433—Value and Anti-Value, Story and Anti-Story Part 5 of 5: The Evolution of Religion: The Urgent Need of Our Time
Religion is about intimacy; Religion discloses the Intimate Universe
This is part 5 of a series - Value and Anti-Value. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 3 here. Part 4 video here.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 26th, 2025] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Ted Wallach).
Symphonic Musical Unique Self Symphony
I want to spend just a few minutes before we get into this week’s topic just seeing where we are in the world. And I’m going to do a little recapitulation, and try to understand where we were this week and why this all matters so much.
I’m going to try to say a couple of new things. And then we’re going to head into this huge world of practice and prayer. And we have a huge week. So are we ready to go, everybody?
It’s been such an intense morning. I woke up this morning and said, “Oh God, I can’t be wearing another black sweater.” So next week, we’re going to try to get out of black for one week. That’s pretty exciting.
Let’s Re-Articulate the Story That We’re Living In
We need three things in order to avoid the collapse of world society. And that’s why we’re here in One Mountain. One Mountain Many Paths is designed collectively by all of us.
It was also the original intention of myself and Barbara Marx Hubbard. Barbara and I began One Mountain together in, I think, 2016. Our intention was at this time of meta-crisis, at this what we’re calling this time between worlds, this time between stories, what do we do to actually avoid what otherwise would be a very, very high possibility of falling off the precipice, what Toby Ord from Oxford called in his 2020 book, The Precipice.
In that book, he named and crunched the numbers and did a hard academic analysis of the different vectors of existential risk, which means fundamentally risk to our very existence. He talks about the first risk to our existence: classical existential risk. It’s a term, by the way, that was coined by his intellectual big brother—who’s down the road there in Oxford, which is also where I did my doctoral studies—Nick Bostrom, who coins the term “existential risk” in the early 2000s.
But Nick really got it from Nick and Toby’s teacher, Derek Parfit, who’s a moral philosopher, moral realist. Someone like Sam Harris in the United States is a student of Parfit.
And where Sam says things that are penetrating and incisive, they’re often Parfit. That’s that lineage. So Parfit really got existential risk. He got that existential risk matters. And he was desperately trying to articulate a language, a moral language, an ethical language that would allow us to respond to existential risk.
Now, I believe that Parfit failed, and I think that Harris fails. But both Parfit and Harris got this very clearly as does Nick Bostrom, as does Toby Ord, as does Yuval Harari. These are our brothers. These are our friends.
They get the threat of existential risk quite clearly and they articulate it clearly.
And they’re doing it in their bodies. Their bodies are screaming the name of God. They are Divinity in motion, screaming the name of God. And even if they write books about the end of faith and even if they caricature religion inappropriately and then kill the straw man that they’re caricaturing—which they do—nonetheless, these are good people. And they’re doing good things.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni
LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online:
We Are Not Accidental Tourists
As I critiqued Harari quite fiercely in any number of talks in the last four months and in a couple of hour-long podcasts a few weeks ago, nonetheless, I wrote Yuval before and explained to him what I was doing and why I was doing it.
And whenever someone posts on the thread, “Harari scum,” “World Economic Forum, Schill,” or “Harari devil,” there’s quite a bit of that going around the web. We’ve created an instruction to please immediately post—because I can’t catch them all, I don’t track the thread.
We’ve asked a couple of people who are running this very beautifully to always post a response which says—No, actually, we’re holding Yuval as being in good faith conversation and that he’s actually trying to articulate, to the best of his capacity, a response to the meta-crisis. And that he is a good-faith actor. And we hold his goodness and his integrity.
So we’ve posted defending, appropriately, Yuval in these threads of people—some of them who post to support what I’ve said but who attack Yuval in ways that are demonizing. And there’s no room for that demonization.
But it’s not sufficient to do this polite, mellow, sweet: Oh, we have this intellectual disagreement. Oh, you’re right, and I’m right, and we can both disagree about who’s right. No. That’s not the case.
What Yuval is doing and the way he particularly is expressing it—although it’s expressed in similar ways throughout this gang—is chilling the very heart of culture. So, it’s not a small issue. It’s a big issue. It’s not just, Oh, we have an intellectual disagreement. No. What they’re saying is actually wrong.
They know it’s wrong in their bodies. There’s a reason why they’re saying it, which I’ll get to in a second. But it’s wrong. And it needs to be—not gently contested; it needs to be fiercely contested.
