A Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies
Essay One Parts 3 & 4 from Our New Book "The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis"
3.1. The First and Second Shock of Existence Merge in the Meta-Crisis: Birthing Homo amor
The postmodern deconstruction of value, story, and self induces the unique terror of death at this moment in time. We have rejected the old stories of value given to us by the old religions; their ethnocentric cruelty blocked our access to their deeper realizations, and the first shock of existence, the terror at the realization of our individual death as human beings, has returned to the center of our existence.
As a result, the second shock of existence comes together with the first shock of existence. We cannot face what Robert J. Lifton called the apocalypse of our being, so we turn our attention to every manner of pseudo-eros—for culture has denied us access to Eros. It has deconstructed Eros and claimed that She is, in the language of Yuval Harari, one popular purveyor of the postmodern consensus, a fiction, a figment of our imagination, and a mere social construct.
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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.
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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.
It is from the depth of this very crisis—this terror of both the first shock and second shock of existence—that we have begun to articulate a New Story of Value. The New Story of Value, CosmoErotic Humanism, is a post-postmodern story that integrates the leading-edge validated insights of the premodern, modern, and postmodern wisdom streams. At the very core of this deeper vision is the emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity, the evolutionary progression from Homo sapiens to Homo amor, in alignment with the inherent plotlines or vectors of evolution. This is not a fanciful conjecture. The realization of Homo amor as a necessary new level of human evolution is the result of decades of work. It integrates the leading-edge, validated insights of the exterior and interior sciences from the premodern, modern, and postmodern periods woven together in a New Universe Story, and a new understanding of identity as Unique Self.
Homo amor is the New Story of Value in person, the incarnation of the New Story, rooted in the New Universe Story and the new narrative of identity for both Me and We, I and Us, that is articulated in CosmoErotic Humanism. Downloading Homo amor into the source code of culture is the direct hit that takes down the Death Star, the culture of death. As we will see, Homo amor responds both to the second shock of existence—the realization of the potential death of humanity—and to the first shock of existence—the realization of the inevitable death experience of every human being.
The encounter with death presses us into new gnosis, and what emerges is a momentous evolutionary leap in what it means to be human. Central to Homo amor is an emergent value theory, the reclamation of value in a post-postmodern context, coupled with Unique Self Theory and its vision of the four selves.
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3.2. The Three Great Inquiries of CosmoErotic Humanism
How does a world spiraling toward ten billion people, all engaged in various forms of rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, avoid collapse and self-termination? A key can be found through a careful study of complexity theory, in part rooted in Alan Turing’s epic essay “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.”[1] One of its core inquiries is: What generates coherent complex systems that do not break down? An important dimension of the response given by complexity theory is that simple first rules, iterated exponentially, generate vast, coherent, complex systems.
When I was first reading the complexity theory literature many years ago, I realized that this is true not only about exteriors but also about interiors. Just as simple first rules generate coherent complex exteriors, so, too, do simple First Principles and First Values embedded in a simple Story of Value generate the hypercomplex world of consciousness and interiors.
In the world of interiors, therefore, we have looked for the most basic elements of our Story of Value as expressed in responses to the three most simple questions:
Who?
Where?
What?
These are three great inquiries that form the motivational architecture of CosmoErotic Humanism. An inquiry is not merely a question. It is a question upon which virtually all future choices depend—a question about the essential nature of Reality itself.
It is worth pointing out here that the why question is off the table. It almost always gets mired down in dogma, abstract philosophy, and theo-logic, none of which is grounded in any direct sense of knowing. If we engage the where, who, and what questions, the why resolves itself in a self-evident way.
The essential who question is: Who am I?
This is the great question of identity: Who am I? What is my true nature?
The question might also be expressed as: Who are you?
The Who are you question may be directed toward a fellow human being but also toward other living beings, or even Infinity itself. When directed toward Infinity, the question of Who are you? is really: Is there a who in Infinity facing me with whom I might commune?
In the plural, a subset of the fundamental Who am I? question emerges, which is dependent on, but not at all redundant with, the first question. This is the question of Who are we?—the Who am I? question of the collective.
These are the great questions of identity. An identity crisis, or a breakdown in identity, which leads to collective or personal insanity, stems from our incapacity to adequately answer these questions.
The second question is the where question: Where am I?
