First Notes on the Eight Core Eros Needs
Part Five of an Early Draft of an Essay on "Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism"
This is the fifth part of an early draft of the essay “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation: “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni and link to the essay on our website.
»Find a List of All the Parts of This Essay HERE«
A later version of it will be part of the forthcoming The Universe: A Love Story series, The Phenomenology of Eros: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire, as well as other forthcoming books. 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.
Introducing the Eight Core Eros Needs
The eight core Eros Needs are:
1) The Need for Eros
2) The Need to be Intended
3) The Need to be Recognized
4) The Need to be Chosen
5) The Need to be Adored/Loved Madly
6) The Need to be Desired
7) The Need to be Needed
8) The Need to Transform
Need One of the Eight Core Eros Needs: The Meta-Need for a Wider Eros
The first of the eight core Eros Needs is a meta-need that suffuses all the other seven needs, even as it has its own distinct contours. The first need is simply the need for Eros.
The litmus test for Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, in which life is self-evidently good and worthwhile. Eros, as we have formulated in the writing of CosmoErotic Humanism, is the experience of radical aliveness yearning for ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. It is both a quality of being—radical aliveness—and a quality of becoming—transformation or growth—the move towards ever-deeper contact and greater wholeness.
Therefore, the experience of Eros, if it is to be sustained, must include both a deep participation in the interiority of being, as well as participation in the pulsating telos of becoming.
[The essay continues below.]
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The Eros of Value
In Eros, we do not answer the question of the meaning of life. It simply falls away.
One dimension of this first Eros Need is the need to feel the elegant order of things. This is what we refer to as the Eros of Value. We need to feel the Eros of the larger goodness, truth, and beauty of existence. We need to experience ourselves inside of the larger order of things.
When we have a direct experience of being on the Inside of the Inside, we get a glimpse of the magic and mystery of existence, which lives beyond our separate selves and which we also participate in directly.
In these moments of Eros, we do not answer the question of meaning; the question itself simply becomes meaningless. The meaningful nature of Reality becomes self-evident.
We might call this first Eros Need the need for the Eros of Value, the knowing that my life has intrinsic value, that my life is significant, that it matters in some intrinsic and real ontological fashion.
A First Anthro-Ontological Note
One anthro-ontological data point is in order at this juncture; it is a point of enormous significance. In all our years of counseling and teaching, we have met many separate-self-actualized individuals. Virtually none of them felt at home, satisfied, or content with their lives. Indeed, a perpetually looming dis-ease—often manifesting as acute disease—with their apparently successful, self-actualized lives was itself a source of enormous anxiety and confusion. Virtually all these individuals had an unrealized core need for a larger Eros, for what we might term an erotic experience of life.
This data point is the Anthro-Ontological Method in full bloom. We realize that the mysteries are within us. The need for a larger Eros, for a wider and deeper sense of identity, is not trivial.
The ubiquity and universality of the Eros Needs points not towards psychological disorder, grandiosity, or Eros—and its meaning as fiction, figment of our imagination or mere social construct.[1] Rather, the core need for this wider Eros reflects a more fundamental ontology of identity. We need a wider Eros and deeper identity because that is our true nature.
This is the very heart of Anthro-Ontology.
In Unique Self, Longing and Fulfillment—Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction—Blur into the Larger Whole of a Life Well Lived
Let’s elaborate on this anthro-ontological data point.
We have just noted that it is a truism of our anthro-ontological experience that even the successful person, who seems to have satisfied their separate self needs as expressed in Maslow’s hierarchy, remains deeply dis-satisfied. This point requires crucial clarification. We are not implying here that satisfaction achieved in the deeper Unique Self contexts of identity ends all experience of longing or even dis-ease. That is self-evidently not the case—for two distinct reasons.
First, a person can be realizing their Unique Self Identity and still needing to engage an entire range of psychological shadow issues, which cause dis-ease of various forms. There is no point at which this interior work of clarification is ever complete or achieved.
