Note to Listener from Aubrey Marcus and Dr. Marc Gafni

We are at a time between worlds, at a time between stories. We live in a world of outrageous pain. We live in a world of outrageous beauty. We live in a world of outrageous love.

In this time between stories, we step beyond the old stories of good and evil in its primitive forms. But that does not mean that we are moral relativists or that value is not real. Indeed all of reality, all of life is Value. We can feel the truth of this in our bodies. We may not be able to explain it perfectly, but when we feel we know. And this is what gives us courage to stand on the side of Life. And to stand on the side of Life is to take a side.

A stand for Life, is by nature a stand against anti-Life, or anti-Value. What that means about what should be done is a question of impossible complexity, pain and uncertainty.

We stand for a culture of Eros against a culture of death. We stand for intimacy against alienation. This requires us to be both tender and fierce, to stand for Life against the forces of anti-life. It is not that there is no value in the universe and therefore naturally no battle between value and anti-value. Value is real. Good and Evil are real.

But good and evil are not split along racial or national, or ethnic or religious grounds. This is a seductively simple conception, that in and of itself is the cause of so much horror. In our formulation, Good and Evil is discerned simply: To be Good is to be ALL IN FOR ALL LIFE.

No one is outside of the circle of Life.

To be All in for All Life requires the cultivation of radical discernment within a broken information ecology, and full blown 5th generational warfare in the form of attention hijacking and propaganda. To stand for Life means to make love to the tender sensuality of sense making. Feeling our way slowly and carefully, but not with timidity masking as humility. Evil is evil.

As much as we might be tempted, we cannot be afraid to call it what it is. Within that is a rejection of universal moral relativism. It is a solemn vow to protect the innocent, all of the innocent, and to protect the world from being held hostage by the forces of anti-life - wherever they are found. We speak with broken hearts, with clarity, but always in the unknowing.

Always in devotion to the Mystery, while always whispering love in every distinction with every breath. It is our prayer that this inspires a story that is unifying rather than dividing. Clarifying rather than confusing. It is a prayer for all Life. Comments will be off on this video, so that everyone can watch it and feel with their own hearts and minds.

AUBREY: We find ourselves in the midst of a time of unbearable pain. Unbearable pain and sadness. And we ask ourselves, what is there to do? How do we navigate our way through this? Should we remove ourselves? Should we take no sides? Should we listen? I think that's an important part of the process. Also, there's a place to step in and say, "No, I do have a side, and that side is life. That side is love, that side is all in for all life." And through this incredibly painful, vulnerable podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni, we explore our own window into what we believe is the position, the sign all in for all life. What that means, and how we can tell a new type of story that leaves no one on the outside, no one excluded from the circle. And that's the story we need to tell to be a new human in a new humanity. So, we enter this podcast, tender, unfalteringly, trying to feel and see and understand as best we can. So, thank you for coming on this journey with us with an open heart and an open mind. And to see what resonates with you, see what doesn't, but find your own center. And, find if there is a place where you too can say, I'm all in for all life. And what does that mean? How does that look? So, thank you for going on this journey with Dr. Marc Gafni.

Starts after intro at 3:32
AUBREY: Well, my brother, we are here in an impossible moment. An impossible moment to make sense of everything, an impossible moment for our hearts that are broken, and our hearts that bleed for all of life, and the suffering of life. And hearts that bleed for the world at this time, a world that's experiencing amazing pain, experiencing a greater pressing of existential risk, experiencing greater conflict and division amongst families and people across the world, and nations, and all of the structures that we hold. It's really an impossible moment. And, we've made the decision to wade into this impossible moment and do our best to come with fierce and tender love, and our best ability to help share the truth as best we can see it, while holding the multiplicity of perspectives that exist, and just try to find our way through. Hopefully, this podcast is of service to many other people who are trying to find their way through, and understand what's real and understand how to navigate their own heart, in their own mind, in their own spirit in these incredibly complicated and incredibly painful times.
DR. GAFNI: Yeah. Thank you, brother. Amen. Every word you say is true, and our hearts are ripped apart. We're both I think in hotel rooms in different places, and we couldn't wait to actually be kind of as if we were in a studio, because this is just not an in-studio moment. It's not a moment that's organized and prepared, or choreographed in any way, or organized with the right, this is not a moment that has the right lighting. It's a moment that is brutal and confusing, and filled with unimaginable uncertainty, unimaginable not knowing. We're asking a question here, which is, what does it mean to be the new human in the new humanity? In the language of cosmo-erotic humanism, the new story of value that you and I are so deeply involved with, what does it mean to be Homo Amor? What does it mean to be a mad lover? And to actually find that deep place inside. As we were trying to get on the podcast for about a half hour, the tech didn't work. Then in my hotel room, the shower didn't turn off. It was almost like all systems are just fucked in the world. We couldn't even... And just to kind of find our hearts in the center of just this unbearable pain is a big deal. So, maybe I can just start with, brother, and turn it back to you. Just to start, we have to lead with what we know, with certainty. What do we know? What's clear? We have to lead with uncertainty. We have to lead with confusion. And how do I act? How do I breathe? How do I cry? How do I find joy? How do I make decisions of unbearable consequence from uncertainty? So, it's this moment of, what are our certainties? Where can we orient in the midst of the unbearable intimacy of this moment? Meaning we're intimate with Horror, we're intimate with pain of all kinds, we're intimate with the confusion around the pain. It's not just the pain, but the confusion of how do we even make sense around the pain? Making sense is central. To know, gnosis, yada. And Adam knew his wife, it's erotic, it's carnal. When Eros itself feels defaced, when desire itself feels defaced, so our ability to be central which is to do sense making, which is to know, to come to know, to locate ourselves, is itself dislocated. And so, there's both the objective horror of these last 10 days, and the utter confusion in the echo chambers of the human heart and mind, about how to make sense, how to find our Eros, how to do sensemaking. And so, I want to just tenderly offer as you start us off, that we breathe, and we lead, and we talk, and we love, and we be tender and fierce, both from the places of utter lack of clarity, to hold our uncertainties, and to not fall to the seduction of false certainties. False certainties are seductive. To avoid seduction of false certainties, to keep our hearts open in the uncertainty, and at the same time, not get lost in a kind of nihilism, in which there are no orienting certainties in which there's nothing that's in any way more whole than anything else. That's nihilism. We've lost our access. Certain things are good, and they're true, and they're beautiful. We're not in a post truth world. There's multiple perspectives, as you said so beautifully. But there's not, what Habermas and others described as, a perspectival madness. Where there's just infinite perspectives, and nothing's better than anything else at all. There's no hierarchy of perspectives at all. Mother Teresa is still better than Hitler. In other words, there are orienting certainties. So, just to be in that dance with you with our hearts ripped open between radical uncertainty, and finding the clarities in the certainties, my brother.
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that seems like the only way forward. So, from your perspective, what are some places we can go that orient us to the certainties, and also where the places where these uncertainties lie, and I'll share my own uncertainties. Because I have so many uncertainties as I've tried to grapple with the breadth of this whole issue, and personally see fault on all over the place. And also, can try, and orient and start to see the threads of the stories that could possibly make sense, that hopefully, and our intention here is, let's be clear. We're team life, we're team God, we're team Shekhinah, we're team all-new human, new humanity. That's our side, our side is life.
DR. GAFNI: Right, all in for all life.
AUBREY: All in for all life. So, let's just be clear, our side is life, and life has a perspective that we'll try to illuminate. What is the perspective of life in this madness and chaos?
