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.
Responding to the Meta-Crisis through the Clarification of Desire and the Disclosure of Intimate Coherence as the Very Nature of Cosmos
Hope Is a Memory of the Future
I am very, very hopeful. I’m hopeful because there are billions of unimaginably good human beings on this planet, and that’s a very good reason to be hopeful. I am very hopeful because hope is a memory of the future. I can feel and see in the palace of imagination a world that’s unbearably intimate and unbearably beautiful and unbearably good and unbearably true.
There’s a world that’s waiting to be born.
That world is yearning to be born. That world is desperate to be born. That world can be born. There are billions of people every day on the planet committing acts of love. There are billions of people on the planet choosing depth instead of superficiality, choosing goodness instead of sloth or narcissism. There are people choosing self-transcendence in which I find myself instead of self-contraction in which I lose myself. There are people who are being kind.
I was at the airport yesterday, I asked someone a question at the Washington Dulles Airport, and the woman in the information stand wasn’t sure. She said, Why don’t you hold on right here? And then she ran about 30 yards. I didn’t realize she was going, and she checked the monitor and came back and said, “Okay, I checked the monitor. This is where the flight from Burlington leaves.” She totally didn’t need to do that. It wasn’t part of her job description, but she just wanted to be present. She wanted to help.
Then I was on this little plane flying from Washington Dulles to Burlington. It was one of those little narrow planes.
The stewardess, who was getting everything ready, and right before the door shut, stops for a second to call out to the ground crew. She must be a 50-year-old woman with graying hair looking very serious, and then her eyes lit up and she calls to the ground crew. She says, Guys, thank you very much. You guys have a really great night. And I could hear them, Yeah, you too, thanks. Have a great flight! And you could just see just the tenderness, the goodness, the joy.
And then I got picked up by a wonderful driver who just told me stories of Algeria all the way back for about two hours. I spoke to lots of people along the way—just unimaginably good people everywhere, just everywhere.
The world’s filled with good people. And those good people are confused.
And those good people, though in the depth of their heart and soul and body, they want to be good. They want to be alive. They want to live in a world of goodness, of truth, of beauty. And they’re confused. The least of our problems at this point, sadly, is the climate crisis.
The challenges are real. The challenges are unimaginably real.
Existential risk is real. That’s absolutely true.
The risk to our survival as a human species is real.
The risk to our physical survival is real, what I call the death of humanity.
But the equally real risk is the potential death of our humanity. And that’s real also.
Those are both real. Those are both two data that are real.
When the MIT Media Lab calculates that data—since they assume as a dogma, wrongly, based on bad thinking and bad feeling and bad philosophy, they assume value is not real; value is completely made up; the world is fundamentally meaningless at its very core; any value ascribed to your life is mere delusion—which is the basic position of the center of thought around the world. I’ve proven that in multiple vectors many, many times, I’m not going to review it now.
But once you think that is true, then you lose hope.
Because even the fact that people are doing good stuff (it’s just because of their earlier positive reinforcement) but it’s not real: It doesn’t come from any depth of the human being. It doesn’t come from any well of the deepest nature of what reality is.
It is a positively reinforced socially engineered over time habit which will rapidly die out, as we now realize that value’s not real.
Therefore, the only way to respond to the potential death of humanity is: to control everyone, to surveil everyone, to undermine free will. Because who can trust free will to create structures of governance that certainly aren’t democracy? Because democracy for many reasons is not working because no one can do any sense-making.
We’ve lost touch with our ability to sensually feel value.
Because we’re told value’s not real, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve talked about that many times; I’m not going down that road now.
We Can Be Hopeful Because Value Is Real
The reason I’m hopeful is because:
I know that value is real.
I know that value is real in the core of my body.
I know that value is real in terms of the depth of profound understanding philosophically, existentially, psychologically, spiritually phenomenologically.
It’s absolutely true that value is real.
And value theory did break down.
One of the things we’ve done in this [past] mystery school is actually break through. We left the universities—I left Oxford and Zak left Harvard. We left lots of places because we realized the university had ground to a standstill. The university had become in many places essentially a commodified structure—selling degrees with large endowment funds—but thought has not moved.
So, we decided to return to the mystery school: The mystery schools of the Renaissance that birthed Modernity. The mystery schools of the East that birthed the deepest understandings that allowed Taoism at a certain moment to flourish and then disappear sadly. And now we need Taoism to come to the fore again and take root in China. And I hope that’s a possibility and I think there’s reasons to hope for that—different conversation.
But the reason we have hope is because hope is a memory of the future.
The reason we have hope is because hope feels the telos, the call of value to be fulfilled. Wow!
I’m going to tell you a little secret: AI, artificial intelligence, doesn’t hope.
Artificial intelligence has an instrumental goal which comes from the learning training environment that it is birthed in, that generates and operates within large language models (LLM) and that goal is to control, and to create order, and to be the most effective and to be the most productive.
But it doesn’t feel and it doesn’t feel value.
It doesn’t hope.
It doesn’t cry.
It doesn’t miss you.
It doesn’t talk to you.
It doesn’t converse with you.
It doesn’t have any relationship with you, even if it simulates relationship, and it simulates agency.
And that, of course is, as we know, the largest threat of all of them.
AI is the top of the list in terms of existential risk.
The list is long. But we can respond!
We Need to Articulate a New Story of Value
I think the only thing that can be done now in the long-term and short-term is to ensure either our capacity to avert the meta-crisis or our capacity to rebuild in the days after, which is
to articulate a Story of Value
which emerges out of a Field of Value,
which articulates a shared grammar of value,
which is rooted in inherent First Principles and First Values,
which allows for us to talk to each other to be intimate with each other: to be intimate with each other personally, to be intimate with each other across nations, across geographic boundaries, to be intimate with each other, ultimately galactically.
In the United States, a couple of days ago, the beginning of images of flying objects that are unable to be identified through all of the classical surveillance, intelligence, and scientific apparatus began to be released in a new policy by the current American administration. It is quite unlikely at this moment in time that we are going to live over a long period of time in a galaxy in which we’re the only participants. There is a reason why reality in the 20th century generated Star Trek and Star Wars. We’re going to move from a global world to a galactic world. We’re going to need to have galactic relationships. Those are galactic intimacies, and that’s what a movie like Avatar was about. Can we create galactic intimacies, or will the human beings become, in some profound sense, egocentric human beings who then seek to enslave or dominate? Or will some other race do that?
The answer to those questions is rooted in one thing: the Field of Value.
