When it was recommended that I do a podcast with Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni, I knew nothing about him. I dove straight into his body of work and my life will never quite be the same. Without hyperbole, this is perhaps the most paradigm shifting podcast I have ever recorded. It tells the tale of the greatest love story of all–the story of the cosmo-erotic universe Herself. In this world-shifting masterclass, we learn how a force he calls Eros is the fundamental substrate of creation all the way down to the first principles of subatomic matter.

Gafni’s wisdom stretches back deep into the secrets of the Temple of Solomon and the mystic Kabbalist tradition. Our conversation touches a wide range of topics, including the nature of the Goddess, the democratization of enlightenment, and rewriting our sexual narratives.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that following the recording of this podcast, I became aware of claims against him that have populated the internet. In subsequent intimate conversations with him, and after checking out the sources that refute the claims here (including polygraphs and independent investigations) I can say that for what it is worth, I trust him. 

This note aside, this conversation is in every sense of the word, MIND BLOWING. For more from Gafni, check out his masterpiece of a book A Return To Eros.  

Addendum:

There is a cognitive bias that leads us to believe that in a situation like this ‘the truth is somewhere in the middle’, or ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’. And while this is sometimes the case, sometimes it is not. 

What I can say with certainty is that his wisdom is timeless and important for the healing of our world. No person should be “canceled” forever, especially without a fair forum to deploy evidence to refute claims that may be false or distorted. How we gather information and judge is the essence of our society. In light of this, we intend to discuss his personal story and associated meta-theory on a follow up podcast toward the end of the year. Until then, if you don’t wish to dive into the evidence yourself to make an informed judgment, perhaps afford yourself the gift of leaving an open question mark about the man, and receiving just his words without bias. 

AUBREY: Marc, we have a very important mission today, brother. 

MARC: Aubrey, it's good to see you. 

AUBREY: It's good to see you too. And we had to peel ourselves away from our coffee discussion downstairs because of this very important mission, this mission, to remember, to restore, to revivify, to return sacred Eros to her proper seat at the center of our own lives, and at the center of what you have termed, the cosmo-erotic universe, back where she belongs. So, let's begin that mission with our full hearts and try to remind people and help people remember a truth that we all have, what is Eros? What is this word that we have cast about and used in all of these different ways, but what is the deeper layers and the deeper meanings and the many faces in them, and the ways in which we can reunderstand this idea that we have lost?

MARC: Oh, fantastic. And maybe, if you're up for it, brother, kind of one step before we plunge into Eros, and get lost in its...

AUBREY: But how delicious is that? 

MARC: But how delicious is that? Maybe we can create a frame, because you began with this need to remember. And I'm going to maybe start there for a second, because we're in this intense moment where we're poised between utopia and dystopia. For the first time in history, we've never been in this moment in which exponential technologies create exponential risk, and threaten the future itself. And they threaten our memory of the future, right? So we understand that in order to recover and classical recovery structures that have emerged in consciousness in the last 100 years, let's say, through the recovery movements, you have to recover the memory of your past in order to undo the traumatic structures that are destabilizing you in a fundamental way. So, that's the recovery of the past. and the psychological self is about recovering the memory of the past. Then, of course, the enlightenment teachers are about, no, there's an eternal memory in the present, right? It's not about the past, it's about entering the depths and the eternity that lives in the present. And that's not the psychological self, it's the mystical self. But you talked about remembering, and there's the memory of the future. And the evolutionary self, not the psychological self, or the mystical self, the evolutionary self, remembers the future, and really hope is a memory of the future. And we were just talking before, so I'm just going to bring in some of that conversation--

AUBREY: Is that because that hope can be so strong in our imaginative force, that hope can be our ability to believe with such ferocity that the hope actually builds the future that we're creating?

MARC: Gorgeous. And yes. Yes, yes and, right? No but, but just yes. And here's the and. What we're trying to do with the and is, let's now ground this in the actual axiomatic structures of the cosmos. See, our assumption today is that there are no first principles in the interior face of the cosmos. So, like our colleagues, like Elon Musk will say, let's go back to first principles. But he reduces and exiles first principles to the values in a mathematics equation. That's correct. But actually, mathematics equations, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is because the interior of the scientist can actually grasp through mathematical equations, the breadth of the universe. And just like there are values in a mathematical equation, there's what I might call the mathematics of intimacy, the mathematics of arrows. But those are not contrived ideas. Those are not imaginary ideas in the sense of low level imagination. God's a figment of our imagination, but our imagination is a figment of God. It's gorgeous. So, as we enter into Eros, we're entering into not a psychological topic, not a mystical topic. We're actually threatened by existential risk. I call it the second shock of existence. The first shock is the dawn of humanity, right, the death of the human being. We realize we're going to die. We move from the biological realization of death to the existential realization of death, which then invokes, it presses us inwards and it invokes civilization. The best of the great traditions come from our meeting with death. And we both understand how we transcend it, but it also transforms life into something completely different, and opens the portals to all of the interior faces of the cosmos. But now we're at the second shock. And the second shock of existence means after we've gone through all the levels of human development, the eight or 10 levels of human emergence over the last several thousand years, let's say the last 10,000 years of civilization, five particularly and three in a more kind of condensed form. We've now hit this point where we're confronted not with the death of the human being, but with the death of humanity. That's the second shock of existence.

AUBREY: To go back to the first shock, just so I understand it clearly. Is this that moment of being cast out of the Garden of Eden where you have the self-awareness that you as a being, separate from everything else will die? 

MARC: Gorgeous, so there's the Garden of Eden's story, right? Is one articulation as you gorgeously say, of this realization of my mortality. This realization of the tension between me and my surroundings, where it's not just the biological experience, the bison might get me this afternoon. I now have enough surplus time that I can actually reflect on, I'm finite, what does that mean? That presses me inwards. When I'm pressed inwards, when I enter into that interior face of Cosmos, then I begin to contemplate. Then I begin to engage in both a new form of sensemaking, contemplation and transfiguration. I began to practice and I've been able to access the portals of meaning, both within life and the actual anthro-ontological realization. Anthro human being, ontological ontology, for realsies. For realsies is a loose translation of ontology. 

AUBREY: Yes. 

MARC: That works. Anthro-ontological for realsies, right? I have an anthro-ontological experience that death is not the end. I don't even need the testimonies although they're important. I don't even need to go to all the empirical evidence, although that's quite important. In the last 100 years, there's a new frame of seven kinds of empirical evidence that were never available for that we've done cross-cultural research and documentation, but I can bracket all that. I know it inside, I have an anthro-ontological access to life beyond death simply because I have a realization that life should be fair. Life should be fair. Realization one. Realization two. I realized that for most people in their lives, life within the course of one lifetime is not necessarily fair. For billions of people on the planet, there's not equal access. Life is actually unfair. It doesn't all get worked out in one lifetime. Ask the Rwandan mother who saw her child brutally killed in front of her, who's not living in the context of an upper middle class, westernized society. Life is clearly unfair for billions of people. And clearly, it's not all worked out in one lifetime. That's just not true, right? The notion that it's all worked out in one lifetime is simply not the case. And it's a kind of narcissistic indulgence of certain sectors of the population. For most of history, for most human beings, life was not fair in the context of a lifetime.

AUBREY: Is that where some of the drive to create an afterlife, which is a misunderstanding of the ever present unborn undying afterlife of our existence, as far as I know it experientially from my own journeys, and also exploration of mystical texts. But in the way that capital R religion has created it, okay, it's not fair now but don't worry, it's going to be so fair when you die. You're going to get to go to heaven if you did good. 

MARC: Let's reclaim capital R religion in its spark of the sacred without its external garb. So, the notion that it's not over when it's over, because Mother Teresa and Hitler can't come to the same conclusion, because that violates our anthro-ontological knowing is actually not wrong. So in other words, we make fun of the Christians because they're talking about harps in heaven. And so, we like to make fun of them. But actually, although there's enormous shadow in Christianity, like there is in all the great traditions. But the core intuition was, is that actually the world's world of justice, and one original text. The signet ring of eternity is truth and fairness. And so, we actually know in our bodies, that it matters the choices that we make, and that justice is real, that fairness is real. So that's actually, the fact that it doesn't work out in one lifetime, on the one hand, we're madly committed to justice. We're madly committed to create equitability, accessibility, an even playing field for every human being on the planet. And, we also understand that it's not over when it's over, and that the perspective of this lifetime is but one perspective, and that the great traditions actually understood something. Their mistake was, they hijacked the understanding for their own ethnocentric story. So it's actually my religion, my conception, my god, and only we get there. So they hijacked their correct intuition of eternity, for their own particular ethnocentric predicament. Now, you pointed brother to something else, which is gorgeous, which is what Wittgenstein points out. That eternity is not just everlasting time, eternity is beneath time. Eternity is the availability of eternity in this moment. So that's absolutely true. And there's the fairness issue. And those are two different intuitions that we hold both of them. So, back to our memory of the future, right? So, if we could today, talk about Eros, in the context of responding to existential risks. So, before the second shock of existence. We have the overwhelming moral imperative of this moment in time, is our commitment to the trillions of unborn people? We're their only voice. The only voice of trillions of unborn generations is us, and most of the planet has their heads down. And so, we have this unique privilege, that we're able to, for the circumstances of our lives to think, to feel, to breathe, to take on that responsibility, that awesome, unbearable responsibility to be in this DaVinci moment.

AUBREY: So, talking to someone like Daniel Schmachtenberger, who illuminates all of the ways in which we are at this very unique precipice in which there was localized existential risk, country, a nation state, I mean, if Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes were coming around, your whole city could be decimated. Not even decimated, that's one out of 10. I mean, we're talking annihilated, absolute annihilation, complete existential risk for a localized population. But now in the world that we are, and we don't need to go through all of these, you can listen to the podcast with Daniel if you want to go through all of the ways in which we're now in a global world where we're facing global existential risk. So, this is the predicament that we're in, and this is the privilege as you say, to be alive right now. Isn't it amazing that we're alive right now? But what I would have never connected intellectually, but what I felt somatically is that there is something to sexuality, desire, eroticism. I wouldn't have used that word, but I knew that it played an important inextricable part in solving the existential crisis.

MARC: Now the conversation begins, right? Gorgeous, right? So, Daniel and myself and the whole grain, Ervin Laszlo when he wrote "The Chaos Point" and "The Club of Rome" when they start talking about the limits of growth, right? And the conversation around it, the conversation really, was started by Nick Bostrom. And Nick, who coined the term existential risk in the early 2000s at Oxford. And Nick wrote a very important series of papers. The last one was in 2019, called "The Vulnerability Hypothesis", where he basically says in a word, you've got an urn, got white balls coming out, good technology, gray balls coming out, internal combustion engine. It's great but you couldn't have fought all the wars of the 20th century without it, right? So it's a gray ball. And he says, what happens if you get a black ball? And a black ball is not a nuclear bomb, which takes state capacity to enrich uranium. A black ball is an existential risk. It's a form of existential risk that can be constructed easily, that's hard to detect, that's available to non-state actors. So that's the black ball of existential risk. And, it's been talked about, and Daniel's doing fantastic work in it, and Daniel's with us actually at the center as well. That's a gorgeous conversation. And as you say, that's the context, that's our... And then what you just gorgeously intuited, and complete correctly is that, the question now is, how do we respond? 

AUBREY: Yes. 

MARC: If we just respond at the level of interest or infrastructure, we won't succeed. We can't do technological rearrangements. Although technology is an important conversation, which that's a different conversation, which is critically important. We're completing a book now called "Techno Feudalism" which is a several hundred thousand word book on the technological dimension, let's bracket that. If we just do social structure, we rearrange, kind of, not going to work. We need superstructure. And superstructure means the new story. What's the best integrated new story of value, where we integrate the best strands of pre-modern, modern and postmodern of validated insights, but integrate them together into a new synergistic whole, greater than the sum of the parts that we can explain to any group of people in Montana or Idaho or Manhattan or Asia or Japan, or Somalia, right? It's a shared grammar of value. And at the center of the shared grammar of value has to be our own experience, and the core of our own experiences are us. And desire. So, you can't split off sexuality, you can't split off desire, you can't split off Eros. Actually, what's happening now is what we might call a global intimacy disorder. It's a failure of Eros. And therefore, the only way to address existential risk is to do what DaVinci did. DaVinci is facing Black Death, pandemic, and all the breakdowns of pre-modernity. He can't get to every village. So what does he have to do? He has to tell a new story. Together with Marcelo Faciano. Paul Tillich says about 1000 people were involved in the Renaissance. That's it. It's kind of shocking, but 1000 people were at the core of the Renaissance and they told a new story. And that was modernity. That's the precise extent of the plot lines of that story were accurate. It generated the dignities of modernity. But to the precise extent that there were core flaws in the plotline of the story of modernity, it generated the disasters of modernity, which have climaxed in the second shock of existence. And the core of it is, a bad story, a flawed story. And it's a story, which is about, and a dear friend of both Daniels and mine, Barbara Marx Hubbard, who was our co-chair at the center until she passed. She passed at 89, filled with energy. She talked for many years about the win lose metrics. And she got it right. That actually the core generator function of existential risk is a failed story. I call it success 2.0. Not 3.0, 2.0. Success 1.0 is the conflict between religions, which religion is going to win. Success 2.0, the conflict between every human being. Reiver is a conflict governed by win lose metrics, success 2.0.

AUBREY: As James Carse writes about, "Finite Games Versus Infinite" -

MARC: Finite Games Versus Infinite Games, gorgeous, right? That's success 2.0. But that's the core story, the core story all the way up and all the way down, between every division, between every human being, right? The commodified forms of spirit. In economics, it's a rivalrous conflict, governed by win lose metrics, which then generates extraction models, exponential growth curves, and complicated systems, not complex systems. Snowden's distinction. A complicated system means there's dissociation between the parts in the system. They can't see each other, so there's a financial meltdown, right? The supply side chains break down. So, both complicated systems and win lose metrics are intimacy disorders. The parts in the system can't see each other, can't feel each other. Human beings can't actually feel and be in space together, because I'm always in a win lose metrics with you.

AUBREY: Which is predicated on the myth of separation. 

MARC: Which is predicated on the myth of separation, which is a failure of intimacy. And intimacy is a property of Eros.

AUBREY: And a property of God. A property of the divine.

MARC: And God is Eros, right?

AUBREY: Right. 

MARC: Another, it's right. So, now we're at the beginning of our conversation. So, now we can... Is that okay?

AUBREY: Let's go.

MARC: Now we're in. So now we're talking about Eros not as two dudes who are bored, right? And so let's talk about Eros. Now we're saying, Oh, my God, the world's at stake, because we've deeroticized reality, right? There's an intimacy disorder. So the only way to restore intimacy or to evolve a new intimacy, is to tell a new story. And a new story means, let's say, between you and your partner, right? Lady V. Who just did this gorgeous invocation as we started, right? So, or between KK and I. So, where does intimacy go a little wonky? When we don't have a shared story. When there's a thing in our shared story that's off, we've got to revision our story. Once we have a shared story, we have a shared vision, we can find our intimacy. So whenever there's not a shared story, whether it's an organization or religion, a couple, right? The global community. When there's no shared story, you can't have intimacy.

