365 — Discerning Israel & Hamas Conflict: Evolving the Battle of Good & Evil to a Higher Level of Consciousness
The battle between good and evil exists in every person
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 8, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
How do you begin a conversation?
This is a difficult day, and it’s hard to know how to begin.
I want to try and find our way here, and understand where we are — not by giving a political analysis of the day — the tragedy, the horror that’s unfolding in Israel (although we will talk about that). There is no political analysis that is separate from — that is in any way distinguishable from — the deeper conversation that we’ve been having here in One Mountain Many Paths.
I was up all night, I didn’t sleep. My son Yair has been here with me. Yair is an incredibly beautiful young man. The qualities that are so missing in much of the sophisticated cultural conversation, he incarnates all of them in spades. He is sincere, just in this incredible way. He experiences — and he has an incarnation of — devotion. He is filled with integrity. He’s kind. He’s generous. He has a heart that overflows. He has been a commander of Commandos in different positions in the Israeli army. He is now in his early 30s, which in the Israeli army is ancient.
To get a sense of what’s going on — he was called back to his unit, to his boys, and about 3am, I walked him to a car service that we got to pick him up here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, to take him to Burlington and to get an 11 o’clock flight to Israel, in order to join the fighting.
Back in 2008, my other son Eytan was visiting me in Salt Lake City. Myself, Eytan, and Diane Hamilton, with Michael Zimmerman, we spent a beautiful Sabbath talking in the depth of the snow of Utah. I was so thrilled to have Eytan with me. It was at a heartbreaking moment in my life.
And then, an earlier Gaza conflict broke out. Eytan left after being with me for 36 hours. Again, I walked him to a car, to a cab, and he flew back to Israel. He went directly into battle. He was also a commander of Commandos. He went directly into battle, a house-to-house battle in Gaza in which many Israeli soldiers were killed because the Israeli army has followed a code of ethics in a situation which is beyond impossible.
I’ve researched this my entire life, and I’ve never seen any army come close to this code of ethics. They give full warning in every possible way, to clear civilians out of the way of operations, which are designed to stop what is pure terrorism. It’s not anything other than that, and that needs to be understood, and I’m going to explain what that means. Eytan has described to me what happens when you go into a house, and you try and clear people out: you walk into the house and you’ll have a baby put in front of you. The soldier steps back, because the soldier is trained in ethics and doesn’t want to hurt a baby — and in that stepping back, the soldier is often killed.
Eytan left my house and went into Gaza. He never talks about it, but in those two weeks, he was essentially on the ground, heavily armed, trying to navigate a deep existential threat to Israel’s existence.
I read this morning the Charter of Hamas. Everyone should take a look at it, you can find it online.
Hamas is aligned with Iran — Iran that’s been involved in the last year in the slaughter of its own women teenagers, for daring to assert their autonomy as women, as human beings. Mahsa Amini — we’ve talked about what’s happened in the last year in Iran.
Iran, representing the most brutal repression of the feminine, of Eros, of goodness, truth, and beauty, is actually responsible for both the Hezbollah in the North border of Israel, or all of the terrorist cells on the West Bank of Israel, for the terrorist cells in Lod and Ramallah in central Israel (which is a tiny country), and for an extensive Hamas terror organization in Gaza.
Hamas commitment is to have no negotiated settlement, no peace, no sharing of land, no shared story of value, no possibility of coexistence — just read of the charter of Hamas. The charter is clear that only the annihilation of Israel and only the restoration of the entire region as an Islamic state, based on the most fundamentally human-violating principles of the most repressive and ugly versions of mediaeval Islam — only their triumph will actually satisfy the Prophet.
A little shocking! It’s like, wow! How do you even begin a conversation? How do you begin a conversation?
Eros and ethics are the same thing
The first thing that we have to say is: my son was in Gaza for two weeks, and he wrote then that he didn’t expect to leave Gaza alive. He hasn’t talked about it since.
He left Gaza alive after two weeks, he was shocked. When he left Gaza and returned to the marketplace in Jerusalem, he was shocked that the ordinary world still existed. And then a couple of days later — just the explosive nature of the entire situation and almost the inability to hold it in the body — he was in a car accident, and wound up in Tel Hashomer hospital, and I got a call saying that he would never walk again. Eytan is fierce like his brother Yair, and is filled with goodness, and integrity, and generosity, and fight — deep, deep fight and a deep commitment. Eytan not only decided he was going to walk again, but multiple operations later, he has run 10 marathons around the world competitively, and opened an educational institution in Israel, which trains people in good thinking and good moral thinking and philosophy through running, through training and running. So yay, Eytan!
That was the last time I walked my son in 2008 to a battle, and now we just walked Yair.
I am just sharing the context. I just want to share the context with you.
Yair got on a plane at about 6:30, he is connecting to Israel — and mad blessings to Yair, and mad blessings to every single person in Israel; every single man, woman, and child.
I want to try and talk about this in a way that actually begins to do sensemaking. Because it’s so impossible to talk about.
You cannot talk about this without all of the larger issues that we’ve been discussing.
The situation in Israel, it’s so unbearably painful, just like the situation in Ukraine is so unbearably painful — and we have to not look away. We need to look towards Israel, and we need to look towards the very fabric of the social, existential, spiritual fabric of Reality, and understand what is actually happening here.
First, we cannot talk about this without establishing a Field of Value in which
value is real,
and there is a shared ground of value, a shared grammar of value,
and that there is some sense in which that value is not just made-up — it’s not just a political creation, it’s not just a social construction, but we align with value; value lives in us.
We have to listen deeply and clarify our interior to listen to the voice of value, to which we have direct access, and we can trust our direct access to that value that lives inside. That value lives inside every human being, and we can listen to that voice of value and trust it, and trust it as it moves in us, as the mysteries live within us.
