Integrating the Two Models of Self: The Five Selves & The Three Selves

Part 3 of a 5-Part Series of an Early Draft of the Essay "The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future"

»Read Part 1 of this Essay HERE«

»Read Part 2 of this Essay HERE«

We have also added new graphics to the whole essay:

We are implicitly engaging here two models of Self that are core to CosmoErotic Humanism. The first, which we briefly referenced above and is discussed in depth in other writings, is the five selves.[1] They are separate self, false self, True Self, Unique Self, and Evolutionary Unique Self.

The Briefest of Recapitulations

Separate self, the classical identity of the modern human being in open societies, and to a large extent in closed societies, is the experience of the egocentric self—the skin-encapsulated ego-self—who experiences herself as ontologically separate from the larger wholes in which she is entwined. She is surrounded, in the best-case scenario, by her immediate set of family and perhaps friends, in open societies; and in closed societies, she is also embedded in the identity of the state.

False self is a distortion of the separate self that starts forming through the pain of separation that the child experiences after the separate self emerges from the pre-personal stage.

True Self is the realization that changes everything. It is the realization that she is in fact not separate from—indeed fully one with—the seamless coat of the Universe in all its interiors and exteriors.

Unique Self is the realization that the coat of the Universe is seamless but not featureless—and that he is its distinct feature, a distinct individuation, of the whole with ontological dignity and distinction.

Evolutionary Unique Self is her self-location in the larger evolutionary context—the realization that she is the personal face of the evolutionary impulse itself.

The Integration

The self of psychological science—the psychological self—is separate self and false self.

The Self of enlightenment science—the Eternal Self—is True Self.

The Self of evolutionary science—Evolutionary Self—is Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self.

While separate self heals by recovering the memory of the past, Unique Self heals by recovering the memory of the future. We engage Unique Self more fully in my (Marc’s) book Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment. But for now, we will focus on its future dimension. Evolution is about the Will of the Cosmos freely reaching for the future, and uniqueness is the sense organ that calls from the future. We have called this dimension of Unique Self your Future Self. We are called by our future selves.

Unique Self Recovery

I (Marc) am co-authoring a psychological manual entitled Unique Self Recovery together with Lori Galperin, one of the leading clinical practitioners and theorists in western psychology. It focuses on the clinical need to recover a memory of the future—to respond to the call of the Unique Self, which itself is the call of our possible future, in order to achieve even basic psychological wellness.

Lori and I began our conversation and work on this book, based on my Unique Self writing and Lori’s clinical work and writing in the therapeutic disciplines, back in 2011. Our premise was that neither classical psychology nor enlightenment practices could create wholeness by themselves without responding to the call of the future. It is Unique Self, and particularly its expression as Evolutionary Unique Self, that is the sense organ for the future. It simply means Unique Self, aware of its own True Nature, as the personal unique expression of the evolutionary impulse.

A Unique Self Recovery Practice

A practice we use as part of the core clinical deployment of Unique Self Recovery is a two-step process of communicating with your Future Self.

First, you ask your Future Self if it would be willing to help you. You might say that you require its help to navigate your life and take decisions from your highest levels of consciousness.

In the second, more central step, you write a letter from your Future Self back to your present self. Your Future Self invites you into your own future—in effect, you become your own sage and seer.

Homo Prospectus

This realization of being called by the future is now entering the doors of mainstream psychology. Paradoxically, psychology itself is, at least at its leading edges, beginning to recognize the call of the future. Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology together with three leading colleagues from mainstream academic psychology, has recently written an excellent set of critiques of psychology’s focus on the past. Instead, they suggest the term Homo prospectus.[2] Homo prospectus is a prospector for gold who is fevered and driven by future possibility. Homo prospectus is the human who—like the prospector for gold—is called by the future. The point of the book is to demonstrate that psychology and learning theory were taken prisoner by the past.

The book’s authors Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, and Sripada point to psychology’s attempt to define the present exclusively in terms of past causation. Seligman and his co-authors, however, argue that humans are actually driven by their desire for the future, what earlier papers called prospection.[3] We have integrated some of the important academic work around Homo prospectus into our broader vision of the New Human and the New Humanity captured in our term Homo amor. Homo prospectus, like the Homo amor, reclaims the dignity of desire and need. Desire implies need. And desire and need reach towards the future.

