A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis
Essay One Part 1 from Our New Book "The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis"
1. What Is the Meta-Crisis?
Let us start with a simple image: the Death Star in the cinematic classic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Star Wars. The Death Star is a battleship armed so intensely that it poses an existential risk. It has the destructive capacity not just to attack and damage but to destroy a planet.
Existential risk is a risk to our very existence. There are two forms of existential risk: the potential death of humanity (the Death Star has the capacity to destroy a planet) and the death of our humanity (the Death Star has the capacity to exert totalitarian control over a planet). The genealogy of the existential risk on our planet is, of course, very different from the precise plotline of Star Wars.[1] But that does not matter. The Death Star emerges in culture as a foreshadowing of both forms of existential risk.
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This is an excerpt from our new book The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis, which you can order on Amazon now.
Please also consider writing a review on Amazon!
For all excerpts from Whole Mate published on Substack, click here.
For all excerpts from The Evolution of Love published on Substack, click here. We will keep adding to it for the next couple of weeks.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Gafni, Marc & Marx Hubbard, Barbara, The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025, Essay One.
1.1. The Death Star as a Symbol for a Culture of Death
From the deeper perspective of cultural myth and prophetic symbol, the Death Star is not one weapon. It is a culture. It is a systemic culture of death that leads to intense suffering for the majority of human beings in the present, catastrophic risk in the immediate future, and impending existential risk in the near or intermediate future.
According to the most hardheaded analysis from multiple vectors of leading-edge policy and social analysis,[2] we are now confronted by the Death Star in a myriad of distressing disguises. That is quite evident to anyone who has the willingness and capacity to do genuine sensemaking, which begins by reading the serious background material available beneath the headlines.[3]
In the cinematic version, there is a realization that the only way to take out the Death Star is with a direct hit: a direct hit that gets through all the defenses, all the structural obstacles, and explodes culture into a new possibility. This book explores one dimension of how we can score that direct hit.
In a word, the direct hit is a New Story of Value. It is only a New Story of Value that truly changes the course of history. The Story of Value is an interior technology of culture. It is the space from which everything is generated. A New Story of Value itself is generated by new insights into the nature of Self and Reality. These new insights often come from interior practice and contemplation, which generate the evolution of consciousness. However, they can also be provoked by new exterior technologies, from the plough to the printing press to the internal combustion engine to the personal computer to social media to machine intelligence–driven data sciences.
This book and its sister volume[4] are about one dimension of that New Story of Value, the emergence of a new structure of relationship. It is filled with hope, for hope is a memory of the future, and the future is called into existence by a New Story of Value.
Before we turn to the direct hit, however, we need to understand the Death Star more deeply. When we are talking about the Death Star, the culture of death, we are talking about the meta-crisis, or the second shock of existence.[5] The second shock of existence, of course, implies the first shock of existence, with which we will begin.
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1.2. The First Shock of Existence
The first shock of existence is the realization of mortality of human beings—our realization that we will die—which dawns in human consciousness at the beginning of history. We are not talking about the biological fact of death but about the existential realization of death.
The existential fear or dread of death begins in the prehistoric period, either during the hunter-gatherer era[6] or when we began to have surplus food. In the second reading, it had to do with having time on our hands. We started to think about our lives. We were much less worried than the hunter-gatherers about the mammoth or lion who could kill us this afternoon—the natural fear of biological death that the human shares with the animal world. But when that fear became less immediate, the fear of death did not disappear. Rather, we began to think about death not in terms of warding off an immediate threat but in terms of what we might call the existential fear of death. We thought, Oh my God, I’m going to die.
The ego structure, which we developed after we emerged from humanity’s early sense of being almost coextensive with nature, became afraid. The ego sought to arrogate to itself its intuition of immortality, which in reality belonged to Spirit or Essence. The ego desired its own immortality and was therefore shocked by the reality of its impending death. I realize that my personality, family, social status, farming community—with my relatively stable home, identity, and existence—is ephemeral. I am going to die. This existential fear of death is the first shock of existence.
