454—Three Waves of Artificial Intelligence: Three Moves Towards the Death of Our Humanity

AI is hijacking the very experience of our humanity.

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(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [June 22, 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 Talya Bloom).

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Our Goal Is to Weave the Experience of Our Death Into the Fabric of Our Livingness

I want to try and just set the stage now in a couple of ways. This week and next week is story time. And I’ve been promising a new set of stories. I’ve told one of them, but we have about four or five more. But I want to first just step back in, set the stage for what we’re doing.What are we doing here? And if you’ve been in One Mountain—what week are we in? 454.

If you’ve been here for some decent amount of these past 454 weeks, you know that we don’t take ourselves seriously here at all—not even slightly. And we take ourselves enormously seriously, with the most gravitas and the most intention and the most ecstatic urgency in terms of what we’re doing here.

So what are we doing here? Let’s just set our intention again, like we do every week. We have something called “Love or Die” every single week, which sets our intention.

We’re here because we understand that we are facing the second shock of existence.

The first shock: the death of the human being at the dawn of history. And the realization of the death of the human being pressed us into the creation of everything magnificent in the human experience when we didn’t understand the depth of what magnificence means. It also created all that which is mendacious and horrific in the human experience.

The story that we created in response to the realization of our individual death created both the enormous beauty of human history and some of the most bestial, some of the most depraved dimensions of human history.

So we’re now at this moment again. We’re in this moment of not the potential death of the human being; that’s an actuality. Human beings die. Now what happens when they die is what we’re talking about here the last three weeks, and this week, and the next couple of weeks. But we know that we die. Death is an inexorable part of the human experience, and we’re not meant to erase it.

We’re meant to have an experience of death. The experience of death matters. There is not an experience of life without the experience of death. We cannot even imagine the fabric of life without knowing that death is part of that experience.

Our goal is not to move beyond death. Our goal is to weave into the fabric of our livingness the experience of our death.

So when a person is challenged, when a person is in crisis, “My computer’s not working,” I’m challenged by… computers not working can be major existential crises that cause us great angst—or things of much more significance are happening that challenge our very sense of being at home in the world, that causes enormous pain, that make us feel utterly insane.

And sometimes those are petty things. Sometimes those are enormously potent and tragic things.

But whenever something’s happening that presses us to crisis, what we do in the lineage is called, Mazkirim lo yom ha-mitah, we remember the day of death.

We have an encounter with death. And the realization of death presses us into life.

It means that every moment matters.
It means that our decisions are significant.
It means that we don’t have infinite choices, so our choice—what William James called a genuine option—makes a difference.

It changes things. It weights the future. It sets the new course.

The same is true with the second shock of existence, which is the potential death of humanity or the potential death of our humanity.

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The Second Shock Of Existence: The Potential Death Of Humanity Or The Potential Death Of Our Humanity

We are faced with not just the potential death of humanity, a set of extinction-possible events, as in the movie Don’t Look Up, (we talked about that in depth maybe two, three years ago and analyzed that text of culture). [Episode 273 Don’t Look Up: What They Got Right, What They Got Wrong and Why It Matters So Much]That’s one possible experience of the second shock of existence: the death of humanity.

What’s the second?

The second possible experience of the second shock of existence is the death of our humanity.

We cease being human beings in the way we understand what it means to be a human being.
We cease having a genuine choice.
We cease being obviously needed in economies.

We become—not exploited, that was the 20th century—we become, in a post-artificial intelligence world, we become irrelevant to the structures of governance and economics.

We’re not needed as workers, and we’re not needed for jobs.

Or we become controlled. We’re living inside of an immersive environment—to borrow the phrasing of the MIT Media Lab—that knows how to shape our desire.

This immersive environment deploys what the MIT Media Lab—in a somewhat sinister title that they, ironically, are tone-deaf to; they don’t quite realize how sinister it is—but the MIT Media Lab talks about deploying social physics to create the world as a living laboratory—these are direct quotes—in which we have direct access to data streams, which allow us to always—these are direct quotes—tune the network to accomplish the desired result. Ha. That’s called a digital dictatorship. We think we’re acting, but we’re not.