AUBREY: It seems like story is a word that could use some clarification, because some stories are the immediate projections of our judgment that obscure reality. 

MARC: Wow, you're in critical territory, right? You're--

AUBREY: Because that's where it is with Vy and I, it is like all of a sudden, the true Vylana and the true Aubrey are obscured by what you could call a story, which is a momentary judgment. 

MARC: Let's make a distinction. Great. Gorgeous, right? So, there's intuition in the interior sciences, which is the world of spirit, interior sciences. But notice we're calling them interior sciences, which is the move beyond your story. And that's the story I need to move beyond. That's an illusion, that's a construction, that's an ego story, that's critical. But what's happened is that move in the world of spirit has undermined a deeper realization that there's a deeper story, which is actually the structure of the cosmos. That reality is not really a fact. Reality is a story. And reality is not an ordinary story. Reality in terms of the best information we have is a love story. And reality is not an ordinary love story. It's an evolutionary love story. It's an outrageous love story. And then my story, Lady V and Dr. A, that story, your story--

AUBREY: I just got my doctorate today. 

MARC: He's got my doctorate today, we're--

AUBREY: I expect certificates to come out. KK, if you want to work on one.

MARC: KK, we're going to be doing that.

AUBREY: I'll frame it. Framers, call the framers. 

MARC: Award ceremony coming down. Awards coming down.

AUBREY: You'll knight me with a pencil. 

MARC: Knight you with a pencil, right? Oh, my God, right? Oh, my God. And so, your story, and this is the big sentence. Your story, not the superficial story. Not the story that Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Theravada, tells us to move beyond. But your story, the ontology of your story, the dignity. Your story is a chapter in verse in the universal love story. So, your love story is not just two separate cells kind of locked in their neurotic embrace, right? But it's actually, this is a love story of cosmos incarnate in you. Your story is a chapter and verse in the universal love story.

AUBREY: Let me share a brief story of a time that I was drinking ayahuasca with my Maestro, Don Howard, and Don Rober. I was having a very profound journey. And in this profound journey, an embodiment of the voice of God came through. And there was an unbelievable little short dialogue where I had access to speak to what I knew was the voice of God at that point. I don't know, it's weird to use that word, right? I mean, what is it? Maybe it was an angel, I don't know what it was. But it felt like God in its entirety, spirit in its entirety, right? And, we had a brief exchange about faith and I asked God, I said, how do you have the time to come talk to me? And then I was like, oh, that's a stupid question, why would I say that? You're not even on time. Sorry, hold on one second. It was a very funny moment and God just lovingly and patiently sent love and reminded me that my challenges were from a lack of faith. And just this gentle loving reminder of that. The transmission finished with something very simple. He said, let me tell you the greatest love story ever told. And I said, "Okay." And God just showed me creation, all of creation. The dolphins and the trees and the people and the bees and the flowers, and how spirit God was infused within matter, and how that was the love. There were no more words, it was just this is the love story, the greatest love story ever told, spirit and matter.

MARC: Gorgeous. So, let's dive right in there, right? So, your story is a chapter and verse in the universe: a love story, that this gorgeous voice discloses to you. Now, we can actually not only access that through interior science, we can access through exterior science. They're both. So, let's just play for a second, okay? Let's introduce two words, kind of, we're just about to start our conversation. We're about to find our ground, right? So let's say, you introduce the word Eros, and what we call, KK and I, KK as in Kristina. Hi, KK. We call the cosmo-erotic universe, or the amorous cosmos, right? The universe: a love story. Or evolution: the love story of the universe. And we mean that with all rigor, with 2,000 pages of footnotes, and with a direct experience, as your gorgeous direct experience. So, the word Eros and the word intimacy. And let's see if we can just define them for a second. So we'll have a definition in this space. And of course, you can't define something fully. We define, we're pointing to its fragrance. But we need to understand the words, and then we can kind of play with them. And we can then begin to construct a new language, right? Because we need a new field of language that's going to become fully available. But it needs to be rigorous and precise in order to find our way in it, in order for it to actually begin to respond to existential risk by telling a new story. And what you said so beautifully is, we don't mean a new story, a new fiction. My colleague in Israel, Yuval Harari, wrote a book called "Homo Sapiens". Yuval is a kind of a, and beautiful man, right? I'm sure. And he's what I would call an uncontaminated source, in the sense that he's a good historian, but when he moves out of history is essentially reflecting the structures of post modernity. So when Yuval for example, talks about value, for Yuval, not his position, he's reflecting the postmodern moment. Value's not real. It's just a story. He calls it a story of fiction, a social construction of reality, a figment of our imagination. Sapiens, chapter two, and chapter seven and Homo Deus. That's a mistake. That misunderstands the Buddhist critique of the superficial story, with the deeper story of Cosmos. The interior scientists and Hasidism, 1760 Baal Shem Tov emerged out of the Carpathian Mountains, and produced this Hasidic movement that Martin Buber talked about. They say it in three words, and I'll translate it into English. God loves stories. But what they mean by that is God loves stories, is story is an ontology of cosmos, and you can't activate political will, and you can't create global coordination, and global coherence, without which we can't respond to any global issue, unless we have a shared story. And a shared story means first principles and first values embedded in a story of value as a context for our diversity. We will not respond to existential risk, and we won't birth the next generations. We can't actually enact a shared global story of value, a universal grammar of value, because we won't be able to create any kind of global coordination. I mean, Aubrey, just think about it. You've got a pandemic. It doesn't respect national boundaries, and the absurdity of responding to a pandemic country by country with diverse policies that contradict each other, and not creating a global coherence and coordinated policy in order to respond to a pandemic, ignoring all the other issues is insane.

AUBREY: Unless you realize that some of the actors in these nation states are more greedy, selfish–

MARC: Win lose metric. There's not a shared story. So we're lost in the success story of win lose metrics.

AUBREY: Nor can we trust all of the actors to act--

MARC: And there's a broken information ecology. So we're alienated from information itself, which is part of the global intimacy disorder, and alienation from information itself. So, we're in this space. So let's see if we can throw into the space this new story, but by story we mean the structure for the first principles and first values of Cosmos embedded in the story of value in which we all participate, and which is available as a new global story. So, Eros and intimacy have to be two core plot lines in that story. So Eros equation, intimacy equation. So, I want to introduce two equations. And these operate like the relativity equation. In exterior sciences, there are actually equations in interior sciences, and I remember, you talked about our friend Daniel before. Four or five years ago, Daniel said, "Okay, now Explain the basis of this intimacy equation." We spend several hours on the phone talking about this equation. So here's the equation, we'll start with intimacy. And we'll play with it. So intimacy equals shared identity. That's the beginning. Intimacy equals shared identity. There's a shared, not separate self as he said. Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of otherness, because we're also other, but in the context of relative otherness, right? So our others are not absolute. It's a relative otherness. So, intimacy equals shared identity, in the context of relevance of otherness, times mutuality of recognition. We recognize each other. Time mutuality of pathos. We feel each other. Times mutuality of value. There's a shared field of value. Times mutuality of purpose. Now, let's make that really simple. Let's just start, before we get to your couple, my couple and all of our couples, let's just talk about subatomic particles. Because this equation works across economics, across molecular biology, across physics, across organizational dynamics. It's the structure of reality. We live in an intimate universe, and the intimate universe lives in us. So let's just take subatomic particles, protons, neutrons, electrons. So protons, neutrons and electrons are allured because allurement is a core structure of the cosmos. Cosmos always has two vectors; allurement and autonomy. There's Aubrey autonomy. Mark and Aubrey get to meet, we get to be allured, we get to be excited. We didn't even want to come up here, we wanted just to talk downstairs, because there's this allurement, these subatomic parts, right? So the subatomic particles are allured to each other. They come together in a shared identity, which is a new whole greater than the sum of the parts. They create an atom. But in that atom, they have shared identity in the context of otherness, because there's still subatomic particles, there's still a proton, neutron and electron. They recognize each other. We know scientifically, that actually the subatomic particles recognize each other, they feel each other. There's a pathos between them. There's a kind of pleasure. There's a kind of quantum hedonism, which is what one scientist called in a kind of wild phrase, Kathy Kaufman in a great paper. There's quantum hedonism. There's an allurement. There's a neutrality of pathos. And then, there's a set of shared values, which create a mutuality of purpose, which is the function of the atom. So the atom is an expression of the basic movement of evolution, which is not the move from simplicity to complexity. Mistake. I mean, do we need more complexity? Complexity is an exterior of an interior and reality is interiors and exteriors all the way up and all the way down. So, evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies. Wow. Okay, that's interesting, right? We have a language here. And Eros, now let's put Eros in the equation. So Eros equals... Let's kind of find the equation. Eros equals this movement of reality towards. Its Eros equals the desire of reality, to find, to experience ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, seeking and desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That's an equation. It works all the way up and all the way down. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, desiring, moving towards ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness.

AUBREY: So, the beauty of what you're expressing in also the trick of Harari's work is that what you're pointing to is that there are stories that are not stories that are truisms. That is like they're true as mathematics are true. 

MARC: That's right. And once that becomes, once we recognize that there actually are interior sciences, and interior science are not dogmatic, and they're not the hijacked stories of the great traditions,, who hijacked some of these intuitions and made them ethnocentric, which is a mistake. But actually Eros is a property of the cosmos. Intimacy is a property of the cosmos. The same quality of intimacy. Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness, times mutuality of recognition, times mutuality of pathos, times mutuality of value, times mutuality, of purpose. That equation, and the Eros equation. Eros equals, and it's gorgeous, the experience of radical aliveness seeking, desiring. Because of desire, we talked about desire before. Right before we started, we had a little discussion. We were listening to Lady V saying something really beautiful about desire. Desire is a quality of the cosmos. There's no local desire anywhere. My desire participates in the field of desire. And you can't even begin to talk about a new sexual narrative without that realization. Let's bracket that for a second. So, we've got an Eros equation. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, moving towards ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. And I participate in the field of Eros. So, the Eros is moving in me. So, let's just apply it just for a second. You can apply to any corporation, to any business, to any partnership, to any interaction, to any of the 11 schools--

AUBREY: Well, let's do this actually. Because we did it with subatomic particles, but let's do it with two people. And let's say it's in a non-sexual way so people can understand. And one of the things that we do, I have an organization called Fit For Service. We bring communities together--

MARC: Fit For Service, beautiful. 

AUBREY: With the idea to create shared intimacy. And it's been a beautiful experiment where people are forming bonds and friendships and experiencing sovereignty on another level, while at the same time yes, and experiencing this collective community experience where they feel truly seen. They feel like they have intimacy and shared values with the group. So let's just say that, and this is something that intuitively we've been creating, but the formula is so beautiful. But let's just say, in this case, it's Aubrey and Anthony, and we don't know each other yet. And we're going through. So let's go through the intimacy equation and talk about the different ways that this will go. And I'll highlight some stories about how this plays out in reality.

MARC: Gorgeous. So, let's start with Anthony and Aubrey, AA. But AA is unique. So within the new story, this new story of value, first principles and first values rooted, embedded in the story of value. And parentheses, that's important. A story is not enough, and first principles and first values are not enough. I have to atone for too many footnotes but I've written, last five months, I've been in this exact one point, why you need both first principles and first values and a story. And they've got to be merged, right? And so, the story of reality is, reality is, the progressive deepening of intimacies, evolutions, the evolution of intimacy. So now we're going to look at Anthony and Aubrey as a chapter and verse in the story. So to do that, we need to look at and access the tenets of intimacy. And the tenets of intimacy are core to the story. So, here's the tenth one. There's 40 basic tenets of intimacy. These are the principles of the interior sciences. And one of them is, intimacy is always unique. So, just to sit, simply, there's this quality, which is a quality I was unaware of X amount of time ago, just the space between Marc and Aubrey. That quality of intimacy that we're just beginning to touch and enjoy, I certainly am, doesn't exist anyplace else in the cosmos. There's a unique quality of intimacy. And let's just play for a second, it's gorgeous. So, the religions talked about God, but the God you don't believe in doesn't exist, right? We all have a caricatured version of God, the God that you were running, you were two years old, you locked the door, your mother's banging on the door, God's going to get you in there. That God doesn't exist, right? The God you don't believe in doesn't exist. So, we need to kind of find what we mean by that God language. So, let's short circuit a long, beautiful conversation and let's just call God the infinity of intimacy. Not just the infinity of power that the religions talked about, divinity as the infinity of intimacy. That's the quality of the God field. Now, Aubrey is God's unique intimacy. There's no Aubrey anyplace else in the entire world. The quality of Aubtryness. And I remember I did a dialogue with my friend who passed away recently, Jumpo. He's a fierce Buddhist. Jumpo is like uniqueness, no, no, it's ridiculous. I said, "Jumpo, let me give you a con that will show you uniqueness." He said one word, "And you'll change your whole position, I promise you." He said, "Impossible." And here's the con, he said, "What is it?" "Jumpo," which is his name. And the guy's irreducibly unique, this fierce character. Of course. And that's not your separateness. That's not your separate self-story. That's the answer to who are you? Who are you? Aubrey, who's Aubrey? You're an irreducibly unique expression of the love intelligence, love beauty, and love desire. That's the initiating and animating Eros of all it is. 

AUBREY: Yeah, that unique essence. 

MARC: That lives in you as you and through you that never was, is or will be ever again other than through you. And as such, Aubrey has an irreducibly unique perspective, an irreducibly unique quality of intimacy, that come together to create his unique capacity to address unique needs and his unique circle of intimacy and influence, that can be addressed by no one that ever was, is, or will be ever again. So, let's get back to Anthony and Aubrey. So Anthony and Aubrey come together. They're each unique selves and a unique self is a core part of intimacy. Intimacy seeks uniqueness. Uniqueness is a property of the cosmos. And with mad respect to my Buddhist friends and my mystical friends in the West, they got this wrong. In others, they confuse separateness and uniqueness in about thousands of texts, right? Now, we've got to disambiguate. I can move beyond my separate self, and still be irreducibly unique. In other words, I'm part of the seamless code of the universe. But the seamless code of the universe is seamless, but it's not featureless. And its feature is Aubrey, right? And he's not a mistake, he's not an accident, he doesn't need to move beyond his story. He moves beyond his superficial story in order to actually realize the clarity of his participant, his unique story participating in the story of all that is. So now, Aubrey and Anthony come together. There are two unique qualities of intimacy, who are unique expressions of the field of the infinity of intimacy. Now, between Aubrey and Anthony, there's a new field created, a new intimacy. But if God's the infinity of intimacy, and Aubrey and Anthony create a new field, they've created a new god. It's like, wow. It's like--

AUBREY: They've expanded the articulation.

