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 David Cicerchi.
The Fourth Big Bang and the Evolution of Love: Who We Must Become
I want to dive right in. I want to have our last conversation on forgiveness next week. I want to focus this week on the sin thing. The sin thing. And the sin thing is about missing the mark. What do you think? Could we could we make that a title of something? The Sin Thing. Do you think that has any potential? I don’t know. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Okay.
So, here we go. We’re trying to fill in this piece that’s missing from a new Story of Value, this piece that’s missing from a new theory of governance, this piece that’s missing from a story of self.
Who are we?
Where are we?
What ought we do?
Those are the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. We have to know how to answer these questions in order to create a world that we want to live in—a world that we want our children to live in—in order to have a world which will indeed survive, in order for humanity to make it through this moment of meta-crisis, this time between worlds and this time between stories, as we’ve called it here in One Mountain for the last decade. This is a time between worlds and time between stories.
Almost a decade before, Zak and I wrote about the second shock of existence. The first shock of existence is the death of the individual human being at the dawn of history—the realization of death.
That realization presses us into the realization of who we are. We go from being homo erectus, this proto human being wandering on the savannah, whose encounter with death presses us into our humanity into the emergence of homo sapiens, into the emergence of
the beginning of sapience of wisdom, and the
ways of operating on reality,
the transmission of gnosis, of knowledge through generations,
the beginning of art and music,
the beginning of trade;
but at the core, language and our capacity to tell a story, which is a Story of Value.
That’s the beginning of sapience. And it’s the encounter with the first shock of existence that bursts the new human.
I first tried to formulate this in 2010, when we were in Europe, teaching about this in 2009 and 2010, at Venwoude, this retreat center in Europe. We talked about this second shock of existence. We talked about the meta-crisis. And we talked about the only response to the meta-crisis, being the birth of the new human.
A good term for the meta-crisis is the second shock of existence. That’s what emerged out of those seminars: that the first shock of existence is the death of the human being, and the second shock of existence is the death of humanity.
And just like our response to the first shock of existence pressed us into birthing the original and first level of our humanity. Homo sapiens, so too does the second shock of existence, the potential death of humanity need to press us into the next emergence.
It needs not to cause us to become doomers in despair—“it’s all over”—
It needs us not to become deniers, which is where most people are—”we’re going to deny”
It needs us not to think there’s no hope, so we’re going to dominate.” That’s Elon Musk’s move: basically there’s no hope. There is no inherent value. That was BF Skinner’s move: Let’s dominate the system. So at least it’ll be run by us. We’re the good people. We’re the good guys.
No!
We need to make a da Vinci move, which needs to be the dawn of a new humanity.
This notion that there’s going to be the birth of a new human and a new humanity:
Is that a fanciful idea?
Is that some mythopoetic idea?
Is that some declaration we’re making?
The Emergence of the New Human and the new Humanity: The Fourth Big Bang
No, it’s the inherent nature of Reality itself.
That Reality explodes with a first Big Bang, which is when the Infinite discloses itself as finitude, as form, as matter, and matter is coded with what matters—matter itself moves towards value. The proton and the electron come together, and they create a new value called an atom. And so, it moves up the evolutionary chain. That’s the first Big Bang.
And then matter triumphs. Matter triumphs in life. Then we go through the biosphere. Then we go through all the levels of the biosphere of life: Ever more coherence, ever more intimacy, ever more uniqueness, ever more value, ever more Eros, ever more capacity for transformation, ever more integrity, ever more depth.
The Third Big Bang, we’re putting to it: the Third Big Bang is the depth of the self-reflective human mind. Fantastic. Now look at what happens.
Does it end then? No, no.
Are we ready to play a larger game? Are we ready to participate in the evolution of love?
What’s the larger game? The larger game is we go through all the levels of life, which is the developmental journey of the human being documented in developmental thought in terms of the individual human in the last 200 years, but also documented in the cultural developmental journey, because ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
That is to say the development of the individual and the development of the species recapitulate each other. That idea was critiqued, but Habermas looked at it carefully and concluded correctly that there are some very important parallels.
We go through all the development of the human being, you can look at about 100 different developmental models, and my dear beloved friend, Ken Wilber did a fantastic job.
It’s popular these days for people, in Meta modernism for instance, to borrow everything from Ken Wilber and then forget to cite him. Oops, we forgot to cite him, Sorry. And then kind of desiccate it and reduce it and make it materialist. Thank you very much. Wasn’t so helpful.