Learn about our different newsletters here—the first one (Center for World Philosophy and Religion) is all our posts together—the other ones are the different sections you can subscribe or unsubscribe to separately by managing your subscription:
And manage your preferences here:
There Is Ultimate Significance
With Manjushri’s Sword outstretched, with a sword of discernment and a sword of fierceness, you cannot say, as Harari does—and Harari, more than the rest of the gang, refuses to pull the punch, and that’s where he is, in a strange way, courageous—you cannot say to children
—because he is writing children’s books saying this: Any meaning you ascribe to your life is mere delusion. And he italicized the word any. Then in your children’s books, saying precisely that, you cite stories of meanings that “the grownups use,” and you say they’re nonsense and ridiculous.
But, of course, what you’re doing is you’re caricaturing myths that are not aligned with facts as evidence that all stories are just made up, that there are no stories of value that are real. Because Harari says, one: value is not real, so there is no ultimate significance, number one.
And number two, story is not real. Story is also a contrivance of Cosmos. It’s an accidental contrivance of an accidental Cosmos, and we are accidental tourists going nowhere.
That is precisely not the case. We are not accidental tourists.
We live in a Field of Value. Our stories matter.
Practice Blooms Reality
You know, there’s a beautiful word, Torah. Torah, T-O-R-A-H. Torah. And Torah has four meanings. The first meaning is:
Ohr, light. And by light, we mean there’s a field of light. And by light, we mean there’s intrinsic value. Light in the sacred text means value. Torah also means light in the sense of value.
Torah means hora’ah, and hora’ah means practice or instructions.
I was talking to my dear friend and he pointed out that when you play the guitar, you get better. When you play the guitar, you get better. Why? Because the world is designed for practice.
The world is designed to demand that we cultivate skill.
We cultivate discernment.
We cultivate transformation.
We practice.
The world is designed for practice.
So if I practice piano, I’m going to get better at it. If I pay attention, my paying attention is going to bloom Reality. So we have to practice attention. Does that make sense? We have to practice attention.
The world is designed for practice.
Attention Allows Me to Practice
Chris Hayes just wrote a new book on attention. You can pre-order it. It’s a good book. And I read an excerpt of it. It’s a good job. But the attention issue has been around since the internet actually started. And Nicholas Carr wrote a book called The Shallows in 2010. The Shallows is the superficial. The superficial is the opposite of the holy.
And he pointed out that the point of the internet is to steal attention. But I need attention, because it’s attention that allows me to pay attention, to practice and cultivate the skill which actually generates the depth. You can’t be a great lover by fumbling around. You’re a great lover by practicing love in every second. You’re a great lover by being the best person at foreplay in the world.
And you know how foreplay works? Foreplay works the last time you finished making love, from then till the next time—every single conversation you have in between is foreplay. And sometimes conversations are fierce, and sometimes they’re tender, but they’re always caring insanely. They’re always wildly passionate. You’re always on the inside because you’re paying attention. You’re practicing.
You’re a great lover by practicing love in every second.
You play the guitar—here’s the magic of Cosmos—you get better at it. That doesn’t need to be true. It’s a very big idea. Why should you get better by playing the guitar? Why? You should just keep playing around with those notes and just killing your fingers and nothing’s changing. But that’s not what happens.
The Four Meanings for the word Torah
You know, there’s a beautiful word, Torah. Torah, T-O-R-A-H. Torah. And Torah has four meanings.
The first meaning of Torah means light in the sense of value. We live in a Field of Value.
Torah means hora’ah. It means it’s instructions for practice.
Torah means to set intention. Torah comes from a word which is yoreh, to aim, Zen and the Art of Archery. I aim. Setting aim, setting intention.
Torah means tourist. To be a tourist.
So the word is latur. Latur means to be a tourist, to seek, to search. I’m searching.
Searching means that I don’t always know the instructions.
Searching means that there’s not a dogma of certainty that removes the mystery.
Searching means that uncertainty dances with certainty.
Does everyone get that?
That’s key. That’s a key part of Torah. This is insanely important. Because what Yuval and Sam and Nick and Toby, the whole gang and Derek Parfit himself—this entire school—they’re making two wrong claims. Harari is a good representative of this postmodern school.
They’re saying value is not real; any meaning you ascribe to your life is mere delusion.
