The core Value of Cosmos is Eros. Indeed, the words cannot be fruitfully split.
Eros IS ethos.[1] Or said slightly differently, Eros is Value exponentialized as the Infinite Value, which suffuses Reality. Nothing exists outside of the circle of Eros as Value and Value as Eros. Eros IS ethos, and ethos, or Value, is the Ought implicit in Reality, which suffuses all of Cosmos. This is what we refer to in CosmoErotic Humanism as ErosValue.
Eros is life.
Eros generates new life.
Eros is a First Principle and First Value of Reality itself.
Eros is Value.
And Value is Eros.
Indeed, it is for that reason that we coined a new term in CosmoErotic Humanism:
ErosValue.
ErosValue generates the Value of Life.
In its creative movement, ErosValue generates ever-greater life through ever-deeper contact. It is the movement of Cosmos that brings together separate parts into larger wholes. The greater wholes have ever-more value. At every greater level of value, the emergent whole has greater depth, consciousness, and capacity.
A subatomic particle has a certain level of depth, consciousness, and capacity—all expressions of Value.
An atom—which contains, within it, subatomic particles that have come together to form a larger whole—has more depth, more consciousness, and more value.
The notion that there is already proto consciousness at the level of atoms is found across the interior sciences and is now appearing in multiple forms across the leading edges of the exterior sciences. The premise, which explains empirical reality far better than the other stunted hypothesis, is what we call pan-interiority. Reality is neither material nor spirit [value]. Rather, Reality is interiors and exteriors all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russel, called this proto interiority at the atomic level prehension.
Atoms come together to form larger wholes, molecules, which have more depth, capacity, and consciousness—more value.
Molecules form a larger whole, macromolecules, which have more depth, capacity, and consciousness—more value.
Macromolecules come together, intensifying their intimacy, aggregating, alluring separate parts into a larger whole with greater depth, capacity, and consciousness—more value—emerging as cells.
Matter has become life. The physiosphere has morphed into the biosphere. This is the inherent process of Eros—animating the processes of classical science and mathematics, as well as the interior sciences—which drives life all the way up the evolutionary chain. At ever-higher levels of emergence, there is more depth, capacity, consciousness, and hence more value. But while there are self-evident gradients of values, all of Reality has inherent Value. Value lives all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Eros is value generating ever-more value.
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Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
Not only, however, is Eros virtually identical with ethos. Ethos is identical with Eros. In other words, there is a feeling to the ethos-suffused movement towards wholeness. That feeling is Eros. The Universe feels, and the Universe feels Eros. For the feeling of ethos is Eros.
What, then, is pseudo-eros?
When access to the Field of Eros is blocked or distorted, we experience emptiness, ennui, and a profound sense of alienation and dislocation that has been extensively documented in the psychological literature of the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first century. We move to cover that Eros with what we have called pseudo-eros. Pseudo-eros appears in two distinct ways. It might be benign and numbing—a soothing quality—or it might be expressed in all manner of ethical breakdown and collapse, both personally and collectively. And when Eros breaks down in the collective, it is the collapse of ethos writ large in the core institutions of culture.
With all of this in mind, another core realization of CosmoErotic Humanism comes ever-more sharply into focus. This is the knowing that not only are the erotic and the ethical not contradictory, but rather the very opposite is true: All failure of ethos can be traced to a prior breakdown in Eros. When Eros is not accessed, then, the overwhelming feeling of emptiness, ennui, and alienation moves one towards ethical acting out in myriad forms. This is true both personally and collectively. That acting out is what we are calling pseudo-eros.
The ostensible contradiction in the unclarified surface mind between the erotic and the ethical is in fact referring not to Eros but to pseudo-eros. There is a sense that one’s natural lifeforce will overrun ethical boundaries. But this assumption refers to unclarified Eros, or pseudo-eros, and not to Eros itself. This distinction also forgets another core principle, which is foundational to CosmoErotic Humanism’s understanding of education: Namely, ethos, or goodness, is not natural. Human beings are not naturally good. Human beings are inherently good. Ethos is not natural. Ethos is inherent. But it must be appropriately evoked, nourished, and trained. Much as the health and strength of the body depends on being appropriately evoked, nourished, and trained.
