Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #454 Gifting and Giving/ Receiving the 8th face of Eros w Dr Marc Gafni

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

We continue the 12 faces of Eros series w Dr Marc Gafni with #8 Gifting and Giving/ Receiving. These EPs are meant to be fast lecture style podcasts that drop knowledge on a particular facet of the Divine.  Join my new community The Kingdom Within on https://www.skool.com/the-kingdom-within-5541/about Microdose with the very best products on Earth and get 15% off everything in the store using "KKP" at checkout  https://brainsupreme.co/collections/all   Get Dr Marc's Book A Return to Eros here  https://a.co/d/0cnzGcY7  

Dr. Mark Gaffney, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you very, very much, sir. It is good to be here, and we are in, God, what number? I don't even know the number. We should know the number. Well, I guess it'll be on the name of the podcast, the number, but we are at, I don't know, something like number eight, the eighth face of Eros.

Could well be. The eighth face of Eros, right? And these faces of Eros are all the way up and all the way down. right? And they operate at the molecular level. They operate at the metabolic level, molecular, the world of matter, the metabolic, the world of cells, all the up into the human world. And they are the structural qualities of cosmos itself. That is to say, we live in a cosmoerotic universe, not as a metaphor, not as a poetic claim. but as the scientific prose of reality's text. That's where we live. So today we're going to talk about this particular quality of Eros, which is the fundamental identity between giving and receiving.

And really, we really have to go back, actually, because really the first quality is gifting and the second quality is giving and receiving. It's really two distinct qualities that we're talking about. So what is gifting? Let's start there. So gifting is this very strange quality. Gifting is this sense and reality that I am willing to, but the word will, is a desire word.

So will is never cognitive, right? Will is always desire. In fact, the Hebrew word for will from the song of songs, the great erotic love song of Solomon, is roots to run. And to run means to access my will. I run with my will. There's that old movie from like 30 years ago,

chariots of fire, which is about these two, right, these two Olympic competitors and, you know, the kind of, that kind of penultimate runner whose name escapes me right now. And I remember the theme music of charades of fire. So that penultimate runner, he runs with his will. You can remember the scene in the movie where he just, right, you can feel him running. So this running roots, right, in the original Hebrew, always means not just I'm technically fast, but I'm running with my, well, I'm running towards you. So in Cosmos, there is this willingness to give, to gift. I have a desire, I have a will, a desire to pour into you. And that's true from the very, very beginning. There is a ceaseless creativity in Cosmos in which parts are allured to. to each other, and to some very specific and precise extent, the part is willing to bracket

itself in order to love the other, to allow for the allurement to the other, in order to create a larger union. And that is precisely how all of chemistry works. All of biochemistry works precisely that principle. And I'm not going to just I'm hungry for you. I'm going to absorb you and you're going to absorb me, but in a way in which we create some form of a larger whole. So in that sense,

the very quality of loving is gifting. And I want to stay very close. And again, in the original Hebrew word for love is ahava. And Ahava, A-H-A-V-A-H-A-A-H-A-H-A-H-A-V-A. And Ahava means two things. It means flame. Le Hava flame, the kind of erotic flame, love desire, right?

The power of love, desire. And I never, by the way, Kyle, like to talk about either love or desire separately. They actually speak the word. They're actually inadequate. They're both inadequate as words by themselves. Desire by itself doesn't quite work. Love by itself doesn't quite work. It's love desire.

So love desire is Ahava. Ava is this kind of, this wildly beautiful flame. But the same word Ahava has a, two-letter root. In English, it would be HAV, just in the way we would pronounce it, Hav. And Hav is a word that appears in several places in the original canon, including in Deuteronomy, Havu, which is, let me give, or in Genesis, Hava, giving. So the very word loving itself, Eros, is giving. The essential nature of love is, and I want to offer kind of a definition here. And of course, you can't define love or you kill it. Love is an experience,

but we can get a sense of what it is, what it's phenomenology, what's dynamic is. So to love someone means I'm willing to bracket myself in order to gift you. That's love. It's actually quite elegant and quite simple. I'm willing to bracket myself for the sake of your own fulfillment, for the sake of your transformation, for the sake of your growth, for the sake of your deepening, for the sake of your joy. And actually, making love, when we create love, right, that particular dimension of errors is precisely how it works. In other words, if a person, if a lover's not willing to bracket their own fulfillment, to be in devotion to the experience of the beloved, that's a bad lover, right? Of course. So in other words, in the, you know,

the sexual always models. and the erotic and the holier one. It's one continuum. So the nature of being a great lover is not technical skill, right? It's actually this very attuned capacity, right, to both feel you, pour into you, to both make myself available to you, but to not engulf you to bracket something of my fulfillment until I've brought you to the fullness of yourself. So gifting, loving and gifting are actually precisely the same experience.

