Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #357 The Second Face of Eros - Presence w/ Marc Gafni Part V

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

We’re back at it today with the good Rabbi Marc Gafni. He explains the order of things vis-a-vis the different faces and their corresponding episodes. Today we’re in episode 3 of the series, and actually discussing the 2nd face of Eros, Presence. If you’re following along in A Return To Eros, chip in on the convo. You can ask questions and review on Apple/Spotify as well. Otherwise just enjoy and take the message of Presence out to the world with yall. CHA!!!   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: Caldera Lab is the best in men’s skincare. Head over to calderalab.com/KKP to get any/all of their regimen. Use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off Fat of the Land Go to www.eatfatoftheland.com to buy some delicious seed oil free chips and use code “KKP” for 10% off at checkout.  That is www.eatfatoftheland.com using code KKP for 10% off at checkout. 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. 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 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. We're in for another treat today with the return of Dr. Mark Gaffney in the faces of Eros. This is the third face, and he'll point out in this, it's actually the second face if we're following along in the book, A Return to Eros, featuring Mark Gaffney and Christina Kincaid. And he explains in the podcast why we decided to switch these. So I'll let him explain that in the podcast. But today we're going to talk about presence and really how easy it is to understand this as a face of Eros and how complicated it has become because of the modern world. So I was blown the fuck away. These conversations keep getting better and better.

And again, I'm the first one to learn it. So I'm fucking so excited to be able to share this with you guys. I love everything that he's teaching and the way he breaks it down is very palpable. I think it's, you know, it stands alone just as itself. And it also is a great way to expand upon the materials that he has written here. Also, I've been diving deep into first principles and first values. I'll link to both of these books in the show notes so you can pick them up.

First Principles and First Values is also on Audible, so I'm chewing through it so quick, and it is phenomenal. In our first two episodes on the 12 Faces of Eros, we really break down what Eros is, how it functions in consciousness,

and all the way up and all the way down, and that's really what First Principles and First Values is about. It's about the new story that humanity is required of humanity to move through existential risk. And the existential risk being not only the loss of humanity, but the loss of our humanity, which if you've been paying attention to listen to this podcast for the last four years has really been my greatest concern. If the lights go out and we all perish, no big deal. We'll run it back somewhere else. But to live in servitude in a techno-feudalistic society, which we do dive into in this episode, finally, that is a fairly large fear of mine as a father and somebody who understands

not exactly what's happening in the world, but sees a lot of clear indications that this is where we're headed. It is also nice to know that people as intelligent, as mindful and as spiritual as Dr. Mark Gaffney also see the same fucking thing. Ken Wilber, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Dr. Zach Stein, other guys that are authors in this series also see the same thing.

So it's not just me. Many of the greatest thinkers on our planet see what's going down and are looking for ways to mitigate that. And it starts with what are the first principles? What are the first values? And how do we operate with consciousness? And this is really what's explained in these 12 Faces of Eros. So love this series. Share it far and wide. That helps the podcast grow. It is intelligent to start with the first one, but you don't have to. If you've never listened to any one of these and you're like, fuck it, let me listen about presence.

It's worth your time to just listen to this episode and not go to backtrack and try to get all five of them in. But that said, listen to this one and you'll want to listen to all of them. So, and you love Mark Gaffney. Cha, he's my brother and such uh, and such a great teacher and love what he has to say in this one, uh, support this podcast by sharing it, leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways. The show's helped you out in life and support our sponsors. They make this show fiscally possible. We're brought to you today by Caldera, the lab first impressions

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Good to see you, brother. Yes. So good to see you. But I got to say, you know, there's podcasts that I do where I get excited. Usually it's a new guest. I'm always excited when there's a return of somebody because it's, you know, I know we're bringing them back on for round two, round three. There's good reason for it.

But I can tell you that because of the material that we're uncovering, very few podcasts get me as excited as the podcast series that we're doing. And every time we unveil another face of Eros, I mean, it's like I got a soul boner. I'm just so excited. So excited for today, brother. Yes. Throbbing soul. We need throbbing souls, don't we? We need pulsing souls, right? We do.

Always, right? We need two messin' souls. Amen. Amen. Amen. So we're today, dear brother, we are in, we're going to be doing the third face. Now, for those of you who are following this in the book, Return to Eros, which I had the delight of writing with my beloved Christina Kincaid, Dr. Kincaid. In the book, the first face of Eros is interiority, being on the inside. The third face of Eros is longing, yearning, desire, because that's what desire is. Desire is about yearning and longing, which we talked about, we touched on in our second conversation. So what we did is we did two introductory conversations, one and two, to kind of set the stage. We talked about Eros.

