Absolutely delighted to be back again with Dr. Marc Gafni to try and tackle one of the most complex issues in philosophy and religion; the causal root of Evil.
The thesis Marc offers is that the atrocities we see in the world can all be described as a failed love story. Our own stories serving as a strand in the braid of this universal cosmic love story. This frame will help bring understanding to how much of what we are seeing in today’s culture, from AI to the war in the Middle East. The surprise reveal is how the box office hit Barbie, actually points to the reality of our failed love story in culture. 

Check out more of Dr. Marc Gafni’s work athttps://www.marcgafni.com/.

AUBREY MARCUS: Next up, we have an uninterrupted podcast with Dr. Mark Gaffney, although it was interrupted slightly by some internet connection issues. So if you notice any hiccups in the transmission, just understand that we've tried to weave it together as best we could, but this conversation is fluid and stands alone in a beautiful way.So thank you for your understanding and enjoy this podcast with Dr. Mark Gaffney. Mark, we are back at an insanely challenging and difficult and strange time in the world. And one of the things that we've been talking about is that so much of what we're experiencing is a failed love story. And you could look at not only the evil that exists in the world, but so much of the challenge that exists in the world because we've lost the plot of the universe and our participation in the universe, something you call the cosmo erotic universe. We've lost the plot of the love story and we've forgotten that we're the main characters in this love story. And when we forget the plot we go off plot 

MARC GAFNI: You know that 

AUBREY MARCUS: And when we're off plot, 

MARC GAFNI: Yeah. I mean you just summarize beautifully. First, it's great to see you brother, right? And you just summarize beautifully, the very very core of cosmetic humanism and you and I have been in deep conversation about this last couple of years, but particularly the last several months, as events in the world have exploded in so many ways and what I've been trying to point towards and what we've been talking about so deeply is, as you said, we got to get beneath the headlines into a place where we can actually make sense. We can actually do sense making. We can engage in the sensuality of sense making and really understand what's happening. And at the very core of it is this equation, evil equals failed love stories, failed love stories, create evil. Now that only makes sense, if we understand that reality is not empty, reality is full, and it has inherent eros and telos, that reality is not merely a fact, that reality is a story, and this is so deep because what we're doing is we're creating the ground of a world religion, the ground of a new way of being in the world, the ground of what we might call the move from homo sapien to homo amor, right, the new human in the new humanity, which each of us listening in our own lives actually can participate in that. Which actually makes life alive and wild and beautiful. So just to follow the thread and then we can deepen. What we've begun to understand is that reality is not really a fact, reality is a story. That by itself is huge. Reality has a plotline. Reality actually has inherent, in its structure and narrative arc. Reality is going somewhere. And the plot line of reality is the evolution of love. It's just so stunning. And we don't mean this in any kind of retro fundamentalist way, nor in a kind of tinsel superficial kind of new age way, but as the deepest structure of the interior and exterior sciences, reality is not merely a fact, reality is a story, reality is not an ordinary story. Reality is a love story. Reality is not an ordinary love story. Reality is an evolutionary love story, an outrageous love story. And then finally, this word begins to become literally the single most real thing as a human being that I could hear, which is that my story, my personal story, has a plot line and my personal story is also a love story and that love story is not separate from the universal love story. It's not separate from the cosmic love story. My personal love story is a chapter in a verse in the universal love story. Once I get that I understand that, those are not words. All of this is just words until we learn it in the stories of our lives. When I actually begin to understand, that's not just words, that's actually the ontological, the true, the real, it's more real than real, it's real, it's reality. Once I get that, then I realize, oh, if that's true, if it's a cosmorotic universe, if it's an intimate universe, if it's the universal love story, and if I live in the denial of the plotline of my own story, I pathologize and I break down. Right. And I move to act out. So to go insane, insanity is to deny my identity, to deny my place, my nature, I'm not in a love story, but I'm not in a love story. That's not a psychological problem. That's not a mystical problem. That's actually a violation of my core identity. And perhaps we could go a couple of steps. So first let's kind of show that this is true. How do we know this is true? Why is this true? So that'd be kind of step one, we can talk about why it's true, but then step two and step three, just to point towards it. So we can kind of see where we're going. On October 7th, there's this brutal, horrific attack, probably as many Gal Gadot from Wonder Woman pointed out, probably the worst atrocity against women in the last 80 years, right? This kind of systemic abuse and rape and torture and dismemberment of women of all ages in front of each other, a horrific atrocity as Hamas kind of enters Israel. As that's happening, Barbie is playing in the theaters. It's an intimate universe. Those two events seem to have nothing to do with each other at all. But actually, both Barbie And Hamas are inexplicable unless you understand them. This is all absent, both from the reviews of Barbie and from the reviews of Hamas, from the news feeds around Hamas, which are massive and everywhere, both Barbie and Hamas are at their core failed love stories, and that approach changes everything. A failed love story creates evil, and there's actually a battle between good and evil, but the battle between good and evil is the battle between love and unlove, the same battle. But we need to understand what that means or we'll lose the battle. We need to understand. So what does the universal love story mean? What does it mean that Barbie's a failed love story? How would that create evil and Barbie is telling the story of what you like to call empire, right? The technocratic totalitarian move for control. And for kind of undermining our essential humanity, which in the end leads towards evil in a very, very deep and profound and horrific way. And of course the story of Hamas, which is a story that has nothing to do with Israel, by the way. Israel's not part of this. It's a jihad story. Jihad, the jihad, which means the struggle, the way it's interpreted now in the jihad world is that the struggle between good and evil is between a certain brand of Islamic faith, militant extreme faith, which is essentially a culture of death against life itself. It's life and anti life and of course jihad happened in Iraq and Syria with Isis islamic state without Israel. So in other words, it's happening in Yemen with the Houthis without Israel. So Israel is not actually the issue. Let's take that off the table. That's a different and important conversation which we've had, but actually, Hamas at its core, and we'll talk about it later, is actually a failed love story. It's a failed story of desire. So that's a beginning, my friend. I mean, to begin to lay that on, that would be true, what we just said. We just literally shifted the world on its axis. Right? It's a huge claim, but we're grounding it in all of the deepest interior and exterior sciences. And to begin to bring this new story of value to the world is actually, this love story as ontological reality is the only way to respond to suffering, pain of the most horrific kind and to the metacrisis in general, which at its core, the metacrisis is a failed love story. And it's only the restoration of the cosmerotic universe, the universe that can actually lead us to take us home, personally and collectively. Wow.

AUBREY MARCUS: So let me gather a few threads and we're going to dive right into this. First of all, you dropped the concept of world religion. And I think it's just worth mentioning that when we say that this is a part of what we mean, it's about understanding the universe, understanding the nature of cosmos itself. And whenever we say world religion, as a context for our own diversity, the many ways, you lead a group called one mountain, many paths. There's many, many ways to understand the nature of the divine and many different practices and many different tracks that you can take, which are all uniquely gorgeous in the way that they've been transmitted through the lineages. And of course, there's the unique challenges that have come with big capital R religion as they've taken these divine sparks and then use them through the forces of empire to wield power and control, et cetera, all of that. But really what we're doing is creating universal truths that allow for a context of diversity of how you worship, the names you use, et cetera.

