415—Why Yuval Harari Got it So Wrong, Part 2: The Eternal Tao is the Evolving Tao
Central to the new story of value is the realization that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, eternity and evolution are not in contradiction.
This is Part 2 of a Series Critique of Yuval Harari. Read Part 1 HERE
Summary: As we continue this series of talks about the postmodern position expressed by Yuval Harari, this episode focuses on the question of Where: What is the nature of the Universe we live in? And, as a subset of the question, Where are we in the story?
Marc Gafni and Yuval Harari agree on the latter question (we are at a moment of meta-crisis and existential risk to the species), but fundamentally disagree on the former. Harari’s claim that we live in a Universe devoid of meaning and value deceptively hijacks the authority of science, even though there is no empirical evidence supporting this claim (in fact, science doesn’t even address this question). As such, it is a dogmatic, fundamentalist claim, in contradiction with actual empirical evidence (some of which is briefly discussed in the episode). More than that, this dogmatic position undermines our ability to respond to the meta-crisis, which is impossible without a new story of value.
Central to the new story of value is the realization that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, that is, eternity and evolution are not in contradiction; indeed, eternity discloses itself as a field of evolution. As an example of the real, deep, non-dogmatic conversation that needs to happen for any meaningful response to the existential risk to be possible, Marc Gafni explores a recent book by Baoshan Ma, a major Taoist scholar, and shows how the seeming contradiction between the Field and the individuated self (central to the surface conflict between the East and the West) is resolved in the concept of Uniqueness and the realization of Unique Self.
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The great question of Where
We said last week that, in some sense, we are claiming importance (something you’re not allowed to do in the postmodern world).
We are saying, this matters — this coming together every week in One Mountain, Many Paths to recognize where we are in Reality in this moment, to be real, to get real about Reality.
Where are we?
What’s the nature of the world we live in?
What are the ground rules of the world, or does the world have ground rules?
Based on a very deep reading of science, we affirm that
the world has a set of First Principles and First Values; and that those First Principles and First Values are structural to Reality.
They are plotlines of Cosmos. That’s a very big deal.
As a subset of this question of Where, we ask,
Where are we along the way? Where are we in the story?
Paradoxically, what Yuval Harari and I agree on deeply is that we are facing existential risk — that we are facing a meta-crisis. At least in terms of some major issues like artificial intelligence, we are reading some of the same sources. We are talking to some of the same people. And we agree that there is a meta-crisis, which emerges from the exponentialized and widely distributed nature of technologies. From my perspective, that’s one major vector, perhaps the primary one. Yuval and I probably agree that that’s the primary one, which challenges Reality with collapse.
It’s a big deal. That’s a big agreement. We agree on the subset question of where.
But we differ on something unimaginably profound; and the difference between us is that I am right and he is wrong. This is not a place for multiple perspectives, which are all equal. They are not. Yuval is wrong.
Now, along the way to being wrong, he says lots of right things, but ultimately, his position is wrong because it is a dogmatic religious fundamentalist position. Yuval adopts a dogmatic religious fundamentalist position that there is no value in the world. His answer to the primary question of Where? is:
We live in a world where, as far as we can tell, human life has absolutely no meaning.
We saw it last week, we listened to a quote from Sapiens (one of Yuval’s early books), in which he said it quite clearly. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell, human subjectivity — meaning love, loyalty, value, all of it — wouldn’t be missed. It doesn’t matter. Hence, any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is an illusion.
That’s his answer to the question of Where.
That’s a dogma. That is a religious fundamentalist dogma.
He uses the word “scientific,” but there is no scientific evidence which points in that direction.
Science doesn’t actually address this question of interior meaning, which Yuval knows very well. He is making what Walter Kaufmann calls a gerrymandering move. Gerrymandering in politics is when you redraw the lines of a political district in order to ensure a particular outcome in elections. Walter Kaufmann, the great scholar of existential thought at Columbia, talks about religious gerrymandering or philosophical gerrymandering. It is when you inappropriately borrow or redraw lines of conversation to come to a particular conclusion, or you draw authority illegitimately, in a deceptive way.
In the paragraph I just referred to, Yuval slips in the words surreptitiously. He slips in the words, ‘as far as we can tell’, ‘from a purely scientific viewpoint.’ But it’s the most deceptive thing you could possibly write. From a purely scientific viewpoint, Reality has no meaning — but science is not addressing meaning! Science is not addressing the immeasurable, the priceless — the inherent meaning structures of Reality.
Science is addressing the measurable.
Science is addressing the world of physics, and then the life world, the biosphere. But even in the biosphere, science is not addressing meaning. And in the world of physics, science is not addressing interiors. Science would just talk about interiors as attraction, but science doesn’t address that issue (which is why, for example, Yuval’s book, Sapiens, has just two paragraphs on the world of matter and life).
