Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #351 The Third Face of Eros - Desire w/ Marc Gafni Part IV

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

We’re just a tad out of order here today. If you’re following along in the book “ A Return to Eros” we jumped to Desire today and will revisit the second face in the next episode. Today Marc gives us the goods on Desire and its role as a face of Eros. These episodes are excellent as standalones, and they are even greater as part of their greater whole. Share this far and wide y’all!   Marc’s Books: A Return to Eros(paperback) A Return to Eros(audiobook) The Erotic and the Holy Your Unique Self Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment Self In Integral Evolutionary Mysticism  NEW BOOK "First Principles and First Values" -David J Temple    Connect with Marc: Website: MarcGafni.com  Instagram: @marcgafni Facebook: Dr Marc Gafni X: @marcgafni Substack: Marc Gafni YouTube: Dr Marc Gafni Medium: Office For The Future Sponsors: Lumen If you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to Lumen.me  and use KKP to get $100 off your Lumen.  Paleovalley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Happy Hippo Kratom is in my opinion the cleanest Kratom product I’ve used. Head over to HappyHippo.com/KKP code “KKP” for 15% off entire store 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: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    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.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. Today we have the return of Dr. Mark Gaffney. Gaffney. Gaffney. And as Mark so eloquently states, we are taking a deep dive into Eros. In his book with Christina Kincaid, A Return to Eros, he reveals the 12 faces of Eros and why the fuck does that matter? Why is it important to us?

And how deep does it go down the rabbit hole? Is it the very nature of consciousness itself? Can we see it from the subatomic all the way up to the cosmic? Mark tries to answer that as best as possible and does so beautifully. We've recorded three thus far out of the 12, but two of which we're really framing

what the hell it is we're talking about. Those are highly valuable to listen to. Otherwise, you might feel lost listening to this. If you've been following all along, we're going to introduce the second face of Eros, but in reality, Mark thought it would be a little bit better to skip on and return to it in the following episode. So if you're following along with the book, Return to Eros, which you don't need to, but I highly encourage as we unpack this further via Mark's wonderful tutelage, we should do without, and we should surrender to our desires and not having them anymore should be the goal. And that couldn't be further from the truth. So Mark really wanted to get this in quickly in the 12 phases of Eros.

And then next week, if you're following along from the book, we will return to fullness of presence, which is actually the second phase. Not next week, but next episode we do with Mark. And that will be a powerful one as well. We've had three so far. This is the fourth in our series, the second face that we're going to cover. And again, not in order if you're following in the book. If you have been following my podcast with Mark, you also know that the one's going to come out that has nothing to do with a return to Eros or the 12 faces of Eros and everything to do with it. It's going to be titled First Principles and First Values. And that's a book written by David J. Temple, which is the pseudonym for Mark, Ken Wilber, and another one of their fabulous people that work at their center. So the three

of them have combined, and I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the third one's name, to complete this first work in a series of works. And that's called First Principles and First Values. You can get it right now on Amazon. I'll link to that in the show notes. And this is really covering the why behind this. And so we will get a podcast from me and Mark very shortly here that aligns with the release of this book that strictly dives into first principles and first values as a framework for the larger conversation of the new story of humanity. And I couldn't tell you, of all the podcasts that I do

and that I get to be a part of, I don't think there's anything more important than understanding the first principles and first values and how we interact with Eros. Where is our place in the cosmos? Why are we here? And Mark beautifully answers these questions with a series of some of the smartest,

most beautiful humans on the planet. So highly recommend both a return to Eros and first principles and first values. Mark Gaffney, of course, the author of a return to Eros. He's also the author of First Principles and First Values, but that one's going to be under David J. Temple. So we'll have those in the show notes. Be on the lookout here in the near future for a quick but robust episode that I do with Mark on First Principles and First Values. And for now, enjoy this incredible conversation

all on desire and why it is one of the most important facets of the 12 Faces of Eros. If you're enjoying this, share it with friends, but share it with them from the beginning. Have them dive into the first couple episodes before they dive into these Faces of Eros. If they've been following along, let people know the latest episode with Mark is out

and continue to listen through. It really helps me when I have friends reach out to me and say, I've listened to every episode you've done with Mark. They're fucking incredible. I'm so happy you guys are doing all 12 faces. Shout out to my boy, Dr. Nathan Riley, who gave me that. I really appreciate that.