MARC: They've literally, that's right. They've literally created a new god. And the precise extent that they don't create that intimacy which is pregnant in that moment, and they don't love that moment opened with a new quality of intimacy that never was, is or will be again, and as Alfred North Whitehead said correctly in his "Adventures of Ideas", reality is the one, the many in the creative advance of novelty. Meaning there's a new intimacy that needs to be born, merging Whitehead into the tenets of intimacy. So, all of a sudden, Aubrey and Anthony have a commitment to this new God that lives between them. Now then, intimacy also generates emergence. All emergence happens through new intimacies. When the subatomic particles come together, they generate an atom. So, the same evolutionary impulse which is intimacy, it's intimacy, it's the movement of intimacy that lives between the subatomic particles, lives quite literally, between Aubrey and Anthony. So there's an emergence that can come from between them, that never was, is or will be again, that's needed by all that is. All of a sudden, their relationship is in an entirely different context. What are they going to generate together?

AUBREY: And it makes it so sacred, I mean, to understand that you're creating this new articulation of the Divine. Every time you come together in intimacy, you're actually articulating a new facet of the infinite cosmic prism of the Divine.

MARC: Yes, right? And I'm just going to push back not on a content thing, on a form thing, by creating a new language. You said it makes it so sacred, which is, of course, so gorgeous and correct. But let's see if we can play for a second, because when we say the word sacred, people can't access it anymore. We've lost our articulation of the sacred. We could actually say that the word intimate is actually synonymous with the word sacred, right? It actually makes it more intimate. And like wow, okay. And all of a sudden, we begin to understand that the intimate universe is the structure of reality. It's not a fundamentalist idea. It's not a freaking new age idea, right? It's not a declaration. It's actually the structure of reality itself, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain is the intimate universe in which I participate. And therefore if I know the tenets of intimacy, I can begin to access them not as a dogma, not as anyone's particular story that they're selling. But the same way we have first principles and first values in mathematics, right? We have first principles and first values embedded in the story of value, which can generate a shared grammar of value, without which we literally have zero chance of actually getting through the next period of time. 

AUBREY: The beauty of what this explication is doing is already I feel a deepening of reverence for every different relationship I have in my entire life. Every single one. All of the people here, it's like, oh, wow, if we deepen into this, soften, deepen, surrender into this, we'll discover this intimacy that is there, that is nascent but always available the more we recognize it. 

MARC: And then jealousy begins to disappear. Because jealousy always means, right? The nature of jealousy always is, a denial of uniqueness. So, there's a quality of intimacy that will exist between Marc and Aubrey. There's another quality of animals that will exist between Marc and Daniel. And the third quality of intimacy between Daniel and Aubrey and then between KK and Aubrey as they get to know each other. And then between Lady C and Lady V, right? They have their particular quality of intimacy, and then each one of them has a different quality of intimacy with Aubrey, right? In other words, instead of trying to actually encroach on each other's intimacies, we actually understand there's irreducibly unique intimacies that our God fields, and we get to be in reverence, but not in a contrived way. In other words, the nature of attraction between subatomic particles is, particular subatomic particles they're uniquely attracted to. And they form a particular configuration, which is called an atom. And then atoms are then allured in the same way, and they form new holes, right? With shared identity, right? With mutuality of pathos, mutuality of recognition, mutuality of a value field, and we try to purpose, that's called a molecule. Then molecules form macromolecules, right? And then macromolecules form cells. And let's see what happens, then cells, single cells, prokaryotes, all of a sudden run into a crisis. There's an oxygen crisis at the dawn of humanity. It's heavily described in the literature in which actually, all the single-celled activity in the world is dying. So what do we do? There's a crisis. It's a crisis of intimacy. Every crisis is always a crisis of intimacy. And then we generate a new configuration of intimacy called multicellular life. So, in other words, reality is evolution. Reality equals evolution, one. Two, evolution equals the evolution of intimacy. Three, reality is driven by the progressive deepening of intimacies. But four, along the way, there are crises. And the crisis is always a crisis of intimacy. And a crisis always can be solved. Five, by the emergence of a new configuration of intimacy. That's true about infrastructure, it's true about politics, it's true about economics. So, this is the structure of reality we're talking about,

AUBREY: I really wish I would have had access to you and this story during my, I had an eight-year exploration of polyamory, which was rife with jealousy. Because there was a comparative story that I had towards my partner's intimacy with other people where I would compare that intimacy to our intimacy, and become jealous of that intimacy, rather than the celebration of the unique divinity and intimacy that was being created amongst them and recognizing that it's... The fault in my story lay in the comparison of one unique intimacy with another unique intimacy. 

MARC: Right, and we lose the irreducible uniqueness. And, polyamory is of course not our topic today.

AUBREY: No, that's a long...

MARC: But let's just say one thing, which is that celibacy, one path, beautiful path. Monogamous marriage, gorgeous path. Polyamory, beautiful path. In other words, there actually are different paths that each have gorgeousness, depth, beauty, they may be available to people at different times in life. But here's what's clear. What's clear is we're at a crisis of intimacy, right? Billions of people in the world are just devastated and lonely. Loneliness creates alienation of unimaginable proportions, right? And loneliness creates a sense of failed Eros. Now, all ethical breakdown is rooted in a prior failure of Eros. And that's a critical equation. All ethical breakdown is rooted in a prior failure of Eros, which is why rule-bound ethics never succeed ultimately, because all acting out, if we can use that formal term, is always, I'm in the emptiness, there's a failure of Eros. And so, I seek to cover over the emptiness by acting out. We call that pseudo Eros. And all ethical breakdowns are a form of pseudo Eros. So, we've created a structure in reality today in which you have billions of people who experience themselves in a failed field of Eros, who are therefore acting out in various forms of pseudo Eros, which creates shame. And shame is the root of all evil, right? And shame is not the experience I did something wrong, that's responsibility. Guilt, I did it wrong, I fixed it. Shame is the experience that I'm broken, and I can't be fixed. There's something irreparably wrong with me. And we live today on a planet drenched in shame. A planet drenched in shame. 

AUBREY: And the formula that we've explored and tested for four years now about how to deepen these bonds of intimacy is to exorcise shame from the interaction itself. So, the ability to show your interior self, the parts of you that you normally wouldn't show and be met by someone else who looks at you, and says, Me too. Me too brother, me too sister. And the power of that is undeniable. And then all of a sudden, you say I'm not alone, I'm not alone. And it may not be me too specifically, like oh yeah, that specific thing. But yes, like I understand, I've felt something that is so in the same fabric and vibration and texture of what you're expressing that that's me too. And then that creates something that's just magical that actually happens.

MARC: Okay, let's play. Can we play for a second?

AUBREY: Yes, please. 

MARC: Okay, so, can we talk about shame? 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

MARC: This is wildly important. And I apologize for the next semi-obnoxious sentence. KK and I have been working on the topic of shame. And in the phenomenology of Eros, we did a whole volume on shame, on this conversation. Because you hit it so beautifully, and it's so insanely important. So, you described it quite gorgeously, right? As in all our conversations, you always do. Precisely what I would call the critical level one in responding to shame, which is there's a hiddenness, there's a split off parts of ourselves. Shame festers in the darkness, right? When you tell the story of shame with that which is mute it's given voice, and it's received in the feral witness of mad love, then the first dimension of shame is liberated. That's level one, and that's critical. Now, let's go to level two. But then there's a second dimension of shame. And you have to, actually, give shame the microphone. You have to let shame talk. And what does shame have to say? So, the first thing that shame says is okay, you guys did a great job at level one. You guys are awesome, necessary, can't skip that. And Brene Brown has done a really good job at focusing on this dimension of shame. Her mistake is, which I think flaws all of the work is that she stops there. Second level of shame is shame also may have a hidden function. It might be so for example, you might have children who weren't loved by their parents. That actually happens much more often than we think of, that there's unlove in a family. And so the child might tell a story about some early trauma, right? And be completely focused on that early shame trauma in order to deflect from the deeper pain of their childhood, which is the experience of unloved. So sometimes shame, shame as a false flag, right? It focuses us, it's a decoy, right? It actually absorbs us so we can actually survive childhood. But deeper, let's go deeper, level three. But there's a deeper, there's a tantric interview of shame, if you will. Which shame is also whispering in your ear, and shame's saying, in its healthy voice, it's saying, you're a king, you're a queen, right? You're royalty. And it calls you to your greatness, right? Now, there's the first level of shame, shame is the root of all evil. And you've got to tell that story. Then what? What decoy role is shame playing? A psychological interview. Then tantric interview, shame whispering in my ear, I'm a king and calling me to my greatness. That's the sacred voice of shame, because Tantra is the principle of non-rejection. So we can't even shame shame. Shame has to have a role. Those were the first three levels, but the core is at the fourth actually. It's at the fourth level. At the fourth level, shame is even deeper. Shame comes from the experience of being humiliated when I'm trying to meet my basic needs. The humiliation at the experience of attempting to meet my need for nourishment and for touch is actually the primal birth of shame. Fairbairn, Cohort, Wintercot, there's 40 years of they touched on this. Each one was looking for that. So, there's a shame of humiliation at meeting my basic needs. Then there's a shame of finitude at my basic mortality, which is deeper than all these other shames. It's an essential shame and then there's actual shame of powerlessness. It's a shame of my essential powerlessness. So those shames have to be responded to in a much more essential way. And they actually coalesce around sexuality, right? Sex is the magnet for shame. Shame adheres to sex because in sex, we experience our inability to be touched and held. We can't get our basic needs met, we feel that we're powerless. And sex reminds us of death. The orgasm is little death. We actually feel our fragility, our vulnerability, even as we feel our eternity. So, if we don't actually have a new sexual narrative, and a new experience of our sexuality, we can't actually respond to shame. And you can't have a new sexual narrative unless you actually move beyond the old sexual narratives which are sex positive, it's really good. Sex negative, truly dangerous. Sex neutral, Kinsey, it's like having lunch, but we know it's not like having lunch. We know it's more than positive, but we know it's not just negative. Sacred because it creates babies. That's beautiful. When was the last time you had sex to create a baby? And I'd say most of the listeners in your podcast probably didn't have sex to create a baby. 

AUBREY: I still haven't, not once. 

MARC: Still haven't, right? 

AUBREY: Yeah, eventually. 

MARC: Eventually, right? Amen, Hallelujah brother, right? Oh my god. That means that all four of our sexual narratives; sex positive, sex negative, church negative, sex neutral Kinsey, sex positive, most of culture, it's sex sacred, the kind of New Age creating the baby. All four of those narratives don't meet our sexual experience. So now we have the most powerful force in the world, desire, because reality itself as desire, is now unmoored from any narrative which creates a new puritanism, of course. So, what will the new sexual narrative be? So the new sexual narrative would be sex erotic. And sex erotic means that in sexuality, I feel not this weird urge moving in me, no. I actually feel the Eros of Cosmos, awake and alive in me. At the cosmo-erotic universe moving through me, the Eros that moves the cosmos. Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, back to our equation, seeking, desiring ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. When that moves in me, the reason it's the most powerful force in the world that sweeps things away, it's because actually reality is Eros, God is Eros. So that force is now awake and moving in me, and electrifying me, and I'm seeking ever deeper contact,  and ever greater wholeness, that's sex erotic. It's only when I have a realization of sex erotic, that shame actually disappears. Because that force is moving in me that undermines my sense of being a good citizen, Tory, a balanced person, what is that force moving? That's sex erotic. That's the current, the erotic current of the godville. That's Eros moving in you, that's the sacred, but it's not because it creates a baby. Sex is not sacred because it creates life. Sex is sacred because it is life. It is the current of life itself. So, wow. So, now we're beginning to create a new field, Eros. Intimacy, desire, become the cornerstone structurally of a shared grammar of value, because Eros is a value. It's not contrivance. It's a value of cosmos, just the same way that E equals MC squared, are values that generate an understanding of relativity, right? Actually, the intimacy equation, the Eros equation, and desire. The equations around desire, which we haven't even gotten to, but we have a sense of it. We understand that desire is the property of the cosmos. We talked about Whitehead before our last sentence. Whitehead was so wonderful, he writes Principia Mathematica with George Bertrand Russell, and he's in Cambridge so his English needs a little... You can't really say it out loud. But Whitehead talks about the apetition of cosmos, the appetites of cosmos. He means desire. Cosmos has appetites, right? Not just you and me. Our appetites participate in the appetites of the cosmos. And cosmos desires, right? Desire is the god field. Reality manifests because there's a Kashmir Shaivism, the Indian sutras that you talked about, that you all studied so beautifully. So, what do they say? There's a stirring of desire in the infinite. That's like, wow. That string of desire manifested you and me. And opera is a unique configuration of desire, unlike any other that ever was, is or will be. It's an irreducible unique configuration of intimacy and desire. So when I meet him, I don't want to be Aubrey. I want to be ecstatically irreverent of him, delighted by reality being Aubrey, knowing that Marc could never do that. Nor should he. And therefore we can meet and we can love each other madly, because all of a sudden we're not separate selves in a win lose metrics. So, now we begin to have a new story.

AUBREY: One of the things that I thought was so powerful about, and I say this at the risk of skipping ahead, and I know that we're methodically going through so many things, and it's beautiful. But one of the things that you mentioned is how eroticism when reduced to sexuality and confined to the act of the sexual congress, the act of sexuality, as we know sexuality. When all of eroticism is reduced and exiled into that category, it collapses under the weight of it because we're putting far too much pressure on this one act to hold this undeniable, inexorable drive--

MARC: You've been listening to the Rock and The Holy, that's right.

AUBREY: This drive to be intimate, this drive to yearn, to crave this level of intimacy. And then we say, oh, no, you get this in sex. But it can't hold it. It can actually illumine the principles, and this is something I would love to get into more. But I've experienced and just before I passed this back over to you. 

MARC: Please.

AUBREY: One of the really profound experiences that I've had was, when I grew up, there was just kind of categoric, homophobia as a man, right? Categoric, it was just universal. Terms of denigration involved homosexual epithets, right? And this was just the culture of my time when I was growing up, and it still exists. I think we've done a lot of work in society to actually start to change our language, and to change our understanding. But it made an imprint, right? And then I became very close friends with my brother, Kyle Kingsbury. And he had shed all of these kind of conditioning and shame. And I remember that we would just be sitting and watching a beautiful sunset or hanging out and talking. And he would just grab my hand and hold my hand. And it was uncomfortable at first. It was very uncomfortable. Or he'd put his hand on my leg, and it wasn't sexual. And I'm sure people listening, "I knew Aubrey was gay." That's still this kind of conditioning if you can't do that with another man. But all of a sudden, there was an intimacy that opened that allowed for touch, that allowed for intimacy, that had nothing to do with our genitals. But I was like, oh wow, I can be intimate with another man. 

MARC: Men can love each other.

AUBREY: Men can love each other. And then all of a sudden, my erotic impulses now have more different inputs of what it can experience. And same with nature. Same with so many things. There's so many ways that we can interact. And then sex doesn't have to hold all of the entirety of our impulse and our drive.

