Know Thyself - E117 - Marc Gafni: Decoding The Kabbalah Tree Of Life: Realize Your Unique Self & Unleash Eros

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

This week we explore the depths of Kabbalah, unique self, and Eros with renowned philosopher Marc Gafni. He begins by defining the foundational concepts of Kabbalah, setting the stage for an exploration of the interplay between masculine and feminine energies that shape our reality. He introduces the profound symbol of the Tree of Life and its relevance to personal mastery. As he describes each piece of the 11 stories in the Tree of Life, the discussion unfolds to encompass the realms of imagination, understanding, and the balance between love and boundaries, highlighting the beauty of contradictions and the coexistence of joy amidst life's challenges.He then describes the concept of unique self, an understanding of self that transcends the misconceptions of both Western and Eastern traditions.As the episode progresses, we delve into how Eros can serve as a portal to deepening intimacy, and ultimately heal our disconnected world.André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:40 Defining Kabbalah: A Mathematics of Cosmic Intimacy9:57 Masculine and Feminine Energy in the Universe20:50 Introducing The Tree of Life22:19 Keter: The Profound Power of Silence30:43 Chochmah & Binah: Ideas, Imagination & Understanding32:49 Chesed & Gevurah: Outrageous Love & Boundaries35:31 Tiferet: Laughter & Beauty that Holds All Contradictions38:51 True Meaning of Beauty & Laughter 49:16 Netzach & Hod: Forever & Surrender51:50 Yesod & Malchut: That Which Receives & Becomes 52:11 Practical Applications of This Wisdom1:01:56 Finding Light in the Broken Heart1:07:28 Every Place You’ve Been, You’ve Needed to Be1:09:21 Who Are You? Defining Separate Self vs True Self1:19:02 The East & West Both Got This Wrong: The Emergence of Unique Self1:29:46 Infinity Desires Finitude: What True Love Is1:37:28 Qualities of Unique Self: Looking Beyond Nondual Thinking1:44:54 Your Risk to Bring Your Gift into the World1:53:40 Framework for Defining & Unlocking Your Purpose1:55:54 Shadow-work: Your Pathway to Purpose2:08:23 Your Unique Obligation2:15:51 Eros: Desire as a Portal to Deepening2:30:08 Earth’s Problematic Intimacy Disorder2:40:27 Human Love: From Soulmate to Whole-mate2:56:38 Conclusion___________Dr. Marc Gafni has been described as a world philosopher — a kind of galaxy heart brain — integrating wisdom from across multiple disciplines into what he has called a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis.Gafni’s doctorate is from Oxford University with a masters degree from Bar Ilan University. He holds an orthodox rabbinic certification from the Chief Rabbinate in Israel and non-denominational rabbinic ordination.He is the author of forty books, of which only the first twelve have been published, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcgafni/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcGafniFirst Principles and First Values (book):https://www.amazon.com/First-Principles-Values-Propositions-Cosmoerotic/dp/B0CS85WYVX A Return to Eros: the Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive (book): https://www.amazon.com/Return-Eros-Radical-Experience-Being/dp/1944648186Your Unique Self: the Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment (book):https://www.amazon.com/Your-Unique-Self-Personal-Enlightenment/dp/1467522775/___________Know ThyselfInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/Website: https://www.knowthyself.oneClips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKgListen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927André DuqumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

Well, first off, just to know that there's a pattern to reality. That's a big deal. We live in a world of outrageous pain. We're facing this global intimacy disorder. That's the radical source of existential risk at its very core. And it's the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. And outrageous love is not mere human sentiment. It's the heart of existence itself.

Well, let's go crazy deep for a second. Kabbala is a mixture of interior sciences. It's the mathematics of intimacy. And one of the primary chapters in that story is the tree of. life and it's this math, the 10 stories of quality of divinity. You need to know all of these in order to know your unique gift. Let's do it okay like this. When I say, who are you? The classical answer to who am I is I'm a separate self. The only problem with that answer is that it's not enough. So both the West and the East got confused about the same thing. It's the distinction

between separateness and uniqueness. And the clarity is there's a seamless code of the universe. It's seamless, but it's not featureless. And its feature is you. Hey, everyone, welcome back to know thyself. Our guest today is a philosopher, researcher, author, visionary thinker, who is really weaving together a tapestry of our understanding of modern psychology, eros cabala, cutting edge evolutionary theory, ancient wisdom traditions, really cohesively putting together a framework and understanding of who we are, where we are,

why we are, where we're going as a species, and as humanity, and so much more. Mark Gaffney, thank you for being here. Yeah, it's good to see, Andre. Yeah. What is Kabbalah? God, what a start. Oh, my God, what is Kabbalah.

You know, the word, Kabbalah is a very beautiful word, and there's an image which I always have from a teacher that I had way, way back in the day, where I went to study with him, Kabbalah. and he offers me an apple, which I was quite happy about. So I went to take the apple, and it was in Meashiream, an old Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, and he says, nine, and yet is no. So I'm like, you're offering me an apple, man, like, hello, I'm like 17 years old, give you my apple.

So he offers me the apple again. I go to take the apple. He says, nine, no. Then I realized, oh, so he offers me the apple, and I put out my hands to receive the apple. So Kaabala means to receive. So the word means. It's a very beautiful word. And to receive means there's something to receive.

That is to say, if I open myself, it's not empty. The world's full. You know, the hills are alive. Ah, right? The world is filled with music. And I can trust the universe. I'm received by the world. the universe and when I open up and I allow reality to love me open, there's a depth to reality.

Reality is not a flat land. There's an infinite depth and the more I open and the deeper I'll go. And so that's Kabbalah. Kabbalah is a my own capacity to receive and trusting that there's what to receive, that the world's not a tale told by an idiot, full of sounds and fury, signifying nothing. And then two, the second piece of Kabbalah is that I'm received by reality. That is to say, reality receives me. And the best way to say it is I'm welcome in the universe. That's a big deal, that there are welcome home signs all over reality. You know, I'm thinking, Andre, for a moment, there's, I remember I was like a year after that Kabbalah story, I was reading Camus book, the stranger. And the book opens something like Mother died today or was it yesterday. And his point

was, and he's a classical existentialist thinker, which is one of the formative structures of postmodernity. And his point was, Mother died today or was it yesterday and it doesn't really matter. Because Mother, that which welcomes you is an illusion. It's a biological social construction. You're not welcome in the universe. That's what existentialism is. saying. He's saying, we're saying, there's actually, there's nothing for you to receive. That's Sartre's book, Being a Nothingness. He says, there's nothing to receive. You make it all up. And Sartre says, being responsible is to get to the grotesque place where you realize there's nothing to receive. What a tragic and painful and wrong position. So there's nothing to receive

and you're not received. Mother died today. Who's mother? Mother is she who holds me. she who receives me right every place i fall i fall into her hands mother right so that that notion of mother and maybe last sentence just to kind of just to begin if we can invoke a little bring some disciplines together ramakrishna right who who i often thought i used to talk to my dear friend sally kempton who's a beautiful teacher of koshim shivism she passed a year ago we were talk about the cabalistic masters and how they and the hindu masters must have reincarnated So Ramakrishna, I always think must have been a Kabbalistic master in an earlier incarnation. So he would walk into the temple and he would scream, mother, mother.

And what he would mean was, mother, I know I'm welcome. I know I'm welcome in the universe. So Kabbalah's two things. One, reality receives me. And two, reality is filled with infinite depth that I can open and receive. That's the beginning of Kabbalah. Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful.

So to unpack this a little bit further in terms of the ancient kind of Gnostic origins of how timeless and ancient the teachings of Kabbalah are, I would love for you to share the origins, how it came to be also the Sephirot, which is the different emanations. And we can start to go through these in terms of how they reveal what we can receive and unlock and share within our stuff. Okay, you got a lot going on there. You got some Gnostic origin.

You've got, you know, Sephirote, right? Which is the tree of life. Like, whoa, that's a lot. Okay, so let's see where we start here. Okay, let's see where we get this started. So first, the origins of Kabbalah are the, Gnosticism is one source, but more likely, and Mosheed Del was actually my thesis advisor at Oxford

when I was writing in this vein, you know, points it, I think correctly. Kabbalah is an esoteric tradition that goes back several thousand years, probably grounded around the time of Ibrahim or Abraham, and it's passed on in a kind of unbroken chain, generation to generation. But there are moments where the tradition explodes. So, for example, Solomon is a moment where the tradition explodes. And I wrote a couple of books called Radical Kabbalah on the Solomon tradition. So Solomon is both a kind of public king and a maker of law. And yet under the temple in Jerusalem, which is Solomon's temple, where you have the Ark of the Covenant, you have the two entwined cherubs above the Ark in this Ark of the Covenant temple, which is, of course, Indiana Jones raiders of the Lost Ark, about the Ark of the Covenant, right?

So under the temple, you have still today, you can see them these chambers, which are the chambers for the study of Kabbalah, the chambers for the practice of Kabbalah. So Kabbalah is an esoteric tradition, but I wouldn't even call it mysticism. I don't like the word mysticism because it evokes something that's unclear. Kabbalah is a mixture of interior sciences. So there's a deep interior science in Kabbalah, and there's a profound practice. practice in Kabbalah. And if I would try and kind of frame Kabbalah on a moment, what it is, it's a mathematics of intimacy.

Right? So just like, you know, Pythagoras already understood there's music and mathematics. And there are flip sides of each other. So there's, you know, when we invoke the cosmos, the cosmos invokes music. There's no music before cosmos. But we have in evolutionary history, in quite a few studies, we understand that there's kind of a music that animates all of cosmos in the first nanoseconds after the big bang, and there's a mathematics that animates Cosmos, and there's mathematical value in reality

all the way down. And that mathematical value, that music is the mood of Cosmos, but it's also the intimate, intimate interconnectivity of the all with the all. Everything's connected to everything. There's a constant movement of eras and intimacy. So Kabbala is a way of telling the story, not of the mechanics of Cosmos, but of the music of cosmos. It's the mathematics of intimacy that is cosmos.

And one of the primary chapters in that story is the tree of life, which is the spheroz, right, that you're referring to, which are fabulous and gorgeous. And Gnosticism, Gnosticism at certain moment emerges and draws from parallel traditions to Kabbalah and, of course, plays and dances with those masters. So that's a sense of a sense of its source and story. Is that that help? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

The framework of, you know, setting the stage there, then also like now going into a little bit of the emanations, the masculine and feminine side, being able to see the mathematics of the music. Let's play. Let's play. Let's play. Let's play. I mean, yeah.

So, and you threw out another term, masculine, feminine, which is a big one. So let's just, let's get that on the table also. and we'll see if we can kind of lay a table together, okay? So let's lay the table here. Let's lay the table if we can, you know, with her grace. So I'm not in love with the words masculine and feminine for a lot of reasons. It's a world in which genders at stake, as you and I both know so deeply. But they're good words.

I mean, they're necessary words, and it's good to invoke them. There's a very beautiful structure in Kabbalah that appears that another one of the moments of Kabbalah's explosion and Safed over the Sea of Galilee. In Israel, in the 16th century, right as the Renaissance is happening, there's a group of band of erotic mystics. I had a band of, I call them Hevraya Kadisha, which is the language of the Zohar in the 13th century. They're the holy band.

Because it's never one person. That's really important. Kabla, it's never the sage is on the stage exactly. It's not quite that. It's a band of mystics. It's a, it's a, Stephen Spielberg just did a beautiful movie, right, about just the pain and heroics of men at war. And it's called Band of Brothers.

Now, this notion of the band, you know, I'm Sally's, Sally's father, Sally Kempton's father, Murray Kempton, who was kind of the, but before our time was the premier journalist in America for 40 years. And, you know, Murray was a big pacifist, but he always would talk about, like, the most real and beautiful time of his life was in the Japanese theater and World War too. And just like, Murray, what are he talking about? You're a pacifist. What do you do? He said, he said, I was with my band of friends, and we had each other's back, and we loved each other, and we loved each other. And he said, I've never had that kind of intimacy ever again that we had in

this band back there. So that's what Kabbalah. Kabbalah is always a band of brothers, sometimes brothers and sisters, and it needs to be brothers and sisters, who come together, who love each other madly. That's very deep, right? What would hold a whole. holds the band as not mere intellectual sophistry or gymnastics or even mastery. What holds the band in the language of Simon's son of Yochai, who's as the author of the czar is B'havivu to Talia Milta. It all depends on love. And they did do a song on that later, right?

But it's like it all the, so there's this band of brothers that love each other madly. In Safed, Luria, Isaac Lurie convenes this band. And he says, let's not talk about masculine and feminine. And I'm trying to, if it's okay, just give you a little bit of the flavor of a cablazz. We can kind of feel it. You know, it's fragrance in the room. It's got a wafting, beautiful fragrance. It's got a.

So he says, let's not talk about masculine feminine. He said, let's talk about lines and circles. Structure and life force in a way. Right, right. There's this kind of, yeah, well, lines, structure and life force, nice, beautiful. So lines, structure. Yeah. Lines is a structure of cosmos.

It's a geometric structure. And lines and circles is also a structure of cosmos. They're inherent to cosmos. And they actually appear in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. There's before there's even an emergence of gender, because we have, of course, about 12 billion years of Eros before there's any sex. You can attract your cosmos, right? You've got 12 billion years of kind of before there's any kind of sexuality in the world.

So you've got this lines and circles. So line is thrusting forward. line is distinguishing, line is analysis, line is hierarchy, your bottom or higher up in the lines, or there's this line quality in cosmos, and lines have shadows. They can discriminate in a good way, let's discriminate, discriminating wisdom, or they can discriminate in a very bad way. Lines have, we actually distinguished, but then there's people on the other side of the track. So the shadow of a line is racism, for example, but the beauty of a line is all science, right,

the ability to make distinctions. And then circle, there's no hierarchy that we're all equidistant from the center. It's embracing. It's holding. It's about depth, right? It's about container. It's about this energy of a circle. There's an energy to the ROS, which is the force energy you were referring to. So reality is lines and circles all the way up and all the way down, right, all the way up the evolutionary chain, all the way down the evolutionary chain, there's lines and circles. And so let's say Andre or Mark, we both are line and circle and we're both a unique combination of lines and circles. So yes, we have a kind of core guy and a core girl, core boy, core girl. But in a certain sense, the gender community got something right.

They were asking the right question, which was, you know, when a baby is born, it's a boy. and I've been at four births, I have four children, right? So, I mean, it's a boy, it's a girl, right? There's this moment. And the gender critique of that is, yes, it's a boy, it's a girl, but I'm more than boy. I'm more than a girl, and that's profound. That's not dismissable. There's something very important than that that Kabbalah really understood.

Kabbalah said, yeah, you got that. You're more than boy, you're more than girl. You're not less than, but you're more than. And what's your more than? You're a unique inner penetration of lines and circles. I'm a unique gender. That's very beautiful. So in other words, the old gender categories,

there's this intuition and the evolution of consciousness, those are insufficient, but we don't kill the category. We actually evolve a category. So I'm a unique gender. I'm a unique interpenetration of lines and circles, and to actually know who I am is to know my unique gender. What are my strong line qualities?

What are my line qualities that are in shadow? What are my strong circle qualities? what are my circle qualities that are in shadow? And then I can literally make a chart. And I often do that with students. What are the 10 qualities of line? It's about 10 qualities of blind. Each one has a shadow and a light version.

10 qualities of circle. Each one has a shadow and a light version. And then chart myself. And all of a sudden I have this very deep access to my identity. That's a couple of. Very beautiful lines and circles. Very beautiful. Now back to the Trail of Life.

Okay. That was just a little foray. We're doing a little foray into lines and circles. Good? Yeah. Okay. Okay. good. Maybe one more thing about lines and circles. Haros Gamos, the divine marriage, which is the

penultimate achievement, you know, in one of the great pictures of Jesus, right, you know, in the Renaissance. And if you look, of course, at the Gnostic Gospels, there's this realization that Jesus says, I'm more than man or woman. And there's a whole number of texts where Jesus says, let's move beyond man or woman. We actually have these couple of very key Renaissance images of Jesus where he's both man and woman. So this unique gender sense. So there's this very deep sense that I want to be in my very body, in my heart and my mind, I want to be the divine marriage. So it used to be only the king and the priestess. Only the king and the queen or the princess and and the priest did a harrow scamos.

They did a divine marriage. And that created blessing in the world. Now we want a democratization of royalty. We're all royalty. And so we all need to do our heros gamos. What's the place in which my line and circle become a spiral? They become more. And so Kabbalah talks about spirals,

which we know cosmically are scientific structures of cosmos. So my line and soul becomes a spiral. And then I'm moving. Then I'm moving. I'm not circling. shadow of circle I'm stuck circling shadow of line I'm not stopping to smell the roses I'm not feeling and bring people and bring anything in so can I my line and circle come together and become a spiral and for anyone listening now it's just a great exercise just list your line qualities

which ones are in shadow list your circle qualities now what happens when they come together in you then there's something called andreiness that never existed ever before in cosmos and andreness is this unique quality of intimacy, a unique quality of line and circle that never was, is or will be ever again other than through you. That's unique gender. So that's like that's, that's a, one of the single most important ideas in Kabbalah, untold, right, unsung and critical. And the reason I just want to spend a little time on it is because the level of pain around gender confusion today. and we have this insane argument, right? And we've got the conservative side, boy, girl.