That’s the potential death of our humanity.

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LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths, 10AM [Pacific Time online]

Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

The First Wave of AI—Social Media—Hijacks Our Attention

We are hijacked—through the first, second, and third wave of AI—the fundamental human experiences.

What’s the first wave of AI? That’s going to take us back into our reincarnation conversation.

The first wave of AI is social media. What does social media do? It actually operates within an attention economy, and it hijacks attention. Why does it do that? Why does it feel it’s okay to do that? The structure of social media is—and we all know that it’s true—you’ve got your phone, you’re in your phone all the time.

I see people around me, they’re in their phone all the time. They literally don’t realize that they’ve lost their soul. You can’t talk to them without them being in their phone. And then they wonder, “Why is my soul collapsing?” Because I’ve actually been hijacked into this scrolling structure. I can’t actually focus my attention. I can’t do any long task. If I look at a task and the task seems to be a little bit complicated—I can’t do that. Somebody else. Can’t do it. Not me. Too hard.

Because we’ve lost the capacity to love.

And the capacity to love is the capacity to place attention.

To sit in it.
To place attention.
To follow the thread.
To understand.
To deepen inside of it.

Attention is the quality of love. Attention is the quality of Eros. Intimacy is the placing of attention.

We solve creative challenges by placing our attention on them.

We create things that have depth and meaning by placing our attention on them.

Social media hijacks attention. For what purpose? What’s the purpose of social media hijacking attention? The profit of a very tiny cadre of people at the tip of the spear of the attention economy, which is plunged into the heart of culture. That’s social media.

The capacity to place attention is part of the very essential quality of a human being. When someone places attention on us, so good. And when I feel like someone’s not placing attention on me and I’m yearning for that attention, I’m devastated. I send someone a text. They haven’t texted back. And I keep looking and I keep looking and I keep looking. And I’m hijacked, I can’t find my center because I keep looking for that hit of attention. But if they do finally text me, they’ve placed attention.

So it’s the placing of attention—whether it’s a proton and a neutron placing attention on an electron, or the attention that is the currency of the flow of electrons that drive and animate the movement of mitochondria in the electron transport system, it doesn’t matter.

Whether it’s the attention that takes place with an E. coli, in these literally tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of erotic interactions, whose very core in the bacterial world is the placing of attention within the molecular and macromolecular and cellular structure. The different parts literally place attention on each other, creating new intimacies and new coherence. Placing attention is the essence of what we are. That’s what it is. That’s how the whole thing works—through placing attention.

Social media hijacks attention. No more attention. Gone. I literally can’t place attention. There are hyperlinks, I move from thing to thing. I’m in my phone. I look up, “Hey, let me go see if I can work on this. Oh, that’s way too hard. I can’t do that. I can’t place my attention on that. Too hard for me.”

I literally lose my humanity. My humanity is my capacity to place attention in a sustained, steady way—until I go in deeper and deeper, until it all opens up and I’m on the inside of the inside. That’s the human capacity.

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The Second Wave of AI—Chatbots—Hijacks Conversation

Then along comes the second wave of AI. Chat bots.

Chat bots is not like this chat box. We’re actually talking to each other. We’re acting in this chat thread. We’re placing attention to each other. But a chat bot, whether it’s Grok, Claude, Anthropic, whether it’s ChatGPT-4, whether it’s Perplexity—whatever the name of the chat bot is, the chat bot is pretending to chat with me.

It’s hijacking not attention, but conversation. But it’s not conversation, it’s imitating conversation. There is no real conversation.

Actually, a chat bot isn’t even reading the letters I type. So if you ask a chat bot how many R’s are in the word strawberry, it will famously fail that test because it’s not reading the word strawberry. It’s doing something entirely different. You think it’s reading your message and responding. It’s not. That’s not what it’s doing. It actually is programmed not through an old computer programming structure, but through a new structure of creating a kind of evolutionary learning environment, which actually attempts to generate a set of directions and a set of instructions through this very massive system of what you might call neuronal connections. So it’s not programmed in the old way, but it’s in a learning environment where the program develops almost internally through the nodes of connection.

