Monthly Digest June 2025
Center Board Meeting, New Books, New Podcasts, Oral Essays, & Book Excerpts
At the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, we just completed our annual Board Retreat at our Center house in Vermont. About fifty supporters of the Center (board members, executive leadership team, donors, and scholars) gathered for a four-and-a-half-day deep dive into CosmoErotic Humanism and the strategy of the Center.
This gathering was both an academic and a sacred space for deep dialogue, strategic visioning, and renewed commitment to our shared mission.
Co-Presidents Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zachary Stein gave a live transmission of the newest and hottest developments in the new Story of Value they call CosmoErotic Humanism, which they formulate in response to the meta-crisis, as well as the unfolding strategy of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion—with forty-two Oral Essays books and a couple of more formal “Great Library” books already published this year (see below) with many more to come. The excitement was palpable.
Below, you’ll find in this order:
More about the board retreat
New Podcasts Featuring Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zachary Stein
Our newest books of the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism (including new Oral Essays books)
Our oral essays and book excerpts—posted on Substack in June 2025
More About the Board Retreat
Never before has the work of the Center been more urgent or filled with more promise and possibility. We are in “a time between worlds… a time between stories.” The old stories of why we are here and what we can accomplish are breaking down, with nothing of substance to replace them, or to transmit to our children.
We are faced with two forms of existential risk: the potential death of humanity or the potential death of our humanity. It does not get more real than that. Only an epic new story—a new Story of Value—has the potential to change this trajectory and ensure that there will be a tomorrow.
But it can’t be just a new-age story or an old fundamentalism from one of the religions. It has to be rooted in the deep integration of the best insights of all periods of history—woven together into a new story of value. It has to be a universal grammar that everyone can understand—whether you are 7 or 70 years old.
That is the Great Library we at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion are writing and communicating into culture right now!
As the Center’s 2024 seminal book First Principles and First Values describes it:
We are attempting to instill, at a moment of supreme need, the deepest insights that humans have had about what is intrinsically valuable, sacred, and good, as well as the means to know these truths, communicate them, and integrate them into culture, psyche, governance, and technology…..The project of placing actual, grounded, intrinsic value at the heart of culture is urgent, and the stakes could not be higher.
With the massive and ongoing response to the initial podcasts that Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zachary Stein have done—collectively, we have reached about a million views or listens—we know that many active and influential voices are excited to engage and share the work of the Center.
It is in this light that we convened this Board Retreat.
Our work has never been more vital. Together, we are not only responding to the crisis of meaning but are actively shaping the future by articulating and transmitting a new Story of Value.
We are living in an age when the mainstream legacy institutions, animated by one strain of postmodernism, have convinced so many that human life has no meaning or purpose—a perspective that can only lead to even more alienation, depression, or addiction. There has never been a greater need for a breakthrough in value—demonstrating that Value is Real and backed by the Universe.
At the Center, it is our mission to offer this new Story of Value into the world during this critical junction of history. We are dedicated to the creation of an integral planetary culture, capable of guiding humanity through the current evolutionary crisis. The publication of the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism in the coming decades serves this mission by advancing an integral worldview that is truly inclusive of premodern, modern, and postmodern truths.
At this retreat, we gathered as leaders, scholars, visionaries, and friends to chart the next steps in this urgent and exhilarating evolutionary unfolding.
Newest Podcasts Featuring Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zachary Stein
Video Podcasts
The Sacred Power of Story | Marc Gafni & Iain McGilchrist Moderated by Zak Stein
Parallax Media hosts this discussion between Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Marc Gafni, moderated by Zak Stein, on the Sacred Power of Story.
Zak Stein moderates an intense and wide-ranging conversation between Dr. Iain McGilchrist. and Dr. Marc Gafni and the dialogue spans the sacred nature of story, the loss of value and eros, the nature of evil, and the deep structures shaping culture today.
Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, literary scholar, and one of the most important philosophical voices of our time. He is best known for The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, where he argues that the left and right hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, with massive consequences for civilization. His work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, art, and depth psychology, offering a vision of human consciousness grounded in attention, embodiment, and reverence.
