418—Channeling: The Danger and the Need in This Time of Meta-Crisis
418—Channeling: The Danger and the Need in This Time of Meta-Crisis
This episode traces the origins of channeling (= the first-person voice of the Divine) to the foundations of Solomon’s wisdom
Summary: This episode begins a new conversation: what is the relationship between articulating a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis and the world of channeling? The episode traces the origins of channeling (= the first-person voice of the Divine) to the foundations of Solomon’s wisdom (Moses’ prophecy) and paganism, and highlights the most important difference between them: prophesy is grounded in a body of Ethos, whereas paganism prioritizes aliveness and wholeness. After the destruction of the temple, the first-person voice disappears from the world; it goes underground and gives way to a more objective, third-person form of gnosis, in both exterior and interior sciences. But as the exterior science triumphs, and we feel the universe being disenchanted, the first-person voice begins to re-appear. We can only respond to the meta-crisis if we integrate all voices and all perspectives, but the first-person voice needs to be clarified; it has to be in a relationship to the field of Ethos — not untethered and unmoored, as it often is in the modern world of channeling.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 13, 2024] 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).
The New Story of Value and the world of channeling
What we want to talk about today is the notion of channel.
I am traveling, and I am in Sedona. I am here with my very, very close student, friend, interlocutor, partner, the Board Chair of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, Aubrey Marcus. We are here for a bunch of reasons, and one of them is an encounter that Aubrey convened between two worlds —
the Dharma — the wisdom of Solomon, the interior sciences, the New Story of Value — CosmoErotic Humanism — that we’re telling in response to the meta-crisis in this time between worlds and time between stories,
and a second world that Aubrey has been deeply committed to, which is the world of channels.
He invited a group of people down here to spend time with me. A group of fifteen or so people, who are all musicians and artists and entrepreneurs, together with myself, and with Paul Selig. Paul is a beautiful man and a well-known channel. He has been doing it for several decades. Paul was a university professor for 25 years and taught playwriting at New York University, and ran the playwriting department at a progressive college called Goddard College in Vermont (not far from the Center for World Philosophy and Religion). Paul was deep in the academic world. For many years, he did channeling sessions in his living room because he didn’t want to go public with it. He didn’t want to ruin his academic reputation. But at a certain point, he began publicly moving in this realm. And as his friend and teacher, he asked me, So what do you think about this? What’s the relationship between this New Story of Value, of these First Principles and First Values, which you’re saying are so central in response to the meta-crisis, and the world of channeling? What do those two things have to do with each other?
I am insanely excited to do this conversation today. It’s an unusual topic, and it’s one where we don’t generally spend time on. More than one person in our circle wrote to me and said, God, why would we talk about channeling? Won’t that ruin our credibility to talk about the important things that we’re talking about in this moment of meta-crisis —
articulating a New Universe Story,
and a New Story of Value, bringing value back into the mainstream conversation — value that’s beneath values, evolving value theory,
and articulating a new notion of what human identity is?
These essential inescapable frameworks, which are the frameworks from which culture needs to emerge in order to evolve the source code of culture and consciousness in response to the meta-crisis— why would you undermine that and talk about channels?
I want to really answer that question today in a a deep way — why this matters, and why this conversation is crucial, and why all voices need to be at the table.
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The moment of breakdown
I just want to do one more minute of check-in.
It’s just a hard moment in the world on multiple fronts. It’s a hard moment in Ukraine and Russia. It’s a hard moment in Sudan. It’s a hard moment in Chad. It’s a hard moment in Congo. And a hard moment in Israel, which I know quite a lot about, and am very close to in a particular way. I am just deeply aware of that. There are casualties all the time. There are people being killed all the time. There is a war which was initiated on October 7th with the horrible massacre at the music festival, the Nova Music Festival and the brutalities that happened.
We have this very, very tragic face of fundamentalism, which is this culture of death, medieval in its context. We haven’t seen that kind of culture of death, — so rampant and so overt. I have promised a larger conversation about what is going on in the Middle East and what’s happening there — and I will deliver, but that’s not my conversation now. For now, just a narrow bit. It is very rare that you can have the level of brutality and massacre that happened on October 7th — and have it embraced. Generally, people would deny it. People would say, that never happened, or they would say that was aberrant; that was some gross violation; we are not in favor of this kind of thing; that’s not what’s happened.
But there has been a radical embrace of this unimaginable level of butchery — intentional, slow, sadistic butchery — performed by Hamas on women as they killed them. That has been embraced as a legitimate form of discourse. That’s a horror. And things have unfolded from that. And as Israel goes, so — in many ways — goes the world. Israel is deeply in my mind — and the need to really understand what’s happening there in a deep way. To understand the suffering of everyone. No one’s blood, as I always say, is redder than anyone else’s blood. No tears, no agony is more agonizing than anyone else’s agony.
Clearly, we need to hold the agony of every mother and every child and every man and every woman. And we need to begin to see how to engage that, and how to tell that story. And that’s a standing promise I have. I’m waiting for the right time and for the right moment to address that, because I don’t want to do it casually. I want to really think through what’s the best way I can be of service to you, to present this in a way that we can, in a relatively short time, get a very deep, and new, and original, and profound understanding of what’s happening.
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In this time between worlds and time between stories, we
need all voices at the table to respond to the meta-crisis. That
means the first person of Spirit, the second person of Spirit,
and the third person of Spirit.
We have excluded the first person voices from the meta-crisis
conversations. Those voices need to be invited, included, and
embraced with discernment and distinction.
We must reclaim the enchanted universe in order to respond
to the meta-crisis. The enchantments, all the sages, scientists,
and seers, politicians and poets, entrepreneurs, and ecstatics.
All voices from all tables demand clarification and depth, but
we cannot afford to exclude any voices nor do we want to —
for indeed, the exclusion of voices is itself one of the root
causes of the meta-crisis.We desperately need new coherence
At this moment of meta-crisis, what we are doing in One Mountain, Many Paths and in the Center for World Philosophy and Religion is:
telling a New Story of Value,
articulating a new vision of value theory,
a new response to essential questions, the simple First Principles and First Values, which, if we iterate them, can create a coherently intimate world (borrowing from Alan Turing who, in his classical essay on Morphogenesis, talks about simple first rules that generate coherent complexity in the exterior world).
At this moment of breakdown, we desperately need new coherence. We create new coherence at a moment of crisis by generating a new vision rooted in a New Story of Value.
The breakdown of coherence is rooted in the breakdown of First Principles and First Values embedded in the story of value. When we lose relationship to First Principles and First Values embedded in a story of value, we begin to generate Reality without those First Principles — and Reality collapses. It cannot but collapse because the coherence of Reality — of what we call the Intimate Universe — is based on living from, and generating Reality from, a level of consciousness that is animated by First Principles and First Values embedded in a story of value.
To the precise extent that we had coherent stories in the past, we created coherence. To the precise extent in the past that our stories were flawed —
that there were traumatized fictions that entered stories and became part of them,
that First Principles and First Values were ignored or distorted
— we created distortion and suffering in the past. But now, we are at this unique moment when everything is at stake. That’s what we mean by a time between worlds and a time between stories: everything is at stake.
At this moment, if we don’t get the plotlines of the story right —
if we don’t go back to the story,
rewrite the story,
integrate the deepest validated knowings, truths, plotlines of value from the traditional period, from the modern period and from the post-modern period, and weave them into the great story of Reality,
— if we don’t weave them together, if we leave out any dimension of value, if we leave anything off the table, it’s not going to work. It’s going to fall apart, because you need precisely all of the First Principles and First Values in relationship to each other, moving together, moving down the field as a team, a cacophony of First Principles and First Values.
There is never one:
If we declare that autonomy & freedom is our principle, it doesn’t work.
If we declare that communion is our principle, it doesn’t work.
Communion becomes shadowy; it becomes totalitarianism. Autonomy becomes shadowy; it becomes a degraded society with no value at the Center, rooted in the personal win-lose metrics Western success story. Shadows of communion will become, for example, communist totalitarianism. Shadows of autonomy will become a liberal Western democracy with its own decadences. Both of them have their own joy. They are not equal in any sense. There is no moral equivalence between those two. That’s important to say. Having said that, what we need to do is bring, for example, autonomy and communion together. We need the First Principles and First Values to operate together in this larger field.
That’s what we do every week in this seat of revolution, meaning:
We are rebelling against the mediocrities.
We are rebelling against a world that’s turning away from the need to turn directly into the meta-crisis.
We are rebelling against the doomers, who say it’s all over, we’re already in doomsday mode. Joanna Macy is a good example. My friend Michael Dowd was a good example. There’s quite a few thinkers like that.
But we are also rebelling against the deniers, whether they formally deny the meta-crisis or pretend to acknowledge it, but effectively deny it in their actions. I think Sam Altman from OpenAI is a good example of that. He mouths some respect for the meta-crisis, but acts directly against that respect.
We are saying, no, no, no, the meta-crisis is real, the potential threat of the death of humanity or the death of our humanity is absolutely real, and we can respond.
How do we respond? We iterate new First Principles and First Values — not by declaring them, not by making them up, but by plunging into the depth of gnosis — from all the fields of gnosis in the world — and weaving them together in this new set of First Principles and First Values embedded in a story of value.
Now, I know there’s a whole bunch of you thinking, why is he repeating all that? We’ve been here, a lot of us have been here. First off, I am repeating it for the new people, but I am also repeating it for me, to locate myself. We have to locate ourselves every week. That’s what we do. It’s a practice. Sometimes when we study, we’re not studying for information, but to be in-formed. We form ourselves again. I meditate every day. I pray every day. I chant every day. Why? And I relocate myself in Reality every day, in order to know what context I’m living and moving from.
With that in mind, here we go.
The Torah is a channeled document
It’s absolutely true that in general, people don’t see any relationship between the world of channels and the world of articulating a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. And in fact, generally, there is not. All too often, the world of channeling, as it appears today, is involved in servicing an upper-class, dispensable-income population that has some change to spare and wants to be spiritually moved by, or entertained by, or engaged by the worlds beyond. Clearly, there is a dimension of channeling, which has become marketed and commodified, which we have no time for and I’m not interested in engaging.
The critique is obvious, but that’s not just true about the world of channeling. That’s true about the world of wisdom. It’s true about the world of Dharma as well. There are commodified versions of both Dharma and channeling that deserve severe critique. I’m not addressing those. That’s a given.
But there is also a very rich contemporary tradition of channeling, beginning with Seth, and with Jane Roberts, and Michael — there is an entire world in the last forty, fifty, sixty years of channeled entities. A Course in Miracles is a channeled book that has actually spoken, at least in part, important truths, that delivered important gifts to certain audiences in a particular way, in a particular form, which was important, and transformative, and actually added gnosis. It actually added goodness, truth, and beauty to the world.
And yet those two worlds seem to be two different worlds.
So, let’s start with the beginning — the Torah itself.
In the Solomon lineage, the book called the Torah, according to the classical lineage, is a channeled document. It was channeled by Moses. The way the lineage describes the document’s emergence, in a number of third-century texts, is that the document was channeled by Moses, and Moses literally took it down as dictation. He is hearing a clarified divine voice, and writes dictation. That’s a classical description of a channel.
Now, Moses’ experience — and this is unique and important — wasn’t a singular lone experience of Moses, there was a public experience, in the description of the lineage, of a theophany, that is to say, of a revelation. There was a communal experience of a profound, unmistakable, self-evidently valid explosion of Spirit, of Infinity disclosing itself to finitude. There was an experience that we have just seen and tasted —
we’ve seen the Voices,
we’ve heard the lightning,
as the description goes (a kind of synesthesia). All of our senses are altered, our cells are altered, and that group of people, those millions of people who were there at this moment of theophany, had an experience which was akin to an ultimate near-death experience — an experience that utterly changes your life, and nothing that ever happens to you is even vaguely approximating the depth of Reality and goodness of that experience. Moses’ channeling happens in the context of that experience.
That’s one experience in history, but for our purposes, I just want to note that that originating document of the Solomon lineage is a classically channeled document.
A prophet is a channel
Now, let’s go deeper.
That experience that Moses has is called prophecy.
Prophecy begins before Moses. There is, in the lineage, a history of prophecy; one of the key prophets is Noah’s son, Shem, who is ten generations after Adam.
By the way, I am not interested here in adjudicating the question of the historicity of these particular scriptures. That’s not even important. Within the classical Solomon lineage itself, there are different schools —
one which understands this as a historical narrative,
and others who understand it as an archetypal narrative, as a movement of collective sacred archetypes;
and there are those who understand it as a mythic narrative — but not mythic in the sense of not being true; it’s not less than history, it’s more than history;
And there are others who understand it as all of it: it’s mythic, and it’s archetypal, and it’s historical.
I am going to bracket that issue. That’s simply not our issue here.
I am going to speak about this in general terms, and you can interpret it as mythic, archetypal, or historical — but all of those are forms of valid truth. They are all speaking to something which is fundamentally true. In the lineage, Noah’s son Shem is a prophet. Some of you may be familiar with one of the places where Noah’s son, Shem appears in history. He appears in a key pivotal meeting with Abraham, who is one of the first patriarchs. He is the formal first patriarch of the Solomon lineage.
There are four powerful women and three powerful men who are filled with potency, and vitality, and aliveness. They are called the mothers and the fathers, the patriarchs and the matriarchs. The first is Abraham, and Abraham has a pivotal meeting with Melchizedek. Melchizedek (who is Shem) is both a king and a prophet (melchi means king, melech, king). He’s also a prophet, and he’s a priest. Melchizedek is a very important figure in that he brings together
the kingship, kingdom, which is politics, engagement in the world
and priest, which is ritual practice and prophecy — this direct channeling.
I just want to say it now clearly, the prophet is a channel. I use the history of the Solomon lineage as an example. I could talk about this from the perspective of Kashmir Shaivism, and from the perspective of early Buddhism, or from the perspective of early Islam, or from the perspective of early and later Christianity, or from the perspective of some of the aboriginal traditions. I am picking the Solomon lineage so you can get how this works, because it’s root lineage for us.
The prophet is a channel. That’s clear. The prophet is a navi in Hebrew. Yes, those are also the people that are in James Cameron’s movie Avatar. The Na’vi are the native people on Pandora. And it’s not by accident that Cameron chose that word, because navi means those who speak the Word of God. The prophet is a channel for the Word of God. It’s a very, very dramatic idea.
Abraham is both a prophet and a warrior prince. Those two go together. Abraham is accessing directly the Divine Word in communication. There is a conversation between Abraham and the Divine. That’s one dimension of prophecy, a conversation. Number two, there is a message. And number three, there is a channel. Abraham actually writes down the Divine Word.
The words that Moses spoke
As we said earlier, the Torah itself is understood to be a channel, and I want to make this even more clear to you.
The classical Torah of the Solomon lineage grounds at least the three great faiths — Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. There are many sources that talk about the relationship between the Torah and the East, specifically mediated through Solomon, but that’s not for now. This original founding document called Torah has five books, called the five books of Moses. The fifth book is Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy, a Latin term, is, in Hebrew, devarim. Devarim is from the word davar, which means ‘word.’ Devarim are the words which Moses spoke. Moses speaks the word. The word is an important word. It’s a very important word. The word is monad. The word is the logos. And the word davar also means ‘thing.’ So, thing and word are the same; meaning, there is not a world only of matter (thing); the thing is the word. The davar is the davar. For example, the Ten Commandments are, in Hebrew, the Aseret Ha’dvarim ‘the ten words.’ The ten words are the animated words. These are the words that Moses spoke.
Now, here’s the problem. We called these books the five books of Moses, but these are also understood to be Davar Adonai, the Word of God. So, one second, this is confusing!
If this is the Word of God, if the entire point of the Solomon lineage is that we have this Torah, the sacred document of instructions for living, of light, of illumination, which is the Word of God, then why do we call them the five books of Moses? Why don’t we call them the five books of God? But more specifically and more dramatically — this is where I want to focus — the fifth book actually begins with ‘these are the words that Moses spoke’, not ‘that God spoke.’ These are the words that Moses spoke. Why is this God’s book? This is Moses’s book. Moses is good.
The lineage engages this very deeply. The Zohar, The Book of Radiance (13th century) explains (I am going to use the Aramaic):
Shekhintei Dabrei MePumei DeMoshe ‘The Shekhinah (She, ErosValue, the Goddess, the Word) speaks to the lips of Moses.’
This means Moses is a channel: The Shekhinah, the Divine Voice speaks through Moses.
You can find expressions of this in all of the great traditions, but it’s most subtle, most nuanced, and most humanistically articulated in the Solomon lineage. It’s far more problematic in certain expressions of Christianity, Islam, Vajrayana Buddhism, et cetera. There is a deep humanist realization in the Solomon lineage, which is one of the reasons why it’s so important. And it is also a potential frame, or one of the important sources, that resource a world religion as a context for our diversity.
So, Shekhintei Dabrei MePumei DeMoshe ‘the Shekhinah speaks through the lips of Moses.’
What does that mean?
One approach of both the Solomon lineage and all the lineages is: Moses got completely out of the way. He got completely out of the way. There was no Moses. Moses’ greatness is his capacity for what’s called bittul ‘self-nullification.’ There is no Moses; Moses is so empty that the Voice can speak through Moses. The image that’s always used is a kind of wind instrument, which is purely empty — and so the music, the voice, the sound vibrations move through the empty instrument.
However, deep within the Solomon lineage there is an articulation that explains it differently. It apparently comes from Solomon himself; it is transmitted generation to generation, and goes ultimately to a figure named Lainer (living in the mid-19th century), who is the receiver of almost 3,000 years of lineage tradition. What he says, based on what he received, based on the deep lineage— and he is using words not as magic, but just as a way of explaining: spell Moses backwards. Moses is Moshe. If you spell Moses backwards, Moshe is Hashem, the Name. So, Moses is the Name.
What does it mean, the Name? The Name means — and it’s very profound and very beautiful —
that Moses is so present,
there is so much Moses-ness,
Moses is so full,
the fullness of Moses is so obviously apparent —
that Moses’ radical subjectivity, his radical unique subjectivity melts into — merges with, discloses as — the Divine. Moses becomes ontically identified with the Divine; there is an ontic identity of wills and voices between Moses and the Divine (ontic meaning for reals, ontological).
In this vision, the channel not only becomes empty. No, the channel empties, in stage one, of anything that’s superficial, because the opposite of the superficial is the holy. The opposite of the sacred is superficiality. Depth is sacred. The shallow is the superficial. Moses empties himself in stage one of anything that’s not of his name — and then, he becomes the ultimate artist of self-creation, and he writes his letter, his unique letter in the cosmic scroll, and that unique letter is Moshe, Moses, Hashem the name. Moses’ uniqueness is therefore not merely his ability to get out of his own way, to bracket himself; that is just the first stage, but then, in the second stage, he is utterly filled with his irreducible quality of unique individuation of the Divine field.
Moses is the expression of Metatron, and Metatron is Enoch who becomes God in chapter five of the Book of Genesis. Metatron is the man/woman God. It’s the human become God. It is apotheosis. It’s the possibility for the human being to clarify the Voice so precisely that I participate in the Divine Field. I become a God Voice.
That’s prophecy. That’s deep. And that’s the origination of the lineage.
Prophesy and Ethos
All through the early biblical period — the period of the canon, the period of the prophets — we have this vision of the prophet at the very center. And the temple that is enacted in Jerusalem (as in temple consciousness and temple energy), that temple is enacted by the prophets.
But the prophets — and now it gets critical — the prophets also hold within them, they are in relationship to a body of material which originates with the Infinite, mediated through the fullness of the prophet in their anthro-ontological experience (anthro means human being, ontological, the capacity of human being to perceive the mystery, to channel the mystery through our fullness — through a combination of our emptiness and fullness).
The prophet articulates sacred texts, and these sacred texts are texts of Ethos and texts of Eros, Eros and Ethos. And what is Eros? Eros is the experience of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That’s the movement of Eros.
And Eros, implicitly, is Ethos, because —
the desire for contact demands ethos,
and ever greater wholeness demands right relationship between the parts — a deep fairness, a justice, a harmony, a possibility of profound intimate communion in which everything is in right relationship to everything else, and no voices are split off, and no parts of self are split off, and no nations are split off, and no people are split off, and no sexual orientations are split off and no one is demonized.
We move from this place of the demonized to the daemonized. We are all called by a shared meaning.
The prophet channel is always in relationship to a sacred body of text, which is a text of ethics. It is a prophetic text of —
perfecting the world,
perfecting the world as ethos,
freeing the slaves,
giving voice to the oppressed,
liberating the downtrodden,
creating wholeness,
meeting and transforming shadow.
The channel never lives independently of a normative text of ethics with a set of ethical demands. In Buddhism, they would call that the Eightfold Path.
In Buddhism, the first person happens in the meditative space — not in the speech of the channel, but in the silence of the Master, meditating. But it’s still a first person voice. Meditation itself — the realization, the kenshō, or the satori of meditation — is a first person experience, and it requires a relationship to a body of ethos. That’s called, in Buddhism, the Eightfold Path.
In the Solomon lineage, it begins with the silence, but then, out of the silence emerges the word. And the word is the niv, it’s the word spoken by the lip of the prophet. The prophet is the one who articulates the word. It’s the word that emerges from the silence. The prophet is a channel articulating the word —
the word that emerges from the silence,
the word that is engaging the marketplace,
that’s engaging the palace and the society,
that seeks the transformation of Reality,
that seeks to transform Earth into the abode of heaven,
that seeks to create Jerusalem on a shining hill,
that seeks to create not, Civitas Dei (Augustine, The City of God), dissociated and alienated from the enfleshed world, but a world in which the enfleshed is the logos, the enfleshed is the Voice of the Divine, in which we can actually experience mib’sari e’che’zeh eloha ‘from the flesh, I vision the Divine.’
This experience of the channel is always in direct relationship with a profound body of ethos.
At the center of the temple is the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant resides in the sanctum sanctorum, in the Holy of Holies, at the very center of the temple. Above the Ark of the Covenant are two cherubs (not of the Hallmark variety), two innocent angels (they are called babyface to express their dimension of innocence).
These beings of innocence are locked in a passionate embrace. And then, the priest enters the temple, — first modeled by Moses, who is the prophet — and the priest accesses, each in different ways, the Divine Word, which speaks from between the cherubs.
Thus, the temple itself is a place of revelation. It’s a place of miracle. Miracle, in Latin, is from the root mirari ‘behold with rapt attention.’ Behold with rapt attention, and you will see the explosion of Infinity suffused all through finitude.
The temple is a place
where natural order can be suspended,
where Divine Voices play from between sexually inter-twisted cherubs,
where, if we listen carefully, we hear the voice of the Prophet; we hear the voice of the miracle.
The destruction of the temple is about a movement to a new era. The temple co-exists with paganism, and paganism is, in its own way, the wild voice of the miracle — of the explosion of infinity into finitude. It is the voice of channels, but paganism, all too often, allowed the ecstasy of the Voice to be dissociated from the field of ethos. That was the great conflict between the pagans and the prophets.
We first have to be good, and our wholeness has to come from our goodness. But the pagan often said, let’s at least experience ourselves in our full aliveness. That’s where we feel whole, and let the good be subservient to that ecstatic experience of aliveness, which, for us, is wholeness.
And the prophet said, no. The prophet said, it’s about the widow. It’s about the orphan. It’s about the details of your paying attention to shadow, and transforming that shadow. It’s about being able to clarify your internal voice. It’s about the heroics of self-edification, self-refinement, the gorgeousness of ethos, the mother who takes care of her baby and suckles her baby. This is the image of the prophet.
Disappearance and re-emergence of the first-person voice
At some point, the temple is destroyed.
Despite the pagan-prophet great debate, both paganism and prophecy embrace the first person voice. When the temple is destroyed, that first person voice is not only challenged, it deliberately goes underground, and something new emerges. This something new is going to take the center stage of history for the next couple thousand years. One name for this new is Dharma. The axial religions emerge, and take the center stage, and they gradually focus on sacred texts, which are articulating the intrinsic rightness of Reality.
The movement away from the first person ways begins to happen in the pre-Socratics; they lived a few hundred years before the temple’s destruction, but their full influence is felt afterwards, in the first millennium of the Common Era (the temple by was destroyed 70 years after what’s given as the time of Christ’s crucifixion, in the year 70 of Common Era, and the pre-Socratics are several hundred years before the Common Era).
Both the pre-Socratics and the axial religions, in their unfolding, move away from the first person voice and begin to articulate a Field of Value. They begin to articulate First Principles, First Values and Ethos. I would call those the interior sciences. When I refer to the interior sciences, I am referring to much more than that, but not less than that. Those are the classical interior sciences.
At the same time, the exterior sciences begin to emerge. The exterior sciences take a momentous leap forward in the Renaissance, but science doesn’t begin with the Renaissance. The Aristotelian move of classification is several hundred years before the Common Era, after the pre-Socratics. Aristotle, Plato — there is this desire to classify, to organize, to probe, to explore, to understand.
In the Renaissance, it will explode into modern science, because in the Renaissance, there is this movement from classification to measurement. Galileo, Kepler, they begin to measure, and measurement gives us access to these other vast possibilities that generate all of the dignities of modernity in their best forms. (Let’s bracket now their shadow forms that we’ve talked about.) The movement of interior sciences also explodes in the Renaissance — with the emergence of universal human rights and justice and the emergence of the feminine, these two great emergences.
Then what happens?
Science marches forward.
Classical philosophy, universal human rights take center stage, at least in a large part of the world — far from all of it, but a large part of the world. And classical science, with its new power of measurement, thrusts forward. The power of measurement is so unimaginably potent, it produces immediate results. Those results are commodifiable, meaning they generate resource, money, and power immediately — and a very intimate relationship gets established between industry, technology, power, and science.
Science focuses on the measurable and that which can be priced — and the priceless and the immeasurable begins to get lost; the interior sciences grind to a halt.
After the establishment of universal human rights, the process stops. We forget to ground these universal human rights in a Field of Value. We just establish and declare them. We hold these truths to be self-evident, the founding documents of the United States. We don’t ground them in a Field of Value, we bypass the issue of value. As I’ve said many times, we took a loan of social capital just to assume value in modernity, but we never articulated a source and ground of value.
And so, the exterior sciences march forward; the interior sciences grind to a halt somewhere after the Renaissance and the Western Enlightenment a couple hundred years later, with the birth of democracy. We feel the world becoming disenchanted. The measured world, the industrial world marches forward, and every moment of time is commodified and measured. We lose access to value. We lose access to quality, to qualia. We lose access to the depths of spirit and first-person knowing. We lose access to Eros itself, and ethos becomes a given, but without ground in Eros.
And then, something new happens. As we feel the world becoming disqualified (to use Lewis Mumford’s word), new voices begin to emerge — channels again, prophets again. In Solomon lineage, it’s called Hasidism; the entire Hasidic tradition begins with the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, this explosion of new prophecy. Romania is the place from which the Baal Shem Tov emerged. Romania is this place of wild mystics and prophets.
Europe is filled with, and is afraid of, these new voices. The frenzy of the witch burnings was the fear of this direct access, this reemergence. Of course, the witch burning begins three-four hundred years earlier, but it’s about this same movement, this underground movement that hadn’t yet broken forward. It is this direct access — this voice is speaking through me. These voices were understood as being in opposition to ethos, and they challenged the power of the establishment, so they were crushed brutally, but they reemerge again. They re-emerge again in the 16th, 17th and 18th century. And again, the emergence of Hasidism in the Solomon lineage is a reemergence of the channel, of the prophet.
You can begin to trace the beginning of the reemergence of these voices, these channel voices all over the world. They are important voices, but they need to be clarified.
They need to be in relationship to a body of ethos.
They need to be in relationship to First Principles and First Values.
If we have channel voices that are unmoored and untethered, then we have an entire field of channels that could become echoes of the regressive strains of paganism the prophecy was standing against. We need to clarify the voice of prophecy. We need to clarify the possibility of the channel. We need to re-embrace and re-enchant Reality — and that means we need to bring the first person voice back into the conversation.
We’re going to pick up this exact conversation next week. This is part one of two. This is just to begin to set the stage.
What a crazy honor to be together! What a crazy pleasure! What a crazy joy!
It’s a new conversation. We’ve just begun it. Let’s come together next week, and let’s deepen. We’re going to go all the way in. We need first person voices in engaging the meta-crisis. And we need first person voices — the channel, the prophet, the artist, the muse — in engaging the fullness of our lives, and it’s only from the fullness of our lives that we will engage the meta-crisis.
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