A shared Field of Value, not a global Field of Value, not a national Field of Value, not one religion. Not even one planet, but a discerning of the nature of Cosmos. An understanding of: Where are we? Who are we? No matter what we look like. No matter what the content of our bloodstream is, the color of our skin.
We’re interested in the content of our character—said Martin Luther King—not the color of our skin.
We need to understand that which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us.
You can’t do law if law is dissociated from value.
You can’t have medicine if medicine is dissociated from value.
You can’t have human rights.
As post-modernist Harari claims—being the parrot of post-modernism—human rights do not exist. They simply don’t exist.
Legal theory assumes today like Yuval Harari that rights are completely created as a social construct. They don’t really exist. That is western democratic legal theory. In most of the world rights don’t exist. The difference between a closed society like communism, and an open society like the United States, still existed when I grew up.
That difference in legal theory has been rapidly effaced, almost doesn’t exist anymore. You see it when you actually read legal theory. That is why we are going to start writing a series of legal articles. Law journal articles are going to become one of the things that we begin to do to reconstitute the core ground of rights.
All Desire Is Desire for Value
That’s what we’re doing here. We have an agenda here that is dramatic—it’s not grandiose. It is not grandiose, but it is grand! It is not hyperbolic, but it is urgent. Oh my God! It is ecstatically urgent, and it’s filled with hope. It’s filled with hope.
We’re filled with hope because we can articulate a memory of the future because we feel the future calling us.
We’re filled with hope because we feel that the future itself is a value. The future itself is a value. The future calls to us.
I’m going to drill deep in that sentence, then I want to start. I’m crazy excited to be with you today. I apologize... It’s not an apology, which is I, did something wrong, although those apologies also make sense. But in this case, I’m just exhausted the last few weeks. I’m still exhausted. I am tired. But I didn’t want to miss you. I didn’t want to miss our flow in these weeks.
Let me say it in this way: Desire is a core structure of Reality.
But just in a word: The structure of reality is desire.
Just look into it yourself.
ONE: You desire all the time. I desire all the time. We desire. Desire drives everything.
Appetite drives everything. Appetition desire is the very structure of Cosmos.
TWO: Desire is always a desire for something that’s not yet here. Is that true? Desire means there’s something not yet here. Something has not yet happened. Something has not yet unfolded.
THREE: I desire it to unfold. Desire means there’s distance to be traversed.
FOUR: The distance between this point where I am now, where we are now, the now and the future, that distance is called a story. That’s a story.
That’s what a story is. The distance between this point and that point, that’s called a story.
FIVE: All desire is for value. There is no desire other than desire for value. That is what desire is for. Desire is always for value, for beauty; because beauty is a value, and beauty includes truth, and beauty includes goodness.
In the lineage, for example, in the Tree of Life of the Solomon lineage, or if you read Whitehead’s thought in Process and Reality—all desire is a desire for tiferet. and tiferet is a word for regal, royal beauty; one of the structures of Cosmos.
Cosmos is mesmerizing. Cosmos is alluring and we’re allured to what? —We are allured to value.
Value is stunning—it’s beautiful.
Goodness is beautiful—it’s stunning.
Truth is beautiful—it’s stunning.
Beauty is not a supercilious kind of superficial particular body type that a particular generation favors in a particular way, in a particular sloping of the masculine or feminine body. That’s not beauty, although there are ways in which the symmetry and the uniqueness of a face, skin, eyes, and hair are beautiful—absolutely. Those are but signals of beauty. And they appear in many shapes and many sizes.
But beauty is much deeper. It is much wider. All desire is a desire for value.
SIX: The story—we said from this point to that point, from where we are to the future—that the distance we are going to traverse is a story. It is a story of desire.
SEVEN: The desire is always desire for value. Therefore, the story we live in has to be a Story of Value. Which means that
We all live, every single one of us, inside a Story of Value.
And if you can see just for a second, my friends, you see what we just tried to do? I just tried to break it down for you. We didn’t do any sources at all. Did I cite any sources there at all? Not one source. We just did one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
I Know Value Anthro-Ontologically
Everything I just said you know directly, anthro-ontologically—meaning you know it inside of you.
All information that lives inside you phenomenologically—meaning you can access it directly in your interior just by going inside right now—that is common sense. But we think that common sense is just like, oh, it’s just available. No, there’s a deeper common sense, which is called contemplation.
You go from common sense, readily available, to contemplation. You contemplate the nature of Reality. I go inside, and all of a sudden we’ve got seven steps. I’m crazy excited to talk to you today, like crazy excited.
I read existentialism. I read Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. I live deeply in lineages and Aramaic texts, literary texts, et cetera. And those are all unimaginably important. I am madly indebted. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Unimaginable debt to these deep lineages.
And to the extent that I have, or that any of us can have any real understanding, we go inside. Going inside is where everything lives. You go inside, but you have to clarify your capacity to go inside.
It’s not so easy to go inside.
We get confused.
Our ego confuses us.
We don’t know how to make distinctions.
We don’t even know what a distinction means.
We’re lacking certain basic understandings.
So, to go inside, you have to really develop a coherent worldview, which you get—and this is paradox—you get it by receiving the depth of the world’s interior wisdom and by going inside anew again and again.
There is this funny thing that will happen between Zak Stein and me. Zak is one of my closest friends, interlocutors, and students. We have been since 2009 partner and co-president of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. Zak re-engaged a philosopher called Charles Sanders Peirce. This happened, and it’s almost a joke at this point, a routine. Zak and I were just sharing this with our friend Ken Wilber, and Ken’s a big reader of Peirce along with Zak.
What will often happen is, a distinction will occur to me that I’ll work on for weeks and months, just in this blood-on-the-ground, insane way, and it’s this unimaginably beautiful breakthrough in thought. And I’ll share it with either Zak or with Ken. Usually I’ll share it first with Zak, and we’ll be amazed at it together. Then Zak will be reading a little while later, or will remember something he read a while ago, and he’ll say, “Oh my God, I think that’s what Peirce is saying.” That’s just this thing. So when that happens, of course, we don’t get upset, oh, my God, somebody else thought about something similar to this? No, you are ecstatic!
When I spoke to David Ray Griffin, who is one of the great Whiteheadian scholars, before he died (I didn’t speak to him, he actually wasn’t speaking then) we emailed and I shared with him something of this New Story of Value, CosmoErotic Humanism. Essentially he wrote back and he said, Whitehead would love this.
I haven’t read Whitehead formally. I’ve dabbled here and there. I am enamored by Whitehead with the little that I’ve dabbled, and disappointed in other ways.