MARC: That's gorgeous. So, Aubrey, you've said so much, and so with permission, let me just tap into the first part of what you said in the second part, because each one is a gorgeous world. So, the first part, there's a phrase in the third century that is about Galuta Shekhinah, the exile of the feminine goddess divine, the Shekhinah, which is Eros. And the exile of the erotic. So where does the erotic get exiled to? To New Jersey? Where does Eros go? So, Eros is exiled into the sexual. And that's what you were pointing to so beautifully, and it's at the core of return to Eros, that work, is that actually when we exile Eros into the sexual, as you said, the sexual collapses under a burden she can't bear. Because we try in our sexing and usually in our sexing with this person, in this particular sexual act to fulfill all of our need for Eros--

AUBREY: All of God now.

MARC: In this moment, and there's no possible way that sexuality can meet our Eros. So, the exile, it's gorgeous. The exile of Eros, Galuta Shekhinah, the exile of the erotic isn't the sexual. But now. So what's the relationship between the two? Are they completely distinct? They're not. On the one hand, there were 12 billion years of Eros before sex. It's kind of a shocking realization. 12 billion years of Eros before sex, because those subatomic particles are erotically alive. There's fields of allurement, there's full Eros in the cosmos. And by the way, when people think about empty space, space is not empty. Space is filled with allurement. The structures of allurement move through all of the known universe, and it's fully alive, right? 

AUBREY: Yeah, what is gravity but things pulling towards each other?

MARC: What is gravity if not, right? The word gravity actually means allurement, right? Gravity is a field of allurement that there's nothing underneath. We call it gravity as if we've explained it. But what's underneath gravity? Nothing. Gravity is allurement, right? And so, the four forces, which are vectors of autonomy allurement, which is called attraction repulsion are animated by Eros, and love emerges not from allurement but from the balance between allurement and autonomy, right? In other words, love is not allurement and not autonomy. Love is the calibrated precise balance between allurement and autonomy, which is the Eros that animates, ours is not a fifth force of the universe, it animates all the four forces. But going back for a second. So, 12 billion years of Eros before sex, and then the sexual comes as a new emergent expression of Eros. Generates newness. And then the sexual begins to model the erotic. The sexual models the erotic, it doesn't exhaust the erotic. And, I've been just madly delighted with KK to work out is, what are the 12 faces of Eros? Which is a different conversation. But now let's go back to the second thing you said, which was also wildly important. You brought me back to my childhood. I was an awkward kid in school. I probably haven't changed much. And I went to a private Jewish school in the town that I lived in. And my parents who both went through the Holocaust, thought that Little League was a little dangerous. So we shouldn't do that. And, pants, if they have a little rip, just get a patch. Glasses from the 50s are kind of good. So I kind of brought down the dress code in the school kind of dramatically. And, I didn't do sports well, because I was always reading a book. And so the name that people called me was, I hadn't thought about it in a decade. It was Win Fag, right? Which was exactly that, the use of a homosexual kind of reference. So Win Fag was the name I was called in school throughout four years. And I remember it now. And our inability to actually hold and how we used, and how we didn't honor. So, the emergence of a possibility of, first off, honoring the world of sexuality, and all of its realms. And it is a gorgeous emergence of the god field. But second, independently of sexuality, Eros, the field of Eros, that men get to love each other is a wildly important idea, right? That men get to love each other non-sexually, is wildly important. And we've lost that sense of brotherhood. The co-president of the center, Zack, Zack and I always we'll just kind of leave each other at, "Hey, lover, how are you?" And it's the nature of our discourse, we get to love each other madly. And what's happened is, Aubrey, our love lists are too short. Our love lists are too short to very narrow sectors of our lives. The immediate egocentric circle of survival. And actually, to be an outrageous lover is actually to understand, we get to fall in love with each other. We get to do that. And we actually want to fall in love with new people every week. Because falling in love, love at its core, it's not just an emotion. Love is a perception. Right means I see you, I perceive your infinite irreducible uniqueness, and I'm dazzled by you. I'm delighted to be dazzled by you. So I get to meet Aubrey and fall in love with Aubrey. What a delight. And how poor my life would be if that wasn't a possibility. And so, to open up that possibility, we're essentially no human beings, back to Anthony and Aubrey, that you introduced in this gorgeous project that y'all are doing. The realization that no one's an ultimate stranger. There's no ultimate strangers in the universe. Because another of the tenets of intimacy, enlightenment means intimacy with all things. That's what alignment means. I'm intimate with all things. Or if we would say it in kind of a more modern nomenclature, we would say, enlightenment means there's no externalities, right? Nothing can be externalized. Which means that no human being is a stranger. One of the great masters of Hasidism, which we invoked before, at his death, he said, I had just asked one forgiveness in the world. I may have loved my son one tad more than the son of my neighbor. Please forgive me.  And as we've hijacked love, to its egocentric predicament--

AUBREY: Let's talk about this because this is one of the things that I think is a real limit on our ability to freely express through love. Now, obviously, I made an experimental effort to go into polyamory, which was, it didn't have the structure to hold it. It didn't have the societal structure, I didn't have the map to hold it. I didn't have the consciousness to hold it. Many reasons that we ultimately couldn't hold it. But it was a noble and daring and bold and painful and beautiful experiment into this, and exposed a lot of different things. But even in so many other structures, this scarcity of Eros, the scarcity of feeling like you can be loved, that you are always loved is what prevents people from actually being willing to love, particularly when it involves the opposite sex. But it's like there's this jealousy that's at the root of, I think it's our egocentric story separate from the unique self, which is a whole other thing I would love to get into. But it's interesting to me, and you hear Ram Dass talk about it, but I've never heard him break it down to first principles. Like you say, you fall in love with the person checking you out at the grocery store, and you fall in love with everybody. And, you know, you feel this to be true, but now I understand. Oh, of course we feel it to be true, because it is true, it is part of a true, true story. But nonetheless, somehow our jealousy hijacks this thing and says I'm scarce, and if you give this there, and if you experience this intimacy there I will have less and I will be in scarcity. And the pain, the pain of this experience will be unbearable to me.

MARC: So, let's circle back. It's beautiful, right? And let's see if we can find it. So first off, just a word about Ram Das. So, it was 2005. I was in Maui. And myself, Ram Dass and Krishna Das were teaching together for like eight days. Ram Dass was after his stroke. And everyone was there eating really healthy food. Now healthy food is okay, like blessings all there, right? But I was hungry. And Ram Dass wasn't feeling that well. So Krishna Das was singing, I was teaching all day, Ram Dass was kind of looking beautiful and benevolent. So, I'm starving. So it's 11 o'clock at night. I say okay, everyone's asleep, I'm going to go get some food. So I get there, there's no food, there's just brownies. I don't have much of a history in this kind of, so, like I said, I'm so hungry. So I eat like four brownies. I go back to my room. And 10 minutes later, I woke up and said, "Oh, my God, I'm dying." So I spent from eleven till five o'clock in the morning in the most wild, insane, right? And then Ram Dass wheels out his wheelchair about 5 a.m. And he says, "Rabbi, you're not looking too good." I said, "I had some brownies." He said, "Brownies? How many?" So, the moral of the story is don't eat brownies from Ram Dass's refrigerator, right? Let's just start there, right? But, after that said and done, we spent many nights together talking about those eight, nine days about these principles of the field of loving, and he was so wildly excited. And he said something to me very, very poignant. which was, he said, and he just he blew me away with it. He said, "Everyone looked to me, Marc for a certain something." And he said, "I could find that something in the world of psychedelics, but I couldn't access it afterwards." And so I looked at this, and I looked for the first principles. But, that's not what I was able to find. And so we spend a week looking at first principles together around love. And it was ecstatic. And he said very beautiful things before we left, right? And we just had a gorgeous time. Just a really beautiful man who, he never stopped searching until the day he died. And so, he had a beautiful journey. And one of the things that we talked about is this notion of ordinary love versus outrageous love, or ordinary love versus evolutionary love. As long as you understand love as being that which exists between two human beings, what you've done is, you've taken one instantiation of Eros, its human expression. And then, so you've exiled love from the field of Eros and Cosmos, to the human realm. Exile one. Exile two, you've exiled it to this particular relation between you and this one other person. Exiled two. Exile three, real love is at the beginning of the relationship when you were ecstatic and infatuated. So now you've exiled it to a particular instantiation of this particular relationship. Now you're devastated, because you can't find that again. So, there's a threefold exile of Eros. The only way to actually love and love madly, and loving madly is the only sanity, is to actually understand I'm in a field of Eros. And love is not mere human sentiment. It's the heart of existence itself. And that's not a clever thing to say, that's the best information we have validated from the interior and extra sciences, integrated from pre-modern, Modern and Postmodern world. Our universe is actually a love story. It's got agony and ecstasy. It's not a pollyannish love story. But reality is the movement of Eros and my love story is part of the universal love story. So, to be polyamorous has nothing to do with sexuality. I can be completely monogamous in my sexuality. But polyamorous, meaning I love more widely than one person. Now I'll have different qualities of love with every person, and they're not the same. And you'll have a quality of love with the person that you live with, and you might share a bank account with, and you might share a bed with every night which is a particular commitment, of course. Another tenet of intimacy, intimacy creates obligation. That's a whole world by itself. Intimacy creates obligation. That's a tenet of intimacy. So, the depth of my intimacy creates a depth of obligation, but obligation is not imposed. The word in Hebrew for obligation is Eros itself, [Hebrew 01:15:53] Same word. So obligation is the field of love expressing itself in the mad embrace. So, what we've done is, because we've lost Eros, our whole polyamory conversation has been around sexuality, but it's not polysexual. It's polyamory, amor. Amor is a quality of cosmos. So, I get to love you madly. And I'll tell you a secret, KK is ecstatic that I'm going to love you madly, right? And if you and KK become sisters, and you love KK madly as your sister, that's delightful. Then I'm going to be ecstatic that there's this new quality that exists between you and Kristina, right? And we're all richer for it. And there'll be something in the quality of your sisterhood with KK that will actually give her something, here's what's wild, which I can't give her. And I have no idea what it’s going to be. But because I love her, right? I don't say, "Don't do that. If you're not getting it from me, you shouldn't be getting it anywhere." Right? So there's a quality because you're a unique self. So, all of a sudden, we're in a different world.

AUBREY: And you have to be in the plenum of your own self-love and self-worth, validation. You can't be looking for external, you can't be putting mirrors on KK and her sourcing of love from you as the way to validate yourself as worthy of love, because of the devotion of love that she isolates to you in order for you to actually feel and celebrate the love that she shares with another.

MARC: Beautiful. And none of that works without actually a new field of language. So even when we talk about self, and maybe we can dip into this for a second. So, what do we mean by self? I mean--

AUBREY: That's a very big question. 

MARC: That's a big question, right? Because if we can't, what does that mean? Because what we do... Remember Thucydides in the Peloponnesian Wars, he says, when words lose their meaning, culture collapses. And so, we need to reengage, revivify this new field of language. Let's talk about self for a second. 

AUBREY: Let's do it. 

MARC: Let's talk about self. So you got a separate self. And let's try and do it again, let's try and do, I don't know, 1000 pages in five minutes, but just to get the field together, because then we can talk about that image that you put into the field, so gorgeously. So, separate self is the experience of being a puzzle piece. I'm a puzzle piece. I'm individuated. I feel like there's a larger puzzle. But society tells me there's not. I have my dignity, my boundaries of separate self. I'm a little idiosyncratic, if you look at the puzzle, because I'm a little funny, I'm a little weird. But I try and round my edges as best I can, and kind of hobble along. And there's dignity to the separate self. A separate self is real, right? I mean, the way we would say it in interior science, a separate self exists in the mind of God. There really is Aubrey, there really is Marc, right? There really is. These are real categories. But separate self is insufficient, right? It's insufficient, right? And that's the intuition of the interior sciences, it's an insufficient understanding of reality. So, we realize, no, I actually have to realize my true identity. That's classical enlightenment, right? which is the move from separate self to true self. Now, that move from separate self to true self needs to be made by every human being. You don't need to do it by sitting on a mat. There's lots of ways to make that move. But we need to democratize enlightenment, right? Democratization of enlightenment is critical. We cannot respond to existential risk, without a new story, a new story of value. And in that new story of value, there needs to be a democratization of enlightenment in order to have an emergent order, of a new cultural enlightenment, that allows for open societies. Otherwise closed societies win. Closed societies that are top down win, unless open societies can survive, and they can only do that if there's a shared ground of value. And that shared ground of value needs to be an accurate narrative of identity.

AUBREY: And the democratization of enlightenment can't be through, I mean, I suppose maybe it can help but words and concepts alone. I mean, I know for me in my journey, it's a gnosis. It's a gnosis. It's a feeling of it. 

MARC: It's a gnosis that then needs to be articulated in shared language. And what happens is either side, people err on both sides of it. 

AUBREY: Right, you experience something, you can't even describe it, and then--

MARC: I mean, here it is. So, we look out your window, we see the ocean. Okay, now, let's say you and I are walking down the street. And I say, "Man, don't you love the ocean?" So the word allows us to access the experience. If we don't have the word ocean, we can't articulate it, then you and I actually have to walk to an ocean, we have to put our hands in, touch it together, right? So we think that words are abstract. No, words actually hold experience. So by saying the word ocean, we can both evoke a shared experience called ocean. So, we need both direct access to the experience of enlightenment. And we need a new vocabulary, which creates a shared space, which is a new strobe which can evoke enlightenment, just like we evoke the ocean. Fair? 

AUBREY: Fair.