Another way to understand the confusion that understands the erotic and the ethical as being in contradiction is to distinguish between three levels of erotic/ethical emergence. This is an expression of the core principle of Trialectics,[2] or She comes in threes, central to CosmoErotic Humanism.
Level one is Eros, unclarified Eros before ethos.
Level two is ethos that clarifies, evokes, and trains Eros.
Level three is the Eros that emerges on the other side of ethos, where it becomes self-evident that, at their core, Eros and ethos were never split. Eros and ethos are one.
One final point is in order. If one experiences a core contradiction between Eros and ethos, then, one feels not welcome in the Universe. If we feel that our very aliveness—which, in our deepest native core, is inextricably linked to our goodness—is in violation of the Good, then, we experience fundamental shame. This is not the same as the experience that I did something bad, but rather the experience that I am bad—I am broken and cannot be fixed. That is the root essence of the feeling of not being welcome in Reality. The feeling of not being welcome in the Universe is the source of all ethical collapse.
Jung is sometimes cited by his critics as saying, I would rather be whole than good. But indeed, that is not possible. For, at the core of Reality, to be good is to be whole, and to be whole is to be good. That is the very nature of CosmoErotic or what we might also call the CosmoEthical Universe. And of course, all of this but another way of saying that Reality is animated by evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value.
Are We Welcome in the Cosmos?
Welcome is a relationship. It is the embrace of the Good that allows us to be at home in the Cosmos. The scientific investigations of CosmoErotic Humanism, both in the interior and exterior and sciences, are in direct response to this question, which wells up from the depth of our humanity. And the answer is a resounding Yes. Indeed, this Yes is the very Yes of the Big Bang, the great flaring forth itself.
It is this very Yes that is the experience of the human being—the anthro-ontological knowing—that we live in a CosmoErotic Universe, and that we, each of us uniquely, are CosmoErotic Universe in person. The self-reflective depth of humanity becomes aware of the Cosmic Story of Value, in which we are not only the storytellers, not only the writers of the next chapter, but in this pivotal moment of the Anthropocene, we are also the primary actors. This is the great humanism that yearns to emerge in full bloom as hom*o amor—the New Human and the New Humanity—the incarnation of what we have called, for example in the previous volumes, the Fourth Big Bang. At this pivoting point in the Cosmic Story of Value, as we stand poised between utopia and dystopia, the central realization, which has the capacity to change the mood of culture, is precisely this realization of being welcome. To be welcome means that we do not live in an impartial Universe. The Universe is partial to Eros. The Universe is partial to ethos.
Deeper still—as we already noted above—Eros and ethos are one. Or said slightly differently, Reality is Eros all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. And Reality is ethos all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. And Eros and ethos are two expressions of the same evolving Reality, the same evolving phenomenology, and the same evolving truth that are the very nature of the manifest Universe.
To recapitulate and deepen: The common superficial assumption—rooted in a confusion of terms—is that there is a core contradiction between the erotic and the ethical. But this surface assumption is rooted in a confused understanding of both Eros and ethics.
First is the failure to distinguish what we have called Eros and pseudo-eros. What is Eros? As we have unpacked it in our Eros equation:
Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, moving towards, desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
The human being not only lives in the CosmoErotic Universe, but the CosmoErotic Universe lives in him. Every human being is uniquely participatory in the Field of Eros. Once we understand something of Eros, it becomes immediately self-evident that Eros is an ethical relationship. The yearning for contact and for ever-greater wholeness—when separate parts in right relationship form a large whole—is the very essence of ethos. For what is ethos?
Ethos is the ought of relationship. And the ought of relationship is the ought of Reality itself. Or said only slightly differently, ethos is right relationship all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. For as we have formulated it in other writing of CosmoErotic Humanism:
Reality is evolution.
Reality is relationship.
Reality is the evolution of relationships.
To say that ethos is the ought of relationship is therefore to simply say that ethos is the ought of Reality.
Another way to formulate the identity between Eros and ethos is to introduce another face of Eros: intimacy. Intimacy, all the way down and the way up the evolutionary chain, as we have formulated in the intimacy equation, is shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness x mutuality of recognition, mutuality of pathos [feeling] x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose. And evolution itself is rightly understood as the progressive deepening of intimacies. Or said slightly differently:
Reality is evolution.