He is the holistic OBGYN, but on this podcast a few times and will for sure be back on. It really helps me to understand the impact of this and how it's landing with people that aren't necessarily familiar with all of Mark's work and maybe haven't taken a deep dive into some of his books as I have. He's authored several incredible books, but we really feel like this is the place to start. This is the place to bring consciousness up, and I'm so excited for

that. Love you, Mark. Absolutely love you, brother. Cha. All right. Outside of sharing this episode, you can leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life and also support our sponsors. They make this show possible and I am super grateful. We've got an awesome new sponsor today. Go to Lumen, L-U-M-E-N.me and use KKP to get $100 off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E and use code KKP at checkout for $100 off. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode. Thank you for being a new sponsor of the show. What is Lumen?

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with you again this is a joy and a blessing and I'm loving your room oh my god it's beautiful this is like it's gorgeous and and alive and filled with eros and turquoise animating reality. It's gorgeous, right? And the books and that's gorgeous. And you're gorgeous. It's great to see you, man. It's great to see you. Yeah, I'm bummed we didn't get to do this one face-to-face.

I know, I know. We almost did, but we're going to do the trip. We just wanted to do it at a more spacious time. It was like bumped in between. And I heard that that festival, in any case, got kind of displaced, moved, farmed. It was like a wild. So I'm actually glad I didn't come down because all of that would have been kind of in play and we wouldn't have gotten our... So yay, yay. But I heard it was great. I heard it was fantastic. It was, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. I heard beautiful residences in the cosmos. So we are in our fourth conversation. We did two kind of meta framework conversations, right? If there's a text that we're kind of looking at, it's, it's a return to Eros. It's this text, a return to Eros. You know, the radical experience of being fully alive on sex, love, and eroticism in every dimension of life, which is not a fast read. It's not one of those, okay, like read it in a second.

It's kind of more like a kind of Bible of Eros, if you will, you know, but Bible in the sense of trying to lay down a fundamental understanding of eros in cosmos as the single most important ethical force, political force, moral force, relationship force, economic force, that actually you can't actually talk about reality without talking about eros, that reality actually is Eros, right? The foundation of reality is Eros, that Eros means something very particular, right?

Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, moving towards desiring, and that's what we're going to focus on today, but desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. But reality is Eros all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. So whether it's subatomic particles, proton and neutron desiring each other and then coming to form a larger whole that's an atom, or whether it's Merck and Kyle or Kyle and Aubrey or Merck and Aubrey or any one of, right, two ostensibly separate parts that are actually participating in a larger field together that

recognize each other and feel each other and live in what becomes a conscious shared field of value and are able to create shared purpose, which is what intimacy means, they create a greater whole, right? That's the movement of Eros. So reality is the evolution of love. Love is Eros. But love is too small of a word, which is what we've been saying. Love is a beautiful word, but it's gotten bastardized. It's gotten cheapened, right? We've killed all the gods except for Aphrodite, the goddess of love, but we've forgotten what she means and how to worship at her altar. And so we've moved to the word eros, or we sometimes call it evolutionary love. Charles Sanders Peirce, who was kind of in the polymath tradition of James Mark Baldwin, you know, who was Piaget's teacher, and then, you know, Peirce, a little later Whitehead, talks about, has an essay called

Evolutionary Love. Ken Willeber and I wrote a piece on evolutionary love, you know, a decade back, or outrageous love, right? But that's Eros. Eros is not mere human sentiment. It's the heart of existence itself. It drives the whole thing. Now, we're talking about 12 faces of Eros. And the first face of Eros, so we did two weeks of introduction. The first week was kind of this meta frame of Eros, kind of week one. The second was the relationship between sex, Eros, and love. The sexual models of the erotic, it doesn't exhaust

the erotic. There are 12 billion years of eros before sex. Sex is an explosion of eros to the next level. But then I want to live erotically in every dimension of my life. I don't want to exile eros to the sexual because then the sexual collapses, right, under a burden it can't bear because I'm trying to do all of my eros in sex. No, I want to live erotically in all of my life. And then when I bring that to sexing, sexing explodes, right? In the most stunning and unimaginable ways.

And then in week three, we said, okay, let's begin to look at the 12 faces of eros. And I'm recapitulating, friends, just so if you want to go back and really dive into any of those, because that's the context, it's worth doing so we can kind of find our way here. And everywhere then becomes kind of dripping laden with meaning and we can open up the space. So in the third week, we talked about the first face of Eros, which is the experience of being on the inside. What is that experience? What is interiority? And this week, right, which is our fourth week and our second face of Eros, we're going to talk about an entirely new face of Eros. And if you are friends following in the book, Return to Eros,

what I'm about to do is the third face of Eros, not the second. And for a bunch of reasons, I'm going to do the third face and we're going to do the second one next time. So the third is desire itself. The actual quality of desire or, Kyle, yearning, longing. And, I mean, we're going to talk, I guess, for some 40 minutes or something like that, but 45 minutes. We could talk about this for 10 hours and just barely begin.

