Evolutionary Love and the Evolution of Love
Part 4 of a 4-Part Series of an Early Draft of the Essay "Early Ontologies of Both—The Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—in the Interior Sciences"
Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
This is the fourth and final part of an early draft of an essay, written by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of Volume 2 of a forthcoming six-volume book series, The Universe: A Love Story, by Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard with Dr. Zachary Stein. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
»Read Part 1 by clicking here«
»Read Part 2 by clicking here«
»Read Part 3 by clicking here«
If you want to read the whole essay in one place, you can find it on our site:
The sources are not only talking about the Universe: A Love Story but also about Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe. Because, for the realization of the esoteric Hebrew wisdom lineage, as recapitulated by Kook, it is not only that an eternal Love, or Eros, is the fundamental nature of Cosmos animating all of its expressions—which is the implication of the Universe: A Love Story. Rather, for Kook and the school of Evolutionary Love Mysticism, from which he emerged,[1] the evolution of love, both personally and cosmically, was the erotic motive of Cosmos,[2] in other words, Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe.
And the core plotline of the Love Story of the Universe is, for Kook and the lineage of interior sciences from which he emerges, no less than the evolution of love. Indeed, the evolution of love as an expression of the Song of Songs is a core motif in Kook’s crystallization of the early ontologies of CosmoErotic Humanism in the interior sciences. Kook ends, for example, a stunning text on the evolution of love, which we already adduced in Volume 1 of this series and will adduce again below, by saying,
[this is] The Song of Songs of Solomon, the King to Whom Wholeness Belongs.
The King to Whom Wholeness Belongs is a formal term in the interior sciences, which alludes to what is sometimes formally called apotheosis. Apotheosis is the realization that the human being in her most perfect form participates in the Divine. And the palpable sense of apotheosis is directly accessible through the realization of human participation in the Infinite Eros of Reality. In other words, the Eros that flows through the human being, animating and driving every human gesture, is the very Eros that animates and evolves all of the movement of Reality itself.
For Kook and for the lineage of interior sciences, beginning with the Wisdom of Solomon, which he is articulating, there is a core ontic identity between human and Divine Eros. Kook draws on the Hasidic tradition and the entire lineage of interior sciences that informs it, in affirming the nature of this ontic identity. In early writings on what we called Nondual Humanism,[3] we have referred to this isomorphism as the ontic identity of wills between the human and the Divine.
Before we turn to Kook and the evolution of love, a word on the ontic identity of wills, core to CosmoErotic Humanism and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, is in order.
A Note on Eros and Will
This notion of Eros incarnate as will, both personal and cosmic, lies at the core of the Wisdom of Solomon and its major text, the Song of Songs, attributed by the tradition to Solomon. In the first chapter of Solomon’s song, the lover writes to the beloved, Mashcheni acherecha ve’ narutza—Draw me erotically after you, and I will run towards you.[4]
The word rutz, as in run in the phrase run towards you, is the same root word as the word ratzon—will, as in the Will of the Name, expressing the Divine or Cosmic Will. The description is paradoxically of the lover being erotically drawn after the beloved, in a manner in which their lover disappears and the higher Will of Eros takes over and guides the way.
There are two distinct steps in the process.
First, the lover says to the beloved, Draw me after you. This is not what we now call in culture consent. It is something far more profound, Eros-laden, and sacred. It is the urgent plea of the lover to the beloved: Draw me—meaning allure me, seduce me. I demand—tenderly and fiercely—your seduction. I invite you, nay I need you, I urgently lovingly need you to seduce me—to demand that I break my boundaries.
And then, the second step, the seduction itself, where the lover is allured to—narutza—run after the beloved. The term run after, as we just noted, is the same as the term will, and in the play of the words, one of the wondrous paradoxes that is coiled in the foundation of CosmoErotic Humanism is disclosed. This description of running after describes the moment in sensuality where one crosses a line, one is no longer rational in the formal sense of making decisions. Rather, one is held and moved forward by a current of Eros, which suspends the lower will. One is carried by the Will of Cosmos, the current of Eros, personally expressed as and directed towards oneself. This moment, when the human being is carried on the wings of Eros, is a pivotal moment of fulfillment and realization in CosmoErotic Humanism. The depth of our humanity is expressed in the ontic identity of wills between the human being and God, in other words between Divine Eros and human Eros.
Clearly then, CosmoErotic Humanism is defying the staid and conventional understanding of seduction in our mainstream culture, where Draw me after you is understood as a regressive boundary violation, which is thought, from an ethical and spiritual perspective, as intensely degraded and negative. But that is only because, in postmodern culture, we have downgraded the human being to being a materialistic separate self, a skin-encapsulated ego, who is born by accident, devoid of meaning and value—in a grotesque attempt to live on purpose—the illusion of which ends in the final brutality of death. From that perspective, the only dignity a human being has in the world is the boundaries of one’s separate self, which must remain inviolate. For their violation could only mean regression to the mere animal—without even the social construction of human dignity.
But from within the realization of the interior sciences, the human being’s True Self is inseparable from the Field of Consciousness, Value, and Desire. Indeed, the human being is not only part of the seamless Field, but the human being realizes that the Field is seamless but not featureless. The human being realizes that s/he is a Unique Self—a higher individuation beyond separate self, an irreducibly unique expression of the larger Field of Eros, Consciousness, and Desire.
From inside this realization, the breaking of boundaries engendered by seduction is not necessarily regressive. There is a new arrow at play in CosmoErotic Humanism. This new arrow points not in a regressive but rather in a transformational—developmental or evolutionary—direction. The boundaries broken are those of contraction and bounded identity. This seduction is to break the limiting boundary of separate self—to realize one’s True Nature as indivisible from the Field of Eros itself and indeed, as an irreducibly unique expression of that Field of One Eros and One Love.
