Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #450 Perception of Eros: The Psychology of Love w/ Marc Gafni

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

Kyle Kingsbury welcomes back Dr. Marc Gafni to continue their short-form series on the “12 faces/phases of Eros,” focusing here on Eros as perception. Gafni defines Eros as radical aliveness desiring deeper contact and greater wholeness, a cosmic force uniquely moving through each person, and argues love is not merely emotion but a “perception-identification complex” in which one perceives another’s irreducible quality/value and identifies their essence with that beauty rather than surface flaws. He critiques modern fast, negative, scandal-driven attention and “pornographic” surface gazing as anti-Eros, contrasting it with deep perception captured by Avatar’s “I see you.” He says understanding love as perception makes it trainable, and extends the idea to orgasm as an illumination and affirmation of divine intimacy.    Connect with Marc here: Instagram   From Kyle: The Community is coming! Click here to learn more   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. These are the b3 bands I was talking about. They are amazing, I highly recommend incorporating them into your movement practice.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyle-Kingsbury Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome back to the podcast. We have the return, the long-awaited return of Dr. Mark Goughney. I hope I say that correctly. I'm always like Gaffney, Gaffney, like some nasally old turd. Just like when a Goldie used to announce me as Kingsbury, Kyle Kingsbury to the cage. And I was like, you know, that's a U, not an E R-R-R-Y, but I'll take it. Anywho, my apologies, you are a dear brother and one of my mentors I consider. So I absolutely love doing these.

We are continuing. the 12 faces of Aeros. These are starting to get shorter and shorter on purpose by design. We want you guys to just chew through these. This is meant to be a series that you can actually just pick up and go. If you'll notice, I don't say a lot on these podcasts with Dr. Mark. And, you know, we have had a couple of podcasts on other things like his other Brooks where it was a back and forth.

And they were great. They were solid. Totally different type of podcast. This is meant to be short-form lecture for you to get a deeper download. as you go through the book yourself, straight from Dr. Mark's lips. And if you're like me, it's going to hit home in a way that helps you expand your understanding of consciousness, the nature of reality, and God itself. Welcome back to the podcast.

Here we go, 12 faces of Eros. Eros as perception. This one is so important. Let's try and go slow for a second, okay? So the word Eros, which we've talked about in our early conversations quite extensively, all right we did at least an entire conversation on on eros and what it means you know in its very core so we said that eros is the experience of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness and that that definition of eros which is love by any other name

but it's love in the cosmic scale in the person scale. That's the whole point of Eros, right? The whole point of Eros is for anyone who who's kind of coming in in the middle or just needs a little refresher for a second, and I always need a refresher. So let me refresh myself and renew myself. Eros is both utterly cosmic and utterly personal. That's the point. We've alienated our personal Eros from the field of Eros, which is why our personal eros collapses. There actually is no local Eros. There's no local eras, there's no local eras desire. There's no local desire. No local desire doesn't exist. There's no local desire running through you. I'm filled with eros. No, no, you're filled with eras,

which is the eros of all of reality moving uniquely through you. Huh. Okay. So eros is loved by any other name. It's the experience of radical aliveness, which takes place at every level of cosmos. We have this incredible group, Kyle, you know, called the evolving parentalism group at the think tank where we are working with a bunch of people. One gentleman who's a professor, you know, was a professor at Harvard Medical School, another kind of Harvard education guy, you know, myself, another person's head of a hospital in Europe, you know, another one in Houston, you know, brilliant doctor. And we're looking at each one of these first principles and first values of Eros

and how they actually operate in the world of enzymology, in the microbiome, right, in biochemistry. I mean, insanely beautiful. And when you actually see how a biochemical reaction, which is chemistry, there's chemistry allurement, right, at the bio level that creates a reaction. reaction means, wow, that's beautiful, I'm reacting. It's a reaction. It's the same structure all the way up and all the way down, which then generates this new level of aliveness.

