457—The Evolutionary Hero, Evolutionary Prayer and the Evolutionary Field of Value: The Holy Trinity of Homo Amor - the New Human and the New Humanity
Who is the evolutionary hero? Who’s the new hero? The new hero is the New Human.
The Hero Stands in the Field of Value
Welcome! I went to see Superman last night. Now it was not a good movie.
But we went to see Superman because one of the key commitments of this revolution that we are in together is the commitment to heroism. It’s the commitment to the hero. Now the commitment to the hero is a very big deal. The hero is the early adopter of what we’re calling the New Human and the New Humanity, what we’re calling here the only adequate response to the meta-crisis. What we’re calling here the only possible way to engage the multiple vectors of existential risk, which are twofold: the potential death of humanity, and a completely related risk—but distinct—humanity continues physically, biologically, but we experience the death of our humanity.
Now, the death of our humanity means that, again, we continue to exist as biological beings, but our humanity’s gone.
That death of our humanity doesn’t come in a blitzkrieg moment. It’s not a sudden moment. It’s gradual. We barely even notice that it’s happening until we wake up one day and we’re asleep, we’re no longer awake. We’re no longer human as we understand it.
Now, what is the vision of the possible human or the vision of the aspirational human, which is what our humanity is about? What are we reaching for? “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”, wrote Browning.
It is the hero. What am I reaching for? I’m reaching for the hero. “I want to be”—wrote Dickens—”the hero of my own life”.
And in some profound sense, what actually happened was, as we entered into the beginning of the high modern moment—late Modernity—the seeds of the demise of the hero are actually in early Modernity. But in late Modernity, we begin to problematize and critique the hero for some very good reasons. In Postmodernity, we reject the hero almost entirely because we view the hero as being pathetic. We view the hero as being a claim to something that’s not true.
Why?
Because the hero stands in the Field of Value.
The hero incarnates the Field of Value.
The hero is in devotion to the Field of Value.
The hero is both ultimately individuated—The hero’s not a blur: the hero’s unique and distinct. There are distinct features to the hero—whether the male hero or the female hero. The hero is the highly individuated being:
but whose individuation doesn’t take them into a kind of hyper-narcissism,
but takes them into an ecstatic, grounded, sober, yet in the best sense of the word drunken intoxication with Reality, with humanity.
So, it takes them not into a hyper-narcissism, but into kind of an amplified devotion.
The hero is divinity in motion, in devotion, incarnating the name of God in service to the whole.
The hero feels the whole.
The Postmodern Critique of the Hero Is Important
Now, you’re not allowed to say any of those things anymore. You get that? We’re not allowed to take the hero seriously anymore.
Of course, as I said, there were good critiques of the hero.
Obviously, The Charge of the Light Brigade, poems by Kipling, depicted a hero who was this white man who was colonizing other human beings. Or the hero depicted a black man who was rounding up slaves and bringing them. These were heroic figures in African literature. The powerful king, but who actually rounded up slaves from the jungles and brought them to the shore to give them to the white man. Both sides. You had these kind of heroic kings in Africa who were actually slave traders. And you had white heroes bearing their white man’s burden, who were actually colonizers of the worst kind.
So we had false heroes.
There shouldn’t have been a Charge of the Light Brigade in history. That was a senseless charge, which was a suicide, which was an utter abomination to our humanity.
There’s a problematized hero that needs to be problematized. But after the problematization, after we challenge the kind of false hero, we need to then reclaim the hero.
But we don’t know how to do it.
The reason we don’t reclaim the hero is because the essential problem with the hero—the reason we’ve rejected the hero—is not only for correct woke considerations. Woke isn’t necessarily wrong—woke is sometimes awake. Some of the woke critiques are correct. It’s absurd to just dismiss it as insane. No, some of the woke critiques are correct.
We did do some terrible shit to found the United States, just like Germany did terrible shit in the formation of Germany and England and China and Japan. Actually, the entire world didn’t have an understanding of a level of consciousness in which we had universal human rights. And so, actually, the woke critique is not on the United States or China.It’s a critique of earlier stages of history. That’s true. That’s good. That woke critique is an expression of the evolutionary impulse.
That postmodern critique is important and sacred and we need to embrace it.
But that’s not the reason the hero got lost. That’s the way that the hero is critiqued on those terms and problematized and thrown out of the story. That’s not the reason the hero got lost.
The hero got lost because the hero is standing for the Field of Value.