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Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

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The Call of the Future: A Metaphor of the Real

We will return to the core theme of desire and need, but first, let’s deepen our understanding of this future-reaching quality of the Evolutionary Love Story of the Universe.

It is worth noting that the call of the future is more than mere metaphor. It is, rather, what our colleague Howard Bloom has called real metaphor—that is, metaphor that evokes ontology, a Real dimension of Reality. One way that the Future Self sometimes shows up in very concrete terms is in precognition, the ability of a person in the present to access details of future events, details that are validated when the event happens.

Research on precognition is no longer anecdotal. It is clearly validated in extensive and rigorous empirical literature. As precognition researchers Dean Radin and Julia A. Mossbridge point out in their articles, which directly address prospection and precognition:

Prospection, the act of attempting to foresee one’s future, is generally assumed to be based on conscious and nonconscious inferences from past experiences and anticipation of future possibilities. Most scientists consider the idea that prospection may also involve influences from the future to be flatly impossible due to violation of common sense or constraints based on one or more physical laws. We present several classes of empirical evidence challenging this common assumption.^[4]

Radin and Mossbridge’s work is long anticipated in the intuitions of the interior sciences, where the DNA of Reality is contained in what are termed, in multiple great traditions, the Names of God.

The Hebrew wisdom expression of the classic four-letter Name of God is Yod Hei Vav Hei—or the English letter equivalent YHVH. In Hebrew linguistics, the first letter Yod always represents the future. The second three letters literally spell the Hebrew word for the present. The Name of God is therefore—literally—the call of the future in the present.

In this not only poetic but very precise sense, Homo prospectus embodies the Name of God. For the core of Homo prospectus—as Seligman and his colleagues already implicitly point towards—is the call of desire. We desire the future. We are in the present, and the past becomes the province of various forms of classical memory, ranging from nostalgia to reverence, but the future is the object of our desire. We desire that which the future offers us. And we need the future. Without the call of the future, we experience life as a repetitive cycle in which our aliveness is deadened in direct proportion to the inanity of our effect. Our effort seems futile.

In the immortal words of the old King from Jerusalem, the wise Solomon, from the perspective of past and present:

Vanity of vanity, all is vanities.[5]

While the psychologist is overly focused on the past, the enlightenment scientists undermine the past and ignore the future, seduced as they understandably are by the Infinity of the Present.

The Freedom of the Will: The Call of the Future

It is important to note at this point that the reaching for the future also implies the freedom to reach.[6] We experience the freedom of our will in reaching for the future. The very experience of cognition, in which a decision appears in our neurons, split seconds before it is conscious in our minds, may be an example of the future pulling us forward.

This is a very different potential understanding than the reductive materialism, which animates much of neuroscience research, which dogmatically seeks to undermine the future entirely. Indeed, reductive materialism allows only for the causation of the past,[7] but evolution is almost self-evidently animated by myriad forms of causation from the future. And as leading neuroscientist, philosopher, and free researcher Eddy Nahmias has pointed towards in numerous studies,^[8] it is the depth of our reaching towards the future that defines our free will.

In moment-to-moment automatic decisions, the programmed responses of the past might tend to be repeated in the present. The depth of our free will is most potently activated when we seek to discern the call of our Future Self.^[9] It is in the prospection of the future that free will emerges most radically. Will is a quality not of mere rationality but of desire. Indeed, ratzon, the source word for will in the original Hebrew, is literally the same word deployed to express Eros and its expression as desire.^[10]

Some dimension of freedom—itself a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos—is one of the core qualities of Eros, Reality’s most foundational value. Let’s look at our Eros definition once more:

Eros is the experience of Reality’s radical aliveness, always seeking, desiring, moving towards, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholes.

There cannot be a yearning without a degree of freedom.[11]

Freedom, on each level of evolution, always dances with the constraints that prior patterns of Reality impose on the new emergents. These constraints of prior patterns function as prior causation, even as they are functions of the telos that Reality desires to realize. But neither the causation nor the telos-driven desire for the future eliminates freedom. Rather, freedom dances with the patterns of the past and the patterns of the possible future inscribed on the walls of nothingness.