Ken did a great job. I mean, one can critique and take issue with Ken. I’ve done that. Ken and I have argued over many things and created new chapters and mutually fructified each other in many ways. But Ken—you’ve got to first recognize the dude did a fantastic and beautiful job at multiple levels, and that needs to be recognized, which is kind of hard for some people to do these days, even within his own movement. Ken did a fantastic job.
I want to just honor that beautiful piece of work. He wrote a book called Integral Psychology, and at the back of Integral Psychology he’s got, I don’t know, 10 or 15 pages, which is a very rough outline map of about 100 developmental theorists, which is the movement of development in the world of the self-reflective human mind.
In other words, we go through all these levels of development, and then, oh, my God, there’s this new emergence. These developmental thinkers, there are different names that they offer, but they have this realization that there’s this new emergence, and they’re documenting it empirically.
Now let’s go back to CosmoErotic Humanism, let’s go back to our the Story of Value.
And Ken, by the way, has joined us in CosmoErotic Humanism. And he is, together with Zak Stein, a part of the collective authorship of David J. Temple. So, there’s an Integral scaffolding to CosmoErotic Humanism, that’s very important. And now, CosmoErotic Humanism is going this huge new step.
Part of this huge new step is we’re redefining, recasting, revisioning, re-understanding the contours of what happens at these higher levels of development. There are these 100 different developmental thinkers, and Gebser is primary among them, and his famous book The Ever Present Origins is a fantastic and important book, where he names his version (before Ken) of what he calls integral. That’s his version of it, Ken adopted some of it and changed some of it.
What we’re doing in CosmoErotic Humanism is we’re redescribing, I think, in the best way possible, the deepest possible view of this new emergence, and we’ve given it a name, an original name, we call it the Fourth Big Bang, which is the emergence of this new human and new humanity.
One of the reasons Barbara Marx Hubbard joined us, who was kind of the greatest evolutionary storyteller of the latter part of the 20th century, and the first part of the 21st century is because Barbara felt like, oh, my God—she literally must have written 50 letters saying—Oh, my God, I can feel this next impulse of evolution happening here at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, I’m actually redescribing my own understanding of what this next stage could be.
Barbara significantly revisioned her whole life teaching in the last five years of her life in some very, very important, significant ways. We literally evolved what conscious evolution could mean in some very real way.
We called it the Fourth Big Bang, the emergence, the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo amor.
I’m going to give you an example of just like little shards of this happening. So, Don Beck called me very beautifully. Don Beck is a key student of Clare Graves, and he took Clare Graves’s work and reformulated it as Spiral Dynamics and spent 40 or 50 years of his life teaching it. So when the Your Unique Self book came out in 2011, which was very early on, when Zak and I published the article on the second shock of existence, Don called me and he said, “Oh, my God, Your Unique Self is the Bible of second tier consciousness”, of this next tier of consciousness. Second tier consciousness is in a certain sense, what different developmental systems, including Don Beck and his teacher, Clare Graves, called this next level.
Carol Gilligan, Kohlberg’s student, described this next level very elegantly in her book In a Different Voice. There was this understanding across theorists that empirically described that there is a next level to emerge. So, we’re calling that, we’re giving it a new name: The Fourth Big Bang.
What the Fourth Big Bang tells you is that this movement that I’m describing is not mythopoetic, it’s not fanciful, it’s not made up; it is the impulse, the movement, the natural movement of evolution.
There are 100 developmental researchers that point each in their own language in this direction. So, to suggest, oh, we’re just going to keep going round and round as classical Homo sapiens, no!
No, the entire point of evolution is who we must become. I mean, of course that’s the movement of evolution.
The Universe Is Teeming with Value
The entire movement of evolution is who are we going to become? Who must we become? But why is it a must? Why is it who we must become? It’s who we must become because the inexorable movement of evolution is to move from the birth of Reality from the Infinite to finitude, the First Big Bang, then matter, we go through all of matter, matter triumphs as life, the Second Big Bang, we go through all the levels of life, life triumphs as the Third Big Bang, the depth of the self-reflective human mind.
And then we go through these levels of development, these evolutionary unfoldings within the depth of the self-reflective individual and collective human mind. And there is this knowing in developmental thought across 100 researchers, that there’s a new emergence, that it doesn’t stop. Of course it doesn’t stop.
Of course, it doesn’t stop because evolution is the evolution of love.