DR. GAFNI: What is the perspective of life, is the most beautiful way to say it, my brother. It's all in for all life. And life has a perspective. That's so important to say, that life has a perspective. Can we listen into the perspective of life? So, I want to start maybe, I think there's, Aubs, as you and I have been talking in the last few days a lot, finding our way through in texts and messages and conversations, there must be about 10 different pieces to this puzzle, without which we can't even begin to align with life. There's so much that we need to talk about, but I want to, just maybe perhaps start with two things. And we're starting, everyone, there's a word in English, Aubs, haltingly. There's a halting quality to the beginning of this conversation as there should be. I wouldn't trust any conversation that dives in with proclamations. We're halting, we're finding our way. That's where we should be. I want to just say one kind of little, one-minute introduction, and then kind of a first beginning, which is, we have to pay attention. What social media has done is hijacked our attention. We've talked before about the attention economy, where attention gets hijacked. The original lineage of Solomon, the word for attention is sin lived, to place your heart. And so, what you and I are doing now is we're inviting everyone to place our hearts, and to place my heart is to pay attention. To place my attention is to follow a thread here. It's not about one sentence, it's not about one unfolding. It's about following a storyline. There's a storyline, there's a thread. There's multiple plot lines, but there is a storyline. We have to kind of find our way. What's the storyline here? We have to talk about power and we have to talk about desire, and we have to talk about Eros, and we have to talk about bombs, and we have to talk about slaughter, and we have to talk about psychonaut festivals that are desecrated. We have to talk about water in Gaza. I mean, there's so much to talk about. But we have to be willing to bracket our desire to let our attention be hijacked by some pseudo outrage before we've actually embraced this all in our hearts. We have to kind of hold for a second. It's that, do you remember that line that we both like in Braveheart? Where Wallace says, "Hold, hold." And the horses are just about upon them. So, if we can just say to all the brothers and sisters, like hold, we're going to place our attention slowly. And we're going to try and make love in this podcast, meaning to restore sensuality, to restore sense making. But to do that, we need forepray. We need forepray, we need to go slow, we need to touch the issues, we need to feel our way in. We can't just plunge in and penetrate the depth of it. We need kind of a reverence. So, I just want to invite in myself, and I can feel it already in you. It's just this kind of heart ripped open reverence as we step in. So, Abraham. This is kind of field one, Abraham. So, in the original Genesis narrative, we meet the father of the Arab and Jewish people, Ibrahim. He's not a Jewish character, he's not an Arabic character, he's the father of the whole story. That's a good place to start. In other words, let's start in the root with, what do these two stories share in common? What they actually share in common is Ibrahim. That's so beautiful, right? That there's this figure, who is Ibrahim, who was Abraham, and there's this moment where the divine voice, however you want to read that. If that's God, if that's spirit, if that's Atman, is Brahman, if it’s Mot, if it's Geist, if it's the implicit order, however you want to tell that story. But that voice, she, what we call she when we're talking, and deep in the lineage, she. The Shekhinah, she. She says, "Hey, Abraham, there's this group of people in Sodoma Gomorra, Sodom and Gomorrah in English, and they are completely wicked. So, I'm wiping them out. They've got to go. These guys are atrocity committers, you're bad folks. They've done bad shit. I mean, they are gone. I mean, now we're not talking about Aubs and Marc doing sensemaking, as beautiful and as holy and as honored as I am to be in that conversation. We're talking about, at least in the literary text, the Divine sense maker. So, Abraham should say, okay, I got it. I got it, God, I'm in, okay. And Abraham says, "No way. Maybe there's innocent people." And God says, "No, no, there's no innocent people." Abraham says, "Don't tell me there's no innocent people. I'm going to bring you 50 innocent people. And if I bring you 50 innocent people, you've got to agree not to destroy the city." God says, "Not going to happen." Abraham searches around, no 50. He says, forget the 50, 40. God says, whatever. He says, "I'm going to bring you 40." God says, "Okay.". This is a long text of several Biblical verses. And 18, 19 in Genesis, usually, the biblical test majors in like little one-word indications or hints or implications or illusions. This is multiple verses, until Abraham can't find 40 righteous people, and he can't find 30, and he can't find 20, he can't find 10. But he keeps arguing with the divine voice. And finally, God says, "You see, you lost." And Abraham says, "Fuck you, God." That's what you want me to say? That's what a real human being says. Will the judges of the whole world not do justice? I demand that you do not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there's any innocent people there at all. Now, God doesn't agree. It's a wild story. But the point is that Ibrahim, or Abraham, becomes the father of the Arab Jewish story, because he argues with God and demands, standing for whoever the innocent people are in the story. Innocent civilians are real. So, in this moment, I don't know what Israel should do. It's an impossible, painful decision. So, it needs to do something. But let's bracket what that is, because we don't know. Actually, I'm not in ground control. I don't have all the intelligence. I don't claim to make decisions for Israel, or for anyone. From the perspective of the public information available, I don't know what Israel should do. But I do know that the voices that are saying across the world, including, obviously in Israel, are saying, "Oh, my God, we have to avoid civilian casualties." How do we do that? Do we open a humanitarian quarter? How do we open that quarter? The voices that are saying, what do we do? How do we protect the innocent people in Gaza? Those voices are the voices of Ibrahim. Those are holy voices. Those are not crazy voices, those are not voices that are not understanding realpolitik. Those are the voices of Ibrahim. Those are the voices of Abraham. And that the voice that says, "Oh my God, we've got to save every innocent person, every single one," and that people can't just be identified by their association. That every human being is potentially in the circle of life. And that there's not Muslims and Jews and Christians, that we need to move to a post nation state, and post rivalrous conflict win-lose metrics world, a world in which no one's outside of the circle, and everyone's inside. And, we value infinitely the life of every man, woman and child. Whatever we need to do in the end, I don't know. I'm not saying what we should do. I'm saying, but the insane valuation in which Abraham argues with God. He says, God, I don't care what information you have. And then God's response is, Abraham, because you argued with me, because you took me on, you're going to be the father of these great nations. That's a good place to start. That's a good place to start, brother. Right?
AUBREY: Yeah.
DR. GAFNI: We have to honor every innocent. We have to hold that voice. And, whether or not we go with God, or Abraham in this story, Sodom and Gomorrah in the end go down. And lo, Abraham's nephew and his family escape. So, however that story happens, whatever should or shouldn't happen, the Abraham voice demands justice. There has to be a demand here for justice. Justice has to be a real category, it has to mean something for all of us. Not that there's no justice, there is, and there is truth. There are standards of ethos. And that all matters. That's a great place to start, brother. Let's first start there.
AUBREY: Yeah, that's such a powerful place to start. Because, as we build this new story, we're going to have to find a shared story of value to actually make our way through. Because in the story of rivalrous conflict, there's seemingly no end, because there's different origin stories, there's different tales of, well, look at the Hebron massacre, look at the Nakba. Everybody points to their own evidence for these stories and their own interpretations of how it went down, and all of that. But if you get back to a shared story, then, if we can find that shared story, then eventually we can make our way through. And if we don't, this just seems like it's going to escalate to absolutely terrifying proportions. I mean, Iran claiming, recently, to the United Nations, that if Israel advances its attacks, then Iran is going to come to the aid of the Palestinians. So, then there's another whole war. And then of course, at that point, what is the US's involvement? And then what does the US do at that point? And then, is this the start of another world war? I mean, we're at the precipice. A very, very fucking scary precipice of where we go. I think, through the pain and through the brutality of this, mutually on both sides, that people are not hearing that Abraham voice, very clearly. That includes Netanyahu in the reports that I've seen, that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. Well, that can't be true. And then there's people on the other side who say there are no innocent Jews, that doesn't exist. Both of those are clearly false statements. So, there's this kind of desire to cast everybody into a binary position. And this is not how you argue and how you sense make, and argue in the sense of making love to the truth and trying to find your heart, which can see clearly. The only place probably that can see perfectly clearly through this is, and that must prevail in this situation, or else, it starts to get really, really nasty. And the only winners of that nastiness will be the military industrial complex, who will be able to explode their inventory and replenish it with unbelievable amounts of cash. This has been a story of the war machine for a long time. The real winners of every war are the people who make the munitions. And really everybody else loses in some way. It's not to say that not any war is ever justified. Of course not. I'm not going to say that we shouldn't have stormed the beaches of Normandy. I really believe we should have. That was necessary and important. You have family members who escaped and survived the Holocaust. I had family members who escaped and survived the pogroms in Russia. There is good and evil, there's right and wrong, and there are times to take action. We're not taking a pacifist position, but simultaneously holding this new story that holds everybody as well, and understands that war is a horror, and there are no real winners in that. There's only, like the noble warrior goes in and says I do the minimum that I need to do to be effective in this, and I do it not with celebration, but with a deep heaviness in my heart and a deep tragedy for what must be done.