And that experience of allurement kind of, you know, what White had calls the lure of becoming, demarcates cosmos. It's always the lure of becoming where we move to ever deeper mutualities of recognition, mutuality, union, and embrace. And they happen always through gifting. So gifting, right, gifting, right, is this first principle and first value. So that's part one in our eighth first principle and first value. And in some sense, I don't know if we're going to call this nine. And I guess we'll resolve this question in the title when we titled them in the end. I don't know if we're going to call this nine or eight A.

We'll have to work with that. But there's a second dimension in gifting, in giving. and the erotics of giving, which is the realization that at their core, giving and receiving are not distinct. It's a very shocking realization. And I actually thought we had talked about this once, but if Suzette tells us this is where we are, then we know this is where we are.

But let's invoke it again, and if we did, then it's always good to talk about something again. because all great things we talked about again and again. We don't say, I love you to a person once. I told you that already. We got that covered. So let's step into this. So let's say I go to my local bank.

I'm at my local bank. And I say, I would like to receive money from my account. And say, sure, how much you'd like? $500,000. Well, I guess that wouldn't be me. Okay, but okay. So, right, okay, 50 bucks. 50 bucks.

So I receive money from my account. And then I say, you know, instead of debiting my account, would you credit my account? So if I'm friends with the teller, he kind of laughs and he thinks that's, it is not sure why that's funny, but he figures he should politely laugh and he laughs. And I said, no, no, no. You know, hey, Tom, and I'm really, I'm really serious. I need you not to, I received money from my account. I really need you not to debit my account. I need you to credit my account.

So he looks at me. It's less funny this time. He's like, okay, at a certain point, I got thrown out of the bank because that's absurd. You just need money from your account, right? So you didn't give money into your account. And obviously giving and receiving the entire structure of our social, political, entrepreneurial, economic system is that giving and receiving are two fundamentally distinct activities. And they're not related to each other. As a matter of fact, they're antagonies.

They're opposites. Right. Fundamentally, one creates a credit, the other one creates a debit. That's its nature. But where's that broken? Where is that illusion broken? Right? In the subversion of eros. In the actual experience of eros. Hey guys, I want to tell you real quick about Brain Supreme. We just had Adam Shell, the founder of Brain Supreme on the podcast where we went into all things microdosing. It was a fantastic episode on the how-toes, the do's the don'ts. the in-between. But if you've been curious about microdosing, I want to try, Brain Supreme is the space. And they have a few different products that are all geared and engineered

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And at this moment, we'll turn towards the experience of embodied eros. The experience of giving and receiving is one. There's no distinction. It's actually the same experience. As I am pouring into you, so I'm pouring into you, looks like I'm giving, looks like you're receiving. But you're receiving is the greatest gift you could possibly give me. Right?

It's like, oh, like oh, right? Your willingness to spread your heart, right, to receive me, right, is the greatest gift. So you're receiving, but you're receiving is gifting. Huh. And it's the essential split between giving and receiving actually utterly disappears. It's kind of shocking, right? And there's particular dimensions of sexing in which there are, let's take sexing, which is that dimension of eros, which must.

models eros, although it doesn't exhaust eras, as we've said many times together, there's 12 billion years of eras before there's any sex. And the sexual models the erotic. It doesn't exhaust the erotic. And actually, we're trying to actually live in full eros in every dimension of life. But let's use, for a moment, the sexual model. So there are dimensions of sexing, which involve kind of direct arousal and stimulation, right, because that's the nature of the nerve endings in the body. And there are others which don't, right? And so, for example, right, in what's called the sexing that involves orality, right?

So in that, right, the giver, right, doesn't actually experience, right, formal nerve-ending arousal. Right. And so what's the pleasure? The pleasure isn't having the gift received, right? I mean, it's actually very shocking, right? it's the pleasure of my devotion being received. And it's actually an enormously intense pleasure, right, that people are very deeply aware of world over.

There's this universal sharing of this ontological truth that actually, if I'm gifting eros, even though there's no formal physical nerve-ending pleasure arousal, it's intensely pleasurable. Why? because I'm being penetrated by your gift, which is the gift of your receiving. Huh. Shocking.

