The Exile of the Eight Core Eros Needs
Part Seven of an Early Draft of an Essay on "Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism"
When all eight of these human needs are met, we have two experiences: we feel radically alive, and we feel profoundly valuable. When these needs are not met, we experience a fundamental deadening and devaluation of self.
Now, here is the problem. In the premodern and even to some extent in the modern world, these needs were provided, at least in part, by a host of experiences. We were part of Universe Stories, systems of meaning, narratives of identity and community, which provided multiple paths to having those significance needs met in some form, albeit within the limitations of pre-democratic, pre-universal human rights, ethnocentric, and often body-rejecting consciousness.
[Continue reading the essay below.]
This is the seventh part of an early draft of the essay “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni. We will post the eighth and final part next week.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation: “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni and link to the essay on our website.
»Find a List of All the Parts of This Essay HERE«
A later version of the essay will be part of the forthcoming The Universe: A Love Story series, The Phenomenology of Eros: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire, as well as other forthcoming books. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
Given the context of these limitations, premodernity abounds in texts of revelation, which speak, even eloquently, to some of these needs. Modernity abounds in texts of romance and reason, which address these needs in other ways. Between the traditional texts of revelation (premodernity) and the modern texts of romance and reason, we were able to fulfill the core human needs for a larger Eros. There were growth trajectories that were not merely subjective, but rather, the subject, the human being, was aligned, participating in, or in relationship to the larger Force of Cosmos beyond the skin-encapsulated, separate, ego self.
While each of these needs is addressed imperfectly in the texts of revelation, romance, and reason, there is at least some sense of these core needs being addressed. By imperfectly, we mean, for example, you are loved by God but only if you accept a premodern religious doctrine. The fully potentiated feeling of being individually intended was hard to access for the commoner in a world in which plague, dire poverty, and powerlessness were so intrinsic to life. But there was at least an intrinsic sense that what you did mattered in an ultimate sense.
You mattered in an ontological sense—your existence was located in the larger order of things (for example, in the Great Chain of Being). Your growth was in response to demands or forces larger than yourself. Your heroism was intrinsically noted by Reality, which enshrined (in the sense of ultimate Truth) the values for which you sacrificed. Your ethical expression was either aligned or misaligned with the larger ethic of Cosmos. You were not an isolated monad seeking to make meaning up out of the whole cloth. In short, you were not merely a separate self, stuck in a disqualified Universe.
But all of this becomes but a discarded image,[1] as the wonders of evolutionary science, enthralled by their necessary rejection of the degraded images of Spirit that dominated so much of public religion, themselves degrade into various strands of scientism, whose common thread was a reductive materialism that emptied Reality of value, Eros, meaning, and purpose.
The sense of there being a larger Eros (and therefore of being intended, recognized, chosen, love-adored, desired, or needed) is wiped out not by evolutionary science but by social neo-Darwinist dogma (which has little to do with Darwin). Growth is reduced to exterior skills and the win/lose success metrics. In the course of a lifetime, very little transformation of identity is genuinely possible outside of social roles, which are not—like in premodern times—predetermined and rigid anymore. Instead, we grow up with the idea that we can freely choose our roles, that anything is possible, and that we are (ultimate) failures if we don’t manage to do so. And yet, genuine transformation of identity is given any emphasis in our education systems, nor is it even known by most people. Moreover, your growth is not aligned with, is not responding to, nor participating in any ontological groove of Cosmos.
Sister to the neo-Darwinist dogma that suffused the twentieth century is postmodernity, which kills all sense of a larger premodern or modern narrative. All gods and goddesses—all values and worldviews—of premodernity and modernity—with which the eight core Eros needs might have been addressed—were systematically deconstructed. The only goddess left alive was Aphrodite, the goddess of romance, love, and desire.
At the same time, the cultural texts of both modernity and postmodernity exiled love and desire to a very narrow script. Aphrodite was imprisoned in a separate-self cell, which could not sustain her; hence, she began to wither as well. Moreover, love and sexual desire were limited to the context of a romance or marriage that is supposed to look and feel a very particular way.
The implications of this exile, with the one remaining goddess (read, the larger context of Eros) coupled with the radical deconstruction of all other ultimate orienting frameworks, is shocking, when you but stop to consider it. It means that one’s core experience of these core needs must be met in an idealized version of love and desire that, for most people, simply does not exist.
[Continue reading the essay below.]
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The Phenomenology of the Eight Core Eros Needs in Exile
At this moment in history, the highest fulfillment of our genuine Eros Needs must be rooted in the individuated current of unique aliveness that is the experience of our authentic identity as Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self, or what we have called Homo amor. That experience, however, does not need to be formulated, or formally identified, with the words or even the very precise structure in consciousness that it signifies.
The larger context of Eros can be accessed through various versions of this structure of consciousness both within and beyond the great traditions. But these core Eros Needs cannot be met in the place where a large percentage of the educated global population lives—in a reductionist, separate-self model, combined with win/lose success stories, in which there is no larger context and no larger narrative of identity. For this very large percentage of the global community, the eight core human Eros Needs are in exile.