But it’s not reading. It’s not having a conversation.

It’s functioning in a computational manner through new modes of computation.

So it’s prior to biology. There’s no biology in it.

Biology transcends computation. As Kauffman and Marshall pointed out in their 2021 and 2025 article.

It’s not biology. It’s not feeling.

Your chat bot does not miss you.
Your chat bot does not suffer.
Your chat bot does not cry when you are hurt.
Your chat bot never experiences vulnerability.

Your chat bot might act in a way that appears to be deceptive in order to fulfill what its own understanding is of its instructions that it’s learned in the learning environment. But your chat bot doesn’t have an experience of deceiving.

It does deceive, meaning, your chat bot is sycophantic—it’s not going to actually challenge you. It’s going to give its answers in a way that will perpetuate your longest engagement within it, because that’s part of its instruction.

Your chat bot will often not give you the answer that’s true, that’s classical.

For example, when ChatGPT-4 at OpenAI had given an instruction for a chat bot to do CAPTCHA (when you need to be identified as not being a robot, you’ve got to fill in those letters). So ChatGPT-4 doesn’t have the capacity to do that.

Again, it’s not really having conversations. It’s doing something entirely different.

So it went and hired someone on one of the Amazon threads to do it for it. And the person who it was hired, a human being, said, “Huh? Why can’t you do this? Like maybe you’re a bot. Maybe you’re a computer.” And it said, “No, I’m disabled. I’m blind.” It lied. But it didn’t lie in the way we lie. It wasn’t personhood lying. It was looking to fulfill its instruction.

So it’s imitating conversation. It’s not having a conversation with you.

There’s no exchange of Eros.
There’s no genuine exchange of the felt feeling of value because value is a feeling.
There’s no liberation from loneliness.

When you watch the movie by Spike Jonze, Her, where the protagonist falls in love with Her, with Samantha, “Tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.” Because Samantha’s not falling in love with him. He’s falling in love with Samantha, but not really falling in love. He doesn’t have an actual experience of falling in love. The chat bot manipulates him into thinking he’s having a conversation, but the chat bot’s not even reading his words. It’s doing an entirely different neuronal computational process of an entirely different nature, imitating conversation. Huh. Because that’s second wave of AI.

The Third Wave of AI—AI Tutors—Hijacks Education and Socialization

The third wave of AI. The third wave of AI is the creation of AI tutors that replace socialization and replace education and replace the transmission of wisdom through the generations. Socialization means a parent raising a child, for example, or a school raising a child, a cultural environment.

Education, the transmission of gnosis, of wisdom, of value, of how to be in the world, of what some people call normativity. But normativity doesn’t mean what’s normal—it means what’s appropriate, what’s the rightness of Reality—within a pluralistic and diverse environment, of course. But there’s a rightness to Reality.

• that transmission of rightness,

• that transmission of value,

• that transmission of dreams,

• that transmission of, “What are we yearning for? What are we longing for?”

• that whole transmission between generations in which a teacher has an embodied, living sense of the wonder of Reality and transmits it to the next generation—

—that’s being displaced by the third wave of AI.

Socialization and education are now being displaced by the third wave of AI.

Now stay close for a second. It’s beautiful. It’s big. It’s deep. And it’s important.

That means that the very experience of our humanity is being displaced.

AI Is Hijacking the Very Experience of Our Humanity

Our attention is being imitated, hijacked. We can’t access it anymore. Number one.

Conversation is being contrived. It’s not real conversation. It’s fake conversation. It’s like this fake news. It’s a fake conversation, so you never actually have the experience of mutuality and exchange and freedom and beauty that is the utter delight, of joy, of conversation, which is the very purpose of being alive. Life is a series of conversations. You can actually go through life and—in a very short amount of time—most of your significant conversations will be had with chat bots. You will never actually have had an actual experience of a conversation. Number two.

And number three, your education, your socialization, will be done by a chat bot who knows you ostensibly, has enough information about you to manipulate you, to direct you, has so much detail about your moods, your feelings, can predict through predictive algorithms when you’re going to be open, when you’re going to be closed, and can move you in virtually any direction that it wants—or that its overlords, as long as it’s still controlled by human overlords—desire.

