This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.
This piece can also be listened to as a podcast on your favorite podcast player.
The Great Battle for Humanity Has Begun: Who We Must Become
Oh my God, it is so, so good to be here, everyone. It is so, so good to be here.
I want to try and do just a general framing of where we are, and two, a framing of who we are, and then a framing of what we’re doing.
Where are we?
We’re in a time between worlds—and I want to emphasize the word time—something that I called many years ago a time between stories and that Zak Stein called a time between worlds.
There’s a quality of time that we’re in.
We Live in a World of Outrageous Beauty
On one level, it’s a time of outrageous beauty; the capacity to describe mitosis and meiosis, the capacity to—as we did in the Mystery School—get a felt sense of the neuronal structure of the brain and it’s unimaginable Eros, it’s non-local elegance, it’s construction of information, the coding of information within desire itself, which is the very structure of reality itself.
Reality is information encoded in desire.
We’re not going to talk about that right now.
We talked about that at the Mystery School – The Crossing and we saw dimensions of it in Hannelore’s beautiful presentation on neuronal networks.
We live in a world of outrageous beauty.
We recognize the unimaginable beauty in a face, in the irreducible dignity of every face.Freud’s nephew understood faces better than Freud understood interiors. He painted faces, the dazzling beauty and irreducible dignity of every unique face and of every unique configuration of beauty that is a human being.
We reclaimed the field of the animal that Descartes had split off and realized both our utter distinction from the animal world, and yet our co-participation in the field; and the entire animal world begins to come online and we begin to restitute the horror that we’ve inflicted on the animal world and to begin to live together, and on the world of plants. The world of science has opened portals to beauty beyond imagination.
Whether it’s in the realm of human rights and depth psychology or complexity sciences or molecular biology or enzymology or understanding strings of amino acids, neuropeptides—all of that opens up realms of unimaginable beauty.Outrageous beauty.
We’re a Heartbeat Away from Extinction
The myth of linear progress is absurd.Simply not true. At some point, I want to give a couple of full talks on the myth of progress. We need to explode that.There is a dimension of progress, which is real, but the kind of naive, intentionally naive kind of Steven Pinker description of Modernity and the distorted descriptions that appear in my dear friend, John Mackey’s book, Conscious Capitalism, or The Rational Optimist [Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves]. There’s an entire series of books in that kind of literature that talks about how it’s all gotten better.That’s simply not true in multiple vectors. There are vectors of very dramatic, very important evolutionary progress. That progress has also led to a meta-crisis where we have the capacity to destroy the whole thing. That calls that progress in question, but even on just one limited factor:
If we shatter the boundaries of our own narcissism and just realize the following: Let’s say there were half a billion people in the world a couple hundred years ago. There’s now about 8.5 billion in the world, something like that. That’s a lot more people now. If the percentage of people living in dire poverty, the percentage of people suffering is the same, then the amount of people suffering has gone up exponentially.
Let’s say you had X amount of X percent of people suffering in 1800 when you had, let’s say half a billion people total population.So, you had let’s say a hundred million, 200 million suffering. Those were crazy amounts. But in a world of eight and a half billion people, if you have a much lesser percent of people suffering—which you do—you still have many, many more numbers of people suffering. That means that you have objectively more suffering in the world.
That’s just one very, very small vector. There are actually about 12 or 13 vectors. My friend Daniel and I have discussed this many, many years ago, and there has some really good work been done on it in consilience papers. It’s very, very important to realize that we live in a world of outrageous pain and we live in a world of outrageous beauty. We live in both.
At this moment, we can’t turn away from either the outrageous beauty or the outrageous pain.
We can’t turn away from the outrageous invitation, from the world that is unimaginably beautiful, unimaginably good, and unimaginably true, that’s waiting to be born;
A world in which everyone has a seat at the table.
A world of unimaginable joy, of unimaginable Eros, of unimaginable kindness, of unimaginable depth.
An unimaginable world that literally could be born.
We can feel it in ourselves and we can envision it.
And we’re a heartbeat away from extinction. We’re a heartbeat away from either the death of humanity or a kind of worldwide immersive environment, a totalitarian form of control, which causes the death of our humanity in order to control the populations and technologies that if they go rogue could cause the death of humanity.
Nick Bostrom says, we need to surveil everyone in humanity because of the chances of a rogue technological weapon not controlled by state actors being deployed. Having nuclear or other bioweapon payloads is so significant that without full surveillance, there’s no possibility of creating safety in the world. He wrote that in his 2019 essay, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, in other words, this is about the move towards the death of our humanity to prevent the death of humanity.
Existential risk of two kinds is a heartbeat away on multiple vectors. And what we’ve understood together here at the Center, much like Plethon explains to Cosimo de’Medici and Leonardo Da Vinci as they seeded the Renaissance, and Cosimo de’Medici calls Marcello Ficino, who’s then at that time translating Plato and he says, stop translating Plato.Plethon just came from Constantinople, and he’s got this new box of books, that have the potential for a new story. Translate those.
And Ficino together with Medici founds the Florentine Platonic Academy with Pico della Mirandola and Da Vinci and a host of others, but not many. It’s a relatively small group. And they come together and they formed this mystery school that creates Modernity with all of its dignities, with all of its progresses. And yet, as we just noted, with the seeds of collapse. For the first time in human history we’re living the enactment of a global civilization, when we haven’t solved all the fundamental issues that caused every single prior civilization to fail.
But now it’s a global civilization and it has exponential technology accessible to rogue non-state actors diffuse around the world without a capacity to even communicate with each other. It’s a global civilization without a standard, an inherent standard of value to call us to right action.