Reality is intimacy.
Reality is the evolution of intimacy.
Again, it becomes self-evidently clear that intimacy and ethos cannot be split. Indeed, intimacy by its very nature is ethos, as expressed in the shared identity in the context of relative otherness that generates new wholeness—in other words, right relationship between parts.
Eros includes intimacy.
Intimacy is a value.
Eros includes desire.
Desire is a value.
And both intimacy and desire long for and seek ever-more value.
Value is what is desired both by Cosmos and by the individual, whose clarified interior participates in Cosmic Desire, what we referred to above and will discuss below in our section on Anthro-Ontology as ErosValue. Value includes Eros as its central core. ErosValue incarnates in the manifest world as goodness, truth, and beauty.
Value is an expression of the interior qualities of consciousness. And, indeed, all of these words are inter-included—inter-texted, interdigitated, inter-intimated—with each other. When value is de-ontologized—not realized and experienced—not seen as Real—then we construct a world system, like our own, which does not optimize its most essential structures for value. Or, at best, we pay lip service to value. But our value words are no longer suffused with the quality of joy, responsibility, and gravitas needed to activate a New Human and a New Humanity in this 11th Hour of our history.
Economics is the way we codify value. A country’s values are disclosed not by the pious professions, not on its ritual holy days, but on the real decisions taken on the day its national budget is determined by its governing bodies.
Economics is our value system codified as value equations that determines how much we value one thing relative to another thing, that determines what we’re incentivized to do and what we confer power to.[3]
As environmentalists have pointed out, a leopard alive in the wild is considered to have no value. A dead leopard is extremely valuable because leopard skin can be sold to coat manufacturers. Economics generates the value equations that incentivize behavior. We also do not look at trees as dryads[4] or as beautiful, while we cut them into beams: The first man to do so may have felt the price keenly, but the bleeding trees in Virgil and the living trees in James Cameron’s Avatar do not define our agenda and little trouble our minds. The stars lose their divinity, and the Tao is expelled from chemical agriculture. The apparatchiks of science are famous in their thinking that Reality can be reduced to measurement. But the greatest scientists, including virtually all the quantum pioneers, understood that stripping the stars, the trees, the leopards, the whales, and us humans of our qualitative dimensions and reducing all to mere quantity—artificial abstractions that can be manipulated—denudes Reality of that which is most essentially Real. It is biological science itself, in all of its leading edges, that tells us that trees are not lumber, and whales are not whale oil. It is both biology (and anthropology) and the interior sciences that tell us that human beings are not computational machines. It is astrophysics at its best that tells us that planets are so much more than dead matter. Indeed, the entire linear materials economy, based on runaway consumption and extraction models, which is collapsing our civilization, is animating the denial of ontological value to anything that does not contribute to the fulfillment of the success story as measured by its win/lose metrics.[5]
Collectively, as many have already pointed out, our economics as a whole incentivizes psychopathy. We are forced by the collective expression of our surface personalities to deaden our deeper selves, in order to be able to do the thing that is incentivized by the system, or somebody else will do it. We alienate ourselves from the larger Field of Value and Eros, while satisfying ourselves with the fleeting pseudo-eros of success, The success story is governed by win/lose metrics, which, as we have unfolded in some depth in other writings, is the primary generator function for collective and personal existential risk, that is to say the death of the individual human and the death of humanity. The deadening of self then generates addiction,[6] depression, and all forms of mental and physical breakdown. It is not by accident that depression may be the fastest growing disease in the world, as global suicide rates skyrocket. Both depression and suicide are natural byproducts of the success story governed by win/lose metrics. If I do not act in accordance with the incentives of the system, I am not successful in the system and receive none of the economic and social rewards of success.
We give lip service to values. We cover our actions with the veneer of value. But our functional selves have gotten used to believing that the values that do not serve the success story are not real. In a post-truth success-story world, goodness, truth, and beauty—even if we still genuflect at their altars—are no longer truly suffused with the ontology of the Real. Eros and intimacy are at best luxuries that we give up when we need to be realistic or engage the real world—real in the calculus of our lives.