But second, even if we are talking about—in terms of shadow issues and personal, psychological wholeness—the most integrated person imaginable, longing and disease still do not disappear. There is an inconsolable longing for home that is part of human existence. And that longing itself points towards a deeper Reality beyond separate self, beyond the valley of tears, which is so often this world.
But in the context of a larger Universe Story, and wider and deeper frames of identity, we begin to both locate ourselves in our longing, and to feel something of the fulfillment of that deeper world to come within the contexts of our lived lives in this world, in this dimension of our existence. When we liberate ourselves from the illusion of being but a skin-encapsulated ego, locked in rivalrous conflict for successful self-commodification, we being to align with the larger life current of Reality.
Our desires deepen in their nature, as they participate in the larger Field of Desire and Eros.
Our values deepen and evolve, as we participate in the wider Field of always evolving yet intrinsic Value.
Our self deepens as we participate uniquely in the larger Field of Selfhood.
Our sense of personal distinction and our unique qualities of intimacy—our unique perspectives—become an expression of the Field of Personhood, instead of a talisman of separateness and alienation.
The infinitely deepened desires, values, and longings of Unique Self, who has evolved beyond exclusive identification with her limited separate-self-identity, are satisfied and not satisfied in the same moment. The chasm between the longing and fulfillment—path and destination—are for the first time not a yawning abyss of despair. Rather, we being to live in the dialectical dance, where longing and fulfillment—path and destination—begin to blur into a larger whole that makes sense of our lives.
To recapitulate:
This inexorable need for a larger Eros is the first of the eight core human needs.[2] The first of the eight needs is the meta-need for Eros—the sense of aliveness and location within the larger order of things. As we connect ourselves to this larger Eros, to the Field of Value, we begin to locate ourselves in the larger order of things. We see the world differently. Something larger than ourselves begins to live us, to animate and even direct our lives. In the ultimate expression of this need, we begin to be lived as love. This is Homo amor.
Essential to Homo amor is, however, not a sense of being merely absorbed in the larger order of things, but a sense of unique significance in the larger order of things. Essential to unique significance is being personally addressed. Homo amor means having the direct recognition—the anthro-ontological realization—of needing to feel personally addressed in the larger order of things. I need to know that I am valued in the Field of Value. That is essential to my capacity to be at home in the larger order of things. It is this sense that is addressed in the next seven core needs, all of which are, in some sense, unique distinctions of the first need.
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Notes on the Contours of Next Seven of the Eight Core Eros Needs
Each of the next seven core needs are expressions of the first core meta-need for Eros. They are each an expression of the first Eros Need for significance (or meaning within the larger order of things). The need for significance itself is not a social, psychological, or cultural construction. Rather, the fundamental need for significance is itself an anthro-ontological expression of significance.
Before unpacking the needs, themselves, which we will do below, we will now turn, in the next sections, to clarifying the contours and characteristics of the seven needs of Eros.
Personal Significance Needs: From Personal to Supra-Personal
All seven needs might be fairly called personal significance needs. Like the first need, these are all Eros Needs. But these personal significance needs are not simply separate self needs. For we are not referring to the personal before what is often called the impersonal. That is what we have called, in Unique Self theory, level-one personal, or in later writings of CosmoErotic Humanism, station one of the personal. There is a higher level of the personal beyond the impersonal: This is the station-three personal. We might also refer to this as the supra-personal.
Let’s clarify this critical idea for a second. The word personal is almost exclusively, used in the classical and contemporary literature of the interior sciences, to refer to aspects of the separate self or the ego self. Beyond the personal is said to live what is alternatively called the impersonal, or sometimes also the transpersonal. This is the realm beyond personality which we, in Unique Self Theory (along with many other theorists) refer to as True Self. So far so good.
