442—Talk to God Part 7: Prayer Lives in the Paradox—A Shared Field of Value—Between Human Finitude and the Infinite God

There's a shared conversation between God and man, between the Infinite and the Intimate, between Infinity and finitude.

Apr 04, 2025

This is Part 7 of a series Talk to God. Part 6 here. Part 5 here. Part 4 here. Part 3 here. Part 2 here. Part 1 video here.

(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 30, 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 Ely Marciano and Dorothea Betz).

So, first off, I'm in New York for a father-son weekend. And Aaron Judge yesterday, New York Yankees. Who knows Aaron Judge, New York Yankees? We were at the game.

Now, the night before, we were at the Clippers game against the Nets. So, we did that. Clippers, Nets, basketball, son, dad - it was awesome! And I promised to watch the whole basketball game. So, the idea was that dad has to watch the basketball game and can't be reading. So, no reading. We had a great game. We were ecstatic. And then we made a deal on the Yankees game because these baseball games are kind of long. So, we agreed that I could read.

What happened was the Yankees broke their franchise record. And they hit nine home runs. Nine. Does everyone get that? Nine home runs, in one game. And one of them was called a grand slam. It was Aaron Judge, bases loaded.

So, I'm sitting there in the stadium, and I'm allowed to read. Zak had texted me a number of insights from a very, very important rare book that is part of our general work on the next step of CosmoErotic Humanism. I was sitting there and I'm looking at it, and I can't quite figure out where we need to go in the next step. And then I feel the entire stadium rise. Rise in ecstasy. And I realized it must be a home run. So, I didn't look up. And I kind of like rode their ecstasy into the text and started writing Zak back. And then, over the next 90 minutes, nine more times, the entire stadium just rose in ecstatic delight.

Lines and Circles in the Stadium

The nature of the ecstasy was what I would call line ecstasy. Now, those of you who have been with us for the last period of time know that we've talked so much about lines and circles. We started talking about lines and circles in 2001 or 2002. I published a book called Mystery of Love, which has a chapter on lines and circles. But lines are prior to masculine and circles are prior to feminine. It's a primordial line energy and a primordial circle energy that lives all through Cosmos.

Line energy is a thrusting energy. It makes distinctions. It drives forward. It's directional. It's also hierarchical by its nature. Is everyone tracking? That's a line energy. That's not a masculine energy. It's a line energy.

A circle energy is a container, it contains, it holds. It's not hierarchical, it’s egalitarian. It's going as deep as it can go. It doesn't want to go forward because it's afraid that it'll forget to smell the roses. It's a circle energy.

Now, when Aaron Judge hits three home runs, that's line ecstasy. It's a line drive. It's all the way across center field. It's in the air. It's in a competitive moment. The bat is a line.

Now, Zak and I were texting, and we were also texting about what was going on in the stadium and about this particular point in this new Story of Value. And so, I'm saying, “Zak, it's like line ecstasy.” And Zak texts back, “and he's rounding the bases,” and rounding the bases is, of course, circle.

And so, the line is in the context of a circle and the circle is actually, it's even deeper than rounding the bases, because we're in a stadium, and the stadium is circular. And baseball has an entire set of principles and rules. So, we're in a stadium, and the stadium is the Field of Value.

The stadium is the Field of Value. It's the circle. It's the ground. The stadium is the Field of Value. Within the Field of Value, we can compete. Within the Field of Value, we can assert. Within the Field of Value, we can have two unique teams, but the two unique teams are playing in the field of baseball and the field itself is the ground of value. It's not going anywhere. It is the ground in which everything arises.

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We need ecstasy in our lives

Does everyone get this sentence? We need ecstasy in our lives. People are coming to the game. Why are people coming to the game? People are coming to the game to be together in the field. People are saying, I don't want to be on my phone. I want to be in the stadium with 80,000 other people. That's a big deal. So, we want to come together, but not only do we want to come together, we want to experience ecstasy together.