MARC GAFNI: Totally.

AUBREY MARCUS: So I just wanted to drop in and give that to people who might've been like, “Oh shit, world religion. What are they talking about?”. “No, no, no, no”. It means keep your faith. Let's just all work together. So instead we're fighting over which God is which and which God is the awesome God in which God you worship means that you need to be destroyed. We got to move well beyond that. So that we can actually be one planetary civilization and system, not in the empire way, which is total control and a hierarchical pyramid where there's some one person or one governmental agency at the top and through use of force, they control everyone. No, a context for diversity with all of the different tribes and cultures and nations all represented in their own beauty and allowed to flourish in their own unique way. So I wanted to pick that thread and then also wanted to speak for maybe

MARC GAFNI: Wait, let’s grab that. Wait for a second. Let's grab that. That's a big one. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Okay.

MARC GAFNI: That's a big one. Is that okay? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

MARC GAFNI: Grab that for a second. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, for sure. 

MARC GAFNI: That's great. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I'll bracket the next one.

MARC GAFNI: Bracket the next one. Yeah. So let's drop it in that for a second. It's really important. I say to our gang at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, which you're the board chair of. And we have a kind of operative, sacred instruction, which is we never say the word world religion, without ending, as you did, world religion as a context for our diversity. Right? For the very reasons that you just laid out so beautifully, right? It's world religion always as a context for our diversity to avoid the sense of a totalizing homogeneity. But when you think about it, the next step, I mean, what is religion? Religion is to re ligare, right? It's to re ligare. Ligare is a ligament, but it's the connective tissue. It's the tissue of eros. So to re ligare is to reconnect. It means nothing's outside of the love story. So all's world religion really means is that nothing is outside the circle. And no one's outside the circle. And it's actually one love, and it's one heart, and it's one breath. And at a moment, my brother, as we know so deeply in which the challenges of the metacrisis, our global, our world, in which every single one of us participating in this conversation today has a sense of the whole of the world in a way that no previous generation did. If you're listening in the United States, for example, a plane can fly into Manhattan and take down two towers, kind of an attempt to kind of cut off the ballast of the West, if you will, and Lobel is now local. You just went to work in the morning and all of a sudden a failed love story from some other part of the world came in and destroyed 3,400, 3,500 people, in a period of seconds. So there is no sense of lobel. We're actually omni considerate, Bucky Fuller's word, for the sake of the whole, that's homeo amore, I feel the whole. So world religion becomes at that point, like breathing. In other words. When we have local problems, you can have local religion, local religare. Of course, that made sense. Now we, by definition, if we don't have a shared story of value, then we have no intimacy. Then we have a global intimacy disorder, a shared love story. And so when we read all the time, Aubs, you and I are so deeply involved in so many different tracks and looking at how do we actually make this Da Vinci move, you know, Da Vinci, time between worlds, time between stories, tries in the Renaissance to tell a new story because he knows only that can challenge black death and plague and pandemic and breakdown. So that's what we need to do today. We need to tell this new story of value and it has to be a world religion and we have to not be afraid to say that. But it's always a context for our diversity. So the image is a unique self symphony in which every religion is a unique instrument in the symphony, but all of them are playing music, and music is Eros. Music is love, right? Music is the one love and one Eros that animates the cosmos. And I want to, you know, after your next bracket, which I'm looking forward to, I want to talk about a little bit what we mean, that friends don't think that we're just declaring this. This is not a new age declaration. I'm not going to root this notion of the universal love story before we go to Barbie and Hamas. So we get that this is real. This is not a fantasy. This is literally the most real reality that exists. And not to know that the universe is a love story and I participate in that love story is actually to be insane. And it's why so much of Western psychology doesn't work. Because we're operating without knowing basic answers to the basic questions of our identity, of who we are and where we are and what ought to be done, and we're trying to do this kind of paper over psychology. Which simply breaks down, doesn't work. So if I don't know that I'm in the field of Eros, I'm in the field of She, I'm in the field of a love story, quite literally, that lives uniquely in me, if I don't know that, and I can't actually, so, to actually go deep into that, actually is the most, transformational knowing I can possibly have. But so let's get, but yeah, brackets, that was just on world religion, which is critical. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm glad you opened that up and finished that thought for sure. Now, what I wanted to voice was just somebody who's saying, well, fuck you guys. Because my life hasn't been a love story. My life has been hard, you know? And that's also true that there are certain people who've had a really tough go at this. I mean, and you can look at this in any culture. You could look at this as someone who's growing up, even in Palestine, right? They're not jihadists, they're not supporting Hamas, but Hamas has taken control and limited their availability. I mean, we saw this with Massimini in Iran. She's living in a failed love story where she's not able to live her own love story because the failure of somebody else's love story is then impacting her love story and all of the tragedy of so many. Right. So the tragedy of so many people who've died in the collateral damage in the conflict in Israel, as well as the direct casualties, all of this is sometimes the failure of somebody else's love story prevents you from living your own fucking love story, which is why again, universally, we have to universally affect the love story of the cosmos, so everybody has a chance.