I mean, it's so stunning and subtle and rich and deep. of moving beyond desire in order to access the purity of spirit is wrong. So that's a big place to start. Now, it's not that it has no place, but it's confused. I never in the manifest world ever want to or can. I neither want to, it should never be my desire, nor can I move beyond desire. That is not a possibility in what Aristotle called the sublunar sphere in the manifest world we live in.

Now, that doesn't mean that every surface desire that pops into my head is a desire that's actually even my desire. Desires that pop into my head come from many places in culture or mom or dad or unfinished business or untransformed wounds or unhealed traumas or the propagandas of the webplex. So the fact that a desire pops into my head, what do I want to do? I want to clarify. I want to clarify that desire. And we call this in the lineage of Solomon, this is called berur.

B-E-R-R-U-R. And berur is the clarification of desire. It's a very beautiful term. And it took me, Kyle, I don't know, about 10 years to translate. I was translating lots of these texts from Aramaic to translate this phrase berur. What does berur mean? It's not the purification. It's not the cleaning. It's the clarification. To clarify desire. Life is about the clarification of desire. But once I clarify my desire, now be careful, I clarify one, but I didn't say I clarify desire. I said I clarify my desire.

Because desire is irreducibly unique. We have general shared desires. We want to eat but we want to eat differently. We want to experience reality differently. If you would push me to the wall and say, who is Kyle? I would say Kyle is a unique configuration of desire. It's like, oh, right? So it's not about moving beyond Kyle's desire, his clarified desire, his clarified unique desire. It's about accessing what is his desire?

And what is really, what is Kyle's? And what is Kyle's, what I would call Kyle's deepest heart's desire, right? So my deepest heart's desire is the desire of God. That's like a, oh, so if I bypass my desire, so instead of clarifying my desire, I nullify my desire, I bypass, I circumvent, right? And I try any of the kind of bypass spiritual roads, the spiritual bypass roads that say, let's move around desire. Then desire, I press it down and it just explodes someplace else and seizes the steering wheel of my life. And generally there's a train wreck. And so I have to access desire. And that begins by recognizing that desire is the structure of reality. Reality is desire, meaning all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. And, you know, we began, we said

subatomic particles desire each other. You know, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, quite literally, protons and neutrons have this experience that we're able to phenomenologically describe. And, you know, even a writer who calls himself a stone-cold atheist like Howard Bloom, and in his book, The God Problem, take a look, page 4041, where he's trying to describe scientifically the experience of protons and neutrons. He describes them as being, you know, caught in the throes of intense desire. That's actually accurate scientifically. There are

no exteriors without interiors. And if you would, again, push me to the wall and say, and I mean this not as a slogan, not as a clever thing to say. We're not interested in slogans here, and we're not interested in saying clever things, and we're not interested in making fundamentalist claims, and we're not interested in new age claims. We're interested in the deepest structure of reality, but we'll speak together in what we might call a language of second simplicity, meaning the simplicity after complexity, not the kind of sloganeering before complexity. So from the perspective of second simplicity,

we might say reality is desire all the way down the evolutionary chain, all the way up the evolutionary chain. And that desire appears uniquely in me. So therefore, the most accurate statement of my identity is I am a unique configuration of desire, which I can only access if I clarify my deepest heart's desire. And my deepest heart's desire is the desire of God, is the desire of evolution. And that's the evolutionary impulse whose personal face is Kyle, is Kyle's deepest heart's desire. Now, that's self-evidently true. And that's what's so beautiful about real Dharma, about real first principles and first values. They're obviously true because

what drives Kyle? So something's driving him. Something made him create this room. You know, with the two chairs for the in-person podcast and the beautiful decor and the play of the books and the, and the aesthetics and the light in the room, which you can feel right. And kind of in the, I mean, you know, I mean, I'm obviously Kyle's trainer. Everybody knows that and kind of got him kind of right. But right. He's working out. He's, he's creating he's right.

So what's driving all that? Why are we getting out of bed? So what's driving all that? Why are we getting out of bed? So what's driving all that is, is this unique quality of desire that is kyleness, that moves to become, that desires something that's not yet here. So desire's different than being. Being, as we'll see when we talk next time, is actually the second face of Eros. Being or radical presence. There's no place to go. There's nothing to do.

There's this experience of radical presence in which I rest so deeply, I feel so powerfully at home, so radically welcome that all of reality opens up. Whatever that is, that's our next conversation. That's being. This is not being. This is coming. This is not spacious and open and calm and the beautiful lake on a perfect day, which is still, this is a tumultuous ocean,

which is dynamic and ecstatic and dangerous, right? And moving, right? And throbbing and pulsing and dripping and yearning, right? It's radically alive and it is one of the two tastes of reality. So in Buddhism, they talk often about one taste. It's one of Buddhism's great mistakes. Buddhism is gorgeous in so many of its variations, but there's very clearly not one taste or two tastes. And that's what Alfred North Whitehead correctly understood as to the lineage of Solomon, as did Kashmir Shaivism, the original Hindu tradition.