Tastes of the Fear of Death
There are many flavors to the existential fear of death, but four interrelated elements are central:
There is a fear of nothingness. There is a fear that death may be oblivion. If death is oblivion, then I will lose not only myself but the precious connections to all that I hold dear and love.
There is a fear of the pain of the body. The body will betray me, and that betrayal will be painful.
There is the fear of accountability. Life itself is filled with injustice. Death is the door to justice in most great traditions. We know in our bodies that Reality should be fair. We know that there is a vast difference between a life lived as Hitler and one lived as Mother Teresa. In death, the promissory note of fairness is potentially paid. It is that promissory note that in many ways makes life bearable. And yet it creates a fear of death, not only for Hitler but for every ordinary human being who has committed offense against their own conception of intrinsic and eternal value. In life, these offenses can at least sometimes remain hidden. In death, all is revealed. That was Woody Allen’s point in his epic movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. The good character in the movie—a rabbi—dies of cancer. His brother, by contrast, murders his mistress so his wife will not find out and leave him, and he gets away with it. Allen’s point is clear: The notion that Reality holds one accountable in the course of a lifetime is not true. Death is often the first moment of accountability.
But there is a deeper fear of death. It is the fear of accountability in an entirely different fashion. It is the fear of not counting. The fear of death is the fear of insignificance, the fear of living a life that does not matter. This is the fear of being a side effect in your own life, or—closely related—the fear of living a life that is not your own. It is the fear that you did not live the life that was yours to live. Your ladder was perched against the wrong wall, so all of your climbing was in vain.
The fear of death of this fourth form is to die when your death is not held in a larger story of existence. If you have no compelling Universe Story, no narrative of identity, no narrative of community, desire, Eros, and ethos that meaningfully weave your life into the larger narrative fabric of Cosmos, then the fear of death will destroy you. But if you are able to access the inner knowing that your story—your love story—is chapter and verse in the Universe: A Love Story, then the natural fear of death is relocated to a larger context, and death, upon deeper investigation, reveals its true nature as a night between two days.
Although the interior sciences disclose that death is a portal between two days, and there is vast empirical,[7] philosophical,[8] and anthro-ontological evidence[9] for the continuity of consciousness, yet death is also, for our own direct surface experience, a stark end. All the stories, all the plotlines, and all the threads of living end at that moment. What happens beyond is a different conversation. Even though mounds of evidence indicate that there is a continuity of consciousness, yet we have an actual experience of ending. We have an experience of death, and this experience—if encountered without reflection and transformation—engenders fear. The encounter with death, and the experience it may evoke, is not a bug but a feature of Reality.
Our first-person surface experience is that death ends this life. It is not the totality of our experience if we go deeper inside, but it is obviously intended to be the central, potent, and painful dimension of every human life. Indeed, as Ernest Becker potently reminded us, we deny death at our peril. Paradoxically, this ending, the experience of our finality or mortality, is what presses us into life. From the implicit demand of the first shock of existence, human beings were activated into creative emergence, and what emerged was all of human culture in its interior and exterior dimensions.
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The First Shock of Existence Activated Our Inner Gnosis
The first shock of existence pressed the human being into disclosing meaning. The Eye of Consciousness was pressed into service.[10] The result was the great religions, the result was great art, the result was great music, the result was law and the cornerstones of civilization.[11]
The fear of death generated a depth of vision and understanding of human nature that invited human beings into a larger story, where they could, at least in potential, participate in immortality. The fear of death focused our attention inside. When we went inside, we accessed the deepest wellsprings of the interior face of Cosmos. The fear of death generated some of the great beauties and critical movements of value—including ethics, Spirit, and religion (the word religion comes from Latin religare, “to reconnect, to realign with the nature of Reality”). The fear of death entering Reality generated a blossoming of Spirit—a story of value, a story about what it means to be a human being in the Cosmos. In the premodern period, this story of value was almost always called religion.