The study of values, what we call philosophy or the humanities, are at an all-time low in the western world—because, why study that which is not Real? The STEM professions, science, technology, engineering, and math are considered serious. They are considered real because they are to some extent measurable by quantitative means, and they directly impact the win/lose metrics of the success story. We often assign values in the form of purity, sincerity, or goodness to those who are not sufficiently successful in the externalized metrics of win/lose. How often have we heard some version of “He is not really successful, but he is a good man” or “She is not really beautiful, but she has a pure heart”? Indeed, the very word values has been hijacked in the culture wars by those who often stand for regressive premodern ideas and norms. Our social structures are what we consider to be truly Real—we value material goods, consumption, and status in the pecking order—in other words, we value what we call the success story governed by win/lose metrics. Value is fundamentally devalued.
When we do not weave the fabric of our social, educational, communal, spiritual, or political garments from the threads of First Values and First Principles of the Real, then all of Reality is ripped apart, imploding on itself. If values are not Real, we are left only with the measurable dimension of the material world. For the last several hundred years since Descartes, we have internalized the view of the measurable material world as dead inert matter—even though the material world is beautiful, magnificent, and complex beyond imagination. But our capacity for wonder and radical amazement is subtly poisoned by the dogma of reductionist materialism, which, in the frenzy of its appropriate rebellion against the dark shadow dimensions of premodern religion, made the absurd claim that the world contains no intrinsic value, only what we are making up as we go along.[7] [i] The dogmatic and non-logical assumption paradoxically ignores the scientific fact that conscious, creative human beings are universally animated by value and directly emergent from Cosmos. They embody an evolved expression of all previous levels of Reality and are therefore directly participatory in and reflective of Her Nature. Instead, dogmatic materialists in science blithely assert that the human being is not aligned with Reality’s Value, but rather alien to Reality’s ostensibly true nature as pointless cosmos.[8] [ii] And whatever meaning human beings do create through their love and value is not an expression of the True Nature of Reality but is rather an absurd gesture towards meaning in the context of the ultimately meaningless cosmos.
This particular comment was made by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prize laureate who is an authority on muons.[9] The muon (/ˈmjuːɒn/; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of -1 e and a spin of 1/2, but with a much greater mass. As a spin 1/2 particle it is classified as a lepton. Muons are generated in the Earth’s upper atmosphere by cosmic rays (high energy protons) colliding with atomic nuclei of molecules in the air.
But why would we think that an expert on muons would also be an expert on meaning, purpose, or value? Muons operate at the level of matter, what conventional science sees as the it level of Reality. Now, there is very good reason, as David Ray Griffin and others have already pointed out, to move beyond the old outdated version of dualism and materialism, and affirm that, even at the level of matter, there is proto-interiority.[10] Indeed, the evolution and emergence of consciousness, which, in our scientific reading, is the evolution of intimacy itself, is one of the core plotlines of Reality.
Nonetheless, it is still clear to all of us that, if you throw a rock against the wall and it shatters into a thousand pieces, you should not go to prison. But clearly, if you throw a human being against the wall, and they shatter and die, you should be held accountable. There is a self-evident it dimension at the level of matter and its constituents, which is in stark contrast to the more evolved world of life and self-reflective human mind. Why then would we turn to an expert on the it world of muons to tell us anything about value, meaning, or direction in the world of life and self-reflective human consciousness? We are mistaken to make physicists our priests. That we do so is only our indication of our shrinkage of the Real.
Because we consciously or unconsciously have been poisoned by the fundamentalism of dogmatic materialism that fly against reams of what William James called radical empiricism, we only consider the measurable physical world to be real. Moreover, we are largely still trapped in the old cartesian world of dualism, which considers matter to be inert and dead. And of course, the dualism of the sixteenth century, the claim that reality was split between dead matter and a living God, who willfully acted on matter, became the materialism of the eighteenth century. For in the eighteenth century, the second part of the dualistic equation—Spirit—was identified with the old fundamentalisms of premodern religion and pronounced dead. And thus, we were left with the obviously absurd claim that measurable matter is the only real. And we embraced that claim with relish, thinking it would liberate us from the old fundamentalists. In other words, from the perspective of the dogmatic materialism of so much of mainstream physics, the dead is the only real. And because physicists deal in the world of measurable matter—the only world we now consider real—we unwisely anoint experts in muons to be our priests and pronounce them experts on crucial issues of meaning, value, and purpose, in which they are not only untrained and ignorant, but also often conditioned to treat these issues in a distorted manner.