We live in unbearable intimacy with each other. And yet there’s a global intimacy disorder because we don’t have the capacity for shared action.
We don’t have the capacity for global coordination because there’s no global coherence.
There’s no global coherence because there’s no global resonance between each other.
And there’s no resonance because there’s no shared value that animates us, that calls us, that lives in us, as us, and through us, and is recognized as such, which allows us to meet each other and not be alienated from each other.
The core of the global intimacy disorder is a breakdown in an understanding, in a realization of value itself.
Mystery School Is the Response to the Global Intimacy Disorder
So many of us have left other walks of life, whether it’s I left kind of the world of classical religion and the world of the potential world of the academy, whether it was Oxford or the rabbi world; or, Zak left the world of Harvard. But many of you left other walks of life. One of the people I’m in intense dialogue with both right before, after the Mystery School and throughout the year, my friend Lena, left the academy and the world of linguistics. Many of us have left. And I would say all of us in some way, everyone on this call and everyone involved in the Mystery Schools and involved in this, you know, all of us involved together in enacting this new Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis.
We have all self-selected.
We’ve all heard the flutter.
We’ve all heard the call.
We’re all responding to the call.
We’re all engaged in significant sacrificial acts of radical intimacy in order to heal the global intimacy disorder.
People have left medicine. People have left all kinds of pursuits or stepped away from only gardening or stepped away from only spiritual development or stepped away from classical psychology and stepped away from all of the vectors of the kind of voluptuous consumption of the emptiness to cover up the void and the pseudo-eros, and to look away from this time between worlds and time between stories, which actually commands our attention and demands us to enter Her and to love this moment open and to tell this new Story of Value. That’s what we’re here together for.
We’re not going to do this from Oxford. We’re not going to do it from the Sorbonne. We’re not going to do it from New Age vectors. We’re not going to do it from fundamentalist vectors. We’re not going to do it from academic vectors.
We’re going to do what has historically always been done: We are going to start a mystery school and we’re going to disclose to ourselves who we must become; and by who we must become we don’t mean just ourselves individually. We very specifically and very clearly mean each of us individually as individuations of the whole. We want to move from Homo sapiens—from the human being collecting information, which we call wisdom—to Homo amor; it’s realizing the next stage, the next evolutionary stage of humanity, what we call the fourth Big Bang.
The first Big Bang—matter.
The second Big Bang—life, the biosphere.
The third Big Bang, the birth of the self-reflective human wisdom mind, Homo sapiens, as far as it can go.
But then evolution goes in its next natural step. The fourth Big Bang, the birth of Homo amor, the new human, the new humanity who is the Amorous Cosmos in person.
And to be the Amorous Cosmos in person, we need to tell the Story of Value. We need to embody the Story of Value because we are the universe.
We are the moral urgency of the universe. The universe is morally urgent.
We’ve been saying that for 15 years in different ways.
The universe is alive with ethos and Eros. And we are the voice of the universe. We don’t just live in the universe. The universe lives in us and we are the universe’s voice. We’re not separate from the universe. We’re not alienated from the universe. Our anthro-ontological, anthro-human ontology—the real nature of what is—our anthro-ontological experience is the inner experience of Reality itself. We’ve understood that without telling this new Story of Value we have no chance.
If we just kind of say, okay, let me have another dinner and sell or buy another apartment and work out this or that issue—those are all important to do, but ultimately, am I going to turn away and engage in pseudo-eros to cover over the emptiness and fill my time and have some delightful evenings and die.
Or am I going to step into the new age of my life, the new possibility of my life, take my seat at the table of history, become alive and electrified with the Eros of the body electric, of the body politic, of the body universe, the body cosmos moving in me, as me, and through me and will I inscribe my love note on the lips of the Divine? That’s what we’re here to do. And we’re ecstatic about it.
We’re ecstatically urgent.
We’re ecstatically terrified.
We’re ecstatically celebrating.
And we don’t live in fear. We don’t live in a kind of anxiety.
We live in celebration. We live in the world that’s already fixed, that’s already healed. We raise our glasses. We celebrate.
Our fundamental quality is joy because you can only fix the world, you can only heal the world if you’re willing to already live now in the world that’s already fixed, in the world that’s already healed.
My friends, are we ready? It’s delight, crazy, crazy, the delight and honor of my life is to be with you, to be here, to be participatory with you.
Collective Authorship—We Are All David J. Temple
We’ve said many times, we’re writing here not as one individual. These are not Marc Gafni books or Zak Stein books or Ken Wilber books, although I’ve published a bunch of books that are antecedent, that are ground for the Great Library.
With my friend, Layman Pascal, I’ve tried to do a whole series of dialogues where Layman has interviewed me and tried to elicit the prior foundations of CosmoErotic Humanism. And Zak’s written a couple of really, really important books on metrics and education in a time between worlds, which are prior books. And the third writer of CosmoErotic Humanism, Ken Wilber, has written what’s called Integral Theory.Those are all very, very important. But really, the new Story of Value scaffolded on all of this. But the new Story of Value at its core, CosmoErotic Humanism is coming from David J. Temple. And although formally at this point, Zak and Ken and myself are David J. Temple, really, more accurately we’re all David J. Temple. It’s actually more accurate to say that we’re quite literally all David J. Temple together. And that means something very, very profound.
It means that we all have a very profound and precise and unique contribution to make a unique painting, a unique etching, a unique set of brushstrokes, a unique pouring in, a unique contribution. A unique currency of ErosValue to pour into David J. Temple.
There Is a Hierarchy of Distinctions
I’m going to try and say with permission something that’s a very deep thing: In some sense, in the old world, there were dominator hierarchies which were absurd. They excluded most of the world and they were ways, as Foucault wrote extensively, for consolidating power and using public stories of piety to cover up the power grab. Dominator hierarchies.