New Book Release: First Values & First Principles
First Values & First Principles
Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
by David J. Temple
AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.
Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.
“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary
David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.
The Radical Implications of the Universe: A Love Story in the Early Ontologies—The Emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity
The interior sciences, in deeply veiled code, directly connect the capacity to have Eros guide the way by passing the assumed inviolability of the conventional structures of law with the cosmic truth that Reality is a Love Story—and, as we have noted above and will more clearly below, an evolving Love Story.
One core writer, Mordechai Lainer of Izbica—also from the Hasidic school, speaking for and extending the classical esoteric wisdom sources—articulates all of the core ideas we noted above in the name of the interior sciences. Lainer, as we have noted in other scholarly writings, is highly influential on Kook.[5] A master in the tradition of nineteenth-century Hasidism, deeply entrenched in the mainstream of the lineage, Lainer articulates his reading of the interior sciences as an expression of Solomon’s hidden wisdom.
To be clear, Lainer himself holds this truth esoterically. As we have pointed towards in some scholarly depth in other writing,[6] only a careful reconstruction of the sources cracks his rigorously crafted code and discloses that Lainer is holding the Wisdom of Solomon lineage and transmitting its essential teaching only to the initiated—namely to those who have the capacity to crack his code and access the esoteric teaching. Lainer boldly declares that the essence of Solomon’s wisdom, as passed down esoterically through the generations, is the capacity to directly access the Will of Cosmos through one’s own will. This is an expression of Lainer’s core realization, which places apotheosis, the human realization of Divinity, as the fundamental plotline of Cosmos.
But our will is not a generic or neutral structure that lives identically in all interiors. Rather, will is unique. We gain direct access to our ontic identity with the Divine Will only through our own unique interior experience. But that unique interior experience is also not generic. It is a unique interior experience of Eros. But not Eros as some sort of social category of utility. Rather, our unique quality of interior Eros participates in the Field of Eros that animates all of Reality.
Lainer’s point is a critical crosscurrent with law and convention. Because for Lainer, Love—Evolutionary Love or Eros—lived in our unique interior—is a normative guide for much of human action. In other words, according to the Wisdom of Solomon, when one is lived as love, one has the ability to directly access the Ratzon—the Will of God—which, as we have noted above, is an expression of the Eros of Cosmos. In Solomon’s wisdom, as unpacked in the esoteric interior sciences, as recapitulated and extended by Lainer, the Eros of Cosmos is personally incarnate in the clarified unique will of every individual, which participates in the Eros of Cosmos.
At this point, we remind ourselves of our note above: In the interior sciences that are the early ontologies of CosmoErotic Humanism and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, Eros and will are mutually entwined if not identical, as disclosed in their shared root, Ratzon and Rutz, as it is deployed in the lovers’ texts of the Song of Songs—the Song of Solomon—which we adduced above.
The narrative of identity, in the Wisdom of Solomon, is sourced in its larger Universe Story, namely that the Cosmos is animated and driven by Eros—in other words, the Universe is a Love Story and evolution is the Love Story of the Universe. The ontological architecture of the interior sciences of the Wisdom of Solomon is a narrative of human identity rooted in a larger Universe Story. That narrative of identity describes the realized human being that uniquely incarnates Cosmic Eros. It is through the human being’s unique access and incarnation of Cosmic Eros, which we might also call Outrageous Love or Evolutionary Love, that the human being has access to and expresses the unique Will of Cosmos that flows through their Unique Self. It is this capacity that allows the human being who is lived as love to be guided by what, for the Wisdom of Solomon, is the implicit normativity of Eros. In other words, the narrative of identity in the Wisdom of Solomon is rooted in its larger Universe Story—the Universe: A Love Story.
We noted earlier that our notion of CosmoErotic Humanism, with its core notion of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, is rooted in both the interior and exterior sciences. On the interior sciences side, one primary set of sources is precisely the Wisdom of Solomon as described by Lainer that we are here adducing. Lainer’s system, in which all is ultimately part of the fabric of Cosmic Eros, is what we have called in earlier writings Acosmic Humanism—or alternately Nondual Humanism. Meaning, the Eros of Cosmos incarnates uniquely in every human being. There is an ontic identity between the clarified human will and what Lainer refers to as the Will of the Divine.[7]
Song of Songs, Chapter One, Verse Four
For Kook, and Lainer and Luria before him, the evolution of love is the core plotline of the Love Story of the Universe. This notion finds myriad expressions in each of these interior scientists. In the passage we will now adduce from Kook, this evolution of love expresses itself as the widening of our circles of felt sense of care and concern. These circles—and our willingness to commit and even sacrifice for their sake— expand:
from our egocentric circle of love [our love of self and our immediate circle]
to our ethnocentric circle of love [our love of our people, religion, nation, or other forms of sociocentric community]
to our worldcentric circle of love [our love for every human being on the planet]
to our cosmocentric circle of love [our love for all living things and for all of Reality—for Gaia and evolution itself].
For Kook and his lineage, this story of the evolution of love, which takes place within the ever-expanding human heart, is the story of the Song of Songs of Solomon. But of course, Kook tells us this elliptically, at the very end of this esoteric passage, in what seems like a poetic flourish, whose true intention would only be understood by initiates.