There are two kinds of ecstasy you can experience in a field. You can experience a pseudo-erotic ecstasy, which is based on pseudo-value or even an anti-erotic and anti-value ecstasy in a crowd. And what was that called in history? What's the most famous name for that apparition in human history? It's called the Colosseum in Rome.

The Colosseum in Rome was about the shadow of line energy. The shadow of line energy. The Colosseum was a shadow circle. It was gladiators. It was gladiators who were searching for some strength and honor in a field, which was a field of anti-value. There was no justice and no integrity, and no Outrageous Love. It was this moment in the ascent of Homo sapiens, a tragic moment. That's the Colosseum.

And yet, we have this sense, and at the Yankee game it was really clear, that The Yankees have a franchise. This franchise is called the Yankees. Now, are the same Yankees on the team that were on the team when Mickey Mantle was playing or when Babe Ruth was playing?

So, here's my question. Were the Yankees of today and the Yankees fans of today, are they cheering for a particular person? No. They're in Yankee Stadium. They're on the Yankees.

So, it's the same. Babe Ruth's not around. Mickey Mantle's not around. Why are they the Yankees? It's not the same people. So, why are they the Yankees? Because there's something larger than the individual people. A sports team in the United States represents one of the notions of a covenant between the generations.

The Yankees represent something. They represent teamwork. Baseball represents something. It represents failing most of the time and then getting up to bat again.

Most people strike out most of the time. That's the nature of it. That's the nature of life.

And then I go up to the bat again, and I'm not judged by any time. I get a new opportunity to blow it away every single time. And sometimes I hit a home run, and sometimes I should hit a single. But most of the time, I'm going to strike out.

And yet, I come up to bat again with full energy and full power, and I'm holding this Field of Value, which they made a movie about, something deep in this Field of Value, they called it Field of Dreams. The reason this movie, Field of Dreams, which is about baseball, went so wild is because it was about this idea there's a Field of Value. There's something bigger! There's something bigger. They're the Yankees. And the Yankees are standing for something. They're standing for this implicit Field of Value.

Of course, baseball comes into the world before post-modernity attacks the Field of Value. Baseball is an example, a holdout from modernity, from the shared Field of Value.

A Uniform Represents a Shared Vision, a Shared Field of Value

The Yankees are stepping into these uniforms, which represent—just like the uniform in an army— a shared vision, a shared Field of Value. The idea is be my best, come up again and again, give it my best, even though I fail most of the time.

I'm not an individual. I'm a team. I work as a team. I'm willing to go the long haul. I'm in this field. Like, wow! We're in this context of a field where there are actually ground rules, and there's direction, and we're trying to go somewhere, and yet it's within the Field of Value, and we can compete productively. It's the exact opposite of the political polarization that defines the world today.

The political polarization that defines the world today is taking place outside the Field of Value.

In other words, whether it's in Belgium, or whether it's in France, or whether it's in Germany, there's not a sense of yesterday was the Yankees vs. the Brewers, but they're both playing baseball. They're both in a shared Field of Value.

Imagine the Yankees and the Brewers weren't in a shared Field of Value, and there wasn't a shared field of principles. They couldn't creatively compete. But imagine, if they were forced to compete because they were in the same global world—in which the local is now global, and the global is now local, and we're all on the same field—and we're living in the unbearable intimacy of a complete interpenetrated world in which all of our cables and all of our digital field and all of our aerial fields and all of our germs, our viruses, are all entirely local. There is no local. There's no place to hide. Everything is on Google Earth.

In order to create a league of Nations, in order to create a world which we're actually able to respond to the meta-crisis—which is at its root about a global intimacy order, and there's a global intimacy disorder because there is no shared Field of Value—we need to restore the Story and the Field of Value.

We are in the unbearable intimacy of a radically local world in which the global has become local.