So none of this is poetry in the sense of being mythopoetic. It's not mythopoetic. It's the ultimate poetry, which is the prose of reality itself. So Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring, ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness, which itself generates ever more value. Now, within this Eros formulation, there's also a more formal Eros equation in our first principles and first values book, which is, you know, someplace on this desk, but I can never quite find where it is.

Oh, here we go. Right. In this book, right, there's actually each one of these equations is listed out. First principles and first values, there's an equation. We don't need the equation. Now, the formulation's enough. But in this formulation, we have to have perception. So where's perception here? So I'm desiring ever deeper contact.

So I'm studying with a new, you know, with a new, you know, beautiful young man in Holy of Holies, Aubrey Marcus. Aubrey has a friend named Kyle. Aubrey says, hey, you should meet Kyle, right? You know, really, you and Kyle should really meet each other. I could say, okay, great. We meet each other. Right. Now, we could meet each other once and say, oh, great to meet you. You know, have, you know, and have a great life. It was sweet meeting you. It was enjoyable. I believe Christina was there when we met and we did our first podcast. Or we could say, no, I really see something in Kyle. Like, he's like, I really see this beautiful, like purity and good. and and, you know, poignancy, you know, which is kind of merged with power. You know, I mean, his body is obviously not as refined and developed as mine is.

But, you know, I mean, just, you know, whatever he could do there, right? But, you know what I mean? In other words, so I see Kyle, I perceive. And therefore, I say, hey, or Kyle says, hey, right? Let's do another podcast, meaning let's have more contact. Huh. Right? So actually, you can actually see that.

It's very real, right? It's at the same thing that's happening at the biochemical level. Okay, so Mark and Kyle say, oh, we have some chemistry. Okay. So we react to each other. So now we're at a biochemical reaction at the human level. We feel this aliveness. I'm, you know, I just got on the phone.

You're in a rush because you have to appropriately go be a great dad. And I'm like, oh, that's sad. I'm not going to get a little extra time with Kyle for a minute, right? But it's a, so there's chemistry, right? And it's based on perception. So it's not just a feeling. It's actually, right? So love is not just an emotion.

It's not just energy and motion, but it's not just affective. It's not just a feeling, although there's a feeling dimension for sure. There's a feeling. But there's also a perception. I'm actually seeing something. I'm actually perceiving a gnosis. I'm perceiving a quality. Right? Do you remember that gentleman thought it was in the 60s or late mid-70s? When was it?

When that gentleman wrote this book Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that book kind of splashed into the world. Then he wrote another book called Lila, right, or Lila or something of the kind. And he was talking a lot about quality. That was his topic, quality. So quality is really another word for value. Right? Quality is like, oh, there's a quality. So I'm perceiving, I'm not just feeling the quality of Kyleness. I'm perceiving, oh, there's like, oh. And actually, once I perceive Kyleness, I never confuse it with someone else.

Right? It's immistakable, which is very interesting, right? The nature. So eros, love is a perception. Love is not only an emotion, it's a perception. And once you have that perception imprinted on your heart, body, and soul, you never confuse it with anyone else. Right. Like so there's no part of me that I kind of, I kind of, when I evoke my perception of Kyle, I don't say, oh, that's Aubrey. No, it's not confusing. Oh, that's, you know,

Godsy. No, not confusing. Oh, maybe that's Caitlin. No, not confusing. Right. It's not confusing. Oh, that's Aaron, not confusing. Right. You know, blessings to all the holy people. But actually, right, It's not just that I have a feeling, right, of Kyle, but I actually have a perception of a particular quality of rightness in Cosmos. I want to get a very precise, a quality of rightness in Cosmos whose name is Kyle. And I'm perceiving that. And not only am I perceiving it, I'm identifying the essence of Kyle with that quality of rightness. So I don't identify the essence of Kyle with, man, his assistant wrote me back a kind of

