What a gorgeous community Call with Dr. Marc Gafni, we had on April 12. Here’s just a small taste of what we explored during the call:
- The importance of good spiritual sense-making based on fact patterns versus fundamentalist, new age, or conspiracy theory beliefs and ideas
- How to address our fear of death (first shock of existence)
- How this pandemic confronts us with our death as a species ( second shock of existence).
- How our response to the second shock of existence calls us to move from Homo sapiens to Homo Amor
And here’s the full transcript. Enjoy!
This is a wild moment. It’s Holy moment and it’s a traumatic moment. It’s a moment of opening and it’s a moment of pain. And so I want to just try and kind of feel where we are, in this little time together. We want to do a little sense-making. Okay?
It’s a moment of crisis and we have to do sense-making in times of crisis. Our information ecologies are broken. We’re not sure who to trust or what to trust. And actually both political and spiritual sense-making, in times of crisis are absolutely essential. Does that make sense? In times of crisis, it is what we need to do. And it’s so wildly good to see everyone and I very much hope we’re going to have a festival the summer, but certainly not a guarantee. If we, if it’s not safe to have a festival, obviously we won’t.
And if we can’t do it in person, we’ll do it online. And it’ll be gorgeous and fantastic and we’re going to do full-on Dharma and we’re going to touch each other emotionally, and we’re going to touch each other spiritually. We’re going to touch each other intellectually. Oh, we’re going to touch each other. In every way that human beings need to touch each other. And no one’s untouchable. No one’s outside the circle.
So let’s do some sense-making, and I’m going to, those of you who have been with us a little bit in One church, Many paths, One mountain, you know that we’ve had some of these conversations. I’m going to add some new pieces, right? And I think we’ve already sent the sensemaking video, right?
So let’s just say a couple of things. So somebody wrote a post this morning that said “it’s not a pandemic, it’s a paradigm shift”. I texted back and said, well, no, it’s actually a pandemic. Right? I mean, people can’t breathe. All right? So walk into a New York hospital, or an Italian hospital and tell people it’s a paradigm shift, It’s not pandemic as they’re doing intubation?
So there’s this enormous movement in the new age world to talk about this great opportunity, and thank you virus for stopping reality. And I just have to say it’s obscene. I just want to say that clearly right off the bat. We don’t thank pandemics, we don’t thank the Coronavirus. If one more person sends me a clip thanking the coronavirus, I’ll either shoot myself or shoot them. Okay. We don’t thank the coronavirus, right?
That’s really important to get, that’s bad sense-making. And it’s why the actual new age and alternative spiritual world doesn’t impact cause it does that kind of bad sense-making. Right? And I want to just understand deeply why I want to go a couple of levels. So let’s just give you an example. The state of Israel was established for many reasons, but it was after 2000 years of exile. There’s no political reason it should have been established. One of the things that moved it to be established was the Holocaust. That’s just historically true. Now, Holocaust had gas chambers, so those gas chambers directly contributed to this paradigm shift in creating a new state of Israel. But we don’t thank the gas chambers, right? That’s a failure of intimacy. Okay.
And when people, living in the privilege of being able to do social distancing who are then being served by populations that don’t have the privilege of doing social distancing because they’re afraid they can’t actually pay the rent next month. So they’re all risking their lives not doing social distancing, which is why there’s a double rate of poor families dying from COVID and wealthy families all around the world today. When people are dying in hospitals around the world, who literally can’t breathe, we don’t thank the Coronavirus, that’s called self-involved new age obscenity.
Whatever emerged from the coronavirus is enormously important. And can people take this time and turn the fate of this virus into destiny? Of course you can. And of course, this is a moment. Our crisis is a birth. A crisis is an evolutionary driver. Of course, the crisis needs to generate a new opening. That’s clear. But we don’t thank the Coronavirus. That’s a fundamental failure of intimacy and that’s bad interior science.
And here’s a rule. If you want a simple rule, if you want to know what’s good, dharmic thinking, what’s good sense-making: “if you can’t speak it this week on the ward of an Italian hospital, it’s not kosher”. Would you walk into an Italian hospital and say, “Hey guys, it’s a paradigm shift, not a pandemic”. They’d shoot you, right? It means that we’ve lost our intimate connection with the whole. Okay, so that’s really important to understand. That’s number one.
Number two, Bill Gates did not organize this pandemic. This is not an intentional winnowing of the world population. Conspiracy theorists take a rest. Relax. Bill Gates is not Hitler. He’s not evil. There’s no accurate information to support that. We’re going to explore this in One Church next week, so I’m not going to do it now. We’re going to do a serious conversation around conspiracy theory and what needs to be looked at seriously and what doesn’t. That’s an important conversation. Sometimes valid information is dismissed on both sides. Sometimes there’s valid information and actually governments dismiss valid information and label it as a conspiracy theory. Let’s give a couple of examples just so we understand this because our information ecologies are broken. I just give you an example. The world trade center, the chances that the world trade center went down according to the classical public story are zero, it did not go down that way. I spent an enormous amount of time researching this. It just didn’t happen that way. What did happen is complex. It’s not completely clear, but anyone who says the world trade center didn’t go down, that’s a conspiracy theorist. That’s actually a way of creating a smokescreen around information, right? So we need to distinguish between that which we have facts on, and information on which we can validate, and that which is a conspiracy theory.