DR. GAFNI: Yeah, no, totally, totally. Beautifully said and painfully said. And this takes us to the place where we have to begin the next part of the conversation. We start with the voice of Abraham, who demands justice and who challenges the divine. And, we invoke the absolute dire need for a shared story of value in which no one's outside of the circle, in which we're all in for all life. And from that place, you say and I think you say correctly, brother love, we did have to storm the beaches of Normandy. That's actually true. Pogroms did take place in Russia and many other places. And, there has to be a way in which we actually can understand and do thought experiments and avoid what I would call, the original sin of moral equivalence. Moral equivalence itself is profoundly against love. To be homo amor, to stand in love, to be a lover requires cultivating of discernment, to love is to see, right? In "Avatar", in the James Cameron movie, right? I love you, I see you. In the "Avatar" movie, there's actually a battle between the people of Na'vi and Jake Sully has got to take a side. He can't say there's no side. There's actually a side that needed to be taken there. And although there's lots of ways we can understand that the fear of the colonel, who is the kind of ethnocentric human who demonizes all non-Humans and says there are hordes that should be slaughtered. We can understand where he's coming from. In the end, we go with Jake Sully and we go with the Na'vi. In the end, correct take a position. And so, I want to just try and offer something deep here before I try and do two thought experiments. So, there's kind of three levels of consciousness in the way we think about these things. So, there's kind of level one, good guys and bad guys. The battle between good and evil. That's level one. And there's some real truth in that. The problem is it was hijacked by too many people in too many ways. And everyone always said, we're the good, and they're the evil, let's wage our battle. As you said before, you used that term beautifully, binary. It was a binary choice, right? You're either good or evil, you're either male or female. No, no, no, no, actually, I've got some feminine, I've got some masculine, I'm not so binary. It's not just light and darkness. It's more complex. I've got to integrate my shadow, I've got to find my split off parts. So, level one is binary, sides. No sides. That's level one. Level two is, so, level one is just sides. Just sides, is level one. Level two is no non-binary, no sides at all. Anyone who takes sides, that's a problem. I saw an article the other day where someone kind of objected to a colleague of theirs, and said, my problem is not which side they took, but that they took a side. That's the level two consciousness position. Somebody took a side. How could you take a side? It's that we challenge and that's not wrong, but that's a next level. We're going to move beyond that kind of battle of good and evil taking sides. Let's move to the next level. We don't take sides. And just for a second, for those of you who want us just to kind of dive in, we can't dive in. We have to set a frame here in order to do sense making. Otherwise you can't do sense making here. We've got to actually hold. And so, here's level two. Level two is not just light and darkness, but like one tech says, greater as the light that comes from the darkness. Greater is the wisdom that comes from the folly. So, we move past the binary, we try, and locate the full range of good and evil on all sides. Everyone's got it all inside of them. So, that's level two, it's beautiful. That's not the end of the story. That's level two. It's always, she comes in threes. It's always three parts. She comes in threes. And the third level is, there is such a thing as man and woman. It's not just gender fluid. I actually can locate myself in some... There's some sense of my man, there's some sense of my women. Hawaii and New York are a little different. Bali and London feel different. There's different qualities that are actually true. And there's a quality of good, and there's a quality of evil. Actually, Aragon, King of Gondor was right when he said, "I've got to take on Sauron." It's very easy to get seduced by Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Actually, Saruman, who's Gandalf's teacher. Gandalf's teacher, Saruman, is seduced by this position which says, there are no sides, there's no hierarchy of good and evil, it's just raw power. That was his position. The other position would be there are no sides, there are no hierarchies of good and evil, everything's just the same, which is a kind of nihilism. And Gandalf understands. And the good king, Aragon, understands that war is tragic and horrible, and unspeakable. And there's a moment in which I need to actually move beyond moral equivalence. And if I can't do that, I just know, my heart breaks, because I know, I can even feel it right now. I know that some of the beautiful people listening, they're, no, no, no. Any assertion that something's better than something else becomes problematic. So, I just want to try and just go into the soul and see if we can get there. Because the whole fate of the world actually hangs in the balance. We can't be homo amor, we can't create a culture of Eros if we don't have a field of value. Value means there's an ought. That's what value means. Value means there's an ought in the universe, right? There's something that ought be done. That's what value means. That's the definition of value. My clarified desire tells me what's valuable, and what's valuable, it tells me there's something that ought be done. There's goodness, truth and beauty. There's truth, it's not just post truth, it's not just post goodness, it's not just post beauty. So, we can't engage as lovers, homo amor without that. And so, I want to just try and do just a little four-part slow, and just excruciatingly obvious, but painful and necessary thought experiment because of the unimaginable confusion. So, I have an eyewitness testimony here that came to me, Aubrey, from the rave. It's actually sitting right in front of me here. I'm not going to read the whole thing, it's too painful. It came from Maor Shammay. It's kind of a figure in the kind of psychonaut rave scene. He was close to the two brothers who organized the festival in the desert, where people were actually in journey. They were deep in journey. Deep like their heart ripped open. There was no Jew, non-Jew, there was no left, right. Everyone was just literally on the inside of the inside of She. And then they felt these paragliders kind of, which were Hamas men kind of paragliding into the festival. I'll just give you a little sense of it. I'll just see if I can find it here for a second but it's kind of unimaginable. He just responds, he's writing this message, he said, I want to share this message, it's not easy to hear. Please don't play this message where children can hear. And, what happened to our friends? He says when the Hamas men came, they took the women, partners of our close friends, tied them up, cut the men's penises off alive, raped their girlfriends, killed them, and raped other people on top of them, and then killed them all. And a couple of just the ones that survived told the story. Then they raped the dead bodies and then brought the dead bodies to parade them around Gaza. Now, when an editor of Teen Vogue having read all of the descriptions of the travesty tweets and says, "Hey, this is what decolonizing looks like." And when students in Harvard, the president of Harvard, a professor from Yale, but actually just an unimaginable delusion, the comment boxes of social media, which basically says and this is not an exaggeration on my part. But you can see clips of people dancing in London. Huge, I don't even know if we have it available now. But maybe we can put it in the thread, but just all over the world. Not just in Gaza and Nablus but all over the world, people gathering in Manhattan in Sydney at the Opera House, celebrating. This is an affront to everything that love is. And if we can't say that, if we can't make that discernment, if we're afraid to say that out loud, then we're not good kings. We're not homo amor. We need to be able to say that and say that clearly without flinching, without hesitating. That's actually the outpouring of support across the world saying, one person tweeted, who is from the democratic socialists of New York, with a host of others, but this was a universal cry around the world. Did you think that liberating the land would be bloodless? It's never bloodless. It's so completely... We're just beginning, but so completely misunderstands Eros and Ethos and the storyline and who the people are, and what happened. But besides all of that, it's a horror. It's just a horror. So I want to, if I can go one more, please. Please, brother.
AUBREY: So, I think one of the challenges that we experienced is that there are people who will say that that story and then eyewitness account is somehow part of Zionist propaganda, that it's all propaganda. And then they'll cite the widely reported stories of the babies being decapitated and saying this story was false, the story was part of propaganda. And of course, I received that story and I was horrified. Then their story is saying that, we're Muslims, we're attacking only soldiers, even though there's videos of clearly the other side. And then everybody was like, see, this is all propaganda. And then Israel then reluctantly released some images of dead babies, but still hasn't been able to confirm the 40 decapitated babies. So, then people start to say, well, what is actually happening? And there's a denial that anything bad happened because that allows that story of the side, that first binary side that they've taken, which is colonizer and colonized, it's a peaceful people in resistance. It's placing them as the Na'vi. And obviously, if we watched the Na'vi go into the encampment, and do some of the horrible acts to the random scientists and people who are just hanging out, and the kids and everything like that, nobody would be on the Na'vi's side. So they have to deny that this actually even exists. So there's this wild kind of denial of the horror and atrocity that came out, saying that this is all fifth-generational warfare, this is all propaganda. And then people have had to sort through all of this. So there'll be people who even listen to what you just said as an eyewitness account and say, not true, categorically not true. Where are the photos and the videos of it? As if that's the only way that they can even make sense.
DR. GAFNI: Right, right. And that's where the tragedy of a broken information ecology and a broken sense making. And I just want to say it clearly here, it is undeniable and incontrovertible. There are mounds and mounds of evidence. I will even take something like the Holocaust. We have mounds of evidence about the Holocaust. Mounds. We have an enormous Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. And yet there's an entire industry of Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial, which is to essentially murder people a second time. Because when you actually murder someone once, then you at least have the dignity of the memory of being murdered. But when you murder someone, and brutalize them, and then say that it didn't happen, then what you do is, you actually create an unbearable evil. And so, even prominent figures in the left, across America, like someone like my colleague, Marianne Williamson, wrote in her post, what Hamas did was undeniably evil. Pure evil, her quote. Pure evil. So, this is a moment actually. Let's just create some moral clarity here. If we can't say, A, that we can actually find our way through, because if we can't find our way through the echo chambers, and actually find trusted sources of information beneath the kind of confusion, and actually be willing to say that there's a fundamental set of moral distinctions here, then we've lost our love, then we're not homo amor. We're not all in for all life. To be all in for all life means, actually say that when you actually commit acts of intentional atrocity, when you actually literally film your murder of a grandmother, and put up the film on her Facebook feed so that's when the family sees it, which is what happened. And I can go on and on. When we have incontrovertible mounds of evidence, that have actually been broadcast through all the modern means of communicating information, and we can still deny that. So we're not all in for all life. We're now standing against