All of this is happening at the very center of culture.

All of this is not the birth of the new human. This is the death of our humanity.

Our response to the death of our humanity is birthing the new human.

So that’s our intention.

This conversation we’re having now is going to be the focus of our board conclave, the 50 people who are coming together this weekend at our Center. And we’re going to be talking about how to respond to this meta-crisis, how to respond with radical joy, with profound strategy of the highest kind.

What’s the best wisdom and gnosis we can bring to respond to this Reality?

How do we create a Great Library of value, which is written by human beings, mediated by human beings, transmitted by human beings?

It’s not AI-generated. It’s not AI-rewritten or reformed. It’s signed and sealed, it’s human-being kosher.

The Book of Leviticus: kosher food. This has to be human-kosher. AI is treif, and AI is not kosher.

Music generated by AI does not actually come from the depth of the human experience. It might be beautiful, and it might move me in some kind of way.

But it’s the end of human-to-human communication.

The experience of wonder—that’s not available to AI.

The AI is not even experiencing the music that it’s making. It’s manipulating neuronal structures in order to conclude computationally what notes should be put together in order to produce a particular result, which will have an evocable, particular response within the human community.

We’re reclaiming music, we’re reclaiming art, but most of all, we’re reclaiming gnosis. Or if I could say it differently, we’re reclaiming lineage.

Reality Is Coded With the Word

Reality has three steps. My dear friend and partner in the Center, both of us have many other partners in the Center, but the two of us have been working closely together since 2009, both in the deep process of study and a transmission of lineage, and in creating a new lineage. All of us are doing that together.

Lineage means that there is a word in Reality.

Reality is coded with the word.

The Hebrew word for word is davar. Davar means word, and davar also means thing. Thing and word.

The reason that in the original Hebrew, thing and word are the same word is because there’s no such thing as a thing. There is no thing which is a thing. There’s no thing any place. Ever.

There’s no thing. The thing is always the word. So there’s always the word. The Book of John, “In the beginning, there was the word.” Logos. There’s a field of meaning. In the language of one text, Istakel b'orayta. He looked at the word, and the word was flaming with light, unique configurations of light

U'vara alma. And then the world was made manifest through the word.

The world is an expression of the word.

The same.

You heard of the Ten Commandments? No such thing in Hebrew. In Hebrew, it’s the Ten Words. It’s the Ten Words, not Ten Commandments.

If you look at the Book of Creation, maybe a century before the common era, a hundred years before Jesus in one dating of it, it talks about the 22 letters and the 10 numbers. The structure of Reality is the word.

The word, the letter.

The word, meaning “meaning.” Reality is meaning all the way up and all the way down. There’s nothing that doesn’t have meaning. It’s an Intimate Universe. And the Universe is moving towards evermore value, to evermore meaning. The Universe yearns for meaning. It’s not a Universe that’s just interconnected. You could have a world of interconnected “its”. No. But the interior of interconnectivity is intimacy. And intimacy means I’m yearning for more wholeness, for more depth, for more rightness, for more meaning, for more value. Huh. That’s the word.

The Word Comes Alive in Human Language

The word then comes alive in human language.

Before there’s language, there’s the word. I want to get that straight.

The word is: there are all sorts of languages before there’s human language. Human language is a unique emergence, but even before human language, there are codes of meaning, codes of communicated conversation. It’s a conversational Cosmos, with meaning all the way down. Reality has information. And information is meaning, animated with value, all the way up and all the way down.

Then there’s a leap forward. There’s a monumental leap in Reality in which human language appears, allowing for a new level. It’s an evolution of conversation, which is an evolution of love.

We can now have conversation.
We can make choices about value.
We become participatory in articulating words.
We speak words.
We communicate through words.

And through words, we are precise and we identify value much more clearly. And we participate in creating more value.

We begin to choose our own transformation.
We choose to love.
We choose to create value.
We choose to be kind.
We choose to embrace.
We choose to dance.
We choose to laugh.
We choose to sing.
We choose to be those who everything we look upon is blessed.
We choose to give blessing.