And, of course, science has no way to address the world of the interior human mind. Science is quantifying. Science moved, around the time of the Renaissance, from the time of Aristotle, when science classified, to the modern world of Kepler and Galileo — from classification to measurement. But value is about the immeasurable, so to say at the beginning of this paragraph ‘from a purely scientific viewpoint’ is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst.
And Yuval, my brother, you know that.
We completely agree with our brother Yuval that we are facing existential risk. In terms of where we are in the story — the subset of the great Where? question — we are facing a genuine existential risk threat to our species.
For the first time, we have a global civilization, but:
All local civilizations have fallen, but we haven’t solved any of their challenges.
We have exponential technologies.
These technologies are being weaponized.
We have no coherent way to address those challenges, because we have no global coordination and no global coherence.
Those exponential technologies are available to widely distributed sets of actors, which was never true before.
I’ll stop at five. I could go to twenty, and I have before, we’ve talked about this before. But you get the idea. We completely agree on that. We agree on the where in the subset question, but not on the where in the primary question — the Universe story.
Scientific evidence for the realness of love
I want to make it very clear that Yuval’s position is dogmatic. It’s a dogmatic fundamentalist position. Let’s call out dogmatic fundamentalism for what it is. It needs to be done.
It is a dogmatic claim.
This claim —
that the world is essentially valueless,
that meaning doesn’t matter,
that human subjectivity (a.k.a. love), is utterly contrived,
that it would not be missed in the universe, has no meaning, has no value —
is not a claim you could seriously make looking a child in the eye, and you never would.
You would actually know in your interior that you are doing something fundamentally destructive. You would feel the cruelty of making that claim to a child. You would feel that cruelty because you would understand, you would know that this is going to violate something in the child.
What attachment theory tells us is that the experience of a world in which I am loved is essential, and it’s my early caretakers who hold that experience for me. If I don’t get that experience from early caretakers, then I can get it later in life. I have to recover that experience or discover it. If I can’t recover it by going back and revisioning my relationship with my parents and finding the love that was hidden (maybe the love wasn’t there), then I can discover it later in life and in other forms of relationship.
The experience of being loved can be felt in other forms of relationship, and in other qualities of being in Reality.
I can feel loved by Reality through beauty.
And I can feel loved by Reality through goodness.
And I can feel loved by Reality through truth.
And I can feel loved by Reality in the dance of sexing at its best, when I’m licked, and sucked, and held, and caressed in such a way that I actually experience that my need is my beloved’s allurement.
Just like a baby experiences him or herself in relationship to the mother in the best possible circumstances — my need is your allurement. When the mother looks at the child and says, your need is my allurement (or the father says it in a different way, or the caretaker), and they hold the child and they look in the child’s eyes, the child feels welcome in the world.
I remember when my son, Zion, was born. Zion is my son and Mariana Caplan’s son, beautiful boy. And as Zion was born, he went almost immediately to me, a few seconds later. And I spent the first hour chanting to him, singing to him. And then, I recorded all of the chants a little later and sent them the chants, so he could remember those moments when he was welcomed in Reality.
Attachment theory is essentially a scientific documenting of the fact that if a child doesn’t experience that love — what Yuval dismisses as meaningless human subjectivity — if a child doesn’t experience that love, the child’s life falls apart. It has been shown through longitudinal studies of the last 50 years, which began with Bowlby’s epic monumental Separation and Loss, which he wrote after World War II, and continued into Mary Ainsworth’s work, and then others, Kohat, Fairburn, Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, et cetera.
When the child is not held in the arms of welcoming love, even if the child has all of their survival needs met — they have food and clothing, and they are in a warm place, and they are getting right linguistic training — but they are not experiencing the fragrance of love, their life collapses, psychologically and physically. Rates of suicide go way up. Rates of addiction go way up. Rates of abuse go way up. Rates of loneliness go way up. Rates of mental collapse go way up in a plethora of studies.
Now, why would that be true?
If the world is merely a survival world, and survival is understood to be simply mechanical (which it’s not; survival itself is a value, it’s the value of life), there would be no need for that, would there? If the Universe wasn’t a love story, there would be no need to be embraced by my caretaker in mad love — and there would be no empirical evidence that my life breaks down if that doesn’t happen.
The only reason that I need that so desperately is because I need to feel at home in the world. Because the world is a CosmoErotic Universe, because the Universe is a Love Story, because Reality is Eros — and my early caretaker represents the Universe to me. If my early caretaker is not attuned to me, if I can use the classical word, and doesn’t know how to soothe me, doesn’t know how to hold me in a place where I feel welcome in the universe, then my entire interior collapses.