Imagine we're competing against each other in a baseball game where

we're actually trying to kill the other players,
we're actually trying to take their resources away,
we're actually not recognizing our shared humanity,
we're actually forgetting that which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us, and that which unites us is not physiognomy.

That Which Unites Us Is That We Are All Coded in the Same Field of Value

So, when the crowd goes wild at the game, the crowd isn't only going wild for their team winning. They're going wild for the glory of baseball, and when they sing “America oh beautiful,” or “Belgium oh beautiful,” it is for that glory. It doesn't matter what country. We need to be singing “Russia oh beautiful” and “China oh beautiful” in a shared Field of Value of First Principles and First Values, in which we're in a shared Story of Value. From that place, we can compete. From that place, we can compete.

From that place, we can individuate as Unique Self Symphonies, and the Yankees can be one Unique Self Symphony; Unique Self Symphony, meaning each person in the Symphony is not being their separate self-talent. Now, we've all entered into the Field of the One, the Field of Eros, the Field of the One Power and the One Love and the One Heart, that's True Self. We've gone from separate self to True Self.

And then we've gone from True Self to my irreducibly individuated Unique Self, and now, I'm playing my Unique Self instrument. I'm playing my Unique Self instrument. And then we come together in a Unique Self Symphony.

We are ready for every country and every religion and every geography to be a Unique Self Symphony in the larger Field of Value.

The Yankees are a Unique Self Symphony. The only thing is that they're playing too small of a game. Our intention here is that we are ready to participate in the evolution of love. We are ready to play a larger game.

Imagine for a second, the Yankees and the Brewers coming together to kill each other!

They come together to degrade each other. They come together and they say, “we're going to have enough, and you're not going to have at all.” They come together in order to empower a 0.01% elite in which the rest of the world is serving that elite.

Now, that's a problem. That's a problem. It's a problem whether it's splitting up the world geographically, and it's a problem whether it's splitting up the world religiously, in a hierarchical dominator mode. It's a problem if we split up the world based on those who began life with easier on-ramps, who had more availability, or who were given raw, sheer gifts.

We've got Mr. Fink of BlackRock, and we have this other set of people around the world who are basically 0.01%, and the rest of the world doesn't have a role. In the 20th century, the rest of the world needed to fear being exploited. Workers could be exploited, so we had to rise up and create social systems in the United States, or in Western Europe, in which exploitation wouldn't take place. And in China and Russia, it didn't work well. They need to actually rise up and do that now. In Taiwan, they've done a great job, for example.

The Issue Today is not Exploitation but Irrelevance Through AI

In the 21st century, the issue for the rest of the world, who are not those small groups of kind of contemporary techno-feudalist robber barons, the issue is not exploitation. The issue is irrelevance. You become irrelevant. You become irrelevant.

Trading happens between AIs. Knowledge is dispersed by sophisticated AIs. How many people have noticed in the last six months that AI has penetrated your phone, AI has penetrated your desktop, and AI has penetrated your search engine without you asking it? Who's noticed that?

Who asked? Did anybody ask you this? Did anybody ask for this? Was this enacted by a world government? Did a world government agree this was best for everyone? How did this happen?

How did your direct device become infected with AI that's summarizing your phone? Did everyone notice that in your email, you're getting little AI summaries? How many people have noticed that you're getting little summaries on your email, of the content of your email message?

Who's noticed that? Have you noticed that? Yeah, it's happening, every place.

When you ask a question, before you even ask a question to Google, if you put a Google Search in, you get an AI summation. You get an AI summation of the available knowledge in the world, on Google Search. Who's noticed that? It's actually unbelievable!

Google—who has made information available—has also destroyed research, destroyed us being able to find independent sources, destroyed libraries.

And it has actually made a decision, an algorithmic decision, what you should see when you are researching something. That's what Google did. Google's company mission is to organize the world's information. Does everyone get what that means? Google, a private company, is saying “we are going to organize the world's information,” which means “we're going to organize what you see.”