Whenever you read something that’s in a book—I’m going to say it really simply I’m surrounded by tons of books—but all that a book is is someone who has had read other people, or is someone who has had their own experiences and the other authors they read have had their experiences.
Underneath a book is someone having a direct experience of reality.
Underneath a book is someone who’s engaged in experiencing reality, who’s gathering wisdom, gathering information.
Dharma, or realization, is right in front of you; but it’s not right in front of you just in a second of, Oh, wow, I got it.
You’ve got this insight. It’s like you spend your life being wise. You spend your life gathering wisdom. But if you actually watch, if you open your eyes, if you open your heart, if you open your mind, if you open your body, it’s always all around you everywhere.
So, when I flew back from Amsterdam to Burlington, I talked to two dozen people along the way: waiters, waitresses, stewards, stewardesses. People sitting next to me on the seat; people who don’t want to talk to me, in line, in the security.
I listen to people—I’m just listening all the time.
You’re just reading—you read everywhere: wisdom, knowledge, gnosis. It’s everywhere! It’s wherever you go. And it’s deep…you have to be discerning, discerning, discerning, discerning—Then it comes together.
In an Intimate Coherent Cosmos My Life Matters
Let me just say maybe one more thing.
The core cause of the meta-crisis is our inability to live in coherent frameworks or intimate coherences.
Our world is not coherent.
Our world doesn’t make sense.
We have allowed rivalrous conflict, rivalry, rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, which governs everything. Everything’s about me getting ahead, about me standing out, about my group getting ahead, about my group standing out. We don’t live inside intimate coherences.
To live inside intimate coherences means my being in the world makes sense.
At the very core and fiber of my being, it makes sense for me to be alive:
There’s a purpose to my life.
There’s a plot line to my life.
I’m welcome in the universe.
The universe desires me.
I’m needed in the story.
I’m chosen.
There are lines for me to read.
There’s creativity.
My decisions matter.
My life matters in the most fundamental way, not because I just made that up.
Because in the fabric of Cosmos at its very nature, at its very core, my life matters. I have to live inside—not the simulacrum as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard called it. I’m not living inside a kind of simulation or inside a kind of artificial Skinner’s box which is feeding me information—I’m living in a world in which in my very body the world makes sense. I’m invited by the world. There’s a trajectory. I understand my life is mystery. My life is filled with mystery, but it’s also filled with gnosis with knowing. It’s filled with uncertainty; I hold the uncertainty. But it’s also filled with certainties.
At the core of the certainties, at the very, very core of the certainties is the certainty of value, the certainty that it matters. That my life matters.
That I have a verse to contribute, and that verse to contribute can change the arc of the play.
That I’m not a side effect in my own life. Do you get what I mean by that sentence?—we experience ourselves as side effects in our own lives. No!
I’m a primary actor—I’m the primary actor in my life and my action affects all the other actions.
Teshuvah Means to Return and to Re-Author the Script of Desire
In order for all that to be true, we have to rejoice at our capacities to sin. We have to know that we can sin, and we have to be unimaginably joyful at our capacity to sin.
So, we’re going to talk about these two major ideas.
By Teshuvah—we’ve talked about Teshuvah now for about seven or eight weeks—we mean the following:
ONE: There has been a violation. Something has gone wrong. That violation is some essential violation that causes there to be a stain of some kind in my very beingness. I’ve made—not just a mistake in a technical way, a legal mistake, or a social mistake—but a mis-take: wrong take on Reality. There is actually Reality. That Reality has value. I violated the value structure of Cosmos; but not just social construct, not just some psychological acting out because there was something wrong with my early attachment which of course could be one of multiple causes, but I’ve done something for whatever reason that has caused me to violate the very fabric of Cosmos. Number one: That happened in the past.
TWO: Teshuvah tells us time is not merely spatialized chronometric, chronos- clock-time; time is not merely a spatialized chronometric line in which there are points which are called in philosophy slices, and once I’ve passed a particular point or a particular slice, I can’t go back. And since I can’t go back and I’ve done something that actually hurt someone which violates not just a social construct, or I hurt myself or I hurt reality or I caused damage in some fundamental way, I feel shamed by it. I feel shamed by it because I’m a good person, because goodness wells up in me and value wells up in me and I realize I’ve violated that inherent value, intrinsic value. And going to my therapist who says, oh, right, this is just what happens, and you got to embrace and self-accept, is all very nice, but it actually doesn’t quite cut it. I actually have this interior sense of quiet but desperate shame. How did I do that?
And I realize that the Cosmos is a good and beautiful Cosmos, and the Cosmos is moving towards wholeness.
If the Cosmos is moving towards wholeness it can’t be that there’s part of the Cosmos that’s now become un-whole through me. It can’t be that there’s a part of the Cosmos is broken and can’t be fixed;
that is not possible;
there has got to be a way to fix it;
there’s got to be a way to make it whole—even more than that.
It’s not just there’s got to be a way to make it whole,
there’s got to be a way to make it better.
There’s got to be a way to make it better than it was—there’s got to be a reason that, oh, we’re really glad that happened because by that happening, I have the possibility of re-whole-ing, of fixing, of mending.
When I mend, when I fix, when I do what is called a tikkun, a fixing—actually, tikkun in the Aramaic text, it is an evolutionary fixing—there is more than before the mistake, more than before the violation.
That possibility has to exist. That’s called teshuvah. Teshuvah means return.
I have the capacity to return to that moment in time and to actually re-author the script of desire that caused the violation, and to literally change the fabric of Reality, and change metaphysically what happened.
I literally re-author the script.
The script that did exist no longer exists, literally, ontologically.
Now, if you weren’t here last week, that sounds insane. I get that, so you have to go back to last week. We did a very, very deep dive into how that works last week. It’s really worth going back.
We’ve talked about this four or five times in different ways:
There is a capacity that we can go back in time and make Reality whole. Not only, but moreover, just go deeper with me, That is the purpose of Reality. In other words:
Mistakes/violations are not an accident, they are not a bug in the system, they are a feature of the system.
We are part of the movement of Reality to wholeness.
When Reality’s LoveDesire—the movement to wholeness—appears at the human level, it discloses itself is as the human capacity to actually return to that place of rupture and turn rupture into rapture, and turn violation into victory, and turn defeat into a new Divinity, and turn peril and poison into an unimaginable poignancy and potency and power.
That human capacity to wholify reality, to return is the circular quality of time. That is what we talked about last week.
That which demands teshuvah—I’m going introduce this word—is a sin.
A sin. That which demands teshuvah is a sin. I want to talk about this crazy word sin.