We cannot talk about this without that possibility —
without that shared ground of value in which we participate,
which lives in us, as us, and through us,
value which both evolves through us — and at the same time, we bow before it.
We bow before value.
We bow before the mystery.
We encounter the mystery, and the mystery incarnates as value, as goodness, as truth, as beauty, as the field of ethos and Eros, which is one.
Because what Eros means is the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, desiring deeper contact and greater wholeness. That’s what Eros is, and that means that Eros and ethics are the same thing.
Ethics is the experience of radical aliveness seeking, desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. That’s what ethos is. There is no split between Eros and ethics.
We are committed to creating, generating, fostering, supporting a Field of Eros and ethos that supports all of life.
That is the ground for any conversation. Without that ground, we can’t have a conversation.
Any religion needs to evolve
There are better and worse expressions of Eros and ethos.
There is no moral equivalence. You can’t just erase distinctions, and erase any notion of distinction. You can’t do that. You have to be willing to do the deep work of collecting truth. Yes, there are multiple perspectives when people have an argument, but not infinite perspectives. You have to actually collect information — facts.
It’s got to be facts.
Facts means there is something that’s real, there is something that’s empirical, that’s checkable.
When you are on the playground, and the bully punches you, and you punch back, there is a distinction between the punching back and the original punch. They are not the same.
How things come about when someone comes into your house to rape your daughter, and you defend your daughter, and you kill them because that was the only way to save your daughter — that’s not murder, that’s something else. That is killing in defense of a Field of Value.
I had a conversation with the Dalai Lama when I was in Dharamsala. We talked about this notion of utter moral equivalence, and how devastating it is.
There are no moral equivalences.
There is a gentleman who writes in the United States, who I have not tracked closely. His name is Sam Harris. I’ve listened to five or six of his presentations, and I take issue with some very, very core assumptions that he makes that I think are flawed. But on one issue, I think he’s done a brilliant job (and this is actually where I encountered his work, maybe a decade ago), where he did the completely audacious thing of challenging Islam, and challenging this notion of moral equivalence in which you weren’t allowed to critique the way Islam was expressing itself in the world. He was right.
The fact is — and this is a tragic fact but a true fact — every religion has its text that it should be embarrassed of. Every religion has a shadow. That’s absolutely true. And a religion needs to evolve in accordance with its own values, in order to align with the broader Field of Value.
What do I mean by that?
For example, in the Torah, which is the sacred text of Judaism, there is a set of texts that talk about the injunction to kill everyone when the Israelites conquer ancient Canaan. That’s tragic, and that was the nature of the ancient world. A few hundred years later, about 2,500 years ago, the readers of that text said, that text cannot be fulfilled — because we can no longer, in this world, identify anyone by their place of origin. The Talmud, in the third century, says, misha ala senchareb bilbela t’umot: at a particular moment in time — it marks that moment in time as the Assyrian kingdom — you can no longer identify a person by their place of origin, so none of the texts from the ancient world that suggest that you can attack a person based on their racial source are valid. They are all nullified. That was the fundamental position of the Talmud, in nullifying any text that would allow for distinction in moral treatment based on racial origin.
Christianity has tragic texts in the book of John, which were used by Goebbels in World War Two. Goebbels, the minister of propaganda for Nazism. And Christianity has evolved and said no to those texts, and rejected those texts, and stood for a wider and more beautiful and deeper world. Christianity has gone through a profound evolution. Yes, there are shadow forms of Christianity, and there are shadow forms of Christian theology, and there are dimensions of Judaism that need to be evolved and transformed evermore. But both Christianity and Judaism have, at the very core of their establishments, gone through an experience of what I would call the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of love, which caused texts to be challenged and up-leveled and evolved and transformed in a very fundamental way.
In other words, Judaism and Christianity interpenetrated their experiences of waking up to an experience of the Divine with an experience of growing up to higher and higher levels of consciousness, so that they began to reject text. The current pope, for example, has made a very strong position of moving towards a deep evolution in transformation of consciousness — long overdue in the Catholic Church, maybe thousand years overdue or more, maybe 1,700 years overdue.
Tragically, the most dominant forces in international realpolitik that root themselves in Islam, and Islam in general, have not gone through that same interpenetration with values of universal sisterhood, universal brotherhood, the emergence of the feminine and the dignity of the body, universal human rights. That hasn’t happened. The experience of Islam interpenetrating with an enlightenment, a Renaissance, with the values that emerged from the Renaissance — the positive values of universal sisterhood and universal brotherhood — that actually didn’t happen.
When Sam Harris pointed this out in his own forum (and I read maybe one article that he wrote about it, a long time ago), he got brutally attacked by the emergent woke communities. But he was right, it’s correct.
This is not a story of moral equivalence
I read The Boston Globe at about 5am this morning. It describes what happened as a morally equivalent battle between the Hamas fighters and the Israeli soldiers, and then it describes how the Hamas fighters went and rampaged through Israeli communities, including a Nature Festival in the south of Israel.
Let me be clear: Hamas fighters were not rampaging through Israel. Rampaging means breaking windows and roughing people up a little bit. No, that’s not what they were doing.
The tragically educated and horrifically twisted culture of Hamas, which basically views people outside of Dar-al-Harb, the nation of the Islam, as those to be subjected to destruction by the sword, entered a Nature Festival with thousands of Israeli kids, teenagers, and massacred them. They massacred hundreds of kids — butchered and massacred. They didn’t rampage. They sought the most vulnerable civilian populations, and massacred them, and then went into houses and massacred families: men, women, children.
That has been part of the fundamental methodology of Hamas.
They didn’t rampage. This is not a story of moral equivalence.
