Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #466 Dr Marc Gafni the12th face of Eros -

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

This is the final episode on the 12 faces of Eros! Marc breaks down "Pleasure & Delight" in our incredible conclusion to our series which has gone a little over 2 years long. Get Marc's book on this very subject here... https://www.amazon.com/Return-Eros-Radical-Experience-Being/dp/1944648186/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1   Brain Supreme is the best microdosing company on Earth- the Genius and the Athlete are my favorite products but all of them work incredibly well for a variety of purposes. Get 15% off everything in the store by using code "KKP" at checkout.  https://brainsupreme.co/collections/all I just launched my new community The Kingdom Within on Skool- sign up now for a free 7 day trial. This community is for people who are dedicated to learning and making positive changes in their lives. Read here for more... https://www.skool.com/the-kingdom-within-5541/about

Welcome back to today's podcast. We have the final episode, Years in the Making, the 12th Face of Eros. I've been doing the 12th face of Eros with Dr. Mark Gaffney now for two and a half years, I think. We started with the first two episodes really breaking down what Eros is as a definition of the divine. And how this definition of the divine of God, source, consciousness, universe, whatever you want to call that, has 12 unique qualities to it. And that's what these 12 faces of Aeros are. Mark did a fantastic book called A Return to Aeros, which all of this is in and more. So if any of these podcasts have resonated with you, please check out the book. We'll link to it in the show notes. And yeah, man, I've told Mark this repeatedly, but this for me has been one of my favorite podcast because I just get to sit and learn. It's lecture style, you know, 20 minutes.

40 minutes max of just Mark really deep diving one of these aspects. And I've learned so much throughout these. So I've got a lot of love for Mark and a lot of appreciation for his work in the world. And yeah, it's an interesting feeling bringing this to a wrap. But I'm sure we'll come up with something in the future here. There's a lot more in Dr. Mark's mind to be able to extract in his heart. So lots of love to him and his team for making this possible. And support our show sponsors, of course.

Brain Supreme makes this show possible. I also have my digital community, peep that in the show notes, The Kingdom Within. Without further ado, my brother and dear friend, Dr. Mark Goughney. Dr. Mark, this is our 12th and final installment of an amazing series,

the 12th face of ours. I think it's like our 14th, but it's our 12th, or 15th, our 12th face of Aeros, right? 12th face Aeros, yes, sir. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

The 12th, that's unbelievable, right? That's unbelievable. I think face 12, my dear friend is pleasure and delight. And maybe the first thing to say is it's a pleasure and delight to do this series with you and to talk to you, my friend. So yay. Pleasure and delight, right? And so pleasure is the interior feeling of eros.

Right? So what Eros feels like is pleasure. So Eros by itself is both a quality of cosmos. the quality of becoming. And this is very important. You know, there's a whole, you know, world that's about meditation. And meditation is definitely important, right? Meditation is when you disidentify, right, with the stream of thought and find a deeper center.

And that's important, right? Oh, I'm filled with rage. Maybe I shouldn't kill the person, right? that I'm enraged at. Maybe I should disidentify with that and feel into a wider expanse. And so that's critical. So I actually disidentify from the grasping thought,

from the contraction. And I feel into the wider space. That's beautiful. But the wider space is always portrayed by the meditation teachers as a field of being. And the way it's expressed is the goal is being. Step out of your busyness, right?

Disidentify with all of that grasping and wanting and disidentify with your story, right, and rest in this beautiful field of being. The only problem with that is that, you know, God was doing really good at meditation before creating a world. world. There was an eternal field of being and God was the ultimate meditator and meditation was going pretty well actually, right? God was good meditator. And then divinity, the infinite, decided, huh, meditation is not enough. I actually want to not just be, I want to become. And Eros is grounded in being, but it's being that expresses itself.

as becoming. So Eros is the experience of radical aliveness. And our last conversation will go back to the beginning and then go forward from there. Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, which I can get from being, right? I'm on the eighth day of my meditation retreat and I'm deep. I'm past the place where my body is kind of aching and, you know, killing me. And I'm past the place where I've gone down the dark rabbit holes of fear and anxiety. I'm on day eight of ten. and there's this day nine and there's this expanse and I'm feeling this aliveness. So being has a feeling of aliveness, but that's not all of Aros. Eros is the experience of radical aliveness desiring.