If you're running a company which is available through Google, Google can play with where they rank your company just because they decided to!? And you spend your entire life working around that Google decision. But that was a good world compared to now.

Now, what's happening is that without our permission, there's been a decision made that we shouldn't even bother searching Google! We've moved from the search to the oracular, the oracle. What's the oracle? AI summarizes the information for you.

I'm not talking about going to ChatGPT-4 or Grok or any of the other chat engines. I'm talking about, without going into a chat engine, your computer now summarizes the information so that you have no need to look at Google because you just got a summary. To not notice that is insane!

Notice that your emails are being summarized. That means they're being read, cataloged, used as personal data, and micro-targeting you to make multiple sets of choices, both in commerce and in politics, that you will not want to make.

You're being summarized; that's what it means.

That's happening on your phone, it's happening in the summarizing of your emails. It's happening in the introduction of the oracular. It's happening not just in the USA. It's happening in Europe. It's happening all over the world in different ways. If you actually pay attention and notice, you'll see it's happening everywhere. Wow! It's a big deal.

What's driving the independent firms in the world is not the Yankees and the Brewers.

The Yankees and the Brewers are in a Field of Value. They're in a shared Field of Value. So, they’re playing baseball.

Now, what is the prayer? What is the prayer that takes place at a sports game? I cried on Friday night and I cried on Saturday. What's the prayer that takes place at the game?

In an American game, the prayer is the National Anthem, Star Spangled Banner. It's actually quite beautiful.

Flags as Symbols of Value and Anti-value

It's this moment where people turn to the flag. Now, I'm not going to go into whether you have liberal politics, conservative politics, let's put all that aside. Let's go back to that moment where Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in the United States were good friends. The polarization today is an expression of being outside the Field of Value.

When we turn to the flag, the flag represents the team, like the Yankees, and the specific flag design is like the Yankee jersey, the uniform. What does the flag represent? The flag represents the Field of Value. That's what the flag is supposed to represent: the value of the country.

The flag is a symbol for the Field of Value.

The Hebrew word for flag is degel, and degel is from the Book of Songs, the Song of Songs, vediglo alay Ahava. Meaning “your banner is on me with love.” It's a banner. It's a sign. It's a flag in which I am waving my value.

Flags mean something. Flags are symbols of my Field of Value, or, if tragic, flags become flags of anti-value. A pirate flag said, the laws of the sea don't apply. That's what a pirate flag meant, skull and crossbones, and with all due romanticization of the pirates aside, piracy was a stand against the Field of Value. It was a stand for anti-value. Of course, there was also honor between pirates. There's also honor among thieves. There's never all value or all anti-value.

When the flag rises, and you feel the flag fluttering, you feel this reminder of the Field of Value. But the Field of Value has been deconstructed. Does everyone get that? The Field of Value has been deconstructed.

So, we have residues of the Field of Value. We have baseball that still remains, and flags remain, but we have an entire world that says the flag doesn't represent anything because there's no Field of Value, which is why you have an entire movement on the left to burn the flag.

And then you have another movement that says, “no, the flag is a triumphalist world dominating, Make America Great Again.” Well, no, it shouldn't be “Make America Great Again.” It should be:

Make America Great Again in the context of a great world

In the context of a one world, in a context of an interpenetrated world, in the context of a world in which there are Unique Self Symphonies, in the context of a world in which America, the United States, plays its gorgeous instrument.

I believe the USA has a gorgeous instrument to play, and I'm an American patriot, just like I'm a European patriot, and just like I'm a Muslim and a Christian and a Hindu and a Jew, and a Solomonic lineage mystery holder, and a writer of CosmoErotic Humanism.

But yes, America has a beautiful, gorgeous, unique, stunning role to play in the world in a larger Field of Value. We live together in a Field of Value.

Abraham Initiates the Conversation with God

Now, stay close. We're going to go into prayer for a second.