Another example: vaccines. Vaccines are complex. They’re very complex, but they’re not an evil plot. There an enormous amount of complexity around vaccines. That’s just important to understand. Okay. What we can look at, is the fact pattern. I want you to stay with me closely now. What’s the fact pattern of Corona? it’s not punishment from God, right? It’s not the law of attraction. It’s not because we’re at a low vibration. There’s so much of that going around the internet and all the fundamentalist communities, the punishment from God cases is going around all the new age communities, the “we’re at a low vibration” thesis is going around and we attracted it. Both of those are absurd. Both of those are forms of victim shaming. Let’s blame the people, right, and both of those have no actual factual validity behind them. You can’t prove them. They’re just claims. And they’re dangerous claims. Because actually what they do is, they’re actually a desperate bid for control.
We refuse to acknowledge the mystery. We refuse to acknowledge our own unknowing. We see suffering. We say we’re suffering because we’re being punished by God. I got a clip from an Orthodox Jewish family explaining why Orthodox violations were the cause of the pandemic. I got a several Christian clips explaining why refusal to spread the word of the Lord was the cause of the pandemic, but I got just as many, quite a few more clips from the new age world talking about our low vibration, being the source of the pandemic. Cut it out, everybody. Cut it out.
In other words, the good sense-making in a crisis is a, how do I respond to suffering? Who’s suffering? How can I be love in action? How do I actually rise beyond my own circumstance and feel the pain of other people and respond to it and transform it? That’s good sense-making. Also to identify the fact pattern. Get the distinction here friends? There is a fact pattern to the coronavirus.
That’s what I want to talk about today because I think there’s a lot of validity to it. I’m not going to bring in other possibilities, but we’ll do that next week if you want to join us at One church Many paths, One mountain. So now I’m going to talk about the simple fact pattern, which is really important. Everybody knows the virus came from the Wuhan market in China. Okay. What’s the Wuhan market? That market is a failure of intimacy. Not as a new-age claim, not as a fundamentalist claim. It’s a fact pattern. The Wuhan market is basically this very large market, and in the Wuhan market, the animals are caged, they’re slaughtered sometimes, right before or even in front of customers. Animals that are in a couple are slaughtered next to the other, right?
There’s an intense, cruelty to animals. So the Wuhan market is a crystallization of a kind of cruelty to animals that’s happening not only in China, but it’s happening all over the world in different farms in Europe, you know, Dutch factory farms and American factory farms and Belgium factory farms, right? What’s lamb chop? Lambchop means you put a lamb in a cage for three months. You fatten the lamb. For a long period of time. So you can have a few seconds experience of the succulence of lamb chops. What does that mean? It means I’ve split off the animal world suffering. and we actually are going to be held accountable for our cruelty to animals in a hundred years. We’re going to look back at our cruelty to animals and we’re going to say, what were we thinking?
So the Wu Han market is number one split off animals. It’s a failure of intimacy in regard to animals. Number one, it’s a failure of intimacy. Number two, it’s a failure of intimacy in regards to the poor population. What about the populations that are actually eating unsanitary food and that have no health plans? Then I have no health protection. Right? And that has fundamental economic insecurity. They don’t have the dignity of knowing that their food is assured, so they have to eat what’s called bushmeat. It’s called bushmeat you know, meaning, cruelly slaughtered meat, not sanitized. So what happens then is, is the virus, jumps from the animal world to the human host and then it goes around the world. Wow.
Now if in fact, it got to the Wuhan market also through, right, the P4 plant in Wuhan, which was creating bioweapons, which is definitely possible, there’s real information on it. That’s a possibility. If it did get come from there, it looks like it wasn’t intentionally leaked. Looks like it was accidentally leaked and then covered up by the Chinese communist party. But that’s actually a much bigger failure of intimacy, right? In other words, the very notion that we’re the Chinese communist party and we’re going to dominate the world is a fundamental failure of intimacy. Just like any ethnocentric supremacy is. So however you tell the story. However, the virus got to the Wuhan market, whether it’s the splitting off of the animals in the poor populations or the more fundamental ethnocentric violation in which there is China and the rest of the world. And we’re not talking about the Chinese people, we’re talking about the Chinese communist party.
That’s an issue I know, sadly quite a little about, I’ve tracked the Chinese communist party for a decade. Read paper after paper on both sides. I am going to say this, tragically, the Chinese communist party is evil. Period. End of conversation. And the liberal inability to acknowledge that is the same liberal inability to acknowledge the evil of Stalin, and Chamberlain’s inability to acknowledge the evil of Hitler. Chinese communist party as currently constituted, they have at least 3 million people in concentration camps today, and they’re killing millions and millions and millions of their own population. And all sorts of, all forms of cleansing. The Chinese communist party is a bad actor in this story. That’s obviously a fundamental failure of intimacy. And evil itself is a failure of intimacy and our refusal to call out evil, is a failure of intimacy.