Possible future, however, is not proscribed future. The future invites the possibility of possibility. Emergence precisely means the birthing of a new potency––a new possibility––a new wholeness that is greater than the sum of all the prior parts. In other words, the new emergent is not merely a consequence of the prior causation of the past. Instead, a new emergent wells from the synergistic convergence of the causation of the past, the depth of possibility in the present, and then, most powerfully, from the telos-animated yet free call of the future.

That is Nahmias’ core point: The ability to think and vision deeply about possible futures—choosing our path—is one of the most profound expressions of free will.^[12]

The word will, itself, speaks not of rational choices that might be determined, but of an innate quality of living desire that incarnates as will. The intimation of the identity of words, in original Hebrew, between the word for will and the word for desire is precisely that will is desire reaching toward the future.

Materialism is (mostly) naturally deterministic in its orientation for what could generate causation other than the past. But for non-reductionists who directly sense the presence of love and value in history, the call from the future is virtually self-evident. The untrained Eye of the Senses, together with the Eye of the Mind, might be mainly determined by yesterday,[13] but what we, as radical empiricists, have called the Eye of Consciousness[14] is called by a vision of tomorrow. And it is this mood of the interior Heart of Cosmos that finds expression in evolutionary thought. For evolution is about the Will of Cosmos reaching from and for the future.

Desire: Reaching for Future, Grounded in the Present, Animated by the Past

And with this, we come to the core point of this section: Human interiors participate in the interior of Cosmos.

The vision of an inert cosmos, populated by mechanistic and lifeless it-objects, generates the vision of a human being who is the same. It is a reductionist materialist universe story, which birthed a reductionist materialist psychology, which only recognizes the causation of the past. However, just as the materialist universe story was highly valuable in moving us past superstition, which ignored the inherent nature of Cosmos in favor of super-imposed supernaturalism, so too was the materialist psychology focus on the inherent causation of the past enormously valuable in liberating us from contrived external causations. Both of these steps were crucial in the evolution of love. But now it is time for Love to continue its evolution.

As quantum physics and the interior sciences—each in their own forms—complement each other in utterly rejecting the vision of an inert cosmos in favor of a living Universe animated by desire, so too must we affirm the dignity of human desire—specifically human desire and allurement as an expression of the larger Field of Desire—as core to the human motivational architecture. In that realization, the evolutionary clarification of desire, both in the collective and in the personal, becomes essential. What becomes apparent, at the human level, is the dimension of freedom in choosing which desires to honor and deepen and which to contain.

That is not to say that intrinsic telos and prior causation are absent in forming human desire. Rather it is to say that there is a dialectical dance of freedom and choicelessness, which is core to the human motivational architecture. If there is freedom in your capacity to direct your desire, then clarifying your authentic desire—so you can focus your desire appropriately—becomes essential.

This is the third part of an early draft of the essay “The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future” by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of The Phenomenology of Eros: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire by Dr. Marc Gafni with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Dr. Kristina Kincaid. 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 of this Essay HERE«

»Read Part 2 of this Essay HERE«

Stay tuned for part 4 of this essay, next week, or go to our website to read the whole essay or download a PDF of it here (no registration or login necessary—we have also added the new graphics there):

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First Values & First Principles

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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.

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Footnotes

[1] Ibid, see Gafni, Marc [Guest Ed.]. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 6:1, Special Scholarly Issue on Unique Self, Ed. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens. See also Gafni, Marc. Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with Introduction and Afterword by Ken Wilber, Integral Publishers, 2012.

[2] See Seligman, M. E., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. (2016). Homo Prospectus. Oxford University Press.

[3] Seligman and his cohorts in Homo Prospectus refer to an article on prospection. See “How Are We Called Into the Future,” pp. xxvii-xxvi in Being Called: Scientific, Secular, and Sacred Perspectives, by M. Seligman, 2015, Praeger.

^[4] “Precognition as a form of prospection: A review of the evidence,” by J. A. Mossbridge and D. Radin, 2018, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5(1), p. 78-93. American Psychological Association.

[5] Ecclesiastes 1:2.