This is a question of the Universe Story: Where do I live? What is the nature of this Reality in which I breathe and upon which and within which I operate?
In a sense, this question precedes the first one: The nature of the Universe determines the nature of the individual. Our response to the where question directly informs our answer to the who question. But from the perspective of the interior sciences, the vector of in-formation is somewhat different, for the interior sciences point out that the mysteries live within us. Thus, from the perspective of the interior sciences, it is not only the where that directs us to the who, but it is also the who that directs us to the where.
The third question is: What is there for me to do?
That question is but another way of stating a deeper question: What do I want?
Or, said slightly differently: What do I desire?
This is an action question. Of course, it may be expressed in multiple forms. For example, we might express it as: What do I need? Or, more broadly: What do I truly desire? What is my deepest heart’s desire?
Or, more broadly still: What does evolution, or Reality, or God, need from me—desire from me—in the very next moment? For at the deepest level of realization, we gain direct access to the truth that our deepest heart’s desire is the desire of evolution itself. Evolution is desire, and evolutionary desire lives intimately, personally, uniquely in us as the deepest heart’s desire (but we are ahead of ourselves).
We might move from the I to the We and ask:
What is there for us to do?
What do we truly desire?
What is our deepest heart’s desire?
These questions imply a distinction between our surface desire and our depth desire, necessitating a process of deepening, an invitation, and even a demand to engage in the clarification of desire.
Another way to ask the same question might also be, in the where form: Where are we going? Or: Where is it all going?
There are no answers to these questions, at least no answers that would make the question disappear and the mystery abate. We humans are always dancing between certainty and uncertainty. Gnosis and revelation—certainty and uncertainty—clarity and mystery—are themselves First Principles and First Values of Cosmos.
But there are potent and poignant responses to these questions. Responses are orienting certainties that locate us in the Cosmos and guide our dance amid the uncertainties. They are not answers but the intrinsic Values of Cosmos that is awake, alive—and therefore accessible—in us.
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3.3. The Realization of Unique Self
Who are you? We are not talking about your separate self or ego self, but you as an irreducibly unique expression of the larger Field of Value.
You are an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire, of the initiating and animating Eros and energy of All-That-Is that lives uniquely in you, as you, and through you that never was, is, or will be ever again in anyone other than you. The central realization crystallizing in this evolutionary moment is that each of us is a Unique Self, with a unique perspective and quality of Self, and a unique capacity for action.[2]
This is not simply our talents as separate monadic units. According to the best of the interior and exterior sciences, we are each not fundamentally apart but rather part of the larger Whole of existence—but we are distinct parts. Each of us is a unique emergent of the entire system. We are unique configurations of the larger Field of Eros, Value, Life, and Consciousness. Therefore, we each have a unique incarnation of value to live and to give that is needed by the Whole. That is our core identity.
In the deepest sense, the fear of dying is the fear of not having lived your Unique Self—the life that was yours to live. It is the fear of dying and not having made the contribution that your very cells know is yours to make. The way to transcend the fear of death is therefore clear: to live your story—your Unique Self—to the fullest, giving your unique gift, writing your poem, singing your song, and being the unique configuration of intimacy and desire that Reality intended in its incarnation as you.
Your unique value is not a psychological construct, not the details of your social status, bodily form, or personality. Rather, it is your unique essence—a unique incarnation of Value that participates in the Field of eternal yet evolving Value. Your unique value is irreducible and irreplaceable. It is the source of your eternal dignity, which, by its very nature, transcends death.
Unique Self is your personal realization of your fully connected uniqueness.
Your entire biological matrix is unique, from your molecular and cellular structure to your immune system, but these unique aspects do not stop at the biology of your Unique Self. To awaken to your Unique Self is to know that you occupy a particular place in the space-time continuum. You are an irreducibly unique emergent value of the whole thing. But you don’t exist without the atmosphere, the plants that produce it, the hydrological cycles that water the plants, or the gravity driving the thermonuclear fusions that fuel our planet. You do not exist independently of everything or everyone else.
In many ways, you are also the same as everyone and everything. You are inter-included and inter-connected—inter-being—with everything and everyone, even as you are irreducibly unique—a unique value in Cosmos, a new ontic identity. You are singularly unique and therefore irreplaceable and irreducibly valuable. Your unique expression and experience of consciousness and agency are emergent properties of All-That-Is, uniquely configured in relationship as you. Although you are a novel property of Eros, you are not reducible to your constituent parts or the laws that govern them at lower levels. You are a new ontological emergent that both generates newness, including new value, and is governed by new sets of laws.