So in other words, the Covid 19 virus is not just accidental. It’s a function of a failure of intimacy. And these failures of intimacy, these specific ones are an expression of what we’ve called, a global intimacy disorder. And we’re at a moment of a global intimacy disorder. Now. Those of us who’ve been together the last five, six, seven years. And I want to say this with like so much love and honor and so much open heart. Maybe now we get that’s what we were talking about. People would say to me, why do you keep talking about existential risk and catastrophic risk, right? How many people came to just do straight spirituality, do unique self? My friends from Belgium, I talked to all the time, Marc, what’s all this? What’s all this fear-mongering for? Let’s just do beautiful spirituality. And I said, no, you guys are living in a different world. That’s not true. There’s a fundamental structural problem in the world and that structural problem is based on two things.We talked about it this summer and the summer before and also we begin to get it. We called it the second shock of existence. Who remembers that? The second shock of existence – show of hands, right? The first shock of existence is when death appears in humanity. Prehistoric world. When self emerges from its embeddedness with nature, that’s the first shock of existence. That fear of death and, and by the way, the Wuhan virus is raising that right? All of a sudden no one’s excluded from the fear of death.
Does everyone get that? You get that all of a sudden, no one in the world at least, in potential is excluded from the fear of death. So the fear of death is out there, right? And we’re not addressing that. Everyone’s talking about dying, but no one’s talking about death. What’s death and what’s our relationship to death? Three weeks ago, and in One church we spent two hours talking about our relationship to death. That’s unbelievably important. I’m not going to talk about that now.
But the first issue, the first issue in our kind of global right narrative is that the global narrative operates in win-lose metrics, which is called a success story. That’s the major story, which causes exponential growth curves. Exponential growth curves always fall off. That’s what they always do. They never don’t fall off. You go from half a billion to 7 billion in a hundred years. You extract all the resources of the earth, which took billions of years to create. You create this huge gap between haves and haves-not, right? You basically create breakdowns in the ecosystems, all through the system. It’s got a huge set of issues. These issues create a fundamental, a global intimacy disorder. That’s a big deal. That’s the win-lose metrics success story
What are the other stories we have? There’s a little romantic story. Me and my person forever infatuation, a very narrow story of love as opposed to evolutionary love, as opposed to reality being a love story, as opposed to love being real. So there’s, there’s a narrow success story. There’s this narrow romantic story. There’s a victim story. That’s the third story we have and the fourth story we have is the hero’s journey, but the hero’s journey is about me and my trauma, me and my wounds and transforming my wounds and trauma. Those are the four stories that exist in the world today. Those are the narratives of reality today in the Western world.
In the non-Western world, you’ve got kind of mythic, you know, “make Russia great again”, “make Philippine great again”. China… right now, you’ve got these mythic narratives of one country dominating. Those are all regressive narratives. But those are the two kinds of narratives we have in the Western world, we’ve got a success story and narrow romantic infatuation story, a victim story, and a hero’s journey, the story of my wounds, those are our four narratives in the Western world today.
In the non-Western world, you’ve got more shadow nationalist stories, of domination or a different form of Russian, Chinese supremacy. Those are our narratives. That is a disaster. Those are the narrative of reality from where we activate, from where we create.
So what we need to do is we need to create a new world. This is a moment for creating a new world and everyone understands that we can’t go back. The worst thing we could do in the world is to go back to business as usual. Because what’s actually going to happen here is, the conditions for the pandemic are these win-lose metrics. The second condition is a complicated system. Who remembers our distinction between a complicated and a complex system? Anybody? The critical distinction, complex system means there’s allurement between the parts. A complicated system means a vast system stretching, which is vulnerable because it’s so vast and it operates based on efficiency, not resiliency.
Efficiency means there are no extra beds in hospitals. Efficiency means one company is doing the masks. Efficiency means quarterly profits, resiliency means there are extra beds. Resiliency means a whole other vision of the world. So we’ve got basically complicated systems and win-lose metrics. Those are the cause of catastrophic risk and for existential risk. That’s what we talked about this summer. And I said to people over the last year, two years, three years, four is this just a matter of time before catastrophic risk hits us. And even the people close to me, they kind of look at me and say, we love you, Marc. We love the Dharma, huh? Uh-huh. You kind of think it’s too big to fail, right? But it’s not, it’s not too big to fail, right? It’s a vast vulnerable, complicated system, which is based on win-lose metrics.
Which means, although we have a global world – we’re all connected, there’s not one global system. There’s not a global health system, right? There’s global exploitation systems like the international monetary fund. What about an office for global healthcare? How about that? How about having an office for human wellbeing, right? How about that? How about an office for ecological justice? How about that? There’s not one global system. Do you understand what that means? It’s like, wow. Right? Because we’re operating in a win-lose metrics. Did you notice that it was impossible to create coordinated action when it all started to happen? You remember what we said the summer? If you don’t have a shared story, then you can’t actually have shared action. Remember we said that? Who remembers that, right? We’re actually seeing it play out and I’m not saying that to say we were right.
Obviously who the fuck cares, right? I’m saying because going forward, we’ve got a huge amount to do. In other words, we can’t change the policies of governments unless we change the source code. I’m looking right here. Look at the New York times from yesterday, and they say, there’s a need for new ideas and the revival of older ideas, of what the government owes the nation’s citizens, what corporations owe employees, and what we owe each other. Right?
But how can we know what we owe each other unless we know who we are and what we are to each other? Do you get that? There’s no narrative of identity. If there’s no narrative if there’s no unique self?