Generating a Culture of Eros
A careful study of complexity theory, in part rooted in Alan Turing’s epic essay “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,”[11] discloses its response to one of its own core inquiries:
What generates coherent complex systems that do not break down?
This is, of course, core to the second shock of existence inquiry:
How does a world spiraling towards ten billion people, all engaged in various forms of rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, not collapse or and extinct itself?
A key dimension of the response of complexity theory is that simple first rules, iterated exponentially, generate vast, coherent, complex systems.
When I (Marc) was first reading the complexity theory literature many years ago, I realized that this is self-evidently true, not only about exteriors but also about interiors. Just as simple first rules generate coherent complex exteriors, so, too, what we are calling simple First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value generate the hyper-complex world of consciousness and interiors.
We now live in what has been called the Anthropocene, a world in which human consciousness will create or destroy the future. For this reason, defining consciousness is an imperative of survival. We have defined consciousness through the simple First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value that we tell ourselves about the nature of Reality and our place in it. Consciousness expresses itself in the manifest world as a Story of Value. Consciousness is the interior of Story.
Said differently, consciousness is essentially the structure of intimacy, of relationship, and of conversation at play. It is not an abstract thing. Consciousness is the depth of relationship, of intimacy, and of conversation taking place—both between the parts inside of the whole and between two or more larger wholes.
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Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
by David J. Temple
AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THEBALANCE.
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetaryculture.
Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories.First Principles and First Valuescontains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to thenext.
“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author ofThe Master and His Emissary
David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects, specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume, Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.
[1] Naturally, Eros and ethos appear at different levels of evolving consciousness. Level one of Eros is often an explosion of Eros that is not yet clarified by ethos. There is a second level, in which ethos constrains Eros, demanding its clarification and appropriate context and expression, There is then a third level, where Eros and ethos disclose their fundamental identity. True Eros—when clarified—when one accesses, at the level of human Eros, one’s deepest heart’s desire, that desire is always the highest expression of Eros and ethos as one. When the clarification of Eros at level two does not take place, then the natural explosion of Eros at level one reappears, in many distressing disguises, as pseudo-eros—showing up whenever the experience of emptiness and void is too powerful to bear, and there is no genuine Eros that the person has the capacity to access to fill the hole. That happens, in other words, for anyone not constantly engaged in the wondrous work of self-transformation and clarification.
[2] We are of course aware that in philosophy, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote about what he called the dialectical method. He referred to a triad that he called concrete, abstract, and absolute. It was Johann Fichte, who originated the terms thesis, antithesis, and synthesis for the three steps in the dialectical method. This triad (German: These, Antithese, Synthese; originally: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) refers to a progression of three ideas or propositions. Nonetheless, together with other thinkers, we prefer the term trialectics as it more immediately conveys the triadic movement of She comes in threes. Sally Kempton, in reviewing the manuscript pointed out to us that her early mentor Osar Ichazo of the Arica school preferred the term trialectics as well for apparently similar reasons.
[3] We thank our colleague Daniel Schmachtenberger for the precise formulation of this sentence: See the video “HOW NOT TO GO EXTINCT” by Daniel Schmachtenberger at Sustainable Human
.
[4] According to Britannica.com, a dryad is, in Greek mythology, a nymph or nature spirit who lives in trees and takes the form of a beautiful young woman.
[5] See our conversation on the win/lose metrics in Volume One of this series. On the success story, see Your Unique Self: An Integral Path to Success 3.0., by M. Gafni and K. Maloney, 2014, with Foreword and Afterword by Ken Wilber, Foreword by Barbara Marx Hubbard, and a special dialogue with John Mackey, Integral Publishers. I (Marc) initiated the Success 3.0 summit in 2014, together with Whole Foods chairperson and former chairperson of the Center for Integral Wisdom (CIW) John P. Mackey and CIW co-chair Kate Maloney, to point towards the distinction between the 1.0 story of success, obedience to a local God and religion and alignment with its principles and dogmas, success 2.0, the classic success story governed by the win/lose metrics, in which our economic behavior disclose the lack of a larger narrative of value, and Success 3.0, a new vision of success based on a reclaiming of a larger narrative of ontological value that reweaves all core stories, from our Universe Story to our narratives of identity, desire, power, and community. The move from success 2.0 to success 3.0 marks the emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity, which we also refer to as the fulfillment of hom*o sapiens in hom*o amor.