I am deeply, deeply aware of the complexity of the Middle East. I lived in Israel for many, many years. I lived in a home in Jaffa, an Arab Jaffa, with an Arab family, with great love and delight. I’ve taken major stands in Israel about how we need to work, and coexist, and share, and create a shared sense of value with our brothers and sisters. That’s all true.
But if you follow and trace this story carefully, if you get beneath the news, if you read real grounding documents and trace the storyline of how this has developed — which I can’t do in this short presentation — you will understand the following.
Israel is — with all of its complexity, with all of its tragedy, with all of its imperfections, of which it has many — a thriving democracy based on a sense of universal human rights. Hadassah Hospital, at the center of Jerusalem, which is grounded in the ethics of Israeli democracy, serves every Jew and Arab that will enter, with Jewish and Arab doctors working side by side. There was a reason it was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. There is tragically no other capital other than Israeli Jerusalem that would allow for the existence of a Hadassah Hospital, where you could go in and know that you would be treated fairly, and beautifully, and gorgeously, with devotion.
That would not happen in any Arab capital, anyplace in the Middle East, and certainly, there would be zero chance of that taking place any place within the province and realm of Hamas. Let’s just understand that. The Hamas-Iran nexus, whose overt covenant is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel, would never allow for a Hadassah Hospital — but Israel does.
The failure to distinguish between these different structures and levels of consciousness is utterly destructive.
I must have read, this morning, five or six accounts in different mainstream outlets of the Western press — and I see things like Hamas fighters rampaged in an Israeli festival. They didn’t rampage in an Israeli festival, they massacred hundreds of high school students. Those are not the same.
If we trace the history of the story — and I have spent thousands of hours tracing the history of how the story began and developed over the last 100 years or maybe 150 years — what’s very, very clear is the following. I’m going to try and summarize it.
The overwhelming majority of the Israeli population has been willing, time and again, to make peace and to share the space and to share the land, in some appropriate way.
There are 21 or 22 Arab states with vast amounts of lands and reserves. There is one tiny Jewish state. That Jewish state itself has been willing to make a thousand compromises for the sake of peace, and there has not been an ethical, stable partner for peace on the other side.
That’s simply true. That’s an undeniable fact. And if you contest that fact, you actually have not traced the story.
There has to be facts. There’s got to be some ground of fact. Again, and again, and again.
If you read, for example, the code of ethics of the Israeli army, prepared by Professor Asa Kasher and others in Israel, you will read one of the most profoundly shocking, gorgeous ethical documents ever written in human history. That’s the aspiration of the Israeli army. When someone violates that, they are court-martialed, they are sent to prison.
Yes, the system breaks down at times.
Yes, there are aberrations; there are always aberrations. But those aberrations are the exception to a very strong rule, which the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of the Israeli population holds.
By contrast, tragically, on a street controlled by Hamas (in Gaza, for example), when someone sees an Israeli car and sees children in the backseat, they shoot into the car — at the children, at the parents — and kill them. This has happened time and again, time and again, and has happened to people in my family. Happened to me, driving a car with my child in the backseat, although I managed to get out at that particular time. That’s standard practice to become a murderer. That person becomes not an outcast, but a hero.
This is not because Israel has a powerful army, and there is this weak and disempowered population, and the only method they have of political discourse is terrorism. For Hamas, that’s not the case.
The reason this situation exists is because Hamas has incarnated an utter rejection of —
the fundamental values of universal human rights,
the fundamental values of universal fairness,
the fundamental values of the honor of the feminine,
the fundamental values of a fact-checking and truth —
— and the list goes on and on and on and on and on.
The ideology of Hamas is based on that rejection, and on the distortion of Eros, which expresses itself in a distorted love story — a tragically distorted love story, in which love means not even love of my people, but much worse than that: I love the only my people who adhere to a very particular and narrow interpretation of the law of the Prophet. That narrow interpretation of the law of the Prophet has to include utter commitment to the annihilation of the State of Israel. This is in the very core charter of Hamas. If you don’t adhere to that, or if you assert, for example, the independent integrity and autonomy of the feminine, independent of its service to the masculine, you’re in violation of the law of the Prophet.
For example, honor killing — killing a woman who is suspected of having “fooled around” with someone — is completely legitimate, and no evidence needs to be brought that the woman was actually in violation of this ostensible moral turpitude. One merely says one was engaged in honor killing. Check it out, there is an enormous amount of information and enormous amount of empirical data gathered on how honor killings happen.
Or if a man, in the world of Hamas, has proclivities towards being gay, he is killed. There was a major Hamas leader killed a bunch of years ago for being gay, killed in a brutal, horrific, torturing way.
Hamas represents the cruelties, the shadow of a medieval world, in its most brutal forms.
We can’t skip this my friends, we can’t skip this.
We can’t go to moral equivalence.
I know this is going to be, for some people, an unpopular position. But if we can’t actually stand for a shared grammar of value, then the whole thing collapses.
Deconstruction of value arouses Hamas
We need to create a culture of Eros — a universal culture of Eros. A culture of Eros means a culture of value.
When we articulate — in this New Story of Value we’re committed to unfolding here in One Mountain Many Paths and at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion — a series of interior science equations, which express a shared grammar of value, among them, as the first equation, we articulate an Eros equation:
Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, desiring, seeking ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
We are talking about Eros as a value of Cosmos. It means deeper contact —
between parts,
between life forms,
between separate parts seeking to create deep and profound, intimate communions.
That’s the structure of Cosmos that begins all the way down the evolutionary chain and goes all the way up the evolutionary chain, to create larger wholes, in which all the parts have a place, in which no one is outside of the circle. That Eros is a value of Cosmos. It’s not that there’s Eros and value — there is ErosValue; a Field of ErosValue.
This Field of ErosValue is a structure of Reality, and it demands something from us:
It demands our devotion.