For classical enlightenment theorists, this is the summum bonum of realization. We have realized in Unique Self theory and enlightenment practice that while the realization of True Self—I am inseparable from the larger Field of Consciousness, the total number of True Selves is One, the singular that has no plural—is a crucial station of waking up. It is, however, NOT the penultimate realization. It is rather a pivotal station on the path to our full emergence as human beings.
For beyond True Self, there is a level of higher individuation. There is a higher individuation of the personal beyond the ostensibly impersonal Field of True Self.[3] This is the emergence of Unique Self, the irreducibly unique eyes, intimacy, and personhood of True Self—personally individuated beyond ego. In other words, the personal of the ego self or separate self is just the first station of the personal.
In other words, neither the healthy differentiation of the first-station personal self or what we also call separate self [western rational psychology] or the apparent transcendence of the personality in the realization of True Self [eastern, and occasionally western, mystical realization] are the end of the story.
One of the core principles of CosmoErotic Humanism is the rejection of this relegation of the personal to the separate self. There is a level of the personal before the impersonal and a level beyond the impersonal. That is the supra-personal, to which we have just referred. Unique Self is supra-personal. Unique Self is the personal Face of True Self.
The seven core Eros Needs—the personal significance needs—are not the personal needs of the ego or separate self, but rather the supra-personal needs of Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self, of Homo amor.
Again, all seven of these needs are expressions of the first core need—the need for a wider and deeper Eros, particularly the need for a deeper, wider Eros of identity, of value and purpose, in the context of the larger order of things.
Personal Significance Needs: The Search for a Life that Matters—I Matter—and the Mattering of Self
Another way to talk about personal significance needs, which we noted in a passing phrase above, is in terms of the need to matter. We are all searching for personal significance. Or said differently, we are all searching for a life that matters. But what the personal significance needs point towards is that it is not enough to matter personally in a narrow sense of personal ego. Seeking is not, as has been suggested by myriad mystical paths, merely a pathology of the separate self.
Rather, the unrest that drives us towards personal significance, towards a life that matters, is an expression of the Eros of Cosmos seeking-ever deeper contact and larger wholes. We might say that our most profound unrest is Divine Unrest (however you understand the term Divine). We need to be able to say not only I am, but I matter.
What I matter means is directly dependent on the Universe Story, in which one lives, and on the narrative of identity, which defines one’s sense of self. I matter has different meanings at each structural stage of consciousness. New Universe stories and narratives of identity arise with new levels of consciousness.
We will focus on the evolution of the statement I matter along two distinct transformational or growth lines—or what are often called developmental lines in developmental psychology. Two such lines are the identity line and the moral line of development.
To say it simply, I matter means one thing at separate self, something deeper at True Self, something even wider and richer at Unique Self, and something almost infinitely more profound and powerful at Evolutionary Unique Self. That is the progression of I matter along the growth trajectory of identity.
Along the moral line of development, I matter means one thing at egocentric consciousness and intimacy, something wider at ethnocentric consciousness and intimacy, something wider still at worldcentric consciousness and intimacy, and something almost infinitely more encompassing at cosmocentric consciousness and intimacy.
I Matter: The Truth of Embodiment
Before we continue unpacking the seven core personal significance needs, it is worth noting for a moment something of the experience of I matter. Matter is a word that, in English (as well as in other languages), connotes both dense physicality and profound interiority.
Matter incarnates as our bodies are filled with energy. In Hebrew, for example, the word for matter is davar, which means both thing in the sense of matter and word in the sense of Divine Logos.
When Julie Andrews sings, The hills are alive with the sound of music, our bodies thrill with the inchoate truth that we knew but could not speak. Matter is alive. Reality is sentience all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. That is the core nature of the self-actualizing Cosmos. It is what we refer to, in CosmoErotic Humanism, as pan-interiority. The Universe is animated by the energy of what physicist David Bohm suggestively referred to as in-formation.