And if you say, there’s no Field of Value, then what’s the hero standing for?
Nothing.
The hero is standing for a false story, for a fiction, for a figment of our imagination, for a social construct. That’s an absurd hero.
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The Response to the Postmodern Deconstruction of the Hero
The response to the postmodern deconstruction of the hero—which is in tandem with the deconstruction of the Field of Value—is the emergence of the fundamentalist hero: the strongman hero, the dictator hero.
We actually regress to a pre-modern version of the hero. The autocratic king, the authoritarian president, the fundamentalist religious sect in which the hero once again becomes the hero for a regressive view of Reality that places only this tiny group of people on the inside. They’re the saved ones. And everyone else are infidels and deserve to be killed for the sake of whatever your idolatrous god is in the most brutal way possible. So the hero becomes villainous again. And the hero becomes, again, the villain.
And the postmodern critique gloats and said, “Look, we told you all along, the hero is a villain.”
No!The hero’s not a villain.
We actually need to respond to the critique of hero by reclaiming the hero—not regressively.
Who is the evolutionary hero? Who’s the new hero?
The new hero is the New Human.
The new hero is the New Human who is able to reclaim the hero—to evolve the hero because we’re actually able to evolve the Field of Value.This is hugely important. It’s crazy, wildly important.
The essence of the hero, therefore, is that the hero is in the Field of Value.
The hero makes contact with the Field of Value.
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The First Way to Make Contact With the Hero Is Explain Why Value Is Real
Making contact with the Field of Value needs to be done in two ways.
One, we have to explain why value is real—that is the work of the great library of CosmoErotic Humanism, that is the da Vinci project we’re in—in response to the meta-crisis which is based on a global intimacy disorder because we can’t access intimacy, because intimacy is based on shared value, and we’ve deconstructed the Field of Value and wecan therefore no longer be heroes of our own lives.
You can only be a hero if you’re an expression, a unique incarnation of the Field of Value.
You are in touch with value:
Your heroic will,
your political heroic will,
your moral heroic will,
your psychological heroic will,
your relational heroic will,
our creative heroic will,
our heroic will,
our moral heroic will is only aroused in response to value.
Value arouses will.
When I meet real value—either violation of value or the allurement to value—that’s what arouses will. Heroic will is aroused by value. If there’s no Field of Value, there’s no hero.
One is, we have to crack value—which we’ve done.We have established that there is this notion of First Principles and First Values.
And here we go...this book is the first primer, the first view, the first kind of “da Vinci view” (by da Vinci I mean this large view that changes the source code).
Take a look at First Principles and First Values!
Get the second edition of the book, which has some 20–30 additional pages that are really important. But I really desperately want everyone to have a copy, and we begin to study this and to disseminate it and to take it the next step together.
So that’s One: we have to explain why value is real.
The Second Way to Make Contact with Value Is Practice Being in the Field of Value
There’s a second dimension.
I’ve got to practice being in the Field of Value.
I’ve got to access and make contact with the Field of Value. And there’s a number of different ways I make contact with the Field of Value.
One of them is I’m value in person:
I pray with my feet.
I pray with my hands.
I’m an activist.
I’m engaged.
I help an old lady across the street.
I was sharing with someone yesterday. I’ve had twice the experience in my life, I’ve had twice the actual, lived and real experience of helping an old lady across the street.
How many people have ever done that?
It is crazy beautiful. You’ll never do something more beautiful. For realsies—you actually help an old lady across the street.
When you’re helping an old lady across the street, are you lost in an existential crisis of meaning?
Do you feel the cravings of the pained emptiness which doesn’t allow you to breathe?
Do you feel Sartre’s Nausea rising inside you as the emptiness engulfs you?
None of the above!
Why? —Because you’re helping an old lady across the street!
What happens when I help an old lady across the street?
If you’re really doing it, actually, your entire vector of attention focuses on the old lady. The traffic kind of understands there’s something important here happening, so you can feel a shift in the subtle energy.
Her arm is in your arm.
Your arms are crooked together.
She’s leaning on you a little bit.
You are both holding her up and holding her dignity.
You are completely entwined in this moment.
It’s a very wide street. And just gently holding her dignity and crossing the street. So that’s your vision. That’s your purpose. That’s your goal. And all of the infinite love of the infinitely intimate Cosmos, and all of the goodness, truth, and beauty of all of the infinite dimensions of Reality, all completely focus and crystallize and constellate.