And really, if you look carefully at Vajrayana, the third turning of the wheel in Buddhism, you see it, you know, kind of appearing even in Mayayana, you feel it. Theravada tried to get rid of it, the first turning of the wheel. But there's being and becoming. I'm not just being. I'm being and becoming. I desire and I desire, therefore I am.

Right? I yearn, therefore I am. And desire, and here's where it gets completely crazy. Desire doesn't stand against value. Desire is the only way. It's the only path. It's the only door. It's the only portal to value itself. Because just ask someone, what's value?

Right? We don't know. What's value? Values, right? So there's these, we argue about values. It's not about values. And this is probably our second conversation today, but it's about value. And what is value?

What's value? Isn't that great? Because like, what is value? It's like, whoa And what is value? What's value? Isn't that great? Because like, what is value? It's like, whoa, what's value? What is value? So value has two qualities. Value is number one, that which I want for its own sake. Value is non-instrumental. In other words, beauty is a value. And beauty might appear in a taste, right? The pleasure, pleasure is one of the interior qualities of beauty. So I taste this ice cream. Why do I taste this stunning ice cream? In order to be famous? In order to be egoically fulfilled? No. I taste the ice cream to taste the ice cream in order to be famous, in order to be egoically fulfilled? No. I taste the ice

cream to taste the ice cream, right? I mean, when we got on the phone the first time, when we met the first time, and every time we get on the phone, why am I delighted to see you? Because! In other words, the quality of value is, it's valid just because. That's it. Just because. It's for its own sake, which the lineage calls lishma. L-I-S-H-M-A. Beautiful word, lishma. And we'll get to it because it's going to appear in the qualities of Eros, but lishma is for its own sake, value is for its own sake. Now, how do I

identify value? So here's an insane, simple interior science equation, which also I'm a little slow on the uptake. So this one also took me about a decade, right? To kind of say it clearly. Once you say it, you're like, oh, of course. So clarified desire is value. That's it. Simple. I mean, it's like, oh, right. Clarified desire equals value. Reality desires. Reality has appetite. I mean, Alfred North Whitehead, you know, sitting reality desires. Reality has appetites.

I mean, Alfred North Whitehead, you know, sitting in Cambridge, we're not allowed to talk about desire, and it's, you know, 1915, and you know, we're English, and we're doing bad, crazy shit about, you know, desire in England at that time, and, you know, quite a few decades, you know, going forward, right? And so Alfred North Whitehead talks about the, you know, and Alfred North Whitehead was one of really the important thinkers. He writes Principa Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, you know, about kind of the new mathematical structures. And Whitehead talks about, and he hopes no one will really get what he's saying, he talks about the appetition of the cosmos, right? That's easier to say than desire in Cambridge, England, in 19-whatever, right? That's easier to say than desire in Cambridge, England,

in 19-whatever, right? But he's saying the same thing. He's saying cosmos has appetites. And what does cosmos desire? Cosmos desires value, right? That's what cosmos desires. Now, value doesn't mean only, oh, Cosmos desires you to help old ladies cross the street. That's a value.

Now, Cosmos does desire that, right? But because it's a value of Cosmos. So cosmos desires separate parts, recognizing each other, feeling each other, coming together in a larger whole in right relationship, right relationship between the parts that creates a synergy, right, that's ecstatic. Now, that might mean lovemaking. And it might mean helping an old lady across the street. Probably not a good idea to make love with an old lady on the street, so you don't want to mix those two things up, but the point is that these separate parts come together, and they create something larger that throbs with aliveness,

because that's what right relationship is. It means these separate parts come together, and there's this new wholeness created in the world. So reality is this drive towards wholeness, which is actually the fourth face of Eros. But for now, I want to talk not about wholeness, but about the drive towards. That's our topic today, right? There's a drive towards. So if we all stop right now and we go inside and we say, huh, what would it feel like if I had no desire? Dead. Essentially. I'd feel dead. I want to have desire. You know, there's a poem I love, you know, and we put it in Return to Eros

and it's in the section, I think, on desire, the third face, which we're now doing as the second face. And it's like Rilke kind of completely got this. He says, he writes, you know, Rilke writes, you see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything. The darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want nothing and are raised to the rank of prince by the slippery ease of their light judgments. But what you love to see are faces

that do work and feel thirst. And he's like, yes. That's the aliveness. I'm only alive when I'm in the full throw of desire. And if I lose my desire for justice, my desire for the quality of pleasure, which loves reality open, if I lose my desire for truth, my desire for truth. You know, when Weinberg, who died a few years ago, and I loved Weinberg, Stephen Weinberg, and he won the Nobel Prize for his research in muons. And Weinberg prided himself on being an atheist, but he was an atheist like I was the Pope, right?