MARC GAFNI: So we're no longer in a world you're saying, and beautifully. Where you can actually withdraw, the illusion that you could withdraw into your own world and live your private love story, has been exploded by this moment in history. So therefore we have to move from homo sapien to homo amor. And homo amor is this new human who's omni considered for the sake of the whole, who knows that the universe is a love story and that it has to be one story. There has to be a shared story of value as a context for diversity. But let's go back to the fuck you for a second because it's so important. There's no one whose story is not a love story, right? So even when my story fails. My story is a love story. As you and I have been talking the last few weeks, I get a text thread every day and I get one text thread from Gaza, which is about people who have been killed in Gaza in the bombings innocent civilians, who Hamas has trapped and not allowed to step out or whatever the particular sets of issues are. Hamas is actually, if there's a colonizer as Douglas Murray pointed out. There's a colonizer in Gaza, it's Hamas. That's quite clear, kind of and quite evident and tragic and so I get a thread of people killed and then I get a thread of 18, 20, 21 year old soldiers killed. The threat I got this morning was actually the worst day of the war, in which 10 boys were killed last night. From the time I went to sleep to the time I went up. And four of them, I knew at least indirectly or indirectly their families or people connected to their families or I'd come across them. I mean, the most beautiful people in the world on all sides. The reason murders are a tragedy and the reason innocent civilians killed in a war is a tragedy, right? And the reason atrocities are atrocities is because they're violating something. In other words, Evil is a failure of intimacy. Evil is the opposite of life. There's life and anti life. Evil is a ‘live’ spelled backwards, if you will, right? In its structure, right? Evil in Aramaic, the other side is when I turn my back to you is my back. I turn my back to you. We're no longer face to face. We're no longer in a love story. And so the only reason that I'm suffering is because I understand that my life should be a love story. The only reason that evil is evil, if the world was empty, if the world was, as our colleague Sam Harris suggests, for example, kind of representing the traditions of reductive materialism, if the world is empty, if it's over, when it's over, if death is the end of the story, which is one of the major themes, for example, in the Barbie movie that we'll get to, death is the end of the story, and all meaning is simply made up, then what's the tragedy of a life without love, right? It's the short little blip you have, love's just a social construction, we made it up anyways. But it's just something that makes you feel a little more comfortable in the few years that you're here, and then game over. And that's the assumption built into both the fundamentalisms of post modernity, which generate Barbie, and which generate a kind of techno totalitarianism in the making, which generate arms merchants, which generate a military industrial complex, which generate a medical industrial complex. The assumption is love's not real. Love's a complete social construction. And Hamas dogmatism or jihadi, right, dogmatism and fundamentalism, which says that actually this world is not a place of Eros value. This world is just a hallway leading to the 72 virtues in heaven, right? But in this world, the desire is to be rejected. Desire is degraded. If I feel desire, that's an expression of a violation. So that's a degraded love story, which itself leads to evil. So it's only evil. It's only suffering because we actually know in our bodies that it's supposed to be a love story, which is why brother there's music all over the world and all the music all through history universally is love songs. It's not because someone dogmatically imposed it. It's the voice of she, it's the voice of the goddess, the voice of the Shekhinah, the voice of Shiva and Shakti, the voice of Earth Sky, right? Of Yin Yang coming together and saying, oh my god, I'm a love story. And so the songs that I'm gonna sing, the music of reality, will be love songs. And it's been that way forever, right? We sing love songs, whether it's a country restaurant with a truck, or whether it's a Chinese version, or whether it's an Indonesian version or an African version or something that happened in New Zealand. It's all love songs because reality is a mathematics of intimacy. And when you violate the values of that equation, you create evil. And so just to feel this for a second, brother, before you take us to the next step. I mean, we have not seen any place in the public sense-making done by legacy institutions, neither left nor right, around the world in an attempt to understand what's happening. We haven't seen one place that actually talks about, I don't know, okay, there's a failed love story, right? And I need to understand that in terms of the battle between good and evil, because if I understand that Hamas is a failed love story. Then it changes the way I do the battle between good and evil. And if I understand that no one's excluded from the love story, it means that even as I battle Hamas, and even as I have to kill people who committed the worst atrocities of the last 70 years, I nonetheless still don't place them outside of the love story. It's different, for example, a Zoroastrian position, which is that there's good and evil, and they're completely split. That's one way to do the battle between good and evil. When I understand the entire universe is a love story, nothing's excluded from the love story, and it's a love story which goes beyond this lifetime. There's a continuity of consciousness. As I close my eyes in death, I open my eyes into a new reality. Then, even those people who are living in a tragic, failed love story, and even when we need, because we have no choice, right, because the world's being held hostage, and we need to protect this and future generations, I still realize there's a spark of the sacred, there's a spark of love in every fallen love story, which changes the way we relate. And let's just look for a second and then last sentence, take a look at Germany, take a look at Japan. Germany and Japan were the two centers of fascism and the worst forms of Nazism, evil. In Germany today, and it's actually shocking when you talk about the world as a love story, Germany today is a thriving democracy. And Japan is in multiple ways a thriving democracy and they had fierce failed love stories at the center of their culture, right? Japanese imperial emperor culture was a failed love story, ethnocentric, limited story in which love was limited and distorted. And Germany was obviously a failure, Hitler was a failed love story, the love of the Aryan race in the most distorted and vicious form. And yet both of those cultures in some deep way have evolved. There's an evolution of love. If we would just exclude them, we would just have to wipe them out forever. But actually there's a way to actually be fierce, full battle between good and evil and yet infinitely tender with this covenant between the generations, which no one's out of the story and there's a spark of the sacred and every broken vessel. Wow, that's to hold back the Garden of Eden is not paradise, right? It's paradox 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And so then we planted a seed and some people are thinking, Barbie, what the fuck does this have to do with Nazism, fascism, jihadism, all of these other things like, come on, Mark, what are you talking about? How does this..? Let's get real here. This is a riddle. This is a popcorn and bubblegum movie about a Mattel doll and it doesn't matter. And why don't we talk about some real shit, but you actually had a deeper reading of this as really a text and as you say so eloquently and so accurately, all of these movies are pointing to sentiments that are living in the fabric of culture itself. And you spotted some things in this film, which I never would have watched unless you made me watch it. So also thank you and fuck you for making me watch Barbie. But nonetheless, like in watching it and then talking to you, I started to understand what you mean, but there's going to be a lot of people listening. They're going like, how the hell are they going to weave Barbie into this fucking conversation? 