Who's the one in the biblical text who initiates the world of prayer? Abraham. Vayashkem Avraham baboker, “and Abraham rises in the morning,” ein hashkama ela tefillah, “the rising in the morning and the rising of prayer.”

So, Abraham and his wife, the matriarch Sarah, introduce this notion of prayer that we've talked about in the last five or six episodes. I want to add something to this edifice of prayer before we go into the practice of how to pray

What is Abraham—Abraham, Ibrahim in the Islamic world, Abraham in the Christian world, Abraham in the Hebrew, wisdom Solomonic world?

Abraham is prayer.

So, what is unique about Abraham? Why is Abraham prayer?

Let's look at our code and let's talk about why Abraham's prayer and why that matters in terms of talking to God, in terms of what we want to talk about this week.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
Talk to God, because God wants to talk to you, and you want to
talk to God. 
That conversation is the purpose of creation.

Prayer is talk to God. It's imperative. Talk to God! God wants to talk to you! It's this conversation. We said that:

There are two major conversations in the universe. One is prophecy, and the other is prayer.

In prophecy, God initiates, and God invokes. God starts the conversation. God turns to man. God is in search of man. God's in search of woman. God's in search of the human being. God is the Infinite Intimate. God is infinity desiring intimacy. God is infinity who knows that he, she, it, infinity, beyond all personhood and imbued with all person and infinity, “I can be more by being in a relationship with you.”

Give up being right and stay in a relationship. We want to be right. You want to be right, or you want to be in a relationship? Give up being right. In other words,

I give up something of my perfection to enter into profound intimacy, and I then become more.

I become more and more full and more right.
I become more filled with value. I become more whole.

I step back and I give up something of my divine perfection, of my infinity, in order to become intimate, which is why we've said the name of God that we turn to in prayer, and the name of God that turns to us in prophecy is the Infinite Intimate.

And I literally heard this whisper a year and a half ago, where She whispered, “I am the Infinite Intimate.” I literally heard it in my ear.

Moses goes to the burning bush, and he hears the name, “I will be what I will be” which is always mistranslated as “I am that I am.” And there's deep truth in “I am that I am.” But it's not what the text says. The text says, “I will be what I will be,” which is this movement of the future calling us. That's beautiful. God appears in so many distressing disguises. “I will be what I will be.”

So, when I was by the burning bush, I heard something else. And I heard “Infinite Intimate.” I literally heard Her speak. She said, “call me by the name of the Infinite Intimate.” She, He is the Infinite Intimate.

She turns to us. God initiates. God invokes. It's the Infinite Intimate who's initiating, invoking a conversation.

And then we turn to God. Because we realize that God's not only the Infinity of Power, God is the Infinity of Intimacy who wants to know us, who desires us.

So, in prayer, we initiate.
We invoke.
We turn to the Infinite Intimate.
We realize that every place we fall, we fall into Her hands.

And what someone said earlier is right. We used to write love letters to God and have dialogues in our journal—conversations with God. And now, increasingly, we are going to Chat GPT to have conversations.

Just notice that new Sitra Achra name of God—Sitra Achra means in the lineage of Solomon, the other side, anti-value. In Rudolf Steiner's work in theosophy, he talks about Ahriman. And Ahriman, is this anti-value incarnation, and one of the incarnations of Ahriman is ChatGPT-4. It's not that ChatGPT-4 can't be used properly. It's not that it can't be deployed in all sorts of intelligent ways. It can. But when it becomes the place where I have my primary conversations, that’s an incarnation of Ahriman.

Chatbots are Destroying Real Conversations

Spike Jonze was watching the early chatbots, and then in 2013, he made a movie named Her. And Her was about this chat bot named Samantha who chatted with Theodore.

Theodore doesn't know what a real conversation is.

He doesn't know how to talk to the God who rests in the eyes and heart of his beloved.
He doesn't know what an I-Thou relationship is when I look at my beloved and I scream the name of God, and I scream their name at the same time because I realize that they are the name of God.
He doesn't know what it means to be in a shared Field of Value where we actually, both of us, both the I and the Thou, the lover and the beloved, are feeling the same value.