Once you realize that you are an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence of Cosmos, you realize that there is a corner of the world that lacks Love and can only be transformed by you. Evolution took 13.7 billion years of synchronicity to produce the unique expression of you. You are the personal face of the evolutionary impulse. You are not irrelevant.
Emergence theory[3] reminds us that evolution moves from unconscious to conscious when you awaken as evolution in person. In our interconnected world of quantum entanglement, we begin to understand that your next evolutionary act sends ripples throughout Reality that literally affect everything.
These are among the revelations newly pressed into our knowing by the contemplation of death, both in the original, first shock of existence and in the new, second shock of existence with which we are now confronted.
3.4. Your Unique Gift Is Your Outrageous Act of Love
As a Unique Self, you have an irreducibly unique perspective and qualities of Eros, intimacy, desire, and power, which come together to activate your unique capacity to live your unique life and give your unique gift. Your unique gift is your unique quality of being in the world—interacting, interfacing, interactivating with Reality—your inter-being with Reality.
It is also your unique quality of becoming—your unique gift is the unique gift that you have to give to Reality. Through your unique gift, you are uniquely empowered to address a unique need in your unique circle of intimacy and influence, which can be addressed by you alone, in the special way that you are able to address it. When you address that unique need in your unique circle of intimacy and influence, you are responding to Reality. That is your unique response-ability.
To address that need is your calling and obligation. This obligation is not imposed from without but is the expression of your unique configuration of LoveIntelligence, LoveDesire, LoveValue, and LoveBeauty. Indeed, in the original Semitic languages, love and obligation share the same root word. In other words, your unique gift, an expression of your Unique Self, is the unique expression of your LoveIntelligence, LoveDesire, and LoveBeauty, which can be manifested and gifted into Reality only by you.
You recognize the unique need that is yours to address because it arouses your deepest heart’s desire. Giving your unique gift to address that need is the unique joy and responsibility of your life. Even more: It is your own deepest need, your deepest heart’s desire. In giving your unique gift, you awaken as the leading edge of evolution and incarnate a unique quality of Evolutionary Love. You become the personal face of Conscious Evolution.
Your Unique Self is your unique configuration of being and becoming. Your unique configuration of being includes the full spectrum of your qualities of presence and interiority. Your unique configuration of becoming includes your unique transformation, which is evolution itself continuing its own process of transformation in you, as you, and through you. In the depth of your Unique Self Realization, it becomes clear that your unique need is your transformation—which is the transformation of the whole—that can be uniquely accomplished only by you.
Every person is a unique configuration of the Eros of the Cosmos. One word for the Eros of Cosmos—deployed by CosmoErotic Humanism in evolving the great lineage traditions—is Outrageous Love. The Eros of Cosmos—Outrageous Love—configures uniquely in you, as you, and through you and capacitates your unique gift into Reality, which is desperately needed by All-That-Is. Your unique gift is your Outrageous Act of Love.
You are welcome in Reality. You cannot feel welcome if you do not realize that you are always, ever, already in relationship. To be in relationship is to be needed. The deeper and wider the relationship, the deeper and wider is Reality’s need for you, the more you are welcome—at home in Reality.
You are needed by All-That-Is. You have irreducibly unique gifts, which are the very engine of evolution. Need drives evolution. You are the unique expression of evolution’s need. The great refrain of the Story of Value was expressed by the great Spanish interior scientist of the Renaissance, Meir Ibn Gabbai, paraphrased by us as Reality needs your service.[4]
Imagine you have been invited for dinner. Great pains were made to find the food that you love, the decor that pleases you, and the guests that interest you. You arrive at the time designated on this generous invitation in your honor. You receive with grace all the effort poured into welcoming you, making you feel at home. But in the back of your mind, you wait for it to be over, when you can really get home, let down your hair, and spread your heart, mind, and body out into the spacious fullness of yourself. You are welcome here, you appreciate the effort made on your behalf, but you do not quite feel at home.