MARC: Fair, so here it gets beautiful. So, I've got to go from separate self to true self. We have to democratize enlightenment. And true self means the singular that has no plural. Total number of true selves in the world, one. We participate in this field, but it's not a field of one consciousness. That's a mistake. It's a field of one desire. It's one love. It's one breath, right? It's not just consciousness, right? It's Satcitananda . It's being sat. Cit, consciousness. So, the inside of being is consciousness. But then it's ananda, Eros, right? The inside of the inside is Eros. It's a field of desire. So, I experience myself in the field of desire, true self. And then in true self, I experienced the radical interconnectivity of the whole field. It's an intimate field. Everything is interconnected, that's true self. But we can't stop there. Because then I'm not a puzzle piece, then I'm a puzzle, right? The image of true self is there's a puzzle, no puzzle pieces. There's just this great, gorgeous, interconnected one. And then you tell your teacher, but I see these lines separating the puzzle pieces. "That's an illusion, meditate more." Then it's not an illusion. Those lines separating those pieces are important, because each piece is distinct. So now I move from my true self to unique self. And unique self is the experience that I'm a puzzle piece, with the capacity to complete the puzzle in a particular place and way that's not available to anyone else that ever was, or will be. So, true self plus unique perspective, plus unique quality of intimacy equals unique self. Wow. Now all of a sudden, we get every human being is an irreducible, unique self. So, unique self brings together all theories of identity, pre-modern, modern and postmodern into a simple second simplicity, though. I'm a unique self. I'm an irreducible unique expression of the love intelligence, and love beauty, and love desire. That's the initiating and animating Eros of all that is. That lives in me as me and through me. There never was, is or will be ever again. And as such, I've got this unique gift and this unique capacity to give that unique gift and my unique circle of intimacy and influence. That's five senses. That's a theory of identity that's not made up, it's not conjecture, it's not contrived, right? It's an actual... But that's not enough. Now, a unique self needs a larger context, the context of evolution, right? I live in an evolutionary field, and the evolutionary field lives in me. I don't live in, evolution lives in me literally. That's the science. In other words, every moor, every Quark, every Hadron, every protocol, every atom, all the way up to evolutionary chain, it's all literally in me. So evolution is alive in me. My deepest heart's desire is the desire of evolution. So, unique self plus evolution equals evolutionary unique self. Then one last stage. So, evolutionary unique self is a puzzle piece that, unlike unique self, completes the puzzle. Evolutionary unique self is, Aubrey actually evolves the puzzle. That's shocking. That's a shocking realization that actually Aubrey has the capacity in a way that Marc doesn't, to evolve the source code, to evolve the puzzle in a way that no one that ever was, is or will be ever can do other than him. There's dignity. There's a sense of... Right? And we've got one last step. But then I need a larger context, right? Where are my brothers and sisters? So, it's not just unique self, its unique self-symphony that actually I participate, I play my instrument, and unique self-symphony, which is not a top-down position. It's a bottom up self-actualizing cosmos, which actualizes in the movement towards uniqueness. In other words, the simple rule of cosmos and in complexity theory, simple rules move us to wide complexity. The movement of the cosmos is a move towards ever greater and deeper uniqueness. So, as we move towards becoming unique selves, giving our unique gifts and we give them together, we come together, then we have a planetary awakening in Eros through unique self-symphonies. That's a vision. Now we have a story. Not a conjecture, not a made up story. Now we're being to have a shared language. Now we've got a vision of self. So now when Aubrey and Kristina, that's brother and sister. There's these two unique selves meeting who have unique gifts, right? Who can then perhaps play an instrument in one particular way together and unique self-symphony, but now we have a language for it. Now we can begin to find our way. Okay.

AUBREY: One of the things that you wrote, and I don't know if you wrote it by yourself, or with KK, or with another collaborator, but I was reading it. And it was distinguishing the unique self-versus the ego, or the separate self. And there was a quote that I had in there. And I know that we could spend so much time on this, and I want to get back to the faces of Eros. Pseudo Eros, which I think is a mind blowing and revolutionary concept that's so applicable to my life. I know Kate's, all of our lives, right? So we have to wind up there. But I just want to quote this because I wrote it down, I thought it was very powerful. Give the ego everything, and it will not be satisfied. Give the unique self anything, and it will be grateful and satisfied.

MARC: Ain't that gorgeous? And it's absolutely true, right? In other words, the ego operates based on a missing tile syndrome. And it's like, "Oh, missing one." And then the ego focuses on the missing tile, and obsesses over the missing tile. And the unique self experiences the partial victories of life. Life is always a partial victory. Life is never a complete victory. Life is always tragic. There's always tragic in life unless I'm only in my narrow life. But if I'm beyond my narrow life, there's always a tragic dimension to life. To move to the post tragic, from the tragic to the post tragic is to be able to experience partial victories. And the unique self. There's one text in the third century that says that the unique self is madly ecstatic over eating an olive. Just an olive. And there's a text which says that grace, the notion of grace over meals, there's a three-part text that says, you shall eat, you shall be satisfied, you shall make Grace, give blessing. Hebrew text. So the masters talk about, well, how much do you need to eat in order to give grace? So they say “you have to be satisfied.” But then they say, but the enlightened unique selves, they do Grace after just eating an olives' worth, because they're satisfied just at an olives' worth.

AUBREY: It's like the poem, eternity in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower.

MARC: Blake got that through direct experience and he's got it right. He says, he talks about the post tragic experience. He says, when such as I cashed out remorse, so great a sweetness fills my breast. We can dance and we can sing. We're blessed by everything. And everything we look upon is blessed. And it's gorgeous, right? So, that's the experience of being able to experience radical satisfaction, in the fullness of the moment, which is the infinity, the eternity in the grain of sand, which is how you started. That's underneath the story, and invests the story, it animates the story. 

AUBREY: Yeah, you said that you wanted to touch on pleasure. 

MARC: Yeah, I mean, beautiful. Because when we think about the structure of reality, and we're trying to articulate a new story, you can't leave something which is core to the human experience out of the story. Human beings are driven by pleasure. Not in the kind of... Evolutionary psychology has made some important contributions. And it also has some incredibly thin literature in which it attempts to kind of reduce the most profound human drives, to wit they'll kind of refer to almost dismissively as a survival mechanism. But of course, survival means life. In other words, what it means is there's a drive to life. And pleasure is associated with life in a fundamental way. I mentioned her before. There's a very, very good article by Kathy Kaufman, where she's talking. It's a very complex scientific article, but she kind of in a throwaway, talks about correctly quantum hedonism, right? And she's talking about it not in the context of a philosophical article, but in the context of a kind of structural article. And actually, her husband Stuart has done incredibly important work right around complexity theory and how mathematics exhausts itself when you enter the biosphere. And actually Pythagoras and Newton in their attempt to kind of reduce reality to number, which ultimately generates the modern notion of measurement instead of classification. And it kind of disconnects us from the immeasurable. And so, that's just kind of a little bit of a background. So, quantum hedonism means that at the very quantum level, there's pleasure. Pleasure is a structure of reality. And you might understand reality also isn't another vector, it's the evolution of pleasure. But let's understand that pleasure is the source of all ethics. See, we think there's the ethical, and there's the pleasurable. And that's a fundamental mistake. And here, again, we need vocabulary. So just to spend a second on this, because it's crazy gorgeous. There are actually about 10 voices of pleasure that live in us, these different voices. The voice that deserves pleasure, the voice that doesn't deserve pleasure, the voice that's shamed by pleasure, right? Got to find the voices of pleasure inside of yourself, big conversation. Then there are principles of pleasure, right? So, a principle of pleasure would be, for example, pleasure is a skill. As a principle of pleasure, pleasure is a skill. Principle two, there are levels of pleasure. You need to name them, understand what they are. And principle three, all of level one can't buy you any of level two, and all of level two can't buy you three. So, there's essentially six levels of pleasure just in a second, because we need this to be able to move in the world. There's physical pleasures, right? Eating, drinking, being merry and all those ways physical pleasures, which have a shadow form, and a form of genuine Eros. Every pleasure has a price. So for example, for physical pleasure, the price is attention, the placing of attention on the pleasure. Without which you can't get the pleasure. The more attention you place on pleasure, the more depth it has. Then you have level two pleasure, which is love, affection, relationships. All of level one pleasure can't get you any of level two pleasure. Interesting. And love, affection, relationships, have other prices, other practices you need to learn to get that pleasure. But then you have level three pleasure, which would be standing for a cause and productivity. So let's say Teddy Kennedy, in the last 20 years of his life, was really good at level three pleasure. Not great at level two pleasure, right? But all of level two pleasure doesn't get you any of level three pleasure. Ain't that interesting? All of love, affection, relationships, doesn't get you standing for a cause. And whether it's the guy or the girl who calls home and says, "Honey, I'm working late." And he or she says, "Well, what do you mean, you've got to come home to the family." And he or she is like, "But I'm doing this for the family." They're lying, right? In other words, no, you're doing it because it's another form of pleasure. You're being productive, you're standing for a cause, it's a new form of pleasure. Level three pleasure. Level four pleasure. The pleasure of true gnosis. It's why I leave everything to go to an ashram, or to go on a journey. True knowledge, true self. Knowing the true nature of reality, that's a completely different form of pleasure. All of level three pleasure, standing for a cause, all social justice warriorship won't get you to level four pleasure. So we're often willing to give up all of one form of pleasure for the next. Level five pleasure, the pleasure of the artists who uniquely create. So level four would be true self love. Level five would be a unique self, right? The pleasure of my unique creativity, which is all of level four, it's not going to get me. And then finally, level six pleasure, the pleasure of power. But what's the pleasure of power? The pleasure of evolutionary unique self. That my transformation transforms the whole thing. I impact the entire field. Ultimate power, right? The pleasure of level six. All of level five, unique self, creativity won't give you level six pleasure. So, what did we just do in five minutes? We just gave a map of the hedonic, but we overcame the Greek split between hedon and demon. It's not that there's a meaning in pleasure. It's a fundamental mistake. Actually, pleasure's at the very core of reality. And pleasure is actually the source of my ethos. You could use just that map and nothing else we said today, and actually effectively guide your life, to live a life of radical enlightenment. That's shocking, and pleasure's at the center. Now, when we exile pleasure, there was actually a gentleman who actually lives in your hood, down in Texas who was on our board. And I remember, and beautiful man, he shall remain nameless in this point, appropriately. We were giving a series of teachings around pleasure. And somehow they circulated around his office, he was in Dallas. And everyone got outraged that he was participating in a course on pleasure, because the assumption was that pleasure was fundamentally unethical. Pleasure is somehow a violation. Hedon violates demons. But actually, there's quantum hedonism. When we violate pleasure, and I don't understand, pleasure is an innate right and dignity of every human being. Whether it's the pleasure of the embodied, the pleasure of love, the pleasure of standing for a cause, the pleasure of true knowledge, the pleasure of artistic unique creativity, and the pleasure of power. And that begins to give us a field that we can enter, which we can't bypass.

AUBREY: It seems that in the understanding of tantra that I've explored and experienced, and also that you helped define from the etymology of it, which is tantra in its essence, is the expansion of the thing. 

MARC: Time to expand. 

AUBREY: So, in all of these levels, however, it seems like there's a layer of tantra you could add and stack on top to expand every single one of these, so that they become even more voluptuous and filling.

MARC: Gorgeous. And notice how beautifully you use the word voluptuous. Gorgeous, meaning the sexual models the erotic. Voluptuous is not exiled to the curvature of a breast. Actually, God is called El Shaddai. God who is Shaddai the breast. So the breast evokes a quality of cosmos. So voluptuous means a fullness of Eros that can exist in an idea, that can exist in experience. Or that can completely celibate and complete access to the voluptuousness of experience. That's gorgeous. And actually, you really just very gorgeously, just with your permission, the word Tantra is a funny word. And we've again, exiled Tantra to sexuality, and the tantric literature that exists world over in all the great traditions, about 1% is about sexuality. Right? And 99% of the literature has nothing to do with sexuality. And other Tantra formally comes from the east. There's what I would call a tantric layer, and all the world literature. So the real key is thinking tantrically. For example, there's strains in Kabbalah that we talk about in, the erotic and the whole return to Eros that are tantric strains. But what do we mean by Tantra? And here you're touching this thing, beautiful. Tantra means three things. One is non-rejection. Nothing's off the table. It's a principle of non-rejection. So shame can't be off the table. We can't shame shame. Pleasure can't be off the table. Right? Sexuality can't be off the table, my fantasies can't be off the table. My fantasies of a better world can't be off the table, right? In other words, non-rejection. Two, and this is what you just alluded to beautifully. Trace it back to its root. It's always you trace the experience back to its root. So you can always follow pleasure to infinity. That's gorgeous. That you can trace pleasure back to the infinite, right? And the voluptuous, you can trace to the infinite. And if the breast remains the breast, but it's not traced back to the field of Eros itself, then it's dissociated and disembodied. And then what you need is you need a new breast then. Because that's pseudo Eros. You're not in Eros itself. And so, when, what was it? In 1957, when Hugh Hefner started Playboy, and you had Ms. July, let's just use Ms. July for a year. But you can't, you've got to use a new person. Why? Because there's no Eros there. Right? It's pseudo Eros. You need something new all the time, because you're not actually having a depth experience, which you can be blown away because you haven't developed the skill of pleasure. Pleasure is a skill. 

AUBREY: Which really is the challenge that I've identified with monogamy as it's played out in society, is people are instructed to be monogamous through ritual and custom, and a variety of different reasons not worth going down, but not given the skill to actually go deeper into the pleasure available with that partner, to such an extent that the pleasure is in such radical outrageous abundance, that you are not in scarcity. Nor do you need that kind of cheap hack of novelty to give you that pseudo Eros, but you're really right in this spot of Eros with that individual. And without that skill, of course, of course, it crumbles because you don't have the skill to actually make it work and revivify it, and give you your fundamental essential drive towards feeling that yearning anymore.

MARC: Gorgeous, right? In other words, I can actually find in a monogamous context, infinity. Because the experience actually is new every time. Intimacy means, we talked about intimacy, the intimacy formula. So what does it mean to be intimate with myself? So, intimacy with myself, intimacy equals shared identity. Shared identity with all the split off parts of myself, plus mutuality of recognition. I recognize all those parts. We try to have pathos, I feel all those parts. We try to value, Tantra principle of non-rejection. They all have value, and mutuality of purpose. All of those parts are part of my shared purpose, right? Now, in a relationship, intimacy means the shared identity. Now, the question is, what's split off from our shared identity? So when something's split off, then by bringing it into the field, you actually create new intimacy, right? So in every experience, every erotic experience, every conversation, we're being born  new, quite literally, because we participate in the infinite field of Eros. As a separate self, you can't be born anew. As a separate self, you get bored fast, as you should, right? If you're a separate self, who's a materialist, defined by antecedent causes, reductionist expression, who's an accidental, random and ultimately meaningless form, then why wouldn't you get bored with the person that you seem to know, every move they make and every breath they take? And of course, you're going to get bored. But if actually, you realize that's a false epistemology, right? Your epistemology is fundamentally false. And actually, you are a unique expression of the infinity of intimacy, and you participate in that infinite field, and you're therefore uniquely renewing all the time. So then, I want to meet you anew every time, and I want to meet the stranger in you.

AUBREY: Yeah. Novelty at depth. 

MARC: That's right. The newness is not a new pair of, it's not a new belly, right? It's not a new male body or female body. It's a new depth in you that I didn't even imagine I could possibly meet.

AUBREY: Or a new depth in yourself, which then goes to meet–

MARC: And then if there's a new depth in myself, it means I'm now more intimate with a split off part of myself than there's a new me who's meeting you. Gorgeous, right? And then a new god is created. And then we've got a field. So, let's go to Eros now. Eros is our topic. I think we started there a couple of hours ago. 

AUBREY: Now we're ready.