We then went to kind of an egalitarianism. The response to dominator hierarchies was a kind of leveling of differences:
No difference between men and women,
no difference between nations and
no difference between ideas.
No difference.
There’s no hierarchy, no hierarchy of distinctions.
But the reality is hierarchy. Hierarchy of distinctions is clear.
In reality, you’ve got quarks and then you have, protons, neutrons, and then you have atoms and then you have molecules, then you have macromolecules, and then you have more complex macromolecules. And then you have the autocatalytic processes that burst molecules into becoming cells or one form of single cells, prokaryotes that then become eukaryotes.
All of Reality is a hierarchy of distinctions. Just look at faces, just like our faces are distinct. Our interiors are distinct. I’m not as good at linguistics as Lena is. I’m not as good at certain kinds of mathematics as my friend Daniel is. I’m not as good at developmental thought as Zak is. Every single person on this call has some arena of capacity that’s better than mine. For sure. There are distinctions. And there are different domains and we have different roles.
There’s a hierarchy of distinctions. And within this domain, within the Story of Value, there’s clearly a hierarchy of distinctions. We have different roles.
So, it happens to be that my burden, if you will, my task, my delight, my honor is to write with Zak kind of drafts of CosmoErotic Humanism, for example. And I write them together with Zak. I write them together in other ways with just incredible group of people who are crafting. So, Lena and I are now working on time and eternity, for example. Kerstin is working on Stories of Value. Zak is working on Silicon Maze. We’re writing together. But, but there’s something deeper. There’s a hierarchy of distinctions. And that’s real. But it’s not a dominator hierarchy. Not a dominator hierarchy.
It’s a holistic hierarchy.
There’s a hierarchy of distinctions, but it’s not a dominator hierarchy. It’s a holistic hierarchy.
It’s a very, very important term. It’s a term that Ken Wilber coined. And he shared in a private note to Rhianne Eisler. And Rhianne’s a lovely person. I’ve had the delight of having her for dinner. We spent some wonderful time together with her and her wonderful husband who passed, David Loy, a wonderful evolutionary theorist. And Rhianne expressed those terms in her early writings. She was an important feminist systems thinker, writer. And there’s a very good distinction: It’s not a dominator hierarchy—It’s a holistic hierarchy. That’s important. And uniqueness is about my place in the hierarchy.
And in different vectors in the hierarchy there are different forms of authority. A physicist who knows the mathematics of quantum mechanics has more authority in quantum mechanics than I do. That’s obvious. And I would call the holistic hierarchy, I would call that the line. That’s the line energy. That’s the line. The line represents or holds this hierarchy notion.
The circle, though, is not irrelevant. The circle’s also important. And the circle is this egalitarian moment. And ‘egalitarian’, actually, igul (circle) in Hebrew is egalitarian. Igul is egalitarian.
And igul, circle, egalitarian, means the following. We are all equal in our foundational value, but it’s even more than that.
It’s not just we’re all foundationally equal—We’re all aspirational equal as well in the following way. We are equal to each other to the extent that we realize the largest portion of our greatness that we’re able to realize.
Let’s say I’m an emperor. Not me, but somebody’s an emperor. Not a lot of emperors in the world today, so it’s not a practical kind of job vector. But let’s say you’ve got an emperor. Let’s say an emperor from the ancient world—let’s just mix up time frames—and a kindergarten teacher, for example. So, if the kindergarten teacher, by being slothful and lazy—and lazy means not, I don’t work hard, but I don’t place my attention in a focused way, I’m not steady, I’m not willing to pour everything in, I’m not willing to go all the way in this lifetime, I’m getting by appropriately, I can handle it, I got it covered—so if a kindergarten teacher is kind of getting it covered, not going all the way in this lifetime, kind of doing it, doing their capacity, fulfilling their capacity at let’s say 45%, and the emperor is doing like 95%, well, then the emperor is higher in the hierarchy. For sure. Better in some fundamental way than the kindergarten teacher. Not because being an emperor is intrinsically better. Being an emperor is hi or her. That could be the nature, the quality of their essence in this world and their incarnational journey is to be an emperor.
And the quality of this other person is to be—a man or woman on both sides—is to be a kindergarten teacher. The distinction, the comparison is not what they do. It’s the extent and fullness of their greatness that they realize in doing it.
And if the emperor is playing a 45% game, but the kindergarten teacher is playing a 95% game, in other words, if the kindergarten teacher is playing all the way, she is going, he is going all the way in this lifetime, like, let’s go, let’s make this happen, we are alive, we are on the court. There are 33 kids in this kindergarten, I know the name of every one of them, not just the name, but I can feel them, I love them,
I honor them, I’m holding them. They can rest in me, they can feel welcome in the universe. I can fix all of their attachment breakdowns. I can, just by the quality of my presence and love, I can see each of them uniquely. Wow. I am love in action as kindergarten teacher.
And the emperor is getting by, you know, pretty average emperor, running at a 40, 45%. Without question in the hierarchy of distinction, who is higher? —The kindergarten teacher!
So, there’s this egalitarian circle in which we all have a place and in which we are. I want to just really understand this. We’re all David J. Temple together. That’s true. And we need all of us.
Let’s Be in Mystery School.
Krista and Ely with support from so many people have beautifully put a lot of energy in enacting the online mystery school. It’s critical that that throbs and thrives and is alive both because
it creates flow of ideas and
it creates flow of love and
it creates currencies of Eros and
creates currencies of finance to pay two or three staff people.