life. I want to do a very, very simple and painful thought experiment, but it's real. There's very, very few things in terms of general philosophy that I agree with my colleague, Sam Harris, on. I've listened to five or six of his videos over the years. Not a lot, but on all five or six, when he got down to fundamental points, I disagreed with how he interpreted sets of facts. So, blessings to Sam, but on this particular issue, Sam and I intuitively came to the same set of understandings. He came to them, and dozens of people did independently around the world. And so, I want to just try and express the way I've tried to talk about this over the last decade. And it's a painful thing to talk about. But here's a simple thought experiment. So, in the world today, there are actually different levels of consciousness. In the world today, as exists today, that's just true. One level of consciousness in the world, as routine practice, uses their own people, men, women and children as shields, as human shields when they're fighting. So, we're going to actually put our guns literally on the backs of our children. We will blow up crowds of our children in order to kill Hezbollah, X amount of American soldiers. We will place our centers in hospitals, our weapons, munitions, our caches, our terrorist centers in hospitals, in apartment buildings, in schools, in preschools. We're going to do that as a matter of policy, because we know that that's going to force the other side either not to fire, or it'll cause condemnation of their fire whenever they go to try and actually respond to our terrorists acts. That's just true. We commit war crimes, and we actually upload them to the internet. So, we're not hiding them. We say this is what we do. We upload our war crimes to the internet. That's one group of people. There's a second level of consciousness in the world that actually abhors the very notion that you would use civilians. So let's just ask a very simple thought experiment. Hamas and Israel. So, who can imagine Israel hiding behind its women and children in order to stop Hamas from acting? No one. First off, you can't even imagine Israel doing it. It's unimaginable. And two, it wouldn't work because Hamas would massacre the women and children. It would be irrelevant. Hamas regularly does the exact same thing, and it's a given that it's in a weird, diabolical, degraded opposition to life way a smart thing to do. Because we know that actually many, many Israeli soldiers have been killed, because they've hesitated or stopped, or not wanted to fire, and it actually is effective. So, these are two very distinct groups of people. It's a very, very big deal. So, before we get to the history of the area, and what the story is, and what the narratives are, is it just a confusion of stories? Is there some way to find a thread? Let's leave all that aside. Just a simple question. I'll just give you a second thought experiment, a very simple thought experiment. If Israel was to lay down its arms, this is a thought experiment, the way we do it in philosophy. Let's say Israel lays down its arms. We're going to lay down our arms, and we're not going to fight anymore. Whatever you Hamas or Fatah, or whatever you decide to do, we go with you. What would happen? A bloodbath, and everyone would be wiped out, because the Hamas charter says, not kill Zionist. So all the Jews in the land of Israel, and they cite texts from a very damaged part of the Koran, which says that every tree and rock will say there's a Jew hiding here, kill them. And killing every Jew in that area that's now known as the State of Israel, the actual quote is to obliterate the Jewish state. In other words, the actual charter of Hamas is the annihilation of every Jew in that territory. That's the charter. Period, end of conversation. So, if Israel laid down its arms and said, we want peace, everyone gets killed. If Hamas would lay down its arms and say, we want peace. And again, this is a thought experiment, there's zero question based on the history, which we'll get to the actual storyline later. What would happen is there'd be peace. There'd be a two-state solution. There'd be a state of Israel and a state of Palestine. Without question, there'd be peace. And in fact, we'll get to this a little later. Five times, there's been very dramatic offers of a two-state solution that have been turned down categorically. Because unless we obliterate every Jew within this area called Israel, there can be no peace. Now, again, I'm bracketing. I'm asking everyone to hold for a second. Let's get to the storyline and how we got here. Let's hold that for a second. But let's just hold the thought experiment. It's a very dramatic thought experiment. It might be really complicated to figure out what to do in the Middle East, but the problem is pretty simple. One side wants the other side dead. That's actually true. Now, if we can't look at that in the face. Israel does not want the Arab or Palestinian community dead. Israel has no genocidal intention. Israel has offered five times a two-state solution. Quite a dramatic one. So let's just understand this. When Israel pulled out of Gaza, Gaza was part of Egypt. Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and Hamas took over Gaza. Hamas could have created a flourishing beautiful state of education and culture and beauty. They didn't. Cha. Now we're in. So, maybe just to try and say it a tad differently, levels of consciousness are real. The evolution of consciousness is the evolution of love. Levels of love are real. Levels of all in for all life are real. It's just a simple example. The German people today as a collective, are in a very different structure of consciousness than the German people were in the middle of World War Two. As Daniel Goldhagen's book from Harvard, pointed out, book's called "Hitler's Willing Executioners. And he talks about the unimaginably painful experience of a degraded consciousness that pervaded an enormous amount of Germany. That's true. There's legions of German writers who have addressed this. To not recognize that Germany today is in a different structure of consciousness than it was in the middle of the height of the Nazi Third Reich is absurd. That's a distinction. We're making a distinction. Or, I'll give you a second example. My dear friend, Fred Jealous, actually just wrote to me beautifully. We did a weekly one mountain conversation, a painful conversation yesterday on the kinds of things we're talking about now. Fred wrote me to thank me, and I thank Fred because he has very much shared with me the experience of what it was like to be a black American even in the first half of the 20th century. He married Anne who's an African American. His son, Ben, Ben Jealous actually ran for governor in Maryland, and became the head of the NAACP. A beautiful man. And Fred recommended to me literature to actually read what that experience was, which I didn't know. You actually see descriptions, Aubrey, of the whole town coming out. In the first half of the 20th century, the United States of America pledged allegiance to the fucking flag at that moment, who come out to see the burning, the killing, the torture of a young black man or woman, and they come out in their Sunday best and they take pictures under the dangling, charred, mutilated corpse, and they actually took souvenirs, body parts, which people displayed at their places of business. This is true. So, what we're not saying is, I'm going to be really clear. We're all children of Abraham in the Middle East. So we're not saying, oh, there's an intrinsic structure of Jewish genealogy, or Arab genealogy. That's fucking racism. It has no place in a culture of Eros, it has no place in a culture of love. None, whatsoever. What we are saying is that in history, whether in different times in history, or in different spaces in history, we have different levels of consciousness. Around the world today, we have a brutal, medieval consciousness that says, only my God is the true God. And murder is only to murder people who are in my narrow slice of reality, but everyone else can be killed. And we behave accordingly. And we create genocidal charters, which is the charter of Hamas. That's true. That is not the same as the Israeli army's code of ethics where the soldier goes through intense training, even when his or her life is at risk, to avoid killing civilians in ordinary combat. Those are very, very different. I mean, just hold this for a second. In the 2014 Hamas-Israeli conflict, which is one of five that Hamas began. 2014, I remember it clearly, Israel made tens of thousands of phone calls, literally phone calls to cell phones, of Gazans to try and direct their evacuation to avoid their being killed. So, Israel routinely, as part of its policy, does everything that it possibly can do. Do they do it all perfectly? Do they not do it perfectly? It's a good question that we can challenge all of that. But at the core of its ethos, Israel's position has been, we do everything we can to avoid civilians being killed. Now, when you create a structure in which you actually place your terrorists in hospitals in order to put Israel in an impossible position, then the question is what should Israel do? So that's a good question. And I hear the voice of Abraham that says, Oh my God, even if there's 50 innocent people, and if the president of Israel says there are no innocent Gazans. If he says that, and I know someone texted me today that he had said that. I haven't checked it myself, I don't know. But if he did say that, I don't know. But if he did say that, he's dead wrong. He's dead wrong. Now, what you can say, which is unbearably tragic. I can have a heart attack as I say it, because your heart is attacked, that there were innocent, beautiful German families that were attacked when the Allies bombed, and sometimes the Allies bombed in ways they shouldn't have. The British, particularly in Dresden. And sometimes the Allies bombed in ways that they needed to. There's no question, Aubs, that as we stormed the beaches of Normandy, which you referred to in the beginning. But there's no question that there were innocent Germans, and that's called in war collateral damage, which is just a fancy way of saying, and a horrific way of saying than innocent people are killed in war. That's true. Those are impossible questions. And when I sat with the Dalai Lama, I mean, I literally sat with him in his... It's a whole different story of how we met and what I was doing in Dharamsala. He said to me, "People say, does Dalai Lama laugh? Haha”. People say, I say no army. He says, "Silly. Of course, we need an army to act”. Of course, we need armies to act, and we should have actually an international army if we could. In an ideal world, these issues should not be nation state issues. We should have a shared grammar of value. And that if any group acts in violation of that shared grammar of value, there should be, as the Dalai Lama suggested to me sitting on his bed in Dharamsala, there should be an international body that upholds an intrinsic field of value when it's violated by anyone. But right now, where we live right now, to be unable to recognize the distinction...Or, and I'm going to get even a little bit more dramatic here, because it has to be said otherwise I'm a coward, and I'm not standing for love. But I want to say even one more step. The suggestion that the cause of Hamas's brutality, as I just described it at the psychonaut rave, is the Israeli occupation, is a level of ignorance, a level of ignoring the actual thread line and plotline of the story, which is kind of beyond imagination. That's actually not the case. What the case is, and I'm going to be here, just very, very tender, but very fierce, with the fierce sort of love. The truth is, is that there are, let's just kind of understand this clearly. Let's see if we can go back and kind of understand where we are. This is not about occupation. Let's just take a couple of minutes just to understand where are we? So what's actually true is that there are two legitimate competing claims on this land. The local Arab population that has lived in the land for the last 100, 150, 200, 300 years, unclear, whatever the amount of time is, but has a real claim to that land that's real. Let's be really clear about that. That's a real claim to the land. And, the indigenous Jewish relationship to that land that's gone on also, from time immemorial. It's also a legitimate claim to that land. Human beings sometimes have competing legitimate claims. That happens. It's okay. When the movement of Jews