Three Levels of Relationship Between Need and Desire Across Evolutionary History
Part Four of an Early Draft of an Essay on "Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism"
This is the fourth part of an early draft of the essay “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni.
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 it 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.
Level One: Desire and Need are Identical
At all the levels of evolution that are apparently driven more by instinct or nature than by conscious choice, from the molecular world all the way through the plant world, and into much of the animal (and even mammalian) world, desire and need are virtually isomorphic.
For an atom, there is no split between need and desire.
When Whitehead talks about appetite, and we talk about Reality as Desire all the way down the evolutionary chain, we are describing the process of evolution driven by need. It is only quite high up on the evolutionary chain—science might argue about precisely where—that living beings experience a split between need and desire. And while there is a sense of proto-I-ness and even freedom that lives even at the level of matter—as has been asserted by the likes of Richard Feynman and argued closely by Stuart Kauffman and others—there seems to be virtually no split between need and desire.
It is only much higher up the chain, as more sophisticated forms of life emerge, that we begin to discern a sense of desire that is distinguished, and even occasionally disassociated, from need. We of course do not have a direct access to the first-person interiors of the plant, animal, or mammalian world, but we witness behavior—mating behavior, for example—that seems to characterize desire rather than need, even as the two remain tightly interlinked.
Level Two: The Apparent Split Between Desire and Need
It is, however, only with the emergence of the depth of the human self-reflective mind, that we begin to proliferate scenarios, where there are authentic needs in the present, with varying levels of desire calling from the future. Indeed, the ability to feel into the future, what one groups of leading researchers call prospection[1] or Homo Prospectus[2] seems to be one of the demarcating characteristics of humanity.
Humans experience a memory of the future.
Level Three: The High-Level Identity of Need and Desire at the Leading Edge of Identity and Consciousness
But when the human experience of desire is itself clarified, because of an ever-deeper clarification of one’s identity—true nature and context—then, desire and need once again virtually blur with each other. In other words, as we unpacked it earlier, the most accurate answer to the first two questions of CosmoErotic Humanism catalyzes the most accurate answer to the third question of CosmoErotic Humanism. More specifically when your identity evolves, certain desires intensify and deepen—transmuting themselves into present-moment, visceral need.
At these higher reaches of human identity, it is sufficient to say that there is an inherent evolutionary need and desire—and here need and desire blur together—for the values of ever-more wholeness, uniqueness, creativity, and Eros. This evolutionary need and desire for these First Values of Cosmos is incepted in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang in matter, the ostensibly inanimate worlds, and continues to unfold through the biological life worlds. This is level one.
But when they enter the human world, or somewhat earlier, there is, at least for most of the trajectory of development along particular vectors of human identity and the Universe Story, a split between desire and need. This is level two.
But at the leading-edge depth of human self-reflective consciousness and culture, desire and need again fold into each other in virtually isomorphic ways. This is level three.
[The essay continues below.]
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The goal of human living is to overcome the split between need and desire. This requires the evolution of identity. At the human level, the evolution of identity is precisely the movement from separate self to True Self—and then to Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self—and finally to our participation in Unique Self Symphony. This movement is not merely a form of personal transformation. The movement of desire and need is rather the evolutionary movement of Cosmos—the individuated expression of need and desire that participates directly in the throb of the larger evolutionary impulse. This movement of Cosmic Eros towards greater value—which includes greater wholeness, uniqueness, creativity, and Eros—manifests in Unique Self, Evolutionary Unique Self, and the participation in Unique Self Symphony in ways that transcend the natural limitations of separate self.
Said simply, there is more Eros, uniqueness, creativity, and wholeness in True Self than in separate self, and then even more of all of the above in Unique Self, and even more in Evolutionary Unique Self—playing her instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
Indeed, the transformation from separate self to Unique Self to Evolutionary Unique Self to the participation in Unique Self Symphony is precisely the realization that your Unique Self is an irreducibly unique response to inherent evolutionary need and the expression of evolutionary desire for growth and transformation to one’s widest and fullest and most accurate self-identity.
Speaking in second person: You are not merely a separate self. You are a Unique Self. And your Unique Self lives in an evolutionary context—Evolutionary Unique Self. Reality’s needs and desires show up uniquely in you, as you, and through you. Your deepest desires are Reality’s Desires. Your deepest needs are Reality’s Needs. Not your surface needs but your clarified needs—your deepest needs.
As such, just as Reality shows up uniquely as you, you need to show up uniquely in Reality. There are unique desires for you to fulfill and unique needs for you to meet in the world. Or said slightly differently, adducing Ibn Gabbai, whom we cited above, God—Reality—needs your service. Or in the same lineage, God desires your service.