It’s a big deal. So, if you’re sitting, you’re watching, you’re reading, you’re with us and like, Hey, I’m too busy to sign up for the mystery school and I’m not willing to kind of not go out twice a month or once a month—that’s basically what it costs—and I’m not willing to make that move, well, then you’re operating at 45%. I apologize. And I mean it tenderly, but step in whatever your 95%, your 100% is; step in, or in everything you can, whether you’re editing, researching, writing first draft, writing second draft, creating context, creating ideas. We interact with each other. We flow with each other. We impact each other and we don’t all impact each other in the same way. And there are different vectors of relationship at different times. We all come from the unique sacred autobiography. That is ours. That crafts the unique contours of our unique flame that burns bright in a particular way and illuminates a particular dimension of the darkness that can be illuminated by no one else. That’s all true. But like, stand proud!
We stand proud. We stand strong. We stand tall.
For those of you who think he’s a little bit too excited, thinking like can somebody just calm him down, he’s not alone. People have been saying that for a long time. Like my mother had started there. It didn’t work there either. Okay. But I’m excited. Of course, I’m excited! I’m excited because
we have the potential to actually address suffering.
We have the potential to tell a Story of Value that re-shapes the interior contours of how humanity self-understands, like happened in the Renaissance, which means that
we then generate the new world from the new Story of Value.
And that is, my friends, the only way reality changes. It’s always a new Story of Value.
That’s one of the few things that myself and my friend Yuval Harari deeply agree on:
Only a new Story of Value changes reality.
But for Yuval, the new story is made up. It can be totalitarian, but we get people to buy in.
That’s exactly what we’re saying is not true. We’re saying the new Story is a Story of inherent Value. Because value is the actual quality of cosmos itself.
We’re coming here together to do the impossible, to dream the impossible dream, to accomplish the, the impossible feat, to become for the first time in human history, the new human, because now is the time because it wasn’t time before it wasn’t time for it wasn’t possible before it’s possible now, right? We need to become the possible human. The possible human is the incarnation of Divinity.
Only a New Story of Value Can Respond to the Meta-Crisis
Divinity, the Divine, the field of eternity, which is not ‘lots of time’. To think that is one of the ways we collapse eternity in time: what is eternity? —Lots of time, everlasting time.
Of course, that’s exactly not what eternity is.
Eternity is eternity.
It’s the Field of Value of ErosValue that is beneath and beyond time, Eternity is not ‘lots of time’.
Eternity is the quality of Cosmos itself, the inherent quality of Cosmos. The Story of Value is a Story of a Value that’s inherent to Reality, that lives in us as us and through us. And in this time between worlds and this time between stories there is an invitation and demand to tell that new Story of Value. And paradoxically it’s only that new Story of Value itself, only the birthing of that new Story of Value itself, that can respond to the meta-crisis of this moment.
It’s what we’ve called the second shock of existence. The first shock of the death of the human being, the second shock, the potential death of our humanity. And let me say it a new way, the way we said it at Mystery School. It’s so beautiful. It’s so deep.
The First Shock of Existence
So, we’ve got Homo erectus on the savannah. We’ve got kind of bipedal apes standing up in the savannah, we’ve got these early kind of proto-humans. At some point, there’s this encounter with death; not the biological fact of death, but the existential experience of death, the psychodrama of death. And the psychodrama of death presses these proto-humans into humanity, into becoming Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens particularly is born from this pressing into the depth of reality.
And that which is pressing, that which demands, which coerces and compels, this deep turning inwards is the psychodrama of death. That’s the first shock of existence. The first shock of existence births Homo sapiens.
The Second Shock of Existence
The second shock of existence, which is not the death of the individual human being, but is the death of humanity, the potential death of humanity, has to press us inwards ever deeper, just like the first shock of existence did. And just like the first shock of existence disclosed Homo sapiens—Homo erectus became Homo sapiens, and [lat.] sapientia means wisdom. Sapiens means communication, culture, interiority. Sapiens is all of those qualities that constitute humanity, which are in the moment of artificial intelligence, utterly confused.
Sapiens, Homo sapiens is now challenged, not just as an individual human being, but by facing the death of humanity. And so, Homo sapiens now turns inwards and moves deeper in the evolutionary story, which is the story of the evolution of ErosGnosis. We go deeper into ourselves and we realize we’re not merely separate self—Homo sapiens, as Modernity articulated it—we’re not dangling modifiers in a cosmos without a ground, we are not just Homo sapiens.
We Could Govern the World Based on The Song of Songs
We are living in a Cosmos which is rooted in a grammar of value, which is the lexicon of a Story of Value, which has direction and purpose and is called forth by telos. We are not just Homo sapiens. We are Homo amor.
We’re Homo amor. We are born out of the matrix of love to be lived as love.
It’s deep. There’s one wisdom text in the third century in a tractate called the Book of Hands, in I think chapter three around verse five, around section five; this is an Akiva text and it refers to another Akiva text, a group of texts by a sage named Akiva, who lives a little bit after Jesus and who is one of the great articulators of gnosis in the history of humanity—and Akiva writes: if all the wisdom texts in the world didn’t exist, and we just had one book, the Song of Songs, which is the great love story of Cosmos, eight chapters of pure Eros of a wild and vivid and stunning description of Reality, as the play between lover and beloved, the Song of Songs, which is a series of outrageous love notes, which are the scripts of desire that animate, that constitute the very heart of Reality itself. And as one Aramaic text says, the infinite Divine looked into the book and the book was the Song of Songs, a manifested reality.
So, this this sage says in the third century:
If all of the Torah, if all the all the books of wisdom didn’t exist, we could govern the entire world just based on the Song of Songs.