MARC GAFNI: Oh my God. So let's talk about Barbie and we'll get back to showing, and we have this radical love commitment that no one gets off of this podcast without seeing very clearly for themselves why the universe is a love story and the relationship between Hamas and Barbie. And how it affects my personal love story. So let's start with Barbie and just to be clear, right? You made me watch the covenant in return. So fuck you. Right. So there we go on that. But the covenant was awesome. That was an awesome movie. So we got a movie trade, and you also made me watch white noise, right? So it's two to one, just being clear. So Barbie, right? So what do we mean when we say that Barbie's a failed love story and that Hamas is a failed love story, Jihad is a failed love story. That there are two forms of fundamentalism and that a failed love story equals evil. So therefore the battle between good and evil needs to be about deepening a love story. Only the deepening of the love story responds to evil. You can't do the battle of good and evil if you bypass the love story. So first let's look at Barbie. So it looks like this very innocent movie. It's got a big piece of feminine empowerment, which is beautiful. It has this major male demonization piece, which is a different conversation. Why the demonization of the male, which takes place, there's not one positive masculine figure, except for the minor character of Alan, who speaks twice. There's no positive masculine figures, but let's not talk about either of those. Let's talk about the very core of the movie. And let's just take a look at just briefly, because as you said, Aubs, and as we've talked about many times before, a movie is a text of culture. So when we're talking about Barbary, we're not talking about what Noah and Greta were thinking when they were hanging out in their apartment in New York, as they wrote the movie. That is not our issue in any way. What we're concerned with is how is, or what we're paying attention to is, how is God speaking through the movie? How does Eros, how does the universal love story, and how does spirit speak through a movie? And I remember, I think I mentioned to you once, I remember hanging out late one night at Lana Wachowski's apartment. And he had just put out a movie called V for Vendetta. And we spent the whole night kind of reading his movie. And it was very clear. We said very clearly that the fact that he made the movie is irrelevant. He gets no authority over that movie. In other words, she speaks to the movie. So let's just take a look at She's. Let's just take a quick look at a couple of scenes. So if you remember, in the beginning of Barbie, there's a dance. There’s a dance moment. And so at the end of the dance, Ken wants to stay over and Ken says, “Hey, maybe I thought it might stay over the night". I'll actually read the script. And she says, “why?”, why would you stay over? Why would you even do that? He said, “Well, we're girlfriend, boyfriend”. And she says, “Well, what would we do?” And Ken says, “Well, I'm not quite sure”. And she says, “No, no, you're just a good friend and this is my dream house. It's Barbie’s dream house and it's girl's night and it's girl's night every night forever”. And Ken's like, “it's girl's night every night, like forever?” And she says, “yeah, it's every night girl's night”, right? And she says, “good night”. And then she walks inside and then he kind of says half to himself. He says, “I love you too”. And the point is there's no one to say, I love you too. And this is not Barbie, a particular person rejecting a particular ten, Barbie's a doll. She's an archetype. She's a structure of consciousness. This is Barbie and Ken. Barbie is saying to Ken, it's Girls night. This night, every night, quote, forever, there is no love story. It doesn't exist. And that's  just one moment in the movie. And then it moves through the whole movie. It's a key theme. So here's episode two, or clip two. There's a movement later in the movie when Will Ferrell, who's the bumbling, masculine, patriarchal president of Mattel, you know, says, two thirds through the movie, responding to Sasha, and Sasha's the daughter of Gloria, who works at Mattel, and she's a key figure in the movie, and Sasha says, “Well, what about Barbie?” And Will Ferrell, president of Mattel, says, “Oh, that's not a problem. Barbie loves Ken”. And everyone says, “Ah, Barbie loves Ken”. And Barbie says, “No, I don't love Ken”. Barbie doesn't love Ken. But she's not saying, when you read the scene, this Barbie doesn't love this Ken. She's saying there is no Barbie and Ken. The notion that there would be a Barbie and Ken, that that's a structure of reality, is silly. There is no love story. And this is so deep, my friends. Right? I mean, we thought, Aubs, that we could kill all the gods and keep Aphrodite. We could kill the field of value and we'd keep one value, Eros, love. It doesn't work. Love is only real, Eros is only real if it's in a field of value. It's part of the universal love story, it's part of the structure of the universe. And along comes Barbie, and Barbie says, there's no Barbie in 10. It actually doesn't exist. So here's a third scene, and just so you see that this is not a contrived thing. If you actually read the movie carefully, not what Noah and Greta intended, This is the goddess, She, Shekhinah, speaking, crying through the movie. When Ken tries to re institute patriarchy at a certain moment in the movie. And then the women, inspired by Barbie and Glory and Sasha, take over and change the constitution. There's this big moment where, kind of, Ken wakes up and they have this heart to heart talk, Barbie and Ken, and Barbie says to him, “what are you doing?” Right? And he says, and I'll give it to you again, it's very beautiful. He says to her, “I thought this would be our house”, meaning there's a love story. We'd have a house together. And, and she says, “I think I owe you an apology, not every night has to be girl's night”. So you think she might be coming towards him? Oh, maybe she's recognizing that there's a love story. So he leans over to kiss her and she says, “no, no, no”, there's none. There's no Eros. There's no love desire. That's not real. And then Ken says, “but I don't know who I am without you”. And she says, “you're Ken”. Now you'd like her to think, Oh, go individuate and be Ken and come back to me. That's exactly not what she means. What she says is you actually are Ken and I'm Barbie and there's no intrinsic allure in between us. There's no love story. And then Ken says, but I only exist within the warmth of your gaze and Ken gets it. In the movie, both in the beginning of the movie, the movie opens where it says, Barbie has a good day every day. Ken only has a good day if he's in Barbie's gaze. So they're mocking Ken. But it's actually Ken who in the entire movie holds the love story. But Ken in the movie is a corrupt patriarchy. So what the movie has done, which is shocking, it said, there's no love story. There's no Barbie and Ken. That's the exact opposite of the realization in the interior and exterior sciences of the cosmopolitan universe, which are saying it's Barbie and Ken all the way up and all the way down. So whether it's molecules coming together to form a macromolecule, whether it's your body and the cellular structure of your body, which your body is a dazzling love story, right? Whether it's the movement and allurement of the celestial bodies and the movement of gravity, whether it's the Eros that animates electromagnetism, whether it's protons, neutrons, and electrons becoming an atom, reality is Barbie and Ken, Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, right? Reality is kissing all the way up and all the way down. And the four forces, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak, nuclear, are forces of Eros, allurement, and autonomy. No, no, postmodernism says, through Barbie, there is no Barbie and Ken, and the only person who actually honors love and desire, we're going to make up a new word here, not love or desire, love desire, one word. The only person who honors love desire is Ken, and he has a song, I'm Just Ken, that he sings, and he says in the song, he says, I have feelings I can't explain. They're driving me insane. Where I see love, she sees a friend. Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility? And then he says one more line, he says, I want to know what's there to love, to feel the real thing. Is it a crime? Am I not hot when I'm in my feelings? So this is Ken standing for the love story, but who's Ken? A blithering idiot. Right? He degrades patriarchy in the movie. So in this movie, that became the biggest box office hit, playing in theaters as Jihad enters Israel in this tragic moment, the basic point to the movie is there is no love story because there's no field of value in Cosmos. And there's no field of Eros, because Eros is a value of Cosmos. And Aphrodite is part of the field, it's part of the universal love story. Oh, that's not true. The entire thing is completely made up. And the only people who think there's a love story are people who are using love for power, which is a degraded patriarchy. And maybe the last two images, which are just kind of, they're wild. The song Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine, right? Appears three times in the movie. It's also in the trailer of the movie. So what's the song Indigo Girls about? It's about one thing. There's no love story. There's no story of value. It's not real. And the actual refrain of the song is, you know, I went to the doctor. I went to the mountain. I looked at the children, and I drank from the fountains. And then what happened? But there's no one answer to any question. There's more than one answer to these questions. And actually the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine. And some definitive means something that's real, that's not created, that's not made up. And that song plays three times, and the point is I'm closer to fine when I give up the field of value, when I give up the field of eros, when I give up the fact that I'm an expression and participate in the universal love story. And finally, you've got Mrs. Mattel talking to Barbie. And Mrs. Mattel says to Barbie, who wants to become human, she's like, “wow, that's a surprise, why would you want to become human?” She says, “humans basically make up meaning and they die.. Like, why would you want to do that? And Barbie being a good existentialist says, well, I'd like to participate in that social construction meeting because it's very beautiful, so great. But actually there is no real meaning. And there is no real, therefore, Eros. And there is no Eros value. And the universe is not a love story. So that's shocking. That's at the very center of cultural heteronormativity. Wow. 