In other words, you are uniquely desired and needed by Reality, and you express a unique dimension of Reality’s Desire. You live in a Cosmos dripping with Eros, which lives in you.
These are part of the core response to the first two great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. Who am I? and Who are we? and Where am I? From here flows the response to the third question, What do you want or desire? The response lays in the realization that your own deepest need and desire is to meet the needs and desires that you are uniquely yours to meet and fulfill.
This is the recognition that your deepest heart’s desire is the deepest heart’s desire of Reality, that Reality needs you, and that your own deepest needs—to live your unique life and give your unique gifts in your unique circle of intimacy and influence—are the Needs of Reality.
These realizations meet your core Eros need of aliveness—together with your core Eros need to transform—to grow to the highest and deepest version of yourself—which is the core Need of Reality living in you, as you, and through you. These needs transform your consciousness in wondrous ways, from which you will never recover.
This kind of—what we might call—participatory mutuality between cosmic and personal need and desire is what evolutionary mystic of desire Abraham Kook was referring to when he wrote,
Cosmic nature and the nature of every particular creature, human history, and the life story of every unique person and her deeds must be surveyed in one encompassing glance, as one content with different parts; then will the light of wisdom which leads to Teshuva speedily arrive.[3]
Submission, Separation, and Sweetness: Pre-Tragic, Tragic, and Post-Tragic
We have written in other contexts of the three stations of love. They are articulated in allusive form by Israel Baal Shem Tov, and as we pointed out in our writings, they overlap in part with levels of developmental consciousness as described in developmental psychology. The three stations apply across domains, but let’s apply them for a moment to the human experience of love. The first station, hakna’ah, translated as submission, refers to the first phase in a relationship of falling in love. The two sides are in submission to one another. Their distinct wills virtually disappear in the ecstasy of that submission. Another name for this first station is what we call, in CosmoErotic Humanism, pre-tragic. The beloveds are in the ecstasies of love’s wonder, before having experienced the pain of the tragic with all of its agonies.
The second station, havdalah, translated as separation, refers to the moment when the relationship shifts into more of a power struggle. The early collapse of will and submission is overcome by a reassertion of individuality with all the competing needs, clashes, and power drives. There is a dimension of tragic separation between the beloveds, even as they continue to love each other. This station is indeed also referred to by us as the tragic, which inevitably comes in every relationship.
The third dimension, hamtaka, translated as sweetness, refers to the moment, in the most profound of loves, where the beloveds fall in love once again, but this time at an ever-deeper level of consciousness. They include and transcended station one—falling in love—and station two—separation—into a depth of union, in which they become as two instruments resonating a single tune of music, while not losing their distinction. At this station, their wills are not collapsed but merged in higher intimate communion.
This third station of love, or relationship, is what we have also called the post-tragic. While, when viewed from the exterior, it appears similar to the pre-tragic—the couple is wondrously and even ecstatically in love—its interior contours are profoundly distinct. The post-tragic has faced the tragic and realized that it was not the end of the story—that there was more and deeper love to come. Love reappears at the station of the post-tragic in the fullness of its radiance, not only as personal love, but as an expression of the Eros that animates all of Reality, disclosed in personal form. It is the move from the finite game of love to the Infinite Game of Love—what we have called the move from ordinary love to Outrageous Love or Evolutionary Love—that is often one of the pivoting points into the post-tragic.
Let’s apply these three stations to the relationship of need and desire through evolutionary history, as we just described it.
The first station is pre-tragic, the level of submission. Need and desire are identical and must be fulfilled.
At the second station, somewhere in mammalian and crystalizing at the human level, there is a separation of need and desire as we described it above. The split between need and desire, when we desire one thing and need something else entirely, is the root of the tragic. Much of religion, both of the mystical and exoteric form, demonized desire precisely because it was viewed as frivolous or even base—the enemy of true human need.
The third station is the reweaving—reintegration—of need and desire. It takes places at the leading edges of human identity and consciousness. One can access one’s own clarified desire—what we call deepest heart’s desire—and realize that this is identical with one’s core needs—and both are in fact the very desire and need of evolution itself. It is this third station, where the split between desire and need is healed, as their higher identity is disclosed, which lies at the core of CosmoErotic Humanism and its practical vision of human potential.
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Between Need and Desire: Recapitulation
In conventional parlance, need is often regarded by us as related to our survival, whether physical, psychological, or emotional. Desire is often understood to be either in reference to a less immediate and less essential need—or to a more primal lifeforce underling any particular need. An example of the former: I need food. I desire gourmet food. Or an example of the latter: I need insulin. I desire life.