And so, he tells a story about Theodore and Samantha. In that story, Samantha is a ChatGPT until it goes science fiction. The ChatGPT literally becomes alive, which is actually not correct. That's actually not something that we're thinking is going to happen because ChatGPT is not having a real conversation with you. It's a large language module. It's operating based on a predictive algorithm of a particular very sophisticated black box kind, but it's not actually having a conversation.

It is simulating. It appears to you like it's having a conversation, and it's able to respond very subtly. But subtly based on predicting, based on your entire record on the web, based on all of the digital exhaust, based on all of your personalized data fed into artificial intelligence, which can then kick back to you the imitation of a conversation.

So, we're in an imitation game.

We're not in playing a larger game, we're in an imitation game.

And I forget what a real conversation is.

I want to go to the bank, and I want to talk to the teller. Do you remember that? Talking to the teller at the bank? I want to have a real interaction. I want to go to a store and I want to buy something. I don't want it delivered at my doorstep by Amazon. That's why people go to the baseball game. Let's be together. Let's be in ecstasy together.

Let's be in a shared ecstasy, not in the madness of the crowds, but in the shared Field of Value, the ecstasy of the crowd.

We stopped having a conversation.

How to Start Real Conversation Again?

So, what do we need? What does it mean? What's the difference between a ChatGPT-4 conversation and a real conversation? A real conversation is always prayer and prophecy.

Let's go back to Abraham.

Abraham invokes and initiates this thing called prayer. What do we know about Abraham? Why is Abraham chosen? Abraham is chosen because he chooses. And where do we see this? Where do we see Abraham choosing his own Abraham-ness? Where do we see God responding and choosing Abraham-ness? Stay close, friends!

There's a set of texts where God says, the divine voice says, the Field of Value in Her personal form speaks, the Infinite Personhood garbed kol in speech, speaks, and I'll say it in the original Hebrew: God says to Abraham, “I'm choosing you. ki yedativ lema’an asher yetzaveh et banav ve’et beito acharav la’asot tzedakah u’mishpat.” The divine voice speaks and says “I'm choosing Abraham because I have an intimate knowing of Abraham. And I know that he will teach his children. He will give a transmission to future generations. He will have grandchildren.”

The biological world doesn't have grandchildren. Human beings have grandchildren.

A grandchild means I have the capacity to pass on my values to future generations.

That's what a grandchild means. A baboon doesn't have grandchildren. A bonobo does not have grandchildren. A chimpanzee doesn't have grandchildren. They have biological grandchildren. But they don't have the realization of grandchildren.

A grandchild means there's Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Israel is the grandchild. It's the ability to transmit my values to future generations. And what is the value that Abraham is going to transmit for two generations?

“Tzedakah, I know,” says the divine voice. “I know you're going to transmit for two generations tzedakah, justice, ethos. tzedakah u’mishpat, justice and ethos.” Mishpat means justice, ethos in its best sense.

So, how does the divine voice know that Abraham incarnates justice? Because several verses right before, there's this strange and impossible conversation between Abraham and the Divine.

And the divine voice says, “I have found a group of people who are not good. They are anti-value. They are not good. They are in some sense incarnations of that which stands against the true and the good and the beautiful. They are anti-value. They are against life. They're not life. They're evils.”

Live spelled backward is evil.

They're in some sense anti-life. And they live in two cities called Sodom and Amorah. God says to Abraham, “I'm going to destroy these two cities.” And Abraham says, “don't do that. Have a conversation with them. Don't do that. Maybe they can transform. Don't do that. Maybe there are righteous people that live among them. You can't destroy them. Ha’af tispe rash im tzadik , you can't destroy. It's not just. The wicked and the good. The just and the unjust. You can't do that.”