Harari is making a specific claim about Buddhism. He’s saying, This is what Buddhism says. And particularly, he’s saying that suffering is to think that meaning is real; you liberate from suffering when you realize meaning is not real.
They’re saying,Religion imposes suffering. Religion, what does religion do? Religion is doing dogma. Religion is creating false meaning. Religion is creating dividing lines between people, which cause suffering. Religion is claiming infallibility while science recognizes its fallibility. In other words, it’s a caricature. They caricature religion.
Now parentheses, go slow with me. Their caricature of religion is not entirely wrong. It’s actually largely right. It’s just not the whole story. So, they caricature exoteric public religion.
Religion At Its Best is Wildly Important
And before there was Crosby, Stills & Nash, when I was two years old, growing up—who remembers Crosby, Stills & Nash? From the ’60s. I was like a two-year-old.
So before they were Crosby, Stills & Nash, they were Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young back in the day. They sang a song, which I remember listening to again and again when I was 19, How many people died in the name of Christ? I can’t believe it all. And they were talking about exactly what Harari’s pointing to: the false dogmas, the false stories.
Religion at its best is actually wildly important. The contrived meanings, hijacked for purposes of power and politics; dogmas that devastate our essential Divinity; dogmas that devastate that diminish our essential humanity. So they’re right to critique that. What they’re not right to say—which they know quite well is a level of shocking intellectual dishonesty—is, “That’s religion.”
No. That is superficial religion. That’s corrupt religion. Just like we’ve got superficial science and we have corrupt science. And just like science can be subverted and made to serve all forms of corruption, all forms of devastation, so there’s pseudo-religion, which claims the authority of religion.
And there’s pseudo-science, which claims to be science. There are scientific dogmas. There are claims in science which say the universe is pointless, and that’s what science teaches us.
But science doesn’t teach us that the universe is pointless. So there’s a huge amount of dogmas in religion. I pointed out in the conversation with Harari 10 modern scientific dogmas.
And Harari, of course, says in his book Nexus, there are no scientific dogmas. Science has no dogma.
That’s utter nonsense. When I say science, I mean, again, scientism. I don’t mean science at its best, just like I don’t mean religion at its best. So, religion at its best is actually wildly important.
We need religion.
Religion is asking critical questions.
It’s pointing in important directions.
And it’s holding the mystery.
And it’s holding the Field of intrinsic Value.
And it’s holding the Field of Meaning.
But it has to hold it in a way which embraces uncertainty. It’s got to hold it in a way which dances with the mystery.
But not in a way which says meaning is not real, rather in a way which says we’re always practicing. We’re always affirming Torah.
Torah means we’re in a Field, there’s always light. And light dances with darkness, but there’s light. There’s value.
Torah, there are instructions for living.
We can practice.
We can play our guitar and get better.
We can transform.
We can become more ethical and more beautiful and more good and more true.
We’re artists. We’re creating.
And our creations matter because the world is not just matter, the world is what matters.
The artist knows that their creativity matters. The artist knows, my creativity matters, my creativity participates in the creativity of Cosmos:
to create new insight
to create new possibility
to create new beauty
to create new truth
to create new goodness
—that’s what we do as spiritual artists. That’s what we do as social artists.
We Are Divine Artists, and We Are Practicing Our Divinity
And art matters, which is why, parentheses, the word for art in Hebrew is amen. Whoa! Amen? What does amen mean? Amen is after a blessing, those fundamentalists say, “Amen!” No. Amen means in Hebrew “artist”. Oman, art.
And amen means the breast of the nursing mother. The nursing mother who holds the child at her breast. And the baby knows, “My mother is not going to drop me.” That’s the second meaning. It means art. It means the experience of a baby at the breast of his mother, that his or her mother is not going to drop him or her.
And amen means trust. I trust you. The baby says to the mother, “I trust you. You’re not going to drop me.” It’s not a speech act. It’s the investiture of meaning and value in which all of language is invested.
And amen means imun. Imun in Hebrew means practice. Instruction, “I’m going to practice.”
When I practice, I get better at the guitar.
When I practice, I transform.
When I practice, I get to paint, once and twice and three times and four times and five times. And we discover all of da Vinci’s early drawings again and again. And all of Leonard Cohen’s versions of Hallelujah, which he has like 150 different versions until he gets it straight.
So we are artists. We are divine artists and we are practicing our divinity.
We’re practicing what it means to be an Outrageous Lover.