And if you think that's not the case, then you are in violation of the cosmos. Then you've got, you know, the liberal side of the equation. Gender fluid, there's 87 kinds of gender. And if you oppose that in any way, you're kind of a Nazi. Right. So you've got these two very, very powerful positions. And each one is saying something important, actually. Actually, each one has a sacred intuition.

How do we synergize those intuitions, move beyond polarity, create a shared conversation where I can actually get, yeah, boy, girl, yeah, yeah, biology is real. Your hormone, hormonal structures are real. Neuronal structures are real. That's important. That's important research on that. And yes, and then there's this evolution of gender. So Kabla allows us often to synergize and create a world vision that wasn't a vision.

available before and different conversation, but polarization is precise what Kabbalah standing against. Kabbalah is saying if you receive, back to receiving the depth of a position, then you receive the depth of another position, and then you bring them into intimate relationship with each other, you will create synergies. So unique gender is such a synergy.

Yeah, I mean, all life, I guess, is really in the dance of that synergy, in the weaving of the Ida, the pingala, you know, and those two forces within us and all of life. And I love in the tree of life how it's also set up in that framework with those 10. Tree of Life. What's your tree of life? Oh my God. Cheers. La Chaim. Salute. Yeah. So now breaking down these emanations and how they set the context and framework for understanding who what we are. So let's talk Sphirot. So Sphirot, Sphero, you're translating Andre Eminations.

We'll play a little bit. So the word actually is Sapir, Sapphire, blue light. And Sapir, it's light, so it's illuminations, if you will, these 10 illuminations. But if we can go, well, let's go crazy deep for a second. Let's go kind of all the way crazy and crazy. So the word Sphira actually means Sipur story. It's a story.

And, you know, the English word number misspire is a Hebrew word. Cipher is a number. So mathematics is about numbers. The cipher, the number. But cipher actually plays with a parallel Hebrew word, which is one of the source words in Kabbalah, which is Sipur, story. Story.

So 10 Sipfi wrote, the 10 Sipfi wrote in the tree of life, is actually the 10 stories. That's actually what the word means. It's the 10 stories of quality, of divinity, of intimacy, of delight, of joy. It's the 10 stories, the 10 God's stories. So the tree of life is the sacred autobiography of God. That's really what the tree of life is. And it's this map.

It's this mathematics of intimacy again, which tells these 10 stories. So let's just play for a second. Let's go for the top one, Ketter. So Ketter's crown. Now, and this is one of the places where the literature here doesn't do well. And the Hebrew literature on this, and the Aramaic literature is very beautiful, but it's very architectural, architectonic, so it's hard to know. And the English literature is somewhat superficial. So you'll look up, let's say, Sephirat, Ketar, crown the crown on the king's head.

Well, that doesn't get me far. So what does it mean a crown of the king's head? So a crown, Keter in Kabbala, crown is always that which is, that which is, is not part of the body, but it is the adornment, which is the door through which I enter. So Keter is always in Kabbalah silence, always silence. So silence, Kabla says very beautifully, has this very beautiful idea called the secret of Khashmal. Hach sh, mal word.

chashmal in Hebrew electricity, but it's actually a color, the color amber, a particular kind of amber that you see on a medicine journey perhaps, and it's described in Ezekiel and Isaiah, the two great prophets who are part of the account of the chariot, the great vision of the chariot, and these two major masters, Ezekiel and Isaiah, these prophetic masters. So they have this medicine journey they take in which they see the chariot, and then the They see hush mal, which is this color in the journey, but it actually means hush, silence, mal speech. So what they mean, and I'm trying to kind of touch the sources

kind of directly, what they mean is hush, there's a silence, which is not a silence of absence. It's a silence of presence. And we all know there's many different types of silences. And we all know, right? I mean, I mean, under, just between us and we're not going to share this with anyone, just between, you know, two guys here. So I was like, I was like 21 years old and it was in Manhattan near Lincoln Center. And I'm on this date that my father's, I think, brother-in-law's, uncles, cousins, gardeners, sisters, wife had set us up on.

So there's a long group of people we're going to get insulted. This didn't work. So we meet each other. And it was just clear to both of us like, in a second, this is just a bad idea. But we had to kind of go through the whole ritual. So we get, you're kind of talking, talking, talking, finally it's like four hours later. And I had a car and I was, you know, I was going to, you know, drop her off. And we get into the car to drop her off.

And there's just, we have nothing left to say. So the silence descends on the car. And had she been able to press eject, she would have ejected me out of the car. And I might have done the same. It was just there was nothing left to say. So that's the silence of actions. And then I remember, I remember when this happened, it was just like a few weeks later, I met an old dear friend, Surrey, that I knew in high school.

And we kind of were like a little bit in love in high school, but we never went out. And we met, same near Lincoln Center. We see each other, right? And we sit down. It's like Sunday morning. We have our New York Times as we're kind of like 21. And we just sit. We just talk the entire day.

They have this gorgeous conversation. She had a car at that point. She's driving me to drop me off. And the silence settles in the car. And there's just no words are necessary. Words would be just completely in the way. So that's a silence of presence. So, Khash, right, Keter, the top sefirah, the top story, is the story of the silences

of presence in my life. And it's kind of the background reality that holds all. And it's this deep silence that's underneath everything. And then Khash, the silence of presence, out of which emerges, Mal the word. And really, we both know that. We have a bunch of common friends, and we've talked about this with some of our friends. You can literally tell the difference between are you talking to someone whose words come from words? Or are you talking to someone whose words come from silence?

And you can trust words that come from a silence of presence. Yeah, there's that innocence. There's that quote, decency is the absence of strategy in a way. Yeah, yeah, there's that. There's a, yeah, there's decencies and absence of strategy. It's beautiful. It's, I would call it a, and we'll play together. It's kind of a second innocence.

Right. I think what you were referring to, right? It's not a naive in a sense. It's like, it's like, yeah, we've gone through all the complexity. On the other side, I've come to this place, which is this second innocence, and we can, we can rest together in that place. So that's Ketter. And maybe one last word about it, the letter that holds Ketter, that holds Ketter.

Keter is the aliph, the alpha female, the alpha male. So we think about the alpha as, you know, the Bonneboe or the baboon with the most power, which is true, but there's a power that emerges from the silence. So the alif is the silent letter. Olive is completely silent in the Hebrew alphabet. And then you have after the alif, you have Bet, gimaldal, or b, g, or b, g, or d, or an English, B, C,D. so you have alaif and then you have begette beg it is the word and beg it in hebrew means two things it means clothing so it's the language that garbs the silence or it's bigidaab betrayal it's the language

that betrays the silence so there's actually two kinds of language there's language that that's what poetry is poetry is when i try and stretch the boundaries of the word until it almost becomes silence, right? And then there's language that betrays. And, you know, as we're, there's a much bigger conversation. We won't go into the artificial intelligence conversation. But, you know, someone on my team just sent me two things. And she's been, it's a great person, been pushing me like, Mark, we got to use these AI

tools. She said, okay, we do this weekly thing called One Mountain. So she said, I'm going to make an invitation from, you know, which we're going to generate from AI. And it's just happened. I sat and I read the invitation and literally I got chills in my body, meaning not in a good way. And it was, here's an unsophisticated Latin word, creepy. It's just as creepy, right?

It's like the words like, and they were all right. And it's all the words were the right words, meaning AI had done a good job of selecting the words. I mean, it's, you know, very, very high powered machine intelligence, you know, the most high power do we have. And it did a good analysis, but it was empty. And literally, right, I felt cold. Right. So that's the sense of words that don't have silence underneath them. And AI doesn't experience silence of presence.

It's like, oh. Words from words. Right, right. It's words that are somehow betraying, Begad, words that betray the silence. So that's just one Sephiras. You get a sense of how rich it is, right? I mean, that's Ketar. So that's the story.

of silence of presence and and maybe last sentence, right? Just anyone listening, one of the ways to do sacred autobiography is to write down the moments of silence of presence in your life. And those moments are sacred. And there's, there's a revelation in those moments. There's a, there's a speaking. And those are, and what words emerge from them. So that's Sephirah one. Do you want to, you want to hit a couple more? Yeah. I want to play. You tell me how you want to play. I want to go through all of them. Oh my God. We can't go through in depth through all of them, but let's just kind of give the overview, perhaps. You said this is going to be about, about 13 hour podcast. About 13 hours, yeah, we still have arrows to cover, which would be another 12.

Let's do like kind of, let's see if we can kind of get, we'll just get a sense of it. Sure. See if we can get a sense of it. Let's see, let's let's, let's, so you have Hohma. Let's do it, okay, like this. You have a central channel, so Ketcher's right in the middle. Right, then you've got a left side and a right. side. Okay. So if you take a look here on the right side, you have Chahmah and Chahma is the

explosion of an idea. When that idea first emerges in you, you haven't, you know, you're kind of you're kind of in the middle of running a media company in Los Angeles and you're in the middle of asleep at night and you have this kind of, this kind of just this thought podcast. But it's not an idea. It's just like it's a, it's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, There's something you want to do there. You have a sense of something you want to offer, but you can't quite formulate it. You don't quite know how to do it.

It's just, it's like there. That's Hohma. It's the explosion of an idea. And Einstein talked a lot about that. And it's about imagination. It's this moment of imagination. And we, one of the things Kabbalah really understood was how important imagination was. You know, Firebach, the great German philosopher,

says that God is a figment of our imagination. And by the way, Fortebach was right. But of course, he forgot that our imagination is a figment of God. Right. And that's imagination is a quality, you know, Adam, as an atom and any of these primordial humans. So the word Adam, everyone translates as Adama, which is earth or human hummus. But Adam also means de my own imagination. So Adam's not just homo sapien.

Adam is homo imaginous. so hohmah is sapien wisdom with imagination right so it's the it's the spark of exploding imagination then on the left side the bina on the left channel in the tree of life the right in the left channel right the bina which is the the womb that understands that receives the explosion that it receives the kind of penetrating explosion of an idea right that just is ecstatic right she as or receives the ecstasy into her womb and then she grows the idea she nurtures the idea she deepens the idea chokhman binah then you have under chokmah on the right side you have chasid chaset's a wild word chesed is radical wild ecstatic overpowering love that breaks all boundaries which means

it's neutral. So for example, in the shadow side, the tragic shadow side of chesed in the book of Leviticus, incest. It's called chasid because it's this radical breaking of boundaries on the absolute shadow side. On the other hand, there's this quality, which I call outrageous love, which is essentially a translation of very deep idea in the Solomon lineage, which is called Ahavah, Rabah, great love, but Rabah That means outrageous. It kind of breaks all boundaries. I was talking to a dear friend, I'm John, John Mackey. And when John, John was at a certain point, we were in deep conversation.

And John said, Mark, that's called unlimited love. And John, if you're listening, it was a funny moment. I said, John, but that's just not outrageous enough, right? Unlimited. It's more than unlimited. It's got this energy. It's got a rage to it, but a rage to it in a sense that it's raging against anything that's small.

it's demanding something, it's outrageous. And we live in a world of outrageous pain. And it's the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. So outrageous love is chesed. And it's like, I'm going to go all the way. And then you have Dean on the left-handed side, Dean or Gvura. And Gvura means heroism. And heroism, Dean, law, means boundary.

So it's the vessel. It's the boundary. It's the, it's the, it's the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's braveheart. It's always brave heart, right? Mel Gibson's always brave heart. Hold, there's a scene in the movie. It says, right?

You see the charge's about to happen? It says, hold, hold, right? They're coming closer, hold. That's, that's rough. It's kind of like those two that you just mentioned, like going back to our earlier analogy, is kind of like the cell wall and the life force energy within it.

Yes, beautiful. That's right. It's exactly. Why is there a membrane? Why could reality work this out without a membrane? Right. And the mitochondria is playing on both sides of the membrane. And the membrane, which is this structure of consciousness incarnate in form, membrane's

really important. That's gorgeous. I love that. That's gorgeous. So the membrane is hold. It's this holding container. Then these two sides, you've got chohma wisdom. Underneath it, you have chesed, this outrageous love.

You have binah, the womb that receives and that gestates. And then underneath it, we have this container. Those two sun catchers in the middle on the top, then those two come into, they synergized into the center into T-Ferrott. And T-Feret is just stunning. T-Feret is beauty, pair, like wild beauty. But beauty is not just an aesthetic line.

Beauty is an ethical line. And when we say beauty, we don't mean surface beauty. You mean this depth of stunning beauty. There was a woman I met, who may be the most beautiful woman I've ever met. It's just like, just unimaginably beautiful. I met her when I was in Barilin University. I was like four or five different moments

where I was going to write a doctoral thesis and I would finish researching and I would get bored and go to the next better research. It was one of those moments. And I was living near Bariland. And we lived, you know, in these parallel little, little, you know, apartments. And Mori must have been when I met her like, I don't know, 88, 89 years old. She was old, right? I mean, I mean, she walked so slow you thought she was

walking backwards. She was really old, right? And I was never able to shake her hand even because she was classically orthodox, so there was no, right? And her face was so stunningly beautiful. You could see on her face all of the contradictions of her life. somehow turned into paradox, all of the betrayals and all of the pain and all of the agony and all of the ecstasy. She hadn't rejected any of it. I mean, it's hard not to cry when I think about her. She had taken it all in and it all shone in her face

in a kind of radiance of beauty. And I'm a beautiful woman I've ever met with, no one even, I mean, just except for my wife, of course, right? KK except for KKK. Yeah, one time I'll be clear about that, right, except for KK.K. Right. I mean, she says, and KKK was, you know, KKK made her living for many decades as a Victoria's Secret model. And she is stunningly beautiful.

And KK.K. and I often talk about Mori. So T. Ferret, which is the middle line in the tree of life, is a beauty that holds all contradictions. So it seems like, yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah. That shift from perceiving beauty is just the skin encapsulated ego and appearance of beauty, which is one level. But you're referring, it feels like more to the essence that is holding the paradox of life. And I've also witnessed that too, where somebody who's really embraced those aspects of themselves

through old age radiate the light from within them and they're piercingly beautiful. Piercingly beautiful. Versus, unfortunately, and I have so much compassion for women because of the societal conditioning and pressures of what it means and standards of beauty and all the things that cover through all means of and of course be free to do what you want but uh on on their face in their body energetically within them stuff down yeah the expression of of those of those oh no no i mean it's it's a big deal and there was i was about to say the name i won't say the name but there was i was in oxford um when i was i was writing there and someone came to visit me who was the

the air of one of the key kind of American fortunes and cosmetics. And we're sitting at the table. It's me, him, and a bunch of women at the table and a couple of men. And he says, I just got a $250 million budget. My dad just right. And I'm doing this whole line of beauty products. And he's just being very innocent, but in a kind of, and he just says, and here's what we do. We write a marketing campaign where a woman feels that if she doesn't have our product,

she'll just be alone forever. And he just drops us at the table. And I looked at him, I said, wow, Satan is sitting at the table. I said to him, I said, whoa, welcome Satan. You know, like, good to have Satan here. And he, of course, he's a beautiful guy, but we had a fierce contestation that day. I said, you know, David, is his first name. I said, like, are you for real?

I mean, you're developing a, right? And that is the shadow, right, of T. Ferret. right that sense and and of course what we're doing to the feminine is we're essentially it's it is the ultimate cultural abuse because what we're basically saying is try and cosmeticize yourself and we do similar things to men now so it's now we're kind of we're kind of get we're and try and look a particular way your whole life instead of kind of actually being in the depth of the beauty of where you are in that moment and and you said it really you said it really beautifully if I can, Andre, which is the other word in Kabbalah for this sefirah, this story in the

tree of life, these 10 stories is shalom. Shalom. And we know shalom is salam. Salam alaqaikum, alaikum, alaqam, peace. But it doesn't mean peace. The word shalom actually means wholeness that holds opposites. So boundary breaking love and boundary, two opposites flow into beautiful. Beauty, beauty holds those opposites and creates a wholeness out of those opposites. And we'll talk about Eros later, but Eros is the movement towards wholeness. And wholeness means my ability to hold opposites

and transform contradiction into paradox. The capacity, which is why the quality of Tifer is laughter. Because laughter holds paradox. So the quality of beauty is laughter on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like it's laughter and, Because laughter holds the ultimate paradox. Laughter is fantastic.