MARC: Now we're ready. Now we're ready. So, I mean Eros is such a great word, right? It's a great word. And I like using Eros instead of love, because love has gotten trivialized. And as on the one hand, love is our sacred creed. And you only know a sacred creed, by what we say at the moment of death, right? So do I say, “Om mani padme hum” at the moment of death in one tradition? Or do I say, you good? Do I say in a Hebrew tradition at the moment of death, the creed of God's oneness. So, our creed that we say at the moment of death, is I love you, right? I mean, the World Trade Center is going down, and we have the cell phone records from recovered cell phones of what people said and people said, "I love you." From every religion, right? You just listen to these... You've got one second left to say, thing is, I love you, right? And so, I love you is our sacred creed, and we've killed all the gods and goddesses except for Aphrodite. But we don't know how to worship at her altar. So we have one goddess left, but we don't know how to worship. And so, we're devastated. We've exiled Eros to this very particular construct. And so on the one hand I love you is our sacred creed. On the other hand, it's grown stale. We don't know what it means anymore. What are its implications? What's the resonant feel that emerges from it? So, we need to actually revivify our relationship to love, which is why Kristina and I never talk about love. We talked about outrageous love. And it's outrageous, right? My friend John, actually from your town in Austin. Says Marc, let's call it unlimited love. It's less controversial. But it's not just unlimited, it's outrageous, right? It's outrageous. It's outraged at injustice. And it's outrageous. It's not ordinary, but it participates in the same force that moves supernovas. And so it's outrageous love, and outrageous love is Eros. Outrage love is Eros. Eros is the quality of the field. Eros is, let's go back to our equation and maybe we can talk about it, at least the first four phases of Eros. So here's our equation. Eros equals radical aliveness moving towards desiring, not just movement. There's a desire on the inside of the cosmos. Reality is desire, reality feels, and reality feels desire, right? God is desire. And it's a shocking realization. So reality is Eros. Eros is the experience of radical aliveness moving towards desiring ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. Sex erotic is when my sexuality participates in Eros. I can be having sex all day and all night and never have an erotic experience, right? I can have a gorgeous conversation with someone where we're just four hours. We've been talking for hours now, a minute's gone by, right? We're in the field of Eros. Time changes. And one of the qualities of Eros, I don't think we're going to get to it today is that time shifts. And when you're in Eros, time shifts its dimensions. So, we've been talking for hours. We feel like we're just barely saying hello. So, let's see if we can find the first four qualities of Eros. So, the first quality of Eros is the experience of interiority, to be on the inside, right? When Rumi says I'm opening the door from the inside. To be on the inside of an experience, it is a quality of Eros. And you can be in the inside of a sentence, you can be on the inside of rapture, you can be in the inside of study, you can be in the inside of... I remember when I was a kid, I must have been, I don't know, seven, eight years old. And somehow my parents were watching "Marathon Man". I'm dating myself, right? I think it was Dustin Hoffman, old, old movie. And Dustin often is running, he's running, and I used to jog. Remember, we used to jog and it was a moment in the world, right? Until they told us it was bad for our knees. You can't do anything anymore. It's like this is bad for your knees, bad for your elbows. Okay, so Dustin Hoffman is jogging, right? And there's this moment where he breaks through. And there was a period in my life where I would jog from one part of Jerusalem to another, right? Every morning I would cross the city. There's this moment where you just, there's not pavement and there's not grass and there's not your clothes, you're just, you're on the inside, you've crossed over to the inside. And in the conversation you cross over to the inside. It's what we mean when we say the sexual models the erotic. When the sexual is happening in its gorgeousness, you've crossed over into the inside. You can be eating, you've crossed over, there's no longer this split between subject and object. You're on the inside and everything is different. So the word to be in the Hebrew literature before God is Adonai. But it means punim, face, and it means inside. It's the actual translation of the word before God, Leviticus 23. We have scripture on this. The actual translation of the word is to be on the inside of God's face, right? So, to be on the inside is the experience of Eros. As long as I'm on the surface, I'm not in Eros. When I step into the inside, I'm in Eros. And it's true in every field. When I'm in Eros, when I've crossed into, when I've stepped into the inside, then everything melts away. I can be in basketball in the zone. 

AUBREY: Well, yeah, I was thinking that same thing. I've been a basketball player, recently picked it back up. And you can either be inside the game, or you can be watching yourself play the game. And it's a radically different experience. One is ecstasy in its own unique way, and its own unique flavor, Eros--

MARC: Ecstasy, I'm beside myself. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And then the other is like, it's very uncomfortable, and you don't play well when you're watching yourself play basketball. 

MARC: Right. And when you step into the field of Eros, then you have capacities that are unimaginable, because you're not limited to your skin encapsulated ego. As long as I'm separate from the field, then the only gifts I have are Marc's gifts. And whatever they may be or not be, they're limited. But when I actually step into the field of Eros, I'm now accessing the field, and all of its creativity and all of its power, and all of its potency, and all of its beauty, and all of its elegance, all of its wisdom, is quite literally moving through me. It's a shocking experience. So, Eros is first, the experience of being on the inside. And paradoxically, we talked earlier about the word sacred. We said, let's replace sacred with intimate, right? So, the word holy is sacred is defined in the sacred texts as the one who's before the divine. But we think before God is God's there, I'm here, and I should bow. Well, yes, there's reverence to the field. Of course there is, and of course, we're in mad devotion to the field. And that's an important topic. And at the same time, the literal translation correctly of before God is I'm on the inside of God's face. I'm in the field of Eros, its interiority. And I can actually enter into literally the interior face of the cosmos. Which is why the face, it's so beautiful, right? Inside is also face in the original Hebrew. So when I look at your face, oh, there you are. And no two faces are because face, 45 muscles in the face, most of them are all about expressing interiority, but not structurally needed for any functional exteriority. So, those muscles are an experience of, to be face to face. Means my inside wants to meet your inside. What was that, just a movie came to mind. The inestimable and wonderful and reverential Tom Hanks. Right, Tom Hanks. Thank you, Tom. Alright, Tom is on, it's a movie called "Castaway". Remember that movie? He is a castaway, he's on the island. Now if evolutional was right, it was a cargo plane that went down. He's on this island, he's stuck on the island, he's learned how to survive. It's a gorgeous Island. He's good for life. But evolution in its reductionist explanations, meaning Neo Darwinian reductionist understanding is incorrect. Evolution's correct. But the Neo Darwinian reduction is incorrect. Survival is insufficient. He can survive there forever. He's going to make this little raft and throw himself in the ocean, right? He's got a 1% chance of survival. Why? Because he wants to have another experience where his interior meets the interior of another person. And when I can't find the interior of another person, and our interiors can't kiss and meet, then the experience is that I'm not alive. I mean that's the experience of loneliness, right? Loneliness means the inability to share my depth with another person, right? And there's three reasons we're lonely. Either because there's no one to share our depth with. But generally, it's a deeper reason. We don't know our depth. And if I don't know it, I can't share it, right? And so, interiority is Eros, Eros is my depth. And the opposite of Eros is the superficial, and the erotic and the holier one. So the definition of the holy is the one who's before God, but before God means to be on the inside of God's face. So, Eros and holiness are actually, it's the same word. And the word holy confuses us, because it's been hijacked and degraded. And so, we need to move to Eros, but not Eros in its sexual expression, as you and I said before, 12 billion years of Eros, before sex. So Eros is the experience of being on the inside, which is gorgeous.

AUBREY: One of my spiritual teachers talks about how one of our great goals is to rescue the fallen angel, which is love. But he's rescuing the word, not love itself. Love needs no rescuing, but it's our concept of it. And this way in which we're understanding love as Eros, and using words like outrageous love is really rescuing the fallen angel. The holy of holies that has been lost because of our vocabulary, our language, our conditioning, our misunderstanding, our lack of a map, and how absolutely essential it is to rescue this fundamental substrate of life itself.

MARC: Gorgeous, gorgeous, right. We need new fields of language, right? And new fields of language are structural, they're not infrastructure that we talked in the beginning. Manfred Harris's distinction between superstructure, infrastructure, and social structure. Superstructure is my worldview, and my world view is expressed in a story, and a story is expressed in a field of language. And it's to revivify the field of language, right? It's magic, but magic in its deepest structural sense, abracadabra, Aramaic “Abracadabra”. I create with my speech, right? And so we literally need to revivify language, but not just mythos poetically. But to understand that poetry is actually the depth of words reaching for the silence, right? As I'm stretching the work to their breaking point, until I can access the depth of the silence, but it's a silence of presence. It's not a silence of absence, right? And that's such a distinction. We can be sitting in silence together, and let's try and find something to say. Which is a very bad date, right? We've all been on those, right? And you're sitting with someone that they don't want you to be there because their cousins, uncles, brothers, sister-in-laws, plumbers, daughters, friends set you up. So you've got a lot of people are going to get insulted if it doesn't work. And you're sitting in the car, and there's nothing to say. And she wants to press eject and get you out of the car, and you want to press eject but you're stuck, and there's no words to cover up with silence. So it's the silence of absence, right? Or you're sitting with a beloved, with your beloved, and it just got really quiet. And it's just so gorgeous. And you don't want to speak a word, because you don't want to break the beauty of the silence. That's the silence of presence. It's where words will somehow violate the silence. So, we need words that express the silence. There's two kinds of words. There's words that violate the silence, and there's words that express the silence. And poetry, you're a poet. Poetry is the bridge between silence and speech. You know that so well, right? You're trying to get to the inside of the words. That's what a poet does. The act of poetry is radical Eros, I want to find my way inside the words, to find the silence that lives under the words. And you can tell the difference between a person who speaks from speech, and a person who speaks from silence. They're completely different in their quality. So there's a second face of Eros.

AUBREY: Let me let me talk about one thing, which is introducing the concept of pseudo Eros, and how in this particular craving, there's a rather nefarious move that we make. Not intentionally nefarious, but it's a very dangerous move that we make by instead of actually being in the interior, we create a pseudo interior by placing something else on the exterior, so that it feels like we're in the interior. And this is a really nasty form of pseudo Eros.

MARC: Gorgeous, right? And that's core in the Dharma of return to Eros, right? You've pointed to a core, so maybe let's enter that, alright? We'll enter that through the second phase of Eros and we'll circle back. Is that okay? 

AUBREY: Great. 

MARC: So, the second phase of Eros is fullness of presence. But the fullness of presence is a very, very, very... The word Shekhinah, the feminine goddess Divine, is Shakin, presence. So, you go to visit someone who's sick in the hospital. When I was, there was a couple of years I spent in kind of formal congregational rabbing. And I used to go visit people in the hospital. So I would go to the children's ward, and I had a clown suit that I got. And you go, and you visit a child that's sick, and sometimes terminally sick. So, what do you say? Often, there's not much to say, but you show up, right? You're present. And there's something in the presence that takes me into the field of Eros. When I was 14, or 15, I went out with a woman named Betty. I remember Betty. I'm thinking about Betty now. And we were in the Orthodox structures of law, so no physical contact. So, we would go walk down by the Spuyten Duyvil Station, in Riverdale, New York, part of the Bronx, but they don't admit that to anyone. And we would just sit on the rocks, and we'd just be present. We would just sit and we would just look at the, and those were gorgeous. It's like a gorgeous time, right? I mean, the most beautiful time for KK and I, and we're just present with each other. And we're present beyond words. So there's a fullness of presence. Now, when that fullness of presence isn't there, there's an emptiness. And that emptiness we can't bear, or the emptiness is inordinately painful. Now there's a way through the emptiness. But let's bracket that for a second. We can't bear the emptiness. So we seek to cover it over, right? There's a hole in everything. And there's a hole in our hearts and that hole, that emptiness is so unbearable, that we do anything we can to cover it over and we cover it over with pseudo Eros. So addiction, at its core, means the inability to fill the void with ordinary pleasure. And the nature of the addict, and there's an addict that lives in all of us. But there's also a kind of more clinically physiologically defined addict, but the formal nature of addiction is, I can't get pleasure from ordinary life activity. So I need to keep upping my hedonic setpoint higher and higher and higher in order to have a sufficient, it dopamine surge, to cover over the emptiness. And once I've used that dopamine surge, it doesn't work anymore. So I've got to up it again, I've got to up it again, I've got to put again. So that creates the cycle of addiction. But addiction lives everywhere. Addiction is the inability to stay in the emptiness. I can't sit in it. And in the nomenclature of the Solomon tradition, there's something which is called the space between the cherubs. These two cherubs, these angelic figures, but they're actually more erotically entwined cherubs that they're above the Ark of the Covenant. Remember "Raiders of Lost Ark" Indiana Jones, the Ark of the Covenant, two cherubs. And the voice of infinity speaks from the empty space between the cherubs, the empty space between the cherubs. When I can stay in the emptiness, it fills. If I can't sit in the emptiness because I don't know who I am, I don't know my unique self, I can't actually perceive the infinity of my beauty, my unique quality of intimacy. So I can't stand the emptiness. I need pseudo Eros to cover over the emptiness which is the source of all addiction. All addiction, all acting out as pseudo Eros. And as you said so beautifully, one of its primary forms is pseudo Eros imitates Eros. It approximates Eros. So Eros means I'm on the inside. I'm in the circle. When I'm not actually in the circle, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to place someone else outside the circle, in order to give myself the illusory experience to create the illusion of being inside the circle. There was a movie that just came out four or five days ago. We did a broadcast on Sunday where we talked about it because it was actually quite complex and beautiful and important, both on what it missed and what it got. And it was called "Don't Look Up".

AUBREY: Yeah, I watched that movie. 

MARC: So, we're doing a series of talks now on "Don't Look Up". Because here's two scenes from "Don't Look Up", okay? Sorry for the spoiler. Okay, so the comet's about to strike. That's a big spoiler, okay? Comet's about to strike. And the character named Bree, who's the television commentator is with her commentator partner. Comet's about to strike, what are they going to do? So he says to her, "What should we do? Should we pray? Should we fuck?" And she says, "Let's just drink and talk shit about people." Wow, right? That's the ultimate pseudo Eros. You're in your last moments, you don't have any access to Eros. And when two people sit together, when there's no Eros between them, they talk about a third person in a negative way. If there's Eros between them, they say beautiful things about a shared person they might share.

AUBREY: Sure. 

MARC: Right, so when I place someone outside the circle to give myself an illusion of being inside the circle, that is pseudo Eros, whether it's a level of government, whether it's an individual relationship. And unless I actually have access to Eros, I will always get lost in all forms of pseudo Eros. The win lose metrics, that's pseudo Eros, precisely what it is. And so without seeing the structure of pseudo Eros, we can't move.

AUBREY: Also, one of the teachers that I've really admired his work, is Don Miguel Ruiz. He wrote a beautiful book called "The Four Agreements". One of the agreements is be impeccable with your word. And part of what he's saying is not to place others on the exterior by using this mechanism. But there's never an explication of why we're doing it in the first place that gives us the level of awareness to actually say, oh, now I see what I'm actually craving, what I'm actually desiring, and why I'm reaching to this impeccability with my word.