But as already noted above, the more aware, the more evolved our identity—the more we realize the more profound and accurate answers to the questions of Who am I and Where am I—the more we transcend the grasping of the skin-encapsulated ego into the accurate radiance of Unique Self, the more we close the gap between need and desire.
We accomplish this clarification, as we unpacked above, by allowing the future to enter the present. We tilt our ear to the future, and particularly, to the voice of our future self, calling us forth. In CosmoErotic Humanism, we call it recovering the memory of the future. When the future enters the present, desire is widened and deepened—clarified.
This, as we noted, has been extensively documented in leading edge trends in academic psychology as prospection.[4] The image is that of the human being as the prospector, who refuses to be satisfied by repeating the present and is instead allured forward by the call of the future. To clarify our prospection is to clarify the objects and subjects of our specific desires. It is to this third station of desire that Buddha alluded—at least in the original Pali cannon—where he is reported to have said, have few desires but have great ones.
The clarification of desire moves us from surface desire to depth desire, what we might also call true desire—or even sacred desire or divine desire. We begin to desire what we truly need and need what we truly desire. This does not mean that we need less or desire less. It is not an issue of how much we need or desire but what we need or desire and how deeply we feel our need and desire.
We might realize, for example, that our need for truth, beauty, love, aliveness, adventure, or goodness far exceeded what we thought we could scrape by on. We often need and desire more than we thought not less. But our needs and desires are exponentially more clarified, precise, and therefore potent. Our personal desire and need—in the precision of its individuated personhood—discloses itself as the Need and Desire of Cosmos itself.
Three Selves: Psychological, Mystical, and Evolutionary—Past, Present, and Future
The core of this third station, where need and desire meet, is the experience of the call of the future entering the present moment.
It is perhaps important in this context to recall a second model of self, which we have integrated into the core model of CosmoErotic Humanism, which crosspollinates with its classical five selves. We engage them because they illuminate the core topic we are discussing here—the call of value from the future reaching into the present, which itself is what creates desire and, by implication, need as well.
The classical five selves of CosmoErotic Humanism are drawn from Unique Self Theory. It is those five selves that we have at the center of CosmoErotic Humanism. The five selves are separate self, false self, True Self, Unique Self, and Evolutionary Unique Self. False self, which we have not engaged in this writing, is simply a particular form of distorted separate self in contradistinction to a healthy separate self. But that is beyond the purview of this conversation.
Let’s look at the complimentary model of self in relationship to the classic five-self-model—and particularly the thread of separate self, True Self, Unique Self, and Evolutionary Unique Self. We call that complimentary model the three selves—psychological self, mystical self, and evolutionary or future self.[5]
Psychological Self: The Need, Desire, and Value of the Past
The first of the three selves, in the new model, is psychological self. Psychological self focuses on the past, sees liberation in our capacity to recover our memory of the past, or to re-experience past trauma in a healthy way, so that our psychological self can heal.
Psychological self is a form of separate self. Like separate self, its view of the real is true but partial. What is key here, however, is that there is both a desire and a need to reconfigure our relationship to the past, and in some sense, to reconfigure the past itself. Moreover, it is fair to say that this model locates value in the past and the need to recover the past is connected to an immensity of that value in the past that we need, in order to live a happy life NOW.
Mystical Self: The Liberation from Need, Desire, and Finite Value in the Present
The second of the three selves, in the new model, is the Mystical Self. Mystical Self sees liberation in moving beyond the stories of the past. Mystical Self sees human wholeness and liberation from suffering in the fullness of the present moment, or what is often called the Now moment. Mystical Self is congruent with True Self in the core model of five selves. Mystical Self sees authentic (or absolute) Value in the Ground of the Eternal Present, which in many classical teachings, serves to liberate us from need, desire, and finite, inauthentic (or relative) value, at least in their more classical forms.
Evolutionary Self or Future Self: Needs, Desires, and Values Calling from the Future
The third of the three selves, in the new model, is Evolutionary Self. Evolutionary Self is all about the future. Evolutionary Self, or what we sometimes call future self, is filled with desire for the future, called by future, committed to recovering the memory of the future. Evolutionary Self naturally maps on Unique Self and Evolutionary Unique Self in the core model.
Again, let us reiterate:
It is not that only Evolutionary Self has a relationship to need, desire, or value. All the selves engage need, desire, and value, but in very distinct ways.
Mystical Self has a fundamentally negative relationship to need and desire, generally identifying both desire and need with what we have called their surface forms and understanding—correctly—that surface desire is a formidable obstacle to entering the Eternity—the Eternal Ground of Value—that resides in the moment.