coming from Europe, 1880s after the pogroms, 1890s. They came and they joined the indigenous Jewish settlement that lived in Palestine, which was living in peace with the Arab population. As they came together, there were incredibly beautiful relationships that were formed. On multiple levels, there was joint agriculture and there were educational projects, and there were economic projects, and there were religious projects. And, there was a real possibility of having people with competing claims actually coming together, and working something out. And now I'm going to say something that people are literally afraid to say. But it's true. I've read over the years dozens and dozens of books, but not just read dozens of books, I've lived for many, many years. I shared a house with a beautiful Arab family in Jaffa for years. I lived next to Qalqilya, near Kfar Saba in Israel, which is one of the four major Arab towns. I was the only person to walk through Qalqilya without my machine gun. I said, I'm walking through, here I am. I was the rabbi of a local Jewish enclave there. So I literally lived this very, very close. My relationship to the Israeli Government is such that if the Israeli government is in violation of a shared ground of value, I will go to critique and take them down in any and every way possible. So, in other words, the notion of kind of this blind, anyone who knows anything about the ethics of this lineage, it's not about blindly following. Israel is fiercely democratic, insanely so. And the level of critique, and the level of social justice movements that live in Israel are kind of unimaginable. It's a pluralistic democracy at the very center of the Middle East. So, any notion of a kind of knee jerk defense of one position violates my whole ethos. That's a given. But if we just understand what happened, I just want to say what happened. I want to say some really harsh sentences here, my friends. But actually, there were huge swaths of the local population, and who are the local population? You've got basically the entire Arabian peninsula, which was under the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire collapses, it comes under British mandate. So, all of the countries of the Middle East, 22 countries are not 500-year countries, they're not 1000-year old countries. They're countries that were all formed in 1919, 1920, 1922, 1920. They're all formed by the British, under the British Mandate. Now, should the British have been making those decisions? Probably not. So, the entire structure was colonial, and was flawed in many ways. But basically, 22 Arab states were established. And then there was a fierce contestation over this piece of small sliver of land about the size of New Jersey. A little bigger than El Salvador. There were huge swaths of the local Arab population, we'll call it the Palestinian population, who desperately, beautifully, gracefully held a fierce sense of their Arab identity, and very much thought that they could actually create a new possibility of coexistence with their cousins. We're all sons of Abraham. The cousins, the family could actually get together. The entire Book of Genesis, is can the children of Abraham get together? That's what the book is, the central text of the Western world is, can the conflict between the sons of Abraham be resolved? And there was this moment, this unimaginable moment, where the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, were actually coming together again. And there was this huge recognition of a possibility that was for example, the Nashashibi family, who were a massive clan, with enormous economic power, but enormous social power, enormous spiritual depth. They represented an enormously powerful movement in the Arab world towards deep coexistence. The Nashashibi clan, in the 1936, quote, Arab Revolt got virtually wiped out by the Husseini clan. The Husseini clan, headed by Mufti Husseini, was very connected to Jerusalem and Hebron, who later affiliated with Hitler in World War Two. The Husseini clan represented this other strain, which is Hamas. Now, Hamas is not precisely the Husseini clan although they were both connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. But they were this other strain of fundamentalist Islam that actually massacred brutally their own brothers and sisters. They did it for decades and decades. The same thing happened on the West Bank, where actually the forces in the Arab world that wanted coexistence were slaughtered. So, actually, the leadership of the Palestinian people now is the great betrayal of the Palestinian people. That's the most, and I apologize, but I'm going to say it straight, vicious. Hamas is a criminal gang disguised under the guise of the most degraded interpretations of Islam, which brutalized their own people, which regularly slaughter and publicly execute people under the guise of being collaborators, which everyone knows they're not. Slaughter their own people. A gay commander gets tortured and killed. Israel's the only gay parade in the Middle East. Hamas slaughters anyone who's suspected of being gay. Honor killings against their own daughters and wives, if they're suspected of some sexual impropriety. But of course, no evidence needs to be brought, and the woman can be brutally killed. The violation of the feminine, the violation of Eros, the violation of actually everything that's held sacred and religion, religare. Hamas is a criminal gang representing the most vicious expressions as was Mufti Husseini. That's not true about the Arab world. That's not true about the Palestinians. The tragedy of the Palestinian world is this leadership. But this leadership doesn't represent the Palestinian or the Arab. It represents a corrupting, a degradation and a violent, violent, brutal hijacking. When I was living in this region, there were people that worked with us that wanted to create cooperation. We said, we always said that there was always a clear position of the overwhelming majority of Israel. We would always, always trade land for peace. That was a given. And it should be a given. I would give back, Aubrey, Jerusalem for peace. You want Jerusalem to be your capital, take Jerusalem. Take the Temple Mount, it's yours. Peace is a higher value. And that's been the core position of multiple Israeli governments. So, we have to be willing to understand, and the last couple of sentences, just our last paragraph to get through. So in 1936, the Peel Commission set up by Great Britain, tried to figure out what to do in Palestine. And they say, let's give 80% to the Arabs who live locally and 20% to the Jews. Let's have two states. Huge no by Husseini, Mufti Husseini, who kills, brutally murders, savagely all of the brothers and sisters in the Nashashibi clan. 10 years later, it's 1947. There's a partition plan made by the United Nations. Again, majority of the country to the Arabs, a small amount to the Jews. The Arabs say absolutely no. Not because the Arabs wanted to say no, but because a corrupt leadership hijacked the voices of the people. Big no. That's no number two to a two-state solution. In 1948, war breaks out. And when the 1948 war breaks out, let's be really clear what happened. There were two population transfers. That's just true. There were 850,000 Jews. Some of them left voluntarily, others were forcibly expelled from Arab lands, and they were refugees that were absorbed in Israel. And there were about 850,000 Palestinians, some of them who left because their leaders said leave, we're going to destroy the Jews and come back, and others were forcibly evicted without question, so let's be really clear. Yes, there was definitely part of both of those groups that were forcibly evicted without question. Israel was not meant to survive the war. Five armies attacked Israel, outgunned, out planed, out weaponed, out moneyed in every possible way. And Israel somehow survives the war. So, the war is over. They set up a United Nations Relief and Works Agency to resettle the Palestinian refugees. Seventy years later, that agency still has a budget of a billion dollars a year, because the refugees were intentionally not resettled. Because the infliction of pain on that population for political means was a given for the tragic leadership that they had. And all the 850,000 refugees that went to Israel were absorbed and resettled. So that's actually what happened. Then we get to 1967, time three. Again, there's a noose around Israel. Nasr says, I'm going to destroy and wipe you out, bloodbath. When people say they're going to do that to you, believe them. So Israel launches a preemptive strike. And then in that war three, that's when Israel takes Gaza from Egypt. Let's call it the West Bank from Jordan. Now we're in 1967. Israel wants to give it back. Egypt doesn't want it. Egypt doesn't want Gaza. Jordan doesn't want the West Bank. So again, there can be land for peace. The Arab League meets in Khartoum, with the kind of influence of that kind of fanatical, genocidal relationship to the Jews, and they issued the three no's of Khartoum. No negotiation, no recognition, no peace. Because that's three. Year 2000, number four, Barack with Clinton there meets Arafat in Camp David and says, take all of Gaza and 94% of the West Bank, create a Palestinian state, it's yours. Arafat says no. And finally in 2008, Ehud Olmert who's then the Prime Minister adds more land to that. And again, Abbas, the successor to Arafat says no. So five, separate times. Five separate times, let's be really clear about this. So anyone in the chat threads, if you're not aware of this, and you're talking about this, you're not in the storyline, you're not being a lover. You've got to really study this carefully, it's a big deal. I know it's hard to hear. It's hard, it's painful. And then last piece, between 2000-2008, 2005 Israel withdraws from Gaza unilaterally, because Egypt doesn't want it. Egypt won't take it. Israel withdraws from Gaza unilaterally. Gazans elect Hamas, knowing full well who Hamas is to represent them. Okay, Gazans elect Hamas, okay. And Hamas at that point could have done something gorgeous. Gorgeous, Aubrey. I stick my life on this, I should be struck dead in this moment if this is not true. Hamas could have built a flourishing state, a flourishing state. The entire world was pouring aid. What Hamas did is they took that aid away from their original vision of creating social welfare. They took it away from education. And they literally turned Hamas into a terrorist cell. And anyone who opposed them, because there's a ton of good Gazans. Of course there are. They were slaughtered, Aubrey. And if we're not willing to speak that, I'm not. I'm not a lover. If I'm afraid of common threads, I'm not a lover. But that's actually what happened. Men and women and children who were the most beautiful humans in the world, Gazans, were slaughtered by Hamas over the last, since 2005. Today's 2023. Happens regularly. That's the nature of what's happened. And it's like, oh, my God, let's understand this. Now, does that mean that Israel is innocent of everything? Of course, it's not. Israel's not, the United States is not. Israel is culpable, and the United States is on a thousand fronts. But the United States is not the Chinese Communist Party. They're not the same. There's a moral distinction between the flawed and broken United States, and the Chinese Communist Party. They're not the same. Israel is not Hamas. If we're not able to draw that moral distinction, cha.
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that whole piece. It's deeply and painfully received as it must be. And I think one of the challenges that we're facing now is that I've seen videos myself that say, here's how we debunk the story of the five no’s. Here's how we debunk the story of the five no’s, and here's how we tell the story of the desire for Empire. That's the American Empire, the British Empire and this desire to colonize and hold power, and wield that power mercilessly. Create open-air prisons for all the indigenous. There's whole narratives on the other side that are well produced, and cleverly made, and compelling narratives that people are seeing that have this contradictory story to the history. So history itself, the story, if we're trying to track the plotline, when there's multiple stories, that's where it gets really, really difficult to actually understand, because these stories come out. And then you're like, well, fuck, what do I actually believe? What is true? I wasn't there. I wasn't able to see it with my own eyes. And both sides present this compelling narrative.