Why shouldn’t we make the world population smaller in order to make it more equitable? Maybe Thanos in the Avengers was right if you get that reference? Thanos, in The Avengers, was basically, you know, a techno-pessimist, saying the world’s going to fall apart. We need to have less people in the world. Let’s get rid of some people. And the Avengers, the heroes, they didn’t have a cogent argument. They knew he was wrong, but they couldn’t say, did you notice that? There’s not one good dialogue in both Avengers movies explaining why he is wrong, and Thanos is a good guy in the second Avengers movie, right? He gets up in the morning and he’s eating his rice and he’s watching the sunrise. He’s a beautiful dude. All right? Ken, he is the kind of guy would like to hang out with. He probably went to Esalen regularly, right? There was no response from the heroes, but actually the heroes often intuitively know, even though they can’t formulate what’s true.
So for example, the hero knows that we don’t die when we die. That’s why the hero rushes in and says, “My life is part of a larger field and I’m willing to live for that larger field”. And now, we have doctors and nurses and healthcare workers and grocery workers all over the world who are heroes, right? Some of them have no choice. That’s a tragedy because that have to eat the next month. And some of them, many, many healthcare workers, many grocery workers, many doctors, many nurses all around the world actually are in their heroism realizing something that’s true. “I’m part of a larger field”, right?
And the heroes in the Avengers also knew something was true. They couldn’t quite say it, they couldn’t quite articulate. It was a unique self. Every human being is a unique self. We’re responsible for unique selves. And it doesn’t matter if people don’t have jobs and if AI takes over in 30 years. Every human being has a unique gift and unique creativity. And without these dharmic principles, we can’t activate a new world. Without a notion of egocentric intimacy, ethnocentric intimacy, world-centric intimacy, and Cosmo centric intimacy…These are ideas I’ve shared with my brother James, and he brought them to the Organization for the Future, and they built actually a structure around it in Belgium a year ago, which was beautiful. Without those four levels of intimacy and this evolution of love that needs to take place, without being able to see that, you can’t even have a conversation about reality. And you can’t call out the problem with, with ethnocentric intimacy, and why it’s limited. All right?
In other words, without a Dharma of identity, without knowing who we are, without knowing where we are, that we live in the universe which is not impartial, right? The dogmatic materialism, not of science, but of scientism, dogmas of science, which says “the universe is impartial” That’s the core of it. Forget Rupert Sheldrake. That’s a detail, we get to that in our conversation, but the basic mistake of physics is that it makes a dogmatic statement which has nothing to do with science. It’s that the universe is impartial. That’s not true. The universe is not impartial. The universe is partial. The universe actually is a love story, right? It’s not a romantic love story, it’s not a Pollyannaish love story, not a new-age love story.
It’s a love story over vast amounts of time. Love evolves. But actually the nature of reality is that there’s autonomy and there’s allurement and there’s a balance between the two, and reality’s moving somewhere and actually there’s not the universe and me. I’m part of the universe. In other words, love is evolving. It’s not, there’s an impartial universe and there’s me. No, I am the universe. That’s the point, right?
I’m an expression of the universe. The universe, literally, scientifically, lives in me. That’s the best of the exterior and interior sciences. And everyone on this call knows that what we yearn for is more intimacy, and more contact, and deeper desire, and more aliveness. That’s not impartial universe there, and I’m yearning for this and I’m split from the universe. No! That IS the universe, right? The universe actually comes awake and evolves as me … The physio-sphere, the world of matter, fulfills itself in the world of life. Then the world of life fulfills itself in the human world. Self-reflection, right? So there’s matter – life and then mind, human self-reflection. Then human self-reflection evolves until we get to a place of Kosmo-centric intimacy – care for every human being on the planet. I care for every animal on the planet. That is the universe awakening to itself. That’s not an impartial universe. The universe went from corks to culture, from dirt to Shakespeare, from bacteria to Bach, from mud to Mozart. There’s directionality in the universe. There’s Telos in the universe, not Telos, as science correctly objected, not Telos owned by a religion, where Telos is my God. Not Telos by an external puppet God puppeteering, but there’s an intrinsic self-organizing intelligence of Reality. The reality that manifested, as we’ve said many times, mitosis, based on elementary principals before there was a human neocortex.
The universe is intelligent. It brings separate parts together into larger wholes. The universe didn’t stop being intelligent now, and we’re part of that intelligence. And us having this phone call and having this conversation now – that is the universe talking. This is the universe talking. We are the universe. That’s exactly the point, right? I am Evolution.
My gaze is the gaze of God. I’m needed by all of becoming. I’ll read you a poem just for a second. We looked at this beautiful, it’s Rilke, the great German poet, he writes: “ All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come toward me to meet and be met”. Isn’t that gorgeous? “All becoming” meaning, the entire evolutionary process needs me. Because I am it, and it is me. And we’re not separate, right? That’s the great disclosure of science that we didn’t know before. And science discloses evolution, and science discloses that almost all the elementary particles live in me, right? And all the previous levels of evolution live in me. And I’m not in the universe, the universe is in me. And I live in an intimate universe and the intimate universe literally lives in me. That’s what’s true.
And so what we need to do is we need to be the expression of the next stage of the intimate universe. That’s what’s demanded at this moment. That’s what Corona demands. So Corona does demand a paradigm shift, right? Corona does tell us that catastrophic risk is in the space. And from catastrophic risk, we’re going to go then to climate breakdown in 10 years. We’re going to go through all the pandemics, people are going to sell off their assets, they’re going to lose houses… Unemployment, businesses shut down, small business owners…
Then you get to climate change. Then all of a sudden the actuarial tables of insurance start factoring in climate change, and insurance companies go bankrupt. And credit unions stop lending because actually we’re now factoring in climate change and how are you going to insure a house when the city might get lost, right? So we actually won’t be able to borrow money.