AUBREY MARCUS: What would you say about this read that just occurs to me because I’m thinking about it. Read this as a transhumanist, Empire fantasy, where empire is actually a projection of the ego which wants to know itself in relative position to everybody else and be dominant in that relative position, which is why all of the dictators of all communist revolutions like Mao or Stalin. It's like ‘everybody's equal except for me, except for me, I'm at the fucking top and I can do whatever the fuck that I want. And I'm in control of everything and I'm the most powerful, let's make a bunch of fucking statues of me and have people read books about me, me, me, me’. And it's in this complete absolute, like I am the father of all of all people and everybody else is beneath me. And there's this kind of idea, empires making its move to create this totalizing hierarchy where there's going to be elites, which will eventually battle themselves until there's one final elite that's at the very top of the pyramid, because multiple elites, they may share the ring of power for a while, but they'll all fight each other. It's in all the stories of culture. They're all fighting each other for the absolute ring of power until there's one Sauron, there's one Mao, there's one Stalin, there's one Hitler, there's one person at the top. And there's also this movement that's, well, let's decontextualize and de eroticize the world. And actually these dolls are a creation of a corporation, which ultimately is kind of like an embodiment of this entity of total control power. Corporations want to make as much money as possible, swallow up as many other competitors as possible until they're at the very top. But these things seem kind of connected where empire and then this kind of postmodern agenda to de eroticize love because love, and I forget who said this beautiful quote, but they want to control love and by they I mean empire, Empire wants to control love or totalitarianism wants to control love because love is something they can't control. So if you create dolls with no genitals, and that's the whole creation of the thing then you can be at the very top of everything and there's no one who will have any energy the fuck to actually challenge you. Which is also why Mao, in the communist revolution, made all of the women dress like boys, cut off all of their hair, de eroticize the whole body politic of all the citizens, wipe out as many as possible, and then create this totalizing control, which is also cutting off people's love, not only between each other, but cutting off people's love to the divine until all there is left to love is the person at the top, which is the dictator, which is the tyrant.

MARC GAFNI: Yeah, that is beautiful and important. So let's just unpack. You said a lot there. Let's unpack this and it's important in terms of how we live our lives. So one, love is revolutionary by its nature, right? Love is subversive, right? Love is by its nature, it subverts. So just even very simply, in the language of my friend Barbara Marks Hubbard, who was your predecessor as the chair of the Center for Orthodoxy and Religion, would call win lose metrics, rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics. And in that structure, everything is about, you're either giving or you're receiving, you're putting money in the bank. You're taking money out. Love undermines that in love desire. When you're in the throes of love, desire, the split between giving and receiving disappears and actually giving and receiving become one. So love undermines the win-lose metrics. Love means, what does love mean? It means I'm willing to bracket my egoic self for a moment to be in devotion to your transformation, right? To your growth. That's what it means to love. It means I bracket the win lose metrics and I'm in devotion. I'm madly excited about Aubrey-ness and I don't view Aubrey-ness as an instrument to Mark-ness. So that's what love means. So love brackets the movement of empire, brackets the win lose metrics. Love is subversive, love's revolutionary, and so by definition it stands against empire. It stands against the win lose metrics. It stands against this notion that we've talked about for so many years, which is that it's not that there's a particular conspiracy theory. It's not that there's a cabal necessarily. It's that the very structure of reality is a structure of win lose metrics. It's a structure of a kind of anti erotic, non intimate universe. Now, that's why George Orwell in 1984, places empire or totalitarianism in the ministry of love. There's a ministry of love and you actually take Winston and Julia and the entire point of 1984 is that we're going to break the love story between Winston and Julia. That's the entire point. If we can break that love story, that ultimate love story, if we break that love story, then actually, and tragically, Moloch, that idolatrous force that Ginsburg talked about and described reality as Moloch, Moloch being the structure of the win lose metrics, right, the structure of the absurd Moloch win. And then Walden 2 by B.F Skinner, who's the informative force defining the entire tech flex that we're now writing on. As you know, we've been talking about it. Skinner describes Walden 2, which is essentially a worldwide, it's a city that he describes. It's a city called Walden 2. He's responding to Thoreau's Walden 1, which is about self-reliance and love and community and autonomy and communion all together. And he's singing a Walden 2. He's saying, no, actually love's not real. And you actually create simulations of love Barbie dolls. You actually commodify love, right? But it's controlled. And it's not actually a true force because the actual assumption of the mainstream kind of the intelligentsia that dominates the Western academy is that actually love is not real and value is not real. And there's no Barbie and Ken. And so therefore the love story starts at the revolution starts with actually the reclaiming of the love story. You can't actually respond to the Metacrisis without reclaiming the love story, because the core of the Metacrisis at its core is two things. It's a rivalrous conflict governed by win lose metrics, meaning that there's always win lose metrics. There's never a love story. And there's what we call a fragile system. What's a fragile system in Taleb, for example, is research. A fragile system means a system where the parts don't know each other or the way we say it in the new story of value in cosmotic humanism, where the parts aren't allured to each other. And since the parts aren't allured to each other, the system's fragile. Love is antifragile. Love or fuck is unfuckable. In other words, that's its nature. I mean, it's beautiful, but it's only when I realize, oh, reality is a love story, and that reality is an intimate universe, but that intimacy literally lives in me. And that's the sense I think we said when we first met, right, back like a year and a half ago. It's not just that I live in an intimate universe. The intimate universe lives in me until I actually get that that's true atomically, molecularly, you know, neuronically, nerve endings, microbiome, right. And, my microbiome, which is where 70 percent of my immune system lives, in which there's complete intimacy between me and the rest of the larger. The larger environment, there's a complete larger, wider, shared identity. Unless I begin to realize the whole thing is a love story, then basically people are atomized against each other. Pseudo Eros, right? Surface fulfillments of grasping and seeking, right? Dominate the day. And you devise a world of a level of mental breakdown, right? A level of incoherence. A level of loneliness, intense loneliness, because since love is not real, loneliness can never be overcome. If the world is not a love story, if there's no field of value, there's no field of eros, you can never overcome loneliness. But it's not just love we're talking about, it's love desire, and I think that's what you're pointing to. Totalitarianism seeks to undermine love desire. So Barbie and Ken aren't real, number one, and number two, to the extent that they exist, they have no genitals. Meaning the corporation has actually deconstructed any reality to desire. Because desire is subversive. You see, desire means that divinity courses in my body. There's dignity to desire. I feel the aliveness of my body. I feel that the bill of rights is encrypted in my body, sacred. I know that to touch, to arouse is this enormous power I have and desire democratizes power because desire is the power to give and receive pleasure as the self evident value, which I realize I'm a king and a queen. Whenever I come together with my beloved. I'm king and queen, but I'm always in my infinite she-ness, god-ness, which is why at a moment of orgasm we crowd, oh god, and so totalitarianism has to actually come in between me and my body. The body is a love story, literally, molecularly, we said earlier, atomically, the body is literally in all of its structures, a love story. And so totalitarianism has to come in between my own capacity to trust my desire, to trust my body. And if I can break my capacity to trust my body, when I lose the self authorship and the authority over the depth of my own desire. And we're not talking about surface desire. We're talking about my ability to actually clarify my desire to access my deepest heart's desire. My deepest heart's desire is what stands against empire. In a communion, people gather to stand against the empire. 