We’re practicing value.
We bow before the mystery, but we know that the mystery is replete with value. We know that value is real.
We are divine artists and we are practicing our divinity. We know value is not hard to find; value is impossible to avoid. And we know that we need religion.
Does everyone get that? We need religion. Religion means religare. It means to reconnect. It means we’re not alienated, we are ligaments in the body divine, in the body electric, in the BodyEros of Reality.
And it all matters. Our lives are infinitely significant. We’re personally addressed by Cosmos. Every breath we take, every gesture we make matters infinitely. It all matters.
Because here’s the thing, my friends, there’s only two choices. Either it all matters or nothing matters. There’s not a choice in between.
So when Yuval says nothing matters, and when he ascribes that to Buddhism, we’re in very big trouble. Because what it does is it chills Reality. And all of a sudden, we can’t distinguish between prime minister candidates and presidential candidates. We can’t distinguish.
Nothing really matters anymore. Things have lost their ultimate significance. We’re not in a shared Field of Value. And that’s the beginning of the end. That is the emptying out of Reality. And once you empty Reality out of value, then the line to existential risk, to decisions that bring us to the death of humanity…
And I’ve talked to several people in the last two years who are major players in the artificial intelligence world, among the hundred people who are making the decisions or the 50 people now. And they say to me blithely, “We’re going to move from carbon”—meaning life-based—“to silicon” —meaning computer chip-based. “And that’s the natural movement of accelerating evolution. That’s just what happens. Yeah. That’s just what happens.” Okay? It’s a big deal. This is a big deal. This is everything.
So what Yuval is doing is he’s saying, one, “Value is not real.”
Two, he’s ascribing it to religion. He’s saying there’s one good religion—Buddhism. And what Buddhism is telling you is that there’s no meaning. And all the rest of the religions, they’re making all these crazy claims, they’re doing bad stuff. They’re claiming to be infallible. They’re claiming utter certainty. They’re doing dogma.
That’s not correct. That’s a caricature of religion.
Value is Both Eternal and Evolving
We need to evolve religion. Of course, we do.
Imagine you were sick and you said, “Okay, I’m really sick and I’m going to go to a 15th-century or a 14th-century or a 13th-century doctor and I’m going to have them bleed me” —bloodletting, which was a 13th-century, 14th-century, 15th-century, and 16th-century medical practice. “I’ll have them use leeches and bloodletting in order to deal with my sickness.”
I’d be insane. No one would do that. So why would I go to a 13th-century or a 14th-century religionist rabbi, priest, or imam?
Value is eternal. There’s a Field of Value.
And then value is evolving.
Love means something, there’s an absolute meaning of Love and Eros in the Cosmos. And then that value evolves.
So we have to participate together in the evolution of love—not because we’re foisting that on Reality.
Because that is the plotline of Cosmos: the evolution of love.
Part of the evolution of love is the evolution of our sense of connection.
What is love? Love means our sense of connection.
We’re connected.
We want contact.
We’re part of the same.
When I fall in love with you, I realize we’re connected. We have an intrinsic, threaded, deep, profound intimacy with each other.
And intimacy is the interior of connectivity.
We need to evolve religion, just like we evolve science
We need to evolve religion just like we evolve science.
Religion is religare, we said a few minutes ago—to be reconnected, to re-fabric.
I’m making contact in the deepest way. I want to evolve.
Religion is about intimacy. Religion discloses the Intimate Universe.
So we need to evolve religion just like we evolve science.
And I’m not going to basically dismiss science because 13th-century science did crazy shit. I’m going to go to modern science and I’m going to go to the best of Newton and Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and the beauties of their measurements. And then I’m going to evolve science.
When we split science and humanities, when we split the STEM professions from art—which is the experience of being held in the arms of the nursing mother; knowing there’s a Field of Value, even as I hold the mystery—then we create this exile. We rend the world asunder. We rip the world in half. We tear it apart.
Remember the image of Solomon. There are two mothers who claim the baby. And Solomon says, “Rip the baby apart and give half to each mother.”
That’s what we do when we tear apart humanities, art, value, meaning, and their intrinsic, inherent nature—we split that from the sciences. The formal, external sciences, the interior sciences—mysticism, value, art—and the exterior sciences, the classical sciences of modern science are actually pointing to the same Reality. They’re both realizing that Reality is coded with value.