[6] For our Homo amor essay on free will, see Towards a World Religion: Homo Amo Essays by Marc Gafni and Zachary Stein, Essay Four: Reclaiming Free Will as an Evolving First Principle and First Value of Cosmos (in preparation).

[7] The concept of causation or causality has also been challenged as a whole by science, especially physics. See, for example, Frisch, Mathias, “Causation in Physics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/causation-physics/. Some physicists, however, come to the conclusion that “causality is more fundamental than time.” See, for example, Riek R, Chatterjee A. Causality in Discrete Time Physics Derived from Maupertuis Reduced Action Principle. Entropy (Basel). 2021 Sep 14;23(9):1212. doi: 10.3390/e23091212. PMID: 34573836; PMCID: PMC8472125. This same notion was also expressed by Reichenbach with the wording that “time order is reducible to causal order.” See Reichenbach H. The Direction of Time. Volume 65 University of California Press; Oakland, CA, USA: 1991.

^[8] Nahmias is incisive in undermining the superficial attempts to deny free will by pointing to physical correlates to an action that appear in brain imaging before the rational mind has had time to express its decision. Nahmias, in one of many arguments, points to the deeper structures of free will that reach for the longer-term future. From Mossbridge and Radin’s perspective, these physical correlates might also be appropriately understood as the call of the Future Self. See “Intuitions about Free Will, Determinism, and Bypassing,” by E. Nahmias, 2011, Oxford Handbooks Online (doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195399691.003.0029). See also “Surveying freedom: Folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility,” by E. Nahmias, S. Morris, T. Nadelhoffer, & J. Turner, 2005, Philosophical Psychology, 18(5), p. 561-584. Routledge. See also “Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: Experiments on folk intuitions,” by E. Nahmias, D. J. Coates, & T. Kvaran, 2007, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, p. 214-242. Philosophy Documentation Center. See also “The Phenomenology of Free Will” by E. Nahmias, S. Morris, & T. Nadelhoffer, 2004, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(7-8), p. 162-179. (https://philpapers.org/archive/NAHTPO.pdf)

^[9] The call of the future is also one of the core anthro-ontological experiences that move us beyond death. Death knows no future while we are always called by the future. In this sense, we have an innate knowing that death is not the end. This however is only one of twelve innate anthro-ontological realizations—gnosis that lives in the depth of our clarified first-person experience—of the non-final and non-ultimate nature of death. See our book in preparation Twelve Portals to Life Beyond Death: Responding to the Second Shock of Existence by Dr. Marc Gafni.

^[10] Song of Songs, Ch.1:4, Mascheni Acarecha, Ve’Narutza—Draw me after you, and I will run towards you—filled with desire.

[11] As the most basic elements of matter, called quanta or quantum waves, can maybe best be thought of as probability waves that only manifest as particles in moments of interaction with other quanta, e.g., in moments of being measured, there is freedom built in from the very beginning of the Universe—the Big Bang. The term probability wave was coined by Max Born, one of the early quantum physicists, for the mathematical wave function that describes the behavior of a quantum particle between detections—with the detection being the moment of the collapse of the wave function, when the particle acts like a classical particle with a simple location. In the original version of the most accepted interpretation of quantum phenomena, the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, it is the moment that the quantum particles interact with a macroscopic object that they become part of the macroscopic realm and their wave function collapses. That can happen, for example, when an electron hits a phosphorescent screen, where it interacts with the phosphor to create a tiny spark. In recent decades, many physicists have pointed out that macroscopic objects are not different from quantum objects. Instead, it is the interaction with any bit of matter or energy that collapses the wave function. Macroscopic objects simply consist of many particles, which provide many more opportunities for interaction than subatomic particles. In this sense, the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is but one of over twenty interpretations under serious considerations, has evolved. Another interpretation is the Bohmian Interpretation that was suggested by David Bohm in 1951, building on the work of Louis de Broglie, one of the founders of quantum physics. In it, the particles are always particles but are guided by a real wave described by the wave function. That guiding wave travels through a field called the quantum potential, and it is part of a universal wave function that connects all the particles of the Universe, regardless of distance. For a simple explanation of the Bohmian Interpretation, see, for example, here: https://quantumphysicslady.org/glossary/bohmian-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/.