Laughter is like, right? And the, the, you remember, Imberto Echo, is this author, wrote a book called The Name of the Rose. And it's about this medieval, you know, kind of seminary where people keep dying. And so who was it? Sean Connery, I think, was the kind of guy playing. And he's got to figure out why are people dying?

So it turns out that the assistant rector is murdering people, how's he doing it? Anyone who goes into the library of the rectory and opens Aristotle's Nicomishian ethics and opens to the page and turns it, which talks about laughter, humor, gets poisoned and dyes. Because what he was saying, this rector was, that spirit was serious,

and it stands against laughter. So he kind of created this antinominy, which is very strong, Lafters of the Devil. But actually, laughter does two things. Laughter is in the most original document of Kabbalah. The oldest document of the lineage tradition has about 455 words, short, but I should learn to write that way. Right. Hello. Right. And it has not five senses, but 12 senses. So sense perception, I see, I hear, I touch, I taste. Each sense perception gives me access to a different dimension of reality. So I know something when I see you, even just

feeling each other. I got to give you a hug when I came in. We had talked on Zoom, but we knew each other in an instant differently by just shaking hands and giving a hug. It's a different. It's a different. So, you know, Howard Gardner at Harvard talks about multi-sensory intelligence. So the Kabbal has this very deep sense of these 12 faculties of sense perception. And each one gives you access to a dimension of reality that you can't get any other way. And laughter is one of those. 12 is the highest one. Right, brother?

Laughter is number 12. It means it gives you the highest perception about some nature of reality. So question is to what does it tell you? So it tells you two things. One is it nullifies reality. So satire. You know, a rebel newspaper has to be a satire newspaper because when you tell a joke, you undermine the structures of power.

You know, it's Cicero. You know, when Rome is falling, They're not sure, is it going to fall? So Cicero says, are they laughing at us? Right? There's an incredible book called With Laughter and Hell about jokes and concentration camps. Right? So one is laughter nullifies.

It shatters the pomposity of what you called beautifully the skin encapsulated ego. But two is laughter holds paradox. It's like, oh. When something is just so painful or so beautiful, like laughter. And you don't, it holds paradox. in this very deep way, and that's the beauty, right, Tiferate, right, in the central chain of the tree of life, the beauty of that which holds opposites. But I'll give you, here's a crazy example. So we talked about Solomon, we mentioned Solomon. So Solomon's father is David. So David is kind of the Davidic king. And if you're, you know, a Rastafarian or a metatron, Judah, right? That sense of, you know, Bob Marley had this deep sense of Judah, right, this kind of Judah energy. So Judah is of the 12 tribes of Israel. He's the, the ancestor of David, who's the father of Solomon. So David is called in the lineage of

Kabbalah in the 13th century, but Khanad the Malika and Aramaic. He's the gesture of the king. He laughs. So the Zahar says, if you want to look it up and you can find it, it's like I think volume 3, like 98A, it's a very beautiful story where Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah, more covers than any song ever made in history, every place. So what's the first stans of Leonard Cohen about? It's about the David story. It's about this story. It's about this story.

And Leonard Cohen, he got a sense of this intuitively. He saw her bathing on the roof. She cut his hair, right, his throne. And every word that I draw from my lips, it's all, hallelujah. There's a blaze of light in everywhere. It doesn't matter which I heard. So the first stanz of Leonard Cohen's song is about David going up. seeing a woman about Sheba, bathing on the roof,

getting her husband killed, taking her for a wife, complicated, horrific story, Book of Kings 2, and causes the beginning of the downfall of the Davidic kingdom. Rheumatic story, and Cohen holds the wildness of the masculine, the feminine in that story. So the Zohar retells that story. The Zohar, which is the book of Radiance 13th century, retells the story about David and says,

David's the gesture of the king. He's telling a joke. Why? because so the Zoro tells the story like this I'll loosely translate from Aramaic David says to God he says God Nassena don't know nassanu which means guess me and God says

I don't think that's a really good idea I don't do not don't do that and David says I got this man I mean pretty closely translating the Aramaic I got this and God says I don't think you got this you should not do this and David says yo yo's like I got this Scott says okay

David goes up a little while later Caesar bathing on the roof and it all goes bad. And God says, I told you, you shouldn't have done that. And so David says, and the Zoro, David says, what do you mean? God, you're the master. I'm the student. You decreed one way. I decreed another way. I would never violate your decree. You're the master. So David tells God's got a joke, right? Right? Just baking, it makes a joke out of the whole thing. So now, why would I even bother to tell you that story? What does that mean? So I studied this passage maybe for a decade. Like, what is this? And all of a sudden, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, of course, of course. And I remember I was ecstatic about it.

What the passage is about is about, do you really choose in the world? Do you have free will or don't you? It's beautiful. In one hand, I choose. You just chose Batchiba. He saw her bathing on the roof. Leonard Cohen. Hallelujah. This is your fault. On the other hand, David had no move. He was overpowered. He was overwhelmed. What could he, right? Which one's true? Am I responsible? Am I responsible? Am I not responsible? Of course I'm responsible.

But of course there's larger forces. Which one's true? Free will, determinism. We can't resolve it. So there's this dimension, which is laughter, which holds the paradox. It's like, huh. And I just, maybe just the last image to make it more real. I just literally like maybe this two weeks ago.

I was with this great couple, friends of mutual friends of ours. and I said to him, I said, it's really a shame that you had to be with X because I'm sure you didn't really have any other choices. And he's a very good looking, strong, powerful guys. And I'm really sorry, you know, Jack, we'll call him Jack. He said, sorry you couldn't find anyone else and you were stuck. And he said, what do you mean I had tons of choices? And then I said to her is also this kind of very, you know, dramatic, you know, and beautiful person.

And I said, really, really a shame you couldn't get anyone else except for, you know, Jack. And then what do you mean? I had tons of choices. I said, okay, now let's go deeper. And I said to him and to her separately, I said, could you really be with anyone else? Did you really choose? And she got very quiet and he got very quiet. And they both said, no, we didn't choose at all.

Of course we had to be with each other. It couldn't be any different. So that's laughter. That's T. Ferret. It's the contradiction. I chose you. And yet we didn't choose at all. That's beauty.

That's Shalom. That's this divine story. Like that? Wow. Yeah, it's beautiful. Then let's finish the tree of life. I know we got, so then you've gone on the right side. Four so far?

Yeah, we got four more, four more, four more. Four more, okay. Four more. We'll go do this. So, Netzach means forever. How do we do forever in one second? Jim Grochie, which dates me, I apologize. There's a song, if I could put time in a bottle.

It's about forever moments. So Netzach is the moments I want to last forever. Those moments. Hode is the surrender. Hode is on the left side. on the right side, Hode on the left side, surrender. It's the willingness to give up the moment and not have it last forever. Right? I mean, it's like, you know, in Faust, in Geertz's great, Faust, there's a deal, right?

Faust is going to have eternal life unless he makes one mistake. Unless there's a moment that happens, and he says to that moment, linger thou art fair. I want you to last forever. He goes to hell. In other words, Netzach, those are the forever moments. They're priceless. They're immeasurable. They're not commodifiable. Hold them and give them up.

Our attachment to beautiful things can often ruin them. Right? And our unwillingness to let them go. Right. The ability to give up the moment and not try and recreate it again again. There's going to be a new moment. Then I go to the central channel again to Ysod. And Yashod is David.

Actually, it's the quality of David in Kabbalah, but it's the quality of phallus. It's the quality of the line quality. So it's that quality of the line that's then received. So this is the central channel. You have Keter, silence of presence, beauty, Shalom, Tferrit, which holds contradictions and makes them paradox. Then you have Ysaud the thrusting line. And then Shechina or Malchut, which is the bottom, Sphira, which is that which receives and holds.

So it's receiving Kabbala. It's Malhut. It's the circle that receives. So the line enters the circle. And then launches, catalyzes the process of becoming, which is this reality. So the 10 Sphirot are both prior to this reality, but then they recapitulate themselves up every place in the world. So for example, we could go through which we won't do now, the human body.

The Svirot live in me. They live in politics. They live in economics. So you could organize your company based on the 10th Sphiroch. You could organize politics, economics, governance, relationship, anatomy, metaphysics. The Sphirot are the mathematics of intimacy, tree of life. Okay. We did a lot of tree of life there, man.

That was good. That was good. We did that. We did that. Thank you, she. Thank you. Thank you, Andre. It was beautiful to be able to get a sense of that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just so fascinating to see the interplay of them, all those dynamics. and when you look at it from a bird's eye of view, I'm just curious, what do you feel is the most practical application for our listeners and how it actually affects their life, how the awareness of what we just spoke to,

I guess changes how they behave. Well, first of, just to know that there's a pattern to reality. That's a big deal. You can't be welcome in the cosmos unless you know that you are a fractal, a larger pattern. Otherwise, I'm not welcome in the universe. And one, but two, that these free wrote, this tree of life plays in me. It plays in me. It's part of me. These stories play in me.

So maybe just, let me add just maybe one sense to really get your sense super directly. So here's a, and this is a big, huge, wild, stunningly beautiful, self-evident in your body and beyond radical idea, deeply grounded in the interior sciences. And I'm closing my eyes because sometimes when you want to say something, it's so deep, it's so beautiful, and you almost don't dare to say it. And to really respond to your question, which is, when we say the Sifiroat live in me,

the Siferoot are the essence of divinity. God. And we talk about God. It's like, the God you don't believe in doesn't exist. It's a good story. It's not a small God, right? It's not a caricatured God, right? It's not a, so the God you don't believe in doesn't exist.

It's not that God. And anyone listening to God, you don't believe it, I don't believe in either. So we're talking about God in a much deeper sense. In every generation, we call the name of God in the language of the Kabbalah. So if I would try and call God a name in this new story of value we're trying to tell,

I would call God's name as the infinite intimate. God is the infinite intimate. And you can feel it. God's infinity, and yet ultimately intimate, so close. So the mathematics of intimacy or the description of the infinite intimate is the tree of life, but the tree of life lives in me, which means that when there's a branch of the tree that's weak, I become that branch and I strengthen, I empower, I enliven the field of the divine. And we're trying to get what that means. It means I'm never powerless. And it's what I do as a

human being is called. If we just met And Andre just for this sentence, I could share this with you. And God forbid we'd never get to meet again, I'd be, I'd be ecstatic. So the core idea in Kabbalah is called, and it's about the tree of life. It's called, and I'm actually so, I'm just feeling joy right. And I'm so happy you ask that question is the core movement, the core strategy. if you will, is a strategy of power, which is called Leshem Iqud, for the sake of creating union in all worlds by bringing together the split off parts of reality into a whole. So any part, any branch, any story in the tree of life, which is somehow shattered or incomplete, I make whole through participating.

So let's say I step into my silence of presence. and I'm with a beloved. And we just, we deeply fall into silence of presence. But then we pour the energy of that silence of presence into the entire field. So the entire field gets animated, gets strengthened. And actually, as it were, the infinite intimate, God gets stronger because I am quite literally a unique incarnation of the divine. I am a unique incarnation of the infinite intimate, meaning, there's not God who's eternal and static,

and this is the sentence, there's always more God to come. That is a shocking idea. What does it even mean? It's girdles incomplete in this theorem. There are no complete mathematical sets, right? So there's more God to come, and who is more God to come me?

So my unique incarnation of the tree of life says that when I'm in a particular moment in my life and I'm creating a boundary, or I'm breaking a boundary that should be broken. And when I break the boundary, that should be broken and I become an outrageous lover in adopting a child and in gifting and creating, then I'm not doing it merely as an expression of my story. My story is a chapter in the sacred autobiography of God, which means I'm never powerless. The notion of being powerless doesn't

exist. You know, my mother just wrote a book that she hasn't published yet, which is my mother's a Holocaust survivor. And, you know, wonderful. human being and you can't talk to her for very long without being back in the kingdom of the night. That was the formative, you know. And so she describes scenes which I won't go into now, but she describes a feeling of intense power, even though she was powerless. There's nothing she could have done, right? The levels of degradation were unimaginable.

And yet she had this understanding, line. in her body that the way she holds this moment is not just about her dignity, it's about God's dignity. And I'm holding God's dignity in me. Now, I was talking to our friends, Aubrey and Violana the other day. We're talking about pleasure with, I don't know if you know, Caitlin and Godseys. We were all chatting and talking. Classic situation with you guys talking about pleasure. We're talking about pleasure. We're talking about pleasure. And I said to, to, to, to, to, to Caitlin and Godzian, Auburnet got very excited about it and Vi. Let's really get this notion of pleasure, which is the source of all ethics.

Pleasure is the sort. We think pleasure and ethics are opposites, different conversation. Pleasure is the source of all ethics. All ethics come from pleasure and knowing what the levels of pleasure are, but six major levels of pleasure and how they relate to each other. But in any case, in that sense, I was trying to get that the idea that pleasure is something different than ice cream, although ice cream is important. and it's a level of pleasure, and neither right flavor.

But pleasure's so deep. So when my mother would describe the scenes of people walking to the gas chambers, some of those people walking to the gas chambers were experiencing, and there's a hard sentence to say, but more pleasure than the Nazi guards who had all the power. How can that? Now, when we say pleasure, we don't mean ice cream, but we mean their sense of belonging to the universe,

their sense of dignity in the face of unimaginable degradation, their sense of self, their sense of the rightness of their being, was ultimately of a different quality of pleasure, but pleasure in its deepest sense than the Nazi guard who actually understood in some deep place that he was violating, his very essence and it was going to be tortured in this world and in future incarnations by that participation.

So you would think, right, He's the Nazi guard and he's got the power and he's going to go do what he does afterwards two hours later. No, pleasure is very subtle. It's subtle. So this very deep sense that how I hold myself in any moment actually is filled with unimaginable power. I mean, I'll say it one last way. Barack Obama runs for president. So let's not get into political issues here, but why did Barack run for president?

And let's just between a seat. So he dances well. show people he dances. You got to do dances, by the way. A guy can dance. I'm just saying. Right. So, but why does he run for president? So to do good, yes, I got that. But what's, what's, what's, what's, he could do good in the south side of Chicago where he started as a, as a, as a, you know, beautiful field worker. So why does he run for president? He runs for president because he loves power.

But in a beautiful way, right? This is not a critique of Barack Obama. He wants to have this experience of divinity. Divinity is the interstate. infinity of power, but not a sauron, shadow, Lord of the Rings, ring of power sense, the abuse of power. He wants to have the experience that actually I have this intense power. I can affect the course of history for the good. That's an enormously intoxicating invitation, but it's not the shadow of power. It's the sacredness of power. And we've actually interrogated power in its shadow form.

There's a holiness to power. So what Kabbalah says is, you're never power. no matter where you are, no matter what's happening in your life, the way you hold that moment and the way you experience it and your ability to create a synergy and to create a union, to create depth, and then pour it into the source code. You literally pour that energy, the way you've experienced that moment into the source code, and you literally change all worlds in all worlds backwards and forwards and time all the way up and all the way down.

That's power. That's power. That's, you're actually a magician, right? You actually, you participate in divine magic. And the way you hold yourself, the way you gesticulate, the way you embrace, the way you hold pain, the way you transmute, horror, the way you laugh fully instead of holding back your laughter, the way you decide in that moment not to withhold, you become more God to come. That's a lot. You're never powerless. Does this correlate to the idea of raising the sparks and becoming fulfilled as a human being?

Yeah, raising the sparks. I mean, Andre, you're hitting kind of like each one. Okay, so we're going to go. Today is 16 hours. We're not going to make it in 13. Let's just do a minute. Raising the sparks is so crazy, beautiful. So here's the image.

Line, we're back to the line. Penetrates the circle of reality called the Khalalraik, the great circle of emptiness. Then this penetrating line into the circle organized itself in 10 vessels. Sometimes the light's so intense that the vessel shatter. We know that in our lives. It's called the shattering of the vessel.

The light is so intense, the vessels shatter. And then my life is in broken pieces every place. So that's called the broken vessels that are spread all over the world. And we live in a world of broken hearts, right in broken vessels. So the master, but the master is no longer just the priest or just the rabbi or just the imam. The master is there's a democratization of mastery. There's a democratization of greatness. There's a democratization of enlightenment.

The text is, you shall be for me a kingdom of priests. priests, we're all sacred masters, if we actually claim it for real. So the master finds the broken vessel, realizes that when the light shatters, the light actually remains a spark of light in each broken vessel. So the master goes and liberates the spark of light that's trapped in the broken vessel. And that's what our lives are about. Often when we fail in our lives, we rip out that page from our book of life. You can't rip out pages from your book of life. It can't be done. Every page has to be embraced. If the word tantra, which is an eastern word, but tantra is actually a notion of expansion. Tantra means to weave them to expand. And it's

this notion that if there's a tantric structure in every great tradition, including Kabbalah. There's a Kabbalistic tantra. Tantra means the principle of non-rejection. Nothing's off the table. Tantra means nothing's rejected. So Tantra means there's a broken vessel. There's these pages ripped out. I need to paste them back in because those are part of my story. And I need to liberate the light from the broken vessel and return it to source. I mean, Andre, I don't know if you have any.