Here is the key: What Kook discloses is that the Song of Songs, in the reading of the interior sciences of the lineage, is not only a great story of Eternal Cosmic Eros but the story of Evolutionary Eros, moving through history and evolving the human being, and, as the text will make clear, his Evolutionary We-Spaces.
Kook calls each of the expression of Eros a distinct song, and all four of them constitute what he calls the four-fold song. The gradual emergence of the four-fold song, with the melody of the individual and collective consciousness, is itself an expression of the Song of Songs of Solomon.
Here is Kook’s text,[8] with our brief explanation in brackets, which should be, at least in its broad strokes, self-explanatory.
There is a one
who sings the song of his soul,
and in his soul, he finds it all,
full, complete spiritual satisfaction.
[This the first circle of Eros—egocentric love.]
And there is a one
who sings the song of the nation.
He leaves the zone of his personal soul,
which he doesn’t find wide enough,
and not settled in ideal serenity,
and attaches himself with tender love
to the totality of the congregation of Israel
and together with her
he sings her songs,
he suffers her pains
and he takes delight in her hopes,
he ponders high and pure ideas
about her past and her future,
and he investigates
with love and the wisdom of the heart
the inner content of her soul.
[This is the second circle of Eros—ethnocentric or sociocentric love.]
And there is a one
who widens his soul even further
until it expands and spreads beyond the boundary of Israel
to sing the song of humanity;
his soul is continuously enlarged
by the genius of Man
and the glory of his divine image,
he aspires towards Man’s universal purpose
and anticipates his higher wholification,
and from this living source
does he draw the entirety of his thoughts and explorations,
his aspirations and his visions.
[This is the third circle of Eros—worldcentric love.]
And there is a one
who rises even further than this in expansion
until he joins himself in unity with all of existence in its totality,
with all creatures
and with all worlds,
and together with all of them he gives forth song;
and this is the one
who “engages daily in a chapter of song”
who is promised that he lives in the emergent world.
[This is the fourth circle of Eros—cosmocentric love.]
And there is a one
who rises with all these songs
together in one unity,
and all of them send forth their voices,
all together they play their melodies,
and each pours vigor and life into the other,
the sound of jubilance and the sound of joy,
the sound of celebration and the sound of exultance,
the sound of rejoicing and the sound of holiness.The song of the soul,
the song of the nation,
the song of humankind,
the song of the world,
all flow together within him
all the time, at every moment.
[The perfect form of the human being sings all of the songs, egocentric, sociocentric, worldcentric, and cosmocentric at once, without experiencing any contradiction between them. Quite the opposite, all the songs synthesize into a new song which includes and transcends each of the previous songs.]
And this completeness, in its fullness,
rises to become the song of holiness:
…
a simple song,
a double song,
a three-fold song
a four-fold song.
The Song of Songs of Solomon,
The King to whom Wholeness belongs.
For Kook, as we saw in his short introduction to the commentary on the Song of Songs[9] [and it is clear in myriad other passages of Kook], all, everything, is alive and suffused with value. Nothing is inert or dead. A pulsing movement of Love throbs in, as, and through everything. But aliveness is not exhausted by being. The Eros of aliveness and value is constantly becoming, both in exterior and interior forms.
For Kook all—everything—is sentient. Reality is, in one sense or another, sentience all the way down and sentience all the way up the evolutionary chain. Kook talks again and again about the Ratzon, the living Eros, that animates all of the living Universe, even that which is sometimes referred to as inanimate.[10] Nothing is inert or dead. A pulsing movement of love throbs in, as, and through everything. And everything is part of an eternal yet evolving organic whole.
All of Reality, with no exception, is animated from within by this pulsing Divine Eros, which vibrates in and as each of us with the absolute radiance of Eros, which is ever-rising, deepening, and evolving, manifest in what we will refer to below as Three Faces of Spirit—S/He, You, and I—third person, second person, and first person.
It is also worth noting the evocation of Solomon that occurs at the end of Kook’s text on the four-fold song above. This is not insignificant. Indeed, in the interior science of the Hebrew wisdom lineage, CosmoErotic Humanism itself is rooted in a number of source sets, all of which are part of a general literature that is known as the Wisdom of Solomon. In the separate volume that we mentioned at the beginning of our conversation,[11] we will engage this set of ancient sources—all expressions of the Wisdom of Solomon, and all directly expressing or foreshadowing CosmoErotic Humanism in greater depth. For now, it is sufficient to say that the Wisdom of Solomon, which lies at the core of the interior science of Hebrew wisdom, is actually but an early form of what we are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.[12]
The manifest Eros of Divinity, for Kook, expressing the lineage of Luria and the Hebrew interior sciences called the Wisdom of Solomon, manifests itself in the universal desire—appetite in the parlance of Kook’s contemporary Alfred North Whitehead—for goodness, love, beauty, and truth, all inseparable from the auto-erotic yearning of Divinity for its own fulfillment. Divine Eros is on the move, Eternity manifests as evolution—eternal being and ecstatically urgent becoming.[13]
Both Kook and Whitehead, however, are deeply infused—the former directly and the latter indirectly—by the primary Lurianic lineage of Eros, with which we began, that moved from Hebrew Kabbalah via various channels including Christian Kabbalah and its mystery schools, into the Renaissance. Given Luria’s and Lurianic Kabbalah’s enormous influence over the Renaissance, it becomes critical to note that Luria himself—in his affirmation of the centrality of Eros, the human participation in the Field of Eros, and the human-caused evolution of Eros—is not an aberration but rather a direct expression and deepening of the lineage teachings of the Universe: A Love Story that is axiomatic to the esoteric realization of the Hebrew lineage. We will point towards this truth in more depth in our Solomon Matrix volume.[14]
Another seminal lineage figure in the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom who expresses the Universe: A Love Story realization is the famed Don Judah Abarbanel, scholar par excellence, son of Don Isaac Abarbanel, communal leader and advisor to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and a major figure in the Renaissance. His major work, Dialoghi d’Amore, was published in its canonical form in the three dialogues in 1535 in Rome. Another work, On the Harmony of the Heavens, was attributed to him, ostensibly penned at the request of the central Renaissance figure Pico della Mirandola.