We talked about sexing and the relationship between them, one and two. Then we started the faces of Eros. So number three was the first face of Eros, our third conversation. Then our fourth conversation, we did yearning and desire, which is in the Return to Eros book. It's the third face. And now we're going to do what's called the second face there, which is in the Return to Eros book. It's the third face. And now we're going to do what's called the second face there, which is presence. So I'm just letting people know if you're kind of saying, oh, that's the third face. And we're doing now the third face in the book.

It's the second face. I reversed the order for the sake of this podcast. If that was too confusing to everyone, just press fucking delete on that. But just those of you who are kind of, you know, slightly, how should I say it? Rigid. And you got to make sure that things are the same list. So I'm just explaining the list thing because, you know, sometimes, you know, there's a particular kind of person, which I empathize with. They're like, the list is wrong. Okay. So we got the list. We got the list. Okay. So we're doing now the face of Eros that's called presence. And I'm so excited, Kyle, to kind of drop into this with you. And let's start in the beginning and see if we can find our way into a very, very, very deep and I think like fundamental, like you can't live without

an understanding of this face of Eros because the faces of Eros are the faces of reality. Eros is the primary value of cosmos. And in fact, you actually can't talk about the word eros without the word value. You know, in the old days, I used to say that eros was a primary value of cosmos, and value itself has this quality of eros. And at some point I realized you can't even split the words. They're one word. It's eros value. And we're talking about value, by the way, as something that's real.

And by the way, I do want to say to everyone that Kyle promised me that by our next podcast, he would have completed reading First Principles and First Values, this new book that I put out with my friends Zach Stein and Ken Wilber. Okay, so that's about value, and value has a quality of eros. I mean, value has fuck. Value has allurement.

Value arouses you, right? That's why the postmodern idea that value is just made up is non-erotic. It actually deflates. It empties the field of eros. And I'm just giving you an example. You know, when George Floyd was killed, which is a very, very painful and complicated story. And of course, it didn't happen exactly the way the story is told. Coleman Hughes, who's a very, very important black journalist, you know, wrote some really important essays about it. But whatever happened there, it was really bad, right? Whatever happened there,

it was bad shit, right? It was a great violation of value, whatever went down. Now, if you remember, that was the beginning of COVID. And that was a moment in which everyone said, if you leave your house, you will cause a thousand people to die, right? In other words, there was this sense of medical emergency, the divergence of opinion and the multiple voices, and then the challenge, right, of the kind of dominant vaccine narrative hadn't taken place. So there wasn't even room for controversy, right? It was a blanket, you are an evil said if you leave your house, you are a bad person, all left their houses and all protested and all protested together in the streets.

And somehow yesterday didn't matter anymore. Why? Because they were aroused. Why were they aroused? Because value had been violated. In other words, in some sense, they were right. In others, they couldn't do long-term considerations in that moment. They just had to say, we just saw value being violated.

We're going out there. So that's the notion of eros value. And it's value is eros. Eros is value. Eros is a value of cosmos, and value itself, when it's real, is filled with eros, which is why the postmodern idea that value is just made up, which is wrong on six or seven counts, but besides being wrong, it actually just destroys your interior sense of aliveness, your interior sense of, and eros is, has multiple components,

but one of them is radical aliveness. And eros is always radical aliveness, desiring deeper contact and greater wholeness. That's what eros is. So we're looking at the faces of eros. So that was everybody. First off, just thank you for bearing with us. I know that was a big introduction, but hopefully helpful.

So now we're going to go into a particular face of Eros, which is presence. Now, the reason I didn't want to do presence in our last dialogue was because when people hear presence, they kind of say, oh, yeah, we got that. Yeah, presence, let's be present. It's like, all right, right, we understand presence. But presence is actually much deeper. It's more subtle. So it's absolutely true that when you and I are talking to each other and if we're sitting in, we're chatting in,

you see me scrolling on my phone, right? That's a violation of presence. So, so we got that. And that's a big, that's not a small one, right? People are actually not present all the time. So actually, you know, being at a table with the family, right? Being at a table with the family looks like now, let's say there's four people in the family. There are four people sitting in the same physical place and they're all on their device. That is a classic picture.