The old religions transcended the fear of death by realizing the immortal Infinite Nature of the human Essence, or Value, which transcends the limitations of finitude. However, locked in their ethnocentric prisms, they hopelessly entwined their genuine realization of the Infinite with dogmatic baggage, which now blocks our access to this realization. The realization of immortality was linked not to the alignment with a universal structure of value but to dogmatic obedience, and every religion, locked in a win/lose metric with all the others, saw only its dogmatic coin as earning Eternity.
Of course, many of us have left the old religions behind. The intuition of immortality was priceless, but the ticket price demanded by each religion was too high. Every religion claimed, in one form or the other, that Eternity, or immortality, was available only to its adherents and only in exchange for various forms of submission, which ranged from doctrinal to psychological, theological, political, and economic. We are children of Voltaire, who led the liberation from the corruptions of religion’s many shadows with the battle cry Remember the cruelties. Those cruelties were often bound up with the ethnocentric prisms of all the premodern religions, which mediated between human beings and the Infinite.
But we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We rejected the ways of obedience and submission demanded by the religions along with their essential intuition, which remains powerfully resonant and true: the realization of the first shock of existence, the overwhelming existential fear of death and the need to respond to it.
To transcend the fear of death beyond the old religions, we need to make our life a triumph. It is only a well-lived life that does not fear death, but a life well lived is no longer reducible to obedience to the dictates of a local god who is alienated from Cosmos and denies human dignity and capacity. Instead, a life well lived is a life aligned with the eternal yet evolving Values of Cosmos. It is not only about alignment with these Values but also about the incarnation. In incarnating the eternal yet evolving Values that transcend death, we most naturally transcend death ourselves—for we ourselves are these death-transcending Values.
Postmodernity, however, has moved to savagely deconstruct all previous narratives of the well-lived life as a life rooted in the personal incarnation of Values aligned with Cosmos. Indeed, postmodernity claimed that the very idea of a well-lived life, a life of intrinsic value, was itself a social construction of reality, not backed by the Universe.
1.3. The Second Shock of Existence
The first shock of existence is the realization of the death of the human being. The second shock of existence is the realization of the potential death of humanity.
Having gone through all the stages of history—of matter, life, and mind, in all of their stages of evolutionary unfolding—we have now come to this moment of dire existential risk. The gap between our exterior technologies—from atomic bombs to social media to weaponized drones to artificial intelligence—and our failure to develop genuine shared interior technologies of value has created extraction models and exponential growth curves, rivalrous conflicts based on win/lose metrics, and complicated, incoherent world systems. All of these together threaten the very existence of humanity.
When the Coronavirus crisis hit in 2020, a catastrophic risk scenario exploded on the public stage. We had been warning about that possibility for many years already, but most people pretty much thought that the systems were too big to fail; they would just keep on going, one way or another. Many of us wrote that the combination of the win/lose metrics and the complicated systems optimized for efficiency instead of resiliency was vulnerable to a thousand different forms of so-called black swans. Our core infrastructure had become inherently fragile, and the realization of catastrophic risk scenarios was just a matter of time.[12] All of this began to be visible to a limited extent in the financial meltdown of 2008, but it became unmistakably recognizable with the eruption of the long-awaited and long-predicted Coronavirus crisis.
Of course, this catastrophic risk was actually a dress rehearsal for the existential risk—or the second shock of existence, the potential death of humanity.
The Coronavirus had evoked both the first and the second shock of existence. The fear of death, which presses into the life of every human being, was now unavoidable—we couldn’t split it off—but the crisis also had the fragrance of the second shock of existence.[13] The catastrophic risk, which was now manifest in many forms as global risk, where all of a sudden everybody was interconnected, raised the specter of a looming existential risk—through climate change; destabilization of ecosystems; rogue weapons; exponentialized destructive technologies; runaway machine learning and AI; methane gas under the tundra; peak oil and peak phosphorus; resource depletion based on extraction models, which feed exponential growth curves based on fractional-reserve banking; the Bretton Woods economic structures, fragile, complicated, spread-out systems that are radically vulnerable to myriad forms of attack. This is only a partial list of possible causes for existential risk. These causes are real, and yet we have split them off from our awareness. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the potential catastrophic risk of the Coronavirus brought existential risk into our hearts and into our living rooms. The fear of death was suddenly radically present. The skull grinned at the banquet again—in the form of both the first and second shock of existence.