Don Judah, or Leone Ebreo as he was known in Christian Renaissance circles, writes as follows:[15]
[Human marriage is a] copy of the sacred and divine marriage of the supremely beautiful with the highest beauty, from which the whole universe has its origin.
This passage and the one we will promptly adduce below anticipate Whitehead’s understanding of beauty, as including goodness and truth, whose most profound realization is the great telos of the Universe: A Love Story. Ebreo explicitly ascribed his understanding to the ancient King Solomon, who, as we point out in section two of the Wisdom of Solomon Matrix volume,[16] is the primary realizer sourcing the ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story in the tradition. Indeed, there we will show that the Wisdom of Solomon itself is a primary ancient antecedent for the ontologies of what we are referring to as CosmoErotic Humanism.
Leone Ebreo:
Solomon and the sages of the bible were of the opinion that the world was created as the son of the supernal beautiful the father, and the supernal wisdom the mother, or the supernal beauty. As they say that the supernal wisdom fell in love with the supernal beautiful as a woman does with a man who is more perfect than she. And the supernal beauty returned her love, and she conceived from him and bore to him a son, which is the entire universe in all its parts…By his love for her she became more perfect…and she conceived and gave birth to the perfection of the reality…the supernal beauty is not only the wife of the supernal beautiful but also its first child…the mother is the first intellect.[17] [i]
Leone Ebreo was a seminal figure in the interior science of the Hebrew lineage in alluring the Christian interior sciences towards Kabbalah and, in this sense, was an important force [one of many] in the flowing of the Christian Kabbalah in the Renaissance.
For, as we noted above, however, it was primarily the Kabbalah mediated through the Christian Kabbalah of the Renaissance that birthed the Evolutionary Spirituality of Fichte and Schelling.[18]
Kashmir Shaivism
As we have explored in some depth the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom, it is but one model of early ontologies in the interior sciences for key dimensions of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe. A similar understanding of Eros as the motive force of Reality, and particularly the creative process, also shows up in Kashmir Shaivism’s notion of Sat Chit Ananda as a central structure of Cosmos. Sat means Being. The inside of Sat is Chit, meaning Consciousness. The inside of Chit is Ananda, or BlissLove. BlissLove is thus the Inside of the Inside—the motive interior force of Cosmos.
In Hinduism, and especially in the original source texts of Kashmir Shaivism, Shakti, which is not entirely dissimilar to what we are calling Eros, is the dynamic motive force of Cosmos.
This notion of Shakti, Ananda, or Eros as central to the evolutionary process was foundational to Sri Aurobindo, the Hindu scholar and mystic who was one of the most important voices of Conscious Evolution in the twentieth century.
Sufism
While Kashmir Shaivism and Hebrew mysticism are most explicit in understanding Eros as the creative aggregating structure of Cosmos, moving diverse parts into larger wholes of coherent intimacy, similar structures appear in Sufism. For Sufism, all love is the love for God and the love of God.[19]
At the source of virtually all of the premodern traditions is a core notion of involution and evolution, which we will discuss in somewhat more depth in Appendix One of First Meditations on the Intimate Universe.[20] As we pointed out at the outset, a full volume integrating the distinct contribution of each of the interior sciences in this regard is necessary. We can for now, however, only provide this essay and one larger volume on the Solomon Matrix,[21] which expands on the material we have adduced here, from the interior science of Hebrew wisdom, with both more breadth and depth. But for now, with all of this in mind, let us proceed with our broader conversation around the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe.
Recontextualizing these traditions in an evolutionary context, we might formulate them as follows: Infinite LoveReality hides itself, contracting into a single point, devolving as it were from Spirit to Mind to Life to Matter into a single Point of Reality. That single point then explodes as the singularity of the Big Bang and evolves again from Matter to Life to Mind and then all the way back to Spirit. This is the involution of love followed by the evolution of love, climaxing, after eons of infinitely meaningful agony and ecstasy, into the New Human and the New Humanity—what we will call Homo amor.
The Three Faces of Love: Love in First, Second, and Third Person
Persian Sufi and Hebrew Hasidic texts love poetry, of which the likes of Rumi and Hafiz are but the most popular representatives. They move constantly and seamlessly through what has been termed the First, Second, and Third Persons of the Divine, to which we have already alluded above.
Thus, Reality’s creative process, constantly evolving towards ever-deeper levels of intimate coherence (Third Person), is—in its essential quality—not different from all the other expressions of love in Reality, be it the human passion for the Divine or the passion for another human being and all forms of finitude (Second Person), or the love that courses through the human being herself (First Person).
Rather, these are three Faces of Love: Love in first person, love in second person, and love in third person:
I is first person.
You, or we, is second person.
Him or her or it, they or them, are third person.
I refers to my own interior experience of myself. I is the interior experience of the first person.
You, or we, is about the space in between us. You, or we, is the interior experience of the second person.
Looking at something, a force or object, or a person or group of persons, is third person. Thus, the third person could be him or her or they or them or it. Him or it—for example—are the interior experiences of the third-person gaze.