They are mitztamtzem, we would say in the original lineage. They actually pour themselves into that one point. And that one point is you praying with your feet, being value in action. Wow!
That’s one way to access the Field of Value.
It’s wildly important.
Third way to make contact with Value is to access the Field of Value
One way is to actually understand, solve value theory. That’s this book: First Principles First Values. That is all the discussions we’ve had on value. Why value is real. (Not doing that now, but get the book)
Two, I become value in action.
Three is—and that’s what I want to talk about today—is I access the Field of Value.
I access the Field of Value.
The way I access the Field of Value is to pray.
Prayer is a way in which I open up my heart, and I open up the Field, and I begin to gain direct access to the Field of Value.
So what I want to do is as follows— I want to do a little exercise.
Take a minute and just jot down your first sense:
“Why is prayer accessing the Field of Value?”
“What’s the relationship between prayer and the Field of Value?”
“How does prayer open the Field of Value?”
And I’m going to ask you (if you don’t want to write anything, just sit in quietly). But let’s stay deep inside. Just throw out whatever you have. We’re going to start from there. Here we go…Okay. What do we got? Let’s take a look at the answers.. Oh, wow!
“Connection to spirit opens up our perceptions to a wider field.”
“I feel what I need.”
“A means to connect with sacred love.”
“In prayer, I am God speaking to God.”
” Participation.”
“And the Cosmos hears me. I’m heard and seen.”
“Attention shifts from illusion to origin.”
“You reach out humbly to the mystery that brings you home.”
“I hear the melody of the universe.”
“We access our deepest heart’s desire.” which we’ve explained in the Dharma is the desire of God—desire, need, and value. I connect directly with She. “
“We have a conversation.”
“Direct access to divine love.”
“I have a conversation with value.”
“I turned towards the love. She responds in some way. I can feel her. She is the Field of Value. It’s a conversation with God/Goddess, where I can ask for anything, and she can hear me, and I can feel her feeling me, asking me to help her, too.”
And by the way, I’m just so delighted to feel the Dharma here in so many of the responses. To feel the precision and depth of the responses is the field of the Dharma that we’ve laid down together. And it’s gorgeous. So people, I’m seeing so many phrases directly from the Dharma, from the Story of Value. It utterly delights me.
“ I feel me feeling her”
“I remember the inside of Reality. I feel the field that connects everything. I rest in She. I feel paradox. I open my heart to truth. My awareness to the larger field that holds everything. “
“I feel the goodness of the Field of Value.”
“Intention, frequency alignment opens one’s heart center. Prayer opens me to it. I feel part of the divine source, a conversation where love flows.”
“In prayer, you’re connecting to your highest version of you and the Field of Value is us.(or is in us, more precisely).“
“Being whole from inside, outside, center point of value.”
“Prayer activates energy that’s always present, which then connects me, I think, to the Field of Value.”
“Prayer is acknowledging Eros.”
So you begin to feel a sense of this. Beautiful!. Thank you. Thank you. Gorgeous.
Prayer Is the Place I Access the Direct Experience That My Life Matters
So let’s get very specific, let’s see if we can go inside, and then we can actually begin to pray. Let’s feel it for a second. Prayer opens me to the Field of Value.
Prayer opens me to the Field. What does that mean? What is the Field of Value?
The Field of Value is the experience that my life matters.
That is the Field of Value. Field of Value means:
not constructed value,
not made-up value,
not a mere figment of my pointless and meaningless imagination.
not a mere fiction,
not a regressive, dogmatic claim that I own God, thatGod loves only my people and only if I self-emasculate to that particular God will I be saved.
None of that.
Prayer is this opening to the Field of Value, and the Field of Value is the experience that my life ultimately matters. That’s One.
Two, that my life is not merely matter, but in the matter of my life is the Mother. The word “Mother” is the root source of “matter.” And matter is the materia. It’s the matrix. The Mother is the matrix, and the matrix is the matrix of value.
All of my life arises in the Field of Value.
I’m born. I’m grounded in the Field of Value. And it’s not just that I’m grounded in—as physics will correctly tell us—we’re grounded in some sense in space and time. No. Space and time are post-primordial to value. In other words, the prior of Reality, the primordial of Reality is value. Everything arises in the Field of Value.
Matter is what matters because it arises in the matrix of the Mother. And the Mother is the Field of Value. That’s the Mother.