And Reality is coded with mathematical value. Reality is Mispar, number. And the very word mispar, means also sippur, story—because there’s no split between story and number. Reality is story. And it’s a Story of Value. And number itself is a story.
And so we need to respond to Yuval fiercely. Fiercely. On three counts.
One: Value is real, even as we hold the mystery.
Three: We need to reclaim religion.
And because there’s no local issues anymore—of course, there’s local issues, but the existential risk issues of the potential death of humanity or the technocracy, which causes the death of our humanity—those issues are global in every way. And every major existential challenge is global and it will become galactic. But now it’s global. So we need a global religion, which means we need a universal grammar of value so that we can actually form sentences, and create communication or communion with each other. So that’s one and three.
Two is: we need to show that this venerable, great tradition of Buddhism is not making the claim that there’s no meaning. It’s making the claim—at its best, in the best of Vajrayana schools—that we have to paradoxically explode all surface meaning and embrace all meaning at the same time. When you read Kukai, eighth century—that’s one particular version of Buddhism, Shingon Buddhism—You look at it, there’s the sense of, “I explode all meaning. I meet the Buddha on the road, I kill the Buddha. I explode all meaning. And I embrace all meaning.” Buddhism is making a much more paradoxical point.
It says, “Explode everything and embrace everything.” That’s what Buddhism is saying.
Buddhism is saying, at its deepest, “Don’t search for meaning. There’s nothing to search for. It’s all meaningful. There’s nothing to search for.” Don’t exile meaning into a particular story of meaning. The whole thing is meaningful. There’s nothing that’s not. And that meaning lives in our bodies—which is why the first imperative of Buddhist thinking is to heal suffering. But healing suffering is a statement of value.
My friend Sam, in his book The Moral Landscape, tries to argue that we can make a scientific conclusion that we should actually take care of people’s well-being that has nothing to do with interiors, has nothing to do with value. That’s preposterous. In other words, not true. And Sam uses the word “science” because Sam, although he doesn’t acknowledge it—Sam, sorry about this, brother—but he is building the Sam brand.
He’s building the Sam Harris brand. Sam is actually much more nuanced and dialectical and complex than his public brand. In Sam’s book, The Moral Landscape, if you just change the word “science” for “empiricism,” the book would work. Meaning empirically, meaning in our bodies, we know in our bodies that we should take care of people. That’s true.
There’s a direct knowing in our bodies—empirically, it lives inside of us: we’ve got to take care of people. Sam spends so much time, like Yuval, caricaturing and attacking religion, then he says, “Okay, now we’re going to get value from science.” Not true. And he knows that’s not true.
Value lives in my body. And the individual body, it lives in the body politic because, anthro-ontology, anthro—in the human being—ontology lives value because the mysteries are within us. In other words, we all agree that we need to avoid suffering. But Sam wouldn’t say, “Let’s avoid suffering by drugging everyone out on heroin. So that they won’t suffer. They’ll be just in hash dens in Thailand, not suffering.” Well, no, we wouldn’t do that. We would want people to engage the existential angst of being a human being. And we wouldn’t want to put everyone in a hash den. Why?
Because there’s something called human dignity, which has to do with how we think and how we choose and how we play and how we make love and how we create. Of course. So we got to get serious here. Okay? Let’s get serious.
And so part of our getting serious last week, we said, Okay, let’s invite a Buddhist teacher to actually challenge Yuval’s ascription to Buddhism the following equation. “Suffering comes from believing there’s meaning.” And that’s Yuval’s direct equation. It’s directly what he says.
That’s not true. And the claim that value is not real, in the name of Buddhism, that’s not true. And so Soryu said three things, which is really important. Four, really.
First off, he said, we have to stand for sacred ethics. And he used the word “sacred,” and he used it intentionally. And by sacred, he meant—he said to me in a text this week—he said, “Buddhists don’t like the word ‘inherent.’” He said, “I can go with sacred.” But by sacred value, he means what we’re calling inherent value, meaning it’s real. It’s not contrived, but it actually represents something that is ultimately real. And it’s real beyond all the contrived stories. It’s the story beyond all the stories. One. So there’s a Field of sacred value. There are sacred ethics. And he used the sacred not as a gerrymandering word, meaning not as a promotional word or a sloganeering word, but as real; it’s ontology: sacred.
Two, that the essence of Buddhism is to fulfill those sacred ethics. And that actually meditation was originally not a mass process.