Then you have, in about 20 or 25 years, all the ecosystems breaking down… extinction, extinction, extinction. Then there’s going to be, at some point, it’s going to cross a critical mass and it’s going to be an ecosystem collapse, right? That’s the third stage.
And then of course during all of these three stages, people move towards authoritarianism. Because, in times of crisis, people move to authoritarian leaders and all the surveillance methods being used now to trace the pandemic, track, and trace – we moved from over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance. We began to have biometric sensors. And now you’ve got an authoritarian totalitarian dictatorship in the world in 40 years. It’s a complete possibility. It’s not science fiction. It’s not dystopian. It’s completely possible.
What’s the response? The response is not pessimism. The response is not an abandonment of hope. The response is not depression. The response is we are Love in action. The response is that we actually have to actually articulate the new source code. The only thing, Marilyn, Jacqueline, Ken, Petrus. We’ve got to take care of security. What your friend ignores Ken, is, he ignores Chinese communism. He ignores the fact that one of the reasons America is not a social democracy is because it actually has the largest defense budget in the world and it supports NATO, it supports the United nations. Right? And actually it can’t afford to be a social democracy right now, right? Like Belgium can or like Germany can. There’s actually a real set of issues. But, but basically, your buddy is actually repeating Joe Stiglitz, Joe Stiglitz is the source of these ideas, the Nobel prize winner. And Joe Stiglitz is right in that we need global public goods. And that we need global security. And we need both, and we need to integrate those two. And we can’t border into kind of an anti-Americanism. Which your friend kind of tilts into, way too many times. That was just a little moment for me and Ken, a little private conversation there for a second.
So what we need to do here, friends is we actually are holding the source code vision. We’re actually holding a source code vision. These simple structures that we’ve developed, but in complexity theory, remember? How does complexity theory work? In Mathematics there are simple principles, right? That generates a complex system, to say it simply. It’s second simplicity though. So what are the simple systems that generate a new society? That’s the Dharma. It’s a narrative of identity. Who am I? It’s a narrative of community? Who are we? It’s a narrative of the universe. Where are we? Okay? Those simple principles, they generate a complex system. That’s actually how it works.
The only thing that’s ever changed history ever, ever is a news story. Nothing else has ever changed history. But a new story can’t be a new-age story. No, it can’t be. And it can’t be a story that says you create your reality, you create part of your reality. But you don’t create all of it. There’s part of it that’s beyond you, right? And you’ve got to bow to that mystery, right? When you take one drop less responsibility than is yours, you take one drop less response within these years, your soul gets corrupt. But stay with me. You take one drop more responsibly than is yours, your soul cracks under a burden that it can’t bear. And part of the demand for control, in fundamentalism and in the new age world is to say, I created the whole thing.
That’s not true, just not true. We do not create all of reality. There are things that are beyond us. There’s a larger intelligent cosmos, that’s beyond us. Now I can create much more of my reality than I think I can. I’m much more powerful then I think I am. So for example, the work that Susy does is critical in taking people from 2% power to 95% power. But then, there’s a moment in which there’s a larger mystery and I’ve got to hold hands with the mystery. Does everyone get that? Otherwise it devolves into a form of victim shaming. Being able to make that distinction is Dharma. So what can do, and what we have to do here, is we have to join hands.
And we have to actually, in some sense, we step out of her own hero’s journey. We’re in our hero’s journey and then we look beyond it, and that’s where my heart expands and I say, what’s my role in the larger story? Right? What’s my role? What’s my unique gift to give? What’s my deepest heart’s desire? My deepest heart’s desire is to actually to commit the outrageous acts of love that actually contribute to the larger story. Simona, in the middle of the house and the breakdown and the individual tragedy of Fabio dying. Oh my God. Right? Right. All of us are dealing with serious, serious hardship. It’s deep. It’s real. And we’re a very unique group in the world. Think Da Vinci in Florence. Think Renaissance. Da Vinci lives, and he confronts a plague. The plague was called the black death, it was the same situation.
There’s a plague in Europe. Da Vinci couldn’t address it because it’s too much. And he realized that actually the old paradigm, the old world story didn’t work. The pre-modern world story. So Da Vinci and the Renaissance – there are about a thousand people total, involved in the Renaissance. That’s it. And what they did is they told a new story. And that new story changed the whole thing. So we’re actually holding, and again, I’m not, I want to be really clear, I’m not saying we’re the only people holding, I’m not saying we’re the best, right? This is not about triumphalism, this is not that kind of moment. But we’re holding a critical piece of the story in terms of a narrative of identity, unique self. In terms of narrative of community, unique self symphony. And I’m not explaining all these now, I’m referring to them because we’ve studied them all before. In terms of narrative of relationship, romance, soulmate, and whole-mate. In terms of the move from homo sapiens to homo Amor.
What is the vision of the new human and the new humanity? In terms of a new vision of desire, in terms of the move from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric to Cosmo centric. In terms of the intimate universe, not the impartial universe, and that’s critical. If there’s one thing that physics did wrong, it was this dogmatic claim, that it’s an impartial universe. That’s just not true. It’s not an impartial universe. An impartial universe doesn’t actually move in the direction it does. The impartial universe generated all of us. And all of us listening to music and all the music we listen to, is love songs, right?
