love of space, and to hear the call of the future.’
It’s deep — but it’s talking about: don’t worry about getting a million likes. Don’t worry, we’ll get there. But first, let’s be here together.
Let’s hide our steps.
Let’s find each other deeply.
Let’s write these new codes.
Let’s find each other every week.
Let’s feel each other.
Let’s touch each other.
Let’s be together.
When we are together, the key is — and it’s the second part of the poem, the last quatrain, which says: ‘and not to recant the face, not even by a tiny fraction, but to be alive, Alive, and that’s it, till the very end.’
So what is face?
Face is the most important word in the text of Genesis. I’ve written a lot about face. We just published an article on Academia.edu about face, and my friend Emanuel Levinas wrote a lot about face.
Face is when we are face-to-face. In Hebrew, the word for face is panim. It means face. But the same root word in Hebrew, p’nimi, also means inside, and the word lifnei (the same root word) means ‘before’ (as when you are before God). So, the word face, in the original Hebrew, means inside and it means before. And it means face.
Why am I telling you all that? Because what lifnei Adonai ‘to be before the Goddess’ actually means is ‘to be on the inside of Goddess’s face.’
To be alive is to be on the inside of Goddess’s face.
Meaning, I’m living on the inside of the Field. I live in the Field and the Field lives in me.
- I am not separate from anything.
- I am omni-considerate for all of Reality, and I understand that in every love letter we write, and in every exchange of our eyes, we never recant the face.
- We never betray the integrity of the moment.
- We love every moment open, with all our passion, with all our force.
In every moment, I am either open or closed
It doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes. To be Unique Self and to feel like reality needs me, and that the whole thing rests on me, doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes. I can make a million mistakes. And every time I make a mistake, the universe resets, and gives me a new possibility and a new opportunity — because that’s a world that’s governed by karma, by the intrinsic principles of Outrageous Love. So, I make a mistake, but I make the mistakes in the right direction, and even when I make mistakes in the wrong direction, reality opens a new possibility for transformation, and the entire board reconfigures itself, and a new path opens.
Of course, we make mistakes. But the invitation, the aspiration, the urgency of life is that we take every moment seriously, and in every moment, we are face-to-face.
There are about 45 muscles in the face, and most of them are not needed biologically. They are needed to transmit love, to transmit Outrageous Love, to transmit feeling, depth, subtlety, nuance, which is the great beauty of being alive —
- when my inside finds and feels your inside,
- when I liberate you from loneliness by recognizing you, by feeling you, by knowing that we’re intimate together, that we have a shared identity.
We are part of a larger Field together, and yet we are unique expressions of that Field.
And we are joining together, playing our instruments in Unique Self Symphony, madly in love with each other and with reality, knowing that reality needs us, that we’re not extra on the set. And yet, reality loves us so much that every mistake configures a new possibility.
In every moment, we never recant face, meaning we never back off. We never say this is just a moment. Every word is fierce and kind. Every word is embracing and madly loving and demanding. And every moment, not to recant face means one thing in Pasternak:
In every moment, I am either open or closed. In every moment, the moment is either open or closed. I can either love the moment open, or the moment stays closed.
That’s what we’re doing here in One Mountain — we’ve come together to actually love each other personally. And a whole bunch of people have said to me, why are you spending so much time on this? Just do big ad buys and build it into zillions of people (and all these people have advice about how you do ad buys on the web). No, that’s not what we’re doing.
Remember that book, Culture Moves? We create — at the periphery of culture — a depth, a loving.
We actually cross to the other side, and we become the new human.
We become those imaginal cells in the caterpillar that find each other.
We love each other, and we love each other outrageously.
We feel each other.
And we begin to be the utopia. We write each other Outrageous Love Letters. We begin to be and become Outrageous Lovers committing Outrageous Acts of Love.
We begin to play our instruments in the Unique Self Symphony.
A gorgeous virus of the new Evolutionary Love Codes will begin to suffuse reality
How do we become an interior science community, a mystical community, a community of Outrageous Lovers, the band of companions, who come together and say:
- We are taking this on.
- We are taking responsibility for the whole thing.
That’s heavy, and yet it’s light. It is heavy in the sense of gravitas. Gravitas: we can actually say that we are going to experience ourselves as Homo amor, omni-considerate for the sake of the whole. We want to spend a few years, as Pasternak writes, in obscurity, quietly, finding each other, deepening and deepening and deepening. And then slowly, from the periphery, the depth of who we are begins to suffuse, to spread into culture. Not because we are preaching — because we’re being, because we are telling the New Story of Value. We are not just telling it, we are being it.
And every exchange matters. Every note in the chatbox matters. Every Outrageous Love Letter matters. Every person who says, I’m going to now join and become a member, I’m going to make it mine. This is my revolution, not theirs. It’s my revolution. I’m going to step in, in whatever way. We are not just going to listen, we are actually going to be the revolution.
We are going to take our seat.
I said this to a close friend of mine a few months ago: we’re going to take our seat at the table of history. Like, wow! That’s what this is about.
It’s time to grow.
It’s time to take the next steps.
It’s time to not do huge ad buys on the web, we’re not doing that. We want to organically grow, and take this, and get stronger and stronger, so that when we’re ready to publish the Great Library, we can share these new tracks, these new codes with each other. And feel it, and then get excited about it, and then talk about it, and then study it, and then share it with the next group and the next group. And then, slowly, there’s a new virus, and it’s a positive virus.
It’s a gorgeous virus of the new Evolutionary Love Codes that begins to suffuse Reality.
Who gets this, who can feel this? Was it helpful? Can you feel it? Can we feel it? I don’t know, there are 85 of us together now, 100 of us on livestream. And then 500 will listen to the replay, so there are 500 to 600 of us every week. We are holding this, and now we are going to grow this together. Can you feel that? This is ours. We can grow this together.
Yes, let’s do it all. Let’s grow this voice. Yes, yes, and yes.
You’ve got to step in all the way. That’s what it means not to recant face in Pasternak: we’ve got to go all the way into this moment, to the inside of this moment. In this moment, we’ve got to be lifnei Adonai — before the Goddess (text in Leviticus, Chapter 23).
But before the Goddess means not ‘Goddess is over there and I’m over here.’ Yes, she’s holding us. But to be before the Goddess means be on the inside of Goddess’s face, to be in the Field of Value. That’s what the word means in Hebrew: it’s before, it’s face, and on the inside; three meanings in one word.
Value is as primary in Reality as time and motion and space.
You can’t get out of value.
Value is there, and in some sense, human beings are responding to value, so we are telling a New Story of Value.
That’s what we are here to do.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on “What is One Mountain?” See Part 1 here.
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.
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