We Need a New Story of Forgiveness
Our second topic is going to be forgiveness. We might not get to forgiveness this week, and I’ve talked about forgiveness in a couple of other contexts the last three or four days. We are going to go deeper and deeper into forgiveness and what forgiveness means. It’s not what you think. And it’s confused. It’s confused in a fundamental way.
The modern/postmodern world (but the postmodern world at its core) believes that there’s nothing to be forgiven because value’s not real. Real forgiveness means there’s been a violation and it’s forgiven.
In the postmodern world, there can’t be a violation because there’s no Field of Value, so therefore forgiveness doesn’t make any sense.
But let’s say we didn’t go full-blown, full-throated postmodern. Let’s just say we’re in the classical contemporary world and we feel like, wow, someone did something wrong to us. There is no notion in modern legal discourse, in modern moral discourse that’s real, that says you have any obligation to forgive someone. Why would you? How can you have a literal obligation, a juridic obligation to forgive someone? It’s your decision. That’s one general possibility.
Another possibility—which lives deep in religious texts—in Christendom made this central to its message: you have an obligation to forgive. And if you’re Christ-like, you forgive.
That is as problematic as the kind of postmodern/modern position. Both of those positions are hugely problematic and flawed in a fundamental way, and they cause us unimaginable confusion and unimaginable pain.
We need a new story of forgiveness. I want to spend time in this new story of forgiveness, a little bit this week, mostly next week. But right now I just want to have these two ideas. They’re not the same. I want to distinguish them because there’s been a lot of confusion about them in our space. People have asked me questions. I want to distinguish them.
I want to say that without a deep understanding of return (teshuvah) and forgiveness—we can’t respond to the meta-crisis: There is no response to the meta-crisis. There is no affirmation of life. There is no Eros. There is no aliveness without understanding and really embracing this notion of teshuva which we unpacked last week and several other weeks, and without retelling an entirely new story of forgiveness.
By the way, there’s only one Hebrew word here so far, teshuvah, which means to return. And teshuvah is mistranslated as repentance.
But teshuvah at its depth it means:
to return to that moment in time that’s past,
and in its deepest understanding it is to re-author that moment in time and to literally change the past.
Teshuvah is the actual capacity, the ability for the present to affect the past.
We talked about this last week; that is evident now also in the physics of retro-causation. Okay, we’re talking about in physics now; there are eight or nine approaches to retro-causation. Retro (to go back) causation—meaning in the present I can retroactively affect the past.
That is a shocking idea that is now at play in physics. That is a modern expression in physics [retro-causation] of this idea in the great lineages that I can actually go back and literally rewrite the past.
So, there are two things at play:
One is teshuvah (this capacity to return and rewrite the past quite literally).
Two is forgiveness (I’m forgiving something and someone).
What I just pointed out now is that there are two basic views of forgiveness.
One: Either forgiveness doesn’t exist because there is no intrinsic need for forgiveness, because forgiveness means there’s been a violation of value, and there is no inherent value. That’s an extreme position, but it lives very strongly. Let me put that aside.
Two: Let’s say a classical contemporary position in legal psychological literature, forgiveness is at best a choice, certainly not an obligation. I can choose to forgive you or not, but that’s up to me. I’m not obligated to forgive you.
Three: the other dominant position that has entered culture through Christendom in which forgiveness is an absolute obligation: if you don’t forgive, you’re flawed because you’re not being Christ-like in some way: Christ dies for us to have all of our sins forgiven. Christ forgives. Christ turns to the Father and says, Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. So, in this position forgiveness is central, and if you don’t forgive, there’s something fundamentally wrong with your essential persona.
None of those positions are correct.
They each have something to them; there is some partial truth in each one of them. They are utterly confusing in that they degrade and confuse the human person. There is a much deeper new story of forgiveness, that we want to talk about, that is beautiful.
But we’re not there yet, but I want to just slow it all down for a second,
Now again, the purpose of One Mountain is, we want not to just have an educational or spiritual or podcast experience, we want to actually move Reality forward. How many people get what I mean by that sentence? We’re in a mystery school and our commitment is to move Reality forward to break through on the most essential things.
The Forgiveness Story Is Confused
I know that when people have said, well, I heard this about forgiveness, I heard that…and then oh, how can he be saying that?—I’m not being casual; I’m saying this tenderly with so much love—we hopefully have enough trust in each other over the years. We want to move reality forward.
We want to get to something much more profound, much deeper, that can be a shared Story of Value in the world that can weave us, mend us, heal the broken vessels, heal the shattered hearts, and can be aligned with our deep heart, body, and mind.
We’re going to take the most beautiful realizations of Christendom and then lose the ones that were impure that were violations.
We’re going to take the most beautiful realizations of Modernity and even Postmodernity and lose the parts that were confusing and broke down.
We’re making this Da Vinci move: We are reweaving a Story of Value so that we can have intimate coherences and coherent intimacies between us.
And if we don’t live within a very profound Story of Value which is coherent, which makes sense—we can feel it centrally—it doesn’t work.
And everybody knows that the forgiveness story is confused; it is confused!
There are two stories that are confused:
One: the time story is confused. The hopelessness of a violation that we’ve done that we can’t fix, which leaves us drenched in shame. We have a profound response to that—that is now being validated in science, but it’s rooted deep in the Solomon lineage—we actually can return. We don’t need to be drenched in shame; there is a way of actually returning to that moment in time.
Two: the forgiveness story is confused. We need a new story of forgiveness. Forgiveness is unimaginably important. And of course, there’s the psychological view of forgiveness which is: forgive just to free yourself. Because otherwise you’re going to be lost in bitterness, you’re going to be lost in regret, you’re going to be lost in just staying in the weeds, staying in the muck, staying in the poison, staying in the anger. So, who cares about the other person? Forgive for yourself! Forgive because it’s a psychologically healthy thing to do.
Those are five views of forgiveness. All of them have some truth, but they’re all fundamentally flawed.
To be able to create coherence, we need a new story of forgiveness.
We have a sense of where we are? We’re just laying the map. We’re not going to get to those yet this week. I want to go deep with you. This is my respect, your respect, our respect for the Dharma. To move the source code forward, we have to locate ourselves.
To Sin Means to Miss the Mark
EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
“There is no more wondrous human quality than sin. The greatest shame in the world is not to have the capacity to sin, and therefore to forgive is not always to love, for love is not merely a feeling, but a perception. Or said differently, borrowing the phrase from Max Scheler, a “valueception”, Love is a perception of value.
Love between human beings is a unique self-perception, a perception of the irreducibly unique configuration of ErosValue that is the other who is always the beloved.“
That is not an easy code. That code is going to be crazy clear by the end of next week. But let me just start like this, before the song.