It is for that reason that sinking deeply into the purity of the body—the state of embodiment—has been articulated as a coming home to oneself. It is this that the interior scientists, the erotic mystics of the Solomonic lineage, referred to when they said, through my body I vision God.[4] The vessel of the body is not, as was thought for two millennia, merely a temple for the soul. Rather, the body is the enfleshment of Spirit itself. The body is a self-organizing field of allured energy, made of subatomic particles and atoms, which themselves are probability waves of relationship, or what we have called configurations of intimacy.
So many people come to our office and present issues that point to not being fully in their bodies. This expresses itself as feelings of not belonging, of feelings of not being seen or heard. Often, they have experienced early trauma, which has interfered with the process of embodiment. A hidden belief that it is dangerous to be here in-forms their physical process. Or, said slightly differently, the in-formation that it is dangerous to be here creates a de-formation in the physical body.[5] They do not come fully into their body because a primal inner fear whispers, if I incarnate, I will be killed. The hidden, foundational belief if I live, I die[6] becomes the distorted organizing principle of consciousness and matter. As one of Wilhelm Reich’s key students, and the innovator of Core Energetics, John Pierrakos, used to say, the issue is the tissue,[7] meaning the emotional issue is literally engrained deeply in the tissues of the body.
As we just noted, the trauma is often related to the danger of being fully seen and heard. As a result of that, the traumatized person often starts to hide, and then, as a consequence, they suffer the wound of not being seen and heard. The sense of personal significance is wounded. As a result, those with this wounding feel they do not belong. They cannot locate themselves in the larger order. Their core experience of mattering is, at least in large part, deconstructed. Such people often conclude that it is not safe to be in their body.
As we go through the process of individuation beyond True Self, we reclaim our unique personal needs. We claim the truth that our lives matter. In doing so, we literally re-matter our bodies. We reclaim our matter, so that we can be seen and heard and feel like we finally belong.
When we lose the thread of mattering, then, we become disembodied. We cannot live in our body. If we feel like we don’t matter, we lose connection to all the in-formation that is available to us through the body. We don’t know what we need, what others need, and what the planet needs. When we are not fully in our bodies, claiming our Unique Self, we are not fully mattered, and people literally don’t see us. When we begin to clarify and fulfill our authentic needs—our own and those beyond us—we begin to matter to ourselves and to others. The full statement of our deepest embodied being is, I am here! I MATTER!
That I matter expresses itself in part in the material body seems strange only if we disassociate from the nature of the body itself. The body looks solid but is actually a spacious, self-organizing field of allured energy and consciousness. Remember that the body is physically constituted by quarks, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, complex molecules, and cells, which are all held together in a web of Eros and allurement. Allurement between quarks, muons, hadrons, and leptons creates subatomic particles. It is Eros—an interior drive towards coherent intimacy and wholeness—coupled with communication between all parts of the body, which constitutes the physical body. Naturally then, the interior experience of I matter is inextricably entwined with one’s incarnation as matter—as mattering in the world.
If we don't feel we matter spiritually or psychologically, it shows up in our physical body. Conversely, the more our statement of I matter! evolves to higher and deeper levels of consciousness, the more our body opens. It is not an accident of language that, in Hebrew, the word for development is hitpath’ut, which literally means opening—because the body is a physical embodiment of consciousness.
Embodiment means becoming whole—to have all of your parts online—to feel deeply and fully—to matter on all levels of consciousness and on all levels of identity, from egocentric to cosmocentric, from separate self to Evolutionary Unique Self.
The Personal Significance Needs Are Bi-Directional
The yearning for all of these personal significance needs moves in two directions. Allow us to explain what this means.
One of the seven personal significance needs is the need to be desired. This expresses itself bi-directionally: I both need to be desired, and I need to desire.
A second of the seven needs is love and adoration: I need to be loved and adored, and I need to love and adore.
In each of the seven core needs, we need to both give and receive whatever the core need might be.
I need to intend and be intended.
I need to recognize and be recognized.
I need to choose and be chosen.
I need to be love-adored and to love-adore.