Evolution is the evolution of intimacy and love, what we call ErosValue in this book, First Principles and First Values, which I’m just desperately asking everyone, please read (And by the way, we need like 10 more reviews). People are reading this now. It’s sold a few thousand copies. We haven’t even earned out the money that it costs to put it out but that’s not our point. My point is that it’s a really important book to read. Someone called Zak and me, I won’t say their name, but it’s a recognized name and a very important force in the world, and he said, this is the best book I read in the last 10 years. The book’s good. If you want to read another version of it, The Homo amor Manifesto. Same book, but take a look at it.
We need to write book reviews for this to move forward. This is what it means to be a movement. We’re not some podcast online trying to get views. We’ve met 500 times through One Mountain Many Paths. We’re at the core in the center of the movement.
Let’s go to the next level, let’s go to Homo amor. It’s very beautiful. We’ve given it a new name. It’s the Fourth Big Bang.
It is the inexorable process of Cosmos, which is why I can be optimistic. There’s great cause for pessimism. There is a meta-crisis.
When Nick Bostrom, in the Oxford Center for Existential Risk, and his buddies, Will Macaskill, and Toby Ord, right—these are good guys—they talk about existential risk, their basic view is, there is no light anyplace in the cosmos, there is no consciousness anyplace in the cosmos, there is no value, anyplace in the cosmos that’s inherent. And for some chance, random reason, in this cosmos some glimmer of contrived human value, appears. They get that it’s precious, but they don’t think it’s intrinsic; they view it as an accident, but they get that it’s precious.
My friend Yuval Harari, in the last page of his book, did a good job. In his conclusion, he talks about, oh, my God, we’ve got to stand against the darkness, because the only place where there’s anything that’s conscious in the entire universe, is right here on planet Earth, and it doesn’t exist anyplace else. And if it goes out here, it’s going to go out forever. No! No. First off, we have to fight for life with all our hearts and souls.
This is the great battle for humanity.
Artificial intelligence is essentially saying, that human intelligence does not matter, that human intelligence is about measurability, human intelligence is about instrumental reasoning, which is mechanical; that actually, human intelligence doesn’t matter, because for artificial intelligence, value is not real. Value is a feeling and artificial intelligence can’t feel.
So, this is the great battle for humanity.
And the reason we get to be optimistic, in a way that Yuval can’t be, in a way that Nick Bostrom can’t be, in a way that Toby Ord can’t be, in a way that Will Macaskill can’t be is because, we understand that value is inherent to Cosmos.
For Nick Bostrom, value is completely contrived and created. So therefore, he can’t imagine that we could have this new emergence of this new human and new humanity, because he doesn’t have access to value, to its inherent nature.
He’s trapped in a kind of postmodern discourse about value.
He’s trapped in a Skinnerian social engineer discourse that says love’s not real, and
value’s not real.
He’s trapped in the same discourse that trapped Yuval Harari, and he wrote a book called Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World.
Nick, you say so many dumb things in this book, it’s kind of unimaginable. And Nick, you’re awesome. Your book on superintelligence in 2014 was awesome. Your Vulnerable World Hypothesis essay was awesome. And you’ve had a deep impact on me, thank you, thank you, thank you. And, and when you move out of existential risk into philosophizing, you repeat kindergarten cliches. And you say unimaginably dumb things. My student, friend, colleague, interlocutor, partner, Zak Stein, partner in crime, wrote a very good review of Nick’s book and he points out some of these things.
So, why are we optimistic?
We’re optimistic, because the universe is teeming with value, because value is not hard to find, value is impossible to avoid.
Who We Must Become is not some name that we just created in a fanciful way to build some community. I don’t give a fuck about building a community and making a couple of bucks; we’re not going to make a couple of bucks, we’ll barely break even, we’ll probably lose money. We’re starting the community so we can have this living, thriving, alive center. We’re kind of, if you will, a monastic academy, if I can borrow a phrase from my friend Soryu. It’s monastic, but we’re monastic householders around the world. We’re feeling the flutter, we’re feeling the demand, we’re acting in the capacity to stay focused on the whole.
So, this is a new level of emergence. It’s Homo amor. It’s this new possibility. The new hope, the rebel alliance, is going to succeed in the end, at least for a time, because the force is real. There’s an inherent force of LoveValue, LoveIntelligence and LoveDesire. And the memory of the future, the most beautiful world, but the most good world, the most true world, the memory of that future already lives in us as us and through us.
We know that we must become something.
That’s the optimism.