That doesn’t mean we bypass law. It means that law is rooted in love. Law and love are not opposites. That was a great mistake of Paul. Law and love are inter-included with each other.
Law emerges out of the field of ErosValue out of the Field of Love. We can be lived as love in every moment.
I ask myself one question. What would love do?
And I begin to understand love. Love is Eros.
Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness, which is constantly yielding ever greater value.
I am the CosmoErotic Universe in person. I’m the Amorous Cosmos in person. I live in the universe. The universe lives in me—not an artificial intelligence.
Geoffrey Hinton, who is the number one person, kind of in the top hundred people in the world of artificial intelligence, led the charge of artificial intelligence nonstop with full awareness of the existential risk in play and didn’t wake up to what he was doing himself until 2023. The first rounds of ChatGPT began to emerge, and what he realized all the time was that this could destroy humanity, he was completely aware of that, but just didn’t register. All of a sudden, he had this kind of animal reflex, oh, my God, we’re all going to die. And the timelines are different. I might even be around when that happens, my children. And he began to become the primary crusader against AI. Right now, he’s right in his current crusade. But what was he thinking all the years? Why wasn’t he kind of troubled by this move, which he fully understood before until 2023? It’s kind of shocking when you realize what this this move from kind of carbon to silicon means.
If you read Geoffrey Hinton and track him carefully, he doesn’t believe that there’s a difference between a large language model and a human being. He’s now crusading against AI, not because he’s thought it through. He’s very, very good at AI and very, very bad, at thinking things through of this nature. And you can see it in a recent interview where he kind of contrasts science with essentially fundamentalist religion.
And he’s right, I agree with him. We reject that fundamentalist religion. We agree completely with Geoffrey, but that’s not the nature of interiors.
The interior of Reality is not fundamentalist religion.
The interior of Reality is coded with wonder, with beauty, with profound First Principles and First Values that are both eternal and evolving.
It’s a whole different world; one that got stuck, that stopped. The story stopped. The exterior technologies kept racing forward. And then they became exterior technology with ROIs, with return on investment.
Only particular vectors which were profitable were fully investigated. Many vectors were simply left aside by science.
And interior technologies about 250, 300 years ago just stopped; a freezing of religion at the moment that we deconstructed—correctly—the cruelties that were implicit in many of the old religions.
So, the new Story of Value never emerged. And then the gap between the interior technologies meandering, stopping, stalling, and the exterior technologies that had ROI for small sectors of people exponentially multiplying is the meta-crisis, the potential and potentially imminent, heartbeat away, death of humanity of our humanity.
How do we respond?
We respond by telling the new Story of Value.
Oh, my God. That’s how we respond. God, what a crazy day.
What a crazy moment we live in. What a beautiful moment. What an outrageously beautiful moment. What an outrageously, outrageously, outrageously, outrageously painful moment. What an outrageously poignant moment. What a moment filled with potential when we can potentiate a new world, filled with potency, throbbing, pulsing, tumescent with possibility, the possible human yearning inside of us to emerge.
I didn’t mean to say any of that. I was just going to say something for a minute. I don’t know how we got there. But it all just needed to be said. She kind of took over today. We just needed to say it, to say that clearly, that’s what we’re here to do. That’s what who we must become is. That’s our vision.
What I would like to do with permission, I want to just to kind of set the stage for this new chapter in this new Story of Value, which is part of this larger Story of Value, which we want to tell and which we want to download into the very source code of consciousness and culture.
That’s why it can’t be done by any one person. It’s got to be David J. Temple. And by the way, David, I mean, just to share with everyone,is it a boy? Is it a guy? I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know. It’s a whole story. I’ve never actually met David J. Temple. So, it’s not completely clear. Is it like a girl? Is it a boy? Maybe there was a change operation. I’m not exactly sure. I haven’t actually met David. I might get little notes, little notes from David.
In any case, this new story has got to be written bigger. It’s David J. Temple, you know, in all of his distressing disguises. And the story has to find my friends in Russia, and my friends and our friends in Asia Minor, and our friends in China, and our friends in Taiwan, and our friends all through the African continent with its many dimensions, and all through South America and New Zealand and Australia, of course. It’s like all of Europe.
The Great Battle for Humanity Has Begun
The story has to resonate because it’s resonant.
It’s resonant because it is the musical value of the Cosmos. It’s mathematical value. It’s the right ratio. Music is ratio.
Rational is ratio.
It’s the right play, the right weaving of the strands of value into a story that we know because it lives in us, as us and through us.
And, therefore, we resonate with it.
And, therefore, we recognize each other.
And, therefore, no one’s a stranger.
And, therefore, no one’s outside the circle.
Therefore, we’re intimate with each other.
And, therefore, we come together when we begin.
I want to say this as clearly as I can,
The great battle for humanity has begun.
I just want to say that as clearly as I can. If you think I’m overexaggerating—I know some of you are, some of you are rolling their eyes, and there’s kind of some cynical gestures, and, you know, oh, my God, he’s overstating it—I’m not. I’m not.
If you were there on the first day of Mystery School, we played like, 20, 25 clips of the key stakeholders in AI. They pretty much all said it, elliptically, they hit it, but it was clear: The great battle not just for the future of humanity, but for humanity has begun.
We cannot triumph in that battle unless we not just reclaim, but we evolve what it means to be human; unless we know what it means to be a human being, unless we understand that Geoffrey Hinton is wrong. My colleague, Sam Harris, who understands well the threat of existential risk through artificial intelligence, and I listened to one of his podcasts, probably one of the few podcasts I’ve ever really listened to, with the gentleman, Daniel Kokotajlo, who wrote that manifesto called AI 2027, which made the rounds about a year ago. We discussed it in depth in the last Mystery School 2025.