[6] On addiction and pseudo-eros, see Chapter Three in The Mystery of Love, by M. Gafni, 2004, Simon and Schuster, and Chapter Five “The Secret of the Cherubs: Reality is Eros” in A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, by M. Gafni and K. Kincaid, 2017, BenBella Books, Inc.
[7] This phrase comes from a PBS interview with Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist. In it, he said [Italics added by us]: “Years ago I wrote a book about cosmology, and near the end I tried to summarize the view of the expanding universe and the laws of nature. And I made the remark—I guess I was foolish enough to make the remark—that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless. … I believe that there is no point in the universe that can be discovered by the methods of science. … If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe… And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That’s not an entirely despicable role for us to play.” [https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html] See accompanying endnote for more.
[8] See The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (2nd ed.) by Steven Weinberg, 1997, Basic Book. See accompanying endnote for more.
[9] Weinberg won the Nobel prize for his work in formulating what is known as the electroweak theory, which explains the unity of electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force. See his Nobel prize lecture, which also explains the relationship of this theory to muons. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/weinberg-lecture.pdf. Retrieved March 2024.
[10] This more likely leading-edge philosophical, spiritual, and scientific realization was articulated by mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, for example.
[11] Turing, Alan Mathison. “The chemical basis of morphogenesis.” Bulletin of mathematical biology 52.1 (1990): 153-197.
Endnotes
[i]
Moreover, Weinberg suggests that there is no unified Cosmos. But in fact, a unified Cosmos is both the premise and the deepest yearning of physics, as has been elegantly expressed by Weinberg himself. But Weinberg, to borrow his own self-description of his statement, seems foolishly unaware of the fundamental fracture he imposes on Cosmos, disassociating the human being from the larger Cosmos, which itself is the most fundamental affront to human dignity—the same human dignity that Weinberg honestly feels he is protecting. At the same time, he is blithely unconscious of how this disassociation of the human being from Cosmos stands against any sense of a unified theory of Reality.
Weinberg and many of his ilk, in the halls of mainstream, conventional science, have ironically and tragically become the new fundamentalists, displacing the old religious fundamentalists, which they fought so correctly to discredit. Weinberg, like many other physicists, is so driven to displace the old fundamentalists that he cannot see his own blindness. He is fixated on the rejection of all religions as inherently evil. But one example of this fixation is Weinberg’s pithy but historically absurd comment:
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” [from an article in The New York Times, April 20, 1999.]
But of course, Weinberg is not talking about religion but about its shadow expressions in premodern and modern consciousness. And we are completely aligned with Weinberg in his critique of the terribly dark shadows of religion in many of its expressions. And yet, government and politics had equally dark shadow forms in the premodern world, and one only has to look towards Nazism and Mao’s or Stalin’s communism to see the shadow forms of secular politics in modernity. Returning to Weinberg’s main point, his suggestion that value is only what we are making up as we go along, let us say for now—and we will unpack this more fully as we proceed—that what human beings are making up as we go along is what the Cosmos is making up in its human form. We are the Cosmos in human form. The human being is an expression of the evolutionary impulse.
It is self-evident that the mystery operates through the laws of both exterior and interior sciences, generating both the evolution of physical structures and the evolution of value. This is the very Nature of Cosmos. Interior and exterior values live and evolve together as part of the larger unified Field of Value. Therefore, to participate in the articulation of evolving Value is not separate from Cosmos but aligned with Cosmos, indeed, it is to incarnate Cosmos in human form. We are Cosmos generating Value, which generates both laws and values. And Value is disclosed through our own deepest interiors, which participate in Cosmic Interiors, and like the rest of Reality, are ever evolving.