Now, imagine that you are sitting next to the host of the dinner—and lo and behold, he or she must take an emergency call. The phone is brought to the table, and by their expression, you realize that some very serious situation has developed. They get off the phone and turn to you with these words:
Thank God you are here. This is what just happened. I know your work and your unique gifts. You are the only one in the world that has the capacity to address this most serious and world-shattering challenge with which we have just been confronted.
The host tells you of the challenge, and you realize that she is right, you are uniquely gifted to address this huge challenge, which—without you—might have wrought great destruction. In that second, for the first time, you feel fully needed and therefore fully welcomed, fully at home, fully intimate with your hosts and all of the assembled.
But you are not merely needed by the dinner host. You are needed by Reality itself.
The realization of Unique Self is the realization that you are uniquely needed by All-That-Is. That is the ontological disclosure that springs from the very fact of your uniqueness. It is only the experience of being in such a relationship—of being uniquely needed—that allows you to feel fully intimate, welcome, and at home in Reality.
3.5. Unique Self Symphony
Unique Self Symphony is the answer to the question of Who are we? We are playing our unique instruments in the Unique Self Symphony. When you are acting for the sake of the larger Whole—which is your deepest heart’s desire, the evolutionary impulse lived as you—you are living your Unique Self and giving your unique gift.
When we give our unique gifts in a way that is omni-considerate, omni-responsible, and omni-loving—for the sake of the Whole . . .
When we intend our unique gifts as an expression a larger evolutionary purpose and Evolutionary Love . . .
When we are allured to other Unique Selves, each giving their unique gifts for the sake of the Whole . . .
. . . then a new emergent discloses itself—a new structure of Evolutionary Intimacy—a Unique Self Symphony. That’s what it means to play your unique instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
Homo amor—the New Human and the New Humanity, incarnate as the Unique Self Symphony—is not a top-down, command-and-control structure. It is the human beings self-organizing—self-actualizing—to their highest, deepest, most wondrous and beautiful self, which is their Evolutionary Unique Self—their Unique Self in an evolutionary context.
Unique Self Symphony is the new emergent of Evolutionary Intimacy, which is the natural product of the self-organizing Universe and the self-actualizing Cosmos. Unique Self Symphonies, as a very specific kind of superorganism, endowed with collective intelligence, will only emerge when all of us have a shared sense of the inviolability and value of each individual’s Unique Self, of each person as a unique expression of the larger Field of Consciousness and Desire—an individuation beyond ego, the personal beyond the impersonal.[5]
It is only such a narrative of realized identity that constitutes the evolution and health of any group. When a group comes together in such a way that no one’s Unique Self is diminished but all are leveraged, there emerges a Unique Self Symphony. This requires all the members to hold the group in mind, to be omni-considerate of the whole, to envision their part in the self-organizing and self-orchestrating social reality, in which they consent to participate.[6]
To participate in a self-conscious Unique Self Symphony is the feeling of being ethically integrated into a larger totality without being absorbed by it. The felt integrity of one’s Unique Self is the core of an evolutionary phenomenology of moral consciousness. To fit into the evolutionary puzzle, or story, the shape must be unique.
When a once open society closes through force—violence or the move to a totalitarian system—it will ultimately be undone, unseated—not because it is physically unsustainable but because it is unbearable for human identity formation and moral development.[7] Every human being must feel that their uniqueness is recognized, felt, and needed by the larger group. Without accounting for the dignity of irreducible uniqueness, all superorganic communities will ultimately break down.
Without an elaborate language of moral consciousness, a language of strong evaluation (as Charles Taylor would put it[8]), all talk about the superorganisms of tomorrow will fall short of catalyzing them. The emerging insights from mainstream evolutionary sciences need to be enlivened with the insights of the alternative narrative, where interiors—consciousness and value—implicated in the next steps of human evolution have been the focal point of concerted scholarly efforts for over a century.
3.6. The Evolution of Intimacy: Evolutionary Intimacy
At every stage of evolution, there is a crisis. It is always a crisis of intimacy, and the response is always a new configuration of intimacy—a new configuration of relationship—that invokes ever-more wholeness. The Universe self-organizes to greater and greater levels of intimacy because evolution itself is the progressive deepening of intimacies.