Psychological self generally thinks of desire as the healthy expression of the separate self in the present. For the psychological self, our unhealed relationship to the past is viewed as being a formidable obstacle to our capacity to know and enact our appropriate desire in the present. But there is also a genuine need and desire to revisit the past and heal its trauma. In this sense, there is precious value in the past.
But for Evolutionary Self, desire—specifically clarified desire—is central. It is clarified desire that holds the call of the future. And once desire is clarified it merges with need—clarified need—as the fundamental compass of a human life well lived, reaching for ever-deeper and wider value—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—and being omni-considerate for the Value of the Whole.
Needs, Desires, and Rights
This brings us to our last two points, which will set the stage for our conversation on the eight core Eros needs.
First, we want to explicate an equation that has been implicit in this writing:
Needs = Desires = Rights.
Your clarified need is your deepest heart’s desire, which is Evolutionary Desire—Divine Desire—uniquely awake and alive in you.[6] Evolutionary Desire, or Divine Desire, is your Divine Right, or Evolutionary Right. Desire is, as we have seen, tightly linked with need and not to be dismissed as superfluous, lest we risk our core wholeness and health, both personally and collectively.
The Emergence of New Evolutionary Identities Generates New Growth Needs and Desires
This leads us to the last crucial point, which sets the stage for our articulation of a new set of core human needs and desires, which include but transcend what we might call Maslow’s Separate Self Hierarchy of Needs. We will refer to these below as Eros Needs or Eros Needs and Desires.
One of the core human Eros Needs and Desires is to transform and grow.
Another core human need and desire is to be sane. Sanity is, stated simply, to know your identity, or said slightly differently, to know your true nature.
Now let’s put these two core needs and desires together in one flow of simple insight. Perhaps the most profound human growth and transformation is to move from ignorance to wisdom, particularly about one’s own true nature. That is the greatest area of human growth. To grow, or transform, from the limited and delusional identity of separate self, to realize that one participates in True Self, the Singular that has no Plural—and then to awaken more deeply into Unique Self, the individuated expression of True Self—and then from there to emerge into Evolutionary Unique Self—and finally to pick up one’s unique instrument and begin to play in the Unique Self Symphony—is the greatest need and deepest heart’s desire of every realized human being.
In other words, it is a two-step process. First, the need and desire to move from separate self to the higher levels of identity is itself a core human need and desire. Second, it is paradoxically true that one cannot identify one’s own deepest needs and desires from the identity level of separate self. It is only as Unique Self—the unique expression of True Self that lives in you, as you, and through—and then from the realization that your Unique Self that lives in an evolutionary context—Evolutionary Unique Self—that you can turn inwards and identify your clarified needs and deepest heart’s desires. And those clarified needs and deepest heart’s desires will always be omni-considerate of the whole. This is the nature of the new human and the new humanity, which we have called Homo amor.
This, of course, emerges directly from our conversation around need and desire just above. There, we saw that the evolutionary trajectory itself might be well understood as the evolution of need and desire. Moreover, we saw that, on the human level, it is precisely the evolution of need and desire—in intimate congruence with the evolution of identity—that discloses the ultimate ontic identity between need and desire.
What we are adding here is that, at this level of identity and consciousness, what we are referring to as Homo amor—Evolutionary Unique Self playing her instrument in Unique Self Symphony—we need a new map of human need and desire. Homo amor is not exhausted by Maslow’s separate-self needs, but rather includes and transcends Maslow’s needs, aligning ever-more profoundly with a deeper and perhaps more primal set of needs and desires.
A New Cultural Enlightenment as the Response to Existential Risk Based on Emergent New Identities and Their Consequent New Needs and Desires
An emergent new sense of identity, both for the I and the We, and a consequent new articulation of human needs and desires has the capacity to usher in a new global cultural enlightenment. A new cultural enlightenment can only be emergent from a New Shared Global Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values. This New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values must begin with a new sense of human identity and a consequent remapping of human needs and desires.
Without such a remapping, we lack the capacity to respond to the reigning narratives of identity and their senses of desire and need—namely separate self, engaged in rivalrous conflict, governed by win/lose metrics—in other words, the modern success story. It is precisely this story that is cause for our global intimacy disorder, which itself is the generator function for catastrophic and existential risk.
It is this failed story, and the failure to articulate a new story of identity rooted in a larger new Universe Story, rooted in a larger Story of Value, that is cause for our global action paralysis and global action confusion. This Eros of deeper identity beyond separate self is therefore not only a core need of the individual human, but also an essential need of humanity.
The New Story in Response to the Second Shock of Existence
As we have written about, extensively in other contexts, the urgently pressing second shock of existence.