MARC: You said so beautifully, Aubrey, and that's exactly right. That's why it's so critical to create a new story with distinctions. Because it's only as you say, I'm just echoing, you say so gorgeously, it's only when I actually realize that I'm placing you on the outside in order to be on the inside. Until that light bulb goes off, I don't actually understand why in my last moment, before the world's about to end, I want to drink and talk shit about people, right? Because it's the only place I can access pseudo Eros. Now, there's one other scene in the movie, in which Kate is her name played by Ms. Lawrence is with, I don't remember his name. I apologize to him. He played Paul Atreises in "Dune". Give me a name of somebody. But anyways, him. And so, he's having this wonderful, right? He's falling in love with Kate, with Jennifer Lawrence. And they're on a rooftop. It's just about all be over. And he says, "Do you want to make out?" She said, "Yeah, whatever." And he says, "Don't say that. That makes me feel shitty. I want you to want it." She says, "Sure. Sure!" He says, "That's better." And they engage. But it's a beautiful moment, right? It's this little throwaway scene. So, what's happening? So the world's about to end, but in desire is infinity. And he says, let's find our desire right now. Because in that desire, in the fullness of that desire, which is the third face of Eros. The third face of Eros is the yearning face of being. It's evolution's yearning, its evolution's appetite. Evolution is not just being, it's not just sitting gorgeously in eternity, right? There's eternity in evolution. Evolution is being, but it's also becoming. And becoming is an ecstatic urgency. And ecstatic urgency is a quality of the cosmos. And by the way, one of the reasons that we demonize sexuality is because our image of grace was either the equilibrium of the master, who for some reason, speaks slowly. We think that people who speak slowly are more spiritual, which is very strange. You say something slowly, it's supposed to have more credence, I'm not sure what that means. But bracket that for a second. Because slowly seems to be connected to being. They talk in many traditions about one taste, that's a mistake. Reality is not one taste. It's not just being unmanifest or unmanifest being, reality is also becoming, reality is ecstatically urgent. And ecstatic urgency means the future, the future is calling me. I want something I don't have. I need something that I don't have. And there's dignity to need. See, the only way we can heal what we talked about earlier, the shame of the humiliation of getting my basic needs met, is if I actually give for the first time in the history of human thought, dignity to need. Need has ontological dignity, right? Need is divine, right? We always portray God as having no needs, right? Whether it's in the east, this ultimate equilibrium, or in the West, God is via negativa, beyond all sense of need. Maimonides, who I love. I'm madly in love with. Maimonides in his book, "Guide of The Perplexed" spends the first 50 chapters, explaining every text that seems to indicate divine need, as being beyond need. Now, of course, both the neti neti idea meaning you can't talk about any needs in the infinite, and the western idea, via negativa, they're talking about something real, they're talking about some infinite causal dimension of existence, which is real. But there's a deeper dimension, which is the divine pathos. Divinity has needs, how do I know? Because here we are. And though divinity could have rested in eternity, and she decided not to. And she decided, he decided to manifest you and me. So the infinity of intimacy has this string of desire in the infinite, in Kashmir Shaivism the radiant sutras, meaning divinity needs. There's dignity to need. And what is... Divinity needs you. It's like, wow.

AUBREY: And an interesting thing is that a lot of people who parrot some level of Buddhism that hasn't quite reached the mystical will say that, something like desire is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want, right? So, they're denigrating desire, denigrating need. You can have whatever you want, as long as you don't need it, all of these different ways of detachment. And this is something I'd love for you to get into. Where we've gotten stuck on this idea that the idea is to transcend our needs entirely, transcend desire, because desire is going to create expectations, it's going to create fears, it's going to create all these things. And so, we're supposed to live in the state where we're absent from desire. But I've always struggled with that deeply. Because how would you even live in a world of pleasure and pain and preference and reality without having desires?

MARC: I mean it's gorgeous, Aubrey, right? In other words, that Buddhist position that you present is often presented, and it's precisely true but partial. And it's if reality was one taste, and it was being, and the goal was to actually merge with being, you would have to then transcend all need in order to merge with being. But reality is not merely being, and divinity, whatever that means, is not being. Divinity is being and becoming. And becoming in its structural form means that reality needs. Need drives reality. Now, I want to clarify need. I want to find my authentic need. I want to find out my desire, but my deepest heart's desire. My deepest heart's desire is evolution's desire. That's the third quality of Eros. The third quality of Eros is that evolution's deepest quality is desire. And my deepest heart's desire is actually the guide to my life. Not my surface desire, my clarified desire, which means I should do my therapy work, that's important. I should work out what are the split-off parts of myself? What are my repetition compulsion? Do all that work, but not in order to create Freud's equilibrium in my separate self, but in order to be able to access my deepest heart's desire, which is evolution awake in me. I am evolution, quite literally. And my deepest heart's desire is the desire of the evolutionary impulse awake and alive in me, and my desire needs. Desire implies need. So, here's the thing, and it's shocking sense. We're so obsessed with codependency. And Melody Beattie, by the way, wrote a great book 30 years ago on codependency and it was an important observation. It was a good perception, it was a good psychological moment in culture. But then it confused need with codependency. If I love you, I need you. And actually, it's a wild thing to say. I love you and I need you. You can't separate those two. I love you always means I need you. And you know what, I need you desperately, right? Like wow, it's like wow, that we can liberate need. And here's the thing God needs. So, here's a text 16th century, this wonderful master, God needs your service. It's like, wow. Now, it's very specific, Aubrey's. And is there something that Aubrey can do for infinity that Mark can't do? And therefore, I need you. I need you to be Aubrey. Because reality is having an Aubrey experience. And reality needs Aubreyness. It's a shocking realization. That's the realization of enlightenment, right? And Buddha by the way, said in the original Pali canon, he said, have few desires, but have great ones, right?

AUBREY: Yeah, I think, I can see the fault lines of where this has kind of infected myself. And I think I can trace them back a little bit, because one of the things that my lovely wife, Vylana, will say was, I need you. And I said, whoa, I don't want to be needed, I want to be craved, I want to be desired, I want to be wanted. And there's something beautiful in that as well. And to me, the word need means well, you just need me. It reduced me to a utility, like a utility function rather than a craving function and a desire function. But also seeing how they really, ultimately mean the same thing. And this is just a linguistics thing that I'm actually speaking of something else when I'm hearing the need. But it's subtle and minute.

MARC: Beautiful. Actually, our friend Daniel and I have a conversation scheduled for a couple of weeks, and we're talking about the relationship of desire and need. That's a big conversation, but they're deeply intimately related. So in each one of these, let's make a split between codependent needs, meaning there's no center in myself. And so therefore, I'm going to use your unique self to create my own center of gravity. And that's, that's a violation of my own irreducible uniqueness, which means it's a violation of the unique quality of intimacy, which is the intention of reality that manifested in me. On the other hand, there's not just autonomy. There's autonomy in communion. There's allurement in autonomy. So Lady V is allured to Doctor A, doctorate on the way, right? There we are, right? 

AUBREY: Forthcoming. 

MARC: Forthcoming, right. And that allurement is a quality of cosmos that brought you together. And what it means is, is that you each have for each other, a way of addressing the specific unique need of each other in a way that no one else that ever was, is, or will be can do. 

AUBREY: Absolutely true, and beautiful. 

MARC: And beautiful, right? So, actually, when Maslow talks about his hierarchy of needs, it's a very important hierarchy, and he did a good job. And then he got older, he realized that he was talking only about deficiency needs. He called them D needs. To the end of his life, he was living in epsilon. Deficiency needs. And he began to sense true self, it began to self-transcendence needs, and then he died, he passed away. Really all of his hierarchy of needs, Maslow, the great developmental psychologist, focused on separate self. They're separate self needs. There's actually a deeper set of needs. If you actually really deepen our understanding of self as we did with the five selves, we deepen our understanding of the intimate universe, the field of Eros, you might talk about needs in a very different way. I have a need to be intended, it's an essential human need. I have a need to be recognized. I have a need to be loved, adored, not just loved but adored. I have a need to be loved, adored, right? I have a need to be chosen. I have a need to be desired, and I have a need to be needed. There's the six core Eros needs that human beings has. Their core needs. Now, what we do is we exile those needs to one person. It's okay, you're going to fulfill you, you in this particular way exactly all those needs all the time, that's impossible.

AUBREY: And then the you collapses underneath those--

MARC: It collapses. It collapses. But those are fundamental needs. So, we actually have a need to be desired, there's a right to be desired. A human being has a right to experience desire and being desired. Desire is a quality of the cosmos. There's a right to need and to be needed. I actually only feel welcome in the cosmos when I feel needed. Gorgeous. Let's say I'm at someone's home. And they've made this beautiful dinner for me and they're welcoming me, and feel at home, right? But you don't quite feel at home, and you're doing as well as you can. But then all of a sudden, they get a phone call. We're just making up this scenario. Now they get a phone call. And oh my god, their face goes white and they turn to you and they say, "I can't believe you're here, look what just happened. And I know your particular skill, I completely need you now." Now you just plunge in, you share your gift, you're completely needed. You're at home.

AUBREY: But there's a deeper layer, I think. There's one thing that I think as someone who's very successful, a lot of people project this fear onto me, which is I'm now in a position of wealth, financial wealth. And so, people assume that I'm constantly worried that people just desire me or need me for my money. But this is not my story. I don't have this need, because I have a sense that there's a uniqueness to my Aubreyness that is actually what is needed. And yes, I can provide financial, I can pay a tab at dinner, and we can order whatever drinks we want. And it's all good. 

MARC: I'm getting a little hungry.

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. But, I think we fear and I've fallen victim to this as well, is that I'm needed for the way that my penis functions, or the way that I can clear out an obstacle or the way that I can... It's never been really about money, but it's still the same thing that I'm in where I'm reducing myself from--

MARC: That's right, to a function. 

AUBREY: To a function. 

MARC: That's right. So need, so sometimes, let me say it this way. The nature of love is, love and need in the relationship is, I'm going to give you everything I have. And that's going to be enough. So, if my penis functions in a particular way, at a particular moment in life, I'm going to give you all of it, right? And then if at a different moment in life, it functions differently, then we're going to work with that, and we're going to dance with that. So, need means I'm going to give you my depth. Whatever I have, I'm going to give you everything I have. And that's always going to be perfect and enough, right? So then I'm not a function, then it's whoever I am, whether we're going to be rich or poor, whether we're going to be... We can actually do that. So, this notion of need, this notion of desire is the third base of Eros. It's the quality of becoming in the cosmos.

AUBREY: Let me go to one other thing, that also is something that I torture myself with, which is I too feel, I have a sense that God, if you want to use that word, God needs me. But I also have a spurious belief. And I believe and I think it's false, but it still affects me that I can fuck it up. I can fuck it up. I'm needed and I can fuck it up.

MARC: Okay, so here's the bad news. You can, right? And it's paradoxical. Let's just hold the paradox because all truth lives in paradox, right? One of the earliest mystical books is called "The Book of Creation" and has about 455 words. And in this book, there are not five qualities of sense perception, but 12. And the highest one is laughter. So laughter is a quality of sense perception. Because laughter allows you to hold something in reality that nothing else does. And laughter allows you to hold paradoxes, right? And when I laugh, I can hold a paradox. So on the one hand, right, we've got all these New Age sources telling you that it's all perfectly you can't fuck it up. Not true, you can fuck it up. 

AUBREY: I feel that.

MARC: Of course, you can fuck it up. 

AUBREY: It feels like I can fuck it up. That's what's tough about it. 

MARC: Right? And it's terrifying. And it should be terrifying, right? Why does everything have to be not terrifying? It's terrifying, right? But that's the dignity of being a human being. And there's to have power and choice is real. That can fuck it up, right? And that's the gorgeous dignity of being empowered. And the more power you have, the more there's a huge sense of gravitas. And at the same time, at the same time, every place you've been you needed to be, and you can never fuck it up. And actually it happened exactly the way it needed to happen. The nature of the pregnant world, is that every time it collapses and you fuck it up, a new reality presents itself, which allows for the full transformation and the full transfiguration. And they're both precisely true. And you know it, we were talking about at lunch, direct access. It's a direct experience. So, it's a shocking experience. There's a wild story about David, King Solomon's father, and kind of the great mystical interior science tradition. And it's a story that exists. It's told in the third century and in the 10th century, and it's about David who goes up to the roof. And this is Leonard Cohen's song, "Hallelujah". The first stanza is about this story. He saw her bathing on the roof. So he sees Bathsheba, this beautiful woman bathing on the roof. And then he makes a series of kind of violently unethical moves in order to bring that to union. That's the David Bathsheba story. And then, of course, at birth, Solomon. So, it's a paradoxical story. So the Zohar 13th century and the Talmud 3rd century tells a story about this. And I'll give you Zohar's version in Aramaic, right? It says, David says to God, kind of like a Bill Cosby routine, in a world in which you're allowed to mention Bill Cosby. So before, when we were growing up, right? So, David says to God, and David says, yo, it's like the opposite of joy. Yo, so test me God. And God said, I don't think that's a good idea. And David says, no, no, I got it going on, test me. God says, I don't think so. David says, God test me, and God says, okay. Bathsheba, bathing on the roof, goes down like it goes down, and David seems to fail the test. So then, God says to David, he says, I told you we shouldn't do that. And David says, what do you mean, it was perfect? And God says why was it perfect? And listen to Aramaic text I'm loosely translating. And David says, why was it perfect? So David says, Well, God, because you're the master, he said I would fail. I'm the student, I said I would succeed, but the student has to obey the master. So I failed. David tells God a joke, right? It's a joke. So the Zohar says David is, he is the gesture of the king. There's a gorgeous text showing King Lear there's the gesture. The gesture holds the impossibility of our lives. On the one hand, it's exactly the way it needed to be. It couldn't have been any different, right? Did you choose to be with your beloved partner? Of course you did. Oh, you had no other choice, right? You can only have chosen that woman. You totally chose. You chose Lady V 1,000%. 

AUBREY: Yep. 

MARC: And could it really have been any different, right? It's like direct access, we don't, right? You had to be with her, couldn't have been any different than it is. You didn't choose at all. They're both absolutely true.

AUBREY: The thing about hearing, we hear all of these, they become like platitudes, New Age platitudes. You hear them, you can't fail, you can't fuck up. But some part of me knows that that's only part true. So I can never fully accept it and never relax. Because it's like, I don't fucking believe that. I's like a violin that's out of tune, and I don't know if I play violin but it doesn't sound right.

MARC: Gorgeous, anthro-ontology. In my body, I'm fucking terrified. And I should be. And I'm ecstatic. And I'm delighted, and I should be. And I've got to hold that paradox. Reality is not paradise. It's a paradox, right? The Garden of Eden is a paradox, not paradise. But truth only lives in paradox. And whenever you try, and you try and exclude something from the paradox, see here's a simple example. Take the issue of abortion, just out of left field. Two sides of the issue of abortion; pro-life, pro-choice. Now just think with me how absurd that is, my friend, right? Are the pro-lifers against the value of choice? Of course not. Are the pro-choicers against the value of life? Of course not. But because they're not in the field of Eros anymore, they're not in the field of value, each one chose a value, and said this value I'm going to decontextualize from the larger field of value. It's become my only value, and it doesn't need to live in a paradoxical relationship with its opposing value. So, whenever you take a value out of its dialectical paradoxical relationship with the opposing value, you actually create the degradation of ethics. And the same thing is true with, am I fully responsible? I am fully responsible. I can fuck up. I'm utterly terrified in the most beautiful way, the gravitas of responsibility to my capacity to respond. And yet, that's also hubris. That's also kind of, it aggregates too much to myself and I actually realize every place I've been I needed to be. It couldn't have been any different. It all was not choice, but choicelessness.