The new configuration of intimacy that responds to the meta-crisis—a new level of Evolutionary Intimacy in this generation—is Unique Self Symphony. The strange attractor toward this actualization is Unique Self. We are uniquely individuated expressions of the evolutionary Field of Eros—of the LoveIntelligence, LoveDesire, and LoveBeauty that is the fabric of Cosmos. Uniqueness is a core First Principle and First Value of Cosmos calling every human being to their Unique Self—and to play their unique instrument in the Unique Self Symphony. In other words, uniqueness is, at the human level, like the pheromones that self-organize an ant colony, or the inherent intelligence of bees that calls each bee to their vocation. We know scientifically that beehives are wildly organized, allured, and uniquely emergent in myriad wonderful expressions of intelligence. But ants and bees are not human beings.
So how does that work on the human level? What calls human beings to their vocation? Human beings, at this stage of history, are, for the first time, expressions of Conscious Evolution. So, what drives us? What guides us? What is our North Star? What is our compass of joy?
Our uniqueness itself. Our Unique Self calls us to our true nature and true vocation of consciousness and desire as an expression of the larger Field of Desire and Consciousness. Your Unique Self is the unique set of allurements that call you forward to express your unique gift.
Your Unique Self is your unique configuration of desire—but not surface desire or pseudo-desire, not the lowest common denominator of desire manipulated for the sake of profit and control. We are talking about your deepest heart’s desire, your clarified desire, which capacitates your unique gift and invites you to play—even demands that you play—your instrument in the Unique Self Symphony. Sometimes we play together. Sometimes ten of us, or twenty of us, or thirty, or a whole division, or a whole people, are playing different notes on the same Unique Self instrument. That Unique Self instrument gives a unique gift to society.
So, I, human being, who am I?
I am a Unique Self. I have an instrument to play in the Unique Self Symphony, and I am needed by All-That-Is. That is the realization of Unique Self. This implies personhood, which means there is a personal relationship. Reality intended me—that’s what uniqueness tells me. Uniqueness tells me:
I am unique; I am not generic.
I am irreducibly unique.
Reality intended me. Reality chose me. Reality recognizes me. Reality loves and adores me. Reality desires me. Reality needs me. Reality needs my own growth and my own transformation.
Reality is evolution. Evolution is a series of transformations animated by the inherent LoveIntelligence and LoveDesire and LoveBeauty of Cosmos. Transformation is Reality’s inherent purpose and goal.
At the human level, transformation is the transformation of identity. It is my transformation from separate self to True Self (I am part of the Field), to Unique Self (a unique expression of the Field), to Evolutionary Unique Self that feels the evolutionary impulse pulsing in him, pulsing in her. These distinctions can be visualized as a puzzle and its distinct pieces: The separate self is a puzzle piece without a puzzle, True Self is the puzzle without the pieces, Unique Self is the puzzle piece that completes—and is needed and held by—the puzzle, and Evolutionary Unique Self not only completes but evolves the whole puzzle.
In Evolutionary Unique Self, that evolutionary impulse has a personal face, and that personal face is my Unique Self playing the music of my Unique Self instrument. That is how I join the Unique Self Symphony made up of Evolutionary Unique Selves acting as unique expressions of the LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire—joining together across space and time—to participate in the evolution of consciousness.
The Unique Self Symphony is the only authentic and potent response we have to existential risk: a new narrative of identity. Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony are not just transformations of personal identity but transformations of the narrative of identity itself.
Who am I? I am a Unique Self, I participate personally in the LoveIntelligence of Cosmos, and we join in Unique Self Symphonies all over the world—as expressions of a bottom-up, grassroots, self-organizing Universe—self-organizing to ever-higher, deeper, and wider expressions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
That is quite a different vision than the attention-hijacking, lowest-common-denominator vision of the rapidly proliferating global technocracy. Indeed, it is this vision that must animate the tech environments in all their noble and also distressing disguises.
The response to existential risk is a Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies.
3.7. The Crossing: From Homo sapiens to Homo amor
To recapitulate briefly:
The meta-crisis is rooted in our alienation from wholeness, and this alienation can only be healed by a new shared Story of Value.
At the core of this New Story of Value is a new Universe Story and a new narrative of identity, CosmoErotic Humanism and Homo amor.
At the core of the New Universe Story and our narrative of identity—the story of I and the story of We—is a new story of relationship.