That’s the radical optimism.
That’s the radical hope.
That’s the radical possibility.
Reclaiming a Higher Vision of Sin as ‘Missing the Mark’
That’s our context. That’s our context, part one.
Part two: Now it starts to get like crazy, exciting. It’s a big context. I want to do this deep dive with you based on this context. I’m going to go back to this fundamental structure of Reality that we’ve been talking about. Three and a half months ago we talked about it. We talked about it at Mystery School. We’re talking about it now. It’s a fundamental structure of Cosmos, which is called teshuvah. And as we’ve said many times, teshuvah is mistranslated.
Teshuvah is mistranslated as penitence.
It’s not penitence.
It’s not repentance.
Those are Latin words, that took on the broken part of Christendom’s claim that the human being is fundamentally degraded, is fundamentally sinful in the old version of sin that we’ve rejected.
The old version of sin, the pre-modern version of sin, the version of sin that dominated the world of the Third Big Bang. The notion of sin that dominated the world of the Third Big Bang in its religious expressions was this notion of sin; the human being’s inherently sinful in some fundamental way.
We need to reject that degraded notion of sin, and we need to evolve our notion of sin in some fundamental way, where sin means I’m missing the mark. Sin means that I am not giving my unique gift.
I am Homo amor. This is the Fourth Big Bang. I’m not just a separate self—Third Big Bang. I’m not just a True Self, part of this field of undifferentiated God awareness, which says that I’ve got to rise beyond my unique story, I got to rise beyond my uniqueness, I’ve got to just become part of The One.
In another version of True Self, I’m part of the state, which is a kind of secular adoption of the sense of The One, the State is The One, the process of the state becomes The One in Hegel, the absolute spirit becomes— in Hegel—a version of The One which births communism, in its original glory, and then in its utter devastation, which killed more people in the 20th century than Nazism did. It’s a big deal.
And Postmodernity is in some sense deeply rooted in some of those same sources.
I need to get this profound sense of a new vision of sin, a higher vision of sin, which is based on a higher vision of the human being, in which
The human being is not just a separate self,
The human being is not just True Self, which means I’m part of The One;
Rather, the human being is an individuation of True Self: I am an irreducibly unique individuation of True Self. We call this Unique Self.
Unique Self is not my Myers-Briggs test; it is the irreducibly unique impulse of the love of Reality. It’s Reality’s LoveImpulse being David in person.
I am the Amorous Cosmos in person.
Sin means, in that sense, that there is a corner of the world that is unloved, and only my love, only my quality of intimacy, only my kindness, only my tenderness, only my vibrating, pulsing, tumescent energy, only my LoveDesire, only my sensitivity, only my opening of my heart, can love that moment open, can love that corner of the world open.
In space, I’m saying it spatially, I can love that corner of the world open, I’m saying it temporally in terms of time, only I can love that moment open.
There is a dimension of Reality in space and time, that is unloved, that only through the meeting with:
my irreducible Unique Self,
my irreducible unique incarnation of the Amorous Cosmos,
my unique incarnation of Evolutionary Love,
my irreducibly unique incarnation of the evolutionary impulse towards ErosValue,
says Abraham Kuk, I am the Lord your God, and only that irreducible I can love that moment open.
Sin, therefore means, I missed the mark.
I wasn’t the great lover that Reality desperately needed me to be, I didn’t offer the kindness, I didn’t sing the song, I didn’t write the love poetry, that Reality needed to hear that needed to spill from my pen, that needed to drip from my lips, upper and lower, the tumescent explosion, of LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty and LoveDesire loving Reality open in a pulsing movement towards wholeness, towards kindness, towards goodness, towards integrity.
Do we get that it’s deep? It’s deep.
Sin, means something very different at the level of the Fourth Big Bang than it does the level of the Third Big Bang.
There Is Sin and There’s Teshuvah in the Animal World
At every one of the four levels of Reality, there’s also a notion of teshuvah, of return.
Now, let’s go even more deeply: At every one of the four levels of Reality, there’s a notion of sin. I’m not going to talk today about what does sin mean at the level of matter and at the level of life; that is a profound realization, but it’s not easy to put in words. You have to access it directly in your body.
The lineage texts, the mystical interior science, lineage texts speak of this subtle quality of both choice and sin, that lives even at the level of matter and life. C.S. Lewis, the “man of classical letters” at Oxford, and Tolkien, who did Lord of the Rings, were the great English writers at Oxford. When I was writing my doctorate there, I would sit at the same pub, I would go to the pub that they used to sit at and write. It was one of my favorite places to write.