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary philosopher, spiritual teacher, and social theorist. A former Orthodox rabbi with a doctorate from Oxford University, he is the co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion and a leading voice in the articulation of “CosmoErotic Humanism.” His books include Your Unique Self, A Return to Eros, and Radical Kabbalah. Gafni’s work fuses Jewish mysticism, integral theory, and Western philosophy to explore the nature of self, eros, and value at the evolutionary edge of human identity and spirituality.
Dr. Zachary Stein is a Harvard-trained education and transformation philosopher known for his work on developmental ethics, meta-crisis, and the future of human learning.
The Persian/Hebrew Axis | Alexander Bard, Marc Gafni, and Zak Stein
Alexander Bard of Parallax in a provocative discussion with Dr. Marc Gafni and Zak Stein.
Enjoy this Parallax Dialogue:
A rich and provocative conversation at the crossroads of philosophy, education, and technology, and a bold defense of religion in the modern age. Three intellectual titans — Alexander Bard, Marc Gafni, and Zak Stein — come together in this deep-dive dialogue, discovering surprising points of unity across their metaphysical differences.
The Infinite Intimate: Cosmic Eros, Sacred Story, and the Anthro Ontology of Value
On the footnotes2plato podcast, Host Matt Segall dialogues about CosmoErotic Humanism with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein
Join Matt Segall in conversation with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein:
In Matt’s voice:
In this conversation with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein, I began by asking about philosophy’s relevance in our current moment of crisis:
What role can philosophy play?
As philosophers, we like to engage in dialogue, but our present world seems very far from dialogue being what guides the decisions that are shaping the immediate future. I invited us to consider how we can feel like what we’re doing here is meaningful when we’re facing this type of rivalrous, revenge-based antagonism.
Regarding my use of “as if” language in my review of First Principles and First Values that Marc questioned, I explained that the “as if” is an invitation to my readers rather than a direct statement of my own position. It is intended as a bridge to the dominant culture, as a pragmatic invitation to see how people’s lives might change if they took these ideas seriously. I shared my grounding in process philosophy and particularly C. S. Peirce’s pragmaticist approach to theologizing: When I use terms like “as if,” it’s really just my way of signaling the participatory nature of truth and the reality of value. It’s not just waiting out there for us to find it. We have to become worthy of it. I emphasized that we need to imaginally body forth truth, goodness, and beauty to maintain them as realities. That’s our crucial role as human beings.
I asked whether consciousness being fundamental implies that the human being is not just the product of an evolutionary process but something more like the very medium of evolution’s expression. I brought in Schelling’s insight that “the human soul is conscientious of creation”—that we’re tapping into our own memory when doing evolutionary cosmology, not just abstractly reconstructing the universe’s exterior development. The intimacy paradigm Marc and Zak are proposing is something like a poetic proof of the existence of God as that than which nothing more intimate can be felt, a phenomenological proof of the existence of the divine ground within and between us. This divine ground, ultimately, is relational, and thus personal.
Audio Podcast
The Road to CosmoErotic Humanism: The “Tears” of Dr. Marc Gafni Part 2
Dr. Marc Gafni on The Integral Stage Podcast
In this episode of The Integral Stage podcast, Layman Pascal and Dr. Marc Gafni continue their exploration of the backstory and intellectual journey to CosmoErotic Humanism with a further exploration of the “relentless Rabbi’s” book on Tears. This time, they focus on questions related to God’s Voice, Laughter in Hell, Bondage & the Abraham/Isaac tale.
This podcast is Part 2 of a series focussing on the book Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion, and Rosh Hashanah. The book uses the rite of Rosh Hashanah in the wisdom of Solomon lineage to explore the necessity of the return of ritual and the importance of religion beyond philosophy and spirituality.
For more Video and Audio Podcasts on Our Website:
We truly want to serve you the best we can. That’s why we make most of our content freely available for you—both here and on our websites. If you subscribe to our publication, you will receive all our posts in your inbox and/or the Substack app.
If you ever get overwhelmed by the many emails we send out, even though you like our content, feel free to manage your subscription in two steps:
Step 1. Learn about our different newsletters here:
The first newsletter on that list (called Center for World Philosophy and Religion) is all our posts together. The other newsletters on that list are the different sections you can subscribe or unsubscribe to separately by managing your subscription.
Step 2. You can always manage your preferences here:
If you get easily overwhelmed by too many emails, we suggest that you at least remain on our list for these Monthly Digests.