DR. GAFNI: I was chatting a little while ago to people that I'm very close to and that I love dearly. All of us, any of us who've ever been in couplehood will recognize this. Because it always exists in couplehood, in relationships always. There's, what do I feel? And what's the storyline? Those are both legitimate. What am I feeling? What's the feeling tone? And what's the storyline? Let's just see if we can track this for a second. Is there a way to create a kind of barometer? Or is it just hopelessly confused? Let's just check, see if we can track this. It's a fair question, and I appreciate it very much, brother. So in the end, Israel's a pluralistic democracy in which women vote, women are honored. Feminism has a place. The dignity of Eros has a place, the dignity of desire has a place. There's fierce contestation between different sides, there's radical critique of the government up and down. There's protest movements every place on anything that seems to violate the dignity of the feminine or the dignity of she. That's the nature of the State of Israel. That is a plethora of evidence, incontrovertible, undeniable. That's just true. Hamas running Gaza desecrates the feminine, desecrates the feminine body, does honor killings against its own daughters and sisters and wives. Violates anything that even comes close. There's no free speech, there's no elections that are free in any sense, shape or form. There's no sense of democracy, there's no dissonance. You're destroyed, killed, brutally and tortured ad hominem. So let's just say, can we make a distinction between those two? I think we can. I think we can. And here's the thing, the people producing that confusion, the people producing those well produced videos that if you don't know the story, and you haven't studied it carefully are easily persuasive in the attention economies of short attention web silos, right? Those people are supporting Hamas. They're supporting this position. Those people exploded all over the world in support of Hamas. That is the desecration of Eros and the feminine and democracy and free elections. I mean, Israel is a place in which a fifth of Israel is Arab Muslims who serve in the Israeli army, who participate in the Israeli government, who can throw an election and determine who's the Prime Minister. So, is Israel an imperfect flawed mess? Israel is an imperfect fucking flawed mess. And if you want me to start to get going on critiques of Israel and corruption and different Israeli systems, I could talk about it from today till tomorrow. There's a lot to say. Of course, that's true. But there's a fundamental distinction. How many viewers in the chat threads if they had to make a decision, if they were brutally honest with themselves, let's do a real thought experiment. Let's be real lovers, and be in real authenticity. If you were offered a choice, you can live in Tel Aviv, or you can live in Gaza. I will wager anything, anyone who's a lover and who's honest, how many people in the chat threads from around America or around the world will choose to live under Hamas in Gaza themselves? How many feminine Goddesses who are in the chat boxes, how many people have participated in the full beauty of the emergence of the feminine are going to say, I'm going to now go bring my daughters, my sisters. How many men are going to bring their wives and go live under Hamas in Gaza or Tel Aviv? You have a choice. You can go to Tel Aviv or Gaza.

AUBREY: I think that's such a powerful point to really illustrate, because, I think there's this narrative that, oh, I wouldn't want to live in Gaza just because of Israeli oppression. But people are not realizing the internal oppressive nature of Hamas towards its own people, towards the feminine. And that's I think where distinction really is important to kind of recognize here. I mean, the whole world erupted in protests and in anguish and in devastation over the death of Mahsa Amini who took off her burqa and said no more oppression of the feminine, and then she was slaughtered. And again this is a different state. The similarities and differences--
DR. GAFNI: This is Iran which is by Hamas's own public statement, and Iran's, Iran is the thought and spiritual partner according to many reports. Actually, the okay for the slaughter was given by a group of Tehrani officials working with Hamas, the Monday before the slaughter. But it's very clear that this has Iran's fingerprints all over it. You point to Mahsa Amini and you're so right, brother. But let's even go together the next step. And again, I apologize for saying it because it's so hard to hear. But we have to say it. 14 and 15-year-old girls, all through this year, were pulled out of Iranian schools and killed by the Revolutionary Guard, the allies of Hamas. Simply for wanting to affirm something of the dignity of their feminine. I mean, that's what we're talking about. And so, there's a choice to be made here. And here's the thing, there's very few places in the world where there's a bright line between right and wrong. But as goes the dignity of Eros, as goes the dignity of desire, as goes the dignity of human freedom, goes to the world. And whatever happens in Israel is going to happen in the United States. It's going to happen all over Europe. It's one world, it's one breath, it's one love, it's one heart. There's no more local, there's no more Muslims and Jews and Christians. We're going to be beyond nation states. This is not a nation state issue. And I wish by the way that this should not be handled by Israel. My prayer, Aubs, is that this should not be Israel's to-do. This should be the job of an international force. Sadly, there is no international force of that nature. Doesn't exist. But in other words, should this be done by a nation state? No. The structure is a tragedy. And we need to move towards that one breath and that one heart and one love, my brother.
AUBREY: Part of the problem that I see in my own critique, from just looking at Netanyahu's comments are, comments like, our enemy has only begun to pay the price, there are no innocent Palestinians. And again, we can fact check those and make sure that that's accurate. But from everything that I've seen, even video clips, it seems to be accurate. But you understand that from the lens of the deep pain and anger, which is why handling this response from a place of pain and anger is not going to be the best possible response. It's like that moment that you've been violated like that, how you respond. It's like that old quote from Nietzsche, he who fights monsters must be careful that he does not become a monster himself. This is human nature that's ultimately playing out. And yes, there are certainly Israelis who now become radicalized because of the issues. And, actually, probably equally want to wipe out Palestinians in the same kind of genocidal impulse from this pain.
DR. GAFNI: I want to go slow here. So I hear you, brother. I hear you with all my heart and soul. I hear you. And again, I have to check what Netanyahu said, or what Hertzog said. But I would say, anyone who says that any people are all of a kind, has actually stepped out of the field of Eros and stepped out of the field of love and stepped out of the field of value. I want to be really clear, you can't say that all Germans are of a kind in the middle of the Third Reich. That's not a possible statement. It's not true. What I can say is that the overwhelming majority of Israel understands that not to be true. Now, there's a second question, which is, will individual Israelis violate the code of ethics of the Israeli army? That might be true. If they do, they will be held accountable. So the question again is, who is your hero? There are always individuals who violate the ethos of the people. In the Hamas world, the hero is one who actually goes, stops an Israeli car, and kills the children in front of the parents and the parents in front of the children, as almost happened to me, driving the car with my children in the backseat. So I know it well, I know what I speak. And that person becomes the hero. In Israel, when someone violates the ethics of the Israeli army, the code of ethics, then they're court martialed, and they go to prison. The question is, who's the hero? Now the question is, will Israel become radicalized? So, my strong belief is that Israel will hold its moral center. The question is, and this is the hard question, Aubs, for which I don't have a simple answer. I'm holding the uncertainty, and I don't have the information. The question is, did Americans have a moral obligation to storm the beaches of Normandy and bomb strongholds of Nazism knowing innocent people would be killed? That's not an easy question. It's not an easy question. But if they did, that means that there is a moral concept that says, there's a distinction, intentions matter. Targeting civilians for brutal rape, murder, mutilation is not the same as responding, knowing that innocents will tragically be killed. Those are not morally equal. And being able to make that distinction is critical. But then even after we make that distinction, then the voice of Abraham has to come in and say, no, no, we reject that distinction. And if there's any innocent people. That's why this shouldn't be done by Israel. Because it's too easy to distort the story. It's why we desperately need to create a new grammar of value, which is a shared grammar of value, which is homo amor, which is all in for all life. It can't be subverted or degraded as an old rivalrous conflict between competing visions of God or nation states. We've got to realize we're one breath and one heart, and one love, and one desire. And one desire.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's true. That's true. In many ways, this is a contest for the soul of humanity. Can we find that shared soul? It's become so polarized and so confusing. But if you look closely, you can see the contradictions, you can see the leader of Hamas saying, "Oh, no, we didn't intend to hurt anybody, Muslims wouldn't do that," blah, blah, blah, and then in another breath, calling for a day of rage around the world. A day of rage, a day of violence. Just one way to interpret the day of rage around the world, and calling on the activism, which what does that mean? Does that mean targeting soldiers in these different countries who are participating in the war? No, it means targeting civilians.
DR. GAFNI: We just have to say that there is a way, and I think we've seen today. We can find our way through. We can discern, but I think it's maybe, brother, worth saying maybe two things here. And the first thing that I think we need to say, we need to articulate, is that you can't... What is Hamas? What is the degradation of Christianity in the white South which comes to witness torture of black men and women? These are degraded collapsed horrors. And what we need to do though is not respond to collapsed horrors with a kind of rejection of value. What we've done is, we've looked at the tragedies of pre-modernity, represented by Hamas, which is essentially pre-modern ethnocentric brutality of the worst kind, which existed throughout Christendom in the pre modern world. But Christendom and Judaism met the Western enlightenment. Islam didn't meet the Western enlightenment, that engagement didn't happen. And so, the classical degradations that lived in Christendom, for example, in the Crusades, but actually have in some sense began to evolve. This Catholic Pope is not the same as the desecrated popes of the Middle Ages. There's been an evolution of love and evolution of consciousness. At the center of Islam, you still have martyrdom, and you still have the killing of the infidel, and you still have structures of tragic thought. So, we can't respond to that with a kind of pallid, insipid, postmodern relativism, or postmodern stepping out of the field of value. We have to actually be filled with passion. We have to be filled with new stories of desire, we have to be filled with a kind of a recognition that we need to actually develop these new churches and mosques and synagogues and Buddhist centers of evolutionary love. We need a world religion of love, but not love as a pallid, insipid, social construction. You go in ChatGPT for "Is love real?" No, love's not real, it's value real. No, value is not real. Everyone makes it up for themselves. Not that, but an actual powerful culture of Eros, in which Eros and ethics are one, and we sacrifice for Eros, and we live for Eros. We're warriors of Eros. I mean, it's why people responded to Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". Because Aragon and Arwin, when all is lost, and Aragon can't find his way, and you and I have talked about this before, Arwin says, "Trust this." And she points to the even star around her neck that lays on her breast, and they begin to kiss, and they make love in the dream. And she's saying, trust this, trust the goodness of desire. Trust that the elf queen is willing to become mortal to be with the King of Gondor even though they're both going to grow old and die, because that's the dignity of being a human being. Trust the hobbits of the Shire. In other words, we have to reconvene the Fellowship of the Ring in which there's Jews and Muslims and Christians and atheists and humanists and Syrians and Iraqis and Egyptians, and Israelis. And we've got to come together not in an insipid, empty, postmodern, desiccated center, where there's no ground of value. But we need to enter the field of Eros and become warriors of Eros, and stand for Eros and live for desire and the goodness of desire. And if we don't have that passion and that aliveness that you live so beautifully in the Aubrey world. Whether it's Fit For Service, or whether it's the events that you put on where that ethos is alive naturally. And as we're bringing the Dharma and the medicine together, in our work together, if we don't have that aliveness, so then we've got this empty flatland of postmodernism. And the contrast is, Hamas, that standing from their perspective for value. Because they're saying, fuck post modernism, value's real, God's real, but we don't have any vision of it that's real. So they go for the most degraded, desiccated, horrific vision of it. So, we have a responsibility here. Words of love.