AUBREY: Yeah, there's a quote from Hafiz. Wherever you are right now, God circled that place for you on a map.

MARC: Right. And I chose it. 

AUBREY: And I chose it. 

MARC: And I can hold them paradoxically at the same time. Gorgeous. Right? And paradox is a quality of Eros. One of the qualities of Eros is the capacity to hold paradox, which is why Eros and laughter are so important, right? You can't trust someone who can't laugh, right?

AUBREY: I absolutely agree. I've always said you can tell a spiritual master by the sound of their laughter. If you're not laughing, you don't get it.

MARC: Yeah, right, and Buddha's smiling. And it's a joke. It's we choose, we don't choose. Do you remember Umberto Eco, "The Name of The Rose" , this great book. There's these monks in a monastery, and they're getting poisoned, and they're not sure what's happening. And so the investigation, Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose" reveals, in the end, that when they go to the library, and they open up Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics", and they turn the page, but when they go to the page about umur, the rector has poisoned that page, because he thinks that umur is of the devil, laughter's of the devil and undermines spirit .When Umberto Eco was correctly and gorgeously trying to say is that you can only trust spirit if it's laughter. And here's a gorgeous play. The word sachaq, laughter in Hebrew also means sexing. In the book of Genesis it appears four times and it always means sexual Eros. And laughter. 

AUBREY: Laughter is an orgasm with different spasms.

MARC: Right? Right. Full-bodied, then a kind of sense of just this gorgeous relief afterwards. And holds paradox, right? Sexuality is the way we hold the paradox of separate selves in a larger hole, right? So gorgeous, right? So we're always making love, we're always laughing. Even as we're radically serious, and we're facing existential risk, in a serious and real way, our choices matter infinitely, and the entire future depends on us. And so we're filled with gravitas, but we're not bitter. There's a joy of ecstatic urgency in this moment. And every moment counts, and every choice matters. There's nothing frivolous, and there's nothing that we can leave and no stone we can't turn over now. And yet we're filled with this radical joy that invests us with the capacity to respond to this moment.

AUBREY: Moving into the fourth face of Eros.

MARC: Yes, the fourth face of Eros. The fourth face of Eros, there's a beautiful text in an ancient Aramaic text, which says, The end is in the beginning, and the beginning is in the end. Says we're close to the end. The fourth face of Eros is wholeness, the wholeness of the whole thing, or the interconnectivity of the whole thing. But that's just the exterior. The interior is intimacy, because intimacy is the interior of interconnectivity. So systems theory, for example, talks about interconnected, but they could be its, interconnected its. So, for the great enlightenment theorists, the Western theorists, they all believed in interconnectivity, that wasn't the problem, which is why the secular paradigms of interconnectivity don't help us because those are exterior. The interior of interconnectivity is intimacy. The whole thing is intimate. Everything's intimate with everything else. Everything affects everything else, everything impacts everything else, which is the knowledge of power. Power means I impact, right? I mean, why did Barack Obama run for president? So lots of ideals, but he ran for President because it felt good. But it's a very beautiful realization. He ran for president because that felt good, right? But not as a narcissistic pleasure, but as pleasure as the source of ethics. It's a level six pleasure, right? I'm connected to everything, and I can impact. So the fourth quality of Eros is the quality that I impact the whole, I'm omni-considerate for the sake of the whole. I feel the whole, and I realize that I can actually directly impact the whole in some serious and substantive way. And that's really the experience of unique self. I mean, Barack Obama's pleasure at being president is the pleasure of impact, that his irreducible uniqueness could actually affect the quality of the field. But actually, from the perspective of the validated interior sciences, every human being, democratization of enlightenment, actually has an accurate self-experience understands that their experience matters, and their story matters. And the way you live your story impacts the entire field. A mother living in Somalia, raising three children, struggling, who has no time to have the broader conversations and she works extra hard in order to give her child some experience of being loved, that ripples through the entire field, and impacts the entire field. Because in the field, there's no split between private and public. That's the fourth quality of Eros in which no one's excluded. And to actually be able to have that experience where I see people as they are, right? Devoid of all their trappings. And I can be just blown away by who they are. Which is why there's just a beautiful practice, just never to receive service from someone whose name you don't know, right? Because there are no its.

AUBREY: I watched you do that today when we were having coffee. 

MARC: Right, there's no its in the field. And all of a sudden, the person smiles, because my name is the access portal to my unique self, right? And maybe as we wrap to close, just to share with you the fifth, there's 12 faces, but let's just finish with the fifth face of Eros. And the fifth face of Eros is imagination. The quality that you invoked before is so beautifully of imagination. The word Adam, the original Adam wasn't man, Adam included originally androgynously Adam and Eve, but masculine and feminine. It's the word Adam means ground, human homos, the ground. But it also means in the original language, which means imagination. So the human being is a homo imaginus, right? And we said earlier, right? God is a figment of my imagination, but my imagination is a figment of God. And every crisis at its core, because we're in a moment of crisis, but crisis is an evolutionary driver. Emergency generates emergence. That our crisis is a birth. And every crisis is both a crisis of intimacy, in which I've got to generate a new configuration of intimacy, because evolution is the emergence of new configurations of intimacy. And it's a crisis of imagination. In a relationship, because let's make it real in a relationship. Where does a relationship run into a crisis? We can't reimagine our relationship. We can't reimagine our possibilities. We said the God you don't believe in doesn't exist. There's no definition of God, God's undefinable. But this field, God or evolution or spirit is the possibility of possibility, right? God's the possibility of possibility, right? So the second there's no more possibility, the second I can't imagine a world in which actually everyone knows, I have a story to tell, I have a song to sing, I have a poem to write, I have a way of loving, laughing and being that's irreducibly uniquely mine. And it's needed by all that is, and I matter, right? And the gap between haves and have nots doesn't become an emergent case system. We democratize enlightenment, and every man, human being, every woman, every child, and then we expand to the larger fields of life. Everyone's got a dignified, gorgeous place in the story. And then there's this new coherence, this intimate coherence, and there's a new symphony, right? A planetary awakening and love through unique self-symphonies. That's a genuine possibility. And we need to create a politics of Eros, right? A politics of imagination, in which we begin to develop policy in relationship to first principles and first values, right? This can't be an abstract conversation, a kind of narrow sector. The emergence of a new field of value. And the reclaiming of value itself as intrinsic to cosmos, just like the values in a mathematical equation, is our only possible response to existential risk. And so, when a person like you who's got this great imagination, you're filled with imagination. So that is evolution. That is the field of evolution, imagining through Aubrey. Wow, what a great gift.

AUBREY: What a gift. I just want to touch on one final thing that's in the realm of pseudo Eros. There seems to be an almost, and maybe this is just another form of pseudo Eros, but there seems to be a darker eroticism, a neuroticism, a sadistic eroticism. An eroticism in taking, in showing your power by inflicting pain on someone else, which the prerequisite for that is, you're in the delusion of separation, right? You do not see yourself as connected to that but you don't see them, you don't see that connection. It requires that. But it seems like it's such a--

MARC: Hugely important. 

AUBREY: It's such a powerful force that we're dealing with right now. 

MARC: It's an enormously powerful force, because we've demonized power. And this is unbelievably important, right? The tantric principle and again, we're using Tantra, not in a kind of pseudo sense, but in its formal sense, the principle of non-rejection. So what the liberal world has done, has negatively interrogated power itself. And it splits between power over as bad, power for is good, that's nonsense. It's utter nonsense. It violates our interior experience, right? All forms of power have a spark of the sacred. It's not by accident that divinity was referred to as the infinity of power. The infinity of intimacy takes it to the next level, but it transcends and includes the infinity of power. Supernova's powerful. And supernova's a reflection of this infinite power. The first moments of the Big Bang, you have an unimaginable power, which is an expression of involution, contracting to a point and then exploding in the manifest in power. So, what we've done is we've interrogated power negatively, for good reason. There's a good reason we did it. We were rebelling against narratives that were pseudo versions of power, pseudo erotic versions of power. We needed to challenge them, and we did but we did it by dismissing power. Foucault's entire first half of his life's writing, the great postmodernist, and Foucault is insanely brilliant. Foucault is not a clever guy. Foucault is like, Derrida is clever, whatever. Foucault is off the charts. He's like one of the greatest thinkers of the last 1000 years, and he recanted a lot of what he did, but he got something right. He got this hidden power narrative. But then what he did is he made a mistake, he then interrogated power negatively. But actually power is part of the field. So, what happens is when we reject power, when we demonize power, we say that there was a power differential. Okay, so could that power differential be handled responsibly? What do we do? There's always power differentials, right? Every relationship there's power distributed evenly and unevenly. In a thousand complex ways, power is never located in one place and not in another place. Power is hidden in many, many different ways. So what we've done is, we've demonized. Business is powerful, therefore business is bad. But actually, there's dimensions of capitalism, when they're expressed consciously, that have actually had enormously potent and positive effects. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

MARC: But we demonize, anything that has power we demonize. So instead of demonizing abuse, we demonize power. And we actually locate and identify in our terministic field, power and abuse together, which is a disaster. Once we do that, once we've split off power, then power comes to demand its due. Because power is an essential part of our experience. So if we don't allow for unique self, evolution unique self, which is the utter reverence for the depth of my power, and my unique power and impact, if I split that off, and I'm just in a materialist, reductionist paradigm, which I'm set to have no power, then I'm going to crave with all of my being, a way to express my power. But since I can't express in Eros, all that's left is pseudo Eros. The only way I can feel powerful is by infliction of pain and not in the delightful play of consensual, safe and sane domination, submission, but actually in a radically inappropriate play, where I actually feel my aliveness, not Eros, but pseudo Eros through the infliction of power, which is exactly degraded into the torture. But that's an expression of the splitting off of the authentic experience of power as a quality of Eros, which is the sixth level of pleasure as we outlined it. And that liberal mistake, this demonization of power, is a huge tragedy. We need to actually split between power which is emergent from its shadow from his tragedy, which is abusive, and power, both power for and power over. There's a delight in power over, all right? And that's a beautiful delight, right? It's not a horrific delight. It's not a dominating delight. It's not a dominator hierarchy. It's the nature of structure of the cosmos that I can actually share, right? I can actually direct things. And everyone has a place in which they should be directing things. Everyone has a place in their life where they should be doing it, and everyone's a teacher. And so, we need to actually reclaim power in its sacred context, we need to agree with post-modernity, and its rejection of all abusive forms of power. We have no toleration for that in any sense, shape, or form. And then we need to reclaim the dignity of power.

AUBREY: One thing that gives me immense optimism is, so many of the things that you're mentioning, I haven't read the works that you've read. I mean, I was a philosophy major, I read the very bare minimum of what that was. I really rather enjoyed it. I love thinking about problems and getting into it. But through my direct experience, through the plant medicine journeys of my life, there's vignettes. And I haven't shared all of them that have come to mind as we've been going, and powering through all of these in such a beautiful way. But the one that comes to mind was an early one about power, where I was sitting with Maestro Orlando Chujandama. He's from the Quechua tradition. And I'm drinking my first cup of ayahuasca and this giant dragon of smoke asked to see me. And I'm not thinking about anything that's happening. This is also at a time where, before, I think Onnit had just started, my company had just started and interesting time in my life. And this giant dragon of smoke comes and looks at me and says, "Do you want power?" And I thought, whoa, that's a very personal question, it's a confronting question from a gigantic 80-foot dragon. And I was like yes. And I had the courage to answer honestly, and I was like, yes. And the dragon says, "Why?" And I said, uh-oh, he's really putting me on the spot here. I said, to help people and I felt good about that answer. Because it's true. And then the dragon says, "Are you sure?" And it showed me all of the ways that I'd taken delight in power for power's sake. Not that I've ever been abusive. That's not my nature. But I'm delighted in power itself. And the dragon took me through this whole, like you would see in an end-of-life montage where you look back through all of these different vignettes in my life and showed me that, oh yes, yes and, I want to help people, and I want power. I just want it. I just wanted fundamentally because it feels good. And yes, I trust myself. And I trust that I will do good with that. And it was such a very powerful lesson. And the thing that gives me optimism is that that wasn't me who figured that out. I didn't figure that out. I guess you could say in some way, my subconscious, but there's an operating intelligence of the universe that we can open doorways to. And it doesn't have to be Ayahuasca by any stretch of the imagination, it's been my path. And other paths too, and sometimes in many different ways, breath work, all kinds of different things. But this intelligence that we've discussed here in our own dialogue has come to me, and I've arrived at it in my own way. And you see this, how so many mystical truths all are pointing at the same thing. From places in different continents and people who never read each other. And this is something that you can say, wow, there is something at work, at play that's true, and it's bigger than all of us. And it's got our fucking back. And look, we still have to make a lot of powerful, important choices. And we still got to do everything we can. But we got some real help, we got some real help in this universe. 

MARC: It's gorgeous. I mean, it's a gorgeous place to complete, because what you're pointing to really so gorgeously, is there are first principles and first values. And sadly, the books have forgotten to talk about them. The philosophy departments have grown sterile, and they're lost, in so many ultimately irrelevant conversations. Direct access is critical. Anthro-ontology, the mysteries are within us. And then you've been on that gorgeous path. And then formulating them in words like ocean, right? That we can actually create a shared story of meaning and the highest sense of story that then creates a global community, a global intimacy, and we come to the end, right? We can then heal the global intimacy disorder, right? Intimacy doesn't mean that Aubrey disappears, it doesn't mean that Americans disappear, or that religion disappears. It means that there's a universal grammar of value that's a context for our diversity, which allows us to act as a global family to create coherence and coordination. And that's where we need to be, we come back to existential risk, we come back to the looming utopia and dystopia of this moment. And knowing as you said, that the mysteries are within us, that reality is governed by first principles and first values embedded in a story of value, and that evolution is not meaningless and mindless, right? Evolution is non-random at its core, right? It has telos and direction, that we live in a telo-erotic universe, not in a fundamentalist way. Not a puppeteer, but the inherent intelligence of reality, moving to create more and more Eros and more and more intimacy. And that that lives in us and we participate in it. A ground for unimaginable hope. Unimaginable possibility. 

AUBREY: Yeah, no doubt.

MARC: Thank you. 

AUBREY: Thank you. 

MARC: What a delight. 

AUBREY: Absolutely. Hopefully one of many.

MARC: Yeah, what a delight. Just, what a delight. Thank you, love. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Likewise. For people who want to dive deeper, for people who want to support what you're up to, where are some places that people can dive in?

MARC: You can find us online at the Center for Integral Wisdom, right? Or the Office for The Future. Those are the two kind of places to find us. So please feel free to find us there, or can find me directly. Just email me or anyone on the team. My email, what is my email? My email is eytanyair, the name of my two older boys, eytanyair@hushmail.com. Find me directly or email Aubrey, and he'll forward it. 

AUBREY: Don't do that. It won't happen. 

MARC: Don't do that. That's not going to happen. But totally find us, with great delight. I can't wait for the unfolding.

AUBREY: Likewise. Likewise. Thank you so much, everybody. We love you.