The laws of science, taken as a whole, both the exterior sciences and interior sciences, describe the third-person forces of Eros that drive Cosmos. Think, for a second, of the four forces, the gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear. These are the four forces that, in every nanosecond, hold all of Reality in exterior and interior bonds.
We often hear the word bond in description of both exterior-science relationships and interior-science relationships: Chemical bonds and emotional bonds, for example. A bond is, from one perspective, the third-person Eros of all of Reality, which itself is a dance between autonomy and allured relationships of intimate coherence.
But of course, as already implicit in the previous sentence and self-evident in science, the third-person force of science with its multiplicity of bonds and precisely attuned bonding forces—forces of Eros—is in fact rooted in myriad second-person relationships. An atom, for example, is inexplicable without discerning—feeling—the second-person relationships between protons, neutrons, and electrons. And of course, the four forces themselves are forces of allurement and autonomy, or attraction and repulsion in more formal exterior scientific terms. Indeed, it is the dialectical relationship between allurement and autonomy that is Eros itself. Thus, third-person Eros is inextricably entwined with second-person Eros.
In the second-person force of Love or Eros, we discern the quality of feeling—both the feeling of allurement and autonomy as two qualities of will. Indeed, as we saw earlier, through looking at the original Hebrew word ratzon, which is literally translated as will, that will is contained within the Principle of Eros as well. Ratzon implies both Eros and will, which are, in some real sense, inextricable.
Finally, this force of Eros—Eros and will—courses in us, as us, and through us as our fundamental experience of our first-person Reality. And this experience of the first person—which itself is the experience of will—does not begin at the human level, but can, on some level, be traced deep into evolutionary history—some theorists would argue to the very inception of the manifest world. This is what Alfred North Whitehead was referring to when he talked about the prehension that lives at the very subatomic level of being and becoming.
These three Faces of Eros are not a social construction of Reality. They are First Principles and First Values of Reality itself. They are not, however, static, or eternal, in the sense of unchanging First Values and First Principles. Rather, they are evolving First Values and First Principles. First Principles and First Values are what physicist Richard Feynman and mathematician Stuart Kauffman refer to when they describe a proto-freedom or will [or Eros] that lives all the way down the evolutionary chain.
In Freeman Dyson’s words,
There is a certain kind of freedom that atoms have to jump around, and they seem to choose entirely on their own without any input from the outside, so in a certain sense atoms have free will.[22]
Mathematician John Conway and his colleague Simon Kochen at Princeton audaciously refer to “the free decisions of particles and humans…free will.”[23] Stuart Kauffman, based on a dazzling depth of scientific and mathematical reasoning, asserts that “elementary particles have volition. That they have free will.”[24] Conway and Kochen articulate what they audaciously call the Free Will Theorem. In its opening lines they begin as follows:
Do we really have free will, or, as a few determined folk maintain, is it all an illusion?
They gave an outrageous answer,
We don’t know, but will prove in this paper that if indeed there exist any experimenters with a modicum of free will, then elementary particles must have their own share of this valuable commodity.[25]
As Howard Bloom recapitulates it:[26]
In other words, Kauffman, Dyson, Kochen, and Conway are telling you and me that if we have free will, then electrons, photons, and atoms have free will too. What appalling anthropomorphism. Or is it?
If you rerun Thomas Young’s two-slit experiment, a photon shooting from your light source has to “decide” which slit to go through. Should it go through the left slit or the right? Writes Reinhold Blümel, professor of physics at Wesleyan University, “a photon . . . has to ‘make up its mind.’”[27]
Blümel is not suggesting that protons think the way humans do. Protons do not have human minds. That would be a pseudo-magical retrojection of the human world onto the subatomic world. There is obviously a radical discontinuity of the quality of consciousness between matter, life, and mind, and even between distinct levels of matter, life, and mind. But there is also continuity. This is what we have called, in our work on First Principles and First Values, the Principle of Continuity and Discontinuity. In fact, Blümel is deploying a metaphor when he says that the photon must make up its mind. But as we point out, together with Howard Bloom and other interior scientists of language, universal patterns in language also disclose First Principles and First Values of Reality. And it is in that precise sense that metaphors work because they are pointing to something real, in Blümel’s case to a quality of will or mind, or what we have called a first-person quality, which itself is what we are calling a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.
This is what Howard refers to as an Ur Pattern. A First Principle or First Value of Cosmos is a deep pattern of coherent intimacy coded with meaning that repeats itself “over and over again on wildly different levels of cosmic evolution.”[28]
So, returning again to Blümel:
Blümel in describing atoms puts “make up its mind” in quotes because he is using a figure of speech, not a scientific description. He is not implying that photons can think. He is not suggesting that photons have minds. He is using a metaphor. But when metaphors work, it is often because they capture Ur patterns, patterns repeated on many levels of emergence. It is often because they capture deep structures of the cosmos. Structures as deeply embedded as axioms. Why deeply embedded? Because they are often structures that have been here from the beginning. Structures on which everything around us has been built.[29]
These structures are what we are referring to as First Principles and First Values of Cosmos.