Where do the core human needs go when they are exiled? Or to put it slightly differently, where are the core human needs fulfilled in their exile?
The core human Eros Needs need to be liberated from their exile. But before we can accomplish that liberation, we need to more precisely locate where we exiled these eight core Eros Needs.
The Exile of the First Eros Need: The Meta-Need for Eros Itself—For a Larger Context of Eros
Exile means we seek to fulfill each of these needs in a context far too narrow to meet the fullness of their urgent demand. As such, we are left feeling empty, desiccated, and needy. We seek to cover that emptiness with pseudo-eros.
In other words, we exile our core need for Eros into myriad forms of pseudo-eros. This includes, for example, the attempt to fulfill all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at the level of separate self.
The Exiled Need to Be Intended
We exile our need to be intended to separate-self versions of romantic and parental love.
Needing to feel intended by our particular partner or parent is good, true, and beautiful. But making our ultimate experience of intention dependent on one or two people is both ontologically wrong and psychologically disastrous. What then happens is that it is only through our partner’s intending us that we feel personally addressed by Reality. That is why birthdays and anniversaries mean so much to us. We exile all our need to be intended to the intention of our romantic partner in planning a birthday or anniversary date for us. And when our partner’s or parents’ intention feels diffuse—when our birthday or anniversary is forgotten or remembered casually in the last moment—or exponentially more painful—we are beyond devastated—when their intention is diverted to another.
Conversely, it is only by us intending our partner or child that we fulfill our need to intend. If that relationship fails, we are bad and broken. Our need to intend has no subject to receive it. So, we must replace the relationship with another version of the same pattern. And the cycle continues.
We must liberate the burden of meeting the entirety of our need to be intended from the shoulders of any single relationship. At the same time, the more our relationships participate in the quality of Outrageous Love that courses through Reality, the more the intentionality of our beloved, be it an Outrageous Love beloved[2] or a romantic beloved, participates in and expresses the quality of Cosmos that intends us personally.
The same is true of all the personal significance needs. They cannot be adequately fulfilled by a separate-self, romantic beloved. We need to feel personally addressed not only by a separate-self, romantic beloved. We need to feel personally addressed by Cosmos itself.
And yet, the more the beloved—whether a romantic or Outrageous Love beloved—participates in the currency of Outrageous Love that animates Reality, the more they can be an expression of the Cosmos itself personally addressing us and meeting our personal significance need, including being chosen, recognized, love-adored, desired, and needed.
The Exiled Need to Be Recognized
We exile the possibility of being recognized to parents, romantic partners, and those who admire our success.
But we are all systematically misrecognized. In particular, we need to be seen in our irreducible uniqueness. Society values our functional roles and our talents; our uniqueness or specialness is honored only to the extent that it is productive or generative.
Imagine, then, the existential pain of being misrecognized by family, romantic partners, or our communities.
Conversely, imagine if it is only by recognizing our partner that we fulfill our need to recognize. If that relationship fails, then we are broken. So, we must replace that relationship with another. And on it goes.
The Exiled Need to Be Chosen
When being chosen is exiled, the only reliable place we can feel fully chosen is by others, be they lovers or family, colleagues, or friends. This is particularly the case in our romantic partnerships. In those relationships, the only place we will feel exclusively chosen is often sexually. Our monogamous partner must choose only us sexually. If your monogamous partner, for instance, steps outside of the exclusivity of that choice, we are crushed.
On the other hand, if we fulfill our need to choose exclusively through the monogamy of our sexual relationships, when those relationships get difficult or fail, which is all-too-often inevitable, then we will feel empty and broken. So, we replace the relationship with another, and another, and another.
Or we live lives empty of Eros, and we lose access to the experience of being chosen. And in the vacuum of Eros, pseudo-eros always rears its head and demands its pound of flesh.
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The Exiled Need to Be Love-Adored
Adoration—intense love—has been exiled four times over:
1) Love has been exiled from Outrageous Love —the Evolutionary Love that animates and drives the Cosmos—to ordinary love—the love that lives between skin-encapsulated egos.
2) Love is then exiled a second time to a particular form of human love, which we call romantic love.
3) Love is then exiled a third time to a very particular form of romantic love—the experience of falling in love.
4) Finally, Love is exiled to the romantic experience of being in love in the civil, social, or religious context of a monogamous marriage.
The Exiled Need to Be Desired
Desire is similarly exiled four times over:
1) We first exile our need to be desired to the narrow field of being desired by humans—we need to be desired by another human being.
2) We exile that desire to sexual desire—we want to be desired sexually by another human being.
3) We exile that sexual desire to a form of very hot and raw desire, like the kind a twenty-two-year-old lover has for his/her nineteen-year-old beloved the first time they see each other naked.