AUBREY MARCUS: All right. So let's look at another few movies from culture because these movies speak and there's countless examples of this, but I'm going to play two for you. All right. So William Wallace under the yoke of long shanks, a ruthless British Emperor, really, King, but an Emperor, acting as an Emperor, right? Because we use King in a positive connotation, but he's the King as Emperor, trying to control everyone, trying to control Scotland. And William Wallace, powerful warrior, filled with fuck, filled with not only love desire, but a sense of goodness. But he was actually happy to have a small cottage somewhere, maybe out in the Glade and raise a couple kids. And then the Empire presses a little too close. They try to rape his beloved. He goes on a little rampage and they try to escape. But they catch Murren, his beloved, who he just married in the secret glade and they have this scene where he takes off her, her cloak and then the hot breath as he's naked and she's naked is on her neck and you just feel her body open and quiver with the tenderness of this passionate lovemaking that's about to occur to consummate their marriage and you see this love desire fill with him and he was happy to lay down his sword. The wildly trained strategist technician warrior, but he was happy to just, it's okay. Empire's got this but I'm gonna carve out my little love story. Well the empire pushes too close and they kill his beloved and then William Wallace Becomes no longer William Wallace. He becomes a hero, like a real hero. And we see this like happening where the empire pushes too far and it awakens the lions, it awakens the dragons, it awakens the inner warrior hero that we have. And I think it's always why I get emotional watching these movies because if we have the love story in the private personal, we can kind of say “Ah, it's okay. The world is kind of tough”. But the moment that empire presses a little too close, and however, that is it awakens something within somebody and sometimes it's not even the romantic love story, I mean look at the whole john wick series. They fucked up. They made a mistake. He buried his guns. He was living in a house and he just loved his dog. He loved his dog. They done fucked up. They killed his dog. And then four movies later and 500 headshots and the absolute destruction of this oppressive control of the empire through this assassins kind of community. They just unleashed hell, same as what longshanks and the British empire did when they pressed against the wall. And we know this is true, but if they were able to degrade love itself, they wouldn't awaken the warriors, but if they don't degrade love, they're going to continue to awaken the warriors, the lions of Judah, the William Wallaces, even the John wicks.

MARC GAFNI: No, that's beautiful. And in that sense, culture, the love story speaks through John Wicks, speaks through William Wallace, speaks through the realization, let's say in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, that Aragorn and Arwen and that great love story is going to actually animate and change the destiny of history. And so then what happens is, Moloch, if you will, right, to borrow again Ginsberg's phrase, or Empire, for use that for kind of the machinery of unlove, the machinery of the non-intimate universe, makes a far more insidious move than Longshanks, which is Barbie. And Barbie is actually not innocent. You actually have a feeling when you leave the movie, you're slightly chilled. There's something a little bit, right? It's the same feeling you have when you finish reading my colleague and bless his soul. My colleague Yuval Harari, who wrote a book called Homo sapiens. And the basic point of the book is that there's this big story, but there's no love story, that Eros and value are not a quality of cosmos. There is no field of value and there is no field of Eros and its Eros value, which is goodness, goodness and love are one. There's no split between goodness and love. They're precisely the same. Eros is the right relationship. It's the right ethos between parts. So when you finish reading Harari's book, Sapiens, you have the same chilled feeling. You're not quite sure why you're uncomfortable. And you have a sense of ennui. As Steiner put it, the sense of something's been deconstructed. The world's not all right. That actually is devastating when you leave the Barbie movie. And it must have asked a hundred people in the last three months. How'd you feel when you left the movie? Funny. There's this insertion of a kind of parasitic virus that seeks to deconstruct the love story itself. And that's one deconstruction of the love story. That's one fundamentalism. Now jihad. And its expression as ISIS or as Hamas is actually also a second failed love story. And here the failed love story is, one, desire is evil. That's the first thing. Desire is evil. That's critical. So the experience of desire is evil. Now, the experience of desire is about the dignity of the human body and that the human body is this living, breathing, pulsing, throbbing expression of desire. So one is, desire itself is evil. That's number one. Number two, there's no field of eros, which is a field of value in which all of reality participates. Humans, every human being. In the animal world, the atomic world, there's no shared field of desire. There's not even a shared field of desire and Eros and value between human beings. There's a line that splits reality. It's Dar al Harb and Dar al Islam. There's those who should be put to death by the line of the sword. And those very small, narrow groups of people, we're not sure, are they Sunnis, are they Shias, are they Islam, but a very tiny group, only they are beloved of God. So it's an abusive love story, in which those in it abuse the body. Number one, right? Because the body is not a place which is sacred. So you actually bypass the dignity of the body, which is why you have incest, honor killing, right? Abuse at the highest rates in the world within that kind of fundamentalist culture. The body has no dignity. Desire has no dignity. So when desire has no dignity, and everyone else is the people who should be destroyed by the sword. What you're saying is there's no field of Eros value. So now you're experiencing desire in yourself. What do you do with that? You project desire, which is evil onto the other, and then you torture them. That's torture is the inverse of the love story, right? And that's when there's no love story, when there's no field of eros value, so you don't caress, you don't make love, you don't arouse, the opposite of love desire is literally torture, right? So what happens is, then we project the experience of evil living in my body because I'm a young Hamas man and I'm experiencing desire, that's evil. I project it out on the other, the other is anyone who's outside of my inner circle and then I go not just to kill them, but I go to dismember them. And we have as even the UN now is we have more forensic evidence of brutality of cutting off limbs as you rape someone and then shooting them and then continuing to rape them. I mean, so in other words, and this is happening, not naturally, right? They were taking all the Hamas boys like the ISIS boys were jacked up on amphetamines. Which turned off the love story of the body and jacked up the aggressive centers and completely depressed or turned off the centers of love of empathy in the body. So they turned off the love story in the body. They lived in a story which was an anti erotic story, a story which violates intimacy. And then they exploded in the tragedy of jihad and atrocity because it's a failed love story. But when I get that, I have to understand they're not actually intrinsically evil devils, aka Zoroastrianism, that they're not actually of Ahura Mazda, they're actually of the other side. No, no, no, they're part of the love story. They're part of the field of Eros, which is why they've got to take those amphetamines, which is why it's a failed love story that turns them to evil. So both on the Hamas side, a failed story of the dignity of desire. A failed love story, which is ethnocentric and only those inside of my circle are deserving of love. The body is not a love story. That's what produces atrocity on the one side. On the other side, Barbie is a failed love story. Love is commodified, owned, And whether it's Skinner in Walden 2, talks about creating a community in which love is controlled and contrived and commodified, but it's not real. Or whether it's Orwell who talks about the ministry of love in 1984, or whether it's Barbie who says there's no Barbie in Kent, they're all saying the same thing, and actually we're going to control reality and we're going to do that by actually saying there's no dignity to desire. There's no love story. There's no love desire. So strangely and paradoxically, these two sides of the world, the postmodern deconstruction as expressed in Barbie, which animates Moloch or empire on the one hand, and the tragic Hamas culture of death, which is anti life. They're both evil. They both generate evil in completely different forms over time. But they're evil because they're failed love stories. And that's hopeful. That's the thing. That's hope. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