sharp email about trying to make our schedule. I guess he doesn't like me or other Jews, right? No, I don't do that. But like, that was a right message, right? You know, and Kyle says, man, that's so hard to make an appointment with that guy, Goughby and Suzette. They're kind of, they, they missed two and we miss two. Like, we don't, I'm saying we don't inflate the little details of trying to do schedule into kind of like, right? Or let's even say that you perceived in Mark some, something you thought was, wow, you know, that's the thing he needs to work on. Or I perceived him, wow, Kyle, Kyle might want to kind of work on that, you know, right? Great. You know, we're all in perfect vessels for the light, right? Of course we are. But when I perceive Kyle, when I love him,

what it means is they, I identify his essence with his beauty, with his unique quality of beauty, with his irreducibly unique quality of beauty. So eros is not just a feeling. Love is not just a feeling or evolutionary love, outrageous love, other words for eros. Love is a perception, A, B, it's not just a perception, it's a perception identification complex. I perceive your irreducible quality of rightness

and I identify you with that, right? And, you know, if I got a couple of issues or you do or, you know, Moses did, you know, Moses had a few things going on in the Old Testament that he could have done some work with. And, you know, Buddha had some, some shitty. Could have kind of, you know, could have maybe done some, you know, early childhood work on to kind of refine a little bit. Right. So that's okay. But I identify Buddha with the Buddha.

Right. And as we have this notion, you know, you know, the nature of our society is, right, our kind of, you know, immersive environment of micro-targeted, you know, attention, you know, what Connman called fast thinking, is actually the opposite of perception. There is, it's surface, it's quick hits, right? And it's attention grabs,

and attention grabs generally go, right, and are transfixed more quickly by tragedy or by negativity, right, or by scandal, right? And so what we do is, We actually do the opposite, right, of Eros' perception. We actually, we actually see some fault in a person that we have no idea whether it's true or not because it got repeated someplace on the web, right? We have no idea if it's true, right?

God, we read Wikipedia. Well, Wikipedia is actually not a good source of information. It's owned and run by a group of probably 35 to 40 editors we know today, right? And as our, you know, in each individual page is fairly well controlled. But we saw something somewhere. We don't know the person we've never met them. We haven't done our kind of what our friend Aaron calls our kind of our own personal research. But we just have a quick hit of something going by, right, kind of flashing by as we're scrolling, flashing by, we're swiping.

Flashing by, we get some hit. Oh, something about a person, right? And then we identify them with that surface piece of information. And then every time we come back to them in their mind, we come back to that surface piece of information that we haven't actually, right, subject. to any true perception. It's like, wow, wow. So we actually, we actually, we do a surface, I want to give you how non-erotic we've become.

We do a surface identification of a detail of information, which is generally connected to what we think is a person's weakness, right? Or a mistake or sin or pathology or imperfection. And we identify them with that forever. that is that's shocking so we've created an environment which is anti eros it's not just right so if reality is eros at its core and the intimate communions of reality are based on right a the participation in a cosmorotic universe and creating right containers of eros in generating what we might call my friend kail a culture of eros right and eros means perception means i see you and by the way

way, it's what Cameron got really well in Avatar. We're making this, right? We're making this podcast. I think we started as Avatar 2 came out. It's around when we started, I think, some of like 20, 23. And it's now 2020, you know, maybe maybe Cameron came out like right before we started. But in any case, in all three avatars, there's this great moment where it's, I see you. And the way they deploy that line in the movie is actually quite critical. Right. If you could actually do a meta analysis of the movie, which I actually did. We published a book where I did an analysis of the first two movies, right?