You know, I took some shots when I happened to be, I was living at a beautiful spot in Miami for a couple of years with KK and And it was a hotel. And so I worked off in the lobby of the hotel. And so I took a series of pictures through the year as I was working downstairs. I did a little picture thing of groups of people would come to the hotel and sit in the lobby, you know, family. And they'd be waiting, you know, to go to their room. And literally no one would talk to each other. Like four or five people would all sit on their device with no contact at all. And that's what a dinner table looks like. So that clearly is a violation of Eros, right? If I'm sitting and looking at my device, so I'm physically present, but I'm not present. So presence is a quality

of Eros and presence means showing up. You know, Woody Allen wasn't wrong when he said something like 95% of life is showing up. But showing up means not just physically, it means I'm here. I have an experience of your presence. You're with me. And there's nothing more painful than the experience that my beloved, my partner, my friend is physically with me, but not present. So, you know, it's the famous, you know, image of let's do it in the guy-girl way, although it can obviously reverse, where she wants him to take walks at night. And so he says, okay, I guess she wants him to take walks. He has a to-do list. Well, okay, that's a goal. Let's take a walk. Okay, because he's pretty goal-oriented. He's got a line quality of goal orientation and she's kind of circle oriented. She wants him in the circle,

you know, with her. She wants him present. So they're on the walk and he's feeling very proud of himself because he's met his goal. Right. And she's furious with him. And he's like, why are you furious with me? Here I am. I'm taking a walk. He says, but you're not present. What do you mean not present? I'm right here. Where do you think I am? And it's this kind of classical conversation where he's fulfilled his line of quality, but she wants him to be present. She wants to feel his presence. And obviously the gender in that can reverse. So that's, of course, the beginning of presence. That's a big deal. And I don't want to make light of that.

That's huge. Just to be present with each other at that level changes reality. But we want to go deeper than that. presence is itself a quality of eros, and it is the quality of the radical placing of attention, right? So eros is this field of reality. Reality is a field of eros value, and it means that everything in the field is placing right attention on everything else. That's how you get coherent complexity in the field, right?

Because I'm now talking to Kyle. So in Kyle's body, which, you know, sadly, no one's mistaken with mine recently, which is I have to work on that. I have to work with my therapist on that one a little bit. But so in his body, you've got in this moment going like 37.3 trillion cells that are all present to each other. They're all aware of each other. They're aware of the entire lymph node system, and they're aware of the capillary system, and they're aware of all of the substructures of cells.

So cells are made up of molecules and atoms, and so there's this very, very, very, very stunning structure in which every part of chialness, right, and then, you know, like a million miles of nerve cable, you know, which is an exaggeration, but, you know, there's an enormous amount of nerve cable. So all of this is precisely present in exactly the right way. So that notion of presence actually lives in the structure of cosmos. And the precise experience of a cellular structure not being present to the entire rest of the cellular structure is called cancer. That's what cancer means. Cancer means I'm not present.

And therefore, I'm actually following an internal vector of mine that's ignoring but dissociates in a larger field. I'm not present to what's happening. Right? So I can be not present to what's happening and ignore the metacrisis of existential risk. I'm not present. I can be not present at the table because I'm on my phone and I'm literally unaware. I could be not present to my partner

or to my beloved or to a friend and not actually understand that they're transforming, that they're different than they were two years ago. And I've placed them in a box and I won't let them out of the box because I'm not actually present to who they are because I've actually stopped being present about four years ago.

And I'm remaining attentive to a person who's no longer here because presence has to be renewed in every second. So Eros is about the full presence and presence is about the placing of attention. Now, as we said in our first conversation, there's 12 billion years of eros before sex. So sex is a disclosure of eros.

12 billion years later, this movement of eros takes this momentously forward and it erupts in sexuality. We move from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction. So sex is an expression of eros, and sex is such a powerful expression that it models the erotic. Now, sex is the placing of attention. That's exactly what it is. What is sex?

Sexing is not a technical, mechanical function. Move hand there, keep hand there for three seconds, make circular motions around, right? That's not, it's not a mechanical man. Then move three inches up and then over to the left, right? That's not sexing. Sex is music. It's not mechanics. And music is about paying attention, right? So the wonder of sexing is not, oh, oh, right. I got this spasmodic feeling of fleeting pleasure for about nine and a half seconds. And it was so good that it changed my life. That's actually not why sexing is alluring. And by the way, if you haven't gotten beyond nine and a half seconds, it means you're not paying attention. It's a big deal, right? But sexing is the experience of radically placing attention

on an other and having attention radically placed on me. So sexing actually is the experience of radical presence, the radical placing of attention. That's different, although it overlaps, but it's different than the first quality of being on the inside. You can place attention even before you're on the inside. It's the, it's radical, just the radical attention by itself has its own quality. So the sexual models the erotic. So being on the inside is a quality of the sexual. You're lost on the inside together. First face of eros, the face we talked about last time, yearning, longing, desire is another quality of the sexual, but that models eros. That's actually a quality of eros that lives all the way up and all the way out and all through cosmos that discloses itself in full display and wonder in sexing. But presence as well, the placing of attention,