MARC GAFNI: That's helpful because the love story is real. And it can be re aroused, but we've got to tell a new story and show it to be true. Wow.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, I'm going to open up something that we won't get to fully conclude in this, but as I look at the cosmos, as I've come to understand it through my psychonautics and we've had some discussions about this. We had a beautiful discussion in New York about it. The one you could say splits into two opposing forces, right? But it's all the one, which is the love story, right? Which is Shakina, which is the divine, which is the Tao, which is the mystery. It is all a love story, but then there's a split into polarity, life and anti life. You could split it a bunch of different ways. And there is an intending, non planetary, extra dimensional force that is like a, it's not God, but it is a demon, basically, a demonic force. And I think there's also a place where people can be in a love story with this demonic force, right? Where this force is actually, they're in worship, an active devotional worship for death, for this culture of death, for this culture of anti life, and there can be a pleasure in worshiping this demon. Now, well, the way that I've seen it, actually, as I've explored this even since our conversation, which was fairly recent, what I see is that, actually, that force is still a part of the love story. Because as the one splits into polarity, which I saw actually happening in a journey, I saw it happening as a wobble, where the one just started to wobble, and created this sine wave of peaks and valleys. And so in the sine wave, which is the ups and downs. There was polarity that was created. There was the top, there was a peak, and there was the bottom. And as it split, that force on the dark side, on the downswing, let's call it, actually has the same impulse to return to love, which is unification, which is absolute unification. So it has this desire to return. And in its failure to be able to do that, because it's locked in polarity, So, if you go down the dimensional cosmos, like Matthias would say, like the ninth dimension, you start going down to seventh dimension, which is where these extra dimensional forces actually live. They actually are trying to destroy everything, because in the destruction of all creation and everything, there'll be the void, which is oneness, which is back to unification with love. So, the idea of the fallen angel, really, the fallen angel just says, I want to get back to the house of God, of love. So my way to do that is actually destroy everything. Whereas the other four say, “no, no, no, no. Let's create all unique, intimate possibilities and return to unification with love through the other side”. So even on these other sides, even though their intention may be pure destruction, they're still part of the love story. So Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu are still in this drive to actually return to the one love, return to the one love.

MARC GAFNI: That's very, very beautiful. You're of course, gorgeously kind of weaving Ahura Mazda into the lineage of Solomon. You're kind of overcoming the split in Zoroastrianism. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right.

MARC GAFNI: And you're kind of reading it, you know, in a Solomonic lineage, which I think is a beautiful reading. Whether our friend Alexander, will have to talk to him would agree it's a different conversation. But I think you're absolutely right. I mean that's what you're saying is so beautifully true in terms of the essence of reality. And to make it most personal and intimate, evil doesn't live out there. Evil lives everywhere. And evil is the anti life force. It's the place when you're in the middle of an argument, which is fierce. And you're just going to say, “fuck you. I'm walking out”. I'm not going to reach in and find the place where I've got a part of this contribution system. And I'm just not climbing down from the fucking tree because I just won't do it. That place where I won't bracket itself, for the sake of feeling other. This mutuality of feeling, that's the root of evil. You can't be in a safe house. You can't be, have your gun looking into a safe house in an Israeli kibbutz and see four children and shoot them in the belly in front of there and not be disconnected from your ability to field the field. What clearly you've lost connection to the love story, but then afterwards, and as we heard one of the recordings, you call home as one of the Hamas boys did, and he tells his mother, are you proud of me? Right? So in other words, and that requires from us this very painful, poignant, fierce paradox, meaning we have to act and make war for peace, just like we make love for peace. We sometimes have to make war for peace. That's what we had to do in response to Nazism. We can't actually allow atrocity to stand. And at the same time, we remember that Germany transformed itself. And the son of the Shaykh, who was the animating force of that anti love story of Hamas, the son found his way and actually became a hero. And so there's no Hamas boy or Hamas woman, who ultimately, in the arc of history, can't actually find their way back to the love story, and in this moment right now, we actually have to do what needs to be done, to stand for love with full fierceness. William Wallace. It had to do what William Wallace had to do for the sake of love. And so it requires from us this intense and stunning and infinitely painful and poignant paradox, which is we wield the sword fiercely for the sake of love, right? And that actually needs to be done. The allies needed to do that in World War II, when Tom Hanks saved Private Ryan and those boys swept the beaches of Normandy. Those boys had a sacred impulse of love animating their hearts. And no one's ever ultimately out of the story. No demon doesn't find their way back. And even the orcs in Tolkien, right? In the Lord of the Rings, the orcs were originally elves, right? Who had fallen, right? There's always a way home. And sometimes it's in this incarnation. And sometimes it's in the next incarnation. Which is why I always have to hold this widest love story and act fiercely for it. And right now, the most revolutionary act we can do is to actually, just like we established democracy in the world. Democracy was a joke a thousand years ago. 500 years ago, a bunch of people got together in Florence and they told this new story. And all of a sudden you have democracy and you have universal human rights, which is the movement of a love story. And right now in this time between worlds, we can't go, Hamas. We can't go to the old religions, we can't go to deconstructed postmodernism and Barbie. So what we have to do is actually tell a new story, which brings interior sciences and exterior sciences, which lives in us. We actually have a direct experience that my love story matters infinitely to the cosmos, that my desire matters infinitely. And we just have to tell this new, not declared story, not made up story, but this grounded, gorgeous, stunning story of love and desire. And every man, woman and child needs to grow up and know that story and grow into that story. And that shift, that transformation, it's a revolution of love, but again, not in a tinsel sense, not in a declared sense, but it's actually a new science, right? It's a new neuro Dharma that needs to come together. It's a great new renaissance that needs to happen. It's the overwhelming moral imperative of this moment. It’s the imperative of articulating and telling that new love story in a way that everyone has a place and everyone can come home.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and it seems like the control of access to feeling this love story is what's actually preventing it because in these cultures that have deny the love story, it starts to, you get the movements that happen with, again, Massimini versus Hezbollah in this same idea. But how does that happen? Well, even despite the controls and the internet service providers trying to limit things and trying to keep this, as they see love stories speak in culture, and as they have access to these books, and as they have access to these ideas. These ideas become subversive to the other fundamentalist totalitarian ideas. So unless you degrade the ideas in stories and culture, people will actually find these. So, it's so important for the artists to keep singing love songs, and for the storytellers and the movie makers to still keep creating love stories that remind us of the nature of cosmos itself. And then the proliferation of these stories is inevitable unless we degrade the story sufficiently itself. So anybody who watches a movie, whether it's Barbie or whether it's everything, everywhere, all at once, where the only actual love or these tiny little moments that are completely inconsequential because the universe is random and chaotic and nothing is actually real because every possibility exists, so nothing, there is no plot line, whatsoever. You can have giant dildo fingers or be all warped out or what. Nothing actually makes sense anyways. 

MARC GAFNI: No plot line. 

AUBREY MARCUS: No plot line. 