The universe feels, and the universe feels love. And we access that, not through the exterior sciences, we access that through the interior sciences. So we don’t want to do bad physics, right? That’s actually to destroy Physics. We only want to do good physics. Physics describes the beauty of critical dimensions of the cosmos. Physics is the world of “it”. It’s the world of matter. It’s really important to understand. We give physicists a pass, like we would make them our high priest. Why would we do that? Physics is the world of “it”, and they’re gorgeous in the world of “it”. And then, we go to biology, right? Biology is after physics. So biology transcends and includes physics, right? So right. We have an uncertainty principle in terms of particles, right? That’s a big motion forward, but no one knows what a dog’s going to do. You’ve got no clue what a dog is going to go. There are no principles of physics that can tell you what a dog’s about to do because a dog actually has a new emergent called life.
We certainly can’t tell you what Emil is going to do through the principles of physics because Emil is now mind. Does anyone get that right? So don’t turn to physicists for anything, but physics. And spirituality doesn’t steal physics, and distort it and corrupt it. Okay? The universe is us. We’re the universe. Literally, we’re the universe and what do we want? What matters to us? What matters to us is, radical love and radical creativity. And radical intimacy and giving our unique gift. That’s what matters to us. So, wow.
So we’re at this moment, and what this moment says to us is, what we’re doing at these festivals and these festivals are Dharma laboratories. And now what’s our intention here? It’s not just a personal self -transformation event. No. this is not a self-transformation event. Self-transformation is a byproduct of what happens, but we’re actually committed to the evolution of the source code and we’re coming together in the festival as a Dharma laboratory to actually articulate, the core source code structures that we need to evolve culture and consciousness. And that’s insane. That’s gorgeous. It’s stunning.
What an insane privilege. And the set of source code structures we have; are the most precious thing I know in the world. And we need to articulate them. We need to deepen them.
The difference between self-help and genuine transformation, self-help is the difference between what can I take from it? And how can I participate in a transformation of reality? And the difference in genuine transformational work is always about transforming the whole thing through my transformation. My transformation participates in the whole thing.
So I know I touched on a lot it, but I wanted to just give you a sense of what’s most important at this moment in time. So number one, we don’t think the virus. Number two, there is a real pandemic. It’s not a fake pandemic. number three, that pandemic was born of a fact pattern. The fact pattern is the failure of intimacy, However, you tell the story. But at its core, it’s a failure of intimacy, right? Which is an expression, number 4, of a global intimacy disorder. Point five which is itself an expression of failed frameworks, failed narratives of identity, failed narratives of community failed narratives of relationship, failed narratives of power, failed narratives of desire, right?
Step five, so what do we do in this moment? Well, the first thing we do is we get enough masks for everyone. First thing we do is, we help Italian hospitals. We help New York hospitals, we help Belgian hospitals. The first thing we do is; we don’t actually dissociate from people suffering. That’s number 6.
Number 7 we then remember that before, before COVID 19, there were 10 million people dying a year. Children, of tragic malnutrition. So why don’t we rise for them? We didn’t rise for them because that was also part of a failed intimacy. The reason the world shut down – this is number 7, the reason the world’s shut down now, was not out of love. It was out of fear. I just want to get that. Let’s speak, let’s call it. That’s sensemaking. The world did not shut down out of love. It shut down out of fear, and it was fear of death.
No one could exclude themselves from the potential fear of death. That’s why the world shut down. Now, what’s emerged, point eight, when the world shut down is this enormous explosion of love. Because that’s what we really are, right? But imagine we’re willing to stop the traffic, for the 10 million children dying every year, right? When it didn’t affect me. That’s when you become Homo Amor.
Homo Amor means when I say “your need is my allurement”. And just track this. Let’s go to the last step. We talked about it two summers ago. We talked about the shame, we all experience, when you humiliated in getting your basic needs met. Remember that? Remember we did a couple of days on shame.
Oh, I just talked to James the other day. He said that was his favorite day, Shame. It was an important day. What are our basic needs? The basic need for touch. We have a basic need for what else? For food. For nourishment. So there are 2 billion people in the world who don’t have safe drinking water. There are 2 billion people in the world that don’t have basic sanitation. There are 2 billion people in the world who are either hungry or have actual food insecurity. Wow. That’s a global intimacy disorder. So all of those people are shamed, by having their basic needs met.
What about the rest of the world? Well, actually about 60 to 70 something maybe some people think 80% of the rest of the world also, is not secure. We don’t live in the old world of job security. People move from jobs to jobs. They do what, in English are called gigs. And people don’t have basic pensions anymore. People are afraid of losing their job. 80% of the world lives paycheck to paycheck. How does that feel? So, we live in a world today in which there’s enough food for everyone. There are enough resources for everyone. But we don’t create global public goods. People are shamed, humiliated, in the desperate attempt to get their basic needs met. Does that make sense? We’re worried about money all the time. Everyone in the world should not be worrying about money, right? We shouldn’t have to produce in order to feel that we have a right to live. We shouldn’t have to produce in a system in which we often can’t get a job, and we often can’t produce, right? In which there’s not a fair playing field.