Catastrophic and existential risk emerges from the gap between our exponentially expanding exterior technologies and our stalled or even regressive interior technologies. This gap has created the tragedies of the commons[14] and multipolar traps,[15] in which everyone has to keep producing to the nth degree. We created weaponized exponential threats to our very existence because we were afraid that if we were not going to do it, the other parties would, and they would hide it from us and then dominate us.
There are two major generator functions of the existential risk:
Rivalrous conflict governed by zero-sum win/lose metrics. This is the success story that dominates the cultural landscape of modernity, the interior North Star that guides virtually every person and group of people. Success, within the context of this story, is almost always defined by objective, measurable, exterior indicators in relation to economic growth, levels of consumption, resources, and power. This success story generates extraction models and exponential growth curves at the core of the economic system, driven by artificially manufactured desires and needs, delivered into culture by ever-more precise forms of microtargeting individuals and groups through the ever-more immersive environment of the worldwide web.
Fragile and complicated (rather than complex) systems. Extraction models and exponential growth curves, animated by win/lose metrics, generate highly vulnerable, fragile world systems that are subject to myriad forms of collapse. In systems theory, fragile systems are often called complicated systems. Both terms describe systems in which different parts are acting independently—each within their own success story—and are disassociated from each other. As a result, each part pulls in its own direction, unaware of the effect of their pulling on the rest of the system, resulting in systemwide breakdown and ultimate collapse. Fragile local systems are made exponentially more fragile on a global level by our inability to meet global challenges with only local social, legal, political, economic, and ethical infrastructures.
1.4. The Unique Terror of Death in the Time of the Meta-Crisis
In our moment of meta-crisis, we are caught without a Story of Value. Modernity and postmodernity threw out the great traditions of premodernity, which became identified with their great shadows. That was, at least for a time, understandable, but the result has been a collapse of Story, and particularly the collapse of a Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values. We are at a time between worlds, a time between stories. The crucial gifts of the transcultural perennial truths shared by virtually all the great traditions have been lost.
One of those shared truths was the understanding that it is not over when it’s over—that what we call death is indeed a portal into a deeper Reality of consciousness. The great traditions were able to locate the truth of the continuity of consciousness as a shared human truth. This was a core part of the shared gnosis of humanity, and when modernity and postmodernity discarded this gnosis, nothing was left in its place.
Without a larger Story rooted in genuine gnosis to hold us, the fear of death turned into a terror that needed to be avoided at all costs. This has created two distinct movements in our culture. The first is an obsession with busyness, entertainment, and diversion, to avoid facing this terror. It is easy to hijack our attention, because we do not want to place our attention on the ultimate dread, the fear of death. We allow the tech plex[16] in myriad forms to steal our attention. This is one form of pseudo-eros—the covering-up of the emptiness with imitation erotics that dull the terror of mortality. The second is to make death the enemy. The frantic obsession with life extension and even immortality—what has been called the War on Death—is a direct expression of this terror.
Because we have ripped death from its mooring in a larger ocean of sense and meaning, we are left, in this moment of meta-crisis, only with its terror and not with its essential gifts. For it is only in confronting death that we find our own deepest integrity. To paraphrase William James: It is only death that makes life a genuine option.[17] Or, as Rilke wrote, “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”[18] Without death, life all too easily devolves into The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s classic where the protagonist does not age. But without the process of aging, decadence sets in. We have lost connection to death’s blessings, so we are left only with her ugly terror.