The Mother is it matters. The Mother is you matter. Which is—
If I don’t have right contact with the mother, then I don’t feel that I matter.
If I don’t feel that I matter, then my life goes off the rails.
That is called modern attachment theory.
- I’m not connected to the mother.
- I’m not in the matrix.
- So therefore, I don’t matter.
So I need to do the work of embodying, of coming down, of beginning to matter my matter.
And paradoxically, the place I access mattering is through my matter—through my body. I can access mattering directly, as a first-person somatic experience, directly in my body. I can go into my body and through my body to source.
“Through my body, I vision God.”
And ‘my body’ means my body of experience. And ‘my body’ means my physical body and my actual embodied, direct expression.
So, prayer is the place I access the direct experience that my life matters. Two.
Prayer Is the Original Conversation.
The particular value at play or the first particular value at play in the Field of Value, which is the field of matter that matters, which is why prayer is the word—Prayer is the word.
It’s an expression of the word. We speak prayer. The Word.
And the word, we’ve said often in Hebrew, is davar. The speech act. The speech act, as we write about in modern moral theory. It’s a speech act.
My speech matters. Davar means a thing—matter. Davar is a speech act.
So the word “thing” and the word “speech act” are the same.
I’m living in this field of logos. It all matters.
Now, the experience that my life matters and is valuable and is intrinsically worthy and worthwhile by itself comes for the human being from my experience of personhood.
I find myself in your eyes.
When I find myself in your eyes—in your eyes I see that I am valuable, even independently of you. Do you get that paradox? The baby looks in the mother’s eyes. I look in the eyes of the mother. The mother might be the physical, biological mother. It might be a beloved. It might be a friend. It might be a teacher. There are many faces to the Mother. But let’s stay with the archetypal image of the baby—the toddler—looking in the eyes of the mother.
What does the baby see in the eyes of the mother?
What I see in the eyes of the mother is that I matter infinitely—but not only in service to you. The mother looks at the baby and gives the baby the direct expression that you matter so much that the mother implicitly says, “Oh my God, I’m willing to sacrifice myself for you.”
So in the original dialogic experience with the mother, in the original conversation with the mother, the baby experiences his or her own intrinsic worth.
I’m born to selfhood in relationship.
So my personhood, the irreducible, unique dignity of my irreducible, unique personhood, I find in the eyes of the mother.
It’s why the face has 45 muscles, the majority of which are for the nuanced expression of intimate communion in all of its phases and forms and stages, and states, and nuances, and precise sculpting of communicative action, borrowing Habermas’ phrase.
“Huh!”
That is the face. “Face” means “inside”, and it means “face”.
I find my interiority in your face, because your face communicates your interior knowing that I matter. And of course, when we’re face to face, that’s the exchange between us.
So, in prayer, I turn to the Divine; the Divine who is the Field of Value.
But not only a Field of Value that is an undifferentiated field of the One, the third-person field of the Divine.
But this infinite field of divine value also has a second-person face, which is what we call the Infinite Intimate.
I am the “I” of God— I am the “I” of God. I am Infinity, but I also personally desire you.
I desire you. I desire you. I am the Infinite Intimate.
I have infinite desire for intimacy with you directly and personally.
Can you feel that?
Prayer turns towards a particular. Prayer both discloses and turns towards, or discloses through turning towards a particular value of Cosmos, which is personhood:
The primordial second-person perspective of Cosmos.
The Infinite Intimate, the intimacy of Reality.
The relational structure of Reality.
Prayer is the original conversation.
Prayer is the conversation. We’re talking to each other. And I disclose my personhood through the depth of your attention to our conversation. That’s two.
Prayer Affirms the Infinite Dignity of My Most Intimate Needs.
And three, when I talk to you, Infinite Intimate Divine, I bring everything to You.
I bring to You everything I desire—my clarified desire, what we call in the new Story Value, my deepest heart’s desire.
I bring to You my clarified desire, my deepest clarified heart’s desire.
I bring to You and I offer it before You.
And I bring to you my deepest need. My need!
I’m in desperate need.
And I bring my need to You, because I know that You, in this conversation, honor the dignity of my need.
My friends, how many of us walk around feeling humiliated in trying to get our fundamental needs met?
All of pseudo-eros, all of rivalrous conflict which dominates reality (the de facto story of anti-value that runs reality) —ivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics that generates fragile systems that optimize for efficiency, not resiliency, and therefore break down, a.k.a. Covid, is but a dry dress rehearsal for catastrophic and existential risk—all of that is a cover-up to cover up my fundamental humiliation in trying to get my need met:
to be full,
to be alive,
to be recognized,
to be chosen,
to be needed,
to be intended,
to be desired.