We look at the future of relationship as a key plotline in the New Story. Relationship and wholeness are intimately inter-included: New structures of relationship emerge from deeper levels of wholeness and generate ever-greater wholeness. In other words, the essence of the meta-crisis is a breakdown of Eros, which is expressed as our fundamental alienation from the whole, the larger whole of which we are a part and the deeper whole in which we rest that is our core. The healing of the meta-crisis is in the emergence of a new level of relationship to the whole. This is what we describe in these two volumes as the rise of whole mate relationship. Whole mate relationship is a key characteristic of Homo amor.
We call stepping into the lived identity of Homo amor, the New Human, and New Humanity the Crossing.
In the great lineages, there is a turn of phrase: our side and God’s side. In the Crossing, we cross to the other side. We no longer see ourselves only as separate-self humans, lost in the grasping of the lonely and traumatized ego. We cross over. We begin to see Reality with God’s eyes. We not only love but we are lived as Love, and to be a lover is to see with God’s eyes. We are not merely separate parts seeking our own good. We become omni-considerate for the sake of the Whole.
In other words, the response to the questions of Who am I? and Who are we? must include the Whole. Indeed, once we are individually omni-considerate for the sake of the Whole, then our relationships are naturally omni-considerate for the sake of the Whole. This is what happens in whole mate relationships, which we described in depth in volume one, Whole Mate: The Relationship for the Future. This is precisely the movement—the crossing—from Homo sapiens to Homo amor. In the language of one lineage—and every lineage has their own unique, intimate language that alludes to the crossing—we reenact, in an evolutionary context, the story of Abraham, the Hebrew. The word Hebrew means the one who crosses over to the other side.
The experience of the crossing is the awakening to the Fourth Big Bang,[9] in which I experience the Field of LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire holding me in every moment. At the same time, I experience all the Field in me—irreducibly and uniquely in me—and I realize, “I matter. I impact Reality. For Real. I am not an extra on the set, but I am fundamentally and poignantly needed by All-That-Is.”
This is, in some very deep sense, precisely the ancient teaching of Hineni. When the Divine Voice calls Abraham, he responds with this one word, “Hineni”—“Here I am.”
There are, of course, two ways to interpret that response. The first is an expression of utter obedience and submission: Here I am, thy will be done. But the other way, which appears in the hidden texts of nondual humanism, is that it’s not that I am completely obliterating my selfness to become an empty vessel for the Divine. Rather, I am so in my selfness, my depth, my uniqueness that my radical subjectivity merges with the Divine. My unique individuated configuration of matter is alive with Divinity. I ultimately matter. And when I say “Hineni,” “Here I am,” I realize that I am found.
4. Conclusion
Crisis is an evolutionary driver, and every crisis is at its core a crisis of intimacy.[10]
We have identified the global intimacy disorder as the root cause of the existential risk, but the underlying ultimate failure of intimacy is the deconstruction of value itself. This means that human value does not participate in any sense of intrinsic Value of the Real. It is not about values but about the Field of Value that underlies all individual values. When the human being, moved by myriad cultural, historical, and psychological confusions, claims to have stepped out of the Field of Value, then intimacy itself is deconstructed. The deconstruction of value is the deconstruction of intimacy.
In the absence of a shared Story of Value, a story that’s an expression of Reality’s Eros, a story rooted in pseudo-eros takes center stage, becoming the generator for existential risk.
Our modern pseudo-eros story is a rivalrous conflict, governed by win/lose metrics. Such a story catalyzes the second generator function of existential risk: complicated, fragile systems with no allurement or intimacy between the parts. It is in that sense we have argued that the success story is the first generator function for existential risk.
The failure of intimacy is precisely the impotent experience that there is no shared identity between the interiors of the human being and Reality. There is no shared identity in the sense of any common participation in a Field of shared intrinsic Value. But only a shared Story of Value can arouse the global will required to engage catastrophic and existential risk. It is only global political, moral, and social will—erotic will—that can generate the most good, true, and beautiful world we have always known is possible.
All civilizations have fallen because the stories that they lived in were, in some sense, based on rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. Every civilization was weakened by interior polarization caused by the lack of a shared Story of Value. We now have a global civilization, but we haven’t created a Shared Story of Value. We haven’t solved the generator functions that caused all civilizations to fall. Our global civilization has exponential technologies and extraction models depleting the Earth of resources that it took billions of years to create, which is going to lead to a civilizational collapse.
Existential risk is a risk to our very existence.
The choice is clear: Love or die.
It is that simple. Eros is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and of the planet.