So there's desire. And desiring is already becoming. Desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness, which creates in its wake, ever more value. That's Eros. That's the erotic cosmos. That's the erotic architecture of me and me participating in the greater field of reality. So Eros is not just being. The goal of life is not meditation.

This is not true. I meditate in order to engage life. Right? That's critical. And how do I engage life? Not simply by being, but by being as the ground of my becoming. right there's something to become there's some place i want to go there's someplace i want to get there's something i want i want to accomplish i want to live my story right i want to generate originality i want to

go ever deeper right i want to transform right i want to feel things right in the deepest and most beautiful possible way right i want to have the experience of doing things for their own sake right and then weaving those things together into a story of a life well lived, which I became more than I was when I started. And I don't want to end life arriving back at where I started. No, I want to arrive back at where I started. And as T.S. Eliot says at the end of four quartets and know the place for the first time. Right? Right? And that's I want to, that's becoming.

So the interior experience of Eros, which is the experience of becoming, ever more, desiring ever, deeper contact and ever greater wholeness, experience of Eros is pleasure. It's very beautiful, right? So fragmentation, ripping apart, pain. Eros coming together, intimate communion, larger unions, creativity, which is taking parts and weaving them into a larger hole, becoming, meaning I'm becoming more whole, because I'm weaving my split off part,

back into myself, right? So all of that, the interior experience is pleasure. That's a very, very deep. That's very deep. That's very deep. So deep, right? So that pleasure is the goal of the erotic life. But the erotic life is everything, right?

Whether it's praying, whether it's raising my children, right? Whether it's studying, whether it's starting a soup kitchen, that's all the erotic life. Right? I'm starting a soup kitchen because I'm desiring everything. deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. So I want contact with the people who need the soup kitchen. I don't want to be split off from my reality because, and I want to be in service, so that's erotic.

There's nothing more erotic than starting a soup kitchen, right? I can't think of any more erotic. It's like that's ultimate eros, right? So it's all eros. The interior experience of eros is pleasure. It's very deep. So another way to say that is that the erotic and the holy are one. There's no split between the erotic and the holy.

The holy is the erotic. The erotic is the experience of becoming. So the experience of the holy is the experience of pleasure. Huh. Right. So the sacred is the experience of pleasure. Now, we don't identify the sacred with pleasure, do we? We think, oh, oh, you got to avoid getting lost in pleasure in order to become sacred

or in order to become ethical or to be decent. you can only be like imagine you got you're going to a party you know an austin party you know the thriving town of austin right and you meet someone and you say hey what do you do and they say i'm a pleasure seeker so i don't know you know i'm not sure you'd introduce them to your daughter if it's a young man right you don't mean you're like okay right and it's a strange thing to say so we we identify pleasure with something which opposes the sacred but that's actually not you're not correct superficial pleasure surface pleasure but the depth of pleasure is the experience of eros so i want to kind of just look at a couple of texts for a second just to get a sense of the depth of this it's

very beautiful so there's this you know new literature that you and i are deeply familiar with my friend kyle which is the we might call it the near-death experience literature there's a whole near-death experience literature so one of the things that's a huge literature near-death experience literature so one of the things that the NDE or the near-death experience literature points towards, right, is the common experience of some kind of life evaluation, right? Some sense of accountability. People hate the word accountability. Like, people like hate that word.

But actually, you don't count if you're not accountable. Right? Right? To count means you're accountable, meaning, I mean, right? In other words, it's why like we love Billy Joel. You know, Billy Joel, like, you know, back in a God, Billy Joel, he stopped playing Madison Square Garden. What was that a year ago?

So Billy Joel, back in the day, right? Back in the day, Billy Joel, when I was like growing up, Billy Joel was big when I was like, you know, 10. And he had that song, only the good die young. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. You know, only the good die young, right? Come on Virginia, don't make me wait. Catholic girls kind of start.

much too late, something like that. That was the song, right? And of course, you know, Billy Joel was right in critiquing the old idea of sin in the pre-modern medieval fundamentalism that sometimes hijacked the best of Christendom. So he was right about that. We don't, we're not excited about that idea of sin, which is about, wow, God's mostly concerned about what you do by yourself when you're naked at home. That's probably not what God's most concerned about, right? And, you know, so, okay, so there's an old negative idea of sin. That's true. But there's also a very beautiful idea of sin that we need to reclaim. And sin means cosmos cares what you do. Huh. It's like, right? Like, huh, sin means cosmos cares what you do, right? So the Hebrew for sin is hate.

Haidt means, right, to miss the mark, meaning I don't want to just live my life. Here's what people do. Here's what the liberal new age world does. The liberal new age world, with all due respect to liberal new age people, of which many of my best friends are liberal and new age. So what people do is they live their life, then they paint a target around their life, and they say, the way I'm living my life, that's the bullseye. But that's actually not the way it works. Actually, there's a target.

Actually, there's value in cosmos. There's actually directionality. There's telos. right there's an image the lineage says there's an image of your life on the throne of god and to be accountable at the end of my life is to match the image i created in living my life with the image on the throne of god and see do they match right that's accountable so there's a series of text very beautiful text to talk about what are the questions that were asked when we passed from the world so this near-death experience literature kind of points to that there's this this universe

universal understanding of this kind of, this kind of a life evaluation. So there's a series of questions. So one question is, you know, did you create a future world? Did you do something for the future world? Another question is, did you do business with integrity? Another question is, you know, kavati timotorah, did you set up, set times to study wisdoms? These are very beautiful questions. So one of the major texts adds a question. It says there's a fourth question of accountability, of judgment, which is, Neheneita me ulami. It's very beautiful.

Did you derive pleasure from my world? Huh. Right? And in the image of some of the interpreters, every experience is brought before me. And I'm held accountable. Did you have that pleasure? No? Oh, boom, hell, right?

Did you have that pleasure? Or even more dramatically, oh, you had that pleasure, but you didn't get sufficient pleasure from it. Right? Why, you had that incredible piece of food, but you didn't really get pleasure from it, right? You were, right?

Or you were studying that very deep idea, but you didn't get pleasure from it. Or you were creating, but you didn't really get pleasure from your creativity, right? Or you were standing for a cause, but you didn't really get pleasure, right,

standing for a cause or you were engaged in in in nosis but you didn't get pleasure from nosis right or you were engaged in relationship but you didn't get pleasure from relationship right right now there's like huh right in other words actually there are levels of pleasure in the world and i've just done actually a very beautiful deep dive with our dear friends um by lanet and kately where we did a very very deep dive into these kind of structures of pleasure in the world we talked about six basic structures of pleasure and 25 principles of pleasure. Pleasure is a very deep, deep topic. Pleasure is the source of all spirit.

All spirits about pleasure. The goal of life is pleasure. That is why we're alive. We are alive for pleasure for no other reason. Anyone tells anything different is lying. We're not alive for self-sacrifice. We're not alive to be kind. We're not alive to be good.

We're alive for one reason for pleasure. But I've got to discern what is pleasure. so it turns out that kindness is very pleasurable right in other words now when when i say we're alive for pleasure i mean i mean pleasure is the litmus test for all of ethos so i'm going to say something very crazy and i had this conversation actually with katelyn and godsey right we had this exact conversation we were talking about pleasure so let's imagine a horrific scene here's a horrific scene you're You're in 1944, you're in Auschwitz at a concentration camp, and you're being walked to the gas chabers. And that's pretty bad, right?

And you're with, you're holding the hands of your children. And you've got like, you know, 10 minutes left to your life. Then you have this, you know, brutal Nazi guard who's kind of hitting people with his rifled butt in these last seconds. Okay. So who's getting more pleasure? Like, wow. So you, the immediate response, obviously, is obviously, It's not the person being walked to their death, right?

But actually, when you look at it a second time, who actually, in this wider span of eternity, in this moment I'm holding my children, right? I'm in this place of unbearable pain and yet ultimate dignity. I know my goodness. I know my integrity. I'm aligned with spirit. I'm aligned with the sacred. Right.

So there's a deep, deep pleasure in that. And pleasure means. something very different than we think it does. Pleasure is this sense of being at home in the universe. It's the sense of being welcome in the universe. Pleasure whispers to me, you're welcome in the universe. That's what pleasure is. I mean, a color, a color, like I'm looking at, you know,

when I'm one of, there's many reasons I enjoy, you know, doing our conversations. One is I just love the background, right? This gorgeous, this gorgeous color. All that color is pleasure, right? And color is pleasure, right? the timber of a voice is pleasure, music is pleasure, the texture of wood, right, is pleasure, right? The wind, blowing across my face is pleasure, that the feeling of the rain on my body is pleasure,

the food as I eat it is pleasure, the fragrance is pleasure. All of reality is this cacophony of pleasure, which is saying to me, welcome, welcome, right? So that Nazi, right, who, you know, who has in his or her hand, you know, this rifle butt who's kind of hitting people, right? You know, you know, and to the ground in the last 10 minutes of their life, he's not experiencing pleasure. Right. It's devastation. And that devastation will, will stay with him or her. There were women Nazi guards as well, right? You know, in this lifetime and the next, right? And it's going to cause nightmares and devastation and emptiness and a kind of soullessness and a terror, right? All right, guys, quick break to tell you

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They also have Sheila-Gite pearls, which are oddly incredible and probably the most convenient way to take in Sheelagie. Check it all out at brainsopreme.co slash KKP. And now back to the podcast. Pleasure is the quality of Eros, the movement towards wholeness, right, when I can actually feel the whole quality of reality. And wholeness includes goodness, goodness and wholeness, right when you see deep deep beautiful blue like this profound blue you're like why does reality need blue right what does reality wouldn't make it without blue right and then red a rich orange right and a kind of stunning yellow right right or purple right kind of the royal purple each one of

those colors is a quality of cosmos. And each one of those qualities evokes, right, the sense of homeless and goodness, which evoke pleasure. Every face I see evokes pleasure, right? Every face I see is a color. And when I get to see Kyle's face, and there's no other face that ever was, is or will be, that's as stunning, as beautiful, as precise, as nuanced, as textured, right, as this cacophony of reality, right, who has signed her name as Kyle. Right. And that's why Lucian Freud, what was it, Freud's nephew, who would paint just faces. It's beautiful, stunning paintings of faces.

And the word face, panim in Hebrew, panim, right, means inside. Right. A person's face takes you inside to their beauty. Right. If you see like 30 people's backs, you're not going to remember who they are based on their back. And, you know, with all due respect to, you know, front sides of men, and women, you won't remember based on that either.

Right? Well, you know, you see face? It's like, oh, right? So there's an enormous pleasure in a face. So the experience of pleasure is actually the goal of living. You can actually evaluate life based on one thing, pleasure. And you have to clarify your pleasure. Right, right?

And so when I'm eating, you know, Boston cream pie, which my mother used to make, which was like a really good. So one piece is really good. but two and then three and four is not going well, right? And if I eat Boston cream pie instead of having protein and instead of having grains, I'll get quite sick. So Boston cream pie is precisely good in its exact right position in my life. The exact right amount, the exact right position, right, it gives them a flash of fragrance

for a moment. But out of its exact right context, it ceases to be pleasure, pleasurable. In the immediate, it also becomes damaging, meaning causing antifference. pleasure in the long term, right? So to be able to actually evaluate my pleasures, right, is huge. So what's an addict? Addiction is the inability to get pleasure from ordinary living. In the wild, right? Addiction is the inability to derive pleasure from ordinary living. What I have to do is I have to ramp up, right, the dopamine hit in order to get pleasure. So I ramp it up and now I'm getting pleasure.

But then as soon as I get used to that level of pleasure, I got to ramp it up again in order to get any feeling of pleasure. So addiction basically is I simply am so shut down that I can't actually get pleasure from ordinary living. Now usually the reason I'm shut down is not because I'm a bad person. Addicts are often shut down because they feel the intensity of the world. They feel often the pain of the world. They feel the acute heartbreak of the world, and it's actually too painful, so they shut down.

And then they're unable to get pleasure from ordinary living. There's a very beautiful book written by a priest that used to work in Times Square. I read the book, Kyle, I don't know, 40 years ago, right? And it was about addicts. It was called Blessed or the Addicts. It was about his work with addicts and the beauty of addicts and why they're they shut down. So when I say addict, I made it with enormous respect and honor and love. You know, and addiction is the inability. It's a beautiful definition of addiction. And I spoke

at some point to a group of directors of addiction facilities where we did a very deep dive, addiction to the inability to get plush from ordinary life activity. Enlightenment. So take, for example, I don't know, in Zen, take the Japanese tea ceremony. Right? So the Japanese tea ceremony is I'm drinking tea and I'm getting immense pleasure from drinking tea. So enlightenment is the opposite of addiction, the ability to get intense and profound pleasure from what seems to be the most ordinary life activity. So I know we have to come to a close. It's such a delight to talk about pleasure. So pleasure is a skill. And that's what we're realizing.

pleasure is not something that happens to you pleasure is the skill of enlightenment you at the capacity to get maximal pleasure an ever deeper pleasure from what seems to be ordinary to actually discern the extraordinary in the ordinary you know air food you know the vitality of the body right the the acuity of the mind you know the the tenderness and fierceness of feeling. All of that's immeasurable. All of that has nothing to do with accumulated wealth of any kind.

It is the actual pleasure of being alive. And the pleasure of being alive is so intense. I mean, sometimes I'll wake up in the morning, you know, and say to KK, I'm just, I'm so overwhelmed by the intensity of pleasure just being alive. You just wake up and, you take a breath and then you see the colors and your body you know seems to be working in your

mind and you can create and and what did I do for this it was a gift obviously right i don't i can't go back to the moment when i created myself right so life is this gift of unimaginable pleasure and to be able to collect the pleasures right to actually be able to be held accountable in that great day of judgment to say that I derived full pleasure from every dimension in the world, full pleasure from all the physical experiences of reality, right, in their exact right context, in their exact right form, full pleasure from all the relational structures of reality, full pleasure from all of the meaning structures of reality, the productivity, the meaning, the standing for causes, full pleasure from all the nois, the study, the gaining of noses, of wisdom,

them, full pleasure from all the creativity, including the highest pleasure, which is self-creation. Right. And then finally, full pleasure from participating in the evolutionary impulse and actually impacting and understanding that my transformation actually transforms all of it, right? The utter pleasure of being able, through my own experience of transformation, to transform the whole thing. So I just actually listed six levels of pleasure, six levels of pleasure, and all of one doesn't get you any of the other. So all of physical pleasure doesn't get you any of level two, pleasure of relationships. All of relational pleasure doesn't get you any of level three, standing for a cause. All of standing for a cause doesn't get you any of four.

Wow, you're studying. You have nosis, enlightenment. All of nosis and enlightenment, level four, doesn't get you any of level five, the pleasure of creativity and self-creation. and all of a unique self, even creativity doesn't get you any of level six by participating in the evolutionary impulse itself. So we just actually enumerated six levels of pleasure, where actually all of one doesn't get you any of the other, and actually being able to ascend and participate in that full range of pleasure

is the utter joy of being alive, and it's also the very purpose of being alive. We're alive for pleasure in all ethics are measurable by the depth of authentic pleasure, right, that that eros generates. Wow. Well, what a pleasure. What a crazy pleasure. Thank you so much.

Oh. I can't believe we made it. Made it to the end, two years in the making. It's been two years, hasn't it? Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed, right? What a crazy delight. And I'm so glad we can offer this to people.

It's such an elegant and tender map of just reality that allows us to to find our way and to become who we must become. To become who we must become. And for people that want to know, a return to Eros is available everywhere books are sold. This is the deeper dive. And yeah, if you enjoyed these, I encourage you, highly encourage you to get the book. And we'll be putting all these out. we've been releasing these over time on the audio only, but we'll be getting these up on YouTube here in a nice little package. So I'm excited to do that and get some clips pulled and all that

fun stuff, throw them on the socials. It's been, I've been on the receiving end of all this knowledge and wisdom that it's been your life's work firsthand. And it's been my greatest pleasure. You know, I've told Tosh and Aubrey and anybody that knows you, you know, right when I come out of these, I'm just beaming. And it usually lasts for like 48 hours. And then I'm just consistently thinking of different ways in which I can witness the divine and participate with it. So thank you for that. It truly, truly an honor and delight, my friends. And just to everyone, if everyone has questions, you know, we'll set up, you know, on the,

on the, you know, maybe on the YouTube, a place that and people can send in inquiries. And, you know, we'll try and, you know, answer as we can and find a way to kind of engage. And it's just, it's so important, right? You got to live the erotic life. That's the full life. That's the God life. That's the holy life. Amen.

Amen, brother. Cha. Cha!