Meditation was for those people who had fulfilled the Eightfold Path and been able to incarnate virtue, ethics, ethos, value in their life.
Now you want to go deeper, you go to meditation. But actually, right view—and right view means value is real.
Right view, a.k.a. value is real, is prior to meditation. Second thing he said.
Three, enormously important, he said, Buddhism without ethics creates monsters.
What he meant was Buddhism without the assertion that value is real creates Thanos and the Avengers or Dr. No and James Bond. It creates designs of the World Economic Forum on its bad days, which says, Let’s reset the world and actually make everyone into a number and not have any currency. Everything is completely operated through a worldwide web that’s completely controlled—because the assumption is that there’s no free will anyway.
Harari’s assumption advising the World Economic Forum, assumption is there’s no free will. The assumption is that love is not real, so let’s actually just survive and let’s control humanity and put all of humanity in a Skinner’s box. Huh? No, no, no. Not okay.
So we have to actually affirm the dignity of the human experience.
But the fourth thing that Soryu said that was enormously important, he pointed out that the presentation of Buddhism as primarily insight meditation or the taking of the strand of Buddhism called Vipassana insight and making it the whole thing and actually dissociating Buddhism from “value is real” or ethics, he said, was a modern move. He said it was initiated, in large part, by Goenka and his school. And he honored them and he said they’ve done a lot of good, but ultimately, they actually dissociated the experience of meditation from the Field of Value that’s real.
Now that is actually what’s happening in the world today.
Sam Harris will have an app called Waking Up. So he’ll say, on the one hand, value is not real. On the other hand, waking up is a great thing to do. Huh?
So then waking up becomes another human construction, which helps you have a little more well-being before you die and then you die and it’s over. No. Meditation is not about that.
Meditation is about cutting through the illusion and accessing the real.
And the real is the experience that value is real, that it’s worth avoiding suffering, not just because I’ll get more comfortable, but because that process of meditating, that process of gaining insight, that process of wielding Manjushri’s Sword of discernment has intrinsic and innate value by itself. Meditation discloses the Field of Value.
Meditation Discloses the Field of Value
Meditation cuts through pseudo-value and discloses value. Not that you’ve got to look for purpose, not that you’ve got to look for value, not that you have to look for meaning—it’s all already meaningful. That’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.
You can’t dissociate meditation from the Field of Value. If you do that, then meditation becomes but another reductive tool of superficial therapy in order to salve and soothe the human being so they won’t create too much trouble before they die and go into oblivion in a world which was ultimately pointless, ultimately insignificant, and a world in which was, in fact, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And we all know that’s not the case. We don’t look at our children and tell them, “The world’s meaningless. Nothing you do actually matters. But try and behave. You’ll have as little suffering as possible before you die.” We don’t say that to our children. Not because we don’t want to destroy them. Because our body, we couldn’t get the words out of our mouths because we know they’re not true.
That’s why this matters so much.
We Need To Evolve Religion and Evolve Science
So we need, one, new religion.
We don’t reject medicine because medicine did crazy shit in the 13th and 14th centuries.
We don’t reject science because science has gotten hijacked for every nefarious end.
We don’t reject science because science has created weapons that can destroy the world 50 times over. And why are we doing that, science? Really? Who’s doing that? Somebody is doing that. And why is there this race to the bottom, where we’re trying to use most of science to create the most destructive weapons possible? But we don’t reject science.
We have to evolve science. We have to liberate science.
We have to liberate science and disclose that, actually, science is an expression of the Field of Love.
And science and art need to come together. If we dissociate the scientist from the artist that lives within us, if we dissociate the prophet from the scientist, if we dissociate the magician from the mechanic, then we’ve rent the world asunder, and the world will be pulled apart, will be torn apart, and will be destroyed. We have to bring together, religare, create intimate communion.
It’s not that there are these two separate magisteria, as many try to argue, there’s religion and science. No, no, no, they’re in the same story.
They’re telling the same story.
They’re telling a Story of Value.
They’re telling a story of meaning.
They’re telling a story of mystery.
So we need to first articulate a new vision of religion, number one, a vision which has certainty and uncertainty, which has humility—epistemic humility—and has audacity. We need a new religion.
Two is we need to affirm that value is real.
Three, we need to affirm that value is evolving.