It's online at Amazon. If you don't want it to look at it, it's a beautiful set of essays. But one of the things you can do is subject avatar to a metal analysis of when you hear the line I see you. And who says it to who, you know, and based on what? Right? So there's this moment in which, oh, God, help me with the name, the, the, the, the, the, the, that he marries. What's her name? Narvati, what's her name? You know what? I'm sorry. I just watched part three, too. It's escaping me, though. Right, right, right. So, so the, the, the key figure who, who he falls in love with, the human who then becomes, you know, kind of goes to the transformation of the body, right, to kind of join, you know, the Navi. So she's the Navi princess. And she has a very, very hard time with the son of the Marine colonel, right, who's kind of the villain, the little son, right? And so she has a very hard time with him kind of through movie one, movie two, right? And then in movie three, there's a moment where she says, I see you.

Right? Movie through is like that. It's one of the most important lines in the movie says, I see you. And what she's saying is, wow, up to now I've been seeing this deficiency and this lack and this complexity. you, but I couldn't actually see you. And all of a sudden, it just exploded in me. And now I see you. I see your essence. I see who you. Right. I see you. So I see you is Cameron's intuitive sense of this notion of Eros's perception. Right. It's love as perception, but it's not just perception. It's perception identification. Right. Now, here's the last thing. And we can end with this.

And I think we're trying to do like short little 30 minute clips on each one of these or something like that. But it's very beautiful, which is, and I remember one of the most beautiful moments I had with the Dalai Lama when I was in Darm Sala. And I've told the story on different occasions. I won't belabor it now. But in any case, the one second version of the story is we had a little bit of a fight at Castro Gandalfo, which is the Pope's summer residence, where he said something kind of really fundamentally annoying. which I told my thought was fundamentally annoying in front of a room full of like 25 people. He had invited like 25 of us kind of to, you know, who were kind of countercultural, quote-unquote,

leaders, you know, to Castro Condolfo to discuss the future of the world. You know all the names that were there. As if anyone cared that we were having this conversation, right? I'm just between us, right? And there's nothing more annoying, Kyle, just really just between us and hanging out with 25 spiritual teachers for like five days, right? You just want someone to pass you the salt. Hey, could you pass me the salt? I'd be honored to pass you the salt of the earth that merges.

Just pass me the salt. You're with like 25 people who have cameras in front of them. That's even worse, right? It's like it's bad. We're in a bad scene. But no, they were all fantastic and gorgeous people, of course. Right. And in this context, you know, we had a fundamental disagreement about something,

me and Mr. Dalai Lama, where he kind of said something. And I responded by walking across the room and kind of challenging him in a very dramatic way. And he responded with a very funny joke. And the end of the story was he, you know, he sent his friend, Achuk Rinfeshay, to who's the head of the Tibetan Library, and invite me to come, you know, hang with him in Darm Sala, which we did. We became friends. And so I went to Darm Sala. And, you know, we did a conversation, which is actually part of it on my website.

We did a few hours of conversation there. And he was wild and beautiful and funny. And he loves being a child, right? And it's one, you know, a true sage is we have to, a true sage is not trustable unless they do baby talk sometimes, right? Do you know what I mean? In other words, a true sage has to be a combination of just intense seriousness and wisdom, you know, and play and kind of childlike, you know, innocence, you know, not naive innocence, but a kind of second innocence that you retain. So he very much kind of models that quality. And I would say, you know, one of the most exciting moments.

And again, this is, you could find this. I think it's on my personal website on Markoffrey.com. You look up dialogue, it's there on this exact moment. So there's this moment we're talking about this idea that love is not an emotion. It's a perception. And he gets very beautiful, beautiful. He's very excited about it. And the reason they're excited about it is because what we realize is it means that you can train love.