Blümel is arguing, together with Conway, Kochen, Kauffman, Feynman, and others that the first-person perspective, or expression, is as well a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos. It is, however, like all First Values and First Principles, what we call evolving First Principles and First Values. This is the crucial point that we point towards in our work First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come and later in the primary book on First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism—Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method.[30]
We have gone to some pains to show that Eros and its quality of will live in three persons, what we have called the three persons of love, or the first, second, and third person of Eros. This tripartite distinction between the first, second, and third person of Eros is central to the ontologies of love as they show up in Hebrew wisdom, Sufism, and Kashmir Shaivism. Expressions of them are also found in mystical Christianity, tantric Buddhism, and indigenous cultures. In Kabbalah, the Zohar famously distinguishes between God as Ani, Ata, and Hu, literally translated I, You, and He. In Kashmir Shaivism, Shiva is pure consciousness, the ultimate I, while Shakti is the dynamic force of Cosmos in both first, second, and third person—with Nara being the effect of Shiva and Shakti, a classic expression of third person.[31]
The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and, later, Integral Theory recapitulate these great traditions, when they point out that these three perspectives—first, second, and third person—are primordial dimensions of Reality built into the very substrate of existence through the universals of language.[32]
Language, for the interior scientist, is the core structure of Reality. For the logical positivist as well, clarity of universal language is a key window into the nature of Reality.[33]
In the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, we might say that language discloses First Principles and First Values of Reality. First, second, and third person need to be understood, in this light, as First Principles and First Values of Reality—the three primordial perspectives.
The three primordial perspectives are, as Whitehead pointed out, the nature of Reality all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Through the intimate interiority of I, the intimacy of We, and the third person telos of He and She, the intimate interiority of Eros itself operates at all levels of Cosmos. It is these three perspectives that we referred to above as the three Faces of Love or the three Faces of Eros.
Footnotes & Endnotes
Footnotes
[1] Marc Gafni has called this lineage Evolutionary Kabbalah. For a set of core sources of Evolutionary Kabbalah. translated into English, together with Avraham Leader, see Marc Gafni, Evolutionary Kabbalah Sources, .
[2] Kook roots himself, like most Hebrew mystics, in the Songs of Songs of Solomon. Ibid. On the Song of Songs, and particularly the verse, “Its insides are lined with love” as a description of Reality as Eros, see Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Book One, p. 120. On Kook and the meta-context of Cosmic Love and its relationship to earlier sources, see Radical Kabbalah, Book One, pp. 325-329 and 247-291. For Kook, Love of God meant the Love that courses through all of Reality, the Cosmic Force of the Universe awake and alive uniquely in the human being. Uniqueness is a major theme of Kook, and particularly uniqueness as an expression not of separation but Essence. On this sense of uniqueness and its history in Hebrew wisdom, see also, Radical Kabbalah, 1-89. The best collection of Kook sources, expressing this sense of things in Kook, is by Ruchi Ebner, a collection of what Ebner termed instead of translations, Transilluminations of key Kook texts. Ebner had published this excellent collection online for a time under the title My Rav Kook. See also Tamar Ross for a more extensive collection of Kook sources, prepared for her university courses, which covers much of the same sources. We are indebted to both collections, which were formative as I (Marc) re-engaged Kook in my early thirties.
[3] See Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Book One, chapter 15, “Lainer and the Romantics” and “Excursus to Volume One: On Acosmic Humanism vs. Autonomy” on ontic identity of wills, and “Nondual Humanism and the Democratization of Enlightenment” in the Introduction to the same volume on nondual humanism. See also Zachary Stein’s “Review of Radical Kabbalah” in Integral Review, March 2014, Vol. 10, No. 1. For a later expression of some of these ideas, see Gafni, Kincaid, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive. BenBella Books, Inc, 2017, and Zachary Stein, “Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern ‘Return’ to a Metaphysics of Eros,” in Integral Review, August 2018, Vol. 14, No. 1.
[4] Song of Songs, Chapter One, Verse Four.
[5] On Lainer as a formative influence on Kook, see Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Book One, “Lainer and Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook,” pp. 325-329.
[6] See Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Book Two, Volume Two: The Wisdom of Solomon as the Matrix of Lainer’s Nondual Acosmic Humanism and Unique Self.
[7] See Marc Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Books 1 and 2, written at Oxford University under the co-supervision of Moshe Idel. I (Marc) wrote some 1200 pages, of which 300 pages were submitted for a doctoral dissertation. The point of both volumes was to unpack the outlines of the New Human and the New Humanity, what I then called Acosmic Humanism or Nondual Humanism. After further unpacking the realities of Eros, which, as I began to realize in renewed depth and intensity, animate all of Reality—as reflected both in the hard sciences and especially in its frontier iterations, think, for example, molecular biology, systems, complexity and chaos theory, new physics, and so much more—I, together with Barbara Marx Hubbard, Kristina Kincaid, and Zak Stein, coined the term CosmoErotic Humanism.
[8] Kook, Abraham, Orot HaKodesh [Lights of Holiness], #82|1:444.
[9] In the section called “The Secret of the Name Meets the Secret of the Cherubs: The Universe: A Love Story.”
[10] See, for example, Kook, in a passage entitled “Ratzon Ha-Olam—The Will of the World” in The Lights of Holiness, volume two, pp. 369, passage thirty-one. This is but one of dozens of passages of Kook that elliptically consent the same esoteric truth: All of Reality is Ratzon, Will and Eros, and all of Reality—matter, life, and mind—participate in the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution the Love Story of the Universe.
[11] Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[12] On the Wisdom of Solomon, see Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Book One, the Introduction to volume one, pp. lix ff., as well as the section “Model Five: The Wisdom of Solomon,” pp 290-291, and Radical Kabbalah, Book Two, volume two, is about “The Wisdom of Solomon as the Matrix of the Enlightenment Teaching of Nondual Acosmic Humanism and Unique Self,” and Radical Kabbalah, Book Two, volume three, “The Sources and Evolution of the Wisdom of Solomon in Kabbalah and Hasidut.” Note: volumes two and three appear in the same Book.