I actually don't know your life history. So I don't know, I don't think you've ever been married, but you may have been maybe six or seven times. I'm unaware of, right? But so I, you know, there's a world which exists in the world. I know I've met it personally and I know many, many people have met it. It's called divorce. And divorce exists all over the world today. What people do when they get divorced is they have this strange notion that they should rip out pages of their book of life, that the vessel is shattered.

So they changed the locks. They hired two lawyers. The two lawyers then go to somehow degrade both sides in the worst possible way. Instead of saying, oh, my God, we came together. There's a holy moment. The vessels may have shattered, but there's light to be liberated from that vessel and return to source. So how I hold my failure and how I turn my failure into my next sacred imagination, my next sacred fantasy. And I take that spark of light and I use it to illuminate the next stage.

That is the shattered vessels. That's the liberation of the spark. And it's true in our personal lives, but it's also true in thought. there's no system of thought, which has depth, that we should reject. We need to weave everything together, not in a mishmosh, right? Not a good word, mishmash, but best I can come up with right now, right? But not in a kind of, you know, it's kind of strange mix, but we need to synergize to respect the integrity of each spark and bring it together in a larger flame.

And that will be the context for kind of a new, if you will, a kind of new world religion as a context for our diversity. I mean, all the religions remain, but there's a larger symphony and there's a larger shared body of sparks which create a flame that creates a shared grammar of value that allows us to have intimacy in the world, right?

We're facing this global intimacy disorder that's the radical source of existential risk at its very core because we don't know how to liberate the spark from the broken vessel. So when we critique a system, we polarize and we find what's broken in it. Instead of seeing, what's the spark that can be liberated

that can come together to create this, this new grammar of value, this shared story of value, and all intimacy comes from shared stories of value. So it's a critical cabalistic structure. So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for bringing it to the table.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we actually could do a 12-plus hour podcast just simply on that, and there's so much that I still want to go to. And one of the last things I want to bring up is just anything that you feel like is applicable, practical, if you had to give something from the teachings of the Sephora Yitzvara. And Yitzirah is it.

Yitziraz. Good. Yitziraz. That's good, my brother. What would you say that is and what we haven't covered yet? That's a great question. What's the, you know, take one thing away. If someone put a gun to my head, which would be impolite, right?

understandably so and they had a kind of a little bit of a clint eastwood thing and they said make my day right tell me like in one sentence i would say it's something like every place you've been you need it to be it's that sense of i'm received i'm welcome in the cosmos and every detour was part of my destination there are no accidents it's always mystery But every place you've been you needed to be, and that's an enormously accurate and liberating realization. It looks different than I thought it would. And sometimes we have to give up the tyranny of the early dream in order to live into the fullness

of possibility. And if I would, maybe last sentence, from wherever I am, there's a yeah, I share a year. I will be what I will be, the name of the divine. And so the Kabbalists say very beautifully, we can't say anything about God because God is in some sense holy other, and yet God's the infinite intimate. So there has to be a way I can approach. So if I would summarize lots of sacred texts,

it's something like, God is the possibility of possibility. Right? Every place you've been you needed to be, yesterday's the slave driver. If it claims to determine tomorrow, I am where I am, and I am the possibility of possibility. I am more God to come. This goes nicely with a quote that I read from your book, actually. Yeah. One section said, your obligation and joy in being alive is to clarify your unique perspective,

realize your unique self, and give your unique gift. takes into a whole new topic, right? That carries this in here. Obviously, this being the Know Theyself podcast. I think our listeners, our community, myself have felt that there is a unique calling, what you also call vow obligation that we can uniquely provide on the planet. And the concept of self, I think, depending on what lineage you study from, has different things to offer.

And I love your context of kind of coming at it from an integrated approach where you know, the Buddhist concept of anata or no self, you know, which a lot of people find is like, okay, I'm not this personality small and skin encapsulated ego. I am one with all. There is. But we're a yes and, and we still have this unique perspective. And so on the path to unlocking our unique gift, calling in obligation, what, let's start unpacking what is the unique self? Let's play. No, that's great. That's great. I mean, unique self is, a little, Let's start, I guess, in the middle, which is always a great place to start. So know thyself, right?

I mean, that great injunction. So who am I? Right, so who am I? So what's the classic answer? And let's play with, let's say, five selves. Let's play with five selves. Let's just. So the classic answer, of course, and you've invoked it four or five times each time elegantly, you know, in our conversation today,

The classic answer to who am I is, I'm a skin-encapsulated ego. I'm a separate self, right? I'm Mark, I'm Andre. And that's, of course, true. Let's start there, right? I'm not Andre and you're not Mark. And the separate self exists in the mind of God. Can I ask for a distinction?

Because you said it's true, and of course it's real. Like, it's an aspect of reality. But would you just make a distinction between what is real? and what is true. Yeah, it's great. That's great. On one aspect, it is a reality of this dimension. It's a reality, and it's also a partial truth, right?

And that's the thing. In other words, separate self means I wake up in the morning, and I have a sense of being Mark. And actually, if I thought I was Andre, let's say I walked in today, and I said, hey, and you said, hey, Mark, I said, no, no, no, I'm Andre. So at first you'd think, oh, I guess that was funny. Right. You kind of like, okay, okay, like, a little weird in person, but okay.

But then I would keep going, like, for five minutes. It's like about 20 minutes in, you're going to call, I don't know, our mutual friend D or and you're going to say, what were you thinking? This guy is insane. He's out of his mind, right? So the first level of sanity is knowing my fundamental identity and all of Western psychology appropriately is about having a healthy separate self. And it is true.

There is a truth. It's not all of the truth, but it's a dimension of the real that I have a separate self. And so the classical answer to who am I is I'm a separate self. The only problem with that answer, which is partially true and participates in the real, is that it's partial. It's not enough. I'm more than a separate self. I feel like I'm more than a separate self. I go to Superman and I want to have more power than I do.

I don't exactly want to die. I feel connected to forever, right? I feel larger, right? I see an inspiring moment and something explodes in my heart, which is not about my separate self desires or I rest in the depth of the silence and my, I explode into this larger space. And then I feel this, this voice calling me. All of this, right, is making me insane in a different way. So my separate self is insufficient.

So maybe we could say it like this. Separate self is a puzzle piece. And the puzzle piece is told you're the whole thing. And the puzzle piece says, I'm the whole thing. Kind of hard to walk around as a puzzle piece. You ever tried to be a puzzle piece and walk? It doesn't do well. It's like, you're like, right?

So you're like, but you want to be part of the larger puzzle, but then you're your therapist, right? And your school tells you you want to be part of the larger puzzle? That's like weird. That's like a cult. That's a regressive kind of crazy idea. and but you know that you're yearning for something, but you're told that it doesn't exist.

There's just a puzzle piece. So you're filled with anxiety, and we have a level of breakdown and depression, right? And you try Prozacian responses, and they're partially effective. So you're like, what am I going to do? So then you realize, oh, okay, no, no, no, no. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to liberate myself.

Before we liberate ourselves, which I'm excited to do. Okay. I'm just quite... I'm putting a block on liberation. Not me. Sorry, y'all. Just quick thought.

What do you think is... What do you think is the current percentage of the population on the planet that presumed themselves to be a separate self? I would say 98, 98, 99, 99.5%. Wow. That's high. Yeah, that's high.

That's the overwhelming majority of the planet. Now, as a separate self, I might be in a relationship to God. Right. So I might be a Sikh, and I might be a Hindu, and I might be a Muslim, Christian, but that means I'm a separate self in relationship to a creator God.

I was still a separate self, though. Okay. So that's fair? Yeah, that's discerning belief in actuality of embodiment. Yeah, here I am. I'm a separate, and I'm separate. In other words, that's what I am. And I'm a separate self who's a monadic unit and I am in relationship perhaps to a larger

world or not, but I'm a separate self. Okay. And paradoxically, a religionist and an atheist share in common, most of them that were separate selves. They actually have a shared sense of identity. Now, the religionist makes a little better and says we haven't to have a soul in there, which is helpful. Right. Okay, that, that's a step, but I'm still a separate self. Both in many ways believing something they have an experientially come to know. I don't have direct access. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Direct access. So back to liberation. Let's get back to liberation. But let's go to your direct access for a second,

along the way to liberation, you know, Aquinas' favorite verse, the great Christian mystic, Aquinas' favorite verse in the Bible was from David, who we talked about earlier, which is Tamu or Uki Tovah tonight, taste and see that God is good. And Aquinas understood correctly as a good realizer, exactly what you, of course, just said so beautifully, they can't get there. They don't have an actual experience of it, you have to taste it. So you've got to taste. It's not, It's not a cognitive claim that I have. It's an actual direct experience, and that experience is liberation, or moksha, or enlightenment, or redemption, or, right, comes by many names, right? But the experience is, I'm not just a puzzle piece.

There's a whole, a complete puzzle, and I am, and the lines separating the puzzle pieces are an illusion, and I'm just, I'm part of the hole. I'm inseparable from the hole, right? The whole lives in me. I live in the whole, right? I am part of this field of consciousness, which is the way it's usually understood. And maybe we'll get to talk about later. It's not just a field of consciousness.

That's a mistake. It's also a field of eras. It's also a field of interconnectivity, but for now it's this field. It's called, let's say, in Kabala, Khakel, Tapuchin, Kaddishin, an Aramaic, the field of holy apples. Right?

It's the seamless code of the universe. So the seamless code of the universe, which we would call not separate self, but true self. And true self is the singular Schrodinger said, the physicist, the singular that has no plural. Or the total number of true selves in the world is one. So that's true self. So the problem with true self is, first of it, before the problem,

it's stunning, it's beautiful, right? It's the change that changes everything. It's the realization that I'm not just omni-considerate of the whole, right? The whole is part of me. It's part of my very identity. That's what I mean by true self, that your true self is not your separation. It's actually your true self. Very beautiful.

Very true. It changes everything. It's stunning. And it's just as crazy making. Right. As separate self. Because you say to your teacher, you say, okay, there's a hole here, but I see these lines separating the puzzle pieces. And your teacher says, die in the cushion, right?

That's an illusion. And you say, okay, I'll met. meditate some more, but you say, but I seem to be also, that's separation. And you get this very, very powerful transmission that says that your experience of being distinct is an illusion. And you've got this deep sense inside of you that, I just not feel like an illusion. And your teacher keeps telling you that's an illusion to you keep sitting. So just like separate self, I'm a puzzle piece, there's no puzzle, makes you insane. It actually, actually challenges your sense of reality.

So does true self. Because true self says that your entire experience of distinction is separation. And that's actually a violation of the real. And that which is real is only true self. So for example, at separate self, you're all about your story. And then you're told, leave your story behind. Okay, true self, leave the story behind. But then you wake up in the middle of your story all the time every day and every night.

You're like, ha, right? And so you've got this bifurcated self, which is actually a rift in your essential beingness. So we can't stop there. To stop at true self is tragic. And I've met over the last 30, 40 years, countless people trapped in this kind of tyranny of true self. And maybe 30 years ago, my friend, when I started talking about this, I won't mention figures, but to key figures, we're kind of leading teachers of true self. philosophers, teachers, they all would look at me kind of with a bemused smile, this kind of, you know,

poor Mark. He's stuck in separate self. He's still stuck in separate self. He doesn't realize it. And I just, in my body, and my body just and mind and heart just, I knew it wasn't true. And I went deeper and deeper into kind of the path of realization, and it just exploded with a kind of clarity. And the clarity is there's a seamless code of the universe, but the seamless, code of the universe is it's seamless, but it's not featureless. And its feature is you. And now there's, you are a distinct expression of the field of true self. And here I want to, if I can, with your permission and you're stuck with me.

So at least for another couple minutes, right? So, so, but, but, but, but if we can, let's just try and just like a two minute crazy deep dive for a second. Because to really, to really get it, once we get it, it's like, huh. So in a certain sense, the West, and this is what's so crazy making, the West, the Western tradition said separate self is what's real. So the entire Western tradition, separate self is real. The East says true self is real. True self says separation is not true. Right. It's it. What do West and East both trying to do? They're trying to get over suffering. They're not,

they're not like bad folks in the West and good folks in the East or vice versa. There are two groups of people trying to overcome suffering. So the West says, is you overcome suffering by realizing you're not part of this larger totalitarian whole. You have dignity as a separate self. You have an inalienable rights, right? As a human being, every human being has this an inalienable right as a separate self, not part of any other whole for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that lives in our body, and that's true.

And the East says, no, no, no, if you stay in that separate self, you're going to be devastated and filled with anxiety and the first noble truth life is suffering. So how do you resolve those? So both the West and the East got confused about the same thing. And you can check the text. And I remember there's a moment where it became clear to me. I called my dear friend Ken Wilber. And I was just ecstatic.

And we just got excited about the distinction. And it's the distinction between separateness and uniqueness. And it's such a core distinction. So in order to go beyond suffering and to realize that I have an inable rights, I don't need to be separate self. I'm now on the west side. I can actually be unique self, meaning I'm not separate. I'm part of the larger whole, but my rights, my inalienable rights are based on my unique self.

I'm a unique expression, unique feature of the field. Now, the East also got confused. The East said, in order to move beyond suffering, you need to move beyond your separate self. That's true. But you don't stop at your true self. your true self ceased through a unique set of eyes. So my unique self is the unique discretion of true self. So once I distinguish between separateness and uniqueness,

actually realize that true self and separate self both have intuitive truths. One is the dignity of distinction, separate self. The other is the realization of the whole. True self, those synergizing come together and actually, more accurate and higher, literally higher, deeper structure of consciousness, which is, I'm a unique self, which means that the answer to who are you, when I say who are you, that question we had, who are you, you are an irreducible unique expression of the love intelligence, love beauty that is the animating energy and eros of all that is that lives in you as you and through

you that never was, is, or will be ever again other than through you. And as such, you have a unique perspective and a unique quality of intimacy that fosters your unique capacity to give your unique gift to address the unique need in your unique circle of intimacy and influence that can be addressed by you and you alone and known that ever was is or will be in the history of cosmos has that capacity to give the unique gift that you have to give and when you give it you're an expression of the whole distinguished giving that unique that's unique self. Okay.

Okay, right? We can live there and you can feel in your body. Our body's no truth. It's like, oh, right, no, I'm not a separate self. Right, that. I'm not, but I'm not just a true self. So I'm a puzzle piece that completes the puzzle. And if you can just kind of just feel the image actually of a puzzle piece,

you've got a puzzle piece. You have your idiosyncratic distinction, but you don't try and make the true self move. Oh, I'm a puzzle piece. let's round those puzzle piece jagged edges into a round circle as true self that's completely crazy making and it violates our essential nature of self no i'm an idiosyncratic unique puzzle piece and then i have a unique distinction that completes the puzzle in a way that no one that ever was is or will be can do other than me and if you just be a puzzle piece with me for a second i'm held by the

puzzle. I'm home. I fit. I'm welcome again. Right. And I have the capacity to address a unique need in reality that no one else can address. And this is insanely important just to feel it. To be welcome in the cosmos, I need to be able to address a unique need that no one else can dress. I mean, I'm invited by friends. I'm just, we'll make this up. I'm invited by friends for dinner. I don't really want to go to dinner, but they work real hard to welcome me. And they have the right food and the right table and the right. So we're sitting at dinner and I kind of want to get home. Right. And it's like, okay, and we're making polite chatter and we're being charming. We're being appropriate. But I kind of like, they're very nice people. But then, again,

we'll just, we'll just make this up. And then, you know, the master of the house, whoever he or she is, they get this call and their face goes white. And then their face, they, their face, lights up and they turn to me and they say, oh my God, I just got this phone call. And I need your help. You're not going to believe this, but I actually know your skill set. You are the only person in the entire world who can address this desperate need that I have right now. And I'm ecstatic that you're here. All of a sudden, you're home. Like you're, you don't need to get home. You're totally good. You're welcome. You're located. Your home. You're needed. That's what unique self is. What true self says is you're not needed. Your true self says you're an extra unmasal.

set and you're in some sense fungible, right, which is why often true self positions work well with totalitarian positions, paradoxically, right? Because there's lots of extras on the set, kind of everyone. There's only the set. And paradoxically, that's a very, very dangerous position. I need to know that there's irreducible dignity, not because I'm a social construction who's an accidental separate self. No, that's actually not true. Not because I'm law. in my victim's story that I keep recursively going over again and again and then I fire my first therapist and I get a second one because the first one doesn't want to hear it anymore and then a seventh one and I keep telling my separate self story and I can't get out of the recursive loop.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Unique self is my story is chapter and verse in the story of cosmos. And I'm needed. I'm ultimately needed. You know, the way the interior sciences say it in the 16th century, a gentleman in, I think, Italy named Mayor Ibn Gabai, he says, Avodat Tsarachkavah, God needs your service. It's kind of a shocking idea, and it's about divine need. So I want to just kind of stay close. I mean, it's like, oh, oh, I thought God had no needs. Huh.