right, is a quality that actually demarcates cosmos. It applies in all the fields of eros, whether it's creativity, whether it's transformation, whether it's knowing, but it's about the placing of attention. And it lives at the atomic, molecular, cellular, lives all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. It's the placing of attention as radical presence. So that's the introduction. So we've introduced it, and in a certain sense, this stuff's crazy important. And if we just talked about this, we'd be happy. I mean, we'd be like, wow, we really get this notion of sexing as the placing of attention, eros as the placing of attention, and it's

beautiful, and it's true, but it's just the beginning. It's the ground of the conversation. So why don't we place attention? What distracts our attention? So I want to kind of start there. What takes us out of the present? Because presence is about this radical participation in the present. So what takes us out of the present is either past or the future, of course, right? So presence is I'm radically in the present. So either the future will take me out, I'm drawn into a future, or I'm reliving a past. And both of those prevent me from being in the present. Now, there's a way to dream as a deep expression of the present. And there's a way to collect yesterday's memories as my deep encounter with what this present moment invites, which is the collection of yesterday's memories. So I want to make that distinction, right?

There's a way to be called by my future self from deep within my experience of presence. And there's a way to collect yesterday's memories from deep within my experience of presence. And there's a way to collect yesterday's memories from deep within my experience of presence. And that's the place in which future and past merge in the present. And that's beautiful. But often there's a kind of reaching towards a different future, right? A kind of surface desire that reaches towards an outcome that takes me out of the present, or there's this repetition, right, the monkey mind chattering, reviewing events of yesterday again and again and again and again, which becomes a recursive loop that I can't liberate myself from, and I can't find my way to the present, which is where fullness of presence lives. So this face of eros that we're

talking about is fullness of presence. So why? Why is that true? Why do we jump out of the present? Why is the present so hard to engage? Why can't we access the present. And eternity resides in the present. There's an eternity that resides in the present, which opens up and blows open the doors of reality. And finitude discloses infinity. And that's what Blake was talking about when he talks about infinity in a grain of sand. That's what he was pointing towards. So what blocks us from being in the present is the fear of emptiness. And this is really where, with permission, brother, I want to, and everyone who's with us on this journey,

we want to enter in, and just so tenderly, my friends, right? Because this is, you know, sharing this is fierce, but it's also so tender. There's quivering tenderness because we're all imperfect vessels for the light. We're all reaching for, and we have to reach together with enormous, unimaginable tenderness, but also fiercely. So let's be fierce and tender here. We're desperately afraid of the emptiness. And life is what you do with your emptiness. It's a good sentence, and it's true. How I engage my emptiness is where life lives.

And emptiness means the busyness stops. And I have to actually look at myself. And I can't cover up that self with any kind of pretty costumes. And I face this void. Like, who am I? What am I? What am I really doing? What is this about? My death kind of finds its way in.

My no-thingness I can't quite access, so I just feel this kind of nothingness. And I have this encounter with this emptiness that feels to me unbearable. And so I reach to cover over the emptiness. See, that experience of reaching to cover over the emptiness, that is the experience that generates addiction. Addiction is not only related to early childhood trauma. It's not true. Early childhood trauma is real, obviously.

Trauma is part of the human experience. And revisiting my trauma again and again as a way of avoiding the presence that's available in the present is something that I need to learn to liberate myself from. That's absolutely true. But the fear of the emptiness is not just that I'm drawn to this old story in the past. It's that the emptiness itself is always there. Right underneath my busyness is this place where the business stops and I, who am I? And it's at that moment that the human being is born.

Life is what I do with my emptiness. And generally what we do is, right, we actually become in some profound sense, we become addicted. So let me see if I can kind of trace this. Let's see if I can kind of understand this. So everyone experiences emptiness. That moment where I just feel this dull throb, this kind of, there's sometimes a loneliness to it. There's sometimes a bitterness to it. There's sometimes just a B-L-A-H, a blah, right? There's just this kind of low grade kind of numbness where I can't actually feel my aliveness. And so I moved to cover it up. So, you know, for many years, Kyle, my friend,

we did retreats. And in the retreats, you know, we would, these were in the Middle East, we would start by saying, we'd like to welcome everyone to our, you know, to our addiction festival. You know, this is for kind of, you know, working with addiction. Everyone's like, whoa, we came to the wrong place because there were a couple of retreat centers and ours was one and there was another one down the road, which was a chemical dependency clinic. And we were like afraid that, no, no, no, we understand that everyone here is addicted. And everyone's like, what do you mean we're addicted? So the room would kind of erupt. So then I would always ask people, so let's define addiction.