[ii]
Weinberg is prototypical of an arrogance in the halls of science, in which physicists use their expertise in the narrow world of its to then pronounce expertise beyond their realm, for example, in the worlds of biology, culture, and spirit. And because we have devalued all that is not a measurable it, we give physicists the status of priests, for they are the guardians of the only realm we still regard as real, the world of matter, which much of mainstream physics automatically assumes to be dead matter. So, what emerges is that the only realm we regard as real we also regard as dead. And we wonder why we are dying.
It is this sense in the zeitgeist that leads directly to the broken narrative of society, in which only success in a win/lose metrics connected to measurable quantification allows one to succeed. And this is, as we have pointed out in depth in other writing, the primary generator function for both collective and personal existential risk. Weinberg sharply disassociates between the living nature of human consciousness and meaning, dogmatically, ignorantly, and even angrily assuming that it is merely fiction—or, in Weinberg’s phrase, what we are making up as we go along—and that the true nature of cosmos is meaningless. Such a split, however, fundamentally contradicts the universal daily experience of human beings across space and time. So, in effect, Weinberg is dismissing first-person reality itself as a source of meaning. Moreover, he contradicts the implicit and explicit meaning that lives in the depth of Reality itself, from physics through biology to culture. On the structure of meaning implicit in Cosmos itself see below in the main body of the text and the previous volumes of this series.
Weinberg says, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” This quote is both deceptive and damaging. Weinberg’s foolish declaration (his own word used to evaluate his statement) has been significantly impactful in undermining the fabric of value and meaning in culture, which as Weinberg has already said, was not his intention. We will turn in a moment to the popular misunderstanding of how Weinberg deployed the word pointless.
But prior to that, it is worth noting that Weinberg is a typical voice in the halls of conventional materialist science in that he is an excellent physicist who then makes declarations, much like Einstein, on that which has nothing to do with physics. He is impactful because somehow people invest his statement with authority because he is good at physics. The physicist has become the new priest because we have been led into believing that only physical matter is ultimately Real, and the priest is the oracle of the Real. Hence, those who study the smallest expressions of matter, physicists, are thus ordained by unthinking pop culture as the new priests. However, taking Weinberg’s advice on the character of Cosmos is somewhat like receiving a medical diagnosis for a life-threatening disease from an expert car mechanic.
Weinberg is an expert on muons. Why would we go to an expert on muons to learn something about meaning, philosophy, or value? Our very life depends on how we understand our own interiority, how we experience and interpret value, and how we understand joy and purpose.
Why would we think that knowledge about subatomic particles, which, according to Weinberg, are ultimately dead matter, would tell us anything about our own clearly alive, conscious living and loving nature? It is difficult to imagine a more preposterous idea than to invest Weinberg or any physicists with moral authority because they study muons. Indeed, as we point out below, Einstein himself was notoriously uneven when it came to matters of morals and meaning. He moved between profundity and mindless repetition of the current vogues of thought, which, in their appropriately fierce rejection of the shadows of premodern religion, caricatured and dismissed all of Spirit—for example Freud’s idea that Divinity is simply the projection of our father figures. Freud was intent in the rebellion against the mythic God and in that he was correct.
But neither Freud nor the materialist mood of the generation were yet ready to move from the realization that, while God is mostly certainly a figment of our imagination, our imagination is even more certainly a figment of God. In other words, our projections from our own deepest interiors actually disclose something Real about Reality. We need therefore not to reject our interiors but to clarify them, to evolve our consciousness, so that our interiors are freed from the dross of superstition and ethnocentric exclusivity. As evolutionary interior scientist Abraham Kook points out, science participates importantly in the clarification of our interiors. Our clarified interiors, however, are a crucial source of information. This is what we refer to in the body of the text and in a separate book as Anthro-Ontology.
Because many people have quite understandably cited this citation to us (and others like it by similarly foolish physicists talking out of their field of knowledge) as evidence for their own nihilism, or to explain the void of depression in which they had fallen, we think it is worthwhile to briefly clarify Weinberg’s self-acknowledged, foolish usage of the word pointless. Weinberg’s statement is prototypical of these kinds of pseudo-scientific declarations made, often mindlessly, by conventional mainstream scientists repeating the dogmas of scientism with little genuine reflection. And they obviously don’t have the benefit of the many emergent possibilities and memetic structures offered by the newly emergent interior and exterior sciences, such as the kind we are presenting in our writings on hom*o amor and CosmoErotic Humanism.