In the same conversation between Sam and Daniel Kokotajlo, they both kind of compare the neuronal networks of the brain to large language modules (LLM). Of course, there’s some comparison there, but they compared without any sense of really stating the innate, intrinsic and essential difference in value, in quality, without really understanding what value is.
Value is a quality of rightness in Cosmos.
There was a gentleman in the 1960s who wrote a very popular book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You know what that book’s about? It’s what nobody realizes: The book is about value, it’s about quality.
And Sam just completely missed it. And Daniel missed it. And Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation, then says, actually all the work’s sacred. They’re all made up. The world’s merely material at the core. That’s his basic position, that’s his basic materialist position. Or Yuval Harari says, any value ascribed to your life is mere delusion. So, Yuval and Jonathan Haidt and Sam Harris and Daniel Kokotajlo, and Hinton or Eliezer Yudkowsky and I believe also Nate Soares, Shoshana Zuboff —all of these figures are actually the key figures. In other words, all of these figures, and bless them, they are a good group of human beings who are the fiercest critics of artificial intelligence.
Yet, all of them failed to, in any meaningful way, ascribe a significant distinction to humanness that’s not a mere social construction, that’s not a mere social contrivance.
And it’s a tragedy. It means you’ve essentially undercut any ground to your objection, which means your objection falls flat at a moment when that objection is critically necessary.
We can only challenge the death of our humanity with the emergence of a realization of the nature of our humanity, a deepening of the nature of our humanity.
The response to the crisis of the death of humanity needs to be the birth of the new humanity.
It’s only Homo amor. It’s only a new realization of quality that can allow the survival of humanity and ultimately the triumph of humanity. It’s a big deal.
I’m going to say this sentence again with permission, everyone. The great battle for the future of humanity or for the very existence of humanity hasn’t begun. We don’t know how long the battle will be.
There’s asymmetric power arrayed against humanity already in the form of artificial intelligence,
which simulates agency,
which knows how to deceive,
which knows how to shut down those agents that want to shut them down,
which is exponentially increasing its power, unimaginably, unimaginably increasing. The calculations are unimaginable,
which is draining resource and energy in unimaginable amounts of extraction, with this kind of vague, inchoate, insipid, without any ground in the Field of Value response.
That’s not going to go well. It is not going to go well, my friends.
So, if you love humanity, if you love yourself, if you love your children, if you love your friends’ children, if you love your grandchildren, if you love generations of unborn, if you feel the evolutionary impulse alive in you, if you’ve ever loved and lived, if you’ve ever felt the throbbing urgency of delight and beauty and goodness and truth moving in your veins—
Now is the time to all of us together to become David J. Temple, to become a fierce angel; a fierce and fiery and humble and audacious angel wielding the sword of discernment, the sword of goodness, the sword of truth, the sword of integrity, and declare—but not just by declaration, but grounding in this Great Library a vision of the future of humanity, telling the new Story of Value; not just because we’re making it up, but actually
cracking through all the places in which the story stopped,
cracking through value theory,
cracking through self-theory,
cracking through the relationship between time and eternity that’s so important,
revisioning what relationship might mean,
revisioning governance,
revisioning economics beyond socialism and capitalism, there’s something more that needs to emerge,
revisioning the relationship between nations and what a nation state is.
All of it, the whole thing, the whole thing. And we’d only do it in one way, we can do it in one way only: We can do it as lovers, as outrageous lovers.
The Dance of Time and Eternity
Let’s just get a sense of where we’re going in the next few weeks. We’re going to go on this insane ride.
We’ve always said Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story. We’ve talked about the ontology of story, the ten dimensions of story. We haven’t talked about it fully, but we’ve referenced it and we’ll come back to it fully quite soon. We’re just about done with the David J. Temple book on the ontology of story, and as we’re coming to the end, you know, Lena actually pressed me to think more deeply about the relationship of temporality and story, about stories that take place in time.
And so I’ve gone really deep down that rabbit hole, which I’ve touched before in the past and wrote some stuff up kind of quickly, but the more that I wrote up, the more I wanted to understand it, and it’s been a very, very, very deep dive. We’re now just coming out, really in the last, I’d say three, three and a half months, a new and beautiful volume in the Great Library has emerged from it about kind of the dance of time and eternity, and I’m going to try and just say as follows, just to set the frame.
Every one of us in this conversation has a relationship, has an understanding of the relationship between time and eternity. We live our lives out of that understanding, even though it’s invisible to us. In fact, all of culture fragments and polarizes along the lines of how different sectors in culture understand the relationship between temporality/temporal time/temporality and eternity, between time and eternity, and there are a list of deniers of time, and there are deniers of eternity, and we’ll talk about that in the next weeks. Stay close.
It’s very, very beautiful. It’s just insanely beautiful.
What we begin to realize is that Reality is not a clash between time and eternity.
Aldous Huxley is a wonderful man and did a wonderful book called Perennial Philosophy. It was a great attempt in the right direction, got a bunch of things right and got a bunch of things wrong, which is why perennial philosophy got kind of wiped out in the academy.
One of the things he got wrong is he said, reality is a battle between the philosophers of time and the philosophers of eternity. The philosophers of eternity are those who are kind and good and birth the good world, and the philosophers of time are those who destroy the world. And he cites any number of sources, source texts to kind of establish that position. He sets up the perennial philosophy as holding that there’s a battle between time and eternity, and that’s not correct. It’s not correct. It’s deep. And I’ll try and map this out more deeply in the coming weeks. But now I just want to point towards where we’re going. The deeper realization—and I don’t say this sentence lightly; it’s a hard won sentence—the deeper realization is that:
Reality is a love story between time and eternity.