In other words, he mocked a vision of God that I don't believe in either. So he caricatured God and he killed that vision. And Weinberg is like madly committed to know everything about muons. He's filled with this throbbing desire that drives him. He's not moving for a Nobel, although the Nobel was a corollary. He's like filled with this desire for truth and beauty and elegance in the mathematics that

disclose muons. And without that desire, nothing happens. Nothing. And when I lose access to the field of desire, I lose access to my aliveness. And so that's kind of all part one and two. Okay, so we'll hold here for a second. So if there's any thoughts, comments, or anything you want to clarify before we make our jump? But I think we laid out the beginning. We got the beginning. No, I just wanted to say, I think it's perfect that you started with that understanding of

where the freshman level knowledge of Buddhism takes us astray. And that's such an important piece because people that track different paths and they're searching for the right answers might find that one of my favorite quotes from ramdas was you know all celibacy all all aestheticism did was turn me into a horny celibate right it didn't alleviate him of anything he didn't graduate to some higher level of knowledge he didn't become enlightened it still consumed him just as much as giving in to his personal desires and having sex all the time. So it didn't ride him anywhere. But I like this. This clarity of desire is an important, it's a very important piece. And I think it's awesome that you've jumped ahead to bring us to this point. Yeah, no, totally. Right. Totally. Yeah. Ram Dass was wonderful. We had a wonderful time in 2005.

I was in Maui and he was after the stroke and we were teaching together. He had invited me to teach. It was myself, him and Katie and Krishna Das, but he wasn't feeling that well. So I wound up doing the teaching and he wound up just kind of, you know, hanging out and chatting and having a great time and kind of being just being Ram Dassi, which he did very well. And he was wonderful. And Katie was great. And let's say just one 10 second funny story. And so we're down there and everyone's like so wholesome. And so like, let's eat all the right foods.

And I'm like, oh my God, get me out of here. Like, I'm going to die. Like, there's no food or everything's like grass, right? And green. And like, I get it. I get it. I'm with you, everybody. But like, we get some food and I'm doing all the teaching. And Ram Dassi is telling me like, oh, this food it, I get it, I'm with you, everybody, but like, we get some food, and I'm doing all the teaching, and Ram Dass is telling me, like, oh, this food's so good for me, I'm starving, so finally, I'm like, I'm like, I get, like, it's late one night, I'm like, it's

four days into the teaching, and it was like, I don't know, a six, seven day thing, and it's like, there's got to be food someplace, so I, everyone's asleep, go to the refrigerator, I open it up, and thank God, they had these, like, great, like, a whole tray of, like, brown refrigerator, open it up. And thank God they had these like great, like a whole tray of like brownies. And I was so excited. So I take this like brownie and I take like a big, I was like, great. So I had like one, I'm starving. And I had a second one, right? Then I had a third one. And I walked back to my room and about seven minutes later, I am like gone, flying. And I didn't, I am like gone, flying. And I didn't have a lot of experience here.

So I'm flying all over the universe. I am sure that I'm having a heart attack. It must be, right? Because I just had some, right? And so I was the entire, like the next five hours, it was six hours. So I'm like flying all over the universe, no landing site anywhere. So somewhere around like 4.30, I'm like stumbled into the living room, and it's early, and Ram Dass rolls his wheelchair out, and he looks at me and says,

he said, Rabbi, what happened? I was hungry. He says, oh, no, what'd you do? You know, and of course, talked a little slower. I said, well, there were brownies. He said, how many did you have? I said, well, there were brownies. He said, how many did you have? I said, three. He said, you can't survive three. So yeah, he's a wonderful man. He's a wonderful, wonderful man.

And we miss him. So the Ram Dass Desire story is actually, it's a great story because it's about, let's try and say two things. Let's try and maybe clarify this before we finish this piece, kind of the relationship to desire, between desire and sexuality and the wider field. So we said in our second conversation that the sexual models the erotic. Eros is in every sphere. Now that means a lot of things, but it means that every face of the 12 faces of Eros lives in the sexual, it's modeled by the sexual,

and then that quality of reality, that quality of reality that value of reality that's modeled on the sexual lives also erotically everywhere in the world so one of the qualities of the sexual is desire, all the faces of eros live in the sexual, the sexual models the erotic. So all 12 faces of Eros, the places that you can get the most immediate access to them is in the sexual.