AUBREY: Amen. I want to go into this because we've invoked it a few times, into this Lord of the Rings mythology. So, one of the issues and the critiques I could say of this is it creates that first stage of consciousness, a clear and simple distinction between good and evil. Like Sauron is clearly evil, and correctly identified as that, but all orcs, all unilaterally, all orcs are of evil nature. There's been a movement to make the Jews the orcs. And that's been historical not only in the Arab world, but throughout the world. And, there's been ways in which people have made the Muslims, the orcs. This creates this kind of racism, this kind of speciesism in that case, but racism of a certain sort. Now, in a more evolved story, there would have been peaceful orc communities who are holding their own little orc villages and raising their young and nursing them at their breasts, and making sweet orc love. There would have been this whole other complex issue. And then there would have been those who would rise up against... Orcs who would rise up against Sauron, and join the forces of the fellowship. And there would be an orc faction who had... It was told in such simplistic terms, and I think, then you evolve. So if you evolve the story to have this other story of, all right, well, it's not as simple as that. And then you evolve to the third part of the story, where can we locate Sauron? And you could locate Sauron in the universal forces of evil, Sitra Achra, the dark forces that seek to undermine and degrade Eros, life, goodness itself for the sake of absolute power, destruction, control, distortion. Then you could look at someone like Saruman and say, maybe Saruman is represented by the war machine, the military industrial complex. There's a dark covenant between the war machine, the military industrial complex, and this other worldly evil, and they get people enrolled in there. So, they would also in this story, there would be humans fighting on the side of Sauron, there would be elves fighting on the side. There would be all kinds of different dwarves fighting on the side of Sauron, because they've been hijacked into this belief, so it wouldn't just be orcs. So, you could make easy species this decisions. And then you would have to see, where is other force? And then it gets complicated, because that's also a position. I talked to a dear brother of mine, who's also a fucking warrior for God and good and value, I trust that intensely. And he locates the evil here, in the Saruman, and to use this analogy, he locates the evil here in the war machine. What about the six billion we sent to Iran? Do we not think that that was going to create more war? And what about this, that was just designed to create more war so that the machine could propagate more war, and that the wealthy who are running these machines could become more wealthy and then there's a greater move at play to create more chaos, division, distortion, because there's a power play, there's an aggregation of wealth play, and there's a sacred covenant between that and evil itself. Evil that lives in the sky somewhere, let's say but also can be found in our own hearts. And so, there's a more complicated plotline of a story that actually reflects the truth here.
DR. GAFNI: That is both so important. And I don't want to say beautiful, but beautiful in being able to see it. Without being able to see that part of the story, it's an incomplete story. Meaning, what you're pointing towards, brother, which I think is just so completely necessary to say, without which we're so fundamentally incomplete that the larger story, there is a great battle between good and evil, which is not a level one battle. It's not level two. We've recognized that we're all mixtures of good and evil. There's a level three, where there is a great battle between good and evil. There is a battle between Gandalf and the Fellowship of the Ring and Sauron, and the Saruman forces on the other side, that's real. But that battle runs through the heart of every nation, and runs through the heart of every person. That's what we mean when we say, in this moment of crisis, we have to decide that we're going to do what Ibrahim did, the father of the Arab and the Hebrew world, Ibrahim. What he does is called to the crossing. Chapter 12 in the book of Genesis, he crosses over to the other side. Says, the whole world is on that side. They're lost in a kind of win-lose metric, and they're dominated by Sauron who hijacks the Saruman war machine and your unfolding of it. We're going across the other side, we're going to be fearless. We're going to be fearless for love. We're going to be warriors of love. But that doesn't mean that we avoid realpolitik. That means that we engage realpolitik, that we're willing to make moral distinctions. I want to just really get this with you clearly. We have to be willing to engage in making distinctions. And here's the paradox of it, right? The day on the Hebrew Wisdom Calendar, where you and I once drank a lot of wine, which is perlwein, which is this day, which is the day in which there's a figure called Haman, who represents the forces of evil. There's this standing against Haman, and there's this political triumph over the forces of Haman. That's part one. That's level one story. But level two of the same story, then on that same day, which commemorates this triumph over evil. You're supposed to get so ecstatically drunk, which you and I began to do, I won't say how far we got. But we began to do, as we lifted glasses. We won't talk about how far you could get or didn't get or anything like that in public or anything like that. I wouldn't do any of that, like on a public podcast, of course. But, we're kind of raising the glasses there. And the idea is, you're supposed to get so drunk, you can't tell the difference between the good and evil. And that's what Rumi is talking about when he says, let's meet in that field beyond good and evil. The field beyond good and evil doesn't mean we don't make moral distinctions. We make moral distinctions, we live in those distinctions. And then we recognize that there's this field beyond where can actually all be good, right? That there's no one who's intrinsically, there's no people, there's no nation that's intrinsically in their essence on the good or evil side. And that actually, that's a decision of every human being in every human community, are we going to cross over to the other side? Are we going to do the crossing? And the only response, brother, as you and I have talked so many times to the meta crisis, is the crossing. Is that we all cross over together, and we create this culture of Eros. You and I didn't talk about this before, and I'm not tracking closely, because our scheduling people are trying to get us together, you're creating a festival I think in Las Vegas, which is a music festival. Is that accurate?
AUBREY: Mm-hmm.
DR. GAFNI: So, I looked at, I think Krista sent me some of the language around it. And I loved the language around... I apologize, give me the name of it.
AUBREY: Arkadia, Festival For a More Beautiful World.
DR. GAFNI: Arkadia. So when I looked at the language around it, I loved the language. Because what it was saying is, we have to actually create a culture of Eros. We've got to come together as warriors, and feel the music. I think there's a reason, my brother, and I don't want to break down, just shattered with tears now, but there's a reason why Hamas attacked this rave, this music festival. Because this music festival actually represented this possible culture, this new possibility. In other words, the medicine and the Dharma come together, which is what you and I are so committed to, then something new is created, which actually has the power to stand against a medieval distortion and a hijacking and degradation of desire. But it's got to be that powerful. In other words, it's kind of intuitively led, what we call in the lineage, what you referred to, Sitra Achra, the other side, Sauron. Sauron understands that you attack the psychonaut on the journey, because they're actually holding, I want to understand what happened there. They're holding the most powerful vision of actually what the world could be. I mean, it's actually when you kind of hold that, you can barely breathe when you say that. Then when that medicine is then infused with Dharma, which is drawn from Hebrew sources and from Islamic sources, bring me Rumi, bring me Hafeez, bring me the thousands of Islamic rebel poets, bring me Rabia, the great Muslim woman. In other words, bring me right the root core of Islam in its gorgeousness, and bring Rumi together with the Tsar, with Lauria, together with Teresa of Avila, together with Naguna, but it's got to be with music, it's got to be with the medicine, it's got to be with dharma. It's not a trivial pursuit. So when I read your texts on Arkadia, that's not a trivial pursuit. That's not casual. But we have to bring the dharma of making distinctions together with the music, together with the Eros, and be fucking tender and fierce in the same moment. And that's Lord of the Rings.
AUBREY: Amen. Amen. And I think, so much from this has allowed a clarification, hopefully, in myself and the listeners. I will just speak my final piece of uncertainty. I'm not convinced that Netanyahu doesn't have a little Saruman in him. Obviously Gandalf trusts him and he trusted, he's leading people and he's part of the good. And there is a small, and I'm not making conclusions, and my uncertainty isn't an insipid and pallid certainty of any sort. But I look at this, and I go, huh, from some of the things I've heard said. And again, it's filtered, and it's hard to know the truth. But there's a small uncertainty that potentially this leader could be actually Saruman. We could see that it's part of a greater war machine. I don't know the answer to that. And I think as events play out, and as history, we'll be able to see, we'll see, hopefully, what is actually there, and what's on that side. Because of course, if that's true, and again, there's a whole vector of people who claim a false flag operation. How did Hamas get in? Were they let in? And if they were let in, what was the reason why? Was it for some other purpose? Was it for the war machine itself? And these are all uncertain questions and questions that we don't have answers to. There's a part of me, that while fundamentally, the structure that we laid out, absolutely, it seems very clear to me. The players and actors in this, I think we have, at least for me, I'm still holding a bit of uncertainty about some of the actors and players in this story. It's so unbelievably painful and horrific to even hold that possibility. But from what I've seen, there's some small part of me that holds that possibility of uncertainty of, is Netanyahu upholding the good, the true, the beautiful in his best way? Or has he been somehow corrupted and become Saruman in this story? I don't have any answers to that, I don't expect you to have any answers to that, either. But I just want to share with the listeners that I'm holding that uncertainty, and I'm praying that he's not been converted to Saruman. And that's not what happened here. I'm praying for all people. It's been so hard, man. It's been so fucking hard.