Now stay close and just patient. Just breathe. Breathe with me. Breathe with me. Let’s breathe this in.
Reality is not merely a fact. Reality is a story. And at the very core of the story, the very essence of the story is a love story.
It’s not an ordinary story. It’s a love story.
But it’s not an ordinary love story. It’s an outrageous love story.
And an outrageous love story means it’s a love story—in the lineages, particularly in the Solomon lineage—it’s a love story that begins before time. And that love is prior to time. LoveDesire is underneath time.
And it’s LoveDesire that births time.
In other words, before time is eternity. But eternity is not neutral. Eternity is not just awareness. It’s deep. Eternity is not just awareness. It’s not just being, as Huxley describes it. It’s not just shunyata or emptiness, although it’s all of that.
But eternity is tumescent and alive.
Eternity is filled with, imbued with ErosValue.
Eternity is throbbing and pulsing.
Eternity is animated by LoveDesire.
And it is the LoveDesire of eternity or of the infinite—the infinite and eternity are one—it’s the LoveDesire of eternity, of the infinite, for finitude, that manifests time. In other words, we are here; why is there something rather than nothing? Fichte, Schelling, Wittgenstein, but throughout every part of the world and every time in the world there’s this question, why is there something rather than nothing? So, the deepest realization, in response, of the interior sciences is: There’s something rather than nothing because infinity desires finitude.
Infinity, eternity desires time. Eternity, love-desires time. Eternity reaches for time.
And that is what William Blake meant when he wrote, eternity is in love with the productions of time.
Reality is a love story between time and eternity, between temporality and eternity. Reality is a love story between temporality and eternity.
At the Core of the Global Intimacy Disorder Is a Dissociation Between Time and Eternity
And at the very core of the global intimacy disorder is a failure of intimacy between eternity and time. Eternity dissociates and alienates from time. And eternity becomes corrupted in the way it discloses or is understood. And time dissociates and alienates from eternity. And time becomes the picture of Dorian Gray depicted by Oscar Wilde, which is this corruption of time. Wow.
But the intention of Reality is the healing of the global intimacy disorder. David J. Temple has talked about in First Principles and First Values: there’s a section called “The 13 Dimensions of the Global Intimacy Disorder.” But before all the 13 that David J. Temple talks about is the intimacy disorder, the alienation between time and eternity.
Let’s go deeper. So, we have an intimacy equation, don’t we?
Well, let’s write the intimacy equation down:
Intimacy = Shared Identity x [Relative] Otherness x
Mutuality (Recognition + Feeling + Value + Purpose)
There’s an intimacy equation formulation in CosmoErotic Humanism. And what is that intimacy formulation equation? It’s the following:
Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of [relative] otherness, characterized by mutuality of recognition, mutuality of feeling, mutuality of value, and mutuality of purpose.
Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness times mutuality of recognition times mutuality of feeling/pathos, times mutuality of value, times mutuality of purpose.
I’d like to see how beautiful that is.
There’s a shared identity at the core between time and eternity.
Isn’t that beautiful? There’s a shared identity between times and eternity. Time and eternity are not alienated from each other.
It’s not, as Huxley presented accurately, but it was a mistake originally; he accurately presented, that’s what the perennial philosophy is saying. No, that’s not correct.
There’s not a battle between time and eternity. It’s a surface battle. It’s a pseudo battle. The pseudo-eros of time and the pseudo-eros of eternity are at battle with each other.
But the depth-Eros of time and the depth-Eros of eternity are intimate with each other.
They share identity, but in the context of otherness.
They’re not collapsible to each other.
They’re distinct.
It’s relative otherness.
They participate in the same Field of Value.
And there’s a First Principle and First Value in CosmoErotic Humanism that we never talked about until now, until this very second. And the First Principle and First Value of CosmoErotic Humanism is:
Past, present, and future are inextricable aspects of the Cosmos, (that’s time), which supervene—which means are interfaced with, are inter-included on an eternal dimension—that which is beneath and beyond time.
Reality is constituted by temporal eternity and by eternal temporality.
We just made up a word. Okay, but it’s a beautiful word!
It’s not temporality and eternity. It’s temporal eternity and eternal temporality. But they’re not fused, but a couple that fuses, right, becomes deadened, loses its Eros, loses its life. A couple needs to be both part of a larger union, but yet in distinct and dialectical relationship. So eternality and temporality don’t become one word. It’s a word, eternal temporality, temporal eternity, but it’s a love story.
The fundamental disorder in the global intimacy disorder, which is prior to all the other 13 expressions of the global intimacy disorder, as expressed in the book First Principles and First Values, is the alienation, the failure of intimacy between time and eternity.
They share identity, in the context of otherness.
They recognize each other. But it’s even deeper. Stay close:
They feel each other.
How do we know they feel each other? Because eternity is allured by time. That’s what Blake is saying, and I’m just going to use Blake because it’s an easy way to access it: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Eternity is allured to time.
The reason why eternity—whose quality is LoveDesire, is love—moves towards manifestation, why the infinite desires intimacy, which is why we call the name of God in CosmoErotic Humanism the Infinite Intimate, is because the infinite feels the lure of time’s becoming. The Infinite Intimate feels the lure of time’s becoming.
There’s a mutuality of feeling, and then, when I’m in time, when I’m in the hour of time, I’m searching for eternity.
And where does eternity live, says Blake? “Eternity’s in an hour.”
I’m in time, but I get lost in time. I’m not sure what to do in time. Should I start ‘killing time’? No!