4) We exile the possibility of meeting that raw desire to one person only, i.e., we exile our need to be desired to hot sex in monogamous marriage with one person for our entire lives, or one person at a time, and demand that that person constantly fulfill the full range and depth of that need.
The Exiled Need to Be Needed
In its shadow form, we call the experience of needing and being needed codependency. However, in its conscious form, needing and being needed is a core source of human dignity.
We exile our need to be needed to our familial, romantic, and collegial relationships. For most people, the only reliable place that they have a long-term sustained experience of feeling ultimately needed is by their romantic partner, child, or (less frequently) in work contexts.
But we need to feel ultimately needed beyond these contexts, because kids grow up, many people either don’t marry or don’t feel fulfilled in marriage, and meaningful work where we are genuinely needed is rare.
We need to be needed in a cosmic context. And that is our true nature and not our grandiosity. In the language of the interior sciences, da ma le’maleh mimka. The simple translation is Know that which is above you, an invocation to piety and ethics, rooted in our humility before the omniscient and omnipotent Power of Reality. But the interior scientist audaciously repunctuates and retranslates the text as follows:
Know that which is above comes from you [is dependent on you].
Or in another version of this same lineage strand, written by Meir Ibn Gabbai, at the same time as the Renaissance:
God needs your service.[3]
When the need to be needed is exiled from its cosmic context to more narrow personal contexts—and those personal contexts break down, a failing marriage, getting fired, or having a child who cuts us off all implicitly or explicitly say, I don’t need you anymore—we are devastated. If these relationships fail, we are both no longer needed, and our willingness to be vulnerable and openly share our needs is fundamentally humiliated.
To the degree that we identify with our key relationships as the primary source of meeting these core Eros Needs—and particularly personal significance needs—we will feel that there is something fundamentally broken and devastated when those relationships falter.
We are alienated from the fundamental ontology of our being essentially needed by Reality. That sense of being needed finds expression in a particular set of relationships—but with two key caveats:
First, it is not dependent on any specific relationship.
Second, the more I experience my personal relationships as part of the larger currencies of Eros that are Cosmos, the more those personal relationships participate in meeting our need to need and to be needed.
The Exiled Need to Grow and Transform
We have exiled our need to grow four times over:
1) We have exiled the need to grow to the human realm when in fact, the movement towards growth and transformation is the ecstatically urgent movement of Cosmos all the way up and all the way down the chain of being and becoming.
2) We have exiled the need to grow and transform to a dimension of the human realm that we call surface growth, which includes growth in physical, psychological, and mental capacities. This is where most transformation is thought to take place in the human realm.
3) We then exile these surface forms of growth to a relatively short time in our lives—most growth takes place before we are twenty-five (at the latest).
4) The fourth (and most significant) exile is when we exile our capacities for deep transformation of identity, of widening and deepening our capacity to love, and to give our gifts fully as expressions of the leading edge of Conscious Evolution to a miniscule elite of teachers, thought leaders, spiritual adepts, freaks, and the like. We look for other people or contexts in which to catalyze growth.
To be clear once again, to personally experience a partial fulfillment of all these core Eros Needs in the context of personal relationship is appropriate, good, and even blessed. But if separate-self relationship-exchange is the sole source of Eros or Love, then it cannot sustain itself. Such forms of Eros—what we sometimes call ordinary love—when (mis)understood as being the sum total of Love, lack the depth and fire to explode open our pain into joy or to hold us in the most difficult times. Our relationship-seeking becomes just another form of addiction. We seek pseudo-eros to cover up the pain of our failure to find true Eros.
When personal relationship participates in the Outrageous Love Current of Cosmos, then the partial meeting of the eight core Eros Needs in those relationships is natural and good. For those personal relationships are no longer separate-self disassociations from the larger context of Cosmos. Rather, they are naturally individuated expressions—unique but not separate from the larger cosmic context.
Revisioning Human Needs
But what if we approach our core Eros Needs from an entirely different level of consciousness?
What if we sought to fulfill our core need for Eros, in all of its eight permutations, directly from the deeper sources of Eros that are intrinsic to our identity?
What if, from this new level of consciousness, the human being could fulfill all their core Eros Needs through their most fundamental identity?
This is the change that changes everything. It changes everything because, for the first time, the eight core needs are met internally, which is to say, through the interior Eros of identity—a natural derivative of the larger Universe Story. Moreover, the transformation of identity through access to an intrinsic sense of wholeness fundamentally changes what is possible in relationship.
How does this transformation happen? The essence of the response to this question lies in what Unique Self Theory refers to as the eight noble truths of Unique Self.
Footnotes
[1] For an account of the traditional world in this regard for example C.S. Lewis in his Discarded Image.
[2] By Outrageous Love beloved we mean a beloved who is not a romantic partner but whom we love and are loved by—and specifically when there is a consciousness that the love participates in the deeper currency of Eros—Outrageous Love—that animates and drives Cosmos.
[3] From Meir ben Ezekiel ibn Gabbai’s Avodat Hakodesh, Section One, Chapter 27.