I can’t get those needs met. You get that? I can’t get those needs met.
So, when I’m unable to get my needs met, my clarified needs, my needs that are sacred, then I go to cover up the humiliation of getting my basic needs met through every manner of pseudo-value, pseudo-eros, and even, in its worst and most debased and degraded forms, anti-value and anti-eros.
Anti-eros: that which moves to alienate.
Anti-value: that which moves to destroy, to debase—torture, for example, psychological, spiritual, emotional, or physical. And sadism runs through human relations in far more distressing ways than one might think.
Prayer affirms the infinite dignity of my most intimate needs.
Prayer connects me. It accesses me. Prayer is an on-ramp to the Field of Value. Because value tells me that my life matters and that my matter matters. And that my individuated, unique, irreducibly personal incarnation and configuration of intimate expression matters ultimately. One.
Prayer is to personhood. Prayer is not a form of contemplation by itself, although it has dimensions of contemplation. Prayer is not merely meditation dressed up in second person. No. Prayer is second person. Prayer is a turning to You, and to experience myself as seen and recognized, and felt, and held in Your arms. And my personhood is disclosed in the eyes of the mother—matter; matter which comes alive as the mother, as the ground that welcomes us. It’s not Gaia. It’s the personal face of Gaia. And Gaia herself is rested in the infinite Field of Value.
Prayer is the place in which dignity andeven divinity is ascribed to my needs.
Because in fact,
My deepest need and my deepest desire are my need and desire for value itself.
My deepest need and desire is my need for contact, my need for transformation.
I need to transform. It’s a fundamental, universal need, to transform;
to become the fullest version of myself.
to give the deepest gifts that I have to give.
to live the deepest life that I have to live,
to sing the song that’s only mine to sing,
to write the poem that’s mine to write,
to laugh the laughs that are mine and to cry the tears that are mine,
to have the orgasms that have my name uniquely written on them, or
to experience the sublimation of celibacy in the unique script of my engagement with the Field of Desire.
That is the unique story of my life. And the unique story of my life is an expression of infinite value.
I am both held by the divine personhood, and I am also a new expression of divine personhood.
I’m madly in love with She who holds me, and She’s madly in love with me. And She/He recognizes Herself in me in a way that She never could before.
So, prayer is an act of mad Eros and mad love.
Prayer is ecstatic. It’s urgent. It’s aligned with ecstatic urgency. Prayer is audacious, radical audaciousness, audacity, that the Solomon Lineage calls tekufot, radical audacity, which combines in its very essence radical humility; a humility meaning, wow, it’s just moving through me.
There is no “I” that’s dissociated from the larger field. And yet, there is no “I” that’s absorbed in the larger field.
I am both an expression of the larger field and ultimately individuated.
So, my Unique Self reaches out as both an expression of and the birthed child of the Infinite Divine.
Wow!
That’s prayer. That’s evolutionary prayer. It’s not the old fundamentalist prayer.
It’s not the prayer of the hero who prays to fulfill their heroic mission but who hasn’t actually examined the nature of the hero, who’s fulfilling a blind narrative, which might be colonial, or racist, or imperialist, but yet, I’m the hero of that narrative.
Achilles, in the ancient Greek story of the Trojan War, the Iliad, and then the Odyssey. Achilles is the exact image of the fallen hero. Achilles doesn’t believe in the battle. Achilles doesn’t trust Agamemnon in any sense, shape, or form. Achilles doesn’t have any attachment to the nobility of the battle. He’s fighting to be the hero because he can’t resist not being the hero. And he needs his story to be sung, and he needs his prowess to be potentiated before the public and praised over generations. A heroic and yet pathetic hero. A hero that we need to problematize, but only in order to transcend, to end the trance of the old hero.
And to become the hero of my life, the one who is chosen by God.
To know that I’m chosen by God, individually, directly, personally.
To know that I’m needed by God, individually, directly, personally.
To know that I’ve been intended by the Divine, by the Infinite Intimate, individually, personally.
To know that I’m love-adored directly by the personal address of She that knows my name.
To know that I’m needed by all that is.
All of that is the field of prayer.
Entering the Field of Value
So I want to enter this field with you today. What an honor. What a joy.