Let's say, what's addiction? So we would start a conversation at the very beginning, like literally the first seconds of the seminar, what's addiction? And all sorts of possibilities would emerge. And the one we generally agreed on is that addiction is, and it's a geta's definition, addiction is when there's something you want to stop doing, but you can't stop. Very simple definition. It's a good definition. You just can't stop doing it. You want to stop doing it, but you can't stop doing it. That's addiction. So we would all kind of agree on that.

And then I would ask everyone, you know, gently, but again, tenderly, fiercely, okay, so how many people here think that casual gossip is a virtue? So pretty much everyone agreed casual gossip, not a virtue. Everyone agrees. Okay, great. We got that one. Okay. How many people here casual gossip?

Everybody. So everybody agrees that this is not a virtue. Everyone agrees that this is not noble. Everyone wants to stop doing it and no one can stop doing it. That means that everyone in this room is addicted to casual gossip and they do it multiple times a day. So I'm now in a room full of addicts. I was right. That's how we started the retreat. And it's very, very painful and potent and poignant and powerful because it's actually true. So why do people gossip? So people don't gossip casually. And I'm skipping all the literature that gossip's a way

of exchanging information. I'm talking about, you know, that's bullshit, right? Everyone knows what we mean by casual, unnecessary gossip, which somehow demeans and undermines another person. We all recognize and we can do all the sociology to explain it away or it's, you know, salutary benefits, but we know exactly what we're talking about. So why? Why does a person gossip? So people don't gossip because they're evil. That's just not the case.

People gossip because it's a very, very quick way to fill up the emptiness, right? And that's powerful. So you meet someone for coffee in the morning and you're not quite sure what to say. You can't find your way into the eros, which is the space between you and the circle that you're in. So what you do is you talk about a third person, you place them outside the circle, and you have an illusion that you're inside the circle. So in essence, gossip is a form of pseudo eros. You place someone outside, which gives you the illusion of being present on the inside. And that's why people gossip all the

time. Now, the prompt, therefore, to the addictive behavior is not a desire to share information about this other person. It has nothing to do with it. It actually comes from a moment of being discomfited. I'm uncomfortable. I can't quite land here, right? I got to make it okay. So I shoot out some gossip-natured information that allows me to give myself an illusion of having landed here. Now, deeper in, that's actually true about all addiction. All addiction is a form of pseudoeros. And pseudoos always means one thing. I can't stay in the emptiness.

Now that's a very, very big deal. And I want to share something. If you're joining us, this is the first time, the first dialogue that you're with us in, the first conversation or the first sharing. And Kyle's style in these dialogues, not at my request, his style in these dialogues is he's going to kind of hold the space. So I'm dialoguing for both of us, but he's kind of transmitting, right, back in and out, right? So we're here together in this particular way. But if this is the first moment you're stepping in and this is the last moment you're going to be here, if you just get this idea, right, and can practice it, I give you my complete word

of honor, you know, on the throne of all the lineages, this will change literally everything, which is when you feel the hit of the emptiness, become aware of it. You want to cover it over. Insert a wedge of eros, a wedge of awareness, and sit in the emptiness. Don't fucking move. Don't scroll. Don't text. Don't write. Don't talk about someone else. When I first started thinking about this, we'd say, don't make a phone call, but who uses phones anymore? But whatever you would do to escape the eros of that moment, stop. Just sit in the moment. Because the moment,

the time, and in the original. Because the moment, the time, and in the original Hebrew there's a beautiful word for time which is zeman, which means invitation. There's a unique eros to this moment of time. And that eros lives inside of the moment itself. So the only way to access the eros of the moment is to rest in it. And I can only rest in it by not leaving it. It's actually elegantly simple and beautiful, but I've got to stay in.

And here's the thing, Kyle, and it's never not true. If you're willing to sit in the emptiness, 15 minutes, literally 15 minutes, I promise you, you will taste direct enlightenment. Because what happens is, in that emptiness, what begins to well up is both the eros of the field that we live in, the field of eros value, and the unique quality of kyleness. Actually, it's not just that the field of eros value, and the unique quality of kyleness. Actually, it's not just that the field arises, but when you actually stay, you bracket, you close the exits. That's what it means to sit in the empty.

You close the exits. You close down the pseudo eros. Then what happens is you actually begin to show up. And you show up not just as awareness, you show up as actually the unique quality, the unique self, a word we use often of kyleness. You begin to fill the moment with your own unique quality of eros, which is your own unique quality of presence.

And it takes about 15 minutes, not less, which is your own unique quality of presence. And it takes about 15 minutes, not less, sometimes a little more, but literally that's it. You don't have to do any other practice. You encounter the emptiness and you actually say, you know what? I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay.