So, C.S. Lewis, late in his life, writes something called The Chronicles of Narnia. Both in Chronicles of Narnia, and in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, because they’re sitting drinking together, there’s this notion of the trees coming alive. And of course, the director James Cameron, borrows this for Avatar.
There’s a line in The Chronicles of Narnia, and I think it’s in the second book, Narnia has been destroyed, and the four kids who were kind of the kings and queens of Narnia have gone back home, but they haven’t yet returned. And the trees forget their identity.
There’s this line in C.S. Lewis, where he talks about how the trees have lost their aliveness, the trees have forgotten who they are. And Tolkien has a similar kind of tree moment. And in Avatar, Cameron picks up that same notion of the trees.
It’s a very big deal.
There’s a very deep notion of that there’s this dimension of choice in nature.
That’s very deep. I’m not going to talk about that today. It’s too much for today. But I just want to acknowledge that it’s there. That’s something I feel very deeply.
What is the level of choice that kind of lives in the trees? I remember driving to Auschwitz in Poland, one of the horrific, most horrific Nazi death camps. I left Krakow, it’s like an hour and a half from Krakow. I saw the beautiful trees, and I remember being utterly enraged at the trees. I said to them, Where were you? How could you stand by? How could you be mute? How could you go silent?
The sense of this subtle choice that lives in nature, is different than human choice. It’s an earlier level of choice.
There’s a famous prophetic text in Isaiah about the lion will lie down with the lamb. The wolf will lie down with the lamb, and there are these different versions of these texts of course. In the Woody Allen version of this text, the lion will lie down with the lamb and the lamb won’t get any sleep. So, okay, but the lion and the lamb lie down together.
There’s this vision of the lion lying down with the lamb—a prophetic vision of a world that’s more whole.
We often have assumptions of this animal world that are not accurate. If you remember Douglas Adams and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? In the movie version, the dolphins are doing this song. Everyone thinks that the dolphins are just doing this innocent, silly song at the aquarium. But they’re actually warning the human beings of existential risk, and no one understands them—And I often feel like a dolphin. Then they translate the dolphin song. The end of the song is something like, the dolphins are now going to leave planet Earth, the dolphins are now going to leave planet Earth. So, the dolphin song is something like, so long, and thanks for the fish.
So long, and thanks for the fish. So, the dolphins are doing that their song. Doug Adams translates their song. He wrote many books; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a is a multi-volume thing. The dolphins are singing, so long, and thanks for the fish.
Or in Cameron’s Avatar, obviously, with the whales, the Tulkun, you get the sense that they are as advanced or more advanced than human beings. Now, they’re probably not more advanced for lots of reasons, that’s probably a myth. But they do have particular levels of development, which are unique and are more advanced. They don’t seem to have overall, deeper or wider consciousness than human beings, which is why they didn’t dominate the planet, they didn’t actually take over the planet. They couldn’t do what human beings were able to do—these little puny human beings had particular qualities of consciousness that allowed them to take over the planet, both for good, and also, they brought us to existential risk. So, both, this incredible human beauty and depth and poetry and, and incredible human choice for evil at the same time. These two paths diverge in the wood, and that’s brought us to existential risk.
I’m just pointing out in these little interstices, that there are four levels of teshuvah.
And there are four levels of sin.
What does sin mean in the First Big Bang?
What does sin mean in the Second Big Bang?
What does sin mean in the Third Big Bang?
What does sin mean in the Fourth Big Bang?
There are four levels of Teshuvah. There are four levels of sin: matter, life, Homo sapiens—the depth of the self-reflective human mind—and then Homo amor.
There are four levels of teshuvah, and teshuvah means the ability to return, to set right.
There’s a sense of teshuvah in atoms;
There’s a sense of teshuvah in the animal world;
There’s a sense of teshuvah in the human world.
And there’s a sense of teshuvah in the Homo amor world, the Fourth Big Bang.
Does everyone get that schematic? It’s the first time we’ve ever said it out loud together.
I’m not going to talk about sin in the world of matter and the world of life, although it can be talked about. So, I looked at a couple of movies, just to get that sense.
In C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, for example, the animals are talking all the time. It’s like, oh, in Narnia, of course, animals talk. Why wouldn’t animals talk?