So all of a sudden, right, we now understand why Eros is not, I have a colleague that I had dinner once in New York. And she loves to say that Eros is transgressive. And I said to her at dinner, and I think that's actually not true. I think that's a fundamentally mistaken understanding of Eros. And we actually did a public conversation on this once. which I think we never, never publicized. But that's the normal understanding is eros is boundary breaking. Real arous is boundary breaking,

and the arousal comes from the transgressive nature. I don't think that's true. Eros is at its core, not transgressive, it's subversive, which are not the same. In other words, in the classical structure of reality, for example, giving and receiving are two distinct experiences. The revolutionary subversive ethic is the real, that giving and receiving are one, they're not distinct. They're the same experience. And that

changes everything. See, that that is boundary breaking, but it's not transgressive boundary breaking. Right. It breaks the boundary of the skin and capsulated ego. It breaks the boundary of narrow circles of self-interest, right? It breaks the boundary of selfishness because it expands the knowing of who myself is. And it's very very very important. profound. I mean, the notion that I am a self who is alienated from the larger field, who is dissociated from the larger currents of desire actually violates all of science. It's not true. I mean, just go to my microbiome. I'm hosting a lot of people, right, as it were, right, in my microbiome. There's an entire world there that's interacting and filled with unimaginable

erotic energy. And I'm just look at the E. coli, for example, you know, just in general, look at the E. coli and just see the E. the amount of kind of bacterial, you know, kind of shimmering aliveness that that kind of moves through my body, right, in the organisms that I'm hosting, let alone in the trillions, right, of cells that make up my own cellular field. And all that entire cellular field is in constant interpenetrated interaction with levels and levels, right, of reality, environmental, you know, waves, right, electromagnetic, you know, molecular, right, atomic, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right? There's no sense, right, of standing alone trying to fulfill my own narrow self-interest.

There's actually a constant conversation that's happening all the time in cosmos. We're in constant conversation. We're in constant intersubjectivity. It's a conversational cosmos, right, all the up and all the way down. That's eros. that's the experience of us and maybe we could finish with one piece and you know the sense of receiving is a very big deal right the ability to receive and to know that in my receiving i'm giving is everything and we talked about receiving you know earlier but just to understand if i actually

understand in my lived body that giving and receiving are one i will live differently every single day of my life. Because every word, you know, every breath, right, every glance, every gesticulation, right, every turning towards, right, which is this expenditure of energy where I'm pouring into you, whenever I pour into you, reality pours back into me. And it might not be you pouring back into me in this moment. It's not a quid pro quo. It's not a, okay, let's check, you know, I gave this, did I give that in return? You have to have a much broader view. You know, people often are kind, I mature needs did you meet my needs within a certain amount of time in a certain way in a certain place.

It doesn't work that way. It's a much broader field, but everything I pour in comes back to me. Not always in this lifetime. Sometimes it's in a larger, in a larger spiraling pattern of living, but there is nothing that I pour into the universe. It doesn't pour them back into me. Every single act of gifting, which is an act of radical. eras pours back into me. And every radical act of receiving, right, is this ultimate gift that

penetrates cosmos. And oh my God, eras, right? First, gifting, the radical gifting, which is the bracketing of self for the sake of your transformation love, to giving and receiving are fundamentally one experience, not as the demarcating characteristic of transgressive eros, which is actually not the nature of eros, but eros is subversive. Eros itself is revolutionary, the most fundamental way. Let's go. What a crazy delight, my friend. Let's go, brother. Wow. Wow. Wow. And I just last sentence, it's actually what you and I are doing right here. It just, of course, occurred to me. You know, there's many different forums, and you and I are going to have many and have been, but we'll have many more different exchanges. But in this particular

exchange, the way that you chosen to set it up, this was your kind of, I'm following you, is you set up the structure in which, at least for this limited engagement, you're in the receiving mode. And I'm in the sharing and the giving mode. But of course, we're actually seeing it happen

in front of us. The reason we're excited to do this is because I'm penetrated by the depth and quality of your receiving. Right? And so that's actually right. So it looks like it's actually a one-way exchange. It's actually not at all. That's not our experience at all. But our experiences when we get off is we've completely exchanged. Because actually in this very forum, giving and receiving her one. Oh my God. Yes. Damn.

Cha. Yes. Cha. Yes. That was fun. Yes. Chaw. That was fun. I love you. I love you, man. Easy peasy. I love you so much. Absolutely. Big hug, brother. Love you. Thank you.