[13] Ibid, Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, Jewish Lives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 94: “Everything is alive. Nothing is inert. A seething dynamism pulses through everything, and everything is part of an eternal, organic whole. All is animated, illuminated from within by God, who vibrates in each and all with absolute, radiant, and loving presence; and everything is rising. All that is, was, or will ever be is of God, a personality living in all three persons—he, you, and I. The eternal God manifests Himself in historical time in the universal yearning for goodness, love, beauty, and truth, all of a piece with His own yearning for self-expression. We are the field on and through which that divine yearning strains for self-realization. The resolution of that longing is holiness; the place where the soul comes to rest is the holy, as near as we can get to the endlessly beating heart of God.” Mirsky is an excellent scholar of Kook. Note, however, both the overlaps in our descriptions of Kook, which are intentional, and the distinction, both in our verbiage and in the feeling tone of our descriptions, which are no less intentional.
[14] Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[15] See Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love, pp, 425, an English translation of his Dialoghi d’Amore [translated into English by F. Friedberg-Seely and Jean H. Barnes, Soncino Press, June 1937. See also Hubert Dethier, “Love and Intellect in Leone Ebreo: The Joys and Pains of Human Passion,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman, (Suny Press, Albany, 1993), pp. 353-385. See also Shlomo Pines, “Medieval Doctrines in Renaissance Garb, Some Jewish and Arabic Sources of Leone Ebreo’s Doctrine” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. B.D. Cooperman, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass, 1983). See also Idel, Moshe, “The Source of the Circles Images in Dialoghi d’Amore” Iyyun 28, 1978, pp. 162-166, where he challenges the assumption of Ebreo’s indebtedness to Renaissance thinker Marcelo Ficino. I (Marc) would argue that the search for external sources in which to root Ebreo is, while not entirely frivolous, fundamentally misguided. Ebreo is in fact a classical expression of the Wisdom of Solomon lineage that formed him, that we have unpacked above and that we will unpack in great depth in the Solomon matrix volume—Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[16] Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[17] Ibid, Ebreo, Philosophy of Love, pp. 454-5. Scholarship correctly points to multiple influences on Ebreo. Shlomo Pines [ibid] points towards Avicenna’s Risalah al-Ishq, The Treatise of Love, which was known to Ebreo. Moshe Idel points to an Arabic nonplatonic treatise of the twelfth century, The Book of Imaginary Circles by Ibn Sid Al-Batalyusi, while pointing to the interaction between Renaissance Neoplatonism and its philosophy of love, mediated by the commentaries and translations of key Renaissance figure Marcello Ficino. Of course, Neoplatonism itself has a long and complex history of interpenetration with the Hebraic lineages, which has never been sufficiently documented. Warren Zev Harvey points to Crescas and his influence on Ebreo [Harvey, Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas, Gieben, Amsterdam, 1998]. All of this scholarship is of course important and helpful. It also needs to be said, as evidenced from section two in the Solomon Matrix volume—Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press]—cited ibid, that Ebreo is actually articulating not a novel position, but rather new language forms of the classical Universe: A Love Story realization that lies at the center of the esoteric Wisdom of Solomon lineage. Scholarship might have paid better attention to Ebreo himself, who is explicit in locating Solomon and other Hebrew sages as his core source. On the general issue of the relationship between Kabbalah and the Renaissance, see Moshe Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: A Survey, Yale University Press, 2011. For the broader issue of the Neoplatonic schools and their relationship to Kabbalah, see an extensive scholarship, in which Moshe Idel’s work stands at the center. See for example, Idel’s “Metamorphoses of a Platonic Theme in Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Studies at the Central European University 3 (2002-2003) 67-86. At this point, we cite Idel’s first three footnotes from this article—in our accompanying endnote—as they are relevant here.
[18] See Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, (p. 468), Endnote 7 to Chapter 8: “The Kabbalists had significant influence on Fichte and Schelling, who are often listed as the originators of Evolutionary Spirituality. On the influence on Kabbalistic sources on Schelling, see Eliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 392n2. This influence is not a minor fancy of some scholar, but a major insight of the most respected scholars in the field.”
[19] See for example E. H. Whinfield, Gulshan-i Raz, The Mystic Rose Garden, London, 1880, pp. 70-94; F. Lederer, The Secret Rose Garden of Sa’d-ul-Din Mahmud Shabistari, Lahore, 1969, pp. 17-22, 41-45 and 61-64; and Johnson Pasha, The Secret Garden, London, 1969, pp.79-81. Lahiji’s Persian commentary on this work, Mâfatîh al-I’jâz fi sharh Gulshan râz, greatly elaborates on the technical meaning of these terms. See the edition of K. Sami’i, Tehran, 1337/1958, pp.549-706. ‘Iraqi explains the meaning of numerous terms referring to sensual images—such as desire, love, beauty, wink, deception, coquetry, veil, tree, eyebrow, languid eyes, wine, tavern, cupbearer, hangover, minstrel, tambourine and dance (a total of some 320 words)—in his Istilahât, ed. by J. Nurbakhsh along with ‘Iraqi’s Lama’at, Tehran, 1353/1974; also by S. Naficy in Kulliyyat-i ‘Iraqi, Tehran, 1338/1959. op cit, The Divine Roots of Human Love, WilIiam C Chittick, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society Journal. These terms parallel the terms in Solomon’s Song of Songs and are meant to be expressions of the Divine Eros at the center of Cosmos. Naturally in both traditions, the mainstream of commentary attempted to allegorize their reading, making the love abstract, intellectual, and often arid, desiccating the Eros that lives in the original sources, as an accurate description of the animating quality of reality and its motives.