How could God have needs? I mean, Aquinas, my monies, everybody says God has no needs. Buddhahood, no needs. It's one of the tragic mistakes, my friend, right, of religious thought was this assertion of a divinity who is perfection, who has no needs. Because if God has no needs, and I'm commanded or Buddha has no needs, let's do the God or Buddha. God has no needs, Buddha has no needs. But I'm supposed to become like Buddha. I'm supposed to imitate Tata dee become like God, which means I should have no needs.

but actually I'm filled with needs and actually the entire notion of Western psychology is to get my needs met and that's the successful human being is ones who address their needs so let's just track the the rent-asunder experience of the human being today

on the way and let's say I'm in an eastern path buddhahood no needs to try and be like Buddha no needs oh I'm now in a religious Christian Jewish you know Muslim path right be like God got no needs. Then my Western psychology self says, get your needs met. A healthy, whole human being knows that I get their needs met, so I'm completely ripped apart because I have these

contradictory messages literally in my source code that are actually undermining my entire integrity. So in order to actually go deeper, I need to realize, and this is, if you would, again, I don't want to take that gun out again because I was like, I want to do that again, but one more gun to the head, okay, right? The single most powerful, original interior science realization of the Solomon tradition is God has needs. God needs your service. Because Wittgenstein or Fichtin Schelling or, you know, everyone across the board asks one version or another of this question, Easter West, which is, why are we here? Right. Hello. Why are we talking? I mean, why is there something rather than nothing. And the deepest, there's not an answer to that. There's not like

a theological answer, but the deepest response that lives, here's a word we created anthropologically, anthro, right, anthro human being, anthropology, ontologically, for realties, lives in my body, right? The deepest realization we know is we're here because we belong here, but why do we belong here? Because God's infinite and perfect. Why is God need us? Oh, God needs us. In other words, infinity needs finitude. There's some way in which God becomes more in the distinction of every human being. Somehow more God shows up. So let me see if we can make that kind of insanely real. You fall in love with someone. So why are you in love with them? So love's an emotion. I have an emotion of love. Okay. But at its core, love's not an emotion. Emotion is energy in motion. And it kind of fizzles,

right? Cupid's arrow hits me. Oh, secretary it's complicated right so so right energy and motion doesn't love not just an emotion loves a perception it's a perception of by the way cameron got anything right in avatar it was that beautiful line which is i see you it's gorgeous and true so love is a perception it's but it's not just perception it's a it's a perception identification complex i see you and i identify you right with your greatness. Okay. So love is a perception. So you fall in love with someone because you see them. But there's a second reason you fall in love with them. Because there's a part of you that shows up with that person that doesn't show up with any other person in the world. So whenever you fall in love,

it's also self-love because that person, when you really love them and they love you, they disclose dimension of yourself that never could be seen and in some sense didn't exist before. And it just begins, right? We're doing this conversation. But this conversation with deep topics that I love dearly has never quite happened this way before. Truly hasn't. And I'm excited about it.

Why? Because I'm in your space. And we're talking and you're evoking not just in some ethereal way by your very presence. and your perception and your unique undreiness, you're evoking a quality of conversation, which means just like hopefully over the years, I'll evoke a quality of under, you'll evoke a quality of Mark, right?

You know, I was just sitting with a mutual brother of ours and he was at the house for a few days and we were up at like, you know, four in the mornings so you can guess who it was, right? And we're talking, we're like, we're ecstatic. We're just like, because we evoke something in each other. So this notion is, what does God need? God needs to become more.

God is both, the gods you don't believe in doesn't exist, but God, the infinity of cosmos is not static. Evolution is also the evolution of God. So there's a way in which God is full perfection by nature, but God is also in the language of one Kabbalist, Abraham Cook, God is perfection who is perfecting. Because, and let's go crazy deep for a second, the capacity to transform it to perfect

is a quality of goodness. If I'm already perfect, and I'm no longer perfecting, I'm by definition less perfect, because I don't have that quality of getting better. So I have two kids, and one is born perfect, and a great kid.

The other kid is born complete mess, but kind of works really crazy hard over 25 years and gets the same pristine perfection as the first kid. Now they're both 40 years old. They're both pristinely perfect, but the one on the left just kind of went through this incredible

battle, struggle. Who's higher, obviously, right? That kid is because, so if God's just perfect and not perfecting, then God's imperfect, by definition. So there's the sense that infinity needs finitude. God needs my service. So say it more precisely, there's a way in which in divinity's relationship with every unique self, divinity experiences a shocking self-recognition.

which he, she cannot experience with anyone that ever was is or will be other than that unique self. So each unique self both is an actual quality of more God to come that generates through their own being and becomingness more God to come in the entire field. So infinity desires finitude. All of a sudden you get, oh, I'm here because I'm desired. and we have a right to be desired. We have a right to desire and a right to be desired. I don't export my desire to one person. I want to desire me in a particular way.

And if they don't desire me in that exact way, then I'm not desired, then I'm devastated. And then I've got to go down the Prasakian root again and I can't find my way out. No, no, no. We don't export desire to one separate self and say if that separate self doesn't desire me in the perfect way, which they never do, then I'm devastated. but not because we shouldn't be desired, we have a right, desires an intrinsic structure of causes,

we have a right to be desired. I'm desired by reality itself. And I'm not just desired generally, undrenous is desired by reality itself, not as a metaphorical statement, but as the ontology of reality, reality desires undreness, and if reality is desiring undreness and gets mark,

that's a shame. Right? But precisely, so that, that, experience that I am the shocking self-recognition of the infinite coded in my irreducible uniqueness. That's unique self. Wow. Right? I'm going to, I'll take that.

Yeah. And it's obviously true in reality, right? Uniqueness is a, what Zach and I call it, it's a first principle and first value of cosmos. That's really critical. We talk about diversity. The big liberal world is diversity, but diversity is actually just a cover word. for uniqueness. In other words, when we say that reality

differentiates into diversity, right, the one differentiates into infinite diversity. It means infinite uniqueness. So one of the principles and values of reality is uniqueness and the evolution of uniqueness, which discloses as

unconscious uniqueness to conscious uniqueness, which is unique self. Which just to put a bow on that. Please. So the true self plus the unique perspective that is infinite. Unique perspective and unique quality of intimacy. Okay.

Both. Equals the unique self. Right. So true self, right? And as you say, let's put two bells on it. Here we go. So true self plus unique perspective, plus unique quality of intimacy, right, which foster my unique gift equals unique self.

Now let's do one more plus sign. Plus evolution, the realization of the evolutionary process, the realization that there's an evolutionary impulse that pulses uniquely in me, right? I am the personal face of the evolutionary impulse is evolutionary unique self. So I want to ask you about the qualities of our unique self that emerge because in deeper contemplative practices, you experience yourself in a much more vast context where there is no tangible you that you can hold, but there is an energy or essence that we're speaking to that can be born and brought into more of a container. and I think...

You experience both, right? There's near recall, let's take the Kashmir Shiva'an Hindu tradition. There's near Recapul Samad, which is this cessation, this kind of wide feel that you're describing so beautifully. And then there's Sahaj Samadhi, where I actually come into this non-dual realization in which might, although they don't use these words and they dance around them. And many, you know, many of the students of the traditions misunderstand them, Many of Mukdananda students, who was a kind of teacher in America in the mid-70s,

who taught the Sidhioga tradition, which is in the Kashmir Shibite, you know, lineage of Abinawa-Gupta, you know, they would always say to me that, you know, Mukdananda says, God appears in you as you as God appears in you as you as, God appears in you as you as your unique self. And they were convinced that the you was true self. And I went back with them to Abinavakabuptan to multiple Kashmir Shaiviite. I said, no, no, no, God appears in you as you is your unique self, right? That is to say after Nirval Samadhi is Sahash Samadhi, or if let's go to the Buddhist tradition, right, there's the 10 oxherting pictures. And the 10 oxyghirting pictures are essentially snapshots of enlightenment, snapshots of the field of enlightened consciousness, snapshots of Shunata, but in different dimensions. So the 10th oxerting picture, which is the apex is when I turn back to the marketplace.

When I turn back to the marketplace, I don't turn back to the marketplace as merely true self. I turn back to the marketplace as unique self. And there's numerous Buddhist texts that talk about realization being the realization of the particular grain of wood that lives in you. Now, admittedly, Buddhism got a little lost in the true self. And you have to actually work with Buddhist teachers who are so beautiful. And they've given us such insane gifts and bringing, you know, the true. self to the West in such a stunning way, and they stopped there. And if you read particularly, not really Tarabata, it begins in Mayana, but really in the third turning of the will in Vajriana,

you begin to have fragrances that are much more real of unique self. And of course, you know, when you think about Nargoujana, you know, is responding to Taravada in the heart sutra, he says emptiness is form and form is emptiness or some version of that. What he means is, emptiness is form and form is emptiness, you could translate that as unique self and true self are one. Because form is always unique. And this is we need to realize there's no true self any place in the manifest world. You will never find a true self anyplace. A total number of true selves is one, but you will never find true self in the manifest world because every true self is uniquely expressed, right, is a unique incarnation. It's unique quality of desire. It's unique quality of

consciousness, you cannot access true self without unique self. Now, if you then reject uniqueness because you've wrongly conflated separateness and uniqueness. You haven't done the spiritual process of disambiguating, good word, right, like smidge, we talked about before, right? You haven't done the work of disambiguating separateness and uniqueness, then you're stuck because you've got this experience of uniqueness, which is this deep ontological goodness in knowing in you, but then you're told that that's just your separate self and you're, and you're, utterly confused. So we need to really disambiguate those two, realize I'm unique self, and then I'm evolutionary unique self, and then last sentence. And then I pick up and play

my instrument and what we might call the unique self symphony. And this is, this is a big deal, because there's so much talk about the hive mind today, and about collective intelligence. But what it too often does is obfuscate distinction. So collective intelligence, isn't that we become a hive mind. That's a regressive move. At hive minds existed way before the human neocortex, we don't want to go back to being a hive mind. That's a recipe for totalitarianism of multiple forms.

We don't want to regress to the hive mind. We want to evolve to the unique self symphony. Like a coherent complexity in a way? A coherent complexity of individuation beyond ego. It's another way to talk about unique self. Unique self is a higher individuation. beyond ego in which I'm playing my instrument in the unique self symphony, but if I don't listen to Andre's instrument, so even just let's make it like completely real right now, even as we're

talking and you're kind of holding space and asking these beautiful questions, there's actually, although I'm not doing it consciously, but it's not unconscious, it's deeper than conscious. I'm actually listening to you all the time. And you can feel me listening. Or we would be somehow jarred and in discordant. And so there's a, I'm sharing this unique self-understanding, but I'm listening to all the other instruments in the symphony. And let's say we're talking about multiple religions. So every religion has its own unique self. There's the unique self of every religion. And yet we realize that we're all playing music. So all of a sudden we have a possibility of both a world religion as a context for,

or diversity and a possibility of a pluralism that's not merely a banal kind of in a real let's say you know i remember early early interreligious dialogue between jews and christians in the early you know 60s someone once said about it it's when jews who don't believe in judaism get together with christians who don't believe in christianity and they discover they have a lot in common right now that's not a unique self-sympany that's a reduction it's a failure to honor Christianity and a failure to honor Hebrew wisdom or between Sunni and Shiites. No, no, there's a beautiful Sunni realization. There's a beautiful Shia realization, but they're not exclusive. They're instruments of unique self-sympany, and there's a deeper music. So that language of unique self-sympany allows

us to not reduce distinction, to move beyond polarization without becoming a kind of homogenized, you know, reductive banal, you know, mix. So, approaching the symphony that is, the collective consciousness is coming together to make this, you know, universe, the song of the universe in a way. I just want to unpack the unique gift that comes on individually as we all have our unique instrument in playing our own unique music. A quote also from your unique self book, the realization of your unique self awakens you to the truth that there is a unique gift that your singular being and becoming offers the world, which is desperately neat. needed by all that is and can be given by you and you alone, just what you were speaking to. Beautiful. And so as we start to go on the journey of experiencing who you are in a more vast context,

these gifts come online and what we can uniquely offer becomes clear, and then we start to offer that contribution to the collective. There's a couple of different ways I can go from here. One, I suppose why do we have the uniqueness that we have and how can we clarify that that uniqueness further so that we can arrive at the unique value obligation we have. That's great, right? It's great. Let's talk about unique gift just for a second. So I'm not supposed to be doing a podcast called Know That Self. Not my job, right?

Unless you're a guest. Right, unless you're a guest. Then you're squarely in your right position. Good place, right? But once I get that, so then I meet Andre and I say, I am ecstatic that he's during a podcast called Know Thyself. And then there's not kind of the normal kind of, you know, male jousting or kind of subliminal jealousies or all that stuff that happens all the time between people that split off because it's not mine to do. And it's my job with Zach and D. we're going to write a great library and we're going to do like 40, 50 volumes. And you're like,

I don't want to write 40, 50 volumes. Actually, I don't want to do that. I mean, I might write, right? Let him do that. And then you get to be, so we get to be excited about each other. Right? So you can't actually have love without unique self. I mean, love is a unique self-perception. That's what it is at its core. To love you means, means I see your unique self. I recognize it's not mine. And I'm willing to bracket myself to be in service and in devotion to your unique self. That's love. So love is a unique self-perception in which I bracket my ego. Now, how do I, how do I clarify it? How do I know my unique gift? How do I, And what you're implying is, I think, correct me, but I think it's absolutely right is you can make a mistake. In other words, you could go down a path which is actually not your unique gift. So how do I, so there's something that we call your unique risk. That's a very big deal. In other words, you can't take your unique self.

You can't live your unique self. You can't be your unique gift. You can't give your unique gift without being willing to take your unique risk. Now, your unique risk is not foolhardy. It's courageous, you know, in a sense of core and sense of love, right? Meaning there's a way in which there's something for me to do here that's mine and to do that. And to do that, I've got to take a unique risk, which means that I can ask everyone in my circle, should I do this? And they will give me all of the pros and cons of why I should do it or not, but they can't feel my unique self.

That's what's so important. In other words, there's no family member, as much as we love family members and we honor them. There's no teacher, as much as we love teachers. And this is very important. Unique self destroys the guru with respect and honor because the guru says, right, the guru says, I have more enlightenment of true self than you do. Therefore, I have authority. Right?

Unique self says you can't have more unique self than I do because it's my unique self. you can't have anymore. So, yes, I honor your true self-realization, and I receive, and I work with you, and I, I, and I study with you. But in the end, I have to be self-authoring. And I have to be self-authoring because I have a letter in the cosmic scroll in the book of life, which is my unique self. So therefore, my authority derives from my self-authorship, which should be grounded, perhaps in a teacher, perhaps in a practice. absolutely, but in the end, the guru has to bow to the unique self. And that's, it's right.

So it changes the nature of the teacher-student relationship in a very fundamental way. As long as there's a true self relationship, then true self is the source of authority. And if the guru is more realized, they can claim authority, but not only over-suitary, but not only over this line called enlightenment, they might claim a wider authority, which would be a mistake. Unique self says, deep honor, my friend, my teacher, but there's a place in which I've got to go alone, right? Because my singularity and my aloneness are connected, and it's only by realizing my unique self that I become part of community, because unique self is not separation. Unique self is the currency of connection. So taking my unique risk is the first thing. I've got to be willing to

take my unique risk and and you know there was a a german thinker named rudolph auto right wrote a book called the idea of the holy and he's got a line in there which i remember reading like 40 years ago and i you know which i guess dates me right um and i was two when i read it of course um right and the line is um he says it's not all sweetness and light it's beautiful it's not all sweetness and light it's translating from the german of course right so this next line is not all sweetness and light. There's a moment of loneliness. There's a holy loneliness, a sacred loneliness, and there's a tragic loneliness, and we should overcome the tragic loneliness in deep communion. But there's a holy loneliness, which means there's a dimension in which I'm untranslatable,

which I can't turn for advice. The coach is not going to, the coach can help me and create context for me. That's important and beautiful, just like the guru can. There's gurus and coaches and they're good and blessings and thank you to all the gurus and thank you to all the coaches. and there's a moment in which I have to walk alone, right? And I've got to go deep inside and find that self-authorship and find that power, right, and find that because my power and my joy are direct functions of my unique self. So if you would imagine, let's say, the currency of cosmos, the currency of consciousness, is an electric cord.

True self is an electric cord. The end of the electric cord, the plug, unique self. So it plugs into the wall, which draws the unique currency of cosmos into me and through me is not my true self. Try and plug the cord into the wall.

You won't get far. So it's only the unique plug that actually accesses both power and energy, creativity and joy right in other words what's that american constitution document that we all know life liberty and the the pursuit of happiness life's good liberty is good you pursue happiness it runs in the opposite direction so so joy is only available of the passionate pursuit joy comes from the passionate pursuit of something other than happiness right you can't prove which is what which is

living your unique self when you live your unique self then Joy is a byproduct of unique self-living. So to clarify unique self, I've got to take my unique risk. I have to be willing to receive all of the wisdom of all the traditions and all the psychologists and all the coaches. And then I've got to be willing to sit in the silence, the silence of presence and not be afraid of the void. Yeah, that's a courageous leap for someone who identifies as a separate self.

and also can be just scary, I think, at different times. I feel that the more that we enter that space of silence is kind of like the space or the source of energy that that plug is plugging into in the outlet, you know, and we spoke to the first at the top nodal point in the tree of life. The silence or the silence, the more that we embody, enter that space of silence, the more we make space for perceiving

what wants to emerge from within us, And I think that before I've done really anything monumental in my life that has been defining, I've taken those periods of silence, which I think really allowed me to gain clarity on what is emerging in that unique gift in that way. And I think there's many different frameworks. And you can feel that silence in you, right? And as soon as I walked in, I said, oh, he's sat in silence. You can feel it in the speech.

It's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And in a way, it takes one to know one for people that know that space. those who know, knows who know, you know? And so you can proceed that space in others as well very clearly. And I love when I meet people in that space,

because it's a non-verbal acknowledgement of the space someone is holding within themselves, which is beautiful. So in terms of unlocking the unique gift, like there's many frameworks. One that I've loved is the Japanese icky guy, which is in the understanding of what you love to do, what you're good at doing, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for is kind of,

Which is nice to be able to be enacted. Let's play with that. Let's play with that. And that's great. Let's play with that. No, that's a front of it's a great frame. Right. That's a great frame.

Let's play in that frame. So there's a kind of unique self-exercise. We'll just kind of play with for a second. So there's your unique capacity, your unique skill. So that's one. So we need unique skill. That's one. Two, there's your unique pleasure, which are not the same.

name. So there's my unique capacity, my unique skill. Then there's my unique pleasure, meaning that which I would do. Yeah, what you'd love to do. Right. So my unique, my unique pleasure. And your skill set is kind of what you're good at in a way. So skill set what you're good at, my unique capacity, to my unique pleasure. Sometimes they meet, sometimes they don't. And what I often do with friends and students is we sit and go through this list and we make a list of one, two, three. My top three unique skills, top three unique pleasures. Three is there's two kinds of need. So the first unique need is what do I need? And as where was I born? What's my early trauma? You know, did I read, right? What's my attachment type? And all that, all that good stuff that shouldn't

be ignored. So it's what are what's my need? What's my unique need? Three. Four is what's the unique need of reality at this moment in time? Right. So that's four. You know, five, which is really, really important to know is, and it's one of the ways you can find your unique self is, what's my unique silliness? What's the way I'm silly? What do you do when no one's around? What are you singing in the shower? There's a part of me that's disclosed in my silliness and in my chok and my laughter that tells me something enormously important about who I am. So that's another door, kind of I call it kind of unique silliness. But, Then there's a couple of other frames that are really important to be able to play with

unique self. So the sixth one is my unique shadow. And my unique shadow is not, it's different than seven, which is my unique wound. Wound and shadow are not the same. My unique wound is the unique wound that's kind of deep, deep, profound, you know, inside of me. So my unique wound might be like, I'm not safe. I'm never going to feel safer. or my unique wound might be, I'm always going to be alone.

Or my unique wound might be, I'm too much. So there's this sense in which, and this is something that, you know, Oscar Ocaso, who hasn't gotten enough recognition for his beautiful work, because he created the anagram. He kind of, you know, he did that, but he created an enormously complex and beautiful system. And one of the things he came up was this notion of a false core sentence. And your false core sentence, right, is your unique wound.

And that later kind of got picked up by Werner, right? you know, in the landmark world, right? And I think they did a good job with it. I think they made a contribution. But it's the sense of my false core sentence is my unique wound. My unique shadow is different. My unique shadow is the place where I keep failing

again and again and again. It's my unique expletive deleted order. Right? It's kind of a, it's the unique place where I just mess up again. And people know exactly what that is. It's that place that no one quite sees. I'm able to hide it well. So that's my unique.

shadow. But my unique shadow, and this is critical in order to know my unique self, to clarify my unique gift. My unique shadow is not, I'm really petty. I'm really jealous. We think shadow is like pettiness, jealousy, rage, addiction, anger. That's not shadow. That's a huge mistake. There's a book that Jeremy Tartcher put out on kind of meeting the shadow, which has got about 50 articles and blessings to all the writers, but they all made the same mistake, which is hugely important in misunderstanding shadow. People, or Robert Bly wrote his little book, Little Book of the Shadow, right, which is just, again,

deep respect, Robert, but you got it wrong, right? He talks about shadow qualities, right? He says, oh, your shadow is, you know, your rage, your anger, your jealousy, all the stuff that we've heard. That's not Shadow. Those are shadow qualities. Shadow is your unique self distortion

or your unlived unique self. So let's say your unique self is your light. save a circle of light. So you take a part of your circle of light, you put it in the darkness. That's shadow. And this is why, you know, there's this huge clarion call, integrate your shadow. So why should you integrate your shadow? And so Robert Bly, in his book and Little Book of the Shadow, he talks about his desire to kill his other brothers. And then Robert said, I've got to integrate that. I said to Robert, like, well, why would you want to integrate killing your brother? Bad idea. So Robert's basic answer is, well, and I apologize for the slight off-color way of saying it,

you know, it's better to be a conscious asshole than an unconscious asshole, right? Meaning, oh, integrate your shadow because at least you know about it. So it won't steal the driving wheel of your life. You've got all the shadow stuff, this pettiness, violence, rage, anger, right? Know that it's part of you, right? Embrace that part of you and it won't be unconscious. True, good, valuable, limited. Right?

No, it's deeper than that. Yes, yes, and deep out of Robert and deep out of that work. But it's insufficient. No, you integrate your shadow because your shadow is not shadow. It's unique shadow. It's a core notion in the wisdom of Solomon and Kabbalah, and that there's two volumes, radical Kabbalah, part two, is 2,000 years of Aramaic sources on this idea, unique shadow.

Your unique shadow means your shadow is the part of the circle of light that's in darkness, which is your disowned, your unlived, unique self. The reason you integrate it is because it's you, right? This is your unlived self, and that's why it has so much energy, right? So take jealousy, for example, I've never, just between us, this is like a lot of personal sharing here, but just between us, please don't share it with anyone, right? Right, right? I've never been jealous of a ballerina. It just never happened. I've never woken up in the morning, say, I don't believe you for one second. I'm telling you, I promise, I promise, I promise, I've just, it's never happened. I've just never been jealous of a ballerina,

I do remember walking in to Barnes and Nobles, and I was, I don't know, 26, 27, right? And this dude who shall remain nameless is a great person who I just spent a lot of time talking to. And I'd share with him this very deep understanding, which I thought was deep, right, about the relationship of uncertainty and uncertainty. And I see, like, his book, which is about that. So I'm bummed by two things. First of, yo, hello, we just talked. talked about this, right? And I kind of looked in the index. I don't show up there. Okay, that's a little shame. So we got a little jealousy going on there. And then he managed to get

the book out so beautifully. We got a little jealousy going on there. So I could disown that. Or I could say, oh, I'm jealous. Okay. So first, once I own the jealousy, I realize I'm jealous of someone who's living a piece of my story that I'm not living. And I had never intended to write. I don't like writing. And at that moment, I said, okay, I have. to write. That's like the power of envy revealing to us our values in a way. It's telling, because I'm not, I'm not jealous of a ballerina, so I'm jealous

of someone who actually is living a dimension of my unique self that I need to live. So if I follow jealousy, tantra, principle of non-rejection, I embrace the jealousy, but not to remain jealous. Actually, let the jealousy go. I actually called him afterwards. I said, yo, man.

First up, I was really annoyed when I saw that book. I let that go. Freaking awesome. Gorgeously done. And then I went, actually, the next Five weeks and arranged five gigs, right? You know, it's going to help him get the book into the world, of course. But he told me something. He said, oh, you keep saying you're not a writer. You need to write.

Because if I wasn't supposed to write, I wouldn't have been jealous of it. And that way we can pay attention to where we're being triggered and where we're jealous or have envy in our life. And maybe what aspect of it is it revealing to us that there is a unique self or dimension of our unique self, like you said, that we want to embody and step into more. Triggers disclose one of two things. Triggers are either pathology or prophecy. So there's one kind of trigger, which is it's a trigger because that's what my mother did.

That's my early trauma. That's one kind of trigger. You're pointing, I think, absolutely, beautifully and correctly, to a second kind of trigger, which is not pathology. It's prophecy, meaning it's a memory of my future. Not a memory of my past pathology. It's a memory of my future. I'm triggered here because it's trying to trigger me into action to activate that dimension of my unlived unique self, which is a memory of my life.

my unique shadow. I need to ask more about the unique shadow because it feels like, and I want to get your perspective on the path to arriving and discovering our unique self and therefore the unique gifts that we have to share with our unique obligation on the planet, the unique shadow and unique wound almost serve in a way like we're entrusted by the universe to have the friction necessary to go on the path to discover who we are by virtue of having the experience of who are not. Yes. And so I would love for you just to share about the there's gifts that are born out of conditioning, like the skill sets that we get from, for example, maybe having the experience or wound or belief that were not enough or like you might become

really skilled at navigating people and networking and organization. There's many different ways and things that come online by virtue of the shadow and the wounds. And so, yeah, perspective on how we may be entrusted with that. Yeah, no, it's good. No, it's good. It's good. It's good. Unique shadows is such a big deal.

It's such a big deal because there's so much talk about shadow work, but as long as you're trying to integrate your jealousy and your rage, you're like, what am I doing? Yes. So we need to get this unique shadow thing. Let me see if I can tell you crazy story. There's a crazy story. So true story. Two versions, perhaps even two short stories, to really just because we need to make

is real, right? All of this is just words until we learn it in the stories of our lives. So we need to make this real. So this is a true story. I'm in Germany, a particular town. And I'm first developing this unique shadow idea. It's, you know, it's X amount of years ago. And it was this seminar. And there was this one guy at the seminar who was just, just a gorgeous guy. I've had a daughter, you know, of his age. I'd say, oh, set this guy up. It turned out he was gay. So he said to me, I told him this. I said, you're right. McQuil. He said, I'm no, sorry. So I said, okay, so okay. And he was funny and he was charming and he was sweet and he was poignant and he was vulnerable. And I start doing the unique shadow thing and he gets like very edgy. He's like not happy

with this. So I say, okay, you know, he raises, let me share with my unique shadow. So he says, my unique shadow is, and I'm saying directly, he says, I go to, I go to, you know, parties and I do too much meth and then I do too much meth and fisting together, which is a particular kind of sexuality. I'm like, whoa, okay. So while That's a combination. That's a combination. So my first response to him was, I said, why is that shadow? So the whole place laughs.

So he says, right? He says, I do too much. I said, okay. I said, you know, we got that. Okay, you too much. Okay. So I said, so tell us what you do. And the rest of the time.

He says, well, I'm a therapist. I said, okay, tell us about your practice. So he starts describing this practice how he holds people and they feel embraced by him, and they feel safe and they walk and they feel comfortable. I said, wow, that's nice. So do you challenge your people? He says, well, I do, but very gently and tenderly. I said, oh, interesting.

So the room is like getting what's going on here, and he's not, right? And we just get to this point. I say, so basically you're not willing to penetrate your client with your real insight. So no, I can't do that. I said, oh. So you do a lot of meth and fissing, don't you? Right? And the whole, right, we all got it and he got it.

It was like, oh, right? So here I am. I'm this therapist, right? I'm really smart. I'm really loving. I have penetrating insight, but I'm afraid to give it. So I disown and I split off

this major dimension to myself. And so it has to emerge a shadow and the shadow's not methamfisting. It's too much. And he knows it's too much just because, not because someone told him because he knows. So it's a great example of unique shadow.

Right. And the nature of unique shadow is, clearly his unique shadow was a distortion of his unique self. And his unique self was he was this beautiful therapist with deep capacity for holding and penetration, line and circle. He had disowned his line quality. He was therapying with his circle quality.

He needed to actually penetrate them together. He couldn't do it so it split off into this other kind of penetration. Huh. Right. So you get, and knowing my unique shadow is kind of finding that, right, that place in myself, which is unique shadow. There's lots of stories, but it's the same frame. And unique shadow always is the yellow book road to magnetic self.

Always. It's never not. Amazing. There's so much to go. Yeah, so much. We could spend an entire, just hours just really doing talking unique shadow because it's insanely important, but it's one of the, you set up the beautiful Japanese model. That was one of the, it was number seven in the kind of dimensions we can stop.

there, but in the dimensions of you need to know all of these in order to know your unique gift. So, for example, his unique gift, right, this young man in Germany, part of his unique gift was the particular capacity that he had to integrate his embrace, right, with his wisdom in penetrating insight. That was his unique gift. But his unique gift was lost because it was in shadow because he was afraid to access it. So only his unique shadow brought him back to the unique gift of his unique self.

like that. Yeah. Yeah. That brings it. Full circle. Full circle. That brings it, man. Literally.

Man, okay, well, I never thought I'd be using this as a segue, but going from meth and fisting to talking about arrows. Yeah. I want to pick up the unique obligation. We'll sidebar that and come back to it. But I do want to focus a little bit on eros now, expanding it from our notion of sexuality to the force of life. Yeah, totally.

Totally. Totally. So what are my chances of picking up in order to do. transition into eros picking up for a moment obligation yeah because because you just mentioned it you just and now you just got my whole head spinning around it so instead of splitting that off so so you mentioned andre this notion which is central to unique self theory which is unique obligation that we have a unique contribution we have a unique obligation and i remember i was invited by by by john to give a talk at some conference at esselin and i start talking about unique obligation and john right you know um who was

was my borker then, who's a great guy, invoked him earlier. And John says, stop, I don't believe in obligation. I say, first off, John, you invited me to give the keynote. Let me talk, man. Right? But we laughed. And he said, because obligation is imposed from the outside.

So it's a beautiful question. It was a beautiful and discerning and important question. Would responsibility not be more accurate in that way? So it's funny, right? So in Hebrew, the word for obligation, Chhovah, is also love. Love and obligation of the same word. So obligation is the unique expression of love that moves through me that has the capacity,

your word, to respond to this moment. So responsibility is, right, life is response. That's what life is. Ability to respond. Life is the capacity to respond to stopping object and become subject. So when I activate my capacity to respond, I become human. That humanness is the capacity to respond to the field of value. field of value. How I respond to that field is my humanness and I have to respond uniquely.

So my capacity to respond is my obligation. Now, here's 10 second story. So I'm at a private school, which I'll also remain nameless. But it's kind of the kind of leading elite secondary school in the United States. And a dear friend, student colleague who was on our board was the dean there. So I came up to give a bunch of talks, great kids, right? You know, kind of a great kid. you know, beautiful young men and women, and scary. It's scary, right? You know, because their sense of the world was such that you're like, huh, they had no sense that there could be any sense of obligation whatsoever.

So ask them a question. This is an absolutely true story. I think we have a recording of it. So I said something like your plane just crashed. and we'll make up the story a little bit differently now because it's boring to tell it the same way but basically you're playing crashed and you're on a desert island

you know think I don't know castaway you know Tom Hanks whoever was there and it's you and Mother Teresa are on the island you're never getting off this is our trolley car problem you and Mother Teresa now if you've read the three or four biographies

of Mother Teresa she was not an easy person to hang out with you don't create an order out of the Vatican in this hierarchical male Catholic system because you're sweet and she was tough right to major an understatement so you're there with mother trace and just between us a little sacros she's driving you out of your mind you're like oh my like she's and like you know shock like every time she opens her mouth 10 years have gone by okay now you do a lot of scuba diving because what happened to survive in your crash with you is for scuba diving equipment she's out

scuba diving one day she breaks both of her arms she comes back you're a doctor of course she set her arms in a cat. Just for me, you and her on the island, she can't eat. Do you have an obligation to feed her? Now, you should not have to think about that question. Of course you do. And I was like, hello, right? Right? 98% of that student body who are leaders in every field. I could mention the names. You'd know all of them, right? Said, I mean, it might be nice. You can't say you have an obligation. Obligation means you have to. You can't say you have to. Because they're extrapolating into an existential necessity or something, and they're not, they're kind of attached to human. They would not say 98% of the student body would not say I have an obligation to feed Mother

Teresa, right? And then the dean of another school who was kind of involved in this conversation said, we cannot formulate, right? In the modern postmodern rule, we can't formulate obligation. That's not true. How do you know you have an obligation to feed Mother Teresa? Because, A, and this brings our whole conversation together. A, there's a need. One. Two, you recognize the need. Three, you have the capacity, right, to know that it's a real need. So there's a need. You recognize the need. Three, it's a real need. Four, you have a unique capacity to meet the need. And five, you're the only person in the entire world that ever was, is or will be, that can meet that need in that way at this moment in time. Five, those are the five dimensions of obligation, which is. is why. Of course, you have to feed Mother Teresa because it meets all of those criteria. Now, to be a unique self is to know that's always true. There's a need. It's a real need. You recognize the need. You have the capacity to meet the need. And you have a unique capacity

to meet that need, right? In a unique quality and way, your unique quality of intimacy that no one that ever was is or will be can meet that need in that particular way. So that is the actual experience of unique self. That's the experience of being needed. mentally. And I do you remember, Andre, God, if we're going to date ourselves, this could be, I don't know exactly how old you're up, but this might be before you're born, which is an embarrassing thing to say, right? But there was a moment in which at Harvard and a bunch of universities, this field called psychoneurromanology exploded into the world. It was like the, was it like the, it was like the, it was like the later 80s. So it was like late 80s, early 90s.