Right. If love is only a spontaneous feeling and, you know, Cupid brings back his arrow. right he brings it back right you know and he just finished reading his end in the art of archery cupid he was kind of cross-pollinating religions and he kind of hits you there right so like boom oh my god i'm in love with the secretary right right right and i was like right right and that's and then it hits somebody else and so you've got this this force that you don't know where it came from that arouses you to this you know what plato calls in one of his you know less noble moments you know the kind of the senseless passions, you know, of the lover, the poet, right, that kind of overtake you

and are kind of, you know, mad and not in a good way, right? And you're like, you're lost. So if that's what love is, if it's this emotion, it's this energy in motion that just is complete, unconstrained and uncontrolled. And that's what our metaphors for love are. You fall in love, right? You're love struck. You're blinded by love. So the entire point of being blinded by love is, right you know love is blind right one of blake's less good lines right no love is not blind right love blinds you to your narrow egoic self and opens you up to the deeper perception of reality right how did emily dickens say it she said she said i love emily dickinson she said not revelation tis that waits but our unfurnished eyes right not revelation tis that waits but our unfurnished eyes

to love is unfunish my eyes. I see you, right, camera on an avatar, right? So if love is not just a capricious feeling, but it's actually a feeling that is birthed through perception. It's not that there's not a feeling, of course love is a feeling. Of course, the universe feels and the universe feels love. The universe feels and the universe feels love. And then that love moves through me as a unique feeling in kyleness,

but that feeling is nourished, is activated, is refined, is aroused by perception. And perception doesn't mean we've reduced erotic perception to pornographic gazing. Right? I mean, it's like, right? So we have this unimaginably visual world, which is pornographic, which is sensation decontextualized from story, from sacred autobiography. right and and the visual is the surface visual it's not the depth visual so the pornographic is the pseudo expression of the erotic right so that's why in the pornographic since it's surface sensation

you need a new male body or a new set of breasts right because and that's why right that's why you know you have to figure out in 1957 oh we'll have miz november and then Ms. December and we're not having Ms. November come back a second time because we saw that set of rest before and we need a new one because we don't have actually depth perception. We're not loving. So the pornographic gaze requires a new object of the gaze. The erotic gaze is not to have a new body, but to see with a new set of eyes. I want to see with fresh eyes. So I don't want a new object. I want a new subject. That's our access perception, right? In other words, and, maybe we can finish here, but it's so beautiful, you never, even something like an orgasm,

right, which is, for those of you who are unfamiliar, right, it's an explosion that happens at the end of a certain kind of contact, generally intersubjective contact, but sometimes autoerata contact, different conversation, but we think that an orgasm is this mechanical eruption of pleasure. I ate ice cream, now I had an orgasm. That's exactly not what an orgasm is. An orgasm is a perception. It's very deep. That's why when a person's kind of moving towards that edge, their eyes start to open and they start to say, oh, my God, I'm so committed to you.

Right. I mean, you're so beautiful, right? We'll be together forever. It's not that they're trying to get something. They're already in. They're not trying to get something. No, what's happening is their eyes are opening. It's like, wow, right?

So orgasm is actually a play on the Hebrew or Mugzum, the extreme light. And I mean that kind of poetically, right? There's an extremity of light. The light that in the lineage traditions was hidden. It's called the Orhaganus, the hidden light. So reality manifests, and then the primary light is hidden. And then only this residue of the light kind of animates the world.

Then there are moments that we can actually access the original light. An orgasm, or Mugzam, the extremity of the light, is a moment we can access that original light, that original illumination. I see you. And then what do I do? I become divinity in motion, gazing at the infinite intimate, incarnate in my partner,

screaming the name of God. And I cry out, oh God. And I cry out, yes, because it's the radical affirmation of the depth of my perception. And I cry out the name of the beloved because the yes in the name of my beloved and the name of God

become in that moment of ultimate erotic perception. the same name. So it is. So it is. Cha. Wow. Wow, what a pleasure. What an honor. Incredible. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. God. I see you, my friend.

I see you, brother. Absolutely. All the way. Until next time. Until next time, brother. Thank you so much. All right, guys. Quick break to tell you about lucy.com. offers 100% pure nicotine, as always tobacco-free. Lucy breakers are nicotine pouches with an extra surprise. Each pouch holds a capsule that can be broken up to release extra flavor and hydration. Set yourself up with a subscription and have Lucy delivered straight to your door.

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