Actually, everyone in the world should generate creatively. Everyone has an obligation to creatively generate. Mothers creatively generate. Jobs need to be redefined, right? And everyone has an obligation to give their unique self gift to the world. And that gift should be recognized, should be honored and should be paid for. But no one in the world should think, Oh my God, I’m going to starve. That should not be. That’s humiliation in regard to my basic needs. Does everyone get that? So we actually need a universal basic income. We need global healthcare, right? We need – Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winner called global public goods. We need competition. We need the best of a conscious capitalism, right? We need creativity, right? But we need to actually reshape the world. We can only reshape it if we have Dharma.
And Dharma means you’ve got a set of source code principles and right now everyone’s going to look. When I say everyone, I mean lots of people are going to look to us in the next five years to express this Dharma clearly and clear books and clear festivals and clear recordings and to get it to opinion makers, right? York times says we need new ideas. What do we owe each other? And I must’ve read in the last six weeks, I must’ve read 500 articles every Saturday, Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, I spend the entire right time, like 20 hours straight in reading article after article after article. I haven’t seen one article, not one article with any sense of how we create this new world? where’s the narrative of identity, right?
Let’s like an all of #Metoo, no one gave us a narrative of desire. No one gave us a new sexual story. We just split off women’s desire and demonized men’s desire. Nicely done. But there’s no sexual narrative, right? So we need a narrative of identity for the New York times to answer the question, what do we owe each other? Who am I? Who are you?
That’s what we talk about when we talk about the intimate universe and the tenants of intimacy. We talked about this summer, right? And outrageous love and ordinary love, right? And again, this is not a meeting to talk about particular dharmic ideas, but it’s talking about where we are in this moment, right? It’s the moment we’ve been talking about together since we met, right?
We’ve been talking about that from the beginning. This is what I’ve described as the second shock of existence. The first shock of existence is the potential death of the individual human being. The second shock of existence, the potential death of humanity, existential risk. It starts with catastrophic risk, but it’s not that we’re hopeless. It’s not that hope is lost, not at all. But there’s a moment where there’s a breakdown. And in a breakdown, there’s a possible breakthrough. Our crisis is a birth. Crisis is an evolutionary driver. We got to love each other more than we ever did. We got to laugh more deeply than we ever did. We’ve got to experience our pleasure more deeply than we ever did. We’ve got experience joy more deeply than we ever did. It’s only joy that animates our energy. It’s only joy that we know who we are. It’s only through joy that we can think, and often we laugh out of one side of our mouth and we cry out of the other side of her mouth.
We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. It’s equally true that we live in a world of outrageous beauty, and in the middle of COVID, there’s outrageous beauty, right? There’s outrageous beauty all over the place. There’s heroes all over the place. The only response to outrageous beauty is outrageous love, and outrageous love is not a new-age idea. Outrageous love is the notion, that the university is not impartial. That’s what it means. That’s what outrageous love means. The universe is not impartial. The Universe is partial. Love is not a social construction. Love is backed by the universe. Love is the nature of the universe which lives in us, so that we actually know that it’s true.
Wow. Now, can you feel it? Everybody can we feel that? Who can feel it? Just who can just feel where we are? Can you feel this moment? It’s a moment, right? Can we hold hands? Let’s touch each other. Let’s just actually literally touch each other. Feel each other’s hands. We need to touch each other and it’s painful to be in isolation. It’s painful not to feel the throb and bustle of the crowd, right? It’s painful for all of us. So we put our hands together, we hold hands around the world, right? In hospitals, right? People are dying alone all over the world. And literally, maybe the most powerful thing the doctors or nurses are doing when they can’t save the people is they’re holding hands.
There are stories all over the world of doctors, nurses holding hands for hours with patients. When we hold hands with ordinary love, Michel, and our hands get a little clammy, our hands get tired and we put them down fast because who wants to do the effort? When we hold hands without outrageous love, which is the source of existence itself, when you hold someone’s hand that way, it’s way beyond romance. We’re actually being romanced by cosmos. We’re actually at home. We rest in each other.
So we love each other outrageously, right? And we rest our hands and I just want to say we’re in complete commitment to the festival this summer. We’re totally on. If it’s possible to do in person, obviously we will. Right? For sure. Billion percent. If we’ll do it online, we’ll do it online. Billion percent. Right, right. So it’s just, wow, it’s going to, it’s going to be the best festival we ever had, no matter how we do it.
And we’re doing it not just to get together, not just to transform. We’re doing it for that for sure. But we’re doing it because it’s more important than ever to articulate the new dharma. This summer we’re doing the Dharma of pleasure, which is the source of ethics. What’s the relationship between pleasure and pandemic? How is pleasure the source of ethics at its core? What’s the relations between pleasure and intimacy and failed intimacy disorders? There is no politics, which isn’t a politics of pleasure.
So thank you everyone. I thank you for coming. Thank you for being with us. I thank you for staying. I thank you for staying in.
What we’ve got to do, is we got to do something different than what’s happening around the world. We gotta be laser focus and our laser focus is, it’s on evolving the source code. No change will ever happen in the world unless there’s a new story. The only way history ever changed is through a new story. Human beings don’t think in terms of mathematics. Human beings don’t think in terms of great ideas, Human beings think in stories. There’s an underlying story, even in mathematics is an underlying story. and ideas are telling a story, but at the core of it, it’s a story, right?
And that’s what evolution tells us. That reality is not a fact, it’s a story. It’s going somewhere. It’s a love story. Not a new-age love story. It’s a long, mysterious love story, and that love is awake in us. We know it’s a love story, because look at your own life. We call that the anthro-ontological principle. We’re going to finish with this. The anthro-ontological principle means ontology. The mysteries live within us. So just look at your life. What’s your life? What’s my life? It’s a love story. My life is a love story. That’s what my life is. Whether it’s about my creativity, it’s about my gift. It’s about another person. It’s about loving myself, right? But my life’s a love story.