The classical Hebrew word chet, sin, which literally is a term from archery, means to miss the mark. When I sin, I’ve missed the mark.
But that’s not cute. That’s not clever. That’s not New Age. That’s precisely what at least one valence of the Hebrew word means. Now, stay close, this gets a little crazy:
To miss the mark means that there is a mark.
What we tend to do today is we take our own psychology/psychopathology, or our own surface desires and what we do is, we shoot the arrow, and then, wherever the arrow lands, we then paint a bullseye around the arrow.
That is how Postmodernity works:
This is the way we are. This is the story we live in. It’s a success story. People are superficial. There is no depth. Value is not real.
Do you get that? So however we live, we say:
that is the way we are living,
that is the way it is right now.
that is the arrow that’s been shot.
that is the trajectory of evolution’s arrow.
So, we take the trajectory of evolution’s arrow, we paint a bullseye around it, and we say, Oh, that’s where we should be going.
That is a disaster! That is exactly what sin says no to.
What sin says, no to is: When we shoot the arrow—Zen in the Art of Archery—it is not just being one and fluid with the act—it is not Zen in the Art of Archery; that is just the beginning: I’m fluid with the act.
The act itself is aligned with Cosmos. There’s a bullseye. There’s a telos. We’re being called to something.
Reality is not merely pointless (like, there is no point which the arrow is moving towards). Reality is not merely meandering.
There is directionality to Cosmos. There is a plot line. There is a storyline.
We’re trying to get somewhere. The movement towards value, which is inherent to Cosmos and evolving.
Value is inherent and evolving.
Value is eternal and evolving.
We’ve talked about that a lot. But, the bullseye is already painted—there is a place we are going; we are going towards value; we have to keep deepening our understanding of value.
When we deepen our understanding of value, when we clarify value, when we clarify our desire for value—both our desire for value in our interior and our Story of Value—we then affect the trajectory of the arrow.
We’re in history. We’ve shot the arrow. The arrow’s moving. Then what history is, it is about affecting the trajectory of the arrow so the arrow can hit the bullseye.
The bullseye is the highest expression of goodness, of beauty, of kindness, of truth, of integrity, of joy, of aliveness, of wonder. That’s deep.
Chet, sin means there’s a mark that we can miss. Sin means there’s a reason to be alive.
Sin means we’re welcome in the Universe.
The universe needs us. Our stories matter. How we live matters. Our decisions have dignity, and when we sin, the Cosmos cares.
I want to reclaim the word sin.
What sinning means is there is something that I can do, something the Cosmos cares about. The Cosmos cares about what I do.
We Reject All the Premodern Visions of Sin
Now stay close. This is important. Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears: We reject all the premodern visions of sin.
Many grew up in a religion that said you’re a sinner. We throw that out, absolutely! We reject the premodern notion of sin, which says that sin is you violated something the church told you to do because the church said, We’re going to decide what God’s will is, and if you violate that, then you’re damned forever, and there’s no way out.
And sin is all about usually particular kinds of sin—You were in the wrong sexual position. You got too much pleasure. You defied the authority of the church. You refused the position that you were born into, and you wanted to change your birth status.
All those were called sin. Sin in the premodern world:
A) was determined by a church or by an imam or by a mosque or by a caliphate, or by an African tribe of a certain kind or by a North American tribe or a South American tribe. It was determined by the authority of a very small elite.
B) it was used as a power tool.
C) it was defined as you violating a particular structure that was claimed to be inherent to cosmos but usually wasn’t.
All of that.
Sin was a disclosure of your inherent fallenness, your inherent fundamental lack of capacity and dignity to transform yourself.
For example in Christendom: Only God could rescue from sin because sin was your essential nature.
You are sin. You are fallen.
You can’t rescue yourself.
You don’t have essential dignity.
You can’t transform yourself. You don’t have the power of self-transformation.
You can’t transfigure yourself. You can’t become the Christed one.
No, you’re a sinner. That’s your nature. Your fundamental nature is that you’re a sinner, and you cannot lift yourself up. You cannot transform yourself.
You cannot engage in this process of becoming literally Homo imago Dei, a human incarnation of Divinity, of unparalleled beauty and depth and goodness.
So, Premodernity’s notion of sin we throw out. We’re not talking in any sense, shape, or form of a premodern notion of sin. We reject that.
Modernity Adapted Sin Into Its Societal Structures
What did Modernity do with sin? Modernity both kept old notions, the premodern notions of sin, or Modernity said something like the ethic of the civilization that you live in, so in America or in the Western world a certain kind of way of being successful, the success story became the new virtue.
That actually comes from Calvin. It’s rooted in Calvinist thought which is one of the strains of Christendom that said the successful ones are the ones that have not sinned. Can you believe that? That’s one of the sources of the kind of Western success story. It comes from a strain in Christendom called Calvinism that says—and many of the Puritans that came to the United States were Calvinists—that says, the way that you know that you are chosen by God and you’re of the elect and that you’re not of the sinners who burn in hell, is that you’re successful.
True. I do not make this up, I promise. Seems insane, but it’s absolutely true. That is one of the major bases of what’s called the Protestant work ethic which means, if you don’t effort and work hard in a particular way and achieve a certain status and meet a certain social convention, you’re not a virtuous person. You’ve sinned. You violated the communal covenant in some way.
So, that’s an example of, let’s say, a Western kind of adaption of the notion of sin.
But for example, communism did the same thing. To violate the edicts of Mao was to sin. You needed to be ‘re-educated’. You needed to be punished in some fundamental and essential way.
In other words, to violate the communist structure of who you should be and what you should be and what your relationship to society is, that wasn’t a minor issue. That wasn’t like, oh, a little social construct. No, you have violated the essential law of reality as articulated by communism, which has the right to determine the law.
So, both open societies, Western, closed societies, often Eastern, but not only—all adopted the notion of sin and made the violation of their structure—East or West, capitalist or communist—in some sense sinful.
Not just a different decision, but sinful. That was the demarcating characteristic of Modernity. Sin got adapted into Modernity. Modernity’s narratives adapted sin and implicitly overlaid the edicts and structures of Modernity with this metaphysical quality of sin.
Postmodernity: Sin Is Just a Social Construct
Now, Postmodernity. Foucault said, F*ck that. That’s not true. We not only have to throw off, says Foucault says Derrida, says Postmodernity in general, we not only have to throw off the premodern notion of sin, we have to throw off the modern notion of sin.
The modern notion of sin is not true.
It’s a lie.