It demands our sincerity.
It demands our generosity.
It demands our gratitude.
It demands our service.
It demands the pouring of our unique gifts into the healing and transformation of the whole.
It demands a relationship to the whole.
It demands the realization that we are unique expressions of goodness, truth, and beauty, and that each of us has a unique instrument to play in this larger Unique Self Symphony.
But this Unique Self Symphony, in which we are all playing our Unique Self instruments, is held together, grounded in a shared score of music. That music is the ground of value. It’s the ground of Eros. It’s the Intimate Universe.
If we don’t embrace that, and instead we articulate a deconstruction of value…
If we say, as one of my colleagues does, that there is no value, all values are the same, no difference between medieval value, in which Christians go to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and contemporary democracy (as one well-known proponent of postmodern discourse argues)…
If you make that argument, if you say there is no Field of Value, all value is completely made-up —
in that utter deconstruction and denial of the Field of Value, you arouse Hamas. Because Hamas — as a phenomenology in the world, as a force in the world — listens in and says: Oh my God, the West has just deconstructed and denied value itself.
There is no value.
There is nothing to sacrifice for.
There is nothing to stand for.
There is nothing with which we need to align.
There is nothing before which we need to kneel.
There is nothing that elicits our devotion.
There is no larger frame. There is no larger story.
There is no Reality that demands our service.
When that claim is made — a false claim, an absurd claim, a claim which empties Reality of significance, Eros, value — it leaves a gaping wound, a gaping gash in the very heart of Cosmos.
In that emptiness — in that collapse of Eros, in that failure of Eros, in that failure of a story of ErosValue — what arises is pseudo-eros: false love stories, narrow ethnocentric love stories that brutalize and degrade the other. But what fuels those pseudo-erotic love stories is a desperate desire to affirm value — and so value is affirmed as my people, my Allah, my Christ, my tribe.
At the core of the Hamas narrative is a degradation of desire
There are two other pieces at play.
One is shame.
This pseudo-erotic love story, where love is limited to a very small group of people, so everyone outside of that group is not worthy of love —
is not to be loved,
is not to be honored,
can be degraded and dehumanized —
— because everyone outside of that circle of love is considered to be not fully human, and therefore can be slaughtered at a Nature party, without regard, with intention — that story is rooted in this fundamental shame.
This is so deep, and it’s so tragic, and it needs to be understood.
That shame is rooted in a degradation of the experience of desire and love itself. When you tell a person, when you murder someone outside of this narrow circle, that’s not murder, that’s for the sake of the Lord, for the sake of Allah —
that person’s interior sense of the mystery,
that person’s interior sense of goodness, truth, and beauty,
that person’s interior sense of the realness and goodness of Cosmos that lives in us —
— are violated.
Do you think you can paraglide from Gaza into Israel into a Nature party and slaughter dozens of teenage women, and actually not experience a profound revulsion and shame about who you are?
Do you understand the shame caused by your participation in that kind of slaughter, in that kind of destruction of love, or that kind of limitation of love (I love only this small group, no one else is worthy of love; not only they’re not worthy of love, but they’re worthy of the worst degradation)?
It’s the shame of your own interior degradation.
But there is a deeper root shame, and the deeper root shame is that your very desire itself has been degraded. In other words, in Hamas’s vision of Reality, the story of desire is —
that desire itself is fundamentally degraded,
and that sensual desire is fundamentally degraded,
and that the sense of goodness and truth and beauty that lives in the body is fundamentally degraded.
This was also the story of the Catholic Church till very, very recently, but it reigns in Hamas today, and it reigns in Iran today. This is why Mahsa Amini and hundreds of Iranian women were tortured and killed in the last year, including high school girls.
You degrade desire, and yet that desire continues to live and to rage — in the young men of Hamas, and the young men of the Ayatollah Revolutionary Guard, and the young men of the military wings of Hamas and Hezbollah. And so, the self-experience of these young men is —
that we are degraded,
that we are fundamentally impure,
that we are fundamentally revolting to the Divine,
that we are somehow disgusting to the Divine.
There is this internal sense of shame, and this inability to trust the core experience of the body. And when there is an inability to trust the core experience of the body, when there is a fundamental degradation of desire that lives in a human being, then the human being becomes alienated from their own capacity to trust themselves and to trust their moral sense (to use an outdated 18th century term) — to trust their deepest participation in the Field of ErosValue. All of that gets alienated, gets truncated from a person’s inner heart.
The person no longer has access to the whisperings of goodness, truth, and beauty that live within them.
That’s huge.
At the core of the Hamas narrative, there is a degradation of desire. That degradation of desire causes fundamental shame. Shame means the experience not that I did something wrong — that I am wrong. That experience that I am wrong is so fundamentally painful, that we can’t live with it — so we cover it up.
We cover it up with pseudo-eros, which are fantasies, in which love lives in this very narrow place between me and my very internal narrow set of people, and everyone else outside of my circle is an infidel, to be butchered and killed for the sake of some illusory fantasy of purity.
It’s like, wow!
We need to articulate a new ground of Desire
In order to respond to the pseudo-eros, we need to establish Eros.
That which gives rise to this pseudo-erotic fantasy of purity is the sense of shame —
shame at my own murderousness and failure of love that arouses hatred to anyone outside of my circle,
shame at the ostensibly degraded desire that lives in my body because desire itself is degraded —
— all of that shame alienates me from any sense of my ability to participate in the Field of Value, and to know the goodness and truth and beauty that lives in me, and be guided by that goodness, truth, and beauty. This creates an unbearable pain inside of me that needs to be covered over by pseudo-eros. Read Hamas’s covenant — and you’ll see pseudo-eros aflame in all of its most horrific disguises.
But again, what gives rise to that is the claim that there is no value. When the classical liberal position of the Western world says there’s no value at all, there is no Field of Value, the response to that is: no, there is value, and that value can get expressed in its most distorted forms.
When there is no consecration of value,
when there is no altar at which we kneel,
when there is no service that we are called towards,
when there is no sense of a higher obligation and a higher responsibility,
when there is no sense of devotion, or sincerity, or generosity, or ethos,
when none of those exist as intrinsic features of Cosmos that invite us, that honor us, by demanding our participation and dignifying our capacity to participate,
when none of that exists, when there is a Field devoid of Eros and value —
— then pseudo-eros rears its head in the most horrific ways.
In other words, when you destroy a healthy experience of my whole self, of my sanctified self, of my holy self, of the holy Eros that lives in me, then you create an experience that is so fundamentally painful for the personal and the collective, that every form of fascism, every form of breakdown, every form of Khomeini-ism, every form of regressive, degraded expressions of hatred, come together as organized forms of pseudo-eros.
When there is no holy Eros, there is only pseudo-eros.
This means that the only way to respond to this degradation is by articulating a New Story of Value which is real —
which evolves through us, which we incarnate in our very being,
and is also the mystery before which we bow, before which we are in service, before which we are in devotion.
If we can’t articulate a New Story of ErosValue, a New Story of desire, then it all breaks down.
We said last week, here in One Mountain, that the core point of the movie Barbie is that there is no love story in Cosmos. It is quite explicit in the movie that any notion of value is made-up. Human meanings are made-up. We live one life, we die, it’s over, and any meaning we had along the way we simply made up.
That’s the position that Hamas is reading.
That’s what Hamas is understanding as being the bedrock of what they call the West — and they are not entirely wrong. That’s a big deal. Hamas responds by an utter degradation of Barbie in an extreme horrific expression of patriarchy at its worst, through the role of the masculine in Hamas’ ideology.
That’s actually what happens.
But what is our response?
The response is the Barbie movie, a universe in which there is no love story, and in which everything is just a social construction.
But then a second expression of that universe becomes a pornographic universe, in which desire is digitally mediated and you have a complete overwhelming of the senses, which are deluged by images of incarnate desire, which are dissociated from larger fields of divinity and larger fields of dignity. We have Billie Eilish, the singer that grew up from age 11 on high-speed internet porn, which was fundamentally degrading and fundamentally violent. I’ve had so many men walk through my office in different ways, and talk about growing up on high-speed internet porn from age 9 or 10, with no sense of a narrative of desire —
of Reality that is desire,
of Reality that is a Field of desire,
of the unique desire and unique script of desire that lives in me, as me, and through me.
None of that’s available.
We need to articulate a new ground of desire, a New Story of desire. To be Homo amor is to be able to live and incarnate that New Story of Desire.
Purity of Desire
Hamas views its goal as purity. There is this great yearning for purity — but actually, the place you can access purity is in the purity of Eros, or in the purity of the sexual, or the purity of fuck. But the purity of fuck is not available through the pornographic universe. The pornographic universe is simply an unclarified desire. It’s simply laziness. It’s the allowing of artificial intelligence to hijack my unique script of desire.
The purity of fuck is actually a hard one.
It is to get to this place where you are beyond shame, and you are actually experiencing the fuck of Reality, the great kiss of Reality, the current of Eros of Reality moving uniquely through you, in all of its purity.
You pour that energy that moves through you into Reality itself.
Giving and receiving become one.
Respect abounds, and every play of desire is burst with open heart and open LoveDesire.
That’s the purity effect. That’s a hard one.
That’s unavailable to Hamas, and it’s not available to the postmodern West.
It’s not a pornographic universe — and it’s not the regressive world of fundamentalist degradations of desire. It’s a new vision, in which fuck itself is not opposed to purity, but in its clarified form, in its deepest clarified experience of desire, you access an unimaginable purity — which is why people may have that experience once in their life. Sometimes people can access that experience by doing a medicine journey, and then mixing that medicine journey with embodiment. But it’s actually available. Once you have that experience, you realize that purity lives inside of you.
In the experience of Hamas, there is no experience of the purity of desire.
In 325, in the original council that formed the Christian church, there was an argument about who is Christ? Is Christ of God — or is Christ like a God? It is based on how you read that particular Greek word.
Now, what’s the difference?
Well, if Christ is of God, then Christ is unique and singular, it’s only Christ. No one else, only Christ is of God. Only Christ is Christed. Only Christ is divine.
But if Christ is a human being who is like God, it means that Christ goes through a transformation to become like God — just like Enoch, in the wisdom literature, is originally a human figure, who is then transformed into Metatron, into the God-Self. In other words, is the Christ figure every human being who can be transformed, and I can be transformed because I can embody the Christ in me? An embodied Christed experience of sex is love in the body — and I can experience the purity of desire in me.
What Hamas has said is — no, it’s only God. It’s not you, you can’t have purity of desire in you. Your desire will lead you astray. You cannot trust your body. There’s nothing that you can trust internally. Therefore, the only possibility of Reality is radical authoritarianism, of the most degrading kind.
Death presses us into gnosis
We have been talking, since 2011 or 2012, about the meta-crisis and the second shock of existence.
The first shock of existence is the experience of the human being that I’m going to die at the end of this life. There is an experience of death. That experience of death forces me into myself, presses me to the wall (to use Rilke’s words). When death presses me to the wall, I have a much deeper realization of who I am, and what value is, and perhaps I may actually generate a realization of a continuity of consciousness beyond death.
Death presses me into life.
Death presses me into gnosis.
In the original experience of the first shock of existence, we are pressed against the wall of existence, if you will. We go deep inside, and we begin to generate knowing —
knowing of value,
knowing of goodness,
knowing of truth —
— fields of meaning. It takes thousands of years for those fields to evolve, but it’s the encounter with death that actually pushes us into the realization of value.
Do you remember the last scene that we saw in the movie about a year and a half ago? We did a deep analysis of the movie Don’t Look Up. There is this realization of death when finally people realize existential risk. A meteor in this movie is going to hit the planet, and there is this last scene where they all gather, the heroic figures in the movie, and they have dinner together in the last minutes of Reality. And they realize that what matters is eating together, and loving each other, and saying grace together, and clasping hands, and giving each other a hug, and opening our hearts and loving.
All of a sudden, in the face of death, you realize: Oh my God, this is what value is!
My son wrote in a family text thread last night: all I want to do is to be at home with my three kids, I want to be at home; nothing else matters, I just want to be at home with my family.
I am not saying that’s the only value. That’s one set of values. It’s a beautiful value. When I encounter death personally, myself, I am desperate to love — and one of the ways I am desperate to love is to write this Great Library at this time between worlds, and download it into Reality, and to stand for this new Great Library and this New Story of Value, and to pour every ounce of my energy and effort into making sure that we can actually articulate this New Story of Value and drop it into Reality, download it into the source code of Cosmos as a gift for thousands of years to come.
That original experience of the death of the human being pressed us into gnosis, and it also moved us to create families. This is a family. This is a father and a daughter, and a father doesn’t take advantage of his daughter sexually. She is not a sexual object. The father protects the daughter. That emergence of the father. The couple, the family, the clan, the lineage, the perpetuation of family, the wider family that gathers and holds each other — these all emerged from the first shock of existence.
In the first shock of existence, one of the things we did is we looked at sexuality. We looked at sexuality, and we said, wow, there is this wild force in Cosmos called sexuality, and we tried to create containers to hold it, which were all forms of ritual, and all forms of guidance, and all forms of: this is fallen sexuality, and this is sacred sexuality. Some of it we got right, and a lot of it we got wrong — but there was this attempt to create containers to hold the erotic, to hold sexuality.
We now come to the second shock of existence. The second shock of existence is the potential death of humanity. Just like the first shock of existence pressed us into new knowing, new gnosis, new forms of family, new forms of the sexual, new visions of meaning, now the second shock of existence also has to press us into —
new emergent value,
new stories of desire,
new visions of a sexual ethos,
new visions of the erotic and the ethical.
We need to come not to a place where we deny value, not to a place where we deconstruct all value — we need to be, again, pressed against the wall of Reality into disclosing new visions of meaning, which means new sexual ethics, a new ethos, new visions of what Eros means.
Democratization of hieros gamos
In the ancient world, virtually all sexuality was, in some sense, diminished in its sacred character, and the only true sacred sexuality was often that of the king and the queen, or the priest and the priestess who engaged in hieros gamos — in sexual coupling for the sake of the people.
All other sexuality didn’t have that status. Only the sexuality of the king and the queen, or of the priest and the priestess, had ultimate value. Often, they would engage sexually in a temple ritual for the sake of the people, and then be put to death as a sacrifice, as a sexual sacrifice. That was the hieros gamos, the divine marriage in the ancient world, in which there was this realization that the power of the sexual needed to be harnessed — but it was harnessed in a way in which it resulted in an actual physical death, and it was reserved for the elite.
We are now at this new moment, in which the old ethnocentric world of it’s just my people and we love only my people doesn’t work. We face global challenges, and we need a global grammar of value — and we realize that it’s not about just the king and the queen — that every human being is royalty, and there is a sense of universal human rights, and there is the emergence of the feminine.
We begin to realize that we need to claim what we might call the democratization of hieros gamos. In other words, we need to reclaim the sexual current of desire that lives through me — not the one mediated by the pornographic universe, not the script of my desire that was stolen from me and imposed upon me by the most reductive forms of broken capitalism, that markets to 10-year-olds, and robs 10-year olds (who become 15 and 20-year-olds) of their ability to access and arouse their own unique fields of desire. Not that. We need to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of a pornographic universe that erases our scripts of desire, and reclaim my own sexuality —
reclaim myself as the priest and priestess,
reclaim myself as the king and queen,
and move towards a democratization of hieros gamos.
In other words, the second shock of existence presses us into a new narrative of sexuality, a new narrative of desire. It’s not that sexuality is sex negative, or it’s not just bland sex positive. And it’s not — like for Kinsey, the sex researcher — sex neutral: it’s just like having lunch. And it’s not sex sacred because it creates babies.
No, it’s this democratized realization —
that sexual desire is the nature of Reality,
that the name of God is desire, and that desire is the currency of Reality.
That Reality is ErosDesire, and that ErosDesire lives uniquely in me,
and that in my sexuality is — I am — a unique incarnation and expression of the entire Field of Desire,
and because I feel sexual desire moving in me — which is desire for pleasure and fullness, and the goodness of life, and the desire to give and share that with someone — I am actually a priest and priestess of the new Reality.
I am a citizen of this new global world, and my sexuality is sacred and needs to be protected and honored. I myself need to distinguish between fallen sexuality and sacred sexuality, and I need to access my deepest heart’s desire, and I need to access my own unique script of desire.
We need to reclaim a new narrative of desire, which is our response to shame.
Shame is: when there is a degradation of desire and that desire lives in me, then it makes me feel abhorrent to myself.
But when I honor the dignity of desire, and I realize that desire lives uniquely in me, I realize that my sexuality — with myself if I live by myself, or with another — is the divine marriage. It’s me marrying all the parts to myself, or me in relationship to another. If I actually begin to say that sexuality is so sacred, then anyone that I’ve even felt sexual arousal towards, I need to be in devotion to my entire life.
Of course, I don’t need to act on any of that sexual arousal, I can be classically monogamous my entire life, yet —
honor my entire Field of Desire,
and honor everyone’s Field of Desire,
and realize that everyone is a king and queen, a priest and priestess, engaged in a unique hieros gamos,
and that the bed of sexuality is the bed of ethics and the bed of value,
that all value lives in the sexual experience.
Because it’s about devotion, and it’s about giving, and it’s about giving and receiving being one, and we need to reclaim the experience of the sexual as a model of Eros as the most sacred dimension of life.
That’s an alternative to the degraded visions of a pornographic universe. That’s a sexuality that we stand for, that we live for, that we die for — when we realize that our own tumescence, and our own throbbing, and our own pulsing is the pulsing of God and Goddess.
Do you begin to see this vision?
All of that is absent. All of that, that entire culture of Eros we just described, is absent. It doesn’t exist anyplace.
In that absence, you get pseudo-eros, and in that absence, you get degraded visions of desire.
Hamas is built on a degraded vision of desire and a degraded vision of the feminine, so of course it slaughters teenage boys and girls in the field, because it’s filled with its own shame.
But of course, the Western liberal world has failed to create a powerful compelling vision, a grammar of value, to which we are in devotion, which is deeply articulated, which is felt.
We worship on the altars of our own narrow narcissisms.
We need to actually create new altars, to create new versions of value.
The battle between good and evil exists in every human being
The other dimension that then mixes in with the degraded worldviews that are expressed in Iran today, and in the Hamas, and in Hezbollah is what we might call the Ring of Sauron — if we can borrow Tolkien’s imagery from Lord of the Rings, talk about the Ring of Sauron.
The Ring of Sauron is actually the dark, degraded ontologies of evil that live in the world.
The lack of Eros creates pseudo-eros. When there is no genuine Eros, there is pseudo-eros. There are all forms of acting out, all forms of addiction, and all sorts of power drives that seek to cover over the emptiness of genuine Eros.
Those pseudo-erotic power drives have enormous power. They are fueled by a pseudo-erotic ontology of evil. In other words, evil is not just the absence of good — evil develops its own appetites, its own hungers. The Hungry Ghosts of Buddhism have a kind of ontology, they have a kind of power. And, of course, that was depicted in Western literature as the devil. But while the devil is absurd in its grotesque and caricatured depictions, what’s not absurd is that there actually is a battle between good and evil in the world.
That battle between good and evil exists in every human being.
There is a battle between the part of me that wants to be gorgeous and stunning, and the part of me that wants to be contracted.
Just find the moment when you are in a fight with someone, and they accuse you of doing something wrong, and you don’t want to acknowledge that you might have done something wrong, even if you did. You want to lash out and destroy them, because you feel ashamed. So what do you do?
Do you actually respond from your fullest self and say: Wow, you just pointed out that I did something wrong! Wow, let me just look at it. Oh wow, there’s something to that, my bad, I apologize. Oh wow, I really own that, thank you. Oh, and now let me share something else — and then go on to the next part of the conversation?
Or are you triggered in shame and lash out to destroy the person?
This is that battle between good and evil.
Can I reach deep in myself and find my joy?
Can I find my love?
Can I find my generosity?
Can I show up when it’s impossible to show up?
Can I be in devotion when I don’t want to be devoted?
Can I be fierce when I need to be fierce?
Can I be fearless standing for the Field of Value, even when it’s not comfortable politically and I may lose some egoic standing in the world?
Can I be aligned with value?
That battle between good and evil exists in every person.
It exists in every community.
It exists between people.
There is a battle for good and evil in the world. Sorry, it’s true.
No, it’s not the old mythic version of the battle — with the good Christians against the bad Jews, or the good Muslims against the bad Christians, or the early versions of the Bible 3,500 years ago, which is the good Jews who are doing their thing, who are going to destroy Canaan (which the Hebrew wisdom tradition said is not valid).
No, we’ve got to evolve beyond that. We totally need to evolve beyond that, absolutely — beyond the old mythic versions, where it’s very easy to say, I’m on the side of the good and you’re on the side of evil. It’s very easy to get caught in the battle of good and evil and make myself the good and everyone else evil, and demonize the other and not see them at all. We get that, so we need to reject that notion of the battle between good and evil — but there is a battle between good and evil, that’s actually true. There are two kinds of forces that exist and live in the world. Tolkien wasn’t wrong when he talked about the Ring of Sauron, and the nine kings seduced by the Ring.
Pseudo-eros exponentialized becomes the Ring of Sauron
And what is the Ring? The Ring is a circle, and a circle is always a symbol of circle Eros, and the circle Eros is a particular kind of depth in Reality. The nature of a circle is that it’s not trying to get somewhere, it’s for its own sake. It’s called lishma: for its own sake.
The circle is for its own sake.
In its beautiful version, I want to sit and have a conversation with you for its own sake, my son wants to be with his family for its own sake, we want to love each other for its own sake. That’s beautiful.
But there’s a shadow of for its own sake, and the shadow of for its own sake is —
the desire for power-over for its own sake,
the desire to assert my power by inflicting pain on the other for its own sake,
the desire to avoid shame by asserting my superiority through utter degrading or murder of the other.
This move for its own sake towards the destruction of the other. I create a circle, and everyone else is outside of the circle. I create pseudo-eros. I am on the inside because everyone else is outside, and I am driven by this seductive drive for power, the Ring of Sauron — and power becomes the value itself.
In other words, pseudo-eros exponentialized becomes the Ring of Sauron. And the Ring of Sauron is called precious. Remember the hobbit who becomes evil in the Tolkien trilogy of Lord of the Rings, he talks about the Ring and he says: my precious, my precious.
What does precious mean? Value. The point is, the Ring becomes value — but it’s really anti-value. It’s the pure raw drive for power which overrides all value.
There is no sense of Eros.
There is no sense of devotion.
There is no sense of kindness.
Do you remember the orcs? The orcs are the manufactured brigades of “fighters,” who go out to fight for Sauron, who massacre everything in their way. Those orcs have no kindness, and they have no sexuality — no sexuality that’s beautiful. They are lost in pornographies of violence.
Those are the orcs.
Yeah, there is a battle between good and evil. But it’s not between individuals of different racial origin. It’s not good Jews and bad Arabs, or good Christians and bad Jews. It’s not good Chinese and bad Americans.
It is never about racial origin. It is about the system of value in which we live.
What is the grammar of value in which we live?
What is the story of value in which we live?
There is no child born into a Hamas family that cannot grow up to be a gorgeous good, true, and beautiful, noble human being, a noble knight of goodness, truth, and beauty.
There is nothing intrinsically broken or fallen about Jews or Arabs or Christians or Yellow or Brown or Black or Red.
Of course not.
It’s about —
What is the story of value?
Am I engaged in the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of love?
Am I evolving value?
Am I actually accessing my deepest heart’s desire?
Am I trusting my capacity to be a responsible agent and player motivated by my deepest heart’s desire?
Or have I demonized my interior desire, so I cannot trust my desire, and therefore I am controlled by a story of value which is built on the degradation, destruction, and the murder of the other?
Friends, there is a battle between good and evil, and we do need to take a stand in that battle. And it’s not all realpolitik, and it’s not all corrupt, and it’s not true that it’s just corruption all around. Yes, there is corruption in every system, and there is no system that’s not without its deep flaws. But there is better and worse, and there are higher and more degraded forms of value.
And there is — I want to say it again — there is a battle between good and evil. That’s real, and we need to take our stand in that battle. It’s not a moral equivalence all around.
There is no moral equivalence between the Russian army and the Ukrainian army. I am familiar, very deeply familiar with all the flaws and complexities that are happening in the Ukraine. I am aware of that — and there is no moral equivalence between what the Russian army is doing and what the Ukrainian army is doing, even though they are both flawed in many ways. But there is a very clear need and value to support Ukraine in the best way possible. That’s true, with all the complexity.
And it’s clearly true in Israel.
Greater is light that comes from the darkness
I’m going to end how I began — with the Hadassah Hospital, and pluralism at the very center of the society.
It is this tiny little country, which has the most advanced code of ethics for its army. It’s an aspirational code that the army strives and stretches to live by. Even now in the middle of the horror, warnings were given in Gaza to evacuate places where the army was going to operate. The whole thing is imperfect.
The whole thing is a holy and broken Hallelujah.
But there is a battle between good and evil, and we can trust our deepest heart’s desire, which incarnates our moral compass. We do need to be telling a New Story of Desire and a New Story of Value. We need to be madly committed to that story, and we need to stake our lives on it. We need to be willing to bracket our narcissistic selves for the sake of the larger whole. That’s what arouses the respect of Reality itself. Wow!
We cannot have Hamas hijack God. Hamas cannot hijack God.
The god of Hamas is a distorted and degraded god, which is idolatrous, which serves, tragically, the degraded forms of the great impulse of goodness that is the spark that’s at the heart of every great system of value, of every great system of religion, of religare — reconnecting. But as Abraham Kook writes, when you degrade your vision of God, you degrade your vision of ethos, and very quickly, you become a mass murderer.
There is a great battle between good and evil, and our role in that battle here in One Mountain is: we are going to give everything we have, with every breath we have — not as a casual side activity, not as a hobby, as we do our narcissistic lives — we are going to lay it all down to tell a New Story of Value.
Not just to tell it, not just to declare it.
Barbara Marx Hubbard, it’s so good to have you with us here, and you began this with us, and Sally Kempton — the two great women who held the Center for so many years and who held this vision of value. I just want to invoke them, and invoke the dignity of that feminine, and the great women and men who hold the Center in all of their positions of leadership.
We are committed to writing, with depth, a Great Library, and to grounding it in the deepest sciences, and the deepest footnotes, and the deepest universal grammars of value, liberating the deepest sparks from every great tradition, and creating the ground of a world religion as a context for our diversity — where there is a place for a gorgeous holy Islam, a gorgeous holy Judaism, a gorgeous holy Buddhism, gorgeous holy Sunnis and Shiites. The tragedy of Islam is that within Islam, murder reigns between every faction. No — let’s have a shared value within Islam, a shared Christ Field.
We are committed to this. We are going to do everything we can, to articulate in every language we can, this new grammar of value, and to validate it — not just to claim it, but to validate it. That’s not a two-year project, that’s our life’s work. We are going to try and publish it, and write it, and film it, and share it in every way we can. That’s our fight. We are fighting. We are in the great battle of good and evil.
And lastly — and with this, we end. This is our Amen, friends. This is our Amen.
We have to own the shadow in us. The only way to be in the battle of good and evil is to know that it’s not just binary. Any evil that exists out there in some place lurks in my heart — and so I have to find that inside of me and transform it.
We say in the text of Solomon: Greater is light than darkness. And then the masters say, in the 13th century, not greater is light than darkness — greater is light that comes from the darkness.
We have to own our own shadows.
We have to own our own flaws.
We have to own our own vulnerabilities.
But not with a sense of moral equivalence. We are all flawed and vulnerable — but there are distinctions, and there are important distinctions. Yet we never make evil solely the place where the other lives. We always look deeply. We are willing to be displeasing to ourselves, because it’s only by being displeasing to ourselves that we can be at an altar to the Divine, at an altar to the Christ, at an altar to the true Allah, at an altar to the true Atman that is Brahman, at an altar to the true Adonai Elohim.
Amen, amen.
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Thank you Marc and may God bless and protect your son Yair.