We cannot become the New Human in response to the meta-crisis without accessing these core sacred technologies of the lineages.
But we cannot go back just to the old lineage. We cannot go back to the old religion.
The postmodern and modern critique of the old religion was potent and good. Voltaire was not wrong—I’ve shared it with you a thousand times—when he made the clarion cry of Modernity in response to the old religion and the old order. He said, “Remember the cruelties! We dare not forget the cruelties.”
And we can see in the plays of fundamentalism around the world cruelty of an unimaginable proportion.
And yet, we dare not forget the Field of Value.
Because we see an equal and even often greater cruelty in those fundamentalisms that have utterly rejected the Field of Value. Not, for example, Hamas, a classical example of fundamentalist extremism of the worst kind, which needs to be utterly rejected; just like any expression of that kind of fundamentalism in Christianity or Judaism, if it ever expresses itself, needs to be fundamentally rejected.
Clearly, there’s no place for them. That’s a regressive fundamentalism that produces demented and demonic heroes who are anti-heroes.
We need to claim real heroes, but real heroes who are not outside the Field of Value.
Mao says there’s no Field of Value.
Lenin says there’s no Field of Value.
Stalin says there’s no Field of Value.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge say there’s no Field of Value.
They create a fundamentalist absolutism of tyranny, totalitarianism, and brutality, and murder, and rape, and dismemberment of the worst kind, because there’s no Field of Value.
No, we need to reenter the Field of Value and evolve the lineages. The lineages are the gnosis that we have. The Word is the Field of Value. The Word that emerges as the lineage: gnosis.
What do we know?
And we know we can actually articulate a Field of Value.
In prayer, we access that Field of Value. We step into it and we pray.
We pray to fulfill our deepest heart’s desire.
We pray to align our deepest heart’s desire with the desire of She, of the Infinite Intimate.
We pray to access the fullness of the Field to be heroes.
So we never pray in the singular.
There’s virtually no prayer in the Solomon Lineage which is in the singular. It’s always the community. It’s always the whole.
The whole can never be the whole of just one nation or just one people—it’s got to be the whole. I’ve got to feel the whole. That’s what prayer allows me—to feel the whole.
And I ask for everything. I ask for the fulfillment of my deepest needs. And my deepest need is to access my personal needs, my clarified, unique personal needs, and my unique life story, and to feel the needs of the whole beyond mine;
To bracket maybe a couple of my vacations.
To bracket go living my own personal, beautiful life.
To bracket my sense that, “Okay, I’ve got to make sure that I make…”
Bracket my obsession with my personal contribution, and feel my sense of the personal in terms of what the field needs from me now.
How do I play my instrument in a larger Unique Self Symphony?
All of that is prayer.
All of that is accessing the Field of Value.
All of that is honoring, clarifying the dignity of need and praying to the power of the Infinite Intimate, to disclose itself uniquely in my life and to hear my prayer.
There’s direct access to the realization that there is no prayer that’s unheard. As sure as you can hear me talking in your field of intelligence, the intelligence of the Infinite Intimate can hear me talking.
That’s what we mean when we say, “Prayer is heard.” It’s that simple.
But for now, do you think we’re in the field now, my friends? Let’s pray. Let’s pray.
Modeh Ani—I Embrace Myself Before You
Modeh Ani, and in prayer in general, we have the sense that prayer is this heart-rending agony. Prayer sometimes is heart-rending agony. I experience heart-rending agony multiple times a day.
But prayer is also heart-rending and heart-stopping ecstasy.
It’s unimaginable joy.
It’s intimacy that’s beyond belief.
So prayer’s all of that.
Modeh ani Le’fa’ne’cha
Melech Chai Ve-Kayam
She - he - Che - Zarta Bi Nishmati Be-Chem-lah
Rabba Emuna Techa
Great is my trust in you God
Great is your trust in me God
When I say Modeh Ani, I say modeh, I embrace myself, my “I.”
Le’fanecha. And I know that I’m always in your gaze. I don’t need surveillance. We don’t need surveillance. Surveillance only comes into play when we want to control the world when there’s no Field of Value. No, I don’t need surveillance. I need to know that we’re always held in the gaze of the Infinite Intimate. Da lifnei mi atah omed. To know with full Eros that you’re always in Her gaze. You’re always in Her palace. You’re always in Her bedroom. You’re always intimate with Her. She’s always gazing on us, and we’re always gazing on Her.