And if you read the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the good name—who’s the founder of the Hasidic movement that Martin Buber would famously write about, that emerges out of the Carpathian Mountains in like 1760 adjacent to Romania—the Baal Shem Tov talks about the songs of the birds, and the masters talk to trees, and to birds, and I talk to trees and birds all the time. Different conversation; don’t report me. That is a more interesting and deep and profound world that we kind of write off as being almost irrelevant.
If you look, for example, at Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens, which is the history of the world—which is, I would say, a very, very well written book and a very bad book on multiple levels, and one of the most damaging books written in the 20th, 21st century, one of the most chilling books written—and again, Yuval is a great writer. And I’ve invited him for dinner many times with his husband Yitzhak. But one of the giveaways that the book’s not going well is: it begins with two short paragraphs of like a couple of lines each, and one is the entire first Big Bang. It doesn’t call it the first Big Bang, but says there’s atoms, the molecular world, and then there’s life. And then like five sentences on atoms and life.
And now the story begins with human beings. That completely misses the point, that actually:
Reality is coded with value all the way up and all the way down.
There’s a coherent story.
The movement from matter to life to the depth of the self-reflective human mind, to the Fourth Big Bang—Homo amor—is a story.
And it’s a Story of Value.
And it’s an evolutionary Story of Value.
But Yuval is caught in the postmodern reductive mind that he can barely get out of and then he ascribes it to a particular strain of Buddhism, which I think is a huge mistake. I had the privilege of having in my house, one of the great Buddhist masters from India, this beautiful man with hundreds of thousands of followers. And we were talking about this just the other day. That’s a huge mistake. But part of the mistake is:
Thinking that the world of matter is just this empty, desiccated, random, chance, dead, inert world. That is just not true. That is an empirical absurdity.
Remember Daisy the cow? So, Daisy, the cow, right has some early dimensions of Unique Self. All cows are not just cows. Descartes made this huge mistake that infused Modernity. He said all cows are just a genus. And many of the Jewish mystical authors made the same mistake, by the way, not all of them, but there’s a group that did along with Descartes, which said, oh, you’ve got this genus, you’ve got a species called cows, but you don’t have individual uniqueness in cows. That is utter nonsense. That is simply not true.
There is some proto uniqueness in animals. Of course there is. We have three cats that live here in the house. And they’re each irreducibly unique, obviously. They have different characters, a different persona. All three of them are significantly more important than me in the house. That’s a separate problem. They’re completely different. And even though, for example, two of our cats, one is called Jeffrey Jones from the Joneses. That’s one cat and another cat is called Boots. Poppy’s the third. Even though two of them look completely the same, they’re utterly different in the way they act. They have completely different personhoods. I’m just pointing out that we can’t just say cats.
Actually sin and teshuvah lives in some very deep, subtle way in the animal world and in the world of matter.
Now, I’m going to say something kind of huge, and I don’t know why we did all this time on this, but it’s beautiful. It’s deep.
The world of matter and the molecular world and the cellular world started the world of life, and from the world of animals, in some sense, follows the human world. Once the human being emerges, the human being has the capacity to actually uplift the animal world.
Now, our point is not to make the animal world human, that’s not the point. We’re not going to humanize the animal world. Animals are part of the animal world. The animal world has jungle dimensions to it, but the animal world has its own inherent ethos.
There is a possibility of sin in the animal world, where the animal world acts out of integrity, where a lion begins to kill more gazelles than should be killed, in ways that are brutal, and ways that are sick, and in ways that are pathological. Other lions will sometimes kill that lion because that lion is sinning.
I just want to open our eyes to the fact that there’s this big, thick and beautiful world.
Humans Are Born to Transform
Now, let’s go back to the four levels of sin, and the four levels of teshuvah. We spent the last part explaining that we’re not going to explain sin at the level of matter and not going to explain sin and teshuvah at the level of life. Because it’s just a wider, deeper, broader conversation, but I didn’t want to skip it; I wanted you to be aware of it.
So, now, we want to talk about who we must become. What does it mean? What does transformation mean?
We are born to transform.
We are born to become something.
We are not born to meditate and disappear into being—that is just utter nonsense.
We are not born to meditate to disappear into being. That is not why we were born. Cosmos was doing a very good job, Eternity, Divinity was doing a very good job at meditating before we came around. So, being, the Field of Being, Infinity, the Infinite Field of Being wanted to birth becoming.
Of course that’s what we’re here for.
We are inter-included incarnations of being and becoming.