[20] See the section of Appendix One of First Meditations on the Intimate Universe: Volume One—Global Intimacy Disorder as Cause for Global Action Paralysis—A New Universe Story as the Necessary Response to Existential Risk, forthcoming, Waterside Productions, on “Involution and Evolution in the New Perennialism,” for the core realization of the interior sciences on the lower being already seeded with the higher. For a short recapitulation of the involution and evolution movement from Plotinus through the modern mystics, see Wilber, K, Integral Spirituality, Shambala Publications, Integral Books, 2006, Appendix One.
[21] Ibid. Gafni, Marc, The Wisdom of Solomon Matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism: Early Ontologies of the Universe: A Love Story and Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe in the Interior Sciences of Hebrew Wisdom [forthcoming, Waterside Press].
[22] Freeman Dyson, “Could Atomic Science Explain Free Will?” BigThink.com, (accessed September 6, 2011)—quoted in Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016).
[23] See Stuart A. Kauffman, “Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind,” Edge.org, August 7, 2009, (accessed December 2023). Kauffman quotes Conway and Kochen in his article (Conway, J. and Kochen, S., The Free Will Theorem, , (2006) and Conway, J. and Kochen, S., The Strong Free Will Theorem, , (2008). The Kauffman article is also quoted in Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016). According to Howard Bloom, “Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind” is “an essay that appears on one of the most prominent websites for advanced physicists and mathematicians.”
[24] Howard Bloom about Kauffman in Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016), p. 511.
[25] John Conway and Simon Kochen, “The Free Will Theorem,” April 11, 2006, (accessed December 2023).
[26] Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016), pp. 511-512.
[27] Reinhold Blümel, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: From Photons to Quantum Computers (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2010), pp. 15, 32—quoted in Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016).
[28] Ibid, Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016), p. 282.
[29] Ibid, Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016), p. 512.
[30] See David J. Temple, First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, and see also the fuller conversation in David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism: Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method.
[31] At a lower level, or what Shaivism refers to as a tattva (levels of emanation, loosely defined, are called tattvas), these three Faces of Reality might be expressed as purusha, the pure consciousness of first person, and prakriti, both the second and third person faces of nature.
[32] I (Marc) and Ken Wilber engaged in an in-depth set of conversations in 2003-5, around particularly the word You, as it appears in language and lineage. We focused on an interior-science story in which a Hasidic lineage master, Zusia of Onipol, faints in ecstasy when speaking the word You in the context of prayer, with You being an expression of the second face of spirit, what I have referred to in Your Unique Self, (Integral Publishers 2012) as the Infinity of Intimacy in its personal face that knows your name. These conversations were integrated and came to be expressed in Integral Theory—recapitulating similar structures in Kabbalah, Kashmir Shaivism, Sufism, Mystical Christianity, and other traditions—as the three Faces of Spirit—I, You, and It—or I, We, and It—First person, second person, and third person. See Wilber, Ken, Integral Spirituality, 2006. See also Gafni, Marc, Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion and Rosh Hashanah, written in 2005 and first published 2014 by Integral Publishers. The introduction contains an extended conversation around the three Faces of Spirit.
[33] See for example, Language, Truth and Logic, by A.J. Ayers, 1936, Dover.
Endnotes
[i] At this point, we cite Idel’s first three footnotes from this article—“Metamorphoses of a Platonic Theme in Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Studies at the Central European University 3 (2002-2003) 67-86—as they are relevant here:
1 G. Scholem, ‘The Traces of ibn Gabirol in Kabbalah’, Me’assef Soferei Eretz Yisrael (Tel-Aviv, 1960), pp. 160–78 (Hebrew); M. Idel, ‘Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance’, in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. L. E. Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 319–52; M. Idel, ‘The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of Kabbalah in the Renaissance’, Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. B. D. Cooperman (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 186–242.
2 G. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah (tr. A. Arkush, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky) (JPS and Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 269, 363; G. Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter Printing House, 1974), p. 45, 98.
3 See, e.g., M. Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 239–49, where I assume the formative role of much earlier elements found in material related to Judaism; M. Idel, ‘The Image of Man above the Sefirot,’ Daat, vol. 4 (1980), pp. 41–55 (Hebrew), esp. pp. 54–5; M. Idel, ‘Kabbalistic Material from the School of R. David ben Yehudah he-Hasid’, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, vol. 2 (1983), pp. 170–93 (Hebrew), esp. 173; M. Idel, ‘The Sefirot above the Sefirot’’, Tarbiz, vol. 51 (1982), pp. 239–80 (Hebrew); Idel, ‘Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance’, pp. 338–44; E. Wolfson, ‘Negative Theology and Positive Assertion in the Early Kabbalah’, Daat, vol. 32–33 (1994), pp. V–XXII. For the existence of a scheme of supernal decades before the period when Scholem claimed that Kabbalah begun see also M. Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 113–18. I hope to return elsewhere to a discussion of an additional example found in late antiquity, where the concept of aperantos is found together with a double scheme of ten divine powers. See, meanwhile, the important discussion of Sh. Pines, Collected Works, vol. V (ed. W. Z. Harvey and M. Idel) (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997), pp. 153–7 and note 22. On the presence, in a late medieval Jewish source, of a theosophical understanding of the ten sefirot, see E. Wolfson, ‘The Theosophy of Shabbetai Donnolo, with Special Emphasis on the Doctrine of the Sefirot in Sefer Hakhmoni’, Jewish History, vol. 6 (1992) = The Frank Talmage Memorial, vol. II, pp. 281–316; E. Wolfson, Along the Path (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 68–9.