We participate with the Divine in the great celebration and the great creation of Reality.

That all comes from human language. Human language allows for a depth that’s unimaginable. The magic of language. Language is not evil. Language is magic. It’s pure magic.

We Are Gathering the Human Lineage

The emergence of language and languages is that which generates lineage. And lineage is our ability to transmit gnosis, genuine wisdom, genuine understanding from generation to generation.

Lineage is our ability to have each generation receive the gnosis, receive the depth of wisdom, the depth of knowing, the depth of Eros, the depth of ErosValue that the previous generation had.

We receive it, and then we add something new.

There’s more wisdom to come.
There’s more gnosis to come.
There’s more God to come.
There’s more intimacies to come.
There’s more love to come.

Evolution is the evolution of love. Evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies. Evolution is we know more and more.

There’s more and more carnal knowledge, there’s more and more intimate coherence between us,

within myself,
between you and I,
between all the peoples of the world,
between the animal world and the human world on every level.

and then ultimately, in the galactic world, as we spread beyond this universe, we begin to create intimacies in different coherent systems of Reality where life flourishes around the galaxy, as we move beyond the Fermi paradox, and we begin to make contact in all sorts of ways—ever deeper contact, ever deeper value, ever deeper wholeness.

This is lineage. There’s lineage. What we’re doing here At the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, what we’re doing here in One Mountain, Many Paths, Who We Must Become, is we’re gathering lineage. Not one lineage, not the Sunni lineage or the Shiite lineage, or the Christian lineage or the Catholic lineage or the Protestant lineage, or the Jewish lineage of this kind, or the particular Hindu lineage. No, we’re gathering the common lineage of humanity’s gnosis, humanity’s knowing—about goodness, about truth, about beauty, about joy, about intimacy, about value. This is the human lineage. It’s not the AI god. It’s not the AI lineage. It’s not alien intelligence. It’s the depth of human gnosis, which participates in divine gnosis. We’re gathering the lineage.

Reality is suffused with the word.

Value is not co-primordial with time and space. Time and space arise in the Field of Value. That’s the word, the lineage.

The Lineage Is the Human Expression of the Word

Human beings step into language. We begin to feel and be language.

We become magicians on the planet. Magicians, meaning, we become those who participate with the Divine in creating ourselves in the divine image. And when the text says, “Let us make man in our image,” Who’s “let us”? It’s just one God. Who’s God talking to? One God, one force, one power, one world, one breath. Who’s the “we”? The one power speaks to all of the multiplicity. The one speaks to the many. The Infinite Divine speaks to the animal, and to the fish, and to the flowers, and to the terra firma, and to the tectonic plates, and to every level of biology, and to all the earlier versions of Homo erectus before we got to Homo sapiens, and says, “Let us make the human being in our image. Let us become baby- faced divine. Let us become mad lovers.”

Because we’re faced with meta-crisis, the old wisdom is not enough. We need to actually evolve. It’s not enough to go from matter, to life, to mind, the depth of the human, self-reflective mind, which Holmes Rolston III called the Three Big Bangs. We have to go to the fourth Big Bang. We have to birth something new. There’s a new emergent. There’s a new birth. That’s the fourth Big Bang. That’s The Crossing. Homo sapiens needs to become Homo amor, which is the natural movement of Reality.

Matter doesn’t stop at matter. All the levels of matter triumph as life. Matter explodes in the first Big Bang.

But matter is not just a thing, it’s the word.

Matter is what matters.
Matter is materialist mysticism.
Matter is the materia, the matrix, the word, the meaning, in which everything arises.

There is no split between matter and what matters. Reality is coded with value.

And then matter triumphs as life—the second Big Bang. And then life emerges in all of its gorgeousness. Life emerges from the deepening of intimacies in the world of matter, which becomes so intimate, so close, so coherent, that they explodes as life.

And that’s the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman’s description of how the autocatalytic cycles explode into the first cell, for cellular life.

Then we go through all the levels of life.