I'm going to stay. I'm going to sit. I'm not going to watch Bridgerton, even though there's a third season. I'm not saying not to watch it. I'm just saying don't watch it to cover over the emptiness. Okay? Netflix, the ultimate pseudo-eros. Right? There's no moment when it stops.

I remember when I was a kid, and by the way, I'm 93. I look a little young for my age, kind of weird, right? You look fucking great. I know, I know. It's like we're working it, right? So I remember when I was a kid and I was growing up, it was first Pittsburgh, Massachusetts, then Columbus, Ohio. There was this moment at like 1145, you know, at night when, you know, the last show was done, right? And then this image would come up on the television. It was

NBC. It was like a peacock, you know, ABC and CBS, three major channels. Of course, you also had your PBS channel that by then was long gone. And then the Star Spangled Banner came on and it's one minute to midnight and good night, right? And then occasionally there'd be on a channel that'd be like late night movies, but that was for the weird, you know, messed up people. Basically it was sleep time. Like it stopped. Okay. What Netflix essentially does is, is it doesn't allow for the stop.

It doesn't allow, right? We've created a world of massive pseudo eros between Netflix and social media, right? There's this constant connectivity with no intimacy. It's like Vegas. It's the digital Vegas. We literally live in the immersive environment of Vegas. And see if I can find it for you here. Hold on.

And I'm just finishing writing on this. A book with my dear colleague and friend and student for many years and beautiful brother, Zach Stein. We're just finishing a book called Technofutilism, the important book that was written 13 years ago. I just happened to have it next to me by Natasha Dow Shul. It's called Addiction by Design, and it's a careful scholarly study of the nature, the Structures of Vegas, and how in certain passages, she's one of the first people to notice how social media designers intentionally studied

the immersive environments of Vegas in order to generate by intention the same environment. And the name of her book about Vegas is Addiction by Design. And I'll just see if I can find it. I just happen to be finishing this book right now see if I can find it here hold on hold on hold on hold on yep right and then right and by the way we didn't prepare this everyone me and Kyle let's just have right this is a book um was put out by Wiley written by Chris Nauter a bunch of years ago. And he's playing on Natasha Dove Scholl's title and he calls it evil by design. Okay, like hello, right?

Evil by design. So this would go from addiction by design to evil by design. And the entire point of evil by design is that the principles of addiction by design in Vegas should be consciously adopted by design is that the principles of addiction by design in Vegas should be consciously adopted by design, right, in the social media world. So your passing comment was precisely accurate and profound. And, you know, I talk about this in the techno-feudalism book, but the reason it matters so much is because of what we're talking about here between us. Because what it basically means is

we are actually defacing the erotic. We are actually violating the quality of eros. And when we talk about the goddess, the goddess is not some new age fantasy, right? Invoked, you know, by a bunch of crystals with all due respect, right? The goddess is the radical fullness of presence, right? That I feel when I step into the moment and I'm willing to engage the

emptiness and walk through it. And I'm willing to bracket my avoidance, which is my a void dance, a void dance. I dance around the void. I refuse to enter the void. I won't do it. And I, you know, there's a, I was at someone's house giving a lecture a bunch of years ago, and it must have been a decade ago. And I couldn't sleep. It was a jet lag issue. I don't fly that well in terms of flying. It was a jet lag issue. And I reach over and it was a, I believe an autobiography of Jane Fonda. You know, it's like, you know, one in the morning I open up this like long autobiography

and it opens up to a passage, right, about the gentleman who started CNN, right, whose name escapes me right now. What's his name? What's his name? Name escapes me. But, you know, Jane was married to him for many years. And then actually my friend Sally Rainey became his partner. And I can't remember his name, but you would know the name if I said it, right? And he was kind of the founder of CNN. Someone can fill it in, that information. Great guy. And he

scheduled his life so he'd never be alone. That was the job of his assistants, and Jane describes it, so that he'd never have a moment that wasn't engaged, right? In some particular way. Not because of a desire for radical, unceasing innovation and creativity, right? But because of this intense fear of the void, right? This fear of the emptiness. So I'm going to go back. Life is what you do with your emptiness. It's so deep, my friends.

It's such a simple sentence. Life is what you do with your emptiness. And what you do with your emptiness. It's so deep, my friends. It's such a simple sentence. Life is what you do with your emptiness. And what you do with your emptiness is sit. Nothing else. Sit. And it will always fill up. And the reason people don't sit in the emptiness is because they've been inculcated, infused, poisoned by a materialist bias which suffuses modernity but actually is the noxious air of post-modernity, which is the default kind of cultural assumption that runs through the academy, which is there's nothing there. So it's not going to fill up, right? There is nothing underneath. So underneath is so unimaginably filled with terror that I have to avoid it, right?