^[12] Ibid, see our earlier footnote on Nahmias. The sense of the brain knowing before the mind, which has been raised extensively in reductive attempts to deploy neuroscience in favor of the denial of free will, is exploded, according to Nahmias (2011), when we talk about the deeper visioning for the future, which is not a short-range decision for an immediate action, which the brain may register before the mind. See “Intuitions about Free Will, Determinism, and Bypassing,” by E. Nahmias, 2011, Oxford Handbooks Online (doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195399691.003.0029).

[13] In physics, for example, there have been quantum experiments that seem to reverse the order of cause and effect. In other words, events seem to be caused by future events. This effect has been well researched. Some physicists are even abandoning the concept of causality altogether. Others conclude that causation, not time, is the fundamental feature of the universe. Other physicists, like Dr. Rod Sutherland at the University of Sydney, Australia, introduce the concept of retrocausality, which allows quantum measurements to influence events in their past. See, for example, Sutherland, RI, (2022) Probabilities and certainties within a causally symmetric model. Foundations of Physics, 52(4), 1–17. doi.org/10.1007/s10701-022-00573-x. See also, Sutherland, RI, (2017). How retrocausality helps. In AIP Conference Proceedings, 1841(1), 020001. AIP Publishing LLC. doi.org/10.1063/1.4982765.

In theory, this effect follows from a quantum phenomenon known as superposition, in which quanta maintain all possible realities simultaneously until the moment they are measured (which is the moment they interact with other quanta). Physicists have observed what has been called indefinite causal order in labs in Austria, China, Australia, and elsewhere by putting a photon (a quantum of light) in a superposition of two states. They then subjected one branch of the superposition to process A followed by process B, while subjecting the other branch to process B followed by A. In this procedure, known as the quantum switch, A’s outcome influences what happens in B, and vice versa. This means that the photon experiences both causal orders simultaneously. Over the past few years, a growing community of quantum physicists has been experimenting with this quantum switch. E.g., Giulia Rubino, a researcher at the University of Bristol, led the first experimental demonstration of the quantum switch in 2017. See her article “Experimental verification of an indefinite causal order” together with Lee A. Rozema, Adrien Feix, Mateus Araújo, Jonas M. Zeuner, Lorenzo M. Procopio, Časlav Brukner, and Philip Walther, published in Science Advances—https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1602589.

In addition to that, all the papers about the quantum switch suggest a link between quantum gravity and indefinite causality. In another key paper in 2019, Magdalena Zych, Časlav Brukner, and collaborators did an interesting thought experiment with two people in spaceships at two different distances from Planet Earth, in which they were able to prove that this situation would allow these two people to achieve indefinite causal order. See the paper, “Bell’s theorem for temporal order” by Magdalena Zych, Fabio Costa, Igor Pikovski, and Časlav Brukner, published in nature communications—https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11579-x.

These quantum effects and their philosophical implications have reached the mainstream with popular science articles: See, for example the article “Quantum Mischief Rewrites the Laws of Cause and Effect” on Quantamagazine, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect-20210311/. See also the article “Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers—but that’s okay” in The Conversation—https://theconversation.com/time-might-not-exist-according-to-physicists-and-philosophers-but-thats-okay-181268.

See also Hoffman, Donald D., The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, Chapter Six, “Gravity: Spacetime Is Doomed” and Chapter Seven, “Virtuality: Inflating a Holoworld”—in the latter, he also quotes the study published on Science Advances we referred to above.

[14] As we have pointed out in other writings of CosmoErotic Humanism, the Eye of Consciousness expresses itself in at least four distinct forms, which we have called the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of Spirit, and the Eye of Contemplation.

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We are also delighted to have released this new Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni as a special gift for you:

CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)

Chapter 1:  Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism

Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers

Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude

Chapter 5:  The Leading Edge of Human Identity

Chapter 6:  Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity

Chapter 7:  Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?

Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains Dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey, which is Reality’s gift for you.

We offer this incredible course of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion as a gift for you, because we believe in the urgent, desperate need to make the new Story of CosmoErotic Humanism available to whomever needs it. We are not in a win/lose metrics selling courses, but much rather, we are seeking to activate a Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies.