Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #276 Marc Gafni
Episode Date: November 3, 2022I am without words yall!!! Marc Gafni came and delivered on all of my deepest podcast dreams. We had a proper introduction. Marc gave us one of the most informed recountings of what it’s like on The... Inside of God's Face. Walked us through “I-We-All”. Then casually wove together the relationship of Light and Dark. This one is special. Enjoy!!! PS Have another potent dose of Marc and a valuable insight into his past with this conversation he shared with our brother Aubrey. Healing the Wounds of Nature w/Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid AMP #383 -Spotify -Apple ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward. Check out Tash and my convo with Mimi and Chase from Organifi on their podcast: The Medicin - KYLE + NATASHA KINGSBURY: Lessons from Plant Medicine, Sacred Union + Conscious Parenting -Spotify -Apple Weekly Live Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday at 10 am PT: https://www.onemountainmanypaths.org/ Other websites: http://www.marcgafni.com https://www.officeforthefuture.com/en Sources: The Erotic and the Holy (Audiobook): https://www.amazon.com/Erotic-Holy-Kabbalistic-Tantra-Mysticism/dp/B073GYD9XN OR: http://eroticandholyworkshop.com/ Awakening Your Unique Self (book): https://www.amazon.nl/Your-Unique-Self-Personal-Enlightenment-ebook/dp/B00A7KCM04 A Return to Eros (book): https://www.amazon.nl/Return-Eros-Radical-Experience-Being/dp/1944648186 Social Media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcgafni/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcGafni Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrMarcGafni Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarcGafni LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarcgafni/ Show Notes: "A Return to Eros"(book) "Your Unique Self"(book) "The Mystery of Love"(book) Center for World Philosophy and Religion "The Erotic and the Holy"(book) Sponsors: Desnuda Organic Tequila Sometimes being fully optimized entails cutting loose with some close homies. We have just the sponsor for that occasion. Head over to www.desnudatequila.com for the tippy toppest shelf tequila in the game. Use Code “KKP” for 15% off your first order!! Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Collagenius Want to become the best and brightest with the best mushroom/collagen product on the market? BiOptimizers go you fam! Head to nootopia.com/kingsbugenius and use “KINGSBU10” at checkout for 10% off as always! Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com Zion Node: https://getzion.com/ > Enter PubKey >PubKey: YXykqSCaSTZNMy2pZI2o6RNIN0YDtHgvarhy18dFOU25_asVcBSiu691v4zM6bkLDHtzQB2PJC4AJA7BF19HVWUi7fmQ Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome back to the show, everybody.
Today we have my, I hate to say it.
I don't hate to say it.
It's actually really cool when it happens,
but it is my favorite episode of all time
with possibly one of my favorite people I've ever met all time,
Mark Gaffney.
Mark is a Hebrew Kabbalist, a Jewish mystic that has studied all of the mystic traditions.
And in my personal opinion, probably knows more about Catholicism than most priests do.
And I'd venture to say he knows more about Islam than most Sufis do.
And he is incredibly well-studied. He is somebody who, perhaps most importantly,
understands the importance of placing these puzzle pieces together. He talks about each
religion having the ability to play one note or one instrument, and that it's only when these
are played together that we get the symphony that it was designed to be. He is one of my favorite authors. He has a fantastic lecture
series available on Audible only called The Erotic and the Holy. If you've been a fit for
service events or listen to me on the podcast previous, you've likely heard me talk about this.
It's great. Most people, I shouldn't say most people, I'm a huge fan of Audible. I'm an auditory
learner. No, they're not a sponsor, but it'd be awesome if they were.
And I just do better listening in.
And if I'm studying, I need to read, highlight,
take notes, that kind of stuff.
But truthfully, for people who have trouble
listening auditorily, they usually have trouble
if it's just some shit narrator.
And what's great is it's an actual lecture from Mark.
It's a series of lectures. He's telling jokes. It sounds a lot like Ram Dass in Becoming Nobody,
also one of my all-time favorites on Audible. And you won't find that available via text or book.
He does have a number of other books that are absolutely incredible. I have several of them.
He has worked with Ken Wilber, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and a number of other incredible folks and thinkers.
He's a part of a think tank that is, in my opinion, the forming of Voltron with the greatest minds on earth.
And what he's putting together is like nothing else.
He's putting together a playbook and a new story for what we're doing
here as humans, what consciousness actually is and how it works. And I don't take that lightly,
what I just said there. To fully grasp that, you're going to need to dive into his work,
which I highly recommend. We'll link to the erotic and the holy in here.
Mark has a new book coming out, a series of books actually called The Phenomenology
of Eros. It's not out yet. I will retrofit link to that in the show notes once it does come out.
It's going to be massive. I've had the privilege of starting to dive into that work and it is
nothing short of incredible. But this podcast, it was my favorite of all time for these reasons.
We dive into a lot of the meat potatoes of Mark's work.
One thing we don't dive into on this podcast is a lot about Mark's past. And that is something that
comes up for people. It's something that came up for Aubrey Marcus, who introduced me to Mark.
And really, it can't be something that's just stated with a couple of sentences. It is something
that requires a podcast, right?
And so Aubrey Marcus did a podcast with Mark Gaffney and his amazing partner, KK. I'm also a
KK. And we'll link to that in the show notes, a YouTube video on Mark's past and really what's
brought him here today. And really, unfortunately, the slander that comes with internet executions. But I assure you,
I would not be having Mark on this podcast if he wasn't the person, the credible person that I
believe him to be and know him to be. And he is the real deal. Inside and out, he is one of the
most beautiful humans that I've ever met. And I do consider this the first of many podcasts that
I'll be doing with him. I'll also be introducing him to many of my other favorites
like Paul Cech and Dr. Nathan Reilly and Charles Eisenstein,
if Aubrey hasn't already introduced him to Charles.
Just fantastic thinkers and great people
that I want Mark to know.
And really, we have the honorable service
of bringing Mark's work to the world.
And in my opinion, nothing could be a greater service.
This is something that has shaped my life in a way where it's grounded me in a way and
honestly given me perspective on a lot of the dark things that I've gone through in
the last two and a half years spiritually through the dark night of the soul and my
journey with plant medicines.
Really looking for that.
You know, it's funny, sometimes we go through an experience and we can't quite figure out why it
happened. This goes for life as well as plant medicines or psychedelics. And it was only
recently when I really gathered this, we were out in Sedona and I was reading the phenomenology of
Eros. And I remember my wife, Tosh, you know, really concerned asking me why I was going to do
30 grams of mushrooms. And she's like, what are you looking for? You know, asking me why I was going to do 30 grams of mushrooms.
And she's like, what are you looking for?
And I said, I want to understand the inner workings of consciousness.
I want to know God on the deepest level possible.
And that is not a thumbs up
for you guys to go and try that shit.
Not everyone comes back from that experience.
It was a true initiation.
And as Maladoma Patrice Sommet says,
it is not an initiation unless death is on
the line. That's not something you go and do by yourself. It is something you want expert guidance
with. And thankfully, I had that with a variety of mentors. And I consider Mark a mentor now.
And I do understand that the thing I was looking for is exactly what Mark has been tracking his entire life. I don't take that lightly, not by any means. That is exactly
what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the inner workings of consciousness, how it works,
how it goes together, and how we track that and implement it in our lives. And this is just a
fucking taste test. It's two and a half hours, but it is just a tip of the iceberg taste test
into Mark's work.
There will be much, much more.
I can assure you,
Aubrey Marcus is going to be doing much, much more.
I think they recorded three podcasts together
when Mark and I got together this week to record ours.
I absolutely love it.
I absolutely love you, Mark,
and I'm excited to know more and learn more
and continue to share more with this podcast.
There are a number of ways you can support this podcast.
First and foremost, share it with a friend.
Share it with a friend who's interested
in this particular episode.
They might not be into all the episodes,
but share them the one that you think they're interested in.
That's a good way.
Two, leave us a five-star rating
with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life.
Organifi, one of our longest sponsors,
is giving away free stuff. My favorite supplements from Organifi will be given out to one selected
winner at the end of each month. Stay tuned. We have somebody for the month of October
that I will dive into in the upcoming weeks and let that person know who wins. Also, leave your
at whatever, at Kingsboo on Instagram, at Living With The Kingsburys, whatever the thing is,
leave your handle and what social media platform it is so we can reach out to you and get these
products to you. That makes it a lot easier. And then finally, most importantly, support our
sponsors. They make this show fiscally possible. They are the reason I can spend so much time
deep diving into the books and the literature of the authors that I have on, into researching, listening to the podcast. I devote a lot of time to this podcast, and it's one of my favorite treats
because it is fulfilling in its own way, right? It absolutely is something that brings me joy
getting to do this podcast because I get to learn right alongside you guys. And thank you for
supporting the sponsors because that actually makes it possible for me to do this. All right. Today's show, we are brought to you by a few oldies and a brand newbie that is
nothing short of amazing. De Snudo Organic Tequila is the cleanest, best tasting premium tequila on
the market. Launched in January of 2022, Indianapolis-based co-founders Nick Bloom
and Brian Eddings selfishly wanted a tequila that didn't leave them feeling terrible after a night of drinking and a spirit that fit into their health and wellness lifestyle.
Out of necessity, they created Desnuda, which means naked.
Their Blue Weber of Gave plants have been organically grown in Jalisco's Ametian region for seven years.
Desnuda is a certified USDA organic and GMO and additive-free, meaning zero pesticides or herbicides, for seven long years. Desnuda is a certified USDA organic and GMO and additive free, meaning zero pesticides
or herbicides for seven long years. Their domestic competitors grow for only three to four years,
all while using pesticides and herbicides. Zero sugar is added to Desnuda, giving their tequila
a low, nearly non-existent glycemic index. This is super important for people. If you're trying
to lose weight, if you're going low carb, or even if you're not, you do not want to drink in calories. You don't
want to drink it in for your beer. You don't want to drink in sugars via hard alcohol. There's a
ton in hard alcohol. There's a ton in wine. It's one of the reasons I love Dry Farm.
You can't get the weight loss goals and you can't get the recovery you want by consuming too much
alcohol and you certainly can't get it by consuming the wrong types of alcohol.
So very important.
Other tequilas on the market do add sugar, and they tend to yield larger profits at the
expense of your nasty hangovers the next day.
Lastly, there are no additives like glycerin, food coloring, or sweeteners to give you the
cleanest, true-to-form tequila, just like they made it hundreds of years ago.
Nick and Brian aren't just passionate about great tequila. They genuinely care about what they put into their bodies. Ding, ding,
ding, just like me, just like so many of us. And they believe that there is a way to balance life
with alcohol. So next time you're out in the town or looking for a tequila to share with friends,
don't choose one of the many low quality, high additive spirits out there. Instead, drink clean,
drink naked, and choose Desnuda Organic Tequila for your health and wellness journey. Order Desnuda at
www.desnudatequila.com and use code KKP for a 15% discount on your first purchase. That's D-E-S-N-U-D-A
T-E-Q-U-I-L-A.com. We are also brought to you today by Lucy.co,
one of our oldest sponsors.
It is an amazing way to introduce nicotine into your life.
Why?
Why nicotine?
Nicotine is one of the greatest nootropics
ever invented by Mother Nature.
The government's banning vapes.
The government's reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.
There's never been a better time to give Lucy a try.
There's great flavors, multiple strengths, and it's the only nicotine pouch with a capsule
inside that keeps it fresh. Look, we're all adults here, and I know some of us choose to
use nicotine to relax, focus, or just unwind after a long day. Lucy is a modern oral nicotine company
that makes nicotine gum, lozenges, and pouches for adults who are looking for the best,
most responsible way to consume their nicotine. It's damn near the end of a year. Why not finish it out by switching to a new nicotine product
that you can feel good about? I love this stuff. I use it in the gym. I use it on flights. It is
amazing where you can use this stuff and you can't use other forms of nicotine. This is the best way
to consume it while traveling. It will lock you in for a period of 45 minutes. This is super
important. If I want to really dive deep and read after my kids go to bed, I can't do that with
caffeine. It'll keep me up all night. Nicotine will work and it'll work in a short window that
allows me to still go to bed at night and still get a restful sleep. Check it all out. Lucy.co,
that is L-U-C-Y.C-O and use promo code KKP at checkout for 20% off everything in the house.
All right, let's take a few moments here as I would love to share my latest discovery with you
guys. Listen in as I guarantee this is the hottest super nutrient packed new product to boost your
brain and overall wellbeing on the market. First of all, a little bit of my experience. As soon as
I tried this product, I became a super fan of it, and I was just blown away by the immediate results. I felt focused, my mind was clear,
and it doubled my mental performance. It became my go-to routine for productivity boost,
immune support, and even glowing and healthy radiant skin, which y'all know I've got it.
This was something that I used also when I went off caffeine. It's an excellent way
to boost the brain when you're off caffeine for 35 days, like I did with my wife. I've reintroduced it since at
a much lower dose, but this stayed with me the entire time. You probably have all heard about
the superpowers of mushroom extracts and collagen. So guess what? The product I want to share with
you today contains the most hyper-concentrated forms of four of the best health-boosting mushrooms,
lion's mane, chaga, cordyceps, and reishi.
It also has collagen and pruvium cacao.
This magic in a jar is called collagenous.
When you combine the cultivating powers of the four mushrooms mentioned above
with the various benefits of collagen,
it is truly the most effective way to energize your brain and body.
It is genius.
It is delicious.
It is effective. Add it to your brain and body. It is genius. It is delicious. It is effective.
Add it to your coffee or simply mix it with water.
The smooth chocolatey drink will definitely find a way into your routine.
And the most important, it will fuel your brain and body with all-day energy without
the jitters or crashes.
So if you struggle with brain fog, have difficulty focusing, and want to repair your brain in
a most natural way, do not wait and check this product out.
It is for sure the hottest mushroom and collagen product on the market today,
which you must try.
Do it now and your brain will thank you.
That's www.newtopia.com slash kingsboo genius
and use kingsboo 10 during checkout.
Again, long ass URLs.
Sorry, folks.
It'll be linked in the show notes. www.nootopia.com slash K-I-N-G-S-B-U-G-E-N-I-U-S. And then Kingsboo 10 in all caps. That's Kingsboo
and the number 10 in all caps to save 10% off everything there. Love these guys. Thank you.
That's another great one from the homies at Bioptimizers, Nootopia, their Nootropic line. Last but not least, we're brought to you by my homies at
Organifi, organifi.com slash KKP. As we mentioned earlier, if you guys leave a review,
five-star review with one or two ways the show has helped you out in life, Organifi is going
to select one winner at the end of each month and send you some of my favorite product.
And this is
awesome. This is something they selected by themselves. They want to help grow this podcast.
And I absolutely love them about them. Love Drew Canole, love their whole team.
Tosh and I did a podcast with Mimi and Chase. Shit, when was it? We'll link to that in the
show notes. Actually give them a little bit of love. It is out now. So I'll have Jose dig that
up and find it for you guys. If you want to listen to me and Tosh talk relationships, parenting, and all that good shit. It's been a long ass time
since her and I have done a podcast together and they asked some great questions. So love the whole
team at Organifi. Love all of their products. My favorites by far are the OGs, the green.
The green has a fat dose of ashwagandha and other adaptogens that help balance mind, body, and
spirit and
emotional state, really affecting the central nervous system. This is important. If you do
take caffeine, you want a balanced approach to chemically altering your state of being,
and you want that to help you feel good. This eliminates jitters. It eliminates panic
and helps you feel grounded in your body. Long, long, very long time, thousands of year old
tool used in Ayurvedic
medicine, ashwagandha is, and there's several others in there. There's moringa and many other
superfoods you'll find in the green. It tastes fantastic. It absolutely tastes fantastic.
Three grams of carbohydrate make it low carb and phenomenally tasting that my kids love.
They absolutely love it. We take it daily. Sometimes, you know, I'll mix it with kratom
if you want to knock out the nasty bitters of that drink
And if you're not into that totally cool, it's a phenomenal product in and of itself the organifier red juice. This is incredible
Uh, i've heard drew talk about this as a pre-sex pre-sexy time guy
I use it pre-workout most of the time, but it definitely works for either and that's a really cool thing
It also works for endurance and I don't just mean sexual endurance. It's got cordyceps sinensis,
which is going to help your mitochondria fire up,
which gives you more mental energy
as well as more physical energy.
Super important.
Anytime we can help throw the mitochondria a bone,
that's going to equal better results
in no matter what we're doing,
whether it's podcasting, studying for an exam,
gearing up for a presentation,
or hammering a hard workout.
We want to help the mitochondria as best
we can. And there's a number of things in the Organifi Red that actually help increase nitric
oxide, which is going to increase vasodilation and more energy and oxygen getting to the muscles or
the brain, whatever is using it most in the current task that we've got ahead of us. Organifi
Red is phenomenal. Organifi Gold. This is the wind down. This is the nightcap. This
is the thing that helps me relax when I want to go to sleep at night. It's got 300 mg of lemon
balm extract, including a number of other things that just help me relax and say, okay, cool.
I can shift gears. There we go. Now I'm good. Now I'm good to go. And it won't just knock me out,
and it doesn't leave you hungover the next day. There's no grogginess. There's no nothing. It
just helps me feel a little bit less of the
stress in the day. And it does so in a way that my body responds to in a beautiful way.
And right now they've got the Organifi Gold Pumpkin Spice Flavor, which is ridiculous. It
is so tasty. Again, I make these really fatty. I add coconut cream, full fat coconut cream from
the can, not from a half gallon container that ain't enough fat. And I add some butter and I whisk that up with a little
whisker jobber and it's money. It tastes phenomenal. It's sweet. It's delicious. And it's
fall in a bottle, baby. It's so good. Check it all out. Organifi.com slash KKP. That is O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash KKP and use code KKP for 20% off everything in the store.
All right, y'all. Without further ado, my brother, mentor, teacher, amazing person,
Mark Gaffney, welcome to the podcast. Mark Gaffney, welcome to the podcast.
Kyle, it's good to meet you. I've heard so much about you.
Yeah, I've been following along, listening to, you know, I've been so close with Aubrey for the last five years.
And, you know, he's introduced me to many great people like Porongi, the artist and entertainer and amazing musician.
And Ted Decker,
Christian author of fantastic mystical teachings,
you know, and right when he met you,
I could feel like, I could feel the shift in his energy as he was talking about you, the giddiness, you know?
And I was just like, holy shit.
All right, where do I start?
You know, and he's like, well,
the podcast isn't going to be out for a while,
and he was telling me everything about you.
And I dove in. The Erotic and the holy was the first book that I've ever finished. And then immediately
went back to listening without a break. Like the second it ended, I said, okay, this is so important
that I need to go back through this again right now, because I really want it to imprint and land
home. And in preparation for this, you this, I've had less than a week,
but I've been working my way through a third time. And I just bought probably like five books. I was
like, of course you have more than one book. So I saw the mystery of love over there and a couple
others, one that you guys had done together. KK's watching us here in the background. So
yeah, I got a big order coming from Amazon. So I'm pumped to deep dive everything else. Yeah, yeah. You know, KK and I did a return to Eros
in which KK was just a major partner in,
in mused, you know, in her wondrous ways.
We got a beautiful blonde right over there
who's the goddess who's watching over us.
So we are good.
She is the goddess.
And it's funny too, because I mean, I adore,
I worship my wife.
She is incredible in every way, shape and form.
And yeah, it resonates, you know, like she's right here.
As you're talking about that in the podcast that both of you just did with Aubrey and
I was watching, I was like, yep, she's got it.
And my wife's got it too.
And it was like a beautiful synchronicity because in an odd way, even though the conversation
is about the erotic
and not just the sexual and we'll dive into the differences in that and i apologize for people
that have first heard you on aubrey's podcast there's gonna be some carryover and some layover
and that's okay because like me you probably haven't fully alchemized and integrated any of
this stuff so hearing it a second or third time is a good thing. But when I listen to your book,
it actually, it draws Eros into the point
where she is the embodiment,
embodiment, embodiment,
where I'm like, I want to be close to her.
I want to pass the salt.
I want to do all of the little things
where like the game does become a day of foreplay
where like, even if I say, let me take the kids to the farm and give you a break, like that is laying
the groundwork for intimacy right there. You know, so much of that is reshaped the way that I look at
our relationship and how to contribute in a way that really does land for people. And you know,
it's different when you're married with kids. So it's a whole different animal on how you court somebody. But there is so much to that inside and out that has absolutely
shaped me and changed the way that I interact with her. And so I really want to thank you for that.
Yeah, gorgeous. Gorgeous. Kyle, it's good to meet you. And let's just dive in and blow up in a new
world that, you know, something new is going to happen today. I love it. Something new. And there's a deep realization
that the only thing that we ever have any real choice in
is are we open or closed?
There's only one thing that happens in the world.
Either we're open or we're closed.
So either we love the moment open
and the moment opens
and we let the moment love us open or we fuck the moment open.
We'll let the moment fuck us open or the moment remains closed.
I mean, it's we're closed to the moment and the moment's closed to us.
And the one minute to minute decision we make in every moment of life is are we going to love the moment open?
Are we going to let the moment love us open?
Are we going to fuck the moment open? Are we going to let the moment love us open? Are we going to fuck the moment open?
Or will it remain closed?
And it's not just a kind of, I mean, there's nothing slogany about that.
That's a mistake.
In other words, that's actually the ontology of cosmos.
And that's when Whitehead talks about the nature of reality,
he defines reality in a way
similar to the interior sciences that reality is the creative advance of novelty very beautiful
right and that in every moment there's an emergent and that moment you know the hebrew word in the
lineage you know for time is zman z-e-m-a-n which means invitation so there's something in the lineage for time is zman, Z-E-M-A-N, which means invitation. So there's
something in the moment that is original, undeniably new, that never existed in any
moment before this moment. So there's a new, just like there's a unique self of a person,
different conversation, unique self, but there's a unique self of time.
Time has a quality. It has a personhood. And so in this moment, so I have just the delight of,
first off, meeting Kyle. I've heard about from Aubrey and from others in the last day or two,
all sorts of good and beautiful Kyle stories. I have to say, you're kind of bigger than I thought.
I thought I didn't quite get,
they forgot to tell me. He's like, Kyle, I got, they didn't tell me that part of it. I said,
whoa, okay. I'm going to be on this guy's good side. And so there's a unique, we get to meet,
something new is created and there's an emergent, There's something that is going to evolve. And that's the shocking
part about reality is that it never repeats itself. And that there's actually the possibility
of generating a new emergent that never existed before. And intimacy generates emergence.
Isn't that beautiful? And then that space in between is where something new is born.
So I'm delighted. Thank you for having me and I'm delighted to be here.
I love it. I love it. Well, at the potential of covering some of the topics you've already
covered with Aubrey, I would love for you to take us through the space between. Talk about the
cherubs, talk about what is Eros and how do we work with this intelligent energy of the erotic. Yeah. I mean,
what is reality at its core? What is the nature of reality? So why are we here? Let's just,
let's start with something like very immediate. Why are Kyle and Mark in this room here? So let's
start from the most immediate,
the most present and in front of us, and then maybe work backwards towards kind of the principles of
Cosmos. And first, I just want to say that it's really important to realize that Cosmos has
principles, right? I mean, just that sentence by itself, there are first principles and first
values that govern reality, which is why we get to be at home in the universe.
And that's really important.
In other words, we kind of outsourced first principles to science, which at a certain moment in time introduced the third-person perspective that allowed us to do Newtonian science and Kepler's laws of motion.
That was critical.
And science has made an enormous contribution. And then something happened in the scientific
enterprise in which it went dogmatic. And it's science became scientism, right? The methods of
science, which are critical, then made claims, not based on empirical evidence, based on dogma and rebellion and appropriate rebellion
against the old traditions,
which actually had corrupted themselves in many ways.
And science said, reality's only exteriors.
There was a disqualification of the universe.
Reality doesn't have interiors.
Interiors aren't real.
What's real is that which you can measure
by exterior measurable dimensions
and everything that's priceless,
that's immeasurable, got lost.
And so we need to go back and reclaim,
not mysticism, not myth per se,
because we don't even know what those words mean.
We need to reclaim interior science.
There's an interior science of cosmos. Cosmos has interiors that animate everything.
And those are actually laws and principles that are empirically available that live both in the
great traditions and esoteric forms, but also are implicit in all of the sciences from molecular biology to contemporary complexity
theory and chaos theory and systems theory. If you weave it all together, if you go across domains,
you actually emerge with a new story of value, who we are and what we are. So let's just start
with why we're here. Okay, fair? Brilliant, yes. Let's start with why we're here. That was just to give us a little context. So why are we here? So we're here because we didn't make a rational decision to be here,
right? Although it wasn't an anti-rational decision, right? The mind is extremely important,
but actually homo economicus driven by rational choice actually doesn't exist.
We're actually moved by something deeper than that. We're moved by the force that actually drives cosmos
every place and everywhere,
which I would call allurement.
Allurement.
When we talk about gravity, what's gravity?
Gravity is a word, but there's nothing underneath gravity.
We name it and we should name it for scientific purposes,
but gravity is describing allurement at the celestial level.
If we look at electromagnetism, what's electromagnetism?
Which drives everything, right?
The four forces, the strong and the weak nuclear, the electromagnetic, the gravitational.
What's electromagnetism?
Well, it's allurement.
That's what it is.
So when you have a proton, a neutron, an electron hanging out,
and particularly the proton and electron, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the proton and the electron, the proton's huge, the electron's tiny, so it's not an obvious match on match.com.
But they have this insane yearning for each other, quite literally.
They actually yearn for each other quite literally. They actually yearn for each other. And there's this
movement, this allurement that brings a proton and electron together. They come together, right? And
they form an atom. Now, an atom is not a proton, an electron, a neutron. An atom is undeniably new.
It's an utterly new emergent with new properties, unimaginably different, right?
Exponentially so than a proton, neutron, and electron.
Now, what brings them together?
Allurement.
So allurement or eros is the quality of cosmos that allures separate parts to come together to make deeper contact, to fuck, to make love, right?
To find each other and not just to find each other,
but to create a new whole greater than the sum of the parts
that never existed before,
that has new quality and new potential
that can potentiate new possibility, right?
Filled with a new quality of interiority,
with new value, with new possibility. That's us.
So why are we here? We're here because there were a series of allurements, right? You know,
I was talking to my friend seven years ago, who was someone who suggested we do a,
and it's, I've never done this before. It's fun to trace this. Like, how did we get here?
So I was talking seven years ago to someone named Daniel, who was introduced
to me so that we should do a dialogue with me being kind of the mystic and him the scientist,
Daniel Schmachtenberger, right? And so Daniel and I get together. We spend six months talking.
Daniel then went through a very beautiful transformation because I was able to share
with him a visionary kind of cosmology that was non-mythic, that was
actually grounded, right? That held a vision. And that was for him transformational for Daniel.
So he shifted. He then got married to Roxie. Actually, I did the wedding. We had a gorgeous
wedding. We did on kind of living evolutionary love, which the wedding was about. And so Daniel
and I became very close friends. Daniel and I were allured, right? So at a certain point, you know, Daniel calls, I think, Aubrey,
right? And says, hey, right? You know, you and Mark's talk. I'd never heard Aubrey's name,
but he said he was in Miami. I said, well, okay. You know, Aubrey, so I said to KK,
do you know this guy? Aubrey said, no, right? I didn't look it up. And I said to KK, do you know this guy? Aubrey said, no. I didn't look it up.
And I said, you know, my friend Daniel, you know, so we went down to the hotel.
And I thought, okay, I'll meet this guy for a couple minutes. We'll do a podcast for a couple hours.
It'll be fine.
And onward Christian soldiers, right?
And there was an allurement.
And something deep emerged.
And there was a resonance.
It was an allurement.
It wasn't a rational decision.
We knew nothing about each other. It was an allurement. It wasn't a rational decision, right? We knew nothing about each other, right?
It was an allurement.
And then at a certain moment, Kyle's on a plane
and we were talking right before the podcast began
and you're on a plane and you're at a ceremony
and you're flying back with Aubrey
and you're in one part of the world
and Aubrey's in another
and there's lots of good reasons to stay in Las Vegas, right?
But there's an allurement.
And so there, here you are in Austin. So why are we
here? We're here because allurement brought us together. So allurement's a quality of cosmos
that drives photosynthesis, that drives mitosis, that drives meiosis, that creates newness.
Hydrogen and oxygen come together. Neither of them are liquid at room temperature. They come together, water.
There's a new, and water's eros, life. So when there's a new quality of eros or a new quality of intimacy, and intimacy is shared identity. So there's a new shared identity. We're in space
together. We're actually not just in a win-lose metrics. We're not just objects in a game. We
actually, we enter into the shared
space and then the space between us, something emerges. So in the lineages, that's Harrison Ford,
Raiders of the Lost Ark. And what was it, 25 years ago, we're dating ourselves, right? Do you remember
that movie? Yeah, I love it. I can't wait to have it, to show it to my son. Right. Oh my God. Right.
Right. Give it a few years. I'll probably show it to him before my wife wants me to.
Needs a few years, I know, right, right.
So Harrison Ford, Raiders of the Lost Ark,
the Ark is the Ark of the Covenant.
And the Ark of the Covenant is in Solomon's Temple
in Jerusalem.
And above the Ark of the Covenant
are these two figures that we generally think
are these hallmark cherubic figures or cherubs, they're called C-H-E-R-U-B-S.
And the cherubs are very beautiful. They actually have childlike faces, right, in the lineage
Aramaic texts, but they're also wildly alive, filled with eros and actually making love.
The cherubs are Kruvim HaMe'Urim Ze cherubs are, right?
That's the text in the Talmud in a particular tract at Yoma 54a,
citing a text in the book of Kings,
as a lover entwined with the beloved.
So you have these two cherubs.
I mean, imagine your local church,
synagogue, mosque, right?
Having two sexually entwined cherubs above the ark.
So whoever the pastor is, they're fired, right?
It's like, it's over, right?
It's over.
So you have these two cherubs and the voice of the divine emerges from between the entwined
beloveds. So you have phak, right, deep in the middle, right, of the holy,
of the sacred. So actually eros and holiness, when you actually look at what it's called the
temple, the temple is the mikdash, the holy place, and the holy place is defined by eros because eros and holiness are actually precisely
the same word. The erotic and the holy, holy means the nature of cosmos of the sacred moving to
generate ever more value, ever more intimacy, ever more eros, ever more goodness, truth, and beauty. And that's structural to cosmos.
So the space between the cherubs,
they don't fuse with each other,
yet they're not alienated.
They're in union, union, not fusion.
That space between the cherubs
is where everything is born.
And it's between people.
It's between us and ourselves,
between us and nature,
between us and the divine. It's the
space in between, and that space in between, that liminal space, the space that births everything.
So that's allurement. That's just a little bit of a just taste. So here we are, right? Two cherubs.
Drawn together.
Right? Drawn together, right? But literally, and when you actually trace your life,
and it's a great exercise to invite people to do.
Why did you really do anything?
Right, and it's underneath,
get underneath the kind of surface motives
of win-lose metrics
and why you're driven by the win-lose metrics,
because I want to succeed.
Why do I want to succeed?
Because I want to be regarded
and I want to be regarded with honor.
Just honor you want?
No, I want to be loved. Oh, okay, you want to be regarded and I want to be regarded with honor. Just honor you want? No, I want to be loved. Oh, okay. You want to be loved. Okay. What drives us is we desperately
want to be loved and we want to love. We don't just want to be loved. We want to love. We want
to be lovers, right? We desperately want the experience of being held and of holding,
right? Of intimacy. We want to be intimate.
We want to be intimate in work, right?
Meaning intimate with the process of creativity, right?
Intimate with knowing something new, right?
I want to be intimate.
I want Eros everywhere, right?
I'm desperate.
People are desperate for Eros.
There's a desperate, because it's our nature.
Because the entire process of reality is a process driven by Eros. There's a desk because it's our nature. Because the entire process of reality is a process
driven by Eros. Everything, right? From the first moments of the Big Bang, all the way through those
subatomic particles, all the way to subatomic particles waking up as life as cells. And then
from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, right? To single-celled to multicellular intelligence. It's all more and more intimacy,
more and more Eros, right? All the way up the chain of life, all the way up to the human being,
right? The entire process structurally is a cosmorotic universe, a universe quite literally
driven by Eros, which doesn't replace the four forces. Eros animates the four forces. Eros is
not a fifth force. They got that wrong. At the Santa Fe Institute, at some point, they talked about a fifth force. And Santa Fe Institute
did a lot of good work, but it wasn't a fifth force. And they realized that later. It was not
a fifth force. Eros is the animating energy, right? Which manifests as the four physical
forces of cosmos. But not only. Those four physical forces are exterior, but they also
live in the interior.
The interior force of Eris that drives,
generate, animates everything.
So that's just a way to say hello.
Hello.
Excellent.
Hello.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Yes.
I love it.
That's fantastic.
Talk about the quality of being on the inside.
Yeah.
Let's talk about the quality of being on the inside.
But I'm going to ask your permission to actually get inside, to actually go backwards a little bit.
I want to go back a little bit because we said a bunch of things that need clarifying so that we get that we're engaged in first values and first principles, meaning in the structure of cosmos, right?
That we actually can be at home in cosmos.
And maybe to give us some context, we're in this postmodern world in which the experience of being welcome in the universe is lost.
People don't have an experience of being welcome. And really there's,
the great question is, can I be at home in the universe? And am I welcome? Are there welcome
signs in cosmos, right? Are there welcome signs posted along the path of my life? Or is cosmos something like, you know,
Camus wrote in The Stranger, you know, mother died today, or was it yesterday? That's how he opens
his existentialist novel, The Stranger. What he means is mother is the experience of being welcome.
That's why Ramakrishna in the temple would scream,
mother, right?
Right, you know, and in the rainbow gathering,
they appropriately saying, you know,
mother carry me child, I will always be,
you know, mother carry me back to the sea.
So that's the Shekhinah, right?
The goddess, Eros is the quality of mother.
You know, mother Mary speak to me, right?
Right, you know, hey Jude. So mother
is the experience of being welcome. And existentialism, which I spend many, many years
deep in its texts. Your homies with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Right, right, right. I spent
many, many years, right, in those texts. And I remember when I first, you know, started reading
existentialist thinkers, I was 17 or 18. And I just, for three, four years kind of tore through all of Sartre and Camus and,
you know, Heidegger and, you know, and Husserl. And they're important and they're tragic because,
and they're heroic figures, but they can't find a way. They're in this moment in which we're
appropriately rejecting the old structures. Nietzsche, they're emerging
out of Nietzsche who kind of says the old illusion, right, that we're at home in the universe, we need
to explode. That was based on the old religions. Neo-Darwinism, right, as a model of reality
reigned in the world. Now we actually understand that neo-Darwinism is a wildly outdated model
and that it actually doesn't reflect reality.
You can just look at James Shapiro's work, for example,
who's a, talks about natural genetic engineering, right?
And the cellular intelligence of cells, right?
And how life actually emerges.
And we understand that there's an evolution 2.0
that's extremely important.
A dear friend of mine, Perry Marshall, right?
Really integrated this material very,
very well in a relatively simple book, but it summarized the literature well called Evolution
2.0. Not that well-known in these circles, but Perry did a great job working with James Shapiro's
work and Lynn Margulis' work. But at that moment, neo-Darwinian synthesis kind of reigned in the
world, and there was a materialist assumption. And materialism means reality's just a tale told by an idiot
full of sounds and furies signifying nothing, right?
Shakespeare and Macbeth.
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps in its petty pace day after day
to the last syllable of recorded time.
Fuck, right?
Fuck meaning there's no fuck, right?
And the whole thing is a limited game
in which death is the end of the story.
And in any kind of value, we just made it up.
That's tragic.
So let's just kind of feel into that world for a second.
I want to just kind of just get quiet with you for a second.
Like just the pain of that world.
And there was no response to that worldview.
And so there was no sense that we had that we were welcome in the cosmos.
And until we had post-modernity, even though we had deconstructed all of the tenets of being welcome, we pretended like
we hadn't. And Nietzsche's point was, David Hume really deconstructed all this shit. We got to
stop pretending, right? So modernity, there was kind of pre-modernity, the traditional period,
which was we all live in a traditional religion, which was beautiful. The problem was the
traditional religions were ethnocentric and homophobic and antibody and had to kill the next religion because they were engaged in a
rival's conflict governed by Winley's metrics, not people against people, but religion against
religion, and everyone hijacked and owned God, right? Bad scene. So it had a lot of beauty
in its depth esoteric structures, but the exterior structures were corrupt or degraded,
which is why when Voltaire kind of begins
the great cry of Western enlightenment modernity,
he says, remember the cruelties.
That's his, right?
So then we step into modernity
and we kind of feel there should be value in cosmos,
but we've denuded cosmos of value,
but we can't quite admit it.
So we behave as if.
And the best way to frame modernity
is modernity is the great as if, right?
Let's behave as if value was real.
And we got away with that for two, 300 years.
So the framers of the constitution talk about,
we hold these truths to be self-evident.
Self-evident means, I guess they're a given.
We don't really have any evidence for the self-evident,
but let's call them self-evident
and we're gonna borrow social capital from pre-modernity
and we can get away with that.
Nietzsche called in the loan. Nietzsche says, fuck that. That's not true, right? That actually creates, you know, grand narratives, right, that imperialists use because they're
pretending that they're based in value, and those grand narratives create World War I,
and then World War II after Nietzsche. And so Nietzsche calls in the loan, the promissory
note that modernity took from pre-modernity. He says, this is bullshit. We live in a world
denuded of intrinsic value. The only people that can create it is us, and then we die.
Now, that's heroic, but stupid. And Nietzsche understood that, and that was Nietzsche's
strategy. Nietzsche goes mad in that strategy, and I'm madly in love with Nietzsche, right? In other words, my
first degree was in philosophy, right? And my second and third degrees were more in mysticism
philosophy. I mean, degrees are silly and colleges are silly. They're kind of a hothouse for
mediocrity, but my mother was happy. My son, he went to Oxford. It's very nice. My son went to Oxford. I have a good Jewish mother, right?
So when Nietzsche calls in the promissory note on value,
people begin to experience gradually
that they're not welcome in the universe.
And that's what Camus was saying.
He's saying in his novel, The Stranger,
he's saying, right?
You know, George Steiner said it later.
He said, strangers are we,
errands at the gates of our own psyche.
Right?
The stranger, mother died today.
Or was it yesterday?
Actually, literally just last night,
I was talking to Aubrey.
We were late at night around the table.
And he said, wow, Sunday, my mom's coming.
He said, if you love me, you're going to love my mom.
He said, I can't wait for you to meet my mom.
She is the best. Right? Right. She is, Right. Right. Kathy, right? Yeah. Yay,
Kathy. Kathy, maybe you're listening. Hi, Kathy. Right? I can't wait to meet you. But that was,
that was a man talking about his mother, right? In other words, and so Camus's mother died today,
or was it yesterday? Meaning mother's the experience that I'm welcome in the cosmos.
And if I don't have that experience, then mother died today or was it yesterday?
It's a tale told by an idiot full of sounds and fury
signifying nothing.
So really what I'm trying to do and what Think Tank,
the Center for Integral Wisdom is trying to do
and what our whole gang's trying to do
is I've tried to gather people in each field
and to each have something critical to say
who are leaders in their field, but maverick in their field, and who each have something critical to say who are leaders in their field,
but maverick in their field, who can actually move beyond the kind of materialism implicit
in the field. And what are the deeper truths of Eros held in that field and weave them together
into a new story of value? That's meaning we're trying to hang welcome signs in the cosmos, right? So eros is the cosmos saying welcome, right?
Eros is the experience.
Let's see if we can just define eros
and kind of go even deeper into it before we get, right?
So eros is the experience of radical aliveness.
Eros is radically alive.
You stop asking for the meaning of life.
It's fucking self-evident. You don't
answer the question. The question falls away. It's gone, right? So here I am. Why am I here?
Just fucking because, right? There's no questions because it's so good, right? So Eros is the
experience of being radically alive, desiring. So there's this desire at the core of cosmos and cosmos at its core is desire
and that's critical to understand and that's not again you know that's not a fundamentalist
statement and it's not a new age statement which is another form of fundamentalism it's an ontology
of cosmos reality's desire alfred northhead, you know, who wrote Principle Mathematica
with George Berger Russell in Cambridge,
you know, and he's a Cambridge Englishman,
so he can't use words like desire,
but he talks about the appetition of cosmos.
Cosmos has appetites, right?
He was the greatest, you know, mathematician of his age.
Cosmos has appetites, right?
Cosmos desires, right?
That's like wild. That actually Cosmos
itself desires and Cosmos desires, Eros desires ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness.
So when Kyle desires deeper contact with his woman, right, that he described earlier so
beautifully, it's not because he's got some issues
and maybe some early traumas
and he has some other issues
and maybe he's working on his attachment issues
with his wife and maybe it'll go,
no, no, fuck that.
And attachment theory is critical
and it has an important critical contribution.
It's a different conversation.
We actually talk about attachment theory today,
but underneath attachment theory
is the realization that the nature of my relationship to my parent,
right, the love between us forms my entire life.
Well, why would that be true?
Well, that would be true because the universe is a love story.
And because my parent is my whole universe, and the universe is a love story, so even
if I'm nourished and well-fed near Darwinian, I'm completely taken care of, it doesn't matter.
I will be fucked, says attachment theory, if the quality of eros between me and my caretaker,
the way I'm actually held is somehow skewed. Meaning attachment theory implicitly is saying
the universe is a love story. If the universe was a neo-Darwinian reductive materialist place,
and you were well-fed and taken care of and had good clothes and good education, you would be fine. We actually know that's not. We have cross-cultural studies from Baalbe in this
three-volume work, Separation and Loss, repeated in Romania, right after, you know, the dictator
there kind of created all these, you know, kind of new social policies that created, you know,
also disasters of children, you know, being raised outside of the family. All the orphans. All the orphans, right, in Romania, right? And so we have cross-cultural studies showing us
that if there's something missing in your experience of being welcome in cosmos,
and the welcome in cosmos is the eros of mother that embraces you in her arms and tells you you are welcome
and mother's desire for deeper contact
and wholeness with the child, mothers and fathers,
because we're all mother and father, right?
So if that's violated in any way,
then your experience in living in a universe
a love story is violated.
Someone has written graffiti
over your welcome sign to Cosmos
and no matter how well you're fed
or how structurally well you're educated, your life will, according to longitudinal
empirical studies, derail. That's shocking. That's like, hello? So Eros, which is Eros equals,
and this is what I'm calling an Eros equation. And what we've tried to
do, Kyle, is write equations in the interior sciences to actually move beyond this postmodern
moment, which deconstructs value. And postmodernity made a good point. It said, wow, underneath these
values are power games. That's partially true. People do hijack values for power games. And
religions did and states did. And we
should actually debunk that, and we should explode that. So post-modernity is not a bunch of bad
people. It's a bunch of beautiful people making a really important point that's true, but partial.
Foucault was brilliant. True, but partial. And Foucault realized in his later life
that he actually got half of the story, but actually there is intrinsic value out there.
Of course there is. And the core value of cosmos is eros. And eros desires. So eros is the desire
for ever deeper contact and ever larger holes. So when Kyle desires his woman, whether he's
desiring her sexually, emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically. He wants to touch this woman,
but he wants to touch her physically, emotionally,
aesthetically, psychologically, spiritually, right?
Existentially, right?
In all those ways, he wants to touch and be touched.
That's because cosmos is animated by the desire to touch.
Whitehead called it prehension.
He said that prehension lives all the way down the evolutionary chain,
meaning that subatomic particles have literally a desire,
a proto-desire to touch each other.
Isn't that gorgeous?
Right?
We want to touch each other.
Right?
We desperately want to touch each other.
And that's an expression, not of our pathology,
but actually of our essence.
And if we're not able to touch each other, then we're alienated from our nature. We're in denial of our nature, which causes
pathology, which causes a global intimacy disorder, right? A collapse, right? Of the human being.
And that's why we're collapsing. So eros is desire, but I want to just one more word if I can,
is that okay? Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Right. Eros is desire, but eros is also fuck. And when we use the word fuck,
it's really important because people say, no, no, no, let's talk about love and grace. Let's
not talk about fuck because fuck is somehow raw, right? Or pejorative or, right? Fuck is, you know, is dirty, right? Fuck is degraded.
But here's the thing. Fuck is a quality of Eros. Desire is a quality of Eros. Eros is
quivering tenderness and fuck can be quivering tenderness. And the word quivering tenderness
is from an outrageous love letter. And we'll talk about outrageous love letters later that
KK wrote to me a bunch of years ago. Remember KK? Quivering tenderness as she's asleep. Right? So, so, so a
certain moment that, you know, go to sleep. Right? Right. I'm so, you listening? Sweetie, do you
remember when you wrote me the outrageous love letter about quivering tenderness? That was you,
right? It sure was boo. Okay. We call her boo. She's Mrs. Boo.
We'll get to that later.
Okay, so fuck has a quality of quivering tenderness and has a quality of kind of outrageous,
raw thrust and power,
but it's a quality of fuck.
It's not just love.
It's actually love plus fuck equals eros.
It's a good equation.
When you bypass fuck, you create abuse.
When you bypass the quality of fuck,
when you don't take that quality in
and honor the dignity of fuck,
which lives in cosmos,
which is why I said in the beginning,
we don't just love the moment open.
We fuck the moment open.
And fuck is the quality of pulsing and
throbbing desire. It's a dripping wet cosmos that's too messant, right? That's alive, that
wants to actually receive the fullness of every moment. So it opens, right? Cosmos opens herself
to receive the full thrust of every moment and human beings actually thrust in cosmos and create new
reality, right? We're now in this anthropocene, this new world. Human beings are actually defining
evolution. We've awakened into this new moment of conscious evolution and what that means,
and that's a conversation. And, right, cosmos thrusts forward and creates emergence.
That's what Whitehead talked about. We talked about earlier,
the creative advance of novelty. So in every moment, the moment receives the moment before it
and then thrusts forward to create a new emergent moment. That's the structure of cosmos itself.
It's like, oh my God. So if I'm alienated from Eros, then I'm actually denying the very essence
of myself because actually all of cosmos
lives in me. Every proton, every neutron, every hadron lepton, right? It's all, every cellular
structure, right? All of prior evolution quite literally lives inside of me, right? Embryogenesis
recapitulates cosmogenesis, right? And that's the entire history, right,
of the emergence of life, matter, life to self-reflective mind, literally, not mystically.
Because in science, here's the thing, science is mysticism. Science is poetry, right? Science is
not mythopoetic. It's not just mythopoetic. It's not just we can make nice metaphors out of science. No, no. Science is mystery, right? And again, we call it gravity, but it's allurement, right? It's
not that allurement's a mythopoetic way to talk about gravity. Gravity is allurement, right? And
so now we got Eros on the table. So Eros is the quality. I can feel we landed a little bit now.
Is that right? We need to land, right? So Eros is the quality. I can feel we landed a little bit now. Is that right?
We need to land, right?
So Eros is allurement.
Let's create a cluster of words.
Eros is allurement.
Eros is desire.
The desire for ever deeper contact and separate parts creating larger holes.
That drive exists all the way up
and all the way down the evolutionary chain,
which means we live in a cosmoerotic
universe. Okay, now we can begin to be at home, right? That's a welcome sign, right? So when I
feel the surge of eros rising in me, right, I that it never arose in anyone else.
So if you pressed me to the wall and said,
you know, Gafni, I'll send you in.
It was a setup, 357 Magnum, right?
Make my day.
Tell me who Kyle is in one sentence.
I would say Kyle is desire.
Kyle's desire. But Kyle's not generic desire.
Kyle is a unique configuration of desire that never was, is, or will be ever again. And as such,
divinity herself, she can only desire in a particular way through Kyle-ness. Shit, right? Right? In other words, literally, right? Right? I become the desire of infinity. Infinity desires uniquely
through Kyle and infinity intended Kyle, right? I mean, Kyle didn't decide where to be born or
when to be born and what kind
of molecular structure to have and, you know, to which parents to be born. And you had nothing to
do with any of those decisions. And Kyle doesn't know, and he should live till 120, as my grandmother
would say, but he doesn't know when he's going to pass. Mark doesn't know when he's going to pass.
Right. And so, so I'm being lived, right, by an eros that intended me.
I mean, we actually, if you,
and that's actually pointing out, right,
reality intended me.
You actually get underneath your separate self.
You actually feel the eros of reality uniquely intending kindness
and then desiring through kindness.
To love God is to let God desire through you.
Right?
Like, wow.
Right?
And my deepest heart's desire is evolutionary desire awake and alive in me.
Right?
That's right.
So Buddha, with all due respect to my friend,
I mean, holy man, sitting under the Bodhi tree
and you brought us so much brother,
but you got a little fucked up on the desire thing, right?
Or at least your students did.
I mean, Buddha in the original Pali Canon
says things like have few desires, but have great ones.
Right? It's a little closer.
Yeah.
Right, a little closer, right?
Right, you gotta clarify your desire. Not every, there's surface desire. ones right it's a little closer yeah we're a little closer right right you got to clarify
your desire not every there's surface desire there's unclarified desire right that's not eros
though that's not eros that's we call it pseudo eros and that's a pretender to the throne pseudo
eros in the emptiness imitates eros to cover up the emptiness. When there's not genuine eros, then pseudo eros
steps in, right? So, Kyle's desire. And Kyle's fuck, because reality is eros at its core,
constituent to reality. Reality is constituted by eros. It's driven the emitting structure of
reality is eros, which is desire, which is fuck.
Wow. So God is desire, God is eros, God is fuck.
And fuck is God.
Now we've restored dignity to desire, right?
When we exile the dignity of desire,
it hijacks the steering wheel from the other side
and drives you off the road into the ditch
and crashes your life and crashes the life of the planet.
When desire is shamed, and remember desire is aliveness,
eros equals the experience of radical aliveness,
desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness.
And I keep repeating the formula
because it means something, Eros.
There's an equation, just like there's equations,
you know, the relativity formula and, you know,
equals MC squared.
So this isn't a formula of the interior sciences.
It's real, right?
Desire is real, right?
And so, wow, God is fuck.
So if I exile my quality of fuck or if I degrade it or if I deny it, I'm denying God. And denial of God never works well, right? So our new form of
God denial is to demonize desire, to demonize fuck. And we shame it, right?
We shame it.
We shame our early aliveness, right?
And how many of us listening can remember stories
of our early aliveness being shamed
and then we split off that aliveness.
And when we're young,
our goodness and aliveness are inseparable.
They're entwined.
So when I split off my aliveness,
I split off my goodness., I split off my goodness.
And I live with this shame that gets recapitulated time and again.
And we wind up living in a planet drenched in shame. And a plant drenched in shame creates extraction models and exponential growth curves and fractional reserve banking and in medical industrial complexes, which are all forms of pseudo eros covering over
the gaping chasm in which we believe and feel there's no welcome home sign here.
I've got to cover over that emptiness with every form of pseudo eros. So what we're talking about
here is we're talking about a politics of eros we need to create we need to generate a culture of eros okay so now we got to say hello now i feel like right right
when i right we broke for a second i went to the restaurant i said like we didn't now i feel like
we're now i know we feel it right we feel it together oh absolutely here we are okay it's
great to meet you brother great to meet you brother yeah amen amen okay i follow you all
right let's talk about being on the inside. Yes. The qualities of being on the inside and the faces of Eros.
Yeah, well, so as you point to, right, Eros has qualities, has faces.
And I was privileged to kind of jot down a couple of books about this.
One's called Mystery of Love, which I wrote in 2001, two,
something like that. And it was based on an article in Tikkun Magazine, which is a kind of
intellectual literary magazine run by my friend, you know, Michael Lerner. And there was a, we did
a cover article that were called on the erotic and the ethical, which we should talk about the
relationship between eros and ethics. Because everyone thinks the erotic and the ethical are
opposites. Actually when eros breaks down, ethics breaks down.
So, and we talked there in Mystery of Love,
and then Christine and I kind of re-mused it all
and wrote a book called A Return to Eros.
And it was actually at a particularly hard moment in my life
when I was under some measure of attack,
which is never fun, but that kind of goes with the territory. In other words,
there's a movement always to murder Eros. It just always is, and it's painful. And so,
KK and I were deep in that together in that moment, and our response was, I mean, we responded
in a number of vectors, but our major response was, as it was happening, we wrote the book,
A Return to Eros, which is the deepest response. And it's about the faces of Eros, right?
Which you point to.
So the first face of Eros is interiority,
being on the inside.
And I think Woody Allen's best movie, by the way,
might've been Interiors.
Do you remember that movie?
No.
Oh, you gotta see it.
It was when you were still allowed
to mention Woody Allen's name, right?
I don't know, didn't mention Woody Allen's name. Right? I didn't mention Woody Allen's name.
Right?
But the experience of being on the inside is when we come alive.
And being on the inside is a quality of eros that's modeled by the sexual. It's a big principle. The sexual
models the erotic. It doesn't exhaust the erotic because there's 12 billion years of eros before
sex, right? In other words, the entire explosion of the Big Bang is animated by eros. We go through
all the levels of matter, all the levels of life, you know, asexual reproduction until asexual reproduction 12 billion years in becomes
sexual reproduction. So Eros generates a new emergent of Eros called sex. So that's actually
it, right? And sex then becomes, doesn't replace all the Eros in cosmos, but it models it. Sex
becomes this beautiful model of Eros. So what's beautiful about a sexual moment? And much of sex is on the outside. You know, most people, most of the time when they're having sex,
they're on the outside. They're thinking about this or that, right? They're not sure quite how
to get aroused, which is a whole conversation about the quality of arousal in cosmos and how
we access arousal and how we take responsibility for our own arousal. So that's a whole conversation.
So people can't access arousal. And so actually we're alienated from our own arousal. So that's a whole conversation. So people can't access arousal.
And so actually we're alienated from our own sexing because we're alienated from our eros.
But again, let's bracket that for a second.
Just talk about this first quality of eros
because we can find it in the sexual, right?
When I'm in the best sex, even in my imagination, right?
Why do I love sex?
I love sex because I step into the imagination, right? Why do I love sex? I love sex because I step into the inside,
right? The alienation between us gradually falls away and we begin to become a larger whole.
And in that larger whole, each of us is more of ourselves. Each of us, there's more Kyle-ness as
he's making love, right? We've stepped into the inside together,
what we call in the lineage, the inside of the inside.
That's the inside of the inside, right?
And the inside of the inside is the name for the holy of holies in the Jerusalem temple
where the two cherubs are sexually entwined.
So that's the holy of holies.
It's called umka du umka, the deepest of the deep.
Lifnaiv lifnim, the inside of the inside.
Kodesh kodeshim, sanctum sanctorum.
So sanctum sanctorum, as I step into sexing, I'm on the inside and we're in a larger rhythm
of reality. There's something that's moving us and spirit moves through us and aliveness moves
through us. And actually the illusion of being a skin-encapsulated ego is shattered, right?
The yearning, right, moves through us,
and we step into this interior reality of incredible joy,
which has self-evident goodness.
I mean, the reason, you know, we take issue in culture with the courtesan,
and we need to actually reclaim the
courtesan in a new way, right? But the reason culture takes issue with it, and we call it
horror or prostitute, right? We demean it is because we think we have this intuition
that the experience of sexing can't be commodified. It's got to be for its own sake, right? Now, there's a way to
actually do the courtesan experience and to actually honor it with a gift, right? There's
a way to reclaim the sacred intimate. We need to do that. We need to reclaim and honor the
possibility of having sacred intimates. We need sacred intimates. We need to reclaim, right,
a sacred courtesan. That's a whole other conversation. But the kind of,
the intuition of culture always has a spark of the sacred. No, we can't commodify this. It can't be
a means to an end, and nor should it be, right? So it's a self-evidently valuable experience.
It has intrinsic, unimaginable value. I'm on the inside, right? And when I live from the inside, then I'm living
from the inside of reality. It's not just the inside of me and my partner.
It's not just the inside of myself. I've actually entered into the inside of cosmos itself.
I'm in the currency of life. I'm in the source code. I've gotten off the desktop.
I'm in the source code and the whole thing is flowing through me, right? I'm in the currency of life. I'm in the source code. I've gotten off the desktop. I'm in the source code and the whole thing is flowing through me, right? I'm in the field of
desire. We've localized desire. We've localized sex, right? As an act that separate selves do
in a few spasmodic grunts and moans that takes about, you know, very, very, very short amount
of time, happens infrequently. and I'm supposed to be getting it,
it's supposed to make me happy,
but it really quite doesn't,
and I can't quite tell anyone
because everyone else seems to be doing it okay,
and no one, right, is it just me?
But actually, it's happening to everyone, right?
Everyone thinks there's some couple in New Jersey
that's got it right, right?
But it's not happening in that way, right?
So eros is the experience of being on the inside.
So sexuality models the
erotic, but I want that experience anywhere and everywhere. I want that experience when I'm
talking to Kyle, we're on the inside together, right? And that's actually my experience right
now. Like I have no idea how much time we've been here, but I'm just so delighted to be here. And
we're on the inside together. We're not trying to get somewhere. We just want to be here
because it is right here. Eternity resides in this moment. This moment invites us inside of it.
And I want when I'm skiing and when I'm doing business and when I'm crunching numbers and when
I'm raking the lawn, when I'm, you know, when I'm, you know, when I'm eating at a restaurant,
you know, I have a custom, which I share with my students that never receive service from someone
whose name you don't know, right?
And just to just try to just ask the waiter,
the waitress their name,
and all of a sudden they're there, right?
And they smile and we show up
and we're on the inside together.
So being on the inside is when we're filled with reality,
we're filled with eros,
and then you connect all those inside moments
and you stop searching for a life with
meaning because it has intrinsic meaning in every moment. So that's the experience of being on the
inside. Yeah. It's gorgeous, right? Yes. Yes. I'll have some of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when I'm
outside the moment, no matter how functionally it works, its aftertaste is terrible.
I mean, if you want to know the litmus test,
am I on the inside or the outside?
The litmus test is always aftertaste.
Sometimes in the moment itself,
you might even have a sense of pseudoeros.
You think you're on the inside, but you're really not.
But aftertaste never lies, right?
Right, right.
When you're on the inside in gorge of sex
with the right person, the right
time and the right place, the aftertaste is sweet. It's beautiful, right? And really the most
beautiful moment in sexing is not the climax, right? The climax is after the climax, right?
It's after the explosion when heaven has been touched And now you're in heaven. And instead of looking away,
you know, turning over and going to sleep, lighting a cigarette, the proverbial cigarette,
you actually at that moment, look in each other's eyes and oh my God, you can see eternity.
So it's in that moment after of pure beingness where I'm on the inside of the inside and the aftertaste is gorgeous.
I mean, you eat a Baby Ruth bar. I happen to like Baby Ruth bars.
They're a classic.
I know, right?
No doubt.
No doubt, right?
Halloween's coming up. They're a classic.
I know, right? And do you remember when we were kids, brother, right? There used to be
just like four bars and I know I'm dating myself again, but there was Hershey's, right?
Baby Ruth. Hershey's right baby Ruth's baby Ruth
Butterfinger Butterfinger Mars bars Mars bars something like that was about it right I remember
I remember when they made Kit Kat that was a big moment it's like what's that that's like that's
like got a crunch got a crunch was like a different I'm like but what are you guys doing so I love
baby Ruth bars right and now if it was up to me, I'd have many more than one.
I like one, two, I can actually taste them right now, right?
They're so good.
But the aftertaste is not good.
It's not a good aftertaste, right?
Because it's pseudoeros, it's a sugar high, right?
It's actually not actually in alignment,
you know, with nourishing the body, right?
And so the experience of pseudo-aeros is very alluring,
but it's a pseudo-allurement, and the aftertaste sucks.
It sucks.
And, you know, if you add four of them,
you get totally sick, right?
You know, M&Ms, right?
So the sugar high is pseudo-aeros, right?
And it covers up the emptiness,
which is why we have this massive obesity epidemic.
More people die of obesity than traffic accidents, right?
Because we have this epidemic of opioids, right?
Obesity, right?
Depression.
These are all the response to pseudo eros,
not actually responding to our deep profound need
to be filled with eros.
And so aftertaste is always the litmus test.
Was I on the inside or wasn't I?
Right, and you can't fool aftertaste, right?
Yeah, you can't fool aftertaste.
She doesn't fuck around, right?
She always tells the truth, right?
The experience itself sometimes lies.
Pseudo-Eros is a very clever liar.
She's good.
She's-
And then, oh God, what have I done?
What was I thinking, right?
The aftertaste is a disaster, right?
Right, right, like that, right?
And in that aftertaste, in that fall in the aftertaste,
when I'm fundamentally disappointed with myself,
right? That's actually when I can fall even farther. It becomes a cycle, right, of fall.
Whenever I kind of violate my eros by the kind of, there's holy seduction. The world's filled with holy seduction. There's holy seduction and unholy seduction, which is a conversation by
itself. But when I'm seduced by that which is not sacred, because we make seduction itself unholy seduction, which is a conversation by itself. But when I'm seduced by that, which is not sacred,
because we make seduction itself unholy.
That's not true.
Seduction is beautiful.
Seduction is a quality of cosmos.
Reality is driven by the lure of becoming.
The lure of becoming drives reality.
Reality is always seducing the next moment into emergence.
And we're supposed to seduce each other. And what does seduction mean? Seduction means I want to seduce you to break the
boundary of your contraction, of your coiled contraction, for the sake of your own deepest need.
That's holy seduction. And we all should seduce each other to our greatness. Unholy seduction is I seduce you to break your appropriate
boundary for the sake of my greed. That's unholy seduction. But we call all seduction unholy
seduction. We identify it with unholy seduction. So we remove seduction from the quality of cosmos.
Cosmos is all seduction. It's about being seduced and about knowing what and who you should let seduce you, right?
And so the experience of being seduced by that,
which is pseudo eros,
when I actually experience the pain of that aftertaste,
I actually can collapse.
And then I can actually collapse and actually fall.
And actually become exactly the person I don't want to be.
So the critical moment is when you feel the pain
of the aftertaste, just relax in it,
just sit in it and just walk through it.
Right, non-judgmentally, you just walk through it
and then rebuild, right?
But don't allow the seduction or the unholy seduction
of that quality of deadened, devastating aftertaste
allow you to actually lose contact with who you are. We all make mistakes. We all get seduced by
what we shouldn't get seduced. There's no one listening, and certainly including us,
who hasn't made mistakes, who hasn't been seduced by what shouldn't seduce us. So when I get seduced,
when I fall into the emptiness, the key to falling into the emptiness is just sit in it.
Right? If I could say one thing to leave, like, you know, you know, people hanging and listening
with us, just one sentence, forget everything we said, just one thing to take away cash,
like cash Dharma, right? Right. It's cash Dharma, right? No, no, no credit, right? Right, it's cash dharma, right? No credit, right?
When you feel the emptiness, just sit in it.
Don't try and cover it over.
That's just more pseudo eros.
Just sit in it.
And what will actually happen is sit in it for 15 minutes.
You just sit and the eros will start to rise again.
It always does.
That's what it means zazen, just sitting, right?
Just sit. And in Hebrew it's called zazen, just sitting, right? Just sit.
And in Hebrew it's called yeshiva, to sit.
I sit in the emptiness until the eros rises again.
But when you fall and you actually did something
that you shouldn't have done,
that's actually when you're most vulnerable.
I mean, when does, let's get real in sacred texts,
when does Anakin Skywalker, right? Right? The great story told, when does, let's get real in sacred text, when does Anakin Skywalker,
right, right, the great story told, when does he become Darth Vader? Where in episode six,
Star Wars, right, Palpatine, you know, persuades, you know, pretends like, you know, kind of plays like Mace Windu is going to actually kill him, right? He needs Palpatine to save Padme, those
of you who are Star Wars people, if you're not, I apologize, right?
And Anakin then lashes out and strikes Mace Windu,
chopping his arm off, allowing Palpatine
to kill Mace Windu.
And then Anakin says, what have I done?
What have I done?
Right, and that's in the pseudo eros of the moment, right?
He steps in and takes the side of the Sith.
It was a mistake, but once he says, what have I done?
He doesn't know how to find himself again. And at that moment, literally, right, he drops to his
knees and pledges allegiance to the Sith Lord and becomes Darth Vader. He says, rise, you're now
Darth Vader. He couldn't find himself in that moment. We all have a moment, which is what have
I done? It's what have I done when I'm most susceptible to having Darth Vader emerge? It's when I sit and what have I done? Everyone has a moment, which is what have I done? It's what have I done when I'm most susceptible to having Darth Vader emerge?
So when I sit and what have I done,
everyone has a moment, which is what have I done?
It's in that moment I've just got to sit,
know that there's no person who hasn't made grand mistakes.
And the greater we are, the greater our mistakes.
And we all get to make mistakes
and everyone gets a second chance
and a third chance and a fourth chance.
So when we make those mistakes, just sit in it, right?
And let the eros rise again.
And it always will because it's the nature of reality itself.
It's a big deal.
Yeah.
Yeah, brother, it's good to be with you.
It's great to be with you. Yay.
Let's continue.
I'm thinking of the, and it may not be the four faces of Eros,
but the moving from the self-reflection into the we reflection into the all.
And I can't remember where it is in that book,
but I know I'm butchering it right now.
No, you're awesome.
So I apologize for two and a half times through.
No, no, you're awesome.
You're awesome.
You're awesome.
Hmm.
Let's try and play it this way if we can, okay?
So we just touched on, just to kind of,
so people can kind of find their way through.
We just touched on, Kyle and I,
on the first phase of Eros, which is being on the inside.
So let's kind of, and if you can get the book, Return to Eros, right? It goes through all the 12 faces of Eros and there's a chapter on each one. And that's a critical journey
by itself. And one day we should maybe we do a podcast on all 12 faces of Eros. I would love that.
You know, here's a crazy idea. This is just a spontaneous, crazy idea. We could do one podcast
on each face, right? I'm in. Is that crazy? I'm in. Absolutely. idea. We do one podcast on each face, right?
Is that crazy?
I'm in.
Absolutely, I'm in brother.
No question, I'm in.
Right, right, podcast on each face.
Amazon's bringing that book right now.
I mean, really, because each face of Eros
is a quality of life and you can literally map your life
based on the 12 faces of Eros.
And each face of Eros has its light expression,
its shadow expression, its structural to cosmos.
And it is literally the interior structure of reality
that lives in you and you can use it to guide
every decision, every aliveness,
whether it's politics or economics or personal.
So I'm in, right?
Right, right, right.
We do one conversation on each face of Eros,
which is gorgeous.
But you're, Kyle, taking us to another place now,
which is a beautiful place to go.
So let's see.
Kyle, you talk about moving from kind of the I
to kind of to the we, to the all, okay?
So let's give that a name if we can.
Let's call that the evolution of love, okay?
So, and each one of those is critical. So the I, like loving myself, that's
a very big deal. Let's talk about loving myself and what that means. But then I want to go to the
we. I want to be able to love you. And I want to love you, you, you and I, and my tribe, my peeps.
All right. So that's the second level. Then there's a third level, which is, wow, I actually
love the whole thing, right? So let's see if we can name those and play with them. So let's call
loving myself egocentric, but in the best, most gorgeous sense of the word egocentric,
because ego got bashed a little bit, right? And this is one of the mistakes that the
mystical traditions make. They demonize the ego. That's a very big mistake. And I have a friend,
I actually did a dialogue with him yesterday, who ran a magazine for many years and then,
you know, experienced a crash and has now kind of rebuilt his world. I ran a magazine called
Enlighten, What is Enlightenment? And it was a good magazine.
And, you know, Andrew used to talk a lot about evolving beyond ego, that his teaching was to
evolve beyond ego. And I would say to Andrew, and we've thought about this, you know, for many years
and have come into alignment on it. And I say to Andrew, you never evolve beyond ego,
ever. And I don't trust people who say they've evolved beyond ego, right?
Anyone tells me they've evolved beyond ego, it's like, watch out.
It means they've split off the ego.
You can't talk to them about it.
You can't say, motherfucker, what were you doing?
Because you're going to get this huge pushback, right, of, you know, of resistance, right? And you can't find them, right?
Aubrey and I have been, you know, that the day I landed is the day that your dear friend
of all of you passed, right? And we've been, you know, invoking his name, you know, which is not
mine to invoke
because we didn't know each other,
but Aubrey and I have been just texting each other,
just invoking his name.
And Aubrey told me a story about him
the night that I landed,
which was right after he had passed,
about how they had done a ceremony
in kind of the Don Howard tradition,
which is the tradition that many of you are involved in.
And somehow it hadn't quite gone right.
And Aubrey said this was kind of the difficult story
that he had with this beautiful man.
And Aubrey had to kind of,
the words he used to call him to the fire
and say, wow, I couldn't feel you, brother.
And then Aubrey described to me
that he just kind of dropped on his knees,
just kind of crying.
And I said to Aubrey, you know,
Aub, that was actually his greatest moment.
That wasn't actually,
that was the moment of certainty.
And Aubrey's saying, I can't work that moment out.
Like that was the hard moment.
And I said, Aubrey, wow,
you actually critiqued him in this deep way.
And instead of pushing back, instead of resisting,
instead of saying, no, this is why I know you got it wrong,
and this was my intention,
he just dropped to his knees and said, wow, wow, bring it on.
That's, I said, that was his holiest actual moment.
It was beautiful.
And we both just looked at each other,
we had this realization that actually this moment would seem to be the hard moment. And when we were sitting there on the
couch and we were about to go to sleep and I said, tell me something more about him. There's
something else that needs to be said here. And he told me, well, there's this one story. And he told
me this story. We both realized together, this was the most gorgeous moment, right? In other words,
when someone says they've evolved beyond ego, you can't give them any feedback, right? It's all in shadow. So we never evolved
beyond ego ever. We evolved beyond exclusive identification with ego. That's completely
different. My ego's there. Ego or separate self. And there's another, people talk about the myth
of separation. Well, not quite.
Separation is not quite a myth.
It is a myth, right?
Albert Einstein was right when he said separation
is an optical delusion of consciousness,
but actually it's a real optical delusion.
Separation is real in the mind of God.
In other words, you're supposed to be Kyle
and I'm supposed to be Mark
and we have the space of shared identity
in this new intimacy
because we're actually,
we're actually, we're clearly, we're friends.
And that's clear, I'm in, right?
I'm in, right?
And yet you're supposed to be Kyle
and I'm supposed to be Mark.
So there's a moment of separation,
but it's relative separation.
And ego is real, ego is holy.
So ego is the sense of, this is my selfness.
Now, maybe in a different conversation, we'll talk about how it's not really my separate of, this is my selfness. Now, maybe in a different conversation,
we'll talk about how it's not really my separate self. It's my unique self. That's a different
conversation. But for now, let's just work with ego's real. So I've got to love myself.
So that's, that's I, I've got to love myself. And it's so hard for people to do, right? So can we
play with that for a second? Is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. Do a little practice. Let's do a
little practice. Okay. Let's do a little practice. Let's do maybe two practices
together, you know, because we can't just have Dharma. We need yoga. Let's do two practices.
Okay. So let's call up. I'm going to do a practice to do it. This is, I'm borrowing this from Tibetan
Buddhism, the word, but it's a, it's a new practice we've developed over the years. So
I'm going to call this using the Tibetan Buddhist phrase of pointing out instruction,
which means it's non-conceptual. We're going to point to something that we already know.
So let's call something up. So let's call up the unique taste. Let's call up the unique taste of,
let's say, we talked a bit about Aubrey. Got his taste. Okay, that's Aubrey-ness. Okay, we got him.
Okay, let's call up the unique taste when I walked in, Dave was there sitting outside.
Let's call up the unique taste of Dave.
Okay, we got it.
We can feel that's Dave.
Okay, I met the other day this wonderful man, Eric, who works with Aubrey.
Godsey, my dude.
Right, dude.
Okay, so let's call up the unique taste of Eric.
Okay, we got that.
Okay, now let's call up the unique taste of Caitlin.
Okay, we got Caitlin. Okay, now Lady V, Villana. We got that. Okay. Now let's call up the unique taste of Caitlin. Okay. We got
Caitlin. Okay. Now Lady V, Villana. We got, we got Villana. Beautiful Christina. Christina. So
we call up unique taste. Oh, wow. We got all those unique tastes and we're not confused.
We're not confused. Those unique tastes are all distinct. Okay. Now call up Kyle,
the unique taste of Kyle. You notice that was hard to do? Not so easy. You could call up the unique taste of Aubrey
instantly, but to call up your own unique taste is not that easy.
Right? So it's actually in some way easier to love Aubrey than it is to love Kyle.
You can call up his unique taste and just love it,
but to call up our own unique taste is hard. Self-love is hard.
So here's a practice for self-love. Okay. You with me, brother?
I'm right with you.
Okay. Could you feel that how it was harder to call up the unique taste of self than of someone
else?
Yeah. Even in the vision, I was trying to see myself like as a third person,
like I'm witnessing myself, my body, but it wasn't in my body.
Right. And the only way to do it and your intuition is brilliant, right? Rockstar fucking
brilliant. That's exactly the way you have to do it. You actually, you just blew it open. So I'm going to follow you. Okay, so let's play. So imagine there's a baby on the floor in between us, you know, here in this
gorgeous room that I loved when I walked in. This is a great room. So we're in this room,
there's a baby in between us. And Kyle, here's the deal. This baby only lives if you love this baby.
So this baby's life is dependent, absolutely.
Such is the decree from on high.
This baby only lives if Kyle loves this baby.
Okay, so you loving this baby brother?
Absolutely.
Okay, okay.
So the baby's like, you know, a month old.
And by the way, I have four kids.
So four times I've gone through a month old, right?
Oh my God.
Congratulations.
Oh my God, fuck me.
Twice where we're at.
Oh my God, oh my God, right?
All praise.
All praise, all praise, all praise to their mothers, okay?
Right, so this baby is like a month old.
Like, wow, a month old, right?
And this baby only lives, so it's decreed from heaven,
when Kyle, Lord Kyle pours in his love.
So you're loving that baby, Kyle.
You're loving that baby?
Okay, the baby's six months old.
Okay, same decree from heaven.
That baby lives if you love that baby you pour in that love in?
Absolutely.
Okay, and you don't have to think about it every second,
but it's a constant pour.
And just every once in a while, you bring your energy back to the baby's a year old.
A year old, you ready?
You loving that baby?
Absolutely.
That baby's gone if you don't love that baby.
So that baby only lives through your love.
The baby's now a year and eight months.
You loving that baby?
Absolutely.
Five years old.
You loving that baby?
Okay.
Baby's six.
Getting a little older, right?
Six years old.
Loving that baby?
Still loving.
Still loving that baby.
Okay.
Nine years old.
Loving that baby.
You loving that baby?
Absolutely.
Totally.
Pouring it in. You've been doing it for nine years. Okay. We're loving that baby. Okay, nine years old, loving that baby. You loving that baby? Absolutely. Totally, pouring it in.
You've been doing it for nine years.
Okay, we're loving that baby.
Baby is 13 years old.
Are you loving that baby, brother?
I sure am.
Oh my God, baby's having a bar mitzvah, okay?
Maybe a little bar, not so much mitzvah.
There we go.
Okay, the baby's 15.
You loving that baby?
Still loving.
18, the baby can drink.
You loving that baby?
Oh my God.
Loving that baby.
25 years old, loving that baby.
That baby will disappear if Kyle's not loving that baby.
Kyle does not love that baby.
That baby's life force is gone.
That baby dies.
The baby is now 32 years old.
Are you loving that baby, brother?
Still loving.
Loving that baby.
That baby is 40.
40, are you still loving that baby at 40, 40 years in?
40 is a big amount.
Jesus goes to the desert for 40 days.
40 is a big amount there.
40 days, the Israelites in the desert, 40.
He's loving it at 40.
That baby's now 50.
You loving that baby at 50, brother?
Oh yeah.
Okay, okay, good.
All right, wow.
Baby's 50, 45, you're loving that baby.
Okay, wow, so look in that baby's eyes.
Look in that baby's eyes at 45 years old.
You're looking, looking deep, deep, deep.
Okay, wow.
Right, and you know, so that baby's name is Kyle.
That's Kyle.
That's who you're loving.
You're loving Kyle madly at every age, whatever age.
You're loving that baby.
That's you.
That's you.
You're madly in love with that baby who is Kyle.
Wow.
And you can actually feel it.
You just poured love into that baby.
And that was easy because it was somebody else.
Third person.
And then we realized that baby's Kyle.
And then you realize,
I'm pouring my love into myself.
Could you feel for a moment self-love?
Yeah, I feel high as shit right now.
High as shit right now, right?
I can feel it in my hands.
Right, right.
In my head.
Right, right.
That is, right.
Oh my God.
That's a yoga of self-love.
So self-love, the I is real, and loving myself is a big fucking
deal. And self-love is the opposite of narcissism. Narcissism comes from self-disgust,
which is covered up by narcissism. That's actually the structure of narcissism. The ideology of
narcissism, psychoanalytically, is self-disgust and narcissist is actually disgusted
with himself right self-love means and oh my god she reality intended kyleness she gifted reality
with kyleness she's moving through me and i actually see myself and actually love myself. And oh my God, right?
Literally, when we do this yoga practice,
we actually sometimes get for the very first time in our lives,
an actual experience, not meta-theoretical.
I'm actually loving myself.
It's so much easier to love somebody else.
So loving myself is big.
It's huge.
Now, high as shit, right? It's like I'm loving myself. That's real. And brother, right, we can do that practice. I sometimes do that
practice twice a day, right? It's a 90-second cash practice. Do it twice a day. You just walk through it in your mind.
You have an actual,
immediate,
lived experience of loving yourself.
It completely changes everything.
And there's a reason
why the good book said,
v'avta l're'acha,
love your friend,
kamocha,
as yourself.
Because you got to love yourself,
but everyone leaves out the end of that sacred text.
The last two words of the sacred text are, I am God.
Meaning my I participates in the divine.
Wow.
We can't live without a lived experience of self-love. And this yoga we just did,
it's actually, we did two steps of yoga. It's direct and we need not just first principles
and first values, which we talked about. We need first practices in order to kind of create a new
universal grammar of value, if you will, kind of, it's almost the beginning of a new world religion,
but not one which dominates, but a world religion which makes room for all religions.
It's a unique self symphony of religion. And I specifically use the word religion. People are
afraid of it, the spirituality. I'm not talking about religion, right? No, actually we need
religion, right? Religion meaning, right, religare, to reconnect. And we've exiled religion to the fundamentalists
and we kind of live in our own little bubbles and we'll say yeah we're doing our spirituality shit
which means i move from one thing to another to another to another never really locate myself
never ground never practice never transform and i never bow right before right that which i'm being
held by so we need not a dominating religion not a-modern religion, but we need to take the best of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern
insight and create a new world religion, not where everyone's doing the same thing, but it's a
shared score of music, which is the context for our diversity, which has a shared dharma, which is
the shared story of value that we live in, which actually overcomes our global intimacy disorder,
which is the source of existential risk. Existential risk means we're going to destroy
the planet. We're going to destroy ourselves. It's the death of the human being, death of humanity,
and the death of our humanity, two forms of existential risk. But existential risk is rooted
in the fact that we can't meet global challenges. And global challenges require global coherence.
And global coherence requires global resonance. We need to resonate with global challenges. And global challenges require global coherence. And global coherence requires global resonance.
We need to resonate with each other.
And global resonance requires global intimacy.
We have a global intimacy disorder.
We have a global intimacy disorder because we don't have a shared story of value with
shared practices.
So we need to actually enact kind of a world spirituality, but almost a world religion,
but as a context for all the religions.
Every religion goes on, but we realize, no, no, actually, we're all instruments in this unique
self symphony of spirit, but it's actually religion in the sense that we live it for real.
We're committed to it. We're willing to die for it, but not to kill others for it, right? It's a
context for our diversity. So this is an example
of a yoga of a world spirituality, the yoga of a world religion, right? The yoga of a universal
grammar of value, which is the I. So we start with the I. Okay, we can breathe for a second,
right? Wow. We got the I, okay? Right? Like, whoa. Right? Where are we? Right? Right?
Like we just did like a journey. We just did a medicine journey. Right? We're just,
we breathe for a second. Okay. Let's breathe for a second. All of us.
So Kyle says, let's go from the I to the we. So we means I love you.
So what does it mean to love you?
So we think I love you is I have this emotion
and it's called love.
So we've literally exiled love.
And the reason we can't love ourselves,
we also can't go to the we, we can't love you
because we don't know what love means. And by the way, I'm sorry for dating myself. I'm doing it again, but my
favorite song, I want to know what love is, Foreigner. They did it. They did it good. They
did good. They did good, right? Tom Cruise version of it's terrible, right? When he kind of slapsticks
it, Tom Cruise, you did good in Top Gun. He's looking good at 60. He's looking damn good. He's
looking damn good at 60. Scientology is doing good. He's looking damn good at 60.
Scientology is doing something.
Okay, so blessings, brothers,
whatever the fuck you guys are doing.
Okay, he's looking good.
Okay, so he was good.
And he's doing his own stunt.
So hey, got to give Tom a bow.
He's still got it.
He's still got it, okay?
Right, but foreigner, right?
I want to know what love is.
And by the way, we do that song as a prayer, right?
At every festival, every event we do.
It's just such a great prayer.
And prayer is hidden in all the most surprising places.
So dated or not dated, it's great.
So I wanna know what love is.
We wanna know what love is, right?
We've traveled so far, right?
I can't do this anymore, right?
So we don't know what love is. And this is a very big deal. So you can't, I can't do I anymore, right? So we don't know what love is, and this is a very big deal.
So you can't, I can't do I love you, right?
Unless I know what love is.
And I love you is,
I love you is our sacred creed.
And our sacred creed is what we say
at the moment of death, right?
So do I go om mani padme om? Do I do in Hebrew tradition, sh'may Yisrael, hero Israel, the Lord of death, right? So do I go, om mani padme om?
Do I do in Hebrew tradition, sh'may Yisrael,
hero Israel, the Lord our God,
the Lord is one at the moment of death?
So generally there's a creed that we say at the moment of death.
So it's 9-11 in 2001.
We all remember where we were
and the Twin Towers are hit
because radical fundamentalist religion
is mad not completely and correctly, right, but they commit an act of terror and they
want to cut off the phallus of the West, right, you know, and the place in which the financial
instruments devoid of intrinsic value are created.
Wow, it's an incredible moment, right? And it's a terrorist
act, right? Now, a terrorist act remains a terrorist act, even if it's fueled by sparks of
rage, which is not completely inappropriate, but it's still a terrorist act, right? It was a horrible we have recovered the cell phone records of what people said in those last seconds they called home
and they didn't recite shema the hebrew sacred creed with jewish or not lots of jews there are
lots of christians lots of muslims right lots of, right? What unites us is so much greater than
that which divides us, right? Me, I'm a Christian and I'm a Jew, right? And I'm a Muslim and I'm a
Buddhist and I'm an atheist, right? I'm all of it, right? Or we got to be all of it, right?
And people fucking said, I love you. That's what they said, right? They had seconds left to live,
right? There's no pretense. They said, I love you. So that's what we say at
the moment of death. It means I love you is our sacred creed. And it's like, right? But here's
the tragedy. We've lost what it means, right? And as it doesn't have the power it once had,
does I love you mean I sleep only with you? Well, maybe, maybe not.
Maybe I love you means I want you to have pleasure that's not only for me. Maybe that means that.
Does I love you mean I'm with you for my whole life? And does I love you mean I love you so much
that I want to bring all of you, even if it doesn't come through me? Does I love you mean,
what does I love you mean? We're right. I love you is right. We don't know what I love you means.
Right? We don't know how to express it. We don't know
what form it should take. Do I love only one person? Well, do you exile love to only one person?
So, so there's this, we don't know what it means and yet it's our sacred creed and we've exiled
love. I would say four or five times over and, and to get to we, right, to I love you, we need to see what's the exile of love.
So first, we've exiled love from the cosmic to the human, right? In other words, we think love
is a human experience. And everything we said at the beginning of our conversation is no,
right? It's what Dante called the love that moves the sun and other stars, right? It's the love that Tagore said,
it's love that's not mere human sentiment. It's the heart of existence itself, right? Like,
right? And it's the heart of existence itself. I call that outrageous love. But outrageous love
is just another term for eros, but it needed another word because you have to feel the outrageousness of it.
You know, my friend down here in Austin, John, John Mackey,
who's a beautiful man, right,
who was the chair of the center, you know,
for a bunch of years of the think tank.
So John and I had a fun argument.
John said, I get outrageous love,
but let's call it unlimited love.
You know, John's like, you know,
let's hold, let's be wholesome about this, right? Outrageous, this guy got rage in it, it's got anger in it. And it was a great inquiry,
and it was a great question. It was a beautiful conversation. I learned from every conversation
with John. But I said, John, we got to call it outrageous love because it's fucking outrageous,
right? It is boundary breaking, right? It keeps every boundary that should be kept,
and it breaks every boundary that should be broken.
And outrageous love is not a human experience. It's the heart of reality itself that then awakens in me.
So we've exiled love from the cosmic to the human.
That's the first exile of love.
We've made love a very small experience,
what Tagore calls mere human sentiment.
When really what's moving in the human
being is the eros of cosmos moving in the human being. That's much bigger, right? So one, we've
exiled to the human being. Two is we've exiled to a particular experience of loving, infatuation,
right? So one, we've exiled to the human being. Let's even go slower. We've exiled one to the
human being. Let's do this together. One, the exile to the human being, from cosmic to human.
Two, in the human realm, we've exiled to an emotion. That's probably a better two. Love is
an emotion. The emotion's there, energy and emotion, it's great. Emotion's gone, then love's
gone. That's what we assume, right? I get hit by Cupid's arrow. Oh, got me.
Oh, now I've got the secretary. Now, right? That's right. That arrow's kind of-
Arrow keeps moving.
Arrow keeps wending and wiving there, right? So we identify love with an emotion, exile two.
Exile three, now I'm getting it clearer. We exile with a particular emotion, the emotion of infatuation, right? Exile for, we think that that infatuation yields a particular form of fuck, right?
Which looks a particular way, you know, and it might be kind of nine and a half weeks fuck.
It might be, you know, in other words, whatever your image is,
whatever's got an image, that's great fuck.
And that comes from infatuation and that's what love is, right? And if that experience wanes, or if I can't access that
experience, or if it doesn't generate direct arousal, that's not really love. And then five,
and I can only have that experience with one person. And if I don't have that experience
consistently throughout my life with one person, then my life has somehow failed because we're not part of the great love story of the universe
anymore. So we try and replace that with the pseudo eros of our personal love story. Now,
what I mean by that is I want to be really careful. Our personal love story is eros itself,
but when it replaces the love story of the universe, when it becomes the whole thing,
when it's two skin encapsulated egos, right, kind of engaging in not an outrageous love,
but ordinary love, which becomes a strategy for security, a strategy for comfort,
which is the opposite of pleasure. I mean, the opposite of pain is not pleasure. The opposite
of pain is comfort, right? So I spent my whole life avoiding
pain, a void dance. I dance around the void of pain. And now I'm 75 years old. And I wonder why
I never found pleasure because the opposite of pain is not pleasure. Pain and pleasure are
inextricably combined, right? I mean, if I can be audacious and correct me if I'm wrong,
but you can see in your face how much you love your wife.
And I guarantee you that also your most intense pain
comes from the place between you and your wife.
It has to.
No doubt, yeah.
Right?
Because pain and pleasure.
Parenting, right there.
Your kids, right?
No doubt.
Oh my God, right there. Your kids, right? No doubt. Oh my God, right? My son, Zion,
right? Whose mom actually got very sick, is living with me now. And like, I worry about him every day.
And Christina's actually just blown it away. Her and Zion have become like best friends.
But you know, Zion causes me massive pain because I just worry about him.
I mean, I want him to grow up in a particular way and I love him madly, right? So you can't split pain and pleasure, right? So we get this
sense, right, that we've exiled love five times from the cosmic to the human, one, two, to only
human emotion, three, to a particular emotion, to infatuation, you know a particular emotion to infatuation, you know, four to
infatuation, which yields a particular form of arousal, right? And then five, and we're going
to make it six, five, and that arousal, if it's true, has to keep going on in the same way all
the time, which it never does, right? Right? It always changes, right? And then six, and you have
to have that all with one person. Really? Really?
Oh my God.
That's the sixfold, we just framed it here in a new way,
that's the sixfold exile of love
that's at the heart of Western culture.
So A, we don't know what love means.
We think it's emotion.
The emotion dies away.
We've exiled it six times,
and then we feel like we've failed
because we're not part of a larger story.
We don't know that there's a larger love story in reality. So the only thing I have is my love story. That's where I get my value from. And I failed in
that love story, according to the standards that it's set up in its mythic falsification of love.
And so therefore, we have a society that's massively depressed, with opioid endemics,
obesity that we talked about earlier, raging, because we're living in failed love stories.
And we live in Western society and in Eastern society,
meaning in closed societies and open societies,
West and East, we live in failed love stories.
That's shocking, right?
That's shocking, right?
We live in failed love stories.
Wow, right?
So let's see if we can, like right here, here right now engage in the evolution of love and the
evolution of consciousness like right here right now so and let's liberate from exile right we have
to liberate love from exile that's what we want to do right here right now like let's do that so one
love is a cosmic experience right we live in a world of outrageous love, right?
We live in a world of outrageous pain,
but the only response to outrageous pain
is outrageous love.
And outrageous love is not ordinary love.
It's the heart of existence itself.
And therefore, who I am,
because remember we said earlier,
scientifically, all of cosmos lives in me.
So the same eros that makes subatomic particles into an atom moves through me.
So outrageous love is literally moving through me.
So who am I?
Not metaphorically, not mythopoetically, I'm an outrageous lover.
For real, I'm a unique expression of outrageous love.
And it's outrageous.
And it rages, it's angry at all that's
small. It has prophetic rage against all that stands against love. So it's a quality of outrageous
love that lives in me. I'm an outrageous lover. And I don't exile my love, right, as this, you know,
limited human experience. No, my human experience is outrageous love moving through me. But then love is not
merely an emotion. And this is huge. Emotion is an expression of love, but love at its core is
not an emotion. Love is a perception. Love is a perception. Love means I see you, right? And when I look into your eyes, I can see you seeing your wife, right?
And by the way, Cameron did a good job.
He got it right.
Avatar, I see you, right?
I see you, right?
So love is a perception.
Love means to be a lover is to see with God's eyes, right?
Like, wow, right?
I see you like God sees you, like infinity sees you, right? Which intended you, which we talked about earlier, right? Like, wow, right? I see you like God sees you, like infinity sees you, right? Which
intended you, which we talked about earlier, right? So to be a lover is to see with God's eyes,
right? And by the way, to love God, right? People talk about loving God. Is God lovable?
Why would I love God? I don't even know what that means, right? But the traditions weren't crazy.
They got corrupt.
They got degraded, but there was a spark of the sacred.
So to love God means to let God see through your eyes.
Right, you just laugh, right?
Right, it's so beautiful and so obvious, right?
To let God, we said before, to let God desire through you,
to let God see through your eyes.
So to be a lover is to see with God's
eyes. And to love God is to let God see through your eyes. So love is a perception. It's not an
emotion. That changes everything. Because if it's an emotion, you keep trying to recreate that
original emotion, which never gets recreated, right?
And then that emotion, energy and motion,
laws of physics, dies away.
But if love is a perception, that perception deepens, right?
I can see clearly now, right?
Great song, right?
From 5,000 years ago, but such a good song, right?
Right, so, right?
Heavy metal never grabbed me, sorry. I never, you know, I'm ago, but such a good song, right? Right, so, right, heavy metal never grabbed me.
Sorry, I never, you know, I'm just, what can I do?
I just like those old pop songs.
I can, it's terrible.
I know it's terrible, right?
But, and I love Ilana's songs.
They're beautiful, right?
They're incredible, beautiful.
So love is a perception.
Perception gets deeper.
The hope and the gorge-ness of that, right? In other words, love is a memory of the future. Hope's a memory of the future. So, I love you means 10
years in, I see you deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, not surface perception, depth perception.
And love means I actually see your infinite beauty, your infinite specialist, your gorge-ness.
And the more I perceive, the more I love, right?
Christina and I had a beautiful moment this morning,
you know, which I won't fully describe in public space.
But it was this beautiful moment where I looked into her eyes
and I saw her eyes in a way that I hadn't seen them in a few years
in this kind of new, beautiful way.
But it was deeper
than what I used to see her eyes that way because we've been through so much, right? Right. We've
been through so much and we've loved each other so deeply and we've been through and we reclaimed
a certain way of looking at each other's eyes, which was infinitely deeper just this morning
than we'd ever done it before. Because perception gets deeper and deeper.
I was, time for a crazy story? No, please. Crazy story. Let's go. You know, our friend,
the Dalai Lama is a good man. So this is a crazy story. It's a true crazy story. It's actually,
it's on film someplace, maybe on the website someplace, not on the Center for Neuro-Wisdom website, I think on my website, but neither here nor there, things happen that are
not on websites. We have to remember that, right? It happened either way, right? It's like,
so I was at the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. And, you know, this group of people had
invited, you know, to come to the Pope's summer residence,
you know, like 20 of us were kind of countercultural leaders in our traditions.
At that point, I was deeply identified with kind of the classical practice of Hebrew wisdom.
I still do all the practices. I'm deeply committed to the lineage practices, but,
you know, I've kind of moved to kind of a much more universal identification,
even with great loyalty, right, to the lineage.
The lineage has expanded.
But at that time I was, you know,
very identified culturally.
And, you know, I was doing in the Middle East
kind of this kind of national television show,
this kind of like Oprah show kind of thing
in a particular country.
And so they had invited me to this gathering of like, you know, 20 of us. And my friend Michael Beckham was
there, you know, that's where we met from Agape. And Michael and I became kind of crazy good
friends and we remained for many years such. And who was there? This whole gang. Elizabeth Sotoros
and I think Bill Urie was there and a whole list of other kind of,
you know, of that, you know, that group of teachers who I wasn't really familiar with
because I was doing, you know, my Middle East thing at the time. And, you know, and I was living
particularly in Israel. And this group was not in love with Israel. I have to say, they were not in love with Israel.
So I was a conundrum to them.
We kind of liked each other.
We're like, oh, we're hanging.
It's cool.
There's this great woman, Afra, right?
With her father from Syria.
So Afra and I got in these kind of wonderful conversations
and people were gathering around.
But it was intense.
It was very intense.
And at some point, Michael Beckwith,
you know, we had become friends and he says, Mark's not Jewish, he it was intense. It was very intense. And at some point, Michael Beckwith, you know,
we had become friends and he says, Mark's not Jewish, he's joyous. I said, Michael, was that
kind of like saying some of my best friends are Jewish? Was that like, what was that? Right? It
was like, it was a very, and we were all in the tension of it, right? And the Dalai Lama and I,
we liked each other and it was all based hanging in a room. And at some point the Dalai Lama says,
he says, because there was all this tension in the space,
and he says, Mark, Mark Jewish, Israeli,
but Mark very nice.
Like, fuck, did the Dalai Lama just say that?
And I was furious with him.
And you're not allowed to be furious with the Dalai Lama.
I'm just saying that's like, that's so political.
It's the ultimate politically incorrect act
is to be furious with the Dalai Lama.
So we're there at Castro Condolfo,
and I'm wearing a skullcap,
which at that time I wore at all times
because I was in that kind of public practice,
you know, at that stage of my life.
And so I go into what you call in psychology
a spontaneous age regression, right? So I'm like, you know, five years old, Columbus, Ohio,
riding my bike and people are throwing eggs at me and saying, kike. So I kind of went that
spontaneous age regression and I crossed the room, place gets really quiet. I go up to the
dialometer. You think it's so easy. You wear it, motherfucker. I Place gets really quiet. I go up to the dial-a-ma.
He's like, you think it's so easy?
You wear it, motherfucker.
I didn't say motherfucker.
I just thought it.
All right.
And he looked at me and he realized,
we both got that this is a,
the place goes dead silent, right?
Because of course I've now ruined,
you know, this, you know what I mean?
Like the ultimate,
we're doing the ultimate sacrilege here.
So he looks at me.
I look at him and there's just this moment.
He takes my yarmulke and he says, Buddhist monk, no hair, yarmulke, very hard. He calls, right?
We laugh. He calls his advisor who brings his sun visor, gets his sun visor, puts it on and
tucks my yarmulke into his sun visor, wears it the whole day, right? And then at the end of the day,
he looks at me with this kind of mischievous smile,
puts my yarmulke in his pocket and walks out.
And I'm like, motherfucker, Mr. Dalam, that's my yarmulke, right?
So he sends his close friend Achak Rinpoche, right, to talk to me.
And basically he says, hey, if you want your yarmulke back,
come visit me in Dharmasala. I said, well, okay, I'm in, right? So I fly to Dharamsala
to get my yarmulke back. You know, we brought a television crew with us, right? So, you know,
and we televised this whole thing, which we actually never aired for a bunch of reasons,
just didn't air. But we spend this incredible time together just hanging out and
talking. And, you know, I brought him a present. You know, there's this very beautiful cloth that
he wears in a particular, you know, teaching practice in Tibetan Buddhism. So I went and
found the woman, which wasn't easy, Ind Dharamsala who made that garment for him.
And then I brought the ritual fringes, which are these shamanic fringes, which are part of kind of classical lineage practice, which are tied in a particular way. I brought with me this guy, Gil
Kopach, who's kind of like Israel's kind of key comedian, and his sister Edith. So Edith, who's a
mathematician, kind of tied the fringes properly onto the Dalai Lama's garment.
So we made this kind of Jerusalem Dharamsala garment.
So I give him the garment.
And the beauty of the Dalai Lama is his capacity to be just a child after having suffered so much.
So he puts on this talit and he says, I'm a Tibetan Jew.
I'm a Tibetan Jew.
And he starts jumping around and he wants to take pictures.
And we're having like a fabulous time. And we had deep conversations about, you know, Jerusalem
meeting Tibet and about what does it mean to be in exile? Because there's this deep Tibetan exile.
And he's trying to figure out, he said to me, I go to the West because they're much nicer to me
there. They like me here. They're mad at me. Tibet's mad at me. Dharamsala's mad at me.
And so we're talking about love. And he said, okay, so what's the teaching on love? Love's so important. And I shared with him what we just talked about, right? That love's not an emotion.
That love's a perception. And he got so excited. And such a beautiful, the beauty of the child,
like the cherubs in the temple have a child face
because it's the face of innocence.
But it's not a first innocence, it's a second innocence.
The Dalai Lama suffered intensely.
I've suffered intensely.
You've probably suffered in your life in real ways.
So the second innocence is the child
that reclaims our innocence.
We re-virginate, we reclaim that second innocence, right?
And he just got so excited.
He just said, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,
because he understood that you can train perception.
You can't train emotion, right?
And as emotion that comes from perception, you can arouse,
but it's gotta be rooted in perception.
So if love is a perception, I can love you.
It's I can fall in love with Kyle,
which is what I'm doing in this podcast.
I'm like this beautiful man sitting across from me
who's just like shining and we're in the inside together.
And we've never met before, but we get to fall in love.
Right?
We actually get to fall in love.
And if we had all those exiles of love,
then we can't fall in love because we fucked love up.
When we actually liberate love,
we actually get to fall in love.
And you got to fall in love all the time.
You got to fall in love with a new person, but for real,
you get to love them.
And we get to love each other outrageously.
And we get to be committed,
and we're going to know each other our whole life. For sure.
Right, I'm in.
Fuck you.
Right, like we're in, right?
And that's real.
It's real.
There's this moment at this event we ran called Success 3.0
that I ran with John, where John turns to me and says,
I'm in love with you.
I said, John, I'm in love with you.
Right, and we've exiled that capacity to fall in love.
So second, the move from I to we is
we actually fall in love with each other. That's a big deal. If we don't fall in love with each
other, if we just have social relations, then we generate the generator function of existential
risk, right? The death of humanity or the second form of existential risk, the death of our
humanity, right? Through a kind of a world of upgraded algorithms and downgraded human beings.
But that's generated, the generator function is the story we live in, which is not a love story.
It's rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics.
That's the story that, that's the opposite of a love story, right?
So to respond to existential risk, we have to fall in love with each other, right?
At a tribal level, right?
Right, we love each other interpersonally,
and we love our people.
That's not enough, that's we.
We've got to move the boundary of the we.
And this is a big deal because we've always fallen in love
with each other at the we level.
We didn't know how to love well enough,
but we knew how to love the in-group.
But we always placed the boundary someplace
where we loved the in-group when we killed the out-group.
We've got to move the boundary.
And that's what we call no boundary consciousness.
No boundary consciousness where I move the boundary,
it's no boundary consciousness or no boundary, right?
We actually love every human being
on the face of the planet.
And so our we, we're still in we,
but our we's expanded, right?
No one's outside the circle.
No one's a stranger.
That's Camus' stranger.
And for Camus, love is a social construction of reality.
That's the postmodern teaching that dominates the university.
And this is something that Aubrey and I talked about, but it needs to be said.
When this book Homo Sapiens, this popular book, talks about love, it says love is a fiction.
It's a social construction of reality. It's a figment
of our imagination. No. No, Yuval, you love your husband Yitzchak. The dude who wrote the book.
Now love is real. It's not a social construction of reality. Just ask Yitzchak. He loves you.
And Yitzchak's actually the guy, his husband, who actually took your lectures at Hebrew University
and loved you so much and put them together in a book and got them published in Hebrew
and then found you a publisher
because Yitzhak was madly in love with you.
And that love was the outrageous love of reality,
moving through your husband, Yitzhak,
loving you madly, giving your gift in the world.
Love's real.
But we got to expand.
No one's outside the circle.
No one's outside the circle.
That's a big, there's no one who's a stranger,
which is why we get to meet.
We came from different places. We have different sociocultural backgrounds,
different parents, different lives,
but we were allured and allurements real
and allurement guides our life.
And allurement didn't stop in the world of photosynthesis.
It's all human beings, no more allurement.
Really?
I mean, it's an insane idea. Allurement guides life. So here we are. We
get to fall in love. How do we get to the all? Okay, last step. And again, I'm just, my job here
is just to respond, just to follow your guidance. So I'm just, you said I, we, all. Let's get,
how do I love the all? So good, right? It's so good. So I move from egocentric, but powerful, healthy,
egocentric love. I don't leave it behind. I love myself. I include it and transcend it into this
sociocentric, ethnocentric, I love my tribe. And my tribe expands, and it's not just my tribe,
it's world-centric love. So the first song is egocentric.
The second song, right, is ethnocentric, my tribe.
It's a we, but then my we gets bigger,
it's world-centric, every human being, right?
Live Aid concert, 1985, right?
We are the world.
That's a world-centric explosion.
That's not enough, I gotta love the all.
The all is everything, right?
So if I'm, and I apologize for the people who like lamb chops.
And Brother Rob, sorry, brother. But if I'm actually eating lamb chops
from a factory farm where a lamb was put in a little cage, essentially tortured for three months
in order to give me a succulent moment of my, of my lampshops, I'm a motherfucker
in regard to the all, right? And I'm participating in the abuse, right, right, you know, of the animal
world, which is horrific. I mean, it's horrific. It's not, it's a massive abuse of the very source of culture because I've split animals off from my circle of intimacy.
They're outside my circle of intimacy, right?
When I don't love the future, right?
In other words, when I'm willing to engage in practices
that generate potential existential risk,
but I displace that risk
because it's going to happen maybe in a hundred years,
so I think, but let's say that's even right.
So what I'm saying is I'm not intimate with the future.
We said before, just in a passing phrase,
we said intimacy is shared identity.
So I have no shared identity with the future.
The future is out of my circle of intimacy.
Animals are out of my circle of intimacy.
Existential risk means that the past has failed
because the past has passed its baton to us.
So I have, the past is out of my circle of intimacy, right?
So in other words, I'm loving in a very, very narrow,
contracted love.
Love has exiled itself once again.
So to love all means I'm intimate with all
because enlightenment is intimacy with all things.
That's what it is, right?
So I love the all, cosmocentric love, right?
So that's the evolution of love.
So the evolution of love, that movement of consciousness
is the movement of cosmos itself.
So Eros is not static.
Eros is not just being.
When I do a medicine ceremony, I fall into being.
And when I go deeper into the medicine ceremony,
I fall into becoming.
The evolutionary impulse,
I participate in the pulse of becoming,
which is the pulse of evolution living in me,
as me and through me,
which is the evolutionary impulse personalized in me,
which is the outrageous love letter of God
written, signed on my body.
It's my uniqueness is God's signature, right?
I am God's outrageous love letter.
And living my life as an outrageous love letter
is my outrageous love letter back to God, right?
Like that.
So the I, thank you.
That was such a beautiful inquiry.
The I, the we, the all.
I love that.
Cha.
Cha.
Wow. Wow.
I love that you brought up Yuval's book. I was such a fan of it when I first read it. And I was
like, oh, that's interesting that he's kind of going through the history in such a way.
And I kind of wondered what his take on spirituality was, you know, coming from Israel. And then, you know, recently I've seen so much of him in light with the Klaus Schwab's of the world and the World Economic Forum and kind of the globalist push.
And I heard from Aubrey that you've studied quite a bit on globalism.
Yes.
You know, I think there's a picture of the all that you're describing.
And then there's a picture of how the all should behave
and act in a different light.
Yeah, wow.
Right, wow.
Wow, wow.
I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, no, no.
There's a lot there.
There's a lot there.
There's a lot there.
There's a lot there.
I don't mind keeping you if you don't mind staying.
I'm good.
We're about two hours in.
There is a term for the darkness in almost every major religion.
And I first had a major encounter with that at the end of 2020.
So, you know, the world is crumbling around me,
as above, so below, as within, so without.
And I know that had a major influence on why my journey took me there.
And there was a lot that I gained from that first encounter with it.
A lot of it was conscious fears.
I lived those conscious fears.
My wife had had a miscarriage in between our two children.
And I lived that over and over again, watching it in the most gruesome way happen right in front of me while she was carrying our daughter, Wolf, who is here with us. And a lot of that, in my mind, if I'm to rationalize it, was to expose
those fears for me. Some were conscious, some were unconscious, and allow me to live, to disregard
and allow those things to fall away. And I only got to move through these layers once I had fully
come to terms with them, and I truly didn't give a shit. I would repeat that layer of the game until I was like, all right, cool. Now she explodes. Now
consciousness ends and it's all my fault. And then finally, when I gave up, then I'd get to
another layer. And I'd had another journey maybe a year later. And it created a series of events
where when I'd go to sleep, it would react, it would reactivate.
And that's where it got pretty weird. The closest resemblance I had to understanding it was a book
called Dispelling Wetiko by Paul Levy. And in that book, he talks about the Native American
term wetiko, which he cleverly called malignant egophrania. And it's almost to the point where,
you know, if it was game theory,
you have non-player characters in the game. And so much of our conversation has alluded to the
answers I was hoping I'd gain from even bringing up the darkness, the love story, you know,
the purpose, the drive of allurement to experience it. It's not just God knowing itself.
There's a purpose and a beauty
behind that exploration of love. And that's really, without those words, without having the ability to
explain it that way, that's what medicine journeys had showed up for me in the past,
remembrance of that. And through this, it was just a complete dismantling of everything I had held on to from a spiritual standpoint, you know, and
really, you know, was quite dark. And I'm not sure the point of that, other than like what happened
after that. Well, I really appreciated the 3D in a way that I never had before. Right. Thank God I
have a body. Thank God I'm sane and not insane. Cause I lived the insane for 17 nights. Yeah.
Wow. Thank God for my kids,
you know, thank God for every little thing that I, that I, that I can be thankful for it. It
reinstilled that. And it also gave me kind of a, all right, I'll stop asking questions.
Like, let me bow before the presence of the mystery and leave it a mystery
and not try to dive into that. But I'm curious, you know,
with the movement to the loving of the all,
you know, does that encapsulate loving the darkness?
You know, Paul Selig is a channel
and somebody you might be familiar with
that Aubrey and I have been a fan of over the years.
We've read many of his books
and, you know, he'll channel a book
and speak it in front of a live audience
and write the whole book in 17 days.
So there's many channels out there where I'm like, maybe, maybe not.
But I mean, just to get down a coherent work of art that is his literature in that amount of time, I imagine something's coming through him.
If it's not his high self, it's something. and one of the things that he's asking for in the evolution of consciousness
for us to move into the upper room as he calls it
is to see everything as it is and to love it
and to love the darkness, to not look away from it
or to say, that's not me.
You know, top diplomacy, that too.
I'm that too, right?
Yeah, yeah, beautiful, beautiful.
There's a lot there. there's a lot there there's a lot there
you said two you raised two separate huge important you know wonderful
you know complicated complex, complex, terrible, critical pieces.
So I'll talk maybe, you know, first about the second, about darkness,
and then a little bit about actually Yuval and Yuval Harari and World Economic Forum,
because I think that's, you raised both of them and they both deserve, you know, an engagement.
But let's first talk about the darkness.
You know, so one,
the darkness hides in many unusual places, right?
And often those crying out against the darkness,
you know, are filled with darkness themselves.
You know, and that's, darkness hides in surprising places, right?
And it's funny, when we look at the Catholic church, we're like, oh, okay.
We kind of expect it because we stopped believing in Catholic dogma a long time ago.
So we're not surprised actually that the church is corrupt and the church has much beauty and it's also intensely corrupt.
And it has been for a thousand years.
And at the same time, many beautiful people have moved through it.
But we're not surprised by corruption in the Catholic church. In the human potential world, you know, in the new age world, we're surprised by corruption
because they're speaking the lines that we expect.
They're speaking kind of, oh, right, right.
And yet, the spiritual teaching world, right, is also filled with self-commodification, rival's conflict,
you know, and with,
you know, really a failure of love.
And so darkness paradoxically
is often right in front of you, right?
The Jedi in the great Star Wars,
you know, epic,
which has become the story of culture
more watched than any other story.
They're looking for
the sith lord who's the dark side he's actually sitting right in front of them and as yoda who
has the capacity to sense at all the movements of the force in the universe right in mace window
and obi-wan kenobi right in kai gu Jin, Obi-Wan's teacher, right, talk every day to Palpatine, and they don't realize he's Darth Sidious.
So the darkness often is right in front of you.
People can write about the darkness and actually be dark themselves.
And so we have to be careful.
You know, the person who wrote about this very, very well
was in his book that got much less attention.
He wrote a very famous book in the mid-70s
that was kind of seminal in the human potential movement,
Scott Peck, you know, the famous book,
The Road Less Traveled.
But his better book was actually the first hundred pages of a book called People of the Lie.
It was about the darkness.
It was about exactly what you're talking about.
And he points out that people of the lie are in surprising places.
And so,
you know, it's a very terrifying realization,
right, that there actually is a quality of darkness in cosmos
and that darkness has some energy, right?
It has some energy.
And yet, we can't avoid the darkness. And that's what's so important. In other words,
if we split off the darkness, and I'll stay with Star Wars, not because the writers of Star Wars
or George Lucas at Skywalker Rants particularly thought about this or didn't, but because the nature of culture is it speaks through its vehicles, right? And
movies are a vehicle that culture speaks through, even if the movie makers or the writers had no
such intention, but the movie stands by itself, right? And so when you look at Star Wars, you have basically the Sith and the Jedi.
And the Sith say the dark is so powerful that it blows away the light.
And its power is so much more intense that if you actually access your rage and you access your jealousy and you access the dark virtues, you'll become much more powerful.
The Jedis say the dark's too dangerous. You can't actually flirt with the dark. So the Jedis split
off the dark side and speak only for what Christianity calls agape. And agape is the noble virtue of service.
And the beautiful sense of being fit for service,
which is beautiful agape.
But they split off Eros.
In other words, the Jedi don't marry.
You've never seen Obi-Wan Kenobi
in any kind of Eros.
He doesn't do Eros.
The only physical embodied Eros where you get a sense of kind of the sexual is one moment when Leia, right, in the first, the prequel, I think it's in movie two, right, is tied by a chain to Jabba, who's this, the ultimate degraded Eros,
this big round blob of degraded corruption.
And he kind of forces her,
because he's captured her,
to dress in a kind of 1950s pinup girl costume.
For the first time, you see Carrie Fisher's body
chained to him.
And her response to that is in know, is in the ensuing
battle, she chokes him with the chain and gets dressed. That's the only flesh scene in all of
Star Wars. That's shocking, right? So there's this exile and Anakin Skywalker, who wants to engage
what I would call noble Eros, meaning not the degraded Eros of the dark side, not agape. He wants to
engage noble Eros. He's madly in love with Padme. And he says, I know our child's a blessing,
right? Episode three of the prequel. And I don't want to talk to Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan doesn't
understand this. And he goes to Yoda. He says, Yoda, all right, I'm having these premonitions.
I'm this fear of loss. And Yoda can't. It's Yoda's classic mistake,
where he actually allows Darth Vader to arrive, to arise. Yoda doesn't get it. Yoda doesn't honor
noble Eros. He doesn't say to him, wow, who are you loving? What are you afraid of losing? He says,
no, no, be willing to give up everything right now that you're afraid to lose, or it'll be a
path to the dark side. Wrong answer, Yoda, right?
Right, Yoda, you got that wrong.
And Yoda means yada, to know carnally, right?
And it's from the book of Genesis 4.1, right?
Adam knew his wife Eve.
No, no, no, Yoda didn't know anything then.
Yoda was ignorant then.
Yoda didn't understand
and didn't honor the dignity of desire.
The Eros moving through Anakin.
So Anakin's caught in a double bind.
Gregory Bateson called it a double bind.
You're ripped apart by two opposing forces
you can't reconcile.
On the one hand, he gets the honor of the Jedi.
On the other hand, he gets that his love of Padme is real
and he doesn't know how to resolve them.
That's the double bind,
which allows Palpatine, meaning the darkness,
to actually find firm ground or soil in which it can root. So, Anakin is traumatized by this
double bind, and in the trauma, darkness enters.
The place where darkness enters us is in the place where we're traumatized,
in the place of our double bind, where we feel broken. We don't know how to put it together.
We feel ripped apart. And in that wound, darkness enters through the wound.
Darkness always enters through the wound.
Now, if I pretend darkness is not there, if I deny the darkness, if I split it off, it has me.
So I have to be willing to engage the darkness, not to do a void dance.
We talked about a void dance.
I've got to walk through the void, right?
So there's a very beautiful text, if I can, and maybe a text and a story,
and we can kind of find this.
The text is,
greater is light that comes from darkness.
No, excuse me.
The text is,
greater is light than darkness.
It's in chapter two, verse seven
of a book by Solomon,
the ancient king from Jerusalem
called Ecclesiastes.
He says,
greater is wisdom than folly.
Greater is wisdom than folly,
greater is light than darkness.
That's a binary split.
The Zohar in the 13th century,
2,000 years later says,
not greater is light than darkness,
but greater is light that comes from the darkness.
Right?
So it breaks the binary split.
So we got to be very careful
of splitting things off as evil
in a way that we create this binary split.
We demonize, right?
We don't want to demonize, right?
We want to actually,
we need to make friends with the darkness.
This is what the Jedi were afraid to do,
which is why I think Yoda understands
in the last episodes
that the Jedi temple needs to be burned.
The last set of episodes with Kylo Ren and Rey,
which are the last three episodes in Star Wars,
for the first time, the darkness,
which is embodied by Kylo Ren and Rey,
integrate into a larger whole.
It's actually, Star Wars actually overcomes itself.
And actually, George Lucas didn't get that.
He didn't understand he couldn't get there.
He actually sells the franchise
because that's how allurement works in the world.
Cosmos has its way.
And the new writers who weren't lost in that split that lived in Lucas rewrite the story.
And actually Kylo Ren comes together with Rey and a new wholeness is created, a diet in the force.
A diet in the force is the mad love actually between Kylo Ren and Rey.
And the deep attraction between the deep allurement which creates diet in the force, which fixes the brokenness, right?
That happens between Anakin and Padme.
Anakin and Padme can't become a diet in the force.
They're unable to do it.
Their love is hidden.
Their Eros is hidden.
Their fuck is hidden.
Their baby is hidden.
It's all hidden.
And in that hiddenness and that trauma,
darkness enters and Darth Vader emerges.
Wow.
Lucas doesn't know his way out of it.
It's actually stunning, right?
I've actually never shared this,
but it's actually very, very beautiful, right?
And then the intimate universe has its way.
Lucas, in this strange set of meetings that he regretted,
you know, sells to Disney, right?
Star Wars.
He regrets it almost immediately.
He's not even sure why he did it.
Then they have this new group of writers and J.J. Abrams and the whole gang,
I think Rian Johnson, whoever they were, and they rewrite the story. Now, not that they're
thinking that they're right. In other words, they just go their way. And when you read kind of all
that Star Wars lore, they don't actually understand what's happening. They're doing their gig. They're
in the win-lose metrics. They're making a movie.
Bless them.
But actually what happens is the story is rewritten.
And actually for the first time, the Jedi temple is burned, right?
And a new vision of a wholeness emerges in which Rey, who's deeply attracted to the darkness,
and Luke Skywalker, now an old man, refuses to train any more Jedi, cuts himself
off from the force because Kylo Ren had such darkness that it almost destroyed him. And he
was afraid of the power of the darkness. When he sees the power of darkness in Rey, he says,
oh my God, I've only seen that before in Kylo Ren. And it's an incredible set of scenes that are
culture speaking, not Star Wars speaking,
culture speaking to Star Wars.
And the integration can only happen
when you burn the Jedi temple
and you realize the entire split
between Eros and Agape is a false split.
It's not right.
The Jedi got it wrong, actually.
And that's actually what the Sith and the Jedi
both agree on,
is that you've got the split
between the light and the dark.
And the Sith and Jedi paradoxically agree on it, only the Jedi and the Jedi both agree on is that you've got to split between the light and the dark. And the Sith and Jedi paradoxically agree on it,
only the Jedi take the light side
and the Sith take the dark side.
They both got it wrong.
There needs to be a new emergent,
which is greater as the light
that comes from the darkness.
And actually that verse that we cited earlier, right?
It's from Leviticus 19, right?
And we need to reclaim sacred text.
Love your friend.
We said, as yourself, the word friend, rea,
as is ra, is the darkness.
The word rea, friend, also means evil darkness in Hebrew.
It's a two letter root, means the same thing.
Damn, damn, right?
Right, like, oh my fucking God. So it's love your evil
as yourself because it lives in you, meaning your darkness lives in you. And that darkness
needs to be brought into the realm of the holy. Because,
let's see if we can say it this way.
This is so important.
So there's all this talk about, you know,
integrating the shadow and the human potential.
Let's integrate the shadow.
You know, Robert Bly wrote a famous book, you know,
called The Little Book of the Shadow.
And Robert, blessings, brother, it's a terrible book.
Right, right, right, right.
And what he basically says is,
your shadow is your jealousy, your rage.
You gotta integrate that shit, right? And, you know, by the time we were 12 years old me and my two brothers the bly brothers we had a bag you know you know a mile long with all of our shadow
in it it was all of our hatred and our anger and our jealousy we got to integrate that well mr bly
with all due respect and you did great in the men's movement and great books of poetry so we
love you but why would you want to integrate that, right? You want to kill your brother.
Why would you want to integrate killing your brother?
Don't kill your brother.
It's not nice, right?
So what does that mean?
So he actually misunderstands shadow.
And there's a book by Connie Zweig
edited for Jeremy Tarcher, you know,
called Meeting the Shadow,
which also has got like, I don't know, 50 essays,
but they all make the same fundamental mistake.
They identify shadow with shadow qualities.
Shadow is not your rage and anger and jealousy
and pettiness and contraction.
That's not shadow.
Those are shadow qualities.
Shadow is your unlived light.
Shadow is your light that you haven't lived.
So in other words, it's not just that Kyle is desire.
Kyle is unique desire.
So Kyle's an irreducibly unique expression of the love desire
of cosmos. That's his light. The candle of the divine is the unique soul of the human being.
So Kyle is a unique light. That's his gift to the world. That's his presence. That's his being.
That's his becoming. To the precise extent that a dimension of Kyle's unique self is unlived, it's in shadow.
So shadow is your unlived unique self.
Shadow is the distortion of your soul print, if you will.
Shadow is either unlived soul print or distorted soul print.
So now your distorted soul print or your distorted unique self is now in shadow.
That's shadow. Then it wants to emerge. It wants to live, right? It's your light. It's your eros. It's your energy. So your eros in shadow, it's now in shadow. You've disowned it.
Now it wants to get your attention. So it acts out, it devolves, it acts out through shadow
qualities to get your attention. Those are shadow qualities that it gets jealous.
You're only jealous of someone who's living
a piece of your life that you haven't lived.
Real jealousy, not surface jealousy,
kind of that deep jealousy is when someone's living
a part of your life that you haven't lived,
then you experience a kind of profound jealousy.
You know, in the myth of Amadeus,
Salieri sees Mozart.
He's like, oh my God, that dude can make music, right?
I'm doing these like sweet, youarius, he's Mozart. He's like, oh my God, that dude can make music, right? I'm doing
these like sweet, you know, little, you know, pop songs, you know, for the Austrian emperor,
this dude's kind of bringing down God, right? And so he's filled with this kind of grenvy,
this greed, envy, and he can't live because Mozart's living a dimension of his unique self,
right? So darkness always comes from, right, the light that hasn't lived itself fully.
That's why we have to integrate shadow. I'm integrating shadow because shadow is my own
unique self distorted. That's what darkness is. And it's, darkness is never an ontology that's
fully independent, right? Darkness is a force that moves in the world that nourishes from the
distortion of my unique self.
And so I need to engage the darkness.
I need to enter the darkness carefully, right?
Without a kind of arrogance, you know, trembling before the divine.
But I need to enter the darkness to breathe it in and to weave it into the fabric of the light, right?
And that's what Nietzsche, by the way, understood.
You know, he said, you know, I have no love.
I have no honor, right, for the weak or without claws, right?
And you need to engage the full power of the darkness
and transmute it, right?
I mean, maybe the last image.
You remember when there were busy signals?
When we were kids, you would make a phone call,
there was a busy, right?
A busy signal.
So imagine you're calling someone to give them,
you know, a compliment about someone else.
You're calling a friend because you got this wonderful thing
to say about someone else.
So you call, like, you get a busy signal
and you call back later, a week later, two weeks later.
But let's say for most people, you call, like you get a busy signal and you call back later, a week later, two weeks later. But let's say for most people,
they're calling to share some piece of salacious gossip.
Get a busy signal, you just keep calling, calling, calling.
You want to share that.
That's the energy of darkness.
Darkness has energy.
And we need to be able to access that energy.
And the reason it has energy,
because it's a distortion of my unique self, right? And I'm not in my eros, I place someone else outside, because by placing them
outside, I got the illusion of being on the inside. We have to access the energy of darkness.
Putin is holding the energy of darkness, but he's got energy, right? There's something there.
And so we've got to liberate the spark of that energy,
right? And bring it into the precincts of the sacred and be very, very careful not to demonize,
but to daemonize, right? Daemon, right? Daemon means, right? The calling,
that there's a calling in the dark. And when I face my darkness,
I've got to listen for what it's calling me towards and not be seduced by it,
but I've got to seduce the darkness.
And maybe the last way to say it is,
you know, a riddle.
Here's a riddle.
Let's make up a riddle, okay?
So,
Kyle, here's the riddle, okay?
You know, I spoke to the presidium of Onnit
and Onnit is willing to offer $100,000
if you get the answer to this question right,
which is very generous of Onnit.
I feel that's very, very nice.
Okay, so the riddle is,
what did Adam say to the snake in the Garden of Eden?
Cha!
$100,000.
For real.
Right?
Cash, $100,000.
We get the riddle, what did Adam say to the snake in the Garden of Eden?
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do, right?
The answer is nothing.
Because men don't talk to snakes, they kill snakes,
right? Snakes, darkness. Who talks to the snake? Eve. The feminine befriends the darkness,
right? She doesn't go to kill the snake. She talks to the snake, right? So in the numerical
valuation of the lineage, every Hebrew letter has a numerical valuation. So the Hebrew word for
snake, nun, chet, shin, three Hebrew letters. And again, each letter has a certain number value.
So the number value of snake is the same number value as the word Messiah. That's called gematria,
that way of kind of equating number value, but it's a way of speaking.
It's not a trick.
It's not a parlor trick.
It's a way of saying there's this deep,
hidden esoteric resonance
that you don't want to speak publicly,
meaning Nachash, the snake, the darkness,
becomes Messiah.
Wow.
And Adam's not willing to have a conversation
with the snake.
Eve is.
The feminine says, no, tell me your story.
The feminine says, let me receive that.
Let me transmute it. That's beautiful. That's the beauty in the beast. The beauty in the beast is
she's willing to talk to the beast. She's willing to have a conversation. Everyone's demonized the
beast. And she says, no, no, no, let's have a conversation. And then that's the princess who
kisses the frog into a prince.
It's that same myth that runs through this understanding.
I need to make friends with the darkness because the darkness is the distortion of me.
And the darkness appears to me uniquely because it's the unique distortion of me, right?
And maybe last, we'll finish with this. I'm remembering a story about one of my lineage masters, the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the good name who founds the
Hasidic movement of kind of radical ecstasy in the Carpathian mountains.
And he's this Romanian kind of mystic. And he would travel from town to town
and he was a healer
and he would, you know, distribute medicines,
you know, of all kinds.
And he comes to a particular town
and there was a baby who had just been born
who was clearly about to die.
It was, you know, white and was barely breathing.
And the custom is that if there's a real sickness,
you call together the 10 righteous people in the town
and they create this quorum called the minyan
and they pray together.
So the parents are desperate, right?
They're a child and they go to the Baal Shem Tov
and he's just coming through town.
And they say, you know, our son's about to die,
our child, our baby, right?
Will you invoke the custom and call together the 10 righteous people?
And he says, yes, but if you want me to do it, I'll do it my way.
And they're desperate, whatever you want.
And so he calls together the 10 wicked thieves in the city,
the thieves that no one talks to.
These are the 10 demons of the city.
And they're like, our child's like on the verge of death.
And the Baal Shem Tov is flirting with the darkness
and he's calling these 10 thieves together.
And they pray through the night, right?
And they're kind of shocked and they pray.
And as dawn comes, the red comes back to the baby's face
and the baby cries and the parents are ecstatic.
And they go to the Baal Shem Tov and he says, V'sutzach, what did you do?
And he says, he said, I saw the gates of heaven were closed.
So I needed a thief who could pick the lock on the gate to heaven.
Right?
Like, wow.
So there's an energy that the thief has that can pick the gates even when they're locked.
So it's greater is light than darkness. That's just level one, the binary split, right? Call it WIDICO, call it
whatever you want, right? But actually greater is the light that comes from the darkness. And when
I split off my darkness, I'm not trustable. We have to integrate the darkness, but in the most
beautiful, we've got to weave it into the fabric of who we are.
And I think even with Klaus Schwab,
we have to be careful.
And maybe that allows us to kind of wrap the last,
we don't want to demonize Klaus Schwab, right?
Or Yuval, and Yuval is working with Klaus.
And, you know, I think Yuval got it, you know,
and Yuval, if you're listening, brother, right?
I think you got it wrong big time, right?
In other words, Yuval was raised in Israel
with a particular view of religion.
He goes to Hebrew University
and he has a certain Jerusalem track, which I know well.
And I was doing the television show in Israel
at the time that Yuval was lecturing at Hebrew U.
And undoubtedly we crossed paths somewhere, someplace.
He was actually my son's lecturer at Hebrew U in history.
And I'm sure Yuval's a beautiful guy, right? I mean, and he is actually parroting the postmodern
affirmation, which is false, right? Based on a true but partial promise that we addressed earlier,
that there's no real value in the world. There is no story. Suvor wrote a book called 21 Questions where he opens and he
says, we need a new story. Then he goes like the 10 wicked problems. The end of the book,
last two chapters, he basically gives a Buddhist talk, story's not real. Wow. And no one notices
this. Story's not real. I mean, there is no story. You got to get underneath story, which is the
Buddhist move. That's wrong, right? In other words, yes, there's a dimension that's
underneath story, right? When you go on a medicine journey, you can get underneath your story. You
can be in pure being. But then from pure being, you return to your story. You return to the
becoming. And actually, story and non-story are one. And the split between story and non-story
is duality. And non-duality is you realize the utter union
of story and non-story.
Story's real.
Story's the language of the divine.
God loves stories, right?
And we need to actually re-articulate a new story of value
because it's only a new story of value
that changes the vector of history.
And the one thing that Yuval and I profoundly agree on
is Yuval writes correctly,
summarizing the historical literature, that the only thing that changes the vector of history is story.
So Yuval says, and they're all made up.
No, they're not all made up.
There's stories that are contrived, but there's axia, there's plot lines to cosmos.
And maybe we can finish with this, which is reality is not merely a fact.
Reality is a story.
It's not an ordinary story. It's a a story. It's not an ordinary story.
It's a love story.
It's not an ordinary love story.
It's an outrageous love story.
And your story, my story,
are chapter and verse
in the outrageous love story of Cosmos.
All right, thank you.
Oh my God.
Amen.
Amen.
Hat damn.
Wow.
Wow.
Wow. Incredible. Oh my God. amen amen hat damn wow wow wow
incredible oh my god i'm gonna link to all your books in the show notes but where can people find
you where can they follow my god well i mean maybe the book return to eros would be kind of the first
link you know and and um a second link your unique self and And maybe the third, you know, mystery of love. That's where I would go.
That's a good way in.
And, you know, the name of the center, Center for Integral Wisdom,
we're actually changing the name to Center for World Philosophy and Religion.
And it's holding organizations office for the future.
So I'll get you that stuff as well.
That'd be fantastic.
And you are, sir, just to say a mad delight.
Just your energy, your presence, your space.
It was actually a great privilege to be with you
and a great pleasure and a great honor.
Thank you, brother.
Thank you.
The first of many.
First of many.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you, brother.
Woo! Thank you.