Then the sexual becomes the seat of wisdom. And it actually says, okay, learn from me. it's not an accident that she that reality that the infinite intelligence of cosmos that god the name for god we use in cosmorotic humanism the infinite intimate it's not an accident that the infinite intimate places sexuality at the very center of reality so people don't wake up in the morning saying ha i wish i could work out Descartes meditations, you know? You know, ha, I'm missing the math, right? In other words, everybody wakes up in the morning at some point in life, right, feeling, oh my God, I'm sorry I don't feel desire, wanting to feel desire or feeling desire, and I'm not quite sure how to fulfill it, but we live our lives in a relationship to desire and particularly to sexual desire.

But that's not a bug in the system. Huh, fuck, isn't that a shame? Something went wrong with the system. There's this crazy transfixing on sexual desire that seems to have stunted and warped the universe. Don't think so. That would be a malevolent cosmos. We would literally live in a malevolent cosmos, you know, and malevolence means, you know, volence, right, in Latin, right?

Meaning it's the opposite of benevolence, right? So volence is this desire to give, to embrace, like volence or voluptuous, right? The sense of, or voluntary, right? All those words are the same. So the cosmos is not malevolent. It's not anti-volence. It's not against the giving radical embrace of aliveness. And this evil cosmos places sexual desire at the center just to fuck everyone up. That was fun. Damn, right? That's an evil cosmos, right? But we actually have a direct experience that we live

in a good universe. That's the notion. The realization of God is not a theological realization. Right? It's not owned by one religion or one way of relegaring or of reconnecting. Right? It's the realization that tamu uru kito vadonai, taste and see that reality is good. It doesn't mean that we're not confronted radically by the mystery of evil. So from that silence, reality is good. And if reality is good, then this transfixing of our attention on the sexual is an intentional structure of reality. Reality turns us towards the sexual, not in order to end the conversation, but to begin the conversation. The sexual becomes the portal to wisdom. There's an incredible text which appears in the third century,

Brother Kyle, and it's so insanely beautiful. It says, if all of the wisdom in the world would not exist, and we only had the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs, which is this eight chapter series of outrageous desire notes, notes of desire between the lover and the beloved. So if we only had the Song of Solomon, the text writes, we could derive all wisdom from these eight chapters, from these notes of desire. So reality is notes of desire. And those notes of desire live in me. And so I want to add a sentence, and we're going to circle back to our friend Ram Dass.

There's no local desire. That's an unbelievably important sense. Local desire does not exist. There's no local desire. Everyone thinks, here I am trying to be a good citizen, living my life, doing my stuff, and all of a sudden these waves of these strange, fetishized, kinked, post-conventional, conventional, confusing, contradictory, right?

All this desire is sweeping through me and I'm like, what the fuck? And so there's no local desire, right? uniquely and accessing my unique configuration of desire is actually the journey of becoming, which is my life. I want to live my desire, not someone else's desire because I live as an imposter in the scripts of desire that are not mine. So I need to access and clarify my desire, but my desire is the desire of cosmos. I'm in the field of desire. And desire is not an action of cosmos. And sexual desire, the sexual models the field of eros, sexual desire is not a bug in the system.

It's a feature. It's the intention of the system because it's sexual desire itself that models the field of desire in every dimension of reality. So it's my relationship to desire and how I engage desire, which actually opens up the field of wisdom, the field of potency, the field of power, the field of goodness, the field of truth, the field of beauty, it all opens the sexual models, the erotic, and every one of the 12 faces of eros live in the sexual. We're now talking about the face of desire or longing or yearning because desire is longing or yearning. That's what it is. And so Buddhism says get rid of longing. No, no, no, no. Actually, longing is a feature. Reality longs. Reality yearns. Reality desires. And so desire is good.

That's so fundamental. And shame, at its core, is the degradation, the demonization of the goodness of desire. Because desire is my experience of my aliveness. And when I'm young, and we're all young, and I experience the shaming, the rejection of my aliveness,

there's no way that I can disambiguate between my aliveness and my goodness. My aliveness and my goodness are fully inextricably linked. And so when I'm shamed for my aliveness, I'm being shamed for my goodness because goodness and aliveness are inextricably bound up. And so Ram Dass is correct, our dear friend, that we need to engage, embrace, and be in relationship. And at different times of life and in different ways,

we have different relationships. It's an evolving relationship. It's not a static relationship. We have, in every stage of life, we have different relationships to sexual desire an evolving relationship. It's not a static relationship. We have, in every stage of life, we have different relationships to sexual desire, but we need to be in relationship and we need to clarify our desire. And, you know, in the Pali Canon,

which the original Buddha texts, Buddha's, I think, more accurately reported to have said, have few desires, but have great ones. See, and that's more, and that's true both in the sexual, the sexual model Zeros, and in every other field of life, have few desires, but have great ones. That's the clarification of desire. What is my deepest heart's desire? And my deepest heart's desire is ontically identified, meaning it's ontologically, it's actually, for real, it's not just aligned with, it is God's desire. And it's God's desire whispers through my clarified desire.