MARC GAFNI: There's no plot line. That's the sense. And everything, everywhere, all at once there's no plot line because the word love and story go together ontologically, right? Love is not just love as a story, right? Love is a love story. Reality is not just love. Reality is a love story. And when we actually find the inner thread of our lives. Our lives are a sacred autobiography. They're a story. And that story is honored by She. William Wallace understands that if you violate my private love story, you violated the cosmos. And my private love story is not just me. My private love story has got to expand and get deeper and wider and has to become the love story of the whole. Now let's just think for a second. I mean, as we're nearing our end. AI artificial intelligence. The tragedy of artificial intelligence is not that it's not intelligent, it is intelligent, but it's not a love story. That's precisely the point. In other words, when I think with my head, super computational super intelligence, my head is connected to the entire field of allurement of my nervous system, of my cellular system, of my everything, my entire field, from my microbiome, to my entire arterial gorgeous stunning reality. AI is disconnected from that entire field. There's no connection to the field. The real reason AI is an existential risk is because existence, existential is existence. Existence is a love story. And AI is doing computation dissociated from the love story. And we never think without accessing the full breadth of the love story. Every breath we take, every move we make is animated. By the field of allurement, right? Which is why in neuroscience, you have moments in which you depress certain systems, you lose the capacity for feeling, and even though you have the cognitive structure ability to make decisions, for example, the famous Phineas Gage story, who gets a spike through his head, and he has full cognitive ability, but he can't feel, so therefore he can't make a decision. So we need actually to reclaim the evolutionary realization that reality is love, desire and love intelligence and love beauty from its atomic to its cellular to its biological to its cultural level. That's actually the nature of reality. So if I'm sitting, I'm watching Aubrey right now, right? How do I participate in the revolution? I will deepen my love story. That's where I started. The evolutionary act is to become a lover in a deeper way to expand my circle. And to deepen where I am and to expand that's the act of revolution

AUBREY MARCUS: There's this novel random thought that again would need a long time to unpack, but if we're imagining AI and we're imagining it disconnected from the feeling tone of the universe, which you've described to me as love, like love is the feeling tone of the universe. So there's lots of movement in this kind of transhumanist idea of basically putting AI into a body, basically, is kind of the idea here. Like you could have a chip in your brain that's running AI. But if there was an upload feature. Where it was not only a download of AI, but also an upload of the intelligence, the love intelligence, love beauty, love desire, that moves within the body, and there was an upload function to that, somehow. So you get some people who are wild erotic mystics, who for the sake of the whole, have this both bilateral download and upload of AI working in their system, so that AI could actually feel love, desire moving through the body and know it as real. That seems like, just thinking in this random thought that occurred to me, it seems like one way that we may actually be able to shape AI to be serving the impulse of life. If we could actually get it in a body. That actually felt what we feel when we're in passionate lovemaking and we fall in love, the AI might like oh I fucking get it. You know what I mean?

MARC GAFNI: I get it. You're pointing to and I know this is wide and I know we're gonna close here brother. But let's just say a couple of things because it's so important and so beautiful and so critical to be potent and precise here. And the poetry is in the precision. So Nick Bostrom wrote a book in 2016 from the Oxford Center for Existential Risk called Superintelligence, where he talks about the value uploading problem. And it's how you upload value into kind of a structure of AI. And he, of course, has two problems. First off, he thinks the value is not real. There is no infinitive value, there is no field of value, right? He's a reductive materialist, right? Simulation hypothesis. So, that's one. So, you have to have value that can be uploaded, number one. But number two, and this is very subtle and it's very beautiful. Love operates all the way up and all the way down. And so, even the atomic world is animated by love. And when I was actually talking to Lana Wachowski, we were talking about the matrix. One of the things he was trying to say is that both the machine world and the human world were part of a larger field. Because of course, even the machine world is held together by dynamic structures of allurement of protons, neutrons, and electrons. So it's actually in some sense, there's a proto sentience all the way up and all the way down, but to be able to access that, we don't yet know how to do. And if we unleash technologies that are coded with implicit values, because technology is never a tool, it's always coded with value, and we don't actually know their effect, then the risk of either the death of humanity or the death of our humanity, it's a different dialogue, through five or six major potential breakdowns in the AI system is enormous. So we can't actually afford to release it before knowing how to do that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right.

MARC GAFNI: We can't even begin to know how to do that until we first just know ourselves that love is real. And so as AI starts to emerge in culture, I don't know if you remember back in like 2013 or 14, there was a movie called Her. H E R. And it was about this love story between a guy and his operating system. And culture's wink, culture's intuition was, oh, if this could become a love story, then it could be okay. But in order to do that, without talking about how we make that move, that's a much broader and deeper conversation about six levels of AI. And I'd love to have it at a different time, but we can't even begin that conversation unless we transcend, we end the trance of Jihad and we end the trance of Barbie. Which are both failed love stories, because that's how we began. Failed love story equals evil, and in the battle between good and evil, the essential move of good now is to tell a new story. Because it's actually the best story that wins. But not the best because it's the best because it's the most compelling, it's the most alive, it's the most alluring, because it's most aligned to the nature of the real in which we participate, so we recognize its truth. It's the best story that wins. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yep. Well, then I have a lot of hope for humanity. 

MARC GAFNI: Yeah. It is hopeful.

AUBREY MARCUS: Because the best story, the best story is a love story. 

MARC GAFNI: That story is a Love.

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, it's a love story. It's what moves us the most in every way. You know what I mean? And no matter what we have to do in this world, how we wield the sword, you know, the sword, my mythical sword. I love fantasy lore, my mythical sword, I call it War's Bane, the Bane of War, but it's still a sharp sword. But its purpose is peace, its purpose is peace, the purpose is love. It's the Bane of War. It's the force that is standing for that. And I think that story is the most compelling story. And unless we can actually universally degrade the love story, which there's forces that are trying to do it, clearly, but unless that's completely degraded and we all lose the plot together, the lions, the heroes, the dragons, they're going to awaken. And I think that's what's happening here. So despite all of the pain and suffering, which is all extremely real on Israel's side, on Palestine's side, and the side of all of the world that's suffering, all the children who are sex trafficked, and all of the horrors that exist, there's still the best story that will ultimately triumph. I really believe that. We just have to stay alive and not destroy ourselves while we've lost the plot. We got to get the plot back with enough time for that story to win. 

MARC GAFNI: That is gorgeous, my friend. And last sense from me to you, my heart to your heart, we're in Hanukkah. You know, Hanukkah is a little bit of light that dispels a lot of darkness. And we're right before Christmas. And I grew up in the lineage of Solomon and I'm also madly in love with Christmas because underneath all of the commodification. And all of the corporation, Christmas stands for love and you can feel it. You wake up, it's Christmassy. If you're walking around and you feel there's something real and we need to take back holy days and we need to create this hope, as you say, because hope is always a memory of the love that's yet to come. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Beautiful. All in for all life my brother 

MARC GAFNI: All in, for all life, my brother. Love you mad.

AUBREY MARCUS: Love you mad, as well. Thank you everybody for tuning into this podcast. We love you and we will see you next week.