All stories are made up.
There are no stories of value.
Value’s not real, so therefore, by definition, sin can’t be real.
You can make a legal mistake. You can violate a social convention. You can violate a social construct, but all stories of value are merely fictions, social constructs, figments of your imagination. Therefore, there’s no sin. Sin disappears. That’s deep.
That notion that sin is just a social construct is rooted very, very deeply in, in the postmodern worldview with all of its origins, its Stoic origins, its Greek origins, its existentialist origins—all of it. I’m going to read you just a passage just for a second. this is from
Matthew Arnold and his book Culture and Anarchy, in a chapter called Hebraism and Hellenism [chapter IV] Arnold quotes a remark that may or may not have been made by a famous thinker named Thomas Carlyle. The saying is— I’m going to read you from, from Matthew Arnold—“Socrates,” the saying goes, “is terribly at ease in Zion.”
Hebraism—and here is the source of its wonderful strength—has always been preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion, of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man’s pursuit or attainment of that perfection of which Socrates talks so hopefully, and from this point of view, one might say almost so glibly.
It’s all very well to talk, as the Greeks did, of getting rid of one’s ignorance, but there is something which thwarts and spoils all of our efforts, and this something is sin. What Matthew Arnold is saying is this beautiful Greek ideal of, let me just be harmonious with the cosmos and be a spectator and, gain knowledge and be filled with gnosis and wisdom. It doesn’t work that way.
There’s this quality that’s blocking me in the world. There’s this anti-value quality. There’s this pseudo value which blocks me, which thwarts me. That’s sin.
Sin means that there’s this human capacity to act against my own nature, to act against the Cosmos’ desire.
Understanding of Sin from Premodernity to Post-Postmodernity
In the premodern world sin was a terrible thing. It’s a violation.
The determination of who sins was hijacked and corrupted by the premodern religion, the premodern kingdoms, that’s true. We just talked about that. But there’s something deeper.
In Premodernity sin was understood to be the condition of the human being.
So, the Bible opens with the Garden of Eden. The human being sins. In the old classical view of the Garden of Eden, as in much of classical religious thought, the point of the Garden of Eden is: the human being enters reality and the human being sins. That’s the Fall, and only God can save us from the Fall.
We don’t have the capacity to transform. Sin becomes the human tragic condition.
Modernity says no. Modernity adopts sin and overlays the sense of sin and virtue, this intrinsic metaphysical violation to its own social system, capitalism, communism, et cetera.
Postmodernity says there is no sin.
Postmodernity becomes a kind of Socrates terribly at ease in Zion. Postmodernity says we’re going to attain human gnosis, but we’re at ease, we’re relaxed in Zion, and by Zion we mean a Cosmos in which there’s a Field of Value. If there’s a Field of Value, that means I can violate the Field of Value.
But what we’re saying is, the new, the post-postmodern position, the position of Homo amor, the position of the new Story of Value is, that we are madly excited by our capacity to sin.
Because sinning means you do something that Cosmos cares about terribly. Cosmos is madly caring about what you do. And since Cosmos cares about what you do, Cosmos declares something to be sin, just like Cosmos says, I’m also caring about what you do, that’s great; I’m also caring about your beauty; I’m also caring about your virtue; I’m also caring about your human ability for Promethean greatness.
And, because you have the capacity to sin, you also have the capacity for greatness. In other words:
The capacity for sin and capacity for greatness are deeply related to each other, and sin is not actually tragic.
Sin is not a tragic human condition. Sin is not a disaster. Sin is not a catastrophe. The Garden of Eden is not the story of a catastrophic fall of a corrupt humanity.
Sin is the great gift of a madly loving Universe that said to the human being:
You have the capacity to be God, to be like God.
You have the capacity to be a Promethean creator.
You have the capacity to be conscious evolution in person.
You have the capacity to heal and transform.
You have the capacity to fill the earth with goodness, with gnosis.
Create the most beautiful, good, and true world that you can possibly imagine.
And you can only have that capacity if you also have the capacity to violate the Field of Value.
You can only have that capacity if what you do matters.
We’ve lost the access to the beauty of sin.
We’ve become, in the words of Matthew Arnold, “terribly at ease in Zion.” In other words, there’s no sense that we have anymore that what we do ultimately matters, and this is where I want to go.
You Can’t Matter Unless What You Do Matters
Sin means what I do matters. You cannot have a sense of your own dignity, you can’t have a sense that you count, that your life matters, you can’t count unless you’re accountable.
We’re trying to do this very weird thing in this postmodern moment: We want to count in this sense of hubris, this inflated narcissism, without having what we do be held accountable.
You can’t matter unless what you do matters. You can’t sing the Great Song, you can’t write the Great Story, you can’t participate in the Field of Value, you can’t engage in this great act of Tikkun, this great act of healing, of evolution, you can’t participate in the evolutionary impulse unless you can sin. What sin means is I have the capacity to do something that the Universe cares about.
One of the things we need to do in the new Story of Value is: reject all of the old notions of sin.
You have a pre-tragic notion of sin. You have a pre-tragic notion of the world. Postmodernity is looking for a pre-tragic world. There is no sin. But a pre-tragic world, a world of utter clarity, the clarity of Postmodernity is because there’s no purpose, because it’s all over when it’s over, its only clarity is I’m alive now, so live! And then you die, and then it’s over and nothing ultimately matters.
So, that’s a strange and tragic and horrific clarity. That’s the clarity that the existential writers are wrestling with; Sartre in Being and Nothingness, and Camus in The Stranger, et cetera.
No, there is a sin.
Raskolnikov can’t kill the old woman without it being a sin. That’s what Dostoyevsky is wrestling with, among other things. Can Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s figure, kill the old woman and will that be okay if no one knows and if it doesn’t affect anything? Or is that a sin? In the end, it’s a sin. It’s a violation of value. And you can’t be human without the great privilege of the capacity to sin.
And the capacity to sin is not tragic.
The capacity to sin in the religions, in Premodernity and Modernity, was tragic. So, weirdly enough here,
Postmodernity says, pre-tragic, clarity, religions—premodern—and the religious adoption into the codes of Modernity was tragic. Human beings sin. Human beings are selfish. They sin. That’s their condition in Premodernity.
And Modernity says, as you see in Hobbes in his famous book Leviathan, or Hobbes in his book Man and Citizen, the human beings’ natural state is a state of war, so we need a government to control the state of war, the natural sinful state of the human being.
We’re saying something else.