`And the realization of the new source code, the scientific realization, the interior and the exterior sciences is that my love story is a chapter in the universe’s love story. Isn’t that wild? That that my love is backed by the universe. Did you get that? Can you feel it? Love is backed by the universe. It’s not an impersonal universe, right? You know, today’s Easter and today’s Passover. So Easter is about resurrection. Well, you know the church fucked up a lot, but there were a couple of good intuitions in the pre-modern tradition that were important, so we’ve got to take them with us. What’s resurrection about, is about one idea. That one idea is that death is not forever.
Death is a night between two days. Does everyone get that? That’s what resurrection says. Resurrection says that it’s not over when it’s over. Now at this point, we’ve got a lot more information on that than the church did, but there’s an enormous amount of data in the world today, that it’s not over when it’s over. We don’t know exactly what happens, but we’re pretty sure based on all the interior and exterior sciences and all the collected data at the University of Virginia, right? Para-psychology. There’s an enormous amount of information that tells us that there’s continuity of consciousness. That’s resurrection. Right, and then there’s Passover. Passover actually is this holiday that happened at the same time as Easter. And it celebrates liberation and Passover is about the idea that there are these Hebrew slaves in Egypt. You’re supposed to be slaves forever once you’re slaves, in the great Egypt. and Moses said no, let my people go. So Passover is about the rejection of the status quo. We reject the status quo and we speak for a new world. Passover is about the possibility of liberation. It’s about the possibility of transformation. And most important, it’s about telling your own story as part of the story of the universe. and in Hebrew, Passover is Pesar. And Luria says in the 16th century Pe Sar the mouth that spoke. What does the mouth speak? It told the story. Passover is about telling my story and knowing that my story is a chapter in verse, in the universal love story.
So we’ve got Easter resurrection. Death is a night between two days. The continuity of consciousness. And you can’t have a narrative of identity, without knowing anything about death. Because life means one thing if you die and it’s over. And life means something entirely different if there’s continuity of consciousness after this life. So you can’t have a unique self narrative of identity without dealing with the issue of death. What happens when you die? And we have an enormous amount of information we can say with absolute clarity today, there’s continuity of consciousness and there’s a mystery. What, how, where, who, right? What does it mean? How does it look? And it, it tells you they know that is lying. And that’s an overclaim. We actually don’t know that. There are a huge mystery and death is meant to be in the story.
It’s only death that actually brings us into life in any real way, you know? And I want to end with this. Here’s the last one. We’re in this moment of Easter, of the resurrection we’re in this moment of fear of death. And fear of death is all over the planet. So Kirsten and I are going to do this next week in a different context, but I want to read something to you. Okay. Right from Rilke, the same dude. And he says as follows, he says, and he’s writing to a friend of his, a woman that he was very close friends with him. And Rilke had about 10 women that he was super close friends with, and they were the core of his life. He died at 51 but he always had people supporting him. And he put all of his energy towards focusing on reality and seeing what he could see in reality. That’s what his life was about. So he’s writing to this countess, she’s got like five names, I won’t read them. But here’s what he says/ He says, “our effort I suggest can be dedicated to this to assume the unity of life and death”. So long as we stand in opposition to death”, I mean we do this war against death, right? Cause we’re so afraid of dying because we have no story of death because we’ve deconstructed all the stories. “so long as we have so long as we stand in opposition to death, we will disfigure it”. Does everyone catch that? “Death is our friend, our closest friend, perhaps the only friend who can never be misled by our tricks and vacillations”. And I don’t mean that in the sentimental romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Not at all. Listen to the sentence, “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is there that is natural, that is love. Life always says yes and no simultaneously. Death, I implore you to know is the true yaysayer. Death stands before eternity and says only yes”.
In other words, if there is no death, there’s never a decision to be made. Helma, if there’s no death. I never have to say yes. Right? And it’s why death is a mystery. Death is a mystery intentionally. It’s an intention because we actually have to have this experience of meeting death. We know there’s continuity of consciousness, but we also have this experience and it’s this potent experience. We meet death, and we become alive in that experience.
And we’re going to finish with this. Just the last one, just we hear it for the last time. It’s Easter, it’s a moment of resurrection. It’s a moment in which this fear of death, that’s what the Coronavirus does, the fear of death makes me alive. So just like the individual awakens into the fear of death, into the passionate and absolute presence with all that is, that is natural, that is love. Just like death for the individual demands an absolute Yes – the response to the first shock of existence – the meeting of death of the individual is the, yes, to make my life a triumph. So now as we meet the second shock of existence, the demand is, we make the life of humanity a triumph. That we move from Homo Sapiens to Homo Amor, that we become a unique self symphony. That we cry out, Yes. Yes.
And so I’m just madly honored to be with you madly delighted to be with you. And we end with one word, right? And everyone’s up for it, let’s just meet each other and chatbox for the last second. Let’s just write, if you can feel it, just write yes, yes, yes. And it’s not by accident that the moment of fulfillment and erotic ecstasy, we say the name of the other, the name of God. And what do we say? Yes. This is a moment for yes. We laugh and we cry together. Thank you so much, Amen.