Yuval’s assertion that human subjectivity, a.k.a. love, is blind, and that the universe is blind and empty, violates our actual scientific, empirical knowledge of the universe —
One, the evidence from attachment theory, which is one of the most important advances in science.
Secondly, it also violates the entire inherent sense of evolutionary forces, which have a dimension of freedom and a dimension of randomness in them, but their randomness exists in the context of a larger movement, which goes from quarks to culture, from mud to Mozart, from bacteria to Bach, from dirt to Dostoevsky, from slime to Shakespeare. It’s a very, very coherent, profoundly coherent, intimate movement. It’s the progressive deepening of intimacies within this dimension of Reality.
Of course, there is also an enormous amount of information that points to this dimension of Reality not being the entire Reality, but just one dimension in a multidimensional Reality; but let’s put that aside.
I just want to understand with you that this claim that Yuval is making, falsely hijacking science as evidence, is demagoguery. It’s pure demagoguery. It’s pure religious fundamentalism.
The academic consensus of meaningless Reality is profoundly wrong
As I said last week, and I affirm it, I look forward to having dinner with Yuval. I am not demonizing Yuval. People ask, is Yuval operating in bad faith? I have no idea what faith Yuval is operating in, but I assume it’s good faith. I assume he is a good man.
I am not interested in Yuval Harari as a philosopher because he is not a philosopher. Yuval is a historian. His early work is on a very narrow, but fascinating history, Renaissance Military Memoirs and Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550. I think he did a fantastic job on this. When, Yuval, you go from being a particular historian to a generalist historian, that’s also okay. But not it’s not okay when you go from there to making incredibly shoddy philosophical claims.
Yes, I understand they represent the consensus of the legacy academic institutions, and you are voicing that consensus — but that consensus is fundamentally incorrect. It’s a dogmatic, fundamentalist, reductive materialism, which was in vogue for a period of time, but shouldn’t be anymore. It was in vogue because it was a rebellion against the overreaches of the broken stories of the classical religious fundamentalisms. We both understand that together, Yuval.
But that story is ultimately inaccurate. You can’t look at a child and say, Love is not real, because it violates the child’s essence. And you know that. You can feel that in your body. You don’t look at your beloved and say, I’m loving you, but love is not real. Now, you might be able to get away with it with your beloved when you are 50 or 40 or 30, because there is some kind of existential play in it. I get that — but you can’t say it to a child. That’s what the attachment theory is saying.
All I have been talking about is in response to the question of Where?
Where are we?
Yuval says we are in an empty, reductive, materialist, meaningless world in which human subjectivity — love — matters not one iota. It’s all made up. There is no meaning.
No, no, no. That’s a dogmatic, fundamentalist, religious claim, which virtually every system of interior science that’s ever been developed disagrees with and counters, based on an enormous amount of empirical information.
Now, Yuval would say that many of those systems and their exterior expressions violated what we think is good today. Well, that’s true — but that means that you’re affirming there is something that’s good.
Yes, the religions overreached. They told stories that were often fictitious in their exteriors. The surface structures of the religion were often fictitious stories, which, at particular moments in time, wrought enormous destruction. Just like the scientific stories of the 20th century created the technologies and the philosophies that led to more people killed in the 20th century than in any other human century, and to higher levels of abject human brutality.
Both science and religion have enormous shadows.
But clearly, Reality is trying to get someplace. Clearly, there is an evolution of love. Clearly, love is not static.
This notion —
that Reality is Value,
that we live in a universe overflowing with meaning;
that we live in a world overflowing with beauty;
that we live in a world that’s overflowing with goodness;
that we live in a world that’s overflowing with truth;
that there is a plentitude of Eros — Reality is Eros all the way up and all the way down —
evokes the question: Why, then, is there suffering and pain in the world?
In about six-seven weeks, we are going to spend a couple of weeks talking about suffering and pain. That’s going to be a critically important conversation. But just to say one sentence:
If Reality were not Eros,
if Reality were not an Intimate Universe,
if Reality were, as Yuval suggests, completely empty and meaninglessness —
then there would be no reason to be outraged by suffering and pain, because why would Reality be any different?
That’s the paradox.
The paradox is: if we live in a meaningless void, well, why shouldn’t three million people be killed on the border of what is today Pakistan and India? Why shouldn’t children have their heads bashed into walls by fanatic human beings driven to the edge of their frenzies?
Why shouldn’t that happen?
Of course that happens. Human beings sometimes get caught in bad stories, they are reduced to their basest instincts, just like chimps do on a bad day, and babies’ heads are smashed open.
Why is that a problem?
And it is a problem. We are outraged by it. It’s a violation of everything we, in our deepest interior, hold dear.
Why? Why?