And it's only that realization, it's only that new story of desire, but by story, I don't mean a postmodern made up story, meaning story, the most accurate understanding of desire. But by story, I don't mean a postmodern made-up story, meaning story, the most accurate understanding of reality. It's only that new dharma of desire, that understanding that desire is value that heals shame. I can't heal shame any other way. Until I basically realized, no, no, I live in a world and a reality that's filled with eros, aliveness, but eros has telos. It wants to go somewhere. Eros is never static, right? Eros has a quality of being in which you rest. We'll talk about that in our next conversation. That's one of the faces of eros, but eros has another dimension where eros is yearning, it's reaching, it's longing, right?

It's demanding and it can't be sated ever. I find a value, I incarnate that value, I'm delighted by it, and then I want to find it deeper. Not in an addictive sense. It's not an addiction. It's the utter delight of being a human being who's constantly becoming. What an unimaginable joy, right? I mean, the only tyranny in the world, and it's the tyranny that is the cause of depression, right? L'chaim, salute my friend, right? The only tyranny in the world is the belief

that yesterday should be repeated today. There are no repetitions. There are no repeats, right? There are no extra days on the set. There are no extra hours, right? We're in a movement of evolutionary becoming and reality is thrusting forward on the set. There are no extra hours, right? We're in a movement of evolutionary becoming, and reality is thrusting forward, and reality is spread open, wanting to receive the thrust of that new moment in time. And there's this constant movement of our capacity to kind of fuck reality

open with our desire, and to have reality fuck us open with its desire from us, right? And in this mutual opening, right, of kind of phallus and yoni within us, right, exploding into possibility that we get actually what it means to be a human being. And that's what it means to be a baby-faced divine. That's what it means to be, because what is divinity? Divinity is desire. I mean, maybe the last couple of things, the name of God, right? The name of God.

And we've identified God in our conversations. The name of God we're using, as we said a little earlier today, is the infinite intimate. But we've mentioned before, and it's worth being kind of a central piece of our conversation, and maybe we'll be able to put it in the show notes, is that there's a four-letter name of God which animated the Renaissance. And those four letters, if you would do it in English, you would do kind of YV, how would you do it? You do it, you do YV, kind of VH, but it's a Yud above. So it's a Yud, which is this tiny kind of mini phallus,

which enters a hay, which is more of a receptacle that receives it. Those are the first two letters. And that's Leonard Cohen's Yah. Hallelujah. Yah. Yah is the Yud. The ha is the hay.

So the Yud, Yah. The Yud enters the hay. That's the first two. The ha is the hey. It's the yud. Yah. The yud enters the hey. That's the first two letters of the name of God. It's the breath of reality. Hallelujah. Yah. And then there's a v.

And the v is the vav, which is a kind of phallic letter that, again, enters the hey, that enters the receiving. So yud, hey, v vav hey is erotic union desire that's what the actual name of god means the yud enters the hey and is received by the hey the vav enters the hey the hey rides the vav right that experience is the name of god that's that is the constituent structure of reality. I mean, reality is desire. And I'm a unique incarnation of the divine name. And again, we want to say, so what is divinity? So you could talk about divinity in kind of quietistic mystical terms as much of the Hebrew lineage does and much of Buddhism does, and all mystical traditions have a dimension of this kind of quietistic,

deep, infinite, ultimate depth. And that's a dimension. It's a taste of reality. But as we said, there's a second taste. The second taste is God is the possibility of possibility. Right? Infinite possibility. right infinite possibility and when kyle knows when mark knows that actually all of the possibility that lives in the first moment of the great flaring fourth of the big bang

at the very inception of cosmos quite literally from an evolutionary science perspective, lives in me. Traces, fragrances, expressions of that explosion of possibility live uniquely in me. And even at this moment, when we're faced by a metacrisis, right, it moves us from doom to possibility, because the evolutionary impulse actually lives in us, right? And the only truth of reality is reality is the possibility of possibility. And that's what evolution means is desire. We kind of forget that teaching it in seventh grade, right? Evolution is not some mechanical theory, right? Evolution is the inherent desire of reality