I want everyone to get it: the name of the school we started matters. This is not the School of Being. This is not my colleague Rupert Spiro’s meditation school. Thank God it’s not. No, that’s not the point Rupert. We’re not supposed to just go back to being and then pretend like it’s going to help our becoming a little bit. No, we’re not supposed to write meditations about disappearing into True Self. It’s not about getting beyond your separate self and saying your separate self is merely your busyness. We have this ritual of busyness, what Heidegger called the busy, busy, busy man. But busyness is the activity of a separate self that’s covering up its own emptiness. So, we move beyond busyness, yes, into Being, into True Self. We access this deep ground of Being. But then the entire point of accessing the ground of Being is that from that ground of Being, we become—that’s Unique Self.
Unique Self is the field of becoming.
We want to become. What do we want to become? We want to become alive. We want to become radically alive.
I want to become radically alive.
I’m a motivated human being. I want to be radically alive.
I want to experience radical joy.
I want to experience radical feeling. I want to be able to feel you and you feel me.
It’s called empathy, empathos. We feel each other.
I want purpose. I want to know that I’m needed.
I want to give gifts. I want to create.
I want to transform.
The entire purpose of Reality is who we must become. It’s not a fucking Romper Room title. Romper Room is an American children’s show. Sorry for the lack of the Dutch reference there or the Belgian reference or the French reference or the Israeli reference or whatever other countries are represented. Australia.
No, no. And who we must become is the very point of Reality: Being wants to become becoming through me, who I must become.
I want to just get this straight. This is the crazy fuck up in the world, and I apologize. I want to apologize to my friend. We had agreed not to use a particular word here. A couple of my friends said that that word was kind of hard for them. We’ve overplayed that word today, so I apologize. So, we’ll get it back next week.
But we mess up. We mess up all the time. I mean, there is no person who doesn’t sin.
Sin is a stain on wholeness. How can we be this human being that yearns for wholeness that aspires to wholeness, when we can never achieve it?
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? asked Langston Hughes.
If our dream is for wholeness, if who we must become is we must become whole, we must become alive, we must transform but everybody messes up, everyone fucks up, everyone sins, everyone falls off the wagon again and again and again, then what happens to a dream deferred? It dries up like a raisin in the sun: we lose our aliveness, lose our aspiration, we lose our life force, because we’re yearning to become whole. And we don’t know how to get there because we keep falling again and again. So, it’s into that double bind, it’s that double bind that Christianity says, well, no, you can’t get there unless Jesus saves you. No! Jesus never intended that. That is not the true word of Jesus. No! That’s not the Christed word.
The Christed word is that you have the capacity to become whole, and that Christ will hold you as you’re in that journey. And that when you become more whole, Christ becomes more Christ—that’s what it’s saying.
So, if my essential nature is to yearn for its wholeness, and yet wholeness is never available, then we get to the poet Langston Hughes, what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? If the dream is to become whole, yet I can’t, because I keep falling, either I have to turn to Christianity, which says, okay, you’re a complete disaster, you keep failing, but it’s not just you, everybody does that. That’s the nature of reality. It’s why only God can save you, and you can’t do it yourself. That doesn’t feel right. That feels like no,
I wasn’t created just to be obedient.
I wasn’t created because I’m helpless and hapless.
I wasn’t created because I have no dignity.
It feels like there’s dignity. It feels that I can transform. It feels that I want to transform it, and yet, it’s so hard to do. Especially when I fucked up yesterday, or the day before, or a week ago, or a year ago—how do I change that? How do I shift that? That’s the great double bind at the heart of reality.
This is amazing.
Teshuvah Solves the Great Double Bind, the Shame of Having Failed
So, what solves that?
What solves that double bind is teshuvah. Teshuvah is the possibility of going back and making that which is broken whole again. The only reason Leonard Cohen can do hallelujah is because the broken hallelujah can become the holy hallelujah. Wow. That’s teshuvah.
Teshuvah is to go back and collect the breadcrumbs that got left behind and bake bread and transform.
Teshuvah is not just how I can psychologically transform, but that I can ontologically go back to the past and re-whole the past.
I return, I return to that prior place of breaking, and then I can literally become whole again.
I want to go in our next episodes into this fundamental realization of what teshuvah really is and why it resolves this fundamental double bind, how it works in this very deep way.
We’re going to talk about teshuvah at the level of Homo amor. There are classical texts of repentance and return at the level of Homo sapiens.
There’s a teshuvah at the level of Homo sapiens.