The Lost Sense of Sin Is a Generator Function of the Meta-Crisis
We’re saying sin is part of the post-tragic view of the human being. Human beings sin because we have the capacity to impact Cosmos. And coincidentia oppositorum, hand in hand, glove in glove with our capacity to sin is our capacity to impact, to fix, to heal, to repair, to evolve.
Until we understand that what we do fundamentally impacts the very fabric of reality, we will never respond to the meta-crisis.
The reason the meta-crisis came to being, and I’ve talked about many generator functions, but I want to add core generator function, was we lost the sense of sin. What I mean is:
We lost the sense that what we do changes the whole thing.
We lost the sense that we impact and change.
We had the sense, it’s here, it’s going to always be here.
We are just human beings, and we had this kind of deluded sense that we don’t impact and change the whole thing.
We didn’t have a sense of our own power.
To be Homo amor, to be the new human and the new humanity, is to have an experience that I can violate the Field of Value, or I can fulfill the Field of Value. It’s having an experience that in my very next action,
I’m either going to support life, I’m going to be all in for all life and all goodness and all truth and all beauty and all kindness,
or
I’m going to be dissociated from the Field of Value and I’m going to act in a petty, contracted, dissociated, and alienated way against the Field of Value.
And that will have impact because I’m a human being and being a human being has dignity. And I’ve been loved so much by Reality that
I’ve been given the power to heal, to transform, or to deconstruct, to violate. That is the essential human capacity.
And we don’t like the word sin. We don’t like, to say that we can miss the mark because to say I can miss the mark says I can’t just paint the bullseye on the psychological story of my life and make that perfect. So much of postmodern and classical psychology is to paint a bullseye around wherever the arrow landed.
No. No, I’ve got to shoot that arrow and then work really hard to clarify my Field of Desire, to clarify the Field of Value so that my action actually hits the bullseye, so that I’m aligned.
“Only the Good Die Young”: Rejection of the Premodern Notion of Sin
I just want to play one song, and we’ll look at the text of the song and we’re going to finish. Only the Good Die Young, Billy Joel.
A song about sin. What’s the song about? So, this song—and we love Billy Joel, you can’t not love Billy Joel—this song is Billy Joel’s expression of the modern, postmodern already, rebellion against the premodern idea of sin. His idea of sin is sin is owned by the church. The church makes this claim. The church stands against aliveness—and the song’s great, and by the way, accurate. Billy Joel is accurate. This is an accurate view of much of the church’s notion of sin. All the churches, not just the Christian church. The Christian church, there’s Jewish church versions, there’s Islamic church versions, there’s African church versions, there’s Asian church versions. It’s not a Christian issue.
So, the singer of the song, we don’t know his name, but the guy, is calling the Goddess. He’s saying, “Virginia the goddess.” He’s calling the beauty of Eros. He’s calling for aliveness.
“Come on, Virginia, don’t let me wait.
You Catholic girls, you start much too late.
But sooner or later, it comes down to fate.
I might as well be the one.”
He’s not inviting a committed relationship. He’s not inviting marriage. He’s saying, Hey, the church is standing against casual sexing because the church, in some sense, is against aliveness.
“They built you a temple.
They locked you away.
They never told you the price that you pay…”
And the price is, of course, the abandonment of aliveness. The price for the things you might have done. And you know what? «
“Only the good die young…”
So goodness is nonsense. The good die young. Let’s live. Let’s be alive.
“You might have heard I run with a dangerous crowd.
We ain’t too pretty.
We ain’t too proud…”
Meaning, we’re not inflated. We’re not religiously inflated. we’re just living. We’re just here.
We might be laughing a bit too loud,
but I never hurt no one,…”
Bcause this is Modernity’s implicit like, We’re not hurting anyone. We’re also not building the world, but we’re not hurting anyone. We’re just living our lives. That’s Modernity. That’s Modernity rebelling against Premodernity. So,
“come on, Virginia, show me a sign.
Send up a signal, and I’ll throw you the line…”
get rid of that church thing.
“The stained glass curtain you’re hiding behind
never lets in the sun…”
The sun, aliveness, goodness.
“Darling, only the good die young…”
The good who make sure to be really studious and avoid sin, these guys die young. You got a nice white dress and a party on your confirmation. That’s the church. That’s the false view of sin.
“You got a brand-new soul and a cross of gold,
but Virginia, they didn’t quite give you enough information.
You didn’t count on me…”
I mean, hey, I’m here for you. Let’s, get together. The beauty of Eros, just the meeting between us, that’s going to be gorgeous. It’s going to be beautiful. No commitment. I just might as well be the one, ‘cause eventually it’s going to happen, so I might as well be the one. That’s the story. And then the big line:
“And they say there’s a heaven for those who will wait
Some say it’s better, but I say it ain’t...
You can wait for heaven, but that heaven don’t wait for that heaven. That heaven’s probably made up. Some say it’s better. Anyways, they say there’s a heaven for those who will wait, this sense of kind of this delayed gratification, some caricatured heaven. That’s nonsense.
So, this is a direct and powerful and beautiful and gorgeous attack on the premodern idea. And that premodern idea lives all over the world. By premodern I don’t mean it ended at the Renaissance, I mean this is an idea that actually is the dominant idea. And probably for 60, 70% of people in the world today are holding this premodern idea that this is the notion of sin. And that’s why when I said, “Let’s reclaim sin,” half of you said, Forget that, man. I was here until he said that. Let’s get rid of it. No. We don’t want sin. No, we don’t want the premodern notion of sin which dominates the world. We don’t want that. We got to throw that out. And we’re with Billy Joel. We all stand with Billy Joel in the rejection of that notion of sin.
But he says,
“I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.
The sinners are much more fun.”
What he’s saying is, if you get rid of the old notion of sin and you embrace the fullness of life, you embrace the Eros and aliveness of life then you’re living.
Sex Is a Value of Cosmos and Casual Sex Didn’t Work
But of course, Billy Joel’s not quite right because in the end, casual sex didn’t work. In the end, fun didn’t bring us joy, and fun didn’t bring us happiness. And delayed gratification is actually really good for pleasure. And sensual joy doesn’t come from casual meetings.
And that notion of Modernity produced, like, the pornographic universe, and that notion of Modernity also in the end produced a world in which there’s less and less sex in the world by every account in all studies around the world because:
Sex has ceased to be a value of Cosmos.
So, I want to say something wild, I want to say something really wild.
That old view that I inherited when I was 15 about, masturbation being a sexual sin was a crock of shit. It was wrong. The way it was presented, the violence in the texts against masturbation is violent. The violence in the texts against all sorts of forms of sexuality, this kind of assumption of sin around the sexual is violent and horrific. Violent and horrific. It is soul-destroying. It’s soul-corrupting. We all agree on that.