animated by the thrust of the creative drive for ever new possibility. And what animates that is not a mechanical manual. Evolution desires. It's the nature of evolution. It has appetite. It has appetite for value. And so an atom has levels of value and depth that a subatomic particle doesn't have. And it can do new things and it has more of a sense of feeling and more of a sense of aliveness. And then

the atom becomes ultimately a molecule and then a macromolecule. And then the intensities of intimacy in the macromolecule, and I'm doing, I'm referring to a particular mathematical position evinced by Stuart Kaufman, but the intensities of intimacy in the macromolecule at some sense deepen and it explodes into the aliveness of a cell. And you have, you know, prokaryotes and eukaryotes, right? You have single-celled and multi-celled and you go into early, early organisms and all the way up. What's driving this? Not an automaton mechanical manual. What's driving it is the music of desire. And that's

exactly what drives reality. So there's no local desire. And all of a sudden we get to heal shame. And it's that desire that lives in me, not local. It's a unique expression of the field of desire that itself is a value. Reality desires my desire. Like, wow. So now the game changes. Now let's clarify that desire. All right. Let's access my deepest heart's desire. Let's know that sex is the gorgeous and stunning model of desire and sex needs to be clarified. And in sex have few desires, but have great desires. And don't let the pornographic universe tell you what your desire is. Right? And as you think, you know, I mean, even in sexuality, you think, oh,

you have to understand when I say you, I don't mean Kyle, I mean, Kyle, Mark, all of us, you, the big you, we have to understand. Who am I? I'm a unique configuration of desire. And I'm sorry, Pornhub, you don't get to tell me what my desire is. And you don't have to get to have an algorithm of plaid skirts you know, 19 year olds in plaid skirts, all of a sudden plaid skirts now I'm getting downloaded into my feed, all these people with you know, who are pigtails in plaid skirts who are 19, oh wow

that's my desire, that's not your desire, right, you just happen to press once on it, and now the algorithm is playing you and actually erasing your own script of desire, right, and actually downloading you, right, a script of desire that it's trying to monetize in order to exploit you. So to actually access my own script of desire is a very big deal.

People think pornography is like liberating desire. No, pornography is erasing my own script of desire is a very big deal. People think pornography is like liberating desire. No, pornography is erasing my own script of desire. And maybe just one more second, you know, on the sexual, and then we'll wrap with maybe a general word on desire. But it's so beautiful and it's so powerful. The only potency of desire that stands against a pornographic universe, which is this asymmetrical, right, assault of high-speed internet porn on the senses, which doesn't leave, no one signs their name triumphantly on their porn. I've never seen it, right? It's like, wow, that was great.

No, no, no, no. It's like, it leaves this strange aftertaste because it's not my desire. It's somebody, I mean, that's what we forget. It's actually somebody else's script of desire, which is machine intelligence, AI generated in order to hijack my unique desire. It's kind of, it's kind of a shocking formulation, desire that moves you from the pornographic universe to the erotic universe is through your own unique script of desire. The only desire more powerful in the pornographic universe is your desire, your unique script of desire. And that's what we mean when we say have few desires, but have great ones. That's how do you actually want to be sexual? Right? Are you reaching over, you know, to choke the person next to you, right?

Because you're 21 years old and you've been watching Chokeporn for the last, you know, 10 years. Is that your desire? Really? Really, is that really your desire? I don't think so. Right? And if it is, you should think about years, is that your desire? Really? Really? Is that really your desire? I don't think so, right? And if it is, you should think about it, okay? If it is, then great. If you've clarified that that's your descriptive desire and you've worked out this deep mutuality, you have safeguards,

enjoy. But if you're doing it automatically because the pornographic universe, right, has entrained you over the last 10 years, you've completely lost access to your own aliveness because desire is always unique. Desire is never generic. There's only unique desire. There's not a generic pool of desire. So clarifying desire, Bayreuth means to clarify my unique desire and my unique script of desire, whether it's artistically or economically or creatively or professionally or in terms of the pattern of my relationship or sexually. And but the sexual models, the erotic, that's what we're talking about. The 12 faces of eros modeled by the sexual or sexually is so potent. It's the most wondrous experience a human being can have when the world stands still

and I become cosmoerotic humanism in person and shame falls to the wayside, right? And all of the eros, all of the name of God uniquely signed in my body, encrypted uniquely in my body, which has its own unique configuration, expresses itself in dances. And this moment is what all of reality intended and waited for uniquely, which will never be repeated again. That's the erotic universe.

That's exponentially more powerful than the pornographic universe, but it's the only thing that is. My unique script of desire and and being alive is writing my texts of desire is writing my song of solemn right so so what a delight to be with you we've now done this this second face of Eros modeled in the sexual. And, and wow. Thank you.

Thank you, brother. Cha. Cha. Thank you.