Don't, no, let's not, we're not going to, we're not going to answer that question. So, right? So, um, so psychoneuraminolominoluminolone. does all these studies, which point out that when there's a couple that's very close and one dies, right, then within a very short time afterwards, the other one will die unless they can actually identify a very real need in the world that they can meet. Because addressing need is part of my experience of humanness, and without it, literally that's my life force comes from, I die. Right. So that's, Unique self is the capacity to address unique need, and to address that unique need is my unique obligation. It's my unique love force. It's the need expression of outrageous love that lives in me

as me and through me that can't love the moment open. That moment can't be loved open by anyone else. I'm the only person who can love that moment open. That's unique self. That's unique gift. That's addressing unique needs. So that's unique self. So thank you. I would have actually been on the way home and said, Oh my God, we didn't talk about unique obligations. It's so important. So thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a really important reminder, just that we are, to respond to the needs of the world and the way we uniquely can. And there is immense fulfillment in that kind of sacred duty in the fulfillment of that. In a way, would you relate it in a sense to the word Dharma? Would you say it's similar? Dharma is a great word. It's a word used in Hindu traditions, which is moving towards this idea, right? My Dharma is close to that.

We won't get into kind of, there's some important distinctions, but yes, that's definitely that direction in a really important and gorgeous way. Yes. I feel like we beautifully put a bow on that conversation and it extends as we discover our uniqueness and the true aspects of ourselves. There's a new dimension of life that opens up. Yes. Erotic aspect of life.

Eros in its bigger context. I'm curious how you see desire come into the play of this picture that we're talking about in the conversation because in light of many, you know, wisdom traditions or certain ones that speak of the transcendence of desire. Right. Can we speak? I would love to hear a perspective as a desire into the portal into deepening. Yeah, desire. Desire. Desire.

Wow. I mean, there's a, let's see if we can. Desire is so important. I mean, I want to throw three words on the table. and they're what I sometimes call word clusters. There's erotic word clusters. So there's the word eros, desire, and intimacy. Okay.

So we'll have those three words on the table. Do you want to define them quickly? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So give your Mark Oxford. Yeah, no, it's like, it's a, so there's a book we just finished called First Principles and First Values, which I did with Ken and Zach. and there's an earlier book, though, called Return to Eros, which is about Eros. But in the return to Eros book, it wasn't defined well enough.

So what we've tried to do is, we had this word that you and I talked about earlier called interior sciences. So just like there are equations and the exterior sciences, you know, equals MC squared, right? And those equations have mathematical values and constants. There are what I've started together with Zach to call equations in the, the interior sciences. So at the core is there's an Eros equation and an intimacy equation. We'll get to intimacy. For now, we'll do the Eros equation because it brings desire into play. So here's the equation. Eros equals, what is Eros? And when we say Eros equals, we mean this is what Eros means all the way down the evolutionary chain and the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. When there's

guzzalins of quarks exploding in, you know, two up quarks and one down quark, right, as a proton and two down quarks and we're up quark as a neutron. And when they come together 380,000 years later and they form an atom when electrons come into the mix, right, that eros, the eras that lives in the space here, the eras between, you know, beloveds, the eras in building a business, the eras of entrepreneurship, right, the eras of governance. So this is eras every place everywhere. So eras equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact. and ever greater wholeness. So eras equals, and that simple sentence took me a decade,

I'm a little slow, right, to formulate it clearly. And that was like the hundredth formulation. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, not just seeking, desiring ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness. Because reality is Eros, and Eros is Eros desire. Reality is desire. So if a tradition stands against desire, they're standing against reality.

I want to make that clear. And just to pinpoint the desire that most speak to in relation to suffering is kind of unmet expectations in a way. So what we do is we, you know, absolutely, my friend, we identify desire with what I would call pseudo desire, right? Or we identify eros with pseudo-eros. Desire is the separate self. Desire, which is I'm in the emptiness.

Uh-huh. Right. I'm not, I can't sit in the emptiness. I'm, I can't, I'm afraid to sit in the void. So I cover up the emptiness with pseudo-desires with all forms of addiction and acting out in order to cover up the emptiness. So that's pseudo-desire, that's pseudo-eros. But eros desire, right, desire is the throbbing pulse of cosmos itself. It's a two mess in cosmos. Cosmos is alive. And as we live in, there's a number of ways you could describe it. You could call it an amorous cosmos. You could talk about the cosmo erotic universe, or you could talk about the intimate universe. Those are the three ways I like to describe it. But that's not metaphor. That's a good science. So let's just play in desire for a second. Okay, so we're 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Along come electrons, you know, in a particular way, they enter the story in a new way. Then electrons, proton, neutrons come together. They come together because there's this, intense desire, which moves them. They desire, they're radically alive, they desire ever deeper contact, and they want to create a new wholeness. Now, if you read descriptions of this in science, what science does in science is so important. And I, you know, people who know me well know that pile tie on my desk are mixtures of aramaic texts and science texts. I know physics,

I read physics, but it's not my favorite field. Actually, molecular chemistry, molecular biology, year more important to me for lots of reasons. I think they're more important in building a new worldview. But in any case, when you read the descriptions of the first atom, 380,000 years, ABB after the Big Bang, you think it seems like this mechanical process. Now there's atoms. That's not true. What's actually happening is, right, the best leading edges of sciences, there's a currency of eros, which is driving these separate parts to form a larger whole. a new intimacy. Now, that's shocking because what an atom is,

is a configuration of wholeness that's emergent from desire. So it's a new configuration of intimacy. Now, play for a second. So intimacy, what's intimacy? So intimacy, here's another equation for you, but it's an easy one, but it's beautiful. intimacy equals shared identity. We have shared identity.

It's not just me and you. It's, we have a shared identity. And the context of otherness, because I don't disappear. It's not fusion, it's union. Times, not plus, times, mutuality of recognition, we recognize each other, mutuality of pathos, we feel each other, mutuality of value we're in a shared field of value, mutuality of purpose, purpose we have shared purpose. Now that seems like, that's just too much for everybody. Well, let's just play with it for second.

It's actually very, so proton neutron and electron. They come together. They desire eras. They desire each other. They create a new shared identity. It's called an atom. But the proton-neutral electron don't disappear, so it's shared identity in the context of otherness. We actually know scientifically they recognize each other, that they feel each other, quite literally, right? They have a shared field of value,

because that's how they actually communicate through value. And now as an atom, they have a shared purpose. Now, here's the crazy thing. I mean, this is just, it's so, it's hard for me to talk about, again, without welling up in tears, because we feel like, We live in a non-coherent cosmos. But we don't, right?

Cosmos is omni-coherent. So the same quality of eros and intimacy that live at this subatomic level live between a couple, right, of any kind. So, right, we want to have shared identity, but we don't want to absorb each other. We have the context of otherness, but it's relative otherness because we're part of a larger whole true self. We have to recognize each other. We have to feel each other. We need a shared field of value, and we need shared purpose. because that's what a couple is.

Or me and my relationship to myself. Right? My dear friend Lori worked for many years with a wonderful man, Dick Schwartz, who was on our board for a while, and Dick does internal family systems. So Dick talks about the split off parts of the self, which is kind of core to part theory. What does that mean?

Meaning to be intimate with myself means I want to have shared identity with all the parts of myself. In the context of relative otherness, no part hijacked. The parts have to recognize each other. So Dicta has the parts talk to each other, right? They have to feel each other the parts. If I have a control and a protector, they need to feel each other.

They need to have a shared field of value in that they need to come together with shared purpose. Let's say we're talking about divisions in an organization. Peter Senge's book where he talks about presence. He talks about how organizations fall apart because different divisions optimize for themselves, instead of optimizing for the larger shared identity. And then the whole thing suboptimizes and falls apart. So what do we just do? We just showed that eras and intimacy define the sub-atomic world,

define the world of relationships. They define my relationship to myself. They define the entrepreneurship business world. In other words, this structure of eras intimacy is the structure of reality. And our fundamental desire is to actually have deeper contact and greater wholeness to create new intimacies and who I am, even as true self. I go from separate self to true self. I'm not just one with the field of consciousness.

I'm one with the field of eros desire. There's a field of eros desire, and I live in that field, and that field lives in me. Reality literally is desire all the way up and all the way down. And if we can be kind of like wild for a second, there's, and I'll have to send you,

but I know that you're, I'm sure you're familiar with it in your study. in various ways. But core to the Renaissance traditions were the mystery schools of Kabbalah. And at the core of the mystery schools of Kabbalah, which influenced, for example,

Marcelo Ficino's Florentine Platonic Academy in the middle of the Renaissance that was funded by Cosmos de Medici, what they're studying is what's called the name of God, the name of God. So there's a four-letter name of God. A y, you know, V, right?

You know, Yud, hey, v-he. Four letters. So it's Yud Yah, He, V, He. Yud He, Vap, He, four letters. But that's Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Yeah. So the way it works is the Yud enters the hay. That's the first two letters.

So there's Eros. The Yud is drawn into, a lured into, enters the hay. The hay receives the Yud, and that's called Constant Eros. And the Zawuqwant met it, Constant Eros. And then the Yud, which is a Yud, which is called constant eros. is a tiny little letter, and maybe I'll send you a picture, but we can show it. When you pulled the yud down, it's a vav, which is phallic. Then the vav enters the hay, or the hay as it were rides the vavh. So vavh. So yud-hah, the yud enters the hay, eros, seeking more intimacy, yeah. Hallelujah,

yeah. And then the second two letters in the name of God, the vavre, which means that yud-heh, the name of God is a desire. It's like, the name of God means, what's the name of God? What's the structure of reality. So the structure of reality in the interior sciences, reality is the names of God. Spelled in many different ways, but all reality is names of God. And what's the name of God desire? So to be alive is to know I am a unique configuration of desire. And the invitation of life is to clarify my desire.

What is not my surface desire, as you pointed to? What's my deepest heart's desire? and my deepest heart's desire is God's desire. So to split off desire is tragic. When you bypass desire, you create abuse. Always. Perversion also distorts. Yeah.

You just radically distort the structure of reality. You bypass desire. You split off that energy. That energy can't be split off because it is your essence. I'm not just desire. I'm a unique configuration of desire. I am God's desire uniquely incarnate in me as me and through me. And here's the crazy thing.

Desire discloses value. What I always desire is value. That's how you know value is real. That was not a social construction value, right? What you desire is value when you read Alfred North Whitehead, who writes principle of mathematics. with Bertrand Russell. So White is an Englishman, and he's, you know, he's writing in Cambridge.

He's got to be a little careful. So as I was talking for, about desire for about a decade, people started sending me passages. There would be one person every six months would send me passages from Whitehead. So I started reading Whitehead. And Whitehead basically has the same notion. He talks about the appetition of Cosmos. Because when you're in Cambridge and you're English and it's 1920, you talk about appetition, not desire.

But appetition means cosmos has appetite. Cosmos is hungry. It's a hungry cosmos. And we're hungry. And Hungary's not. In other words, the Eastern traditions identified hunger with hungry ghosts. If you're hungry, you're a hungry ghost. No, no, no, no.

There's a shadow of hunger, which is hungry ghosts. And there's hunger which is gorgeous, which is this unique desire in meat, which discloses unique value, right? All desire, all appetite is for value. right and so reality is a story of desire disclosing value desire discloses value clarified desire discloses clarified value contorted desire discloses contorted value of course but but if we don't re-embrace eros desire at the very heart of who we are we're destroyed where we're destroyed because because it's only shared desire that creates shared value

And if we could play for a second, let's just, let's move into like where we are today in the world. Like where are we today in this moment? So we know we have this thing called existential risk, right? And back in 2009 or 10, you know, I started just reading more seriously and reading the techno optimists who were quite quite strong then as they are now, right? Sam Altman, blessing to you, brother Sam, is a technical optimist. And then I started reading kind of the real literature of existential risk, and I really read it carefully and, you know, I'm slightly insane in that way, so I read too much and it crossed footnoted it. And it was clearly the existential risk threat is real, meaning an existential risk means one of two things, either risk to our existence, meaning an actual extinction, it's the end of the story, death of humanity, or it can mean the death of our humanity, meaning we solve existential risk with a kind of neutralitarianism, right, which is kind of an immersive environment of surveillance, et cetera, which undermines free will. It's a longer story. I'm sure you've talked about it, which is the death of our humanity. Those are both forms of existential risk. Now,

When you think about those forms, you think about them, they're rooted in the end. What causes them? Like, what's their cause? And I want to just kind of just play for a second and just in two vectors because it changes everything we get why this matters so insanely much. So my dear friend, Barb Marks Hubbard, was kind of a wonderful futurist who passed away in 2018, 19, a good friend of mine, Daniels, Daniel Schmartenberg. Daniel Barbara and I did a wonderful play together for a few days where we tried to talk about the future of the world. And Barbara used to always talk about win-lose metrics. That was Barbara's part.

Win-lose metrics is going to be the, then take, let's say, Nassim Talab, you know, who talks about fragile systems. Or Snowden, who talks about the difference between a complex system, which considers the whole and a complicated system which is fragile. So the classical way to talk about this is, okay, you've got, you know, Barbara, win-lose-match. tricks, right? Then you've got complicated systems. Daniel's done a great job of bringing these together and done really good work here, which is fantastic and beautiful and necessary. And underneath those, and Daniel likes the phrase generator functions, underneath those generator functions of existential risk, there's actually a deeper root cause, which is there's actually an intimacy disorder. Right. There's actually, when lose,

metrics means we're not intimate with each other. We don't have shared identity. A complicated system means you create a financial instrument in China, which ripples through Europe and some bearer stern office than ripples through America and causes financial instruments we don't even understand. We're not intimate with the instrument. And it causes a financial meltdown in 2008. And the people creating the financial instrument have no idea what's going on in Montana. There's no shared identity. So there's a, it's an intimacy disorder. And it's underneath. the win-lose metrics issue, and underneath the complicated systems, there's a global intimacy disorder. Now, an intimacy disorder, whether I'm working with myself, I'm not intimate with the part of myself

or with a couple, but in order to get over an intimacy disorder, you need a shared story of value. It's a shared story of value that creates intimacy. So if we have that at play, we begin to understand something which is shocking and critical, which is, so we've got global challenges. So we need global coordination. Global coordination needs global coherence. We need some sort of coherence because we've got these global challenges.

You've got COVID-19, right? This bug flying around the world. And do you remember the conference when everyone got together to talk about it? So neither of us do because it never happened. So like everyone's handled, it's a insane. We're handling locally a virus that knows nothing about locality.

So each government is locally handling something, which is obviously a problem, which is a global challenge, which requires global coordination, which requires global coherence. But we can't get global coherence because we don't have global resonance. We don't resonate with each other. But we don't have resonance because we don't have global intimacy. There's a global intimacy disorder. Why? Because there's no shared story of value. So value is a quality of eros.

See, that's the thing. It's not eros. and there's a new word that just kind of clarified to me about eight months ago, which is eros value. I used to say in the old days, oh, eros is this desire for value, and value is fully alive, but has eros. And then I realized I got it wrong.

They're the same thing. Eros is when separate parts, when it create larger holes, new wholenesses, new value. I just spent a couple hours with my dear friend Ken in Boulder, and we were kind of geeking out, excited with Zach, about why the word wholeness and value are the same words. So I won't take it down that whole geek root. But basically, let's say the equation again, eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater

wholeness, ever more value. Right. So there's a shared field of value. If there's no shield of value, there's no intimacy. If there's no global intimacy, there's no global resonance. If there's no global resonance, there's no global coherence. If there's no global coordination, If there's no global coordination, we can't meet global challenges, and it's over. So all of a sudden, this is not metathoretical. In other words, you can't respond to the metacrisis just through doing really good infrastructure work. And you can't respond to it through creating.