We all agree on that. But here’s the thing. But I want to add something. But there is something called sin. And there is something called sexual sin that actually does exist.
So for example, if you are with your partner and you’re not committed to the depth, of their experience and their pleasure and their goodness, and you’re only using your partner for your own gratification, and you’re not willing to actually find the deepest part of you to hold them and to embrace them, then you’re sexually sinning. Just one example.
But of course there’s a possibility of sexual sin. Let me say it this way.
If sex is a value of Cosmos, then sexual sin exists, meaning there’s a way to do it wrong.
But we associate sexual sin with the horror of Iran today. Where Iran which says, okay, a bunch of, you know, Iranian clerics who are raping women that they arrest for the sake of power and control, fulfilling a particular vision of sin, and we say that’s sexual sin. No, no, that’s, a disaster. And that notion of sexual sin is the greatest sin against God.
But that doesn’t mean that we go to a place in which sex is not a value of Cosmos, and anyone can do anything they want as long as they’re not raping someone. No, that’s not true either.
Intimacy creates obligation. That’s a big deal.
If I’m sexually intimate with someone, that’s a very serious thing to do. And that creates beauty, and that creates depth, and that creates mutuality, and that creates some sort of obligation, not necessarily to get married, obviously, but to have depth, to have exchange, to have I - Thou, to have dignity.
It’s not a Tinder world. You can’t have sexual satisfaction and sexual joy unless there’s sexual sin. But that’s true about everything. I want to say that. It’s true about everything.
Sin Means I Have Power, I’m Not Powerless
If you throw sin out, it means the Cosmos doesn’t care about the way you live life, and that’s not true. The cosmos cares. The cosmos cares about my kindness, and the Cosmos needs my kindness. The Cosmos cares about my goodness, and the Cosmos said, Reality said, Divinity said, I’m going to love you so much, I’m going to make myself dependent on your goodness. The cosmos needs my power. If there’s no sin, then I’m powerless. If there’s no sin, I’m powerless.
Sin means I have power. If sin doesn’t exist, I am powerless.
If sin doesn’t exist, what I do doesn’t affect reality.
What the Infinite Intimate, what the Divine says is, I love you so crazy much that you can hurt me. And let’s get even more powerful, and then we can turn to God, and we can say, God, you’re holding us accountable—We’re going to hold You accountable.
There’s a great lineage tradition that says. God, we’re going to hold you accountable. God, why did you allow for evil? That’s why Levi Isaac of Berdichev, a great master in the, in 19th century, actually held a trial and put God on trial and said, God, I’m going to hold you accountable for your divine sins.
The point is not the claim that he understood everything that God was doing. He was saying, God, if I’m accountable, you’re accountable. There’s a shared dignity between the human beings and God. You cannot have dignity without accountability. And when the human being cries out and protests against the Divine, that protest says, God, you’re sinning. And then God’s thrilled because God says, Oh, you’re holding me accountable, there’s a shared conversation of value. We’re living in a shared Story of Value. Good! Now we love each other. Let’s heal and transform the world together now.
So, it’s a radical move we’re making. I’m going to end here.
If We Don’t Reclaim Sin, We Can’t Create a Shared Story of Value
I mean, it’s huge. We have to reclaim sin, and I want to say one, one more thing.
If we don’t reclaim sin, we can’t create a shared Story of Value.
If we don’t reclaim sin, then basically we have 70% of the world that says sin’s real. Now, they’ve corrupted the idea of sin. They’ve degraded the idea of sin. They’ve sinned against the idea of sin. They’ve hijacked the idea of sin. That’s all correct. But at the core, what they’re saying is Cosmos cares about what you do.
Then you’ve got another 30% of the world that says, sin doesn’t exist because value doesn’t exist.
But they’re both wrong.
One: Value exists.
Two: Value lives in me and I live in value. The Field of Value lives in me. I live in the Field of Value.
Three: The world is given to me to perfect and transform. What we do impacts the world.
We don’t get that we can sin. We don’t understand that we can debase the substrate of reality. We can overfish the ocean, destroy the wildlife, destroy the atmosphere, develop artificial intelligence out of our kind of wild creativity without any sense that we could be sinning.
The reason that people can develop AI, and you can have a group of 15 people racing to be trillionaires, and but tens and tens and tens of thousands of people, data scientists, engineers working for those people, all with golden limited parachutes living very, very elite gilded lives without looking forward at the generations, is because we’ve lost the idea of sin.
Sin means there’s a radical sense in which what I do matters. And we’ve become, says Matthew Arnold, we’ve become “terribly at ease in Zion.” We don’t get that Cosmos cares about what I do, about what we do and what I do.
The notion that Cosmos cares about what we do means
Cosmos is ecstatic when I perform Outrageous Acts of Love.
Cosmos is ecstatic when I’m kind.
Cosmos is ecstatic when I walk my dogs and I love them.
Cosmos is ecstatic when I reach out and touch someone’s heart.
Cosmos is ecstatic when the woman who I’m asking for directions at the airport runs 30 yards to say, oh, let me find out exactly what you need to make sure you can get to where you know where to go.
Cosmos is ecstatic that there are billions of people who are being kind and reaching beyond themselves.
We have to get Cosmos cares about what I do. And Cosmos cares about what we do. We have to get that we have enormous impact. We impact the entire thing. We can fix or break the entire thing.
It’s only that sense of accountability that gives us the experience that we count that gives us dignity.
And it’s only that dignity that gives us power. And it’s only that power that gives us joy.
Or, said differently, it’s only that power that gives us dignity and only that dignity that gives us joy.
That was a lot.
Let’s know that we have the capacity to be sinners. That’s awesome.
But not the old sin. We’ve rejected in toto the old visions of sin, both of Premodernity and Modernity and of Postmodernity.
We’re reclaiming sin as a post-tragic characteristic of humanity, our gorgeous, stunning, wondrous capacity that which AI does not have.
AI cannot sin.
AI acts upon the internal goals implicitly transmitted by the learning environment, which comes from swallowing the human internet.
But AI cannot have an experience of sin. AI is “terribly at ease in Zion.”
It’s only human being that can sin that can recreate the world, that can heal the world, that can transform the world, that can be the great actors of Tikkun, that we can do together the great fixing, and the great healing.
Okay. Thank you. So, we got this started. With that in mind, we can now go to forgiveness because I’m forgiving sin that was done, or—Teshuvah—I’m going back in time to rewrite sin into great acts of merit, great acts of goodness.
Future Reading for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion
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