I need to desire and be desired.
I need to need and to be needed.
Needs Are Rights: A Second Anthro-Ontological Note
Earlier, we unpacked a core equation of CosmoErotic Humanism:
Needs = Desires = Rights
We saw that, as consciousness evolves, both needs and desires are clarified, and although the distinction does not entirely disappear—the two words do not collapse into an isomorphism—they do blur into a larger dance of synchrony and syntony. In what the interior sciences call the process of Berur, to which we referred above as the deeper clarification of need, needs become desires, and desires become needs.
We noted above that each of these core needs and desires is also a core human right. That is the point of the Anthro-Ontological Method. These needs, which we experience in our deepest, and most clarified, healthy selves, are not artificial psychological or social constructions, but rather disclosures of the very nature of Reality. When English poet William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,”[8] he was making an anthro-ontological observation. Our deepest and most clarified interior experience discloses the Infinite. In both, the interior and exterior sciences, human beings are microcosms of the entire evolutionary process.
Between Need, Desire, Values, and Rights: The Right To Intimacy
At the foundational level of existence in the manifest world, interior need and desire are identical. Three quarks need each other and desire each other. Protons, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, desire and need electrons. It is from that primal need and desire that the atom—a new configuration of intimate coherence—a new Value of Cosmos—is formed. Reality is the ever-deepening need and desire, which in turn generates the evolution of value.
At the aspirational levels of Cosmos, the further reaches of human development, clarified need and clarified desire are once again virtually identical. The desire to act in integrity and the need to act in integrity, the desire to create goodness, to disclose truth, and to manifest beauty, and the need for the same are the virtually identical.
Need and desire, in their clarified forms, foundationally and aspirationally,[9] disclose value. Value discloses rights.
For example, intimacy is a fundamental need and desire of Cosmos, foundationally and aspirationally. Desire and need disclose value. We realize that intimacy is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos. As such, intimacy is a right. The right to intimacy, in all its manifold guises, must therefore be embedded in law, economics, education, governance, psychology, and spirituality.
We must read the sciences not in a reductionistic materialistic fashion. Science constantly describes immaterial forces acting on the material.[10] We must take the interiors of the science seriously—reading the sciences in the full implicational fabric of their empirical disclosures.
By doing so, we can articulate a new shared Story of Value, which then becomes the ground for a shared vision of universal human rights, of the kind that was first attempted in modernity but has since broken down under the onslaught of the postmodern deconstruction of rights and values.[11]
Infinity Garbed in Finitude
We could fairly summarize the sciences as saying, Infinity garbs itself in finitude. Or Infinity discloses itself in the singularity of the Big Bang. In the great flaring forth of evolutionary explosion, finitude emerges from the Infinite. Evolution then unfolds—driven by Eros, the desire for ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness (ever-deeper intimacy)—and ultimately incarnates as humanity. Humanity continues to evolve, until we awaken from unconscious to Conscious Evolution—the realization of Homo amor. In this evolutionary unfolding, our interiors are clarified as we move through structural stages of consciousness—in Jean Gebser’s description[12] from archaic to magic, to mythic, to rational, to integral. The last level—Gebser’s integral, which received a profound articulation in contemporary Integral Theory and in our own CosmoErotic Humanism, which is coming online increasingly in our time—transcends, and yet ideally seeks to include, the validated insights of all the preceding levels of evolution—exterior and interior.
Mysteries of interiors and exteriors—of Infinity and finitude—eternity and evolution—unfold in the clarified interior of Homo amor. Gnosis lives inside of our clarified desire. As the interior scientists of Eros write again and again, the razei ha’torah—the mysteries that animate Reality—live within the omek penimi—the deepest interiority—of the nefesh muar u-mevurar—the awakened and clarified heart, body, and mind.[13]
That is Anthro-Ontology.