None of this suggests that our moral passion at this moment of meta-crisis dares to be invested in anything other than the transformation of self and culture necessary to avert dystopia and manifest Reality as it truly desires to be: a love story. This is a moment when we must rage against death and do battle with all the Promethean force of human dignity. It is in that sense that the prophetic mystic cries out in Isaiah 25:8, Let death be swallowed forever. But when the battle is not set in the dialectical context of a larger Story of death, then we are left only with the fear that devolves into terror when denuded of narrative. The prophet speaks against death, even as he tastes the eternity that lives beneath the flow of time.
All of this is the particular contemporary expression of the first shock of existence—the fear of death rearing its head—mediated through this postmodern moment, a time between stories, where the sacred heroic battle against death, which requires all of our moral, economic, and political passion, remains untampered by a larger narrative of meaning. The result is that the inner knowing, activated in prehistoric times by the first shock of existence, is missing, and this induces a worldwide terror.
1.5. The Second Shock of Existence Activates Our Inner Gnosis
Just as the first shock of existence created a first wave of value realization—a new level of Spirit, a new level of meaning in the world—because it pressed us into our own interior realization, now the second shock of existence needs to press us into ever-deeper gnosis, where we begin to articulate a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.
The second shock of existence must press us into new gnosis, and at the core of new gnosis is a new grammar of value—evolving yet eternal value—with which we are aligned and which we incarnate. Such a new grammar of value would engage both the terror of death and the terror of a life devoid of intrinsic meaning backed by the Cosmos.
The new gnosis is the articulation of a new set of First Principles and First Values, eternal yet evolving, embedded in a New Story of Value. The First Principles and First Values are the plotlines of the Universe: A Love Story. The shared grammar of value is the only possible context for a global civilization that wouldn’t self-terminate.
This is the deeper sensemaking that seeks to emerge from the second shock of existence.
At this moment, it is not enough to be activists to heal the direct crises—be they medical crises, environmental crises, AI threats, or wars. We need to reenvision our infrastructures and our social structures. But we dare not waste the meta-crisis, or it will be the last crisis we are privileged to navigate. We must allow this moment to spur us and invite the second shock of existence into our hearts—not in a way that paralyzes us, but in a way that inspires new levels of insight and realization—precisely the insights and realizations that will be necessary to prevent the second shock of existence from ever actualizing.
1.6. A Time Between Worlds, a Time Between Stories
We stand in this moment poised between utopia and dystopia. We are at a time between worlds and a time between stories. We need a New Story of Value, eternal yet evolving, rooted in First Principles and First Values, which would become a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.
This is exactly what the Renaissance was—it was a time between worlds and a time between stories. In the Renaissance, we were challenged by the Black Death, a pandemic that swept Europe. The Black Death destroyed between a third to half of the population of Europe and a huge part of Asia. People died horribly, brutally, in the streets. They had no idea how to meet this challenge. In response to the Black Death, da Vinci, Ficino, and their cohorts understood that they had to tell a New Story of Value—and that story was the story of modernity.
Did they get the story right? They got part of it right, and this birthed, to use Jürgen Habermas’s phrase, “the dignity of modernity,” the new way of information-gathering and universal human rights. But the story of modernity also, at least to some extent,
disqualified interiors,
deconstructed the source of value,
downgraded the dignity and Eros of human nature and identity,
undermined the moral coherence of human communion,
and disenchanted the Universe from the rivers of the sacred that nourished its core.
This gradually generated the disasters of modernity and has led us to this point where our very future is at risk.
Modernity lost the basis for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
This basis used to be Divine Revelation (God told us), but that Divine Revelation was owned by religion, and every religion had overreached and overclaimed. The revelation was often mediated through cultural categories and wasn’t fully accurate, so modernity threw out revelation but was unable to establish a new basis for value. Value was just assumed to be real; as it says in the founding document of the American revolution, the Declaration of Independence, “we hold these truths to be self-evident”—that is, we don’t really have a basis for value, but we just take it as a given. In other words, modernity took out a loan of social capital from the traditional world, but the source of value has never been worked out, and then, gradually, value began to collapse.