In any and all possible ways. Now, let me see if I can go in one step deeper with you. All right. And hopefully Kyle, my brother, you understand a little bit better now. It's why I didn't want to go to presence the second conversation. It's a very subtle conversation. And people also get caught in the first part of presence, which is important. Be present.

That's a big deal. But that's just the beginning. The reason people aren't present is because they're always going someplace else because they're afraid of the emptiness. So if my conversation with you, I feel, doesn't fill me, and I feel some pang of anxiety and some pang of discomfort, I can't actually be here with you. I don't actually trust that I can drop into this deeper place because the deeper place doesn't exist in a flatland universe. So I've got to go someplace else, pseudoeros, and I'm addicted to pseudoeros. Addiction is not about the particular form of the addiction. Addiction means

I can't stay in the emptiness because I don't trust the eros to emerge, so I go to always cover the emptiness with pseudoeros. So now it gets crazy beautiful. It gets crazy beautiful and crazy deep. And let's just go kind of subtle and slow, you know, and it's so, it's so insanely beautiful. So we talked about, I think in the first week we talked about our dear friend, Harrison, Harrison Ford, who among his many appearances, Raiders of the Lost Ark was primary. And I'm living here in Vermont in this little town, and there's a little movie theater here in town, and they keep rerunning old versions of like the Temple of Doom. It's like, really? So the Ark is, of course, the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon's Temple, right, in Jerusalem. And the lineage of

Solomon, the lineage of the wisdom of Solomon is a primary lineage at the center of world culture, affecting both East and West. Solomon's ahead of his time. We all know the word wisdom of Solomon, just doesn't matter where you are in the world, you say wisdom of Solomon, everyone knows that something, but we kind of don't, we forgot what it is. And I was just insanely privileged to, through a number of life circumstances, to be kind of invited in by the whisperings of she into that lineage. And I spend, you know, thousands and tens of thousands of hours kind of deep on the inside of these Aramaic texts. And, you know, one of the volumes that I wrote is called Radical Kabbalah in volume two is about the wisdom of Solomon. And it's a hidden volume.

We don't even call it the wisdom of Solomon because it has to be hidden. It's not about marketing it. Right. So I tried to trace 2000 years of Aramaic texts that unpack the kind of subtlety of the wisdom of Solomon. So Solomon's wisdom is located in this notion of temple, right? And at the center of temple is the ark, and the ark's the ark of the covenant. And above the ark of the covenant are these two cherubs. The cherubs are sexually intertwisted.

That's a conversation we had a little bit in the beginning when we talked about Eros in our first conversation. But for now, I want to focus on a different dimension. The text reads, right, in the sacred canon of civilization, right, the text reads, I will meet you there. Right, the voice of the infinite says, I will meet you there. The voice of the infinite says, I will meet you there. Between the two cherubs. So between, what does between mean?

So between is one of the language symbols for Shekhinah, for the goddess. So the goddess is not a New Age fantasy. The goddess is the radical presence that emerges from Bain. Bain is the Shekhinah, the goddess, which is Eros itself, which comes from Bain, and the word Bain means in-between. And in-between is the empty space in-between. At the empty space in between. At the empty space in between. You know, I'm at the airport.

My flight's been canceled. People go out of their mind. My flight's, what am I going to do? You got four hours to the airport. What am I going to do? No, no, no. That's the space in between. The space in between is when Heidegger's busy, busy man, busy, busy woman,

it stops. It's the space in between. I'm not doing an activity which is functional. I'm not, I've liberated myself for a moment from the addictions of pseudo eros, everything stops. There's a cessation, right? I enter the space in between. And from the space in between, the voice of she emerges. It's very beautiful, right? I've got to be willing to enter into the emptiness, which the empty space between the cherubs.

Now that's Eros. Now I want to, with your permission, Kyle, I want to add something and it's, it's so important and it allows us to retell a story of value that reanimates us and allows us to respond to the metacrisis and to become new humans, which is all ethical breakdowns come from failures of eros. We generally understand there's this contradiction between

the erotic and the ethical. In order to be ethical I gotta liberate myself from kind of the throes of the erotic it's exactly the opposite actually all collapses of ethics of every kind in every place whether they're national whether they're personal whether they're financial whether they're national, whether they're personal, whether they're financial, whether they're sexual, right, whether they are violent or not violent, all collapses of ethics, without exception, come from a prior breakdown of eros. When eros collapses, ethics fails. That changes our entire way of understanding civilization and ourselves. Instead of there being a clash between the erotic and the ethical, and if you say the erotic and the ethical, okay, that's the clash, the erotic versus the ethical. No, exactly not true. All ethical collapses happen