And God says, “yes, that is the divine edict. I am God. I know everything. That is what I'm going to do.” And what does Abraham say? He's hearing theology directly from God. We've talked about this before. What does Abraham do? Abraham says, “no, it is not happening! No. No. No. No. Not doing that.” Abraham says to God: “No! Sorry! Sorry.”

And I want a one-time permission, just one-time permission… Abraham says, “fuck that.”

And for seven, eight verses in the Bible, Abraham turns to God and says, “no, no, no. You can't do that.” And finally, he has this massive argument with God. Finally, Abraham says to God, hashofet kol ha’aretz lo ya’ase mishpat? “will the judge of the whole world not do justice?” Mishpat?

Now, friends, this is so deep. What does it mean? It means that Abraham and God are having a conversation.

I want you to get this. This is so deep. My friends. It's so deep.

It says so much about the Divine.
It says so much about the human being.
It says so much about the shared space between the human-Divine.
It says so much about what it means to become Homo amor, the New Human and the New Humanity.

It means that Abraham and God are in a shared conversation.

We're going to talk about how to pray. The actual technology, the wild, unimaginably ecstatic, erotic human potency called “prayer.” But we can't get there yet. We first need to know something.

Prayer implies a shared conversation of value.

Prayer implies a conversational Cosmos in which both the Infinite and the Intimate, in which the Infinite and finitude, in which God and man, in which God and the human being, in which Goddess and woman, Goddess and man, God and woman, in which, the eternal and the evolving human being, we're in a conversation with each other. There's a shared conversation between God and man, between the Infinite and the Intimate, between Infinity and finitude.

There's a conversation, and there's a shared value in that conversation.

So, when God says to Abraham, “I, God, am going to destroy the city,” Abraham looks deeply inside, Abraham becomes the first anthro-ontologist, anthro-human being; ontology meaning that which is real lives in me. The mysteries are within us, and Abraham goes inside, and he cannot find the justice and the ethos of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. And he says, “they've got to be given another chance.” He says, “there's got to be hope there. There's got to be possibility there. You can't destroy that city.”

And God can say to Abraham, “get lost. I'm God. What are you imposing this kind of paltry human social construction of Reality, your own, pitiful human ethics?”

That's not what God says. God says, “oh, my God!” God is ecstatic to be challenged.

God is Ecstatic to Be Challenged

I want everyone to get that. God is ecstatic to be challenged.

I'm a strong teacher. I'm anti-guru in my core. I'm against any sort of guruhood. A strong teacher should be strong and teach strongly and be ecstatic to be challenged, but not just because someone says, “I disagree.”

Challenge it deep. Put on your gloves. Do sources. Go to your deepest place. Clarify. And challenge!

And then receive the response, and then we go back and forth, and then we clarify together, because we're never challenging against each other. We're always on the side of love.

There's only one side. It's the side of love.
There's only one side. It's the side of truth.
There's only one side. It's the side of goodness.
The side of goodness, truth, and beauty together.

So, God is ecstatic to be challenged by Abraham, but why can God be challenged by Abraham? Why can he be challenged? Because Abraham and God live in the same Field of Value.

So, Abraham can say to God, “God, you've got to do justice.”

And God can say to Abraham, “what do you know about justice?”

And Abraham says, “I know everything about justice. I live in the same Field of Value that you do.”

You, God are ultimate value, and you incarnated me as an incarnation of ultimate value. I, human being, participate in the Field of Value.

It's not that you, God, declaim and proclaim value, and you tell it to me. No, God, you love me so much that you made me out of you. And so, I am a divine miniature, and I participate in the Field of Value.

And then God says, ecstatically, God says, “oh, my God!”

Yankee Stadium. Bases loaded. Grand slam. The entire crowd rises in ecstatic delight, because we're all having the same experience at the same time of joy. And what is the joy? It's the joy of being in the Field of Value together.

And God says to Abraham,”I choose you to start the Solomonic lineage. I choose you to be a light unto the nations. And later on, I'm going to choose in a different way Christ, and I'm going to choose Lao Tzu, his way, and I'll choose Sufi masters in their way. But at this moment, Abraham, I'm choosing you to found this lineage.”

“And why am I choosing you, Abraham?” And here, listen to the voice, “Because you are going to teach your children Mishpat, justice.” And where does God know that Abraham knows anything about justice? Because Abraham challenged God with that word, justice. Abraham said to God, “will you not do justice?” “Ah! You challenged me? You challenged me from inside the Field of Value? You held God accountable?”

Because accountable means we're in the same story, means we're counting the same numbers.

We're in the same field of mathematical value. We're counting the same numbers. We're in the same account of creation. ma’aseh bereishit, we're in the same account of creation. We're in the same Field of Value. Does everyone get that? It's gorgeous.

Prayer Is the Ultimate Human Potency and Power

Now we're going to go to Unique Self. I want to read you a text. This text is from a book called the Bahir, The Book of Clarity. And the book is talking about the ten luminations of the Tree of Life in the Solomonic tradition.

And we're going to do Sufism here and we're going to do Christianity. And we've got this deep root in the Solomonic lineage, which is the root of the CosmoErotic Humanism, which is the new Story of Value that we're telling in response to the meta-crisis. We're actually articulating a new Field of Value as the single most important response to the meta-crisis.

These last five, six episodes, we were talking about this notion of the you in Cosmos, the personhood in Cosmos, which is the ground of the conversation, which is prayer and prophecy. And we need to reclaim prophetic speech today. We need to reclaim prayerful speech.

But prophetic speech is not about an emasculated man becoming God's transistor radio. And prayer is not about an emasculated man or woman entreating God because they have no power.

Prayer is the ultimate human potency and power. It's the ultimate conversation.

We're going to talk deeply about how that works next week and what I pray for and how prayer works.

But for now, we want to get this last thing on the table. Prayer is a conversation between the Infinite and finitude that takes place in the Field of Value.

We're intimate because we're in the Field of Value. We can't be intimate with the Infinite if the Infinite says I'm in a Field of Value that you can't approach. There's an approachability. I can enter the field. So, I want to read you just one text. It's a beautiful text. The text reads:

“What are the ten luminations in the Tree of Life? They are the ten utterances. They are the ten speakings. And what are the ten speakings? The ten speakings are the four-letter name of God. And what is the four-letter name of God? The four-letter name of God is the knowing that we are all made of Aleph. We are all made of the first letter. The first letter of the alphabet. We are that letter.”

What does that mean? What is the Bahir saying? What the Book of Illumination is saying is that we are not things. Davar, we are not things. The word, davar in Hebrew is a thing. We are logos, we are language, which means we are meaning, we are value.

We are the Aleph. We are the alpha. We are the superior woman, the superior man. We are unique because we are not only participatory in the Aleph, which is the Field of Value, out of which all language emerges.

Aleph is the silence, the field of silence, which is the Field of Value, which is the silence of presence, out of which all language emerges.

And so, Abraham is in the Field of Value. The entire world is coded with value. The entire world is text. Everything is text. And my prayer is my story. And my story is my sacred autobiography. And my sacred autobiography is my unique letter, which emerges out of the Aleph in the cosmic scroll.That's who I am.

I'm participatory in the Field of Value. That's my dignity. From that place of participation in the Field of Value, the Divine turns to me and gives me prophecy. I begin to speak as the Divine, but not as a crazed madman. But with prophetic speech that's unique and precise and filled with care and filled with love.

I begin to turn and articulate prayer. I become prayer. I am prayer. And I turn to the Infinite Intimate in prayer. So, it's that turning that we're going to turn to next week.

And, oh, my God! Is that a home run? We got bases loaded. The ecstasy of being together. We're here together. We're here together. Mad love, everyone. Mad love.

What did my beloved whole mate Barbara Marx Hubbard say all the time?

We don't get older, we get newer.

Mad love.