The Universe Story began to collapse.
The belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are real began to collapse.
The belief that Love is real began to collapse.
As Bertrand Russell said,
I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it.[19]
What do you do if you grew up in a world in which Value is not real—a world without a source of value, without a Universe Story, without a story of human identity, without a story of desire, without a narrative of power?
In the words of W. B. Yeats, “the centre cannot hold.”[20]
Or, in the words of T. S. Eliot, we become “the hollow men and the stuffed men, shape without form, gesture without motion.” [21]
We have a collapse at the very center of society because we no longer have Eros. We no longer have a Reality in which Value is real—and so there is this lingering sense of emptiness. This complete collapse at the very center is the source of existential risk.
But we are not hopeless. On the contrary, we are filled with great hope. Hope is a memory of the future. This memory of the future is the direct hit that takes down the Death Star—the culture of death.
[Read footnotes below.]
This is an excerpt from our new book The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis, which you can order on Amazon now.
Please also consider writing a review on Amazon!
For all excerpts from Whole Mate published on Substack, click here.
For all excerpts from The Evolution of Love published on Substack, click here. We will keep adding to it for the next couple of weeks.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Gafni, Marc & Marx Hubbard, Barbara, The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025, Introduction.
The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis
by Dr. Marc Gafni
Story is the source code of culture and consciousness and of all Reality-all the way up and down the evolutionary chain. Story is the attempt to gather information about the nature of Reality and translate it into narrative frameworks bounded by Value.
Stories that organize culture are “Stories of Value, backed by the Universe”.
Postmodernity argues that Reality is just a story, and that all stories are created equal (equally meaningless of inherent value) because value itself is not real. And therefore, all stories of value are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.
The postmodernists are wrong.
Story is real. And not all stories are equal. There are better and worse stories. A better story is an eternal and evolving story of Value. Evolving Value backed by the Universe.
A worse story—one with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines of distorted value, like the story we’ve lived in the West for the better part of the last century—can, and will, bring us to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it.
Value is both real, backed by the Universe, and like everything in the Universe, value evolves. The evolution of value itself is the evolution of love, as Eros and evolution themselves, are inherent plotlines of value in the great story of Cosmos.
The goal of The Evolution of Love, and its companion volume Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, is to provide a first articulation of a new, better story of Value in the domain of relationship. At the core of this New Story of Value are a new Universe Story and a new narrative of identity, which we have called CosmoErotic Humanism and Homo amor.
If we fail to articulate this New Story of Value, the results will be excruciating for billions of human beings and for the entire life system–as for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.
All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.
All of the present depends on us to live.
All of the future depends on us to be born.
Footnotes
[1] The Death Star depicts an Orwellian totalitarianism of the kind that is enacted today in China, for example. There is, however, a more ostensibly covert totalitarianism, of the kind that is now gradually disclosing its nature in open societies, which seeks to enclose the world in a planetary stack, designed and monitored for maximum control, without the controlled even knowing that their freedom was forfeit. We call it TechnoFeudalism.
[2] See, for example, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, by Toby Ord (2020).
[3] See The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, by Peter Zeihan (2022). Zeihan advises energy corporations, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the US military. See also Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, by Ray Dalio (2021).
[4] Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, by Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard (2025).
[5] A colleague, Mauk Pieper, an excellent thinker in his own right, attended my seminars themed around Your Unique Self in response to collective existential crises in Holland between 2009 and 2013. He published a book, Humanity’s Second Shock and Your Unique Self (2014), for which I gladly wrote an afterword. He understood well the basic premise of our work, the Unique Self Theory, an emergent new theory of identity as an accurate response to the first great question of CosmoErotic Humanism: Who am I? (See Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, by Marc Gafni [2012], and the special issue on Unique Self of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 6:1 [2011]). The Unique Self Theory as part of a larger Story of Value is crucial if we are to respond to the meta-crisis of the twenty-first century and beyond. Pieper coined the term second shock of existence to capture the notion of existential risk, which we happily acknowledge. The term shock of existence seems to have been coined by philosopher Robert F. Creegan in his book The Shock of Existence: A Philosophy of Freedom (1954).