In the last half of the twentieth century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth: A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personally and globally, even with all the resources of intelligence and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in Love—in the embrace of Eros.
We must embrace a personal path of Love and a global politics of Love—not the ordinary love, a mere human sentiment, but Eros, or what we sometimes call Outrageous Love, the heart of existence itself. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.
To love means to participate in the evolution of love, which is the evolution of the human Story of Value. It means to evolve, to activate a new cultural enlightenment, rooted in a new narrative of identity, a new narrative of value, a new narrative of intimate communion, a new narrative of desire, a new narrative of power. All of this will birth new narratives of economics and politics.
The evolution of love is the telling of a New Story. It must be told as a Love Story, for in fact that is the deepest truth of Reality, rooted in the best exterior and interior sciences that we have at this moment in time:
Reality is not merely a fact. Reality is a story.
Reality is not an ordinary story. Reality is a love story.
Reality is not an ordinary love story. Reality is an Outrageous Love Story.
A New Story doesn’t mean a made-up story. It means doing the hard work of integrating the validated insights of the traditional world, the modern world, and the postmodern world. This is the intention at the heart of CosmoErotic Humanism.
Together with other emergent strands, CosmoErotic Humanism needs to become the ground of a world religion as a context for our diversity. We need religion, even as we need science, to articulate a shared global grammar of value. A New Story means that we come to the Story from a new interior wholeness—with a new relationship to the larger Whole.
[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.
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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.
Footnotes
[1] Alan Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1990/1952).
[2] The concepts of Unique Self, Evolutionary Unique Self, and Unique Self Symphony are discussed in depth in volume one, Whole Mate: The Relationship for the Future, by Marc Gafni et al. (2024).
[3] See Phillip Clayton and Paul Davies, eds., The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (2006).
[4] Arthur Green, in his essay “God’s Need for Man: A Unitive Approach to the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel” (2015), writes: “In his summary of kabbalistic teaching ‘Avodat ha-Kodesh,’ Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai, who lived in the Ottoman Empire in the early sixteenth century, offers a great synthesis of Jewish mystical wisdom in the generation immediately preceding that of Moshe Cordovero and Yizhak Luria, who were to make such great additions and changes to that tradition. The key theme of the work, repeated frequently throughout, is ha-‘avodah tsorekh gavoha (lit.: ‘service is a need on high’), that worship, including the life of the mitzvot, fulfills a divine need.”
[5] On Unique Self and Unique Self Symphonies, see volume one, Whole Mate: The Relationship for the Future, by Marc Gafni et al. (2024).
[6] In my own anecdotal experience, I have found that, if there is a strong enough center of gravity in a community that has realized Unique Self identity, it creates a vortex that draws in and positively shapes even those who have not experienced such realization. This requires further research, both quantitative and qualitative. On the qualitative side, depth of uniqueness and the capacity to generate Unique Self Symphonies are an essential next step in evolving democratic forms of self-governance. This line of thinking is very much in tune with the design principles for CPR (common-pool resource)—organizational governance structures outlined by Elinor Ostrom (summarized by David Sloan Wilson in his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life’s Greatest Dilemmas” (2016). Yet not all forms of deliberative democracy are created equal. See We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, by John Buck and Sharon Villines (2007), and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, by Jürgen Habermas (1996).
[7] Human systems are different from other biological systems in the sense that they can have identity crises (of self-understanding and conscience) as well as systemic crises (of resources and reproductive capacities). The book Legitimation Crisis, by Jürgen Habermas (1988), makes this point, suggesting the limits of views of social evolution that focus on systems, objectives, resources, and economies while neglecting the fact that meaning-making systems are equally important in sustaining the continuity of society and life.
[8] See Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, by Charles Taylor (1989).
[9] For more on the Fourth Big Bang, see Essay Three.
[10] We discuss this idea in more detail in part two of this book, in particular in Section V.3.
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.
I dove right in. Framing these questions are important for everyone to ask themselves. I think framing these questions could help bring us out of the meta crisis of the battle between right/wrong good/evil if we take the time to complete this deep introspective work. For me the battle of "falling asleep" in the "matrix" or the Maya of everyday life is a real struggle. I love to continue to remind myself of these questions, to help me from falling completely "asleep". Thank you for your work!!
All aboard the LoveTrain! It's a wonderful ride