Footnotes
[1] These are the classical terms deployed by the modern and postmodern mainstream establishment, which rejects the notion of inherent value in Cosmos. See for example, Yuval Harari, Sapiens, chapter two. Harari is significant as he is not a philosopher but rather somewhat of a parrot for neo-Buddhist postmodern deconstruction of Eros and meaning.
[2] It is worth reasserting that we are not suggesting the eight core needs as a hierarchy of needs. They do not necessarily show up in a particular order. Rather, these might more accurately be seen as a spectrum of needs. However, the meta-need of Eros sources the other seven needs.
[3] Indeed, and this is crucial and a major dimension of the new chapters of Unique Self theory, True Self itself is NOT an impersonal Field of Awareness. Rather, it is an Infinitely Personal Field of Awareness and Allurement—of Personhood beyond personality. True Self is a Field of what we have called ErosValue, not yet distinguished—at the human level—into the irreducibly unique expression of the Personal that we are calling Unique Self.
[4] Paraphrased from Job 19:26: “And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.” (NIV)
[5] Wilhelm Reich was pointing to precisely this nexus in his classical statement on the five core character structures. See Reich, Wilhelm. Character analysis. Macmillan, 1980.
[6] See also the section in this book “The Double Bind of Desire and Need: If I Live, I Die.”
[7] This was one of the core teachings of Pierrakos in thousands of talks, which has been adopted by multiple students of his, often without attribution. Pierrakos was a seminal figure in the emergence of body-centered therapies in the second half of the twentieth century. He co-founded, together with his close friend and collaborator Alexander Lowen, bioenergetics. Both were students of Wilhelm Reich. John ultimately split from Lowen, and together with his wife Eva, founded Core Energetics. Eva’s body of work, integrated into Core Energetics, is called Pathwork. See The Pathwork of Self-Transformation by Eva Pierrakos, Bantam 1990. See also, John Pierrakos, Core Energetics, LifeRhythm, 1998.
[8] From Blake, William. The marriage of heaven and hell. Vol. 321. American Chemical Society, 1975.
[9] We are happy to invent this word.
[10] See for example, Howard Bloom’s writings for an extensive description of this phenomenology of Reality that is described by science and yet obfuscated in its jargon. See also, Evolutionary Science Dialogues, Marc Gafni, Howard Bloom, and Barbara Marx Hubbard, forthcoming, for an extensive discussion of this theme, which is implicit in Bloom’s work and is provocatively brought forward by Gafni and Hubbard in their multiyear dialogue series with Bloom.
[11] For an in-depth analysis and critique of these themes in Harari, see the Aubrey Marcus Podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni “Yuval Harari Gets DISMANTLED—Marc Gafni Exposes The Faults In His Logic,” https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/yuval-harari-gets-dismantled-marc-gafni-exposes-the-faults-in-his-logic/. See also our forthcoming books, ErosValue: Love Stories Are the Fabric of the Real: On Value, Pseudo-Value, and Anti-Value—The Great Reconstructive Project (Volume 1 and 2) and Harari’s Bedtime Stories and Why They Cause Nightmares for Children and Adults.
[12] See Gebser, Jean. The ever-present origin. Ohio University Press, 2020.
[13] This is the major motif of Mordechai Lainer and one of the key mystics whom he greatly influenced, Abraham Kook. The Hebrew terms that appear in this sentence, and the meaning we have attributed to them, are part of the combined core lexicon of Lainer and Kook. See Gafni’s Radical Kabbalah, volumes one and two, for a deeper dive.
You Can Also Read the First Parts Here:
Part 1:
Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism—Part One
·
Mar 27
Part 2:
From Maslow’s Five Needs to the Eight Core Needs of Eros
·
Apr 1
Part 3:
CosmoErotic Humanism on Need and Desire
Apr 8
This is the third part of an early draft of the essay “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni. It can be cited under that name.
Part 4:
Three Levels of Relationship Between Need and Desire Across Evolutionary History
This is the fourth part of an early draft of the essay “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni.
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