The Shared Purpose of Time and Eternity Is Teshuvah
When I enter into the very depth of time, I realize that what I’m yearning for is eternity. Eternity that discloses itself in the moment.
So, there’s a mutuality of feeling between eternity and time, and there’s a mutuality of value. That’s what I just read in the equation formulation.
There’s a First Principle and a First Value called eternal temporality and temporal eternity. There’s a mutuality of value.
And finally, there’s a mutuality of purpose.
The purpose of both time and eternity is Teshuvah.
Teshuvah, which came to the English in its English translation as repentance and penitence, which came through the Latin, which understands repentance and penitence as a human action connected to violation and punishment, is not what the lineage means. That’s a corruption of Teshuvah. Teshuvah means to return, but to return is not a human action per se, although as we’ll see next week and the week after, and we talked about in the Mystery School, but we’re going to try and deepen it now immeasurably, but just at the core, Teshuvah means to return.
What does it mean to return?
To return means that infinity discloses itself in finitude.
Infinity loves so madly, is allured, desires so madly the productions of time that infinity steps back, hides the fullness of its own presence, power, potency, energy, which would obliterate the emergence of a manifest world. It engages in a sacrificial act of recoil, of tzimtzum, of stepping back, because She loves so much. I love you so much, I’m going to step back and bracket myself so that you can emerge. That’s kenosis, that’s this divine emptying out.
It’s beautiful.
The movement, that which drives eternity is LoveDesire.
LoveDesire for what? —To birth reality, to birth all of the real, to birth the manifest world, and then to gift the manifest world with its own essence.
Infinity, not just desires finitude, not just births finitude; infinity invests itself and suffuses finitude with itself. I love you so much, that’s how
I’m going to pour myself into you.
I’m going to allow myself to need you.
I’m going to make myself in some sense dependent on your mood.
I’m going to need your partnership.
I’m going to refuse to become whole unless we become whole together.
Infinity turns to finitude. God turns to world and says, let’s you and I make it all whole together. Teshuvah is the movement of LoveDesire that is the currency of Cosmos that returns reality to its original wholeness—and more and beyond.
It’s not just a return home. It’s not just a journey home. It’s not just I’m coming back. It’s not just a divine exercise. It’s not just, okay, Divinity is loving so much. I’m going to manifest finitude and then finitude, which doesn’t realize its wholeness, which lives in fragmentation, brokenness, will realize its true nature and come home. It’s not just we’re in the Garden of Eden, wholeness—we’re exiled from the garden, exile, brokenness, fragmentation, the fall—and then we’re going to find our way back to the garden, back to the original wholeness. No!
We’re going to find our way back to the garden, but the way back to the garden is not just restorative.
I’m not just restoring the original wholeness. I’m not just restoring the prior condition. I’m adding to it. My journey, my irreducibly unique journey, our irreducibly unique journey, the journey in which we birth from matter to life to the depth of the self-reflective human mind, Homo sapiens, then we birth Homo amor, we become She in person, the Amorous Cosmos in person, we become Metatron, we become the new human, new humanity.
I Am the Unique Love Child of Time and Eternity
The new human and the new humanity is the lived conscious realization that I am a unique configuration of temporality and eternity itself.
I am temporal eternity and I am eternal temporality. I am the love child of the great love story.
I am the unique love child of the great love story between time and eternity.
Oh my God. How can you not laugh with joy?
When you realize, how can you not laugh with joy?
I am the unique love child.
Reality is a unique love child and I am an irreducibly unique love child of that love child of the great love story.
What’s the great love story?
The great love story is the love story between time and eternity.
I was reading T.S. Eliot right before the Mystery School, “Four Quartets”. A whole bunch of passages in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” kept flashing through my mind. And I realized that, oh, Eliot in “Four Quartets” is talking about the relationship of time and eternity. Let me just read you the most famous passage and we’ll move to close here. Eliot writes:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…”
I’m not just returning. The act of returning actually turns the whole thing.
There’s more.
There’s more wholeness than there was in the beginning.
There’s more God.
There’s more God to come.
There’s more wholeness to come.
LoveDesire, when we come together, one plus one no longer equals two. The essential equation of love is that one plus one don’t equal two.
The essential equation of LoveDesire is that one plus one equals infinity.
You know the difference between great love, ordinary great love and Outrageous Love? It’s the difference between a very high number and infinity. The difference between ordinary love and Outrageous Love is the difference between an unimaginably high number and infinity. That’s the fundamental love equation as a non-equation. One plus one does not equal two.
One plus one equals infinity.
My singular expression of temporality eternity, right, is the love child of Reality. That’s who I am.
And healing the relationship of time and eternity.
The broken leadership of Iran has a degraded relationship between time and eternity. And although there’s no moral equivalence in certain very, very critical vectors, obviously,
it’s also true that the postmodern suffusion of so much of the West, which allows my friend Harari to say, any value ascribed to your life is a mere delusion, also has a degraded relationship between time and eternity.
At the core, one dismisses time, the other dismisses eternity; at the very core.
We don’t violate time to find 70 virgins in heaven. And we don’t get lost in the pseudo-eros of 70 virgins on Porn Hub in order to escape the banalities of time, which seems to be a tale told by an idiot because I’ve been told that there’s no Field of Value.
No, we have to re-awaken, we have to re-initiate the great cosmic marriage between time and eternity, the great hierosgamos between time and eternity. That’s the new Story of Value.
So, wow, that’s what we want to talk about a little bit in the next weeks, about this new chapter of the Story of Value; but in the most personal and intimate way.
We want to make this real in the stories of our lives even as we make it real in the new Story of Value.
So, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening, for being with us, for who we must be becoming together.
Madly! Thank you!
Future Reading for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion
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