There’s also a teshuvah at the animal level.
There’s also a teshuvah at the level of atoms.
I’m going to talk about teshuvah at the level of atoms. I’m going to talk about teshuvah at the level of animals. I’m going to talk about teshuvah at the level of Homo sapiens and talk about teshuvah at the level of Homo amor.
Who we must become is only possible through teshuvah.
The entire notion of becoming requires teshuvah. I can’t become if I fall every day, then I’m not becoming anything.
There must be a deeper notion of becoming in which failure becomes part of the fabric of wholeness.
Yearning transforms the brokenness, and the rupture has a path to become the rapture. There is a vector which allows the vicissitudes of the vanquished to become the voluptuous victory, which is triumphant, in which the human being emerges whole as Homo amor.
Teshuvah is essential for becoming. There is no conversation of who we must become without teshuvah. Can’t be done. And it must be teshuvah at the level of Homo amor. You can begin it with teshuvah at the level of Homo sapiens, but it must go farther; we have to go to the level of Homo amor.
It’s the fundamental belief of the mainstream academy—that has not reinvented itself, that is kind of repeating its old and tired cliches— that this is not possible. This is what Nick Bostrom assumes in his book, Deep Utopia. He assumes there is no real deep utopia. It’s not possible. Human beings can’t actually transform. Nick Bostrom is aligned with fundamentalist Christianity in that regard, paradoxically.
Who we must become is this very radical positivity. But it’s not a blind positivity. It’s not a pollyannish positivity. It’s rooted in the very nature of Cosmos itself.
You can feel that. We’re building blocks. We’re going to build this building block, not just for ourselves, although it will be for ourselves, but it’s going to be from the wider self.
I wrote someone this morning, I’ll read it to you:
Place thine attention on all that is thee. Place your attention on everything that’s you, and then expand not the conceptual circle of your intention, but expand the visceral circle of intimacy that is She so that actually your field of attention is the whole, you can feel the whole.
That’s part of who you must become. That’s part of Homo amor. So, teshuvah has to come from that place.
Here’s just the last image I’m going to leave you with: If you want to feel what it’s like to be Homo amor, if you want to feel what it’s like to feel the whole. If you can imagine, I don’t know if any of you have ever engaged in this process called sensuality. It’s an embodied process that begins with sexual reproduction, after asexual cells divide, and then you get to sexuality many billions of years into the Cosmos, and then it moves into the animal world and up into the human world. I don’t want to go into it now. But in any case, there’s this very deep process that happens when a person feels their beloved’s need.
You’re madly in love. And you feel your beloved’s need and you feel their visceral immediate need to be touched and held, and addressed in the body. You feel the depth of your beloved’s need. You don’t shame your beloved for the need; you’re delighted by the need. Them letting you witness that need is their greatest gift to you.
And you turn to your beloved and you say—and this is one of the major kinds of credo stanzas, verses, sutras of CosmoErotic Humanism—you say to your beloved, your need is my allurement.
What it means to become Homo amor is that we say to Reality, we say to She, we say to every suffering servant, we say to every suffering child, we say to the Madonna and to the child, we say to every child world over in India, who’s in a caste that they still call in India untouchable, and are still oppressed and devastated and we say to every man, woman and child: No, your need is my allurement. I feel you. You feel me. We’re going to do this together. We’re going to become Homo amor.
What stops us is the belief we can’t do it because we don’t have teshuvah, because we’re shamed by all the ways we’ve failed, by the ways we’ve fallen.
And we don’t yet have a realization that weaves our failure into the fabric of our wonder. And that’s teshuvah.
EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Teshuvah is mistranslated as penitence or repentance and is then blemished by the Latin implication of original sin and the degraded nature of humanity.
More accurately, teshuvah means return. Return is the movement of Cosmos toward ever deeper contact, greater wholeness, and ever more value. Teshuvah is the love desire of Cosmos reaching for ever more Eros, contact, wholeness and value.
Atoms do teshuvah, cells do teshuvah, human beings do teshuvah. At every one of these three levels of Reality, what we have called the three Big Bangs, there is a dimension of teshuvah. The fourth Big Bang, the birth of Homo amor, births this great new level of teshuvah, the human being realizing the capacity to attain unimaginable wholeness through the irreducibly unique human faculty of entering the past itself, and rewriting and re-scripting the older scripts of desire and re-authoring the story, not meta-poetically, but ontologically, for real. ~Dr. Marc Gafni
Future Reading for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion
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