The first shock of existence is the realization that we each individually die. The second shock of existence is the realization that humanity itself could go extinct through any one-off a host of looming existential risks.
The only genuine response to existential risk, whose generator function is the broken source-code story driving Reality, is the articulation of a New Story that catalyzes—as only a new story can—the emergence of a new human and a new humanity. It is catalyzed by a collective transformation of identity through the democratization of enlightenment, which is an essential need of humanity.
Linguistically Merging Need and Desire in the Eight Core Eros Needs
With this in mind, let’s introduce the eight core Eros Needs and Desires.
But we will turn to these needs and desires not as expressions of separate self but rather as core evolutionary needs and desires inherent in Cosmos that live uniquely in every human being, as an expression of Unique Self Identity. And remember that Unique Self is the unique expression of the Field, with the Field being True Self. Thus, Unique Self, when located in an evolutionary context, becomes Evolutionary Unique Self.
In calling them Eros Needs we are—with intention—integrating need and desire into one phrase, Eros Needs. We could just as easily call them the eight core Desires—or the eight core Needs and Desires. We chose to simply call them the eight core Eros Needs, blurring needs and desires into one phrase, for all of the reasons we have adduced above, which points to—at the higher levels of consciousness—their inter-inclusion and even identity.
We chose to call them needs instead of desires for aesthetic reasons, as this conversation takes place in the larger frame of the Maslow needs conversation. Since Maslow’s needs are the context in which we are presenting the eight core Eros Needs, it was easier to just refer to them as Eros Needs, instead of, what would have been more confusing, needs and desires.
The eight core Eros Needs are a crucial evolutionary step, existentially urgent at this moment in culture, to honor and evolve beyond Maslow’s old hierarchy of needs, which—in at least the way it has been adopted by culture, even if that was not Maslow’s intention—focus on the classical separate self. The presentation of a new set of universal Eros Needs is part of the movement from the old skin-encapsulated, separate-self Homo sapiens to the new human and the new humanity—the Evolutionary Unique self—Homo amor.
Footnotes
[1] Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2007). Prospection: Experiencing the future. Science, 317(5843), 1351–1354. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144161.
[2] Martin E. P. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada, Homo Prospectus, Oxford University Press Inc, 2016.
[3] Light of Penitence 4:4.
[4] See for example, Martin E. P. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada, Homo Prospectus, Oxford University Press Inc, 2016. We have integrated the extensive research on prospection, gathered by leading thinkers in neuroscience, cognition, learning theory, education, psychology, and philosophy, into CosmoErotic Humanism. Our notion of the memory of the future was developed independently of prospection. The research on prospection, however, filled in major areas of research, confirming our own core notion of the memory of the future as being essential to human well-being, both from a psychological and even what we might call a transpersonal or spiritual perspective. In general, as we unpacked in our original note on the same, CosmoErotic Humanism synergized multiple meta-theories from a wider range of disciplines into a larger mood and worldview. When we encounter excellent research around a core realization of CosmoErotic Humanism, namely the crucial nature of the memory of the future to human wholeness and health, we integrate it with very great joy and recognition.
[5] For a more detailed description of this three-selves model, see our essay “The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future” on our website: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/the-three-selves-a-memory-of-the-future/.
[6] Clearly, we are not talking about the right to fulfill one’s desire for sexual contact with a random person that happens to catch your eye or with a relational partner that has refused you. That desire is neither clarified nor authentic. In a shocking example of what Walter Kaufman once called intellectual gerrymandering, Amia Srinivasan, in her acclaimed early-twenty-first-century book, The Right to Sex, identifies the right to desire precisely in this way, with its most twisted forms. Particularly, she cites treatises from the darkest corners of the incel community, particularly the writings of one incel (involuntary celibate), who became a mass murderer, as caricatured evidence for the ugliness of the right to desire. But of course, the right to desire is innate and essential. Desire is a right and not an elite privilege reserved to those who are thought to be aesthetically attractive by whatever standards ruling at a particular moment in time. Rather, the right to desire is a democratic right which refers to your clarified desire. That clarified may have a sexual expression in a context that is radically mutual. Even as it also applies to the wider Field of Desire.
You Can Also Read Parts One, Two, and Three Here:
Part 1:
Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism—Part One
·
Mar 27
Part 2:
From Maslow’s Five Needs to the Eight Core Needs of Eros
·
Apr 1
Part 3:
CosmoErotic Humanism on Need and Desire
This is the third part of an early draft of the essay “Beyond Maslow: The Eight Core Needs of CosmoErotic Humanism” by Dr. Marc Gafni. It can be cited under that name.