DR. GAFNI: So fucking hard, right? I mean, brother, I hear you. And let me just say, and again, and I want to just feel this with you, love. In other words, the easy thing to share and respond now would be just to hold it with you. But I've got to hold it in, because that's the covenant. We are in the Fellowship of the Ring together, right? We're brothers in the Fellowship of the Ring. So, I can't speak for what goes on Bibi's heart and soul in this moment. I am not in his heart and soul in that way. I do know two things. One is, it's impossible to know a person through the way that they're projected in the filter bubbles of the attention economy. One. Two, deeper, the ethos that Bibi has upheld virtually his entire life, whether you're virulently opposed to him as half of Israel is, or supportive of him, as certainly part of Israel as, his ethos has been an ethos of universal grammar of value. It hasn't been a racist ethos at all, in any sense, shape or form. I don't know Bibi. We've conversed only once. I've chatted with him once at an event someplace, where I happened to have a book I wrote, "Soul Prints". I gave him a copy, and we talked about the book for a little while on a porch. So I don't know him well. I would say the danger, the danger is of a different nature. And maybe that's what you're pointing to, brother. The danger is, how do we create a new culture of Eros, a new human and a new humanity that's not run by a civilizational fabric, which itself violates love, which is what a war machine does. So, in Bibi's position of trying to protect Israel and his complex set of alliances at different times. When he draws closer to Putin, or makes an overture to China, and engages in a kind of, as has become acceptable in the world, there's this kind of acceptability to this kind of game of realpolitik which violates the field of love. So, has Bibi gotten lost in that? My intuition is, that until now, the Bibi that I was aware of until a couple of years ago, when I was kind of deeply following this, because I haven't followed it closely in the last several years. But the Bibi that I knew in the time with which I lived in Israel, which was till 2006, was not the person you described. I sat and felt him, it's not who he was. Who is Bibi now? I don't know. But I do know one thing, Aubs. I do know that the nature of the pluralistic democracy of Israel, the feminine honoring, the desire honoring, the freedom honoring democracy of Israel, which has opposed Bibi with such passion, and with such Eros, what they call the Brothers in Arms, who completely opposed Bibi and kind of opposed judicial reform. We're now at this moment kind of actually completely engaged in actually simply protecting the women and children and men of the state. They took Bibi on. The top army officers, top intelligence people. So if Bibi engaged in a false flag here, I will wager anything that Israel will disclose it and hold them accountable. I mean, that's the nature of--
AUBREY: I agree with that.
DR. GAFNI: If that's true, this is not 9/11 in the United States. If Bibi engaged in a false flag, which I have no information about, but if Bibi engaged in a false flag of the kind that you're suggesting, Israel will hold him accountable, of that I have no doubt. As they should.
AUBREY: I agree with that, and the whole world will. It's just a matter. And Gandalf, there was a time where Saruman was Gandalf's teacher, and Gandalf trusted him. Gandalf was not a dummy. If you go to this story, Gandalf is not a dummy. Saruman couldn't have been all bad at all. But there was some point, some dark moment where another dark covenant was made. That's the only uncertainty that I'm holding. I'm also holding the certainty that if that's the case, that the goodness of the world will discover it, disclose it and find it. And, it will be dealt with because, I think, in the holding of, hopefully the holding of value, if we can return to this story of value, I 100% agree with that. He will be held accountable. It's such a difficult and complex time and I just felt that as we started this, there's certainties and uncertainties. And for me to also share that, I share in many of the certainties that you've shared, less so on the historical certainties because I haven't done the research, but it all makes sense. But also certainties in the story of value, certainties in this necessity to move beyond moral equivalency and this universal relativism of all things. I don't believe in that. I believe in the good, the true, the just, the beautiful. I am on team life, I have picked a side. I am team life, I am team God, team goodness. And when I say God, not my God, not that my God is an awesome God and your God is false. In the universal oneness of all reality, conspiring for greater complexity, evolution, beauty, throughout life. That is universally my team. I guess this is a moment for faith, and a moment for faith that throughout whatever difficulties come, that there will be, the destruction will yield the creation of something more beautiful, rather than the opposite, rather than this dystopic vision of the future which is also very possible. But it's a time to hold that faith and to stand as strong as we can in the truth of what we know in our own hearts, and feel in our own bodies.
DR. GAFNI: Thank you, brother. I want to receive. No but, and just received. On my side, your side, our side, on life side, I just want to end in a difficult way but one that I think also needs to be said. The orcs, and I want to go in the way that you went, brother. The orcs are manufactured by Saruman, who's an agent of Sauron. Here's the thing. The Hamas brutalizers are actually tragically not works. And here's the thing. If you go inside the beating breast of a young Hamas boy, who was raised in a culture of hate, your heart can't help but break. Because actually, he's not an orc. Actually, he's trapped. And my heart breaks for the Hamas boy who's become a terrorist, who crossed over and committed atrocities. Because actually, divinity breathes in him. As he commits unbearable atrocities, he doesn't actually have the luxury of being immune to a sense of unimaginable shame that actually lives in his body. And so, he feels this unimaginable shame. He's told that he can't trust his body, that he can't trust the goodness of his desire, that he can't trust the feminine, that he can't trust his own senses. That the only path right to Heaven is one that's strewn with him directly inflicting suffering. Whether or not you actually cut the baby's head off or you mutilate the baby, that's not the issue. Really? That's what we're talking about in social media? Was the baby mutilated? Was the head cut off? Babies were mutilated horribly. Babies were murdered.
AUBREY: Yeah, there's pictures.
DR. GAFNI: Right, but that Hamas boy is devastated, is devastated. The tragedy is that Israel has no choice but to kill them. The same way the American boys landing on the beach of Normandy had no choice but to kill the Nazi gunners. But here's the thing, we can take no joy in that. We can't have any celebrations about that. When you saw people celebrating on the streets of London, you know there's something so violently wrong in the culture of love, when you read the description of the lineage of the Egyptian taskmasters, and the great Exodus story that Spartacus and Black American spirituals are all based on. When the Egyptians are drowned in the Red Sea, the people begin to sing praise, and the voice from heaven says, how dare you sing praise when my creatures are drowning in the sea? There's no cause for jubilation, there's no cause for some glory of vengeance. Even if we have to commit actions for the sake of the greater good and the fabric of humanity, we do it with our hearts broken. Even if we have to kill Hamas terrorists, we do that with our hearts broken.
AUBREY: Amen.
DR. GAFNI: There's no joy here, there's no jubilation here. There's only a broken heart. But that broken heart can't just be tendered, also has to be fierce.
AUBREY: Yeah, amen. For many years, the primary charity that my company Onnit was donating to was a charity called Seeds of Peace. Seeds of Peace brought Palestinian and Israeli boys and girls together. And they had kind of like a neutral playground area.
DR. GAFNI: I know the program.
AUBREY: And they would tell stories, because we were in touch with them, because we donated to them every year. That was our primary nonprofit that we were supporting. The stories of, at first, they're very kind of cagey and separatist and sitting. But as they started playing, a soccer ball came between them. And then all of a sudden, they started kicking the soccer ball back and forth, very much like the Christmas story in the World War. As they started playing, and as they started seeing each other, they just saw boys and girls again. They didn't see enemies, they saw actually the universal common bond between each other, and then they would go back. The idea is, they would go back to their homes, and they would go back to their school yards, and they would share, actually, I just spent a week with a bunch of Jewish boys, or I just spent a week with a bunch of Palestinian boys, and they're awesome, and they're my friends. This was the idea of, how do we see each other? How do we actually, I see you, I see you. And that's ultimately where we need to get to where everybody sees the beating, loving, breathing heart of the humanity inside. And then, just as if someone breaks into my house with violent intent to come and rape my wife or kill me, I have a gun, and I will use it, but I will take no joy in that. There will be no me standing over the body of the attempted rapists, and seeing his gun and seeing mine, and then celebrating that. It's only sadness. It's only sadness for what drove him to such depravity, and also, the necessary actions of what had to be done in that moment. I think we have lost that in many ways in our culture, that sense. But also if it happened to us, we would naturally know and it would emerge, because it's a first value and first principle of the cosmos. It lives within us this sense of all three stages of consciousness as you ultimately put it. It's just true.

DR. GAFNI: Mad blessing, brother. Mad blessing. Mad blessing to our children, to my son who's in Israel in this moment, who's deeply, deeply engaged. Mad blessings to all of the innocent men and women and children in Gaza. Breaks our hearts. And mad and fierce love and discernment and recognition and honor and blessing to Israel for wisdom, for mad wisdom in this time. Let love and wisdom and fierceness come together.
AUBREY: Amen.
DR. GAFNI: We're people of the sword of love. Let us wield it. I love you mad, brother. Thank you.
AUBREY: I love you mad as well. And thank you everybody for listening and tuning in, and hearing us explore this impossibly painful and difficult situation. We love you as well, even if you hate us after this conversation. Ultimately, it's your part of life, and we love you for that.
DR. GAFNI: All in for all life.
AUBREY: All in for all life. So it is. Thanks for tuning into this podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni and myself. Obviously, by the time this podcast airs, many things will have transpired. Probably many horrific things will have transpired. But we hope and we pray that all of this tragedy and all of this horror awakens a greater spirit for all humanity, a greater understanding of ourselves and a greater understanding of what it means to stand all in for all life. Sending you love and blessings, whoever you are. May peace and love and joy find you in your life even in the most difficult situations.