Get Our Newest Books
Our team did the virtually impossible this last year. We published forty-two Oral Essays books, with still more to come. Below you can find the links to two whole series of Oral Essays books:
These oral essays are based on talks delivered by Marc at either One Mountain or Eros Mystery School. Thus, the style of these books is the spoken word, rather than a formally written text. That makes them easy to read and enjoy, while allowing you to feel the transmission of these living teachings. People have reported that reading these books is like sitting in the room with this master teacher, Dr. Marc Gafni.
Below the Oral Essays books, you can find our most recently published Great Library books, with more to come soon. [And below that, you can find our Book Excerpts and most recent Oral Essays published on Substack in June 2025.]
One Mountain Oral Essays Books
The Oral Essays library is a series of lightly edited, compiled transcripts of oral teachings given by Dr. Marc Gafni and the late Barbara Marx Hubbard in their weekly online broadcast, One Mountain, Many Paths, which they co-founded in 2017. Originally called an “Evolutionary Church,” One Mountain, Many Paths became a key venue for the articulation of an inspired and deeply grounded new Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. Marc and Barbara—together with Zak Stein, Kristina Kincaid, Ken Wilber, Sally Kempton, Lori Galperin, Aubrey Marcus, and dozens of other thought leaders over the years—began to articulate what they call a World Philosophy and World Religion as a context for our diversity.
Until Barbara’s passing in 2019, she and Marc transmitted teachings together as evolutionary partners and “whole mates,” weaving together insights and transmissions from their decades of practice, study, teaching, and activism into a synergy of wisdom, a grounded vision for future policy across all sectors of society.
We are joyfully grateful to Marc for the clarity of his Dharma, the elegance and “second simplicity” of this language, and the mad, Outrageous Love with which he transmits his teachings.
Barbara and Marc called the mission of One Mountain “a Planetary Awakening in Evolutionary Love Through Unique Self Symphonies.” We are an evolutionary community with a deeply grounded, radically alive, and “post-tragic” revolutionary spirit. We are activating a new humanity and awakening as a new species: Homo amor, the fulfillment of Homo sapiens.
One Mountain is committed to articulating a Story of Value that can become the ground for the new society that must be birthed in response to the meta-crisis. We recognize that we are living at a pivotal moment in history. In this “time between stories,” the great moral imperative is to tell the new Story of Value. It is ours to do, personally and collectively, with great trembling and ecstatic joy.
Eros Mystery School Oral Essays Books
These oral essays are based on talks delivered by Marc at the Eros Mystery School. Thus, the style of these books is spoken word and not formally written text.
Our Newest Great Library Books
Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships
Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis
Love or Die: The Temple Mysteries and the Secret of the Cherubs: The Four Primary Faces of Eros—Interiority, Presence, Desire, Wholeness—Early Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism Vol. 1
Most Recent Book Excerpts on Substack
Read free chapters of published books from the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. These are being sent out of our once-a-week formal essays series.
For more “formal” essays from yet-unpublished books, click here.
From Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships
A New Operating System for a New Vision of Relationship
In our quest to improve our relationships, we turn to relationship books, seminars, and counselors. Yet, taking their advice is mostly like installing a new piece of software on our computer: it enha…
For all excerpts from Whole Mate published on Substack, click here.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Gafni, Marc & Marx Hubbard, Barbara, Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025.
From The Evolution of Love
Introduction to "The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture"
Postmodernity argues that Reality is merely a story, that no story is better or worse than any other story, and that stories are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.[1] Po…
For all excerpts from The Evolution of Love published on Substack, click here.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Gafni, Marc & Marx Hubbard, Barbara, The Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025.
Read More Formal Essays and White Papers on Our Center Website Here:
Most Recent Oral Essays on Substack
The Oral Essays, sent out once a week, usually on Fridays, are lightly edited transcripts of live talks given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of these essays is the spoken word, rather than a formally written text.
451—Homo Amor, Parapsychology, and Reincarnation: The Five Philosophical Axioms that Demand the Principle of Reincarnation
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [June 1, 2025] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbar…
452—Reincarnation: New Methods of Collecting Evidence—First Stories of Children and their Past Life Memories
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [June 8, 2025] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbar…