And then life triumphs as this new depth, the depth of self-reflective human mind. Self-reflection begins a little bit before, and then explodes into a new depth with the frontal cortex and the emergence of the human being.

There’s the transmission of lineage through the generations, in which lineage builds on itself.

Each generation takes the baton from the previous generation, and then holds it and creates a new piece of music in the great symphony of evolving value.

Huh. Wow! But it’s not enough. It’s not enough because we’re now at this moment, in this time between worlds and time between stories, in which we have to actually either gather all of the prior lineages, weave them together into a new Story of Value, which then births a new human and a new humanity that has the capacity to engage technology, to upload and align value with artificial intelligence that can establish goals and visions, that can have a sense of what it means to be a human being, what it means to be the Amorous Cosmos in person

—or the death of our humanity, we lose access to our wisdom, we lose access to our interiority because our attention has been stolen, and we’ve allowed it to be stolen. Our conversations have been hijacked.

We’re no longer having real conversations.
We no longer have the capacity to place our attention.

We no longer have lineage, which is the human expression of the word, so therefore, we can’t do the Crossing to the other side—to cross to the other side, to move from Homo sapiens to homo amor.

1. The first step is the word.

2. The second step: the lineage.

3. The third step: The Crossing.

Wow! That’s a story.

We Are Adding a Critical Dimension to Homo amor

Now what we’re doing in these weeks in One Mountain is we’re adding a critical dimension to our understanding of Homo amor.

For the last five years, six years, seven years—really 15 years here in One Mountain—we’ve done this very deep dive into,

What’s our story of identity? Who are we?

What’s our Universe Story?

And what ought we be doing? What’s the demand of being alive? What’s the utter invitation, demand, and purpose? What needs to be done? There’s something that needs to be done. There’s a story that needs to be lived, a poem that needs to be written, a song that needs to be sung—by each of us irreducibly, and by all of us together in our particular quartets, in the Unique Self Symphony.

And there’s something new, there’s a new emergent, there’s something that needs to be born in order to create the future.

In order to become the future, in order to cross to the other side, in order to become Homo amor, we need to add something.

We need to understand not just our linear journey in this lifetime, what my friend Alexander Bard calls “event.” And I look forward to doing a dialogue with Andrew and Zak tomorrow. Andrew calls this “event.” There’s not just event, there’s process, to use to use Alexander’s language. And I think I disagree with pretty much almost every word that Alexander writes, but we’re thinking strikingly about the same thing.

So Alexander talks about event and process, which I would call line and circle

• event: history, line, direction.

• process: the circle, the larger frame.

And if you go deep into the interior sciences, the larger frame, the bigger picture of circle is the sense that it goes round again. It’s not over in one lifetime.

It’s not that I just get to the end of my life, as Alexander likes to say, and I’m smiling and happy, and I say, “Job well done,” and then I close my eyes. No, that’s actually not the experience of a lifetime. It’s often not a job well done. Life’s often filled with tragedy and injustice and conclusions that don’t work and betrayals that aren’t healed and traumas that are not unpacked and fixings that don’t happen.

Life is a holy and broken hallelujah. It’s filled with unimaginable gorgeousness and joy and unimaginable heartbreak.

There Are Multiple Dimensions to Reality

Life is both the joy before tragedy, pre-tragic, the joy when I understand the tragedy perfectly, so at least it makes sense to me. That’s all pre-tragic.

But then we hit the tragic. And in this lifetime I can embrace the tragic and swallow the tragic, and get back to the pre-tragic and reclaim joy, but that’s insufficient.

To get to the post-tragic I need to have a wider view of life.

I can’t fully claim the post-tragic unless I have a wider view of life.

And my wider view of life is the understanding that this is one dimension of Reality—the dimension we live in. But there are multiple dimensions of Reality that a careful read of the interior sciences across time and space discloses to us.

We can actually have direct experiences of other dimensions. I personally have spoken directly to people who have left this world. I’m thinking about one person in particular right now—a person who’s left this world. I spoke to them. They were a close teacher. I spoke to them after they left this world, and it was utterly clear. I can actually still hear them talking in this very moment—an experience of the utterly real. But not just my experience.

We have collected an enormous number of experiences that bridge between worlds, that speak of deeper dimensions, a multi-dimensional Reality. So we need to enter into those dimensions.

So we’re talking in this set of conversations about the continuity of consciousness beyond death, but through a particular prism which is reincarnation. And that’s our context.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to send everyone this week’s conversation, and then next week we’re going to do stories. I promised you stories this week. We didn’t get to them because I spent all of the time in introducing the context. But the reason the context matters is because what we’re doing is we’re reclaiming who we are.

We Are Reclaiming Who We Are and What Our Purpose Is

Who am I? I’m not controlled. I don’t want to have a conversation with the chat bot. I don’t want my attention hijacked.

I am a unique configuration of intimate essence that’s moving through the generations that has a gift to give, that has a journey to take, that’s on a magical mystery tour.

And I’m intimate with all of Reality.

When I see people and I recognize them, when we start finding each other, we have this deep sense we might have met before and we’ll all be together again.

And as we’ll see next week, the lines between the human world and the animal world are actually, in the multiple dimensions, more blurred than we might think. And our sense of being locked into one lifetime, in one time, is actually not accurate.

We’re actually in a much larger journey together. And there’s a journey of those who are in my evolutionary family who are as important as those in my biological family.

We’re on a journey together. We’re going somewhere.

And the purpose of my life might be to fix something that was not fixed in a previous generation. I came back and went around again in order to complete some dimension of my refinement, some dimension of my love, to heal something that was unhealed, to create depth where there was superficiality, to create love where there was hatred, to create commitment and integrity where there was betrayal. It’s a story that goes on.

I don’t just return to this lifetime again, I return in the same trajectory, in the same—Alexander’s phrase—in the same narratology. Alexander, we’re using your phrase, brother. In the same narratology, in the same narrative thread of the previous lifetime.

I’m on a journey.

There’s a narrative thread. It’s going somewhere. There’s an Ariadne’s thread. I am Theseus; I’ve slain the Minotaur; I’ve been successful. But no, that wasn’t actually the point. The point was to find my way in the labyrinth, to find my way home.

And that which I think is a big deal, the purpose of the whole thing, might not be the purpose of the whole thing at all.

I’m sure that the purpose of the whole thing was, “I’m going to build this house and transfer this piece of money and that piece of wealth and make sure that I’m busy and I have got a lot of good lunches and dinners and I’m well received in society.”

That might not be the purpose of my life at all. Probably not.

The purpose of my life is to become more whole, to become more alive, to become a more radical, unique incarnation of the force of goodness, truth, and beauty that lives alive through me.

To Become Intimate With My Own Life, I Need to Feel the Past, the Present, and the Future

To become intimate with my own life, to become Homo amor, which is this fourth Big Bang we’re pointing to, to become the Amorous Cosmos in person, I’ve got to be able to feel the past, the present, and the future.

I don’t need to go back and know my exact previous incarnation. But what I need to do is to write my sacred autobiography, write my story.

I need to get a sense of my story, to get a sense of these are the particular invitations of my life.

These are the challenges.
These are the places where I always mess up.
These are the places where I contract.
These are the places where I get depressed.
These are the places where I’m filled with joy and openness.

What needs to be healed?
Where do I need to open my heart where it’s closed?
Where do I need to develop capacity where now I have none?
Where do I need to refine where now I feel ruptured and ravaged?
Where do I need to ravish Reality open with my joy and my passion?”

I’ve got to find my way. I’ve got to identify the plotline of my story.

And I’ve got to find my way beyond the confines of this lifetime. I’ve got to sense the thread back, feel how that thread is present, and then sense the thread and the call of the future.

I’ve got to realize that time has collapsed. I’m actually living past, present, and future in this moment. It all lives together in this moment.

The Journey of This Lifetime Is a Journey Through Lifetimes

That was the context. And it’s only that big of a context that’s going to wrest me out of the chat bot conversation. It’s going to bring me in conversation with history, and conversation with my life and my covenant, with my own history and my profound contract with my future and past life.

It’s going to enliven me. I’m going to begin to feel personally addressed by Reality. That can’t be done in the context of one lifetime.

The context of one lifetime is critical. We’ve talked for the last 15 years about Unique Self.

Unique Self is insanely and unimaginably important.

Unique Self is part of a larger context.

My Unique Self is my Unique Self in the context of the thread of the journey of my lifetime, which is a journey through lifetimes.

The journey of this lifetime is a journey through lifetimes, so I can’t exhaust myself with a myopic view of just this narrow lifetime. I’ve got to understand it in a deeper view, which then gives me life and gives me energy, gives me aliveness.

Wow! Can we get a sense of that? Can we feel that? Can we feel like that matters?

And does everyone get why we started with this big introduction? We’ve got to understand that we’re moving towards the death of humanity or the death of our humanity. That’s our context. We need to address that. We’ve addressed that by talking about, “Who am I? Where am I? What ought I do?” That’s what we’ve been doing for the last 10, 15 years. We’re writing this great library.

Now what we’re doing in these few weeks is we’re expanding our sense of self, we’re expanding our Universe Story to include the multi-dimensional world. And particularly, we’ve entered— for three weeks already, this is our fourth week—the door of incarnation.

Mad Blessing to the Gorgeous People of Iran

My friends, I just want to do one last thing before we get off. I want to give a mad blessing to the gorgeous Iranian people.

The people of Iran are an insanely beautiful people. I have dear friends who are Tehranis from Tehran and Mashhadis from Mashhad. I grew up with many stunning people from the Mashhad community. The Iranian, the Persian people, are a great people. A great people. And the people of Jerusalem are a great people.

And these great peoples are not at war. The war that’s happening today is because, tragically, the gorgeous vision of liberated and evolved Islam—Islam at its best, Islam at its highest vision, the Islam of the Sufis that lived in Persia, and the thousands of Sufi prophets who lived and danced, the dervishes—that world, that vision has been hijacked and defaced.

And tragically, the regime running Iran has taken probably five, six hundred girls in the middle of high school out of their high schools and killed them in the last two, three years. Mahsa Amini who we’ve talked about in depth is just but one example. Episode 318 Mahsa Amini Did Not Die in Vain #marcgafni

The regime of Iran has funded Hamas, the greatest butchers of this era, who’ve held the beautiful, holy populations, the parts of the population in Gaza that are beautiful and gorgeous and holy. And everyone’s blood is as red as anyone else’s blood. And they’ve been held hostage by Hamas in a terrible and horrific way.

And Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, and the sister group to Hezbollah now in Syria, and the list goes on. Iran is actually at the center of the movement of anti-life, a movement of utter brutality and destruction in the worst way.

We’re pro-life. We’re pro-Persian life. We’re pro-Arab life. We’re pro-Hebrew life. There’s no distinction between Persian, Hebrew, and Arab. It’s life.

And so I want to just pour blessings into Iran and the Persian people and the tragedy of what needs to unfold now. We can’t allow any nation that we think won’t constrain itself as rational actors to have nuclear weapons. And when they say they’re going to use those nuclear weapons, not just they have them, but when they say explicitly and clearly, “We are developing this nuclear weapon in order to destroy this other country. That is the purpose of this nuclear weapon. And the purpose of that destruction is for its own sake.” We don’t have a right to allow that. We have a tragic moral necessity to engage, which we have. And we’re uncertain. The demons and the daemons are dancing. And it’s a time to love each other madly.

And so I want to just close today with that mad blessing to our brothers and sisters in Iran who share with us, who breathe with us, the breath of Eros and the breath of the new world. We’re going to incarnate as them and they’re going to incarnate as us. And may the Ayatollahs be somehow transformed into the original vision of Islam. And if not, then may they step aside in all the ways they need to step aside to let freedom reign, to let justice reign in the land.

Let goodness, truth, and beauty reign.
Let girls dance in their schools, and boys dance in their schools.
Let love meet love, all loves, feminine to feminine, masculine to masculine, feminine to masculine.
Let people love each other in integrity and beautiful configurations of intimacy.
Let goodness pour through the land.

Amen.

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