So infrastructure would mean, how do you find bio-weapons in the wastewater in a better way? You can't do it by better social structure, which means let's do better regulation. so there's someone in the freaking government who even understands how chat GPT4 works, which is there's not now. Those are really important, but they're not enough. We need to do it, and these are Harris's terms, we need to do better superstructure.

And superstructure is a shared story of value, which is a context for our diversity. And here I want to be just tender, and with full humility, but also with a tad of audacity, we actually need a world. religion as a context for a diversity. Not a world religion that effaces, Christianity continues, Sunni continues, it all continues, but underneath, in other words, when you had local problems,

you could have local religions, which formed coherence, and those religions both had tragedies. Voltaire starts modernity by saying, remember, the cruelties. We need to move beyond their tragedies, but we need to need to move forms of them. But there is no local anymore. So the notion that you only have local religions, when every civilization animated by local religions has failed, we now have a global civilization with local religions, meaning local coherences, that are mostly pre-modern. That's insane. So if we don't have a world religion, but not a dominating world religion, right, a common grammar of value as a context for our diversity, we simply will not be able to create global

coordination. And at the core of that is eros, is that reality is eras. It's a cosmoerotic universe. It's an intimate universe. And an intimate universe means that's the mathematics of intimacy with which we started a few minutes ago. And an intimate universe means there's fundamental coherence. There's a desire for parts to create larger holes. Right.

And maybe last sentence, who is Andre and Mark? Andre and Mark are atoms or billions and trillions and trillions of atoms. and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. And atoms are structures of allurement. So they are realized allurement. An atom is a structure of allurement. It's a configuration of anemone. The atom then intensifies and deepens in its intimacy

and becomes a molecule. The molecule then becomes a macromolecule. The macro molecule then intensifies its structure. It's a very good passage in the mathematics of this in Stuart Kaufman. And then it awakens as a single cell, right, a precariot. And then a precariotes faces crises. which create an evolutionary driver, and then it becomes a eukaryote,

a multicellular structure, and then we go all the way up to neural nets and neurocords and hominids on the savannah. But all of it is the evolution of new configurations of an emacy in a response to crisis. And we are, it's not just we live in an intimate universe. The intimate universe lives in us. So all those atoms, all that all that allure meant,

quite literally lives in me. So the entire field of value that lives between a proton to an electron and between a molecular structure and a macromolecular structure and a cellular structure or the mitochondria that are animating my bone cells and my skin cells, which are accessing the electron transport system. It's accessing the currency of eros, right, moving through the electrons to actually animate your mitochondria to animate your cells. That's not mysticism. That's what's happening right now in this second. So if I get that, if I get reality to coherent field of eros, then I am eros all the way up and all the way.

down, it's why artificial intelligence can be wonderful in terms of exponential intelligence, but it doesn't participate in the field of eros. It doesn't participate in the field of desire, right? It doesn't participate in the field of intimacy. It's non-intimate with reality. And I can only make decisions, right? And this is what Bostrom was correctly pointing out in his book, superintelligence, right? And we talked about issues like the paperclip maximizer, where you give artificial intelligence and instruction, but because it's non-inimate with reality, it logically follows the instruction until it make paperclips, but then it turns the entire all reality into paperclips. That's not just an illusion. It means we're non-inimate with reality. So we need to,

we need to, we need to be intimate with each other, but intimacy as a value of reality, not as a clever, psychological, Western, separate self-construct. Enlightenment, Dogen said it right, is intimacy with all things. No externalities. So let's dive deeper into intimacy. Yes, sir. There was a lot we discovered there. Yeah.

So good. So thorough. Thank you. Yeah. In terms of human dynamics. Yes, sir. With me and another person, you in another person. Yes, sir.

Do you feel that then essentially the less pretense there is? or kind of small separate personality structures that we're operating from, the more that we're in a clear field where the presence can be born and is shared within two people. Therefore, you see into each other more clearly and there is less of a barrier

in between you and other. Beautiful, I'm going to interview someday. Right, right? That's beautiful. That's beautiful. That's right. And what you're saying is that true self, the realization of the shared field of intimate consciousness, right, is necessary for creating genuine intimacy.

I think it's beautifully said and absolutely true. You cannot create intimate we space from the place of separate self alone. So let's unpack a little bit of this notion where I think Eros is misattributed solely to sexuality in some aspects because I desire intimacy, deep intimacy with all the people in my close circle. Right. Male, female, lovers, non-lover, you know, and I think that the eros, the heiress that's realized born out of intimacy and true connection and truth with another person is simply

a liveliness. And I desire that and life desires that. Yes. To itself like you just so beautifully articulated. And so for individuals that are listening and tuning in right now that are in partnerships, that have friendships and communities that want to cultivate more truth, more intimacy, I would love to just show how Eros can be a lot more in that context. No, it's fantastic.

First, it's worth noting there were 12 billion years of Eros before there was any sex. Thank God that eventually came along. Right. And we're real happy that Eros disclosed as sex, and that's a different podcast, different conversation, but the sexual models the erotic. It doesn't exhaust the erotic. And so Eros is the desire for wholeness for value for intimacy. It's the sense of radical aliveness. And, you know, one way into it in terms of how you described it is realizing, A, you know, I have Eros with men, women, gender flu,

and small mammals, right? In other words, right, it's a, it's this very wide and broad quality. If there's no eras in the relationship, there's a deadened sense to things, right, and that you can't, you can't find the aliveness that makes life self-evidently good, true, and beautiful. But a way to kind of find your way into eros is through one of the definitions of intimacy in the, in the intimacy material and in this new story of value that we're trying to tell it. The name, by the way, of the story that we're trying to tell what we're calling this kind of version of world religion is cosmoerotic humanism into the name of it.

So there's a whole conversation around intimacy. So one of the ways into intimacy is, I feel you, you feel me. But that's not simple, meaning I literally bracket myself, I bracket my feeling structure, and you need something for me, I feel your need and your need is my allurement. Your need is my allurement.

That's an incredible experience. Your need is my allurement. And so I feel you and you feel me. We bracket our egoic self and we feel each other. Then we go a deeper step. I feel you feeling me. Right. And I felt that this whole conversation,

which is why it's been such a delightful conversation. I feel you feeling me. You feel me. feeling you and i feel me feeling you feeling me yes exactly right no that's oh my god right and then the third loop would be exactly you feel me feeling you feeling right now in the old just a field of feeling it's a field of and of course this is where the sexual models they're erotic because in sexuality on its best day you have these loops of feeling which are what what make it so so so so so so so mind, you know, bogglingly beautiful,

because in sexuality, I actually feel the cosmorotic universe come alive in me in person. But actually the sexual models the erotic, so I actually want to live in eros. I don't want to exile eros to the sexual. That's the exile of the erotic to the sexual. I want to liberate the erotic and live in eros in every dimension of my life.

So in Eastern traditions, you'll see very arcane and beautiful contrasts. conversations about I'm aware, I'm aware of awareness, now I'm aware of being awareness of awareness, right? And they do these loops. Now, switch those loops over to intimacy, right? Now, then you expand, right? Because generally, your need is my allurement, the sense of genuine intimacy, barely exists

between two human beings. But when you can actually get that, when you actually, when a mother is with a child, the child needs to feel from the mother that the mother's experience is your need is my allurement and when that's violated that's what attachment theory is describing all of attachment theory disorganized attachment avoid an attachment right right this kind of which is which is about you know since really since you know balby's separation of loss then mary ein's worth and then coatt and fairburn did really good work and then you know winnicott's had important things there that whole particular line of development in attachment theory.

And Dan Brown and Mark Schorst did really good work in it as well. But it's all about basically the child not feeling that the experience of the caretaker is your need as my allurement. But what we then do is we limit our circle of intimacy. So if we get intimate at all, we limit it to one person. So we literally exile our entire need for intimacy. to one human being. And therefore, if that doesn't work, we crash, burn, then we go to demonize them and destroy them. That's what happens.

But actually, intimacy is the quality of reality. So I might be monogamous with one person in my entire life. That's a completely legitimate, beautiful, and wholly gorgeous life path. That's your path of choosing. But intimate with many, many people in my world because we actually have a sense of shared identity. We're not just soulmates. We're home mates, if you will, right? We have a vision of the larger hole.

We're not just, you know, soulmates look deeply in each other's eyes. And at some point they get bored and no one's allowed to admit it just between us. You're like, okay, okay, I'll keep looking in your eyes. Okay, you all right? But you're not allowed to say that because you're not allowed to be bored by looking in someone's eyes, but you get bored. Of course you do, because personal fulfillment at some point becomes idolatrous and narcissistic. if it's not omniconsiderative the whole.

So what I need to do is, okay, now we're not just going to look deeply in each other's eyes. We're going to look at a shared horizon. We're going to look in the same. So when Neo meets Trinity, 1999, Lano Wikowsky is doing the Matrix, right? You know, you know, you know, Neo says, how did you find me? She says, we're asking the same question. They're going in the same direction. And so even when Trinity dies in that incredible scene, you know, Matrix 3, she says, like the most

incredible moment of my life, the most gorgeous one when we kissed soulmate and go on, shared vision. I'm counting on you. And even when they make love, right, in the Matrix, that's Matrix 2. They do it in this alcove and that incredible rave scene in the Matrix. So they're making love in the alcove above this wider scene because they're part of this wider community. Completely different than 1970, right? Let's not talk about who was born when, right? But 1970, I think we've established that. We've established that. We've established there. 1970 love story, Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neill, right? That whole movie is about soulmates, right?

Looking at each other's eyes. No, no, no. To be intimate, we need to be hommates, shared horizon, which means we're intimate with the larger field of reality. We're hommates and you can have much more than one homemade. Barbara and I, Barbara Marks Hubbard, we always talked about each other as evolutionary homelates. We were looking together right at this shared vision.

I met Barbara when she was 84. Holmates needs a new rebrand. It's nothing the best word. Rolemate to soulmate to homemate. There we go. Right. Homeate, homemate, right? We have to talk about that.

I like home mate. Holness mates or something. I got to say I like holmits or I'm going to stand on that. As a matter of fact, we have actually a book coming out called Holmate, a relationship for the relationship of the future. You just need to pronounce it better. Like, hallmates. Oh, ha, ha, ha, rah, d'all mates. Wow.

It's a good word. I like the word. I have to say, I'm going to stand on homemates there. Okay, so we're staying with homates, but it's role mate to soulmate to homemate. Rolemate, we're just raising the kids. We have shared roles. Soulmate, we're looking deeply in each other's eyes. Homemate, we're looking at a shared future.

We're intimate with the whole thing. But we can have many, many, many, we need to be intimate with many people, which means we need to have shared identity with much more than one person, and we need to feel much more than one person, and we need to have mutuality of recognition, neutrality of purpose. So the non-inimate universe is the source of the metacrisis. like wow so being intimate with a wide field and having remember we said earlier andre you know as i know we moved towards a close we mentioned the zohar in the 13th century we were talking about the solomon tradition that the cabalah tradition so shimon bar yu chai who's the he's considered the author of the

zohar but it's really a group of people just like zach and i are doing this david these books by david j temple so so david j temple is zach and i and can and in one book and another one coming up and others. So Shuman Baruchai is this collective authorship, which is very critical at moments when you're at a time between worlds. So the Zohar is authored by what's called the Hevraya Qadisha, the Holy Band. And that's how we started.

It's this band of intimate brothers and sisters who have, it's a kind of evolutionary family, which is it doesn't in any way dishonor, a deep honor for biological family, deep honor. But it's insufficient. Biological family is critical and insufficient in this world of metacrisis, in this world of dislocation. We actually have evolutionary family, the people that walk with us,

that see the whole with us, that, you know, when Abraham Cook, one of the great evolutionary mystics, interior scientists of the 20th century, he says, all those who feel a, I'll translate a flutter in their soul, right, to care about the whole or join together in the new family. So it's like it's a new priesthood. It's not a priesthood you inherit. It's not about wealth.

It's not about positions. It's not about power. The new elite is the people who say, I'm joining the band. I'm joining the band of outrageous lovers. We're going to be intimate together. We're going to look at the future together. And we're going to love each other. I just want to say that we're actually going to love each other.

And to love each other can mean a thousand different things in a thousand different shades. We're actually not just going to love each other. We're going to be in love with each other. We've exiled falling in love with someone to a particular kind of infatuation, which leads to a particular kind of sexuality, which means we've exiled the fundamental experience of falling in love to this very narrow vector.

The truth is we should fall in love all the time with ideas, with people, with vision. When we fall in love, we're at home in the universe. So the experience of falling in love is a core structure of the inner universe that we need to reaccess as part of the very fabric of our lives. That outrageous love that you were speaking to

in relation to Eros. That outrageous love. And we said earlier, and it's so absolutely true. And maybe last story in my part, I was at Sally Kempton's house who I invoked earlier, who she was actually the Swami of the Oakland Ashram.

She called Swami Durgananda. And I was giving a talk there to a group of people on Zoom. And we were familiar with Zoom. And it was 2011. And they were like, I don't know, 50, 60 people on the call. And I got very quiet. And everyone thought that it was for very profound reasons. It wasn't.

There was nothing profound going on in me whatsoever. It was just a very painful moment. I was a little overcome by different dimensions of personal pain. kind of experiences of betrayal and I couldn't quite get over it and I couldn't quite find the works so there was there was no noble filling of shunate in me I just couldn't find the words and I kind of said to myself I remember I can remember the moment and I said I guess I'm done I just I can't do it anymore and then literally these words came down and I said we know we live in a world of outrageous pain and I was describing my experience and I said in the only response is outrageous love

and then I went on and it was like a blur of an hour and Sally's always doing her meditation or whatever she was doing in the space and she stopped and she took notes and she gave you the notes afterwards and that became the beginning of the Dharma if you will of outrageous love but outrageous love is a true quality of cosmos and outrageous love is is not mere human sentiment I mean it's the heart of existence itself but it's the you know Dante the love that moves the sun and other stars

Mm-hmm. What a ride. We've been on quite the ride, man. Wow. Super grateful for this whole conversation and just how, you know, I think we all have alongside our unique self-visions that are unique to us kind of come through

about how we can fulfill unique needs on the planet like we were speaking to. And you being in conversation with me today and the way that you're sharing is very much so fulfilling a vision of myself and bringing as a bridge these conversations to the world. So just immense gratitude for you enabling my unique need being fulfilled. And enabler in the best sense of the term. And I delight Andre to be in your space. There's a feeling tone to a space. And this was actually, you know, the word in Hebrew for Messiah, right the the vision of the possible human is masheek which means conversation

right so so a great conversation is everything and this was a great conversation was a great conversation and you know anyone who knows me knows that I I don't do need your compliments at all to say to major an understatement there's a a space that you created that generated right and for me it feels like 20 minutes went by and so just deep deep bow to the space you create thank you Thank you. Fully received and just so grateful for you contributing and sharing your heart,

which is felt in between and through all the words that you've been sharing so eloquently and 20 minutes flies by or three and a half hours fly by and feels like 20 minutes, you know? And to be continued, you know, I think right now like you so beautifully shared, we are in a time between stories

and that transition is occurring and what a time to be alive contribute in the way that we can towards the birth of that new paradigm. We got started today, my friend. To be continued. Well, Mark, thank you so much, man. As just any last words for anything within this conversation,

but also pointing to where people can find you. We'll link everything down in the description for people that want to be more connected. Yeah, totally, totally. I'd say just maybe two things. One is there's always something to do. Right? So it just makes me just personally just brings crazy joy to me

is if someone's listening and there's someone that they've cut off from their world that they hear and they listen to us talking and they say, hey, I'm going to make that phone call. So just an invitation to whoever it is to make that phone call. So that's just super concrete, make that phone call. And two is just to offer, there actually is a wonderful book which we try to write as a kind of digest of vision

for this new possibility called First Principles and First Values. And I want to just invite everyone to kind of dive into it. And there's a second book called Return to Eros. And I never, right, our executive director, Krista, always tells me you go on a podcast and you never mention the books. So I get in like very big trouble. Then Zach tells me, right, you didn't mention first principles and first values. So I'm not in trouble.

And just and read and find us and review it and be with us in this. This is, let's do this together. Yeah, get involved. Dive deep. All the way. Yeah. Amazing. Everybody's been tuning in.

Please let us know in what part of this conversation from the wide ranging topics of the tree of life to returning to Eros and unlocking outrageous love, discovering our unique self, the transition into a new story. These conversations make me feel incredibly alive as I feel you do for you as well if you're this far into the conversation. Oh, my God. And just thank you for being part of the collective that we feel. is birthing this new paradigm. So thank you. Let us know in which ways your unique gift is contributing. Let us know in which way this was uniquely impactful for you.

And until next time, we'll have some fun next week. Be well.