Because we hold this deep understanding that Reality is meaningful, and fairness is a quality of Reality, and justice needs to emerge, and goodness, truth, and beauty are the nature of Reality, and we live in an Intimate Universe, and evil is a violation of intimacy.
The point I’ve been slowly weaving our way to is that Reality is filled with First Principles and First Values, that Reality is not empty. This notion is actually a universal notion, and if we don’t approach the world through that understanding, we can’t even begin to create a universal grammar of value. And if we can’t create a universal grammar of value, then we can’t have global coordination in response to the global challenges of existential risk. We’ll return to this point next week.
Human intentions could be cosmological
There is a book written by Xi’s brother-in-law. Xi is the head of China, one of the smartest and one of the greatest violators of human rights in the world today. And yet, the way to approach him — and we haven’t gotten there yet, because that conversation hasn’t happened — is to invite him into a universal grammar of value which holds him accountable. And that has to happen through his own sources.
His brother-in-law, Ma, Baoshan Ma, wrote a book, one of many that he has written, called Cosmology and Logic in the Dao of Changes, which I’m reading now. He is talking about Taoism. I am going to read you something which is going to blow your mind. When you read this, you’ll think, huh, that is exactly what we’re saying in First Principles and First Values. He is not arguing Yuval’s position (= Reality is empty and meaningless), and yet, the bridge hasn’t yet been drawn to his brother-in-law. How to draw that bridge is a very important question, but I want to bracket it for now.
But let us hear his answer to the question of Where, Taoism’s answer to the question of Where, at least based on a set of texts interpreted by the leader of China’s brother-in-law, who is a major Taoist scholar.
This is written by an essayist who is the translator, and he is summarizing some of what Ma says in the book. He writes about Ma’s insistence on the continuity of mind and events.
What he means by the continuity of mind and events is exactly what we call the continuity of value in the Cosmos —
my mind is not separate from the Cosmos;
my mind participates in the Cosmos;
my mind participates in the Field of Cosmos.
My mind is in continuous participation with Reality and with events in Reality.
It’s not the old fundamentalist creation story of a creator God who is out of Cosmos, who is making shit up, and is creating me in order for me to be obedient to him or her, for some odd reason that we can’t quite figure out, and God is in need of deep therapy, and so are we all, because we live in an irrational, slightly sadistic, and sinister Cosmos. No, no, no. Actually, we are co-extensive with Cosmos. We are participatory in Cosmos. It is a participatory Universe.
That’s exactly the way Ma is reading Taoism. Ma insists on the continuity of mind and events, and this is the continuity of heaven in human beings.
Just listen to this next sentence:
Human intentions could be cosmological once they understand the continuity of mind and events, which is counter to the common Western belief that humans could be the master or conqueror of nature. The Chinese ancient wisdom of the continuity of humans and Cosmos is a perspective describing the real existence of humans in the Cosmos.
What he is saying is the exact same thing that the Solomon wisdom says. Taoism is saying that if I set my intention, my intention participates, changes, and shapes Cosmos.
Wow!
We call that, in the Solomon wisdom, LeShem Yichud ‘for the sake of intimate communion.’ For every action I do, I have an intention. My intention is LeShem Yichud, for the sake of the union, of the erotic union, Kudsha BerichHu U-She-Chin-Tei, the two unique qualities of masculine and feminine that exist in Cosmos. This doesn’t mean masculine and feminine in a gendered sense. It’s what Luria calls lines and circles, which begin from the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Human beings participate in the Field of Cosmos. The human intention could be cosmological. We can engage, we participate in Cosmos.
Now, does Taoism have an idea we can actually change? I think that idea is implicit in Taoism, but I am not going to have a Taoist scholarly conversation now.
The beginning of a Universal Grammar of Value
Yuval, get over your knee jerk rebellion against the Israeli religious establishment. It is a little bit of a mess, I understand. I lived there for 20 years. I was in that system. I understand that you have a legitimate and important critique, which I spent two decades expressing. We share that critique.
Yes, you and I both understand, Yuval, that Voltaire, bringing modernity into existence, cried out, Remember the cruelties! Yes, we understand the overreaches and the tragedies wrought by religion, but those are equally wrought by science. Don’t have your conclusion be this unimaginably superficial dogmatic fundamentalist thinking about meaning in the world, which is but an echo of classical postmodernism meeting Buddhism in a particular way.
That meeting between postmodernism and Buddhism happens all the time. You are reflecting a common position, which is superficial in an unimaginable way. The opposite of the holy is not the profane. The opposite of the holy is the superficial. So, brother, we can do better than this.
This notion that Reality is a Field of Value in which we participate is not some old religious position you need to rebel against. This is the basic structural understanding of Reality held by the Solomon wisdom at its best, and held by Taoism at its best.
We can do better, brother.
Let me keep reading:
In this perspective of the continuity of mind and events, this would be very helpful in assisting, writes Ma, the Western understanding of traditional Chinese wisdom.
Human spiritual participation illuminates the Cosmos. And it’s only through the minute changes of human intentions that the benevolent and creative nature of the Cosmos can reveal itself to human beings. Accordingly, human beings celebrate being the co-participants flourishing in the living spiritual and mystical Cosmos.
I’ve been saying this, in one way or the other, reflecting the Solomon tradition, for the last 25 years. I had no idea that Xi’s brother-in-law, Ma, was reading Taoism in the same way. And he is a very, very good reader of Taoism.
You begin to see what we are calling a Universal Grammar of Value.
So, Yuval, when you assert in your book, deceptively hijacking the authority of science, that the human world is empty and meaningless, devoid of any fullness, you are actually going against the subtlest and most discerning minds in every generation in history.
And you are saying it as though it were obvious. Wow! What a dogmatic and arrogant claim! Don’t parrot, man! You’re smart. You’re deep. You’re beautiful. Give us your best. Give us your deepest thinking.
Here is the next paragraph (Ma is asking, why does this matter?)
As for the application of this revival of ancient Chinese wisdom in modern ordinary lives, the Chinese social pattern should follow the Tao of heaven. The structure of society comes after following the eternal patterns of the Cosmos.
Wow! He understands that politics and metaphysics need to be linked. But, of course, that position requires another deeper structure. He could very easily fall into the Aquinas trap, which is: politics has to follow the eternal structure of Cosmos — objective and unchanging; but this actually violates the structure of Cosmos, which is evolving.
In other words, the danger here is to adopt Taoism as a religious fig leaf for a particular Chinese political position, which claims the authority of eternity but freezes value at a particular moment in time, and doesn’t not allow it to follow its own inherent Eros, which is to evolve.
The eternal Tao is the evolving Tao
When we wrote (when David J. Temple wrote) in First Principles and First Values, that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao (p. 159), I was responding to my readings of Taoism.
Ma has to be careful not to fall into a position that the 10,000 things emerging from the Tao (= the structure of society) should be subordinate to a dogmatic interpretation of the eternal Tao, which ignores and rejects evolution. The eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, and the relationship between eternity and evolution is critical.
The reason postmodernism says that it’s all made up and there is no real value is because they are rebelling against all the religions, which said that value is eternal and unchanging.
That’s what Aquinas said: Value is eternal and unchanging.
That’s not true. Value is eternal, but eternal doesn’t mean everlasting and unchanging. Eternal doesn’t mean everlasting time.
Eternity is that which is beneath time and space.
Eternity is the sunyata, the deep ground, or the Tao, or the Field of Value, which incepts Cosmos. It’s the inherent structure of value, which is beneath time and space.
This is why, when Cosmos appears, it has an entire Field of Value already in place, which expresses itself
as mathematical value,
as subatomic value,
as musical value,
and as the nascent forms of moral value.
When separate parts come together to form a larger whole, to create new intimacies, while respecting the integrity of the individual parts, it means you have a Field of Value in place. And this is exactly how subatomic particles come together to form an atom.
Value means there is a particular quality which Cosmos desires, which is an Ought of Cosmos, something that’s a good result, a result that affirms life. That’s why protons and neutrons come together with electrons. Those are unique values. They come together, they form a unique whole, which is a new unique value, which then generates ever more wholeness, ever more value.
That’s in the structure of Cosmos itself.
But this structure of Cosmos, this eternal structure, is not eternal as in ‘unchanging.’ Reality doesn’t stop at hydrogen. If Cosmos was an unchanging Cosmos, there would be no manifestation, there would be no, as Aristotle would say, sub-lunar sphere. Said simply, you and I wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be changing, we wouldn’t be growing, we wouldn’t be transforming, we wouldn’t be challenged.
The reality is that Infinity desires finitude — that Infinite Eternal actually desired to manifest finitude.
Divinity didn’t stop being eternal because Divinity manifested the world. The world is a change, the world is something new. No, eternity means the Ground of Value, the Ground of Infinite Intimacy.
The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. The God that Yuval rejects, I reject. We both reject the God that tells people what kind of fashion to wear, or the God that says only this people is chosen, and those people should be killed. Yuval, we both reject the same God.
But the God who is the Infinite Intimate, the Infinity desiring Intimacy, the Infinity desiring more value, the God that manifests Cosmos, this Ground of Value — this eternal God is not eternal in the sense of being everlasting and unchanging. It is the ground underneath spacetime. It is ever always already present, and it infuses all spacetime. That’s eternity.
Eternity evolves.
Huh! How do you know? Well, here we are.
Eternity discloses itself as a Field of Evolution.
It’s beautiful.
The sparks of light in the broken vessels
Let’s go back to Ma:
As for the application of this revival of ancient Chinese wisdom to modern ordinary lives in China, the Chinese social pattern should follow the Tao of heaven, and the structure of society comes after following the eternal patterns of Cosmos.
The ancient Chinese wisdom is that there is a Tao, that there is — in my reading of the Tao — the Field of Value. It’s a very precise read. Those eternal patterns of Cosmos, my friend Ma, are eternal and evolving. And you cannot, my friend Ma and your brother-in-law Xi, you cannot freeze-frame eternity at a particular historical time and claim, Oh, okay, we’re done. End of story, and then use that as a cover for brutal totalitarianism that violates human rights, and human dignity, and love.
You’ve got to be aware: Just like Christendom can make that move, Taoism can make that move. Just like Shiite Islam or degraded versions of Sunni Islam — Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis in Yemen — can make that move, so Taoism can. Taoism can make that move as well.
Having said that, the realization — this move by China and by Xi’s brother-in-law to try and ground China in the Field of Value — is enormously important because once we are in the Field of Value, now we are in a conversation.
Now, let’s talk about eternity that’s evolving Tao.
Now, let’s look at Taoist texts.
Now, we can begin to articulate together a grammar of value.
Ma says,
.. the current westernization of Chinese society seems to have changed the societal structure away from the non-individuated person.
What he’s saying is: The Tao is about the Field, and it stands against individuation; it stands against the individual. Now, that’s a particular reading of the Tao, and there is some truth in some dimensions of that reading, but of course there are other texts that go the other way.
What he is trying to do is adopt the Tao as support for the non-individuated person. And he says, it’s not appropriate culturally to strengthen the unique individual. He is standing against uniqueness. He is standing against the dignity of the individual in a particular way. Instead, he says, Chinese society should strengthen the traditional value system, which can be traced back to its ancient cosmological roots as the Tao of heaven.
Great. So, here we’ve got a Field of Value. Exactly the opposite, Yuval, of what you’re saying. And we can critique this vision of eternity, because eternity doesn’t mean unchanging.
Yuval, whenever you read eternity, you actually caricature eternity, as though it means unchanging, and you contrast it with evolution. That’s a mistake. Actually, the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao. We can have eternity and evolution that live together. Eternity means the ground of value.
We need to go back and liberate the sparks from the broken vessels.
Religion created vessels for value. Premodernity was filled with vessels for value called religions. All those vessels competed with each other. They each thought they had an exclusive claim to truth. Along came the new revelations of the sciences and shattered the vessels. That’s what happened in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance. The vessels shattered. The vessels broke. Religion collapsed. The center of society collapsed. The old structures collapsed.
They collapsed legitimately. They collapsed just like in the great cosmological vision of the Solomon wisdom, in which the vessels shatter. They collapsed because of the intensity of light — new scientific knowledge, new understandings of human rights, new understandings of third-person perspective.
The light shatters the vessels, but then you have these broken vessels, in the cosmological image of the Solomon wisdom, and in each one of the broken vessels, there is a spark of light. Each one of the great traditions is a broken vessel, and the spark of light is the realization of the inherent value structure of Cosmos. Those sparks of light need to be liberated. What the master — the prophetic voice — has to do is — and we need to be that prophetic voice together, we need to be David J. Temple together — we need to liberate the sparks from the broken vessels.
To say it in a different version of the vernacular, we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. The dirty bathwater, throw out, but don’t throw out the baby, which is the Field of Value itself. And for that, we need to realize that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao.
Human beings participate in the Field of Value
The translator, this essayist I’m reading, says, Ma’s contribution is returning China to the cosmology of the Tao of changes, which is the return to the original ontological thinking of Chinese philosophy.
Ma’s understanding of Qi, the vital force which I would call Eros, is more relevant to pre-heaven existence, which is pure and pristine. When Qi manifests with a normal phenomenon, when Eros enters into the world, and diverse phenomena and events come into being, then what emerges are Ma’s five onto-generative beings. Ma describes a Field of onto-generative beings.
What is ‘onto-generative being’? Value.
Onto-generative-beings are First Principles and First Values.
Ma’s five onto-generative-beings become different forms within the evolution of Qi.
All of a sudden, we see that Ma, who seemed to be talking about unchanging eternal, is beginning to talk about the evolution of Qi. He is beginning to move towards this notion that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, but he would say, the eternal Qi is the evolving Qi. The eternal Eros is the evolving Eros.
Ma’s five onto-generative beings become different forms within the evolution of Qi, or Eros, which is alive with cosmological consciousness within which human beings participate.
This is the Eros of the Divine, in a somewhat different form. But it’s not describing an empty universe. Now listen to this sentence:
It’s the evolution of Qi which is alive with cosmological consciousness, within which humans can participate and complete as part of cosmological human continuum.
There is this notion that the present moment is eternity, which is absolutely true. That’s absolutely right. There is an experience, in the present moment, of full eternity, and anyone who has done real practice has experienced that. There is an eternity that resides in the moment. In the Tree of Life in the Solomon wisdom, it’s called netzach.
Remember the song, anyone, If I Could Put Time in a Bottle? There is an eternity that resides in the moment. It’s beyond time and beyond space, it’s eternal. There is an eternity like that. That is the ground, that’s the Tao which is beneath the spacetime continuum.
And then, that eternity discloses itself, paradoxically, in evolution.
If I didn’t say that evolution flows from eternity, I would be a complete dualist. I would be saying that —
there is a world of divine sacred eternity,
and then there is a world without divine sacred eternity, a world that’s actually empty of divine sacred eternity, which is exactly what Harari is saying, that the world is empty.
But there is this realization of the Ground of Value, this eternal Field of Value; and we know this eternal Field of Value because it lives in us.
We just mentioned the attachment theory earlier in our conversation. We said, can you look in a baby’s eye, can you look in a three-year-old’s eye and say,
I love you, I love you, I love you, I’m holding you. You’re welcome. But that welcome is just a story, just so you know. And it’s not real. It’s not really real.
Why are you telling me that, mother? Why are you telling me that?
It destroys the child because the child participates in the Field of Value — that’s exactly what Ma, citing Buddhism, is saying. But it’s also the fundamental realization of the the Solomon wisdom, which says that every human being is Chelek Eloha Mi'ma'al mamash, an ontogenetic participatory expression of eternal value. Literally, ontologically, I participate in the Field.
Now, Ma says, it’s all about the Field and not about the individual. And to participate in the Field, I’ve got to give up my individuality, or at least large parts of it, which is very close to classical Theravada, and Mahayana Buddhism, and to a lot of Vajrayana.
That’s a huge mistake.
The mistake of the Eastern traditions, and of certain Western Hasidic and mystical Christian traditions as well, is that they got the Reality of the Field of Value and they thought that you need to stand against separation. They were right about it. You’ve got to stand against separation. Therefore, they would say things like Ma says in this book, which is the goal is the non-individuated person. The goal is the anti-individual because your individuality is your separation. It separates you from the Field.
It’s not actually right. It’s not right empirically. It’s not right scientifically in terms of evolutionary science; it’s also not right in terms of interior science.
What I am trying to do is, what we are trying to do, what David J Temple is trying to do, what we are trying to do together is to crack open the Field and to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture. We are going to make that move right now.
Individuation is not separation, but uniqueness
In the next evolution of the source code, we understand that we need to stand against separation.
Ma is correct in his reading of Taoism. We need to stand against separation, but that doesn’t mean that we get to this place of what he calls the non-individuated being. That’s not correct. That is a wrong conclusion.
What we actually get to is higher individuation beyond ego.
We stand against separateness that says I am merely a separate self.
We realize that I am part of the Tao. I am part of the Field. We call that True Self. True Self is the Tao, the Field or the Field of Value.
And then, I realize that I am Unique Self. I am an irreducibly unique expression of the onto-generative being-ness that lives in me, uniquely in me, as me and through me that never was, is, or will be other than through me, ever in history.
My uniqueness doesn’t separate me from the Field. It doesn’t make me separate — and in that sense, selfish, and in that sense, degraded. No, my uniqueness is the currency of connection.
Ma is correct in the way he portrays Western thought. He is counterposing Taoism to it, as standing for communion and non-individuated being as a value. He makes communion the value, but he ignores the value of uniqueness, because he mistakes uniqueness for separateness. In other words, he is affirming the value of communion, which is the non-individuated being in the Tao. He rejects the Western position — correctly, because he understands the Western position (and he is right) as affirming separateness, which is the Western mistake. It’s not about separateness. It’s about uniqueness.
Just notice this. It’s so insanely gorgeous when you get it. This is the evolution of the source code itself. This is, Yuval, what we need to be doing together.
The East — Ma — makes a mistake, and he says, the value is communion, the Field, and therefore we need non-individuated beings. He rejects individuation because he says that individuation is separateness.
No, no, no, individuation doesn’t need to be separateness. It can be uniqueness. I am part of the Field, but I am a unique expression of the Field. That’s the next evolution of consciousness. That’s the next evolution of love. My Unique Self is not just mechanical function, it’s the unique expression of the onto-generative being, which is the Eros of Cosmos, the Qi of Cosmos living uniquely in me, as me, and through me.
The West makes a mistake, because the West ignores communion for the sake of autonomy and individuation. It views communion as being somehow dominating. Communion means my value comes from the whole, which meant, in the pre-modern world, the state, the religion, the King, et cetera. So, the Western Renaissance said, no, no, no, forget about this communion thing. I exist. I have irreducible dignity in and of myself.
The West said, it’s all about autonomy, which is my separate self; it’s not about the Field.
But the West made the same mistake that Ma made. The West said, it’s all about individuation, and individuation means separate self, separateness.
No, individuation means Unique Self. I move beyond my separate self, I recognize that I am in the Tao, and that I am a unique discretion of the onto-generative Field of being called the Tao. And onto-generative being, in Ma’s reading of Taoism, means First Principle and First Value.
We cannot respond to the meta-crisis without a new story of value
We just brought together the two Fields of Value in the world.
We realized that there is eternal and evolving value.
We realized that the Western Renaissance, which birthed science and birthed the individual, got something enormously right. It evolved our understanding of the individual in the Tao. It moves us beyond a non-individuated being to the possibility of individuation — not against the Tao, but as an expression of the Tao.
It actually evolved Taoism’s understanding, and allowed Taoism to embrace the empirical Reality of uniqueness. Uniqueness is what Ma would call an onto-generative being. Ma, if you are listening, brother, your onto-generative beings have to include uniqueness if you are taking the Qi of Reality seriously, because Reality is the emergence of ever greater and deeper levels of uniqueness. This is why Herbert Spencer, in his book, First Principles, in chapter 15, talks about differentiation and integration.
Reality differentiates, it becomes unique, then uniqueness becomes the currency of new union, the currency of connection. If you take onto-generative beings seriously, you have to include uniqueness. If you include uniqueness, then you have a structure to evolve Chinese society from within.
On the one hand, you hold the value of the Field, which is the Field of the Tao, and you can hold that traditional Taoist value in a strong and beautiful sense. And yet, as you yourself say, these onto-generative beings evolve, the Qi evolves, and you can embrace uniqueness, not separateness. You need to turn to the West, Ma, and say, you got lost in separateness — and yet, embrace uniqueness.
And as you embrace uniqueness, the West has to embrace the Field.
Once we do that, this entire ridiculous, absurd Chinese-American juggernaut race, which at this moment has the potential to destroy the world, will be over.
Yuval, my friend, this is what we need to be doing. When you just declare a meaningless world, you are not helping the story. Let’s actually get involved in a real conversation.
I want to invite everyone to read a book called Unique Self, which talks about this. Yuval, I know you like scholarly publications, so, I am going to invite you and everyone else to read the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, Volume 6:1, where we wrote some five or six articles on some of these distinctions. They are really important. We’re going to be starting a course (I think, in November). We’re going to be talking about some of these distinctions out of the Unique Self Institute.
Okay, we have answered the question of Where.
I have tried to show two things:
Where are we right now in the plotline of the world story? Existential risk, meta-crisis. I agree completely with Yuval on that.
But the deeper question is how we respond to that meta-crisis. We can only begin that conversation by first establishing the deeper Where, the ontological question of Where am I? What’s the nature of the Universe story?
We are inviting Yuval to move beyond the blind echo of postmodern reductionism, which flies against the subtlest and deepest wisdom of all lineages — their depth structures, not their surface structures, not the bad stories, not the fictitious stories. They disagree with each other on major issues, but there is a shared realization of a Tao, of a Field of Value. We saw it both in the Solomon wisdom and in Taoism — in this notion of an evolving Qi, an evolving Field of Value, an evolving Eros.
This changes everything. Our swords are out, my friends. Our swords are out. We have to be ontological warriors, ontological activists for the sake of the whole.
You might think, this is so irrelevant. It’s not. It’s only when we can do the deep work to change the very source code of the story in a way that Ma and I can come together, Solomon wisdom and Taoism can come together, and Yuval can lend his appropriate critiques of the surface structures of the old religions — only then can we respond to the meta-crisis.
We can’t respond to the meta-crisis without a new story of value. It can’t be done.
We’ll talk next week about why that is true.
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Value is real.
Value can be distorted.
Clarification of value is the great purpose, passion, and joy of life.
Story is real.
Story can be distorted.
Clarification of story is the great purpose, passion, and joy of life.
All stories are stories of value. Only a new story of value will
protect the trillions of unborn lives and loves that will
otherwise be lost to existential risk. So, it really matters.
And just to be clear, the claim that there is no value, that value
is not real, that all stories of value are fictions, is probably the
most dogmatic possible story of value in the history of the
world.This is Part 2 of a Series Critique of Yuval Harari. Read Part 1 HERE
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