because of a prior failure of eros. And let's just find it. When I'm in my eros and I feel my fullness, I don't need to cover over the empty space with some kind of acting out, whether that acting out is violent or just obsessive or abusive or whatever it happens to be. No, because I'm in my fullness. It's actually only when I meet the emptiness and I'm desperately afraid of the emptiness, right? And I feel kind of the kind of deadness of the emptiness. And I yearn to feel alive and I yearn to actually experience, right, my aliveness and my ability to draw attention and to place attention, right, that I act out. So acting out is always the covering up

of the spaces in between. Like, wow. So prophecy, that text we just described, that we just read, is the description of prophecy. Prophecy is, the prophet is simply the man, the woman, who met the emptiness and sat. That's it. That's it. That's prophecy, right? Life is what you do with your emptiness, right? I enter my emptiness. I sit in it and I become a prophet. I don't, and I mean this with great tenderness. I think there's enormous space and reason to do medicine journeys.

I think that they have an enormously important space and practice. And with our brother Aubrey, Aubrey and I have kind of done deep dives in Holy of Holies and in Sacred Study, where we've talked about the medicine needs the Dharma, and the Dharma needs the medicine. And then we actually did, you know, a journey together, right? Because even just for us to be able to do, to study together, and what I call the Holy of Holies,

it was important to meet Aubrey in the world that he lives in. And so we did this very, very deep journey together. It was beautiful. I remember there was a particular point in journey says, do you want more? I said, give me all of it. He said, you sure? I said, let's go. And so we poured in and we went for a wild ride. It was a holy ride. And so the medicine needs the Dharma. The Dharma needs the medicine. Medicine's a holy journey. So I want to just bless that. And medicine itself can either be eros or pseudoeros, right? Of course, that's true. Medicine is either an expression, a disclosure of the eros, or it's a way to cover over the Right? And in some sense, the most profound potent medicine is simply to sit. And that's where prophecy emerges from. So that's presence.

That's the second face of eros, which revisions the relationship between the erotic and the ethical, revisions the essential journey of a human life. And I've said it probably four or five times, and I apologize somewhat insincerely, but I'll say it again because it's such a big deal. You know, I heard this whisper, I don't know, a decade ago, you know, 15 years ago, this whisper, life is what you do with your emptiness. And I jotted it down when I heard the whisper and I hear it every day because we encounter the emptiness always, right? It can be late at night when we're by ourselves and everyone's gone to sleep. It can be in the morning at 10 o'clock.

We meet the emptiness. She's always there. And either she becomes the place out of which the most profound value emerges, right? I call it, the name we call it is there's value and anti-value, right? Which is the sense value means I met the emptiness. I sat so deeply that value disclosed itself, or I went to cover over the emptiness and anti-value emerges. When you look at Lord of the Rings, you have Sauron, the eye of Sauron. Sauron is the ultimate incapacity to stay in the emptiness, and therefore you have to cover over the emptiness with pseudo-Eros,

but the ultimate form of pseudo-Eros is power. Power is, right, it's the ultimate form where you have the sense that it's for its own sake. It's the ultimate disguise. The place that pseudo-Eros disguises itself most viciously as eros is in power that's of course what the the ring of sarn is about it's about ultimate power and the only response right to ultimate power which is a power over a power that dominates a power that separates

a power that desiccates, a power that breaks apart. The only response to that can be the fellowship of the ring. True eros. It's to come together. And it's the bonds of love, right? It's the radical fellowship. Chan, I always feel that fellowship with you, my brother. Every time we talk and it delights me and honors me.

So this is it. This is our third face of Eros, right? Radical presence sitting through the emptiness into prophecy. So thank you. Cha. Thank you, brother. So fucking good. I've been reading Lord of the Rings to Bear. So I hadn't read those books when I was younger. We had seen the movies, of course, and we just finished The Hobbit. I'm going to read it right now. Wow. That lands so deeply because when I, you know, I try to wrap my head around the things, you know, one of the things we talked about in at least a few of these podcasts is that the

existential risk that we're up against is not, you know, it could be the death of humanity or more likely the loss of our humanity. Right. And the loss of our humanity would be predicated by those few who have power and who crave power and crave control. And, you know, you can name them or not, it doesn't really matter, but that does exist. And it probably exists throughout history. That's why we have these downloads come through the she, through the writing or in film, you know, and we see these things pop up again. But I loved, I loved what you talk about with the fellowship because there is a power that's greater than all the rings.

There is a power that's greater than those that control us. And I love it, brother. And I love you big time. Yeah, I love you. I love you big time. Big time, brother. We are the fellowship of the ring together, right? And welcome.

Madly, brother. Yay. Cha, brother. Cha. you