Modeh Ani, I acknowledge, I embrace my “I”,
Lefanecha. I’m before you. And Le’fanecha always and ever means—as we said earlier—it means, Le’fanecha, to be before. Le’fanecha means to be on the inside, penimi, to be on the inside in the original Hebrew. And Le’fanecha means panim—face. So to be before the gaze of the Infinite Intimate is to be held by She. And yet, as Rumi writes again and again, “To be on the inside of God’s face.” And Rumi doesn’t use that phrase, but it’s what he’s trying to describe. So that’s Modeh Ani, I embrace my “I,” Le’fanecha.
Evolutionary Prayer
And this prayer is not a Hindu prayer. And it’s not a Jewish prayer. And it’s not a Christian prayer. And it’s not an Islamic prayer. And it’s not a Buddhist prayer. And it’s not an Indigenous African prayer.
It’s prayer.
It’s a universal prayer. The particular words I’m using come from the Solomon Lineage tradition. But the Solomon Lineage is poured in with many other lineages into CosmoErotic Humanism. We’re going to borrow Latin words, and we’ll borrow English words, and we’ll borrow Gaelic words, and we’ll borrow Sanskrit words. At this moment, I’m borrowing Hebrew words.
Modeh Ani, I embrace my “I.” Le’fanecha. I am before You. I am before You. I’m on the inside of Your face.
Melech, you’re the King, you’re the Queen. You’re royalty. Let me be your prince and princess. Chai ve kayam, You are full aliveness. You are existence self.
And I thank you, Sheh’he’chezarta—: You’ve returned to me Nishmati, my Unique Self, my unique essence, my unique quality and configuration. My unique soul, if you will.
Rabba emuna techa. Rabbah means not great but outrageous, Emuna techa is my trust in You. Emuna—trust. Great is my trust in You. Great is my trust in thee, She.
But the same words, Rabba emuna techa—great is Your trust in me. Great is Your trust in me.
We’re holding hands. We’re doing this together. So prayer is this intimate communion. Prayer is falling into Your hands.
Prayer is the begging for the fulfillment of my personal need.
And I beg desperately. Yet I beg ecstatically. I beg the way the lover begs—desperately from the Beloved—to fulfill their deepest heart’s desire. So I beg in a way in which I abandon all dignity, and all dignity is restored in the selfsame moment.
Modeh Ani.
[Chanting] And if you want to invite someone to chant with you, invite them in. Invite She to chant with you.
[Chanting] Can you feel the desperation? At the same time, you feel celebration.
[Chanting] It’s celebration tinged with desperation, and desperation tinged with celebration. That’s the nature of the human experience. All of that animates prayer.
[Chanting] Anything less than that realization is insanity, and not in a good way.
To be insane is not to know my identity, not to know who I am, not to know that I’m a messenger of She, and that message is encrypted in my unique body sacred.
To be insane in its first step is to forget the message, to be a messenger who forgot the message. But the deeper insanity is to forget that I’ve forgotten.
To be a messenger not just who forgot the message, but I’m a messenger who forgot that I was a messenger.
We’re messengers of She, or Her angels, or Her hands, or Her verbs, or God’s verbs, or dangling modifiers.
We’re God’s adjectives and adverbs.
We’re God’s noun.
We’re all of it.
We’re the language of the Divine.
Our hands are Her hands.
Our hearts are Her hearts.
Our throbbing is Her throbbing.
Our yearning is Her yearning.
Our longing is Her longing.
And yet She holds us. And yet we rest in Her arms. And yet, She finds us, even when we’re more lost than we could ever imagine. But none of this has anything to do with the faith of the old religions the way they taught them.
This is a universal grammar of intimate Eros, a universal grammar of the Infinite Intimate. A universal grammar of the dignity, the great oration on the dignity of human personhood that Pico della Mirandola began but didn’t know how to ground value, so he couldn’t complete it, and he left it dangling.
It’s time to complete the story.
It’s time to evolve the Field of Value.
And prayer is the door in—Evolutionary prayer.
The prayer of Homo amor.
The prayer that allows us to gather in every corner of the world and pray together as She.
And prayer then births activism. Prayer births the aroused moral and political and economic will—itself a form of prayer.
Rabba emuna techa!
Crazy joy.
Great is Your trust in me.
Can you imagine the joy of being trusted by She?
I know She trusts me. Cha! So, thank you. And prayer and devotion and delight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Amen.
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