[6] According to some historians, the existential fear of death was already present in hunter-gatherer societies. David Graeber has correctly problematized the linear unfolding of hunter-gatherer to farming communities on several key accounts, showing conclusively that larger organized gatherings with sophisticated religions appeared in the hunter-gatherer era. See The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by Graeber and David Wengrow (2021).
[7] Evidence gathered by the most serious researchers beginning with Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick at Cambridge University and William James at Harvard University and continuing, in highly rigorous forms, for the last 150 years, as recapitulated by David Ray Griffin in multiple volumes. See also, for example, Real Magic: Unlocking Your Natural Psychic Abilities to Create Everyday Miracles, by Dean Radin (2018), The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, by Dean Radin (2009), and the earlier classic by Frederic William Henry Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1907).
[8] This requires a cogent analysis of materialism and dualism, and the introduction of a far more cogent third possibility, which we have called pan-interiority (see Sections I.1–I.3 in part two).
[9] We discuss anthro-ontology in some depth in the forthcoming book by David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism: Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. For now, we will simply define it as an innate and clear interior gnosis that is directly available to the human being.
[10] On the Eye of Consciousness, see Section I.6 in part two.
[11] Of course, many of these great revelations were mediated through distorting prisms resulting in the horrific pain inflicted by the ethnocentric bias of virtually all of the great traditions. But underneath their public ethnocentric teachings were also teachings of profound depth and realization revolving around the nature of meaning, justice, goodness, ethos, relationship, and joy.
[12] Although the Corona threat itself was of course relatively “minor” in terms of the destabilizing power of catastrophic risk, it indicated how potentially fragile the systems are.
[13] COVID-19 itself was self-evidently not an existential risk. But it pointed to the fragility of the interlocking world systems and exploded the myth that the world system was too big to fail.
[14] The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory that was first conceptualized in 1833 by British writer William Forster Lloyd. The term refers to a situation in which individuals who have access to a public resource (i.e., a common) deplete the resource by acting in their own interest.
[15] A multipolar trap (in game theory, also known as destructive defection) is a group situation where individual incentives produce a suboptimal outcome for all participants. When individual actors obtain a benefit (an advantage over the other actors in the system) from taking action that is detrimental to the group as a whole (i.e., a defect), the other actors are then faced with the choice to either defect themselves or slide into irrelevance. If all actors assume that the other actors are rational and self-interested, this kind of defection will propagate through the system until everyone is contributing to the harm of the group—and is losing their initial advantage. In fact, the situation of each individual is probably worse than before.
[16] By tech plex we mean the technological infrastructure of society, which includes the entire planetary stack (Benjamin Bratton’s term), as well as the daily immersive environment constituted by social media and the internet of things. The tech plex is unique in that it has facilitated a new world in which technology is no longer a tool, but an immersive environment. We live inside of that plex. It moves all the way up and all the way down the planetary stack. The tech plex is constituted by infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure. Clearly, there is infrastructure, in terms of the actual physical structures of the tech plex. There is social structure, in relationship to the laws (and the absence of laws) that govern the tech plex. And third, there is superstructure: The technology actually codifies particular values and ignores, bypasses, or rejects other values. In other words, the tech plex is not value-neutral; the tech plex implies a set of worldviews or superstructures.
[17] See the essay "The Will to Believe" by William James, first published in The New World, Volume 5 (1896), 327-347.
[18] Rainer Maria Rilke, Anita Barrows, and Joanna Macy (2009). A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke. HarperCollins Publishers.
[19] Charles Pigden, ed., Russell on Ethics (1999), pp. 310–11.
[20] William Butler Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
[21] T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men.”