And here’s the thing, I’m going to go back to the Buddhism point—it’s not even about having a historical debate about what intention was Buddhism, because anyone who knows anything about scholarship knows that that’s nonsense. As I’ve mentioned before, there wasn’t just the first, second, and third turning of the wheel in Buddhism—Theravada, then Mahayana, then Vajrayana. There are actually multiple other unimaginably important schools in Buddhism. Sean Hargens is doing important work on various non-dual schools in Buddhism. And Sean and I are meeting regularly to talk about that: What are the different non-dual moves that Buddhism makes?
So it’s not even about, “Can Yuval find four texts in Buddhism where Goenka said this?” That’s not the point. Yuval, did you just become a dogmatic guy? The point is, what is the best version of Buddhism—which has the highest understanding, the most evolved understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful—that we can articulate and teach today? So Yuval, Goenka was Goenka. You be Yuval.
And Yuval, brother, you know value is real. You’re spending your life trying to make the world better. You’re spending your life trying to avoid the pitfalls of existential risk. So let’s go do it, brother.
Let’s find what we share in common.
Let’s articulate a shared grammar of value.
Let’s articulate a new lineage of an Amorous Cosmos, which is filled with mystery, in which our primary injunction is to heal suffering.
We heal suffering not just by getting comfort, which allows us to avoid some of the pain, but by actually moving to pleasure—the pleasure of knowing, the pleasure of value, the pleasure of meaning, the pleasure of art, the pleasure of creativity.
And we know that no one gets to hijack meaning. Because it’s everywhere. Again:
Meaning is not hard to find. Meaning is impossible to avoid.
And everything is at stake. Okay? Okay. Cha!
Don’t “Believe” in God; Know God
You don’t need to believe in God. You do need to pray, and everything else will follow. God will be ecstatic, and so will we.
You don’t need to “believe” in God. That’s right. Don’t “believe” in God. No one. Don’t “believe” in God. We’re against believing in God. Don’t “believe” in God. No one should “believe” in God. I want to make that super clear.
Don’t “believe” in God with “believe” in quotation marks. And that’s “belief,” which is belief in a dogma, which says this religion has this truth and no one else has it and only through this religion do we go to heaven. Don’t “believe” in God. That’s clear. Don’t “believe” in God.
No one should “believe” in God. In quotation marks, “believe.” Religion doesn’t talk, right? At its best, the Solomon lineage doesn’t talk about believing in God. Don’t “believe” in God. I can’t make that clearer. Don’t “believe” in God.
Know God. Taste God. Taste and see that God is good. And God means it matters. I’m personally addressed. Injustice violates something in the Cosmos. Wanton cruelty is not just problematic because it violates my personal preference. Wanton cruelty is problematic because it violates the Field of the Divine.
And God is the Infinite Intimate. God is the Field of Value. Participate in the evolution of love. Every moment of my life is meaningful.
every breath I take
every piece of art I create
every exchange
every tenderness
every fierceness
—it all matters.
That’s all God.
Don’t “believe” in God. Know God. Know God directly; direct access. Nothing in between. Nothing in between.
Says Meister Eckhart, “All of Reality is kissing.”
And every moment, every thing is a yearning for, a yearning towards. We’re not satisfied without yearning towards.
And honor that yearning towards. That’s what prayer means.
Prayer means… Oh my God.
Prayer means that:
We’re not by ourselves in the Cosmos which is pointless.
We’re not by ourselves in this tale told by an idiot.
Actually, our stories matter.
And so we pray. We reach towards. We turn towards. We experience ourselves as being personally addressed by the Infinite Intimate. The Infinite Intimate knows my name.
Just like I am divinity in motion, screaming the name of God, God is humanity in motion screaming your name and screaming my name.
The god you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. But it’s not really the god you don’t believe in. It’s not about belief. Let’s reframe it. You know God directly.
So when you say, “I don’t believe in god”. That god doesn’t exist. You shouldn’t “believe” in God. That’s true. The god you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. Don’t “believe” in God. I’m with Harari on that. Don’t believe in God. I want to be really clear.
The god you don’t believe in does not exist:
Know God.
Taste God.
Taste meaning.
Taste value.
Taste art.
Taste the mystery.
And you know that it’s real.
And Yuval, cut it out, man. Stop telling children that value is not real, and that art is irrelevant, and that meaning is a delusion. Stop it, man. Just stop it. Let’s do this. We can do this. Everything is at stake. We can do this.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni
LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online]