First it is worth noting that Weinberg uses the word pointless in a particular and pointed manner. By it he means simply inexplicable in human terms. The following for example is another deployment of the word pointless by Weinberg, which discloses how he uses the word.
In our world we deal with accidents and principles. Accidents can’t be explained. It’s pointless to ask why a comet hit the earth sixty-five million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. It’s another thing to attempt to find out something about the rules of heredity among the dinosaurs and all other living things. Those involve underlying principles—to be precise, the principles of biochemistry. And the biochemical laws can be explained in turn by atomic physics. Then comes particle physics, and so on. Ultimately, it boils down to the final theory. That’s where all “why” questions end. [From Klein, Stefan. We Are All Stardust: Scientists Who Shaped Our World Talk about Their Work, Their Lives, and What They Still Want to Know (p. 80, “The Unity of the World—Physicist Steven Weinberg on Science and Religion”). The Experiment. Kindle Edition.]
Note that Weinberg calls pointless is not the Cosmos. Rather the seeming accidents of the Cosmos. He refers to the impact of spontaneous freedom in Cosmos, which the laws of Cosmos as we understand them do not seem to govern. But that is simply an acknowledgement of mystery. It is not that dissimilar to John Updike’s elegant declaration that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery at least given the present state of human brain. For Updike and Weinberg, consciousness is reduced to the material state of the brain’s evolution. It is a purely physical, technical problem. The absurdity of reducing consciousness to the brain is blithely dismissed by Weinberg in a kind promissory materialism or what we sometimes refer to as materialism of the gaps. It goes something like this: Even though it makes no sense and is counter-intuitive and goes against all the empirical evidence, since materialism is true, and spirit and value are not real, then in the end, materialism will give a purely physical explanation to reality.
Another question is whether our brains are powerful enough to even understand these increasingly comprehensive laws. In the end, dogs can’t be trained to solve the Schrödinger equation. [From Klein, Stefan. We Are All Stardust: Scientists Who Shaped Our World Talk about Their Work, Their Lives, and What They Still Want to Know (p. 80, “The Unity of the World—Physicist Steven Weinberg on Science and Religion”). The Experiment. Kindle Edition.]
Although his acknowledgement of the limitation of human capacity before the mystery is phrased in technical, materialist terms, the basic realization that we must bow before the mystery of the unknown and our inability to make ultimate sense of the ultimate mystery of being is accurate.
Another example, ignored by Weinberg and virtually all of conventional science—or what we might call the fundamentalism of dogmatic materialism, would be all of the, by now, well-documented psi phenomena, for which there are presently reams of incontrovertible evidence, but which are entirely ignored by conventional physics. See for example, Parapsychology, philosophy, and spirituality: A postmodern exploration, by David Ray Griffin, 1997, SUNY Press. See also Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, by Dean Radin, 2006, Pocket Books.
Two things are clear: We have no idea why a meteor hit Earth 65 million years ago. We bow before the mystery. And we know that Cosmos is an explosion of Eros, a pattern of intimate coherence nested in patterns of intimate coherence. What is clear is that Cosmos is not only accident or mystery. Cosmos is also elegant intelligent order to such a dazzling degree that we can only cry out in rapture in the face of Reality’s exponentially dazzling Eros. That is what Weinberg refers to when he goes on to say that Cosmos is governed by principles. There is self-evident inherent design in Cosmos. That is what principles mean. The principles of biochemistry, for example, are about elegant order—unique configurations of intimacy between elements arranged in particular patterns of relationship. Weinberg ignores the simple fact that biochemistry is about configurations of intimate coherence that obey the tenets of intimacy that apply to all of Cosmos.
We are also delighted to have released this new Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni as a special gift for you:
CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)
Chapter 1:Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture:Don’t Look UpExplores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3:Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4:The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5:The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6:Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7:Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?
Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days duringEros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains Dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey, which is Reality’s gift for you.
We offer this incredible course of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion as a gift for you, because we believe in the urgent, desperate need to make the new Story of CosmoErotic Humanism available to whomever needs it. We are not in a win/lose metrics selling courses, but much rather, we are seeking to activate a Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies.