419—On Prophets, Scientists, Channels and Unique Self: Overcoming the Global Intimacy Disorder
A deeper mode of channeling is Unique Self: as an irreducibly unique perspective of the Divine
This episode is Part 2 of a series, read Part 1 here.
Summary: This week, we continue the conversation about channeling as the first-person voice of Spirit, because we need all voices, all perspectives (first person, second person, third person) — both to overcome the global intimacy disorder and to live fully, and ethically, and filled with Eros. The loss of intimacy between the first person, second person and third person modes of gnosis is one of the expressions of the global intimacy disorder, and thus the root cause of the meta-crisis. Channeling guides is just one type of channeling. A deeper mode of channeling is Unique Self: as an irreducibly unique perspective of the Divine, each Unique Self is a direct channel of the Divine. A type one channel receives the voice of the guides. A type two channel incarnates the Divine via the realization of an irreducibly distinct voice of Unique Self. A type three channel synergizes the guides and Unique-Self realization into a new voice. The paradox of all human channels is being the unique voice of the Divine (Unique Self) and being broken at the same time. We are all imperfect vessels for the light. We are all holy and broken Hallelujahs.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 27, 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).
A life well lived
We are in One Mountain, Many Paths. This is week 419.
I had the privilege of starting One Mountain with my very, very dear friend Barbara Marx Hubbard.
We started One Mountain in order to respond to the meta-crisis, on the one hand.
On the other hand, we started One Mountain in order to enact an Evolutionary Church — an evolutionary mosque, an evolutionary synagogue, an evolutionary Buddhist dojo, an evolutionary secular humanist center, an evolutionary scientific vision.
What is the best enactment of being a human being in this lifetime?
What does it mean, in this lifetime, to be a human being, and to be able to come to the moment of my death without fear — because I’ve actually lived my life well, and this lifetime becomes the ground for the next lifetime, the launching pad for the next lifetime? A life well lived sets the course for a deep transformation that takes place within the unique quality of my being — the unique quality of Infinity that is garbed in my unique finitude.
What does it mean to live fully, and ethically, and filled with Eros, and alive, and incarnating goodness and truth and beauty?
Even if there had been no meta-crisis, we would want to evolve religion, and evolve Spirit, and evolve science. To take them out of their partial insights and their partial intuitions — parts that, in most systems, claim to be wholes and wind up distorting the field. How do we take the true but partial insights and weave them together into a larger whole, which itself is the evolution of consciousness? And the evolution of culture and consciousness is the evolution of love.
That would have been urgent by itself, but this urgency is exponentially amplified by the meta-crisis.
All civilizations have failed, and we’ve solved none of the core risks that caused them to fail. I often refer to Joseph Tainter’s book on the rise and fall of civilizations, which (among other works) discusses this in some depth. We now have a global civilization, none of the old problems solved, with exponential power and the capacity to literally destroy the entire thing — not through a nuclear bomb that requires state capacities, but through rogue actors. Rogue actors are much more likely to destroy everything because we don’t have a shared story. We are not intimate with each other. We are not family to each other. We are not an evolutionary family.
There is a global intimacy disorder. We are not in a shared story of value.
We have identified the root cause of this meta-crisis as the failure to overcome the global intimacy disorder, which, at its core, is based on the failure to articulate the vision that value is real. We need to take the true but partial insights of different systems and weave them together in a larger whole, which would be a valid story, a story of value rooted not in contrivances and fictions, but in First Principles and First Values. Evolving First Principles and First Values, which become a shared grammar of value —
that creates intimacy between us;
that allows us to live fully, and be radically alive;
to liberate ourselves from the brokenness, or turn the brokenness into part of the wholeness;
and at the same time, to respond to the meta-crisis.
This week, we go into a very, very unique dimension of what we need in order to overcome the global intimacy disorder, and to enact this New Story of Value that will allow for —
global intimacy,
and therefore global resonance,
and therefore global coherence,
and therefore global coordination in response to global existential challenges.
Are we ready to play a larger game? Are we ready to participate in the evolution of love?
This is as though we’re doing this for the first time. It’s always for the first time. Madonna got some things wrong. She got some things right — like a virgin. We re-virginate. We step in again.
We are going to make love in a new way.
We are going to enact in a new way.
We are going to articulate in a new way.
We are going to be serious in a new way.
On the one hand, it’s radically new. On the other hand, we are bringing with us everything from all the different places we’ve been engaged in in this revolution, in this response to the meta-crisis, but we want to add something new that’s never been here before. Something radically new.
We want to be both virgins and sages.
The nature of being a sage — and we need to be a sage together — is: We get excited again. It’s for the very first time. Even as we deepen, we say things that are radically new, but they build on — they take with them, they draw from — everything that came before.
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The play is in the space between
We are talking about channeling.
I got a bunch of emails from different people in our circle, fantastic people, saying, “Why are you talking about channeling? This is the serious place — a New Story of Value, revolution in world philosophy. Why are you talking about channeling?”
That’s what we began to address last week. One of the things we began to address was why channeling — the first person voice of channeling — like all the other voices, needs to be part of the story.
To take channeling out of the story would itself be an expression of the global intimacy disorder.
In our book, First Principles and First Values, we talk about the global intimacy disorder, and we give thirteen expressions of the global intimacy disorder. One of them is the lack of intimacy between different modes of knowing. It’s incredibly important. In other words, one mode of knowing tries to colonize the world of gnosis, and everything else is left out.
There is the third person knowing, for example, Dharma, the laws of the universe, a vision of First Principles and First Values backed by the universe, this new vision that we’re calling the New Story of Value, CosmoErotic Humanism. That is a third person story. By Dharma, we mean something about the true nature of Reality that we can know — which, by the way, doesn’t remove uncertainty. It doesn’t remove mystery. Part of the nature of Reality is mystery and uncertainty, so it’s not a fundamentalist claim of certainty that is alienated from uncertainty. Mystery and revelation, certainty and uncertainty dance together, and that, by itself, is one of the core features of this New Story of Value.
The second person is the space between us. We are in conversation. It's a community. It’s communion. It’s the yearning, the allurement towards the larger whole, and being part of the larger whole, but it’s specifically the relationship between parts — the space in between.
Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory talks about Reality as four quadrants (and the four quadrants are borrowed and expanded from Habermas’s three lifeworlds, I, We, It):
I It
We Its
It is third person (it doesn’t mean it’s dead; it simply means that we’re looking at it from the third person perspective). The second person is We. It’s the space in between. I is the first person of the individual, or the interior space of the individual. Then you have the interior space of culture, which is We. On the right side, you’ve got the exterior of the individual — the objective dimension, not the interior (It). And then, you have the exterior of the community (Its).
The exterior of the individual might be the physicality of your individual body (did you take your vitamins?) and the exterior of the community is, for example, the form of government. What form of government do we have? What form of healthcare do we have? Those are exterior structures.
Whether you are talking about Habermas’s three lifeworlds (I, We, It), or Integral’s expansion of it (I, We, Its), the key is not each one individually, the key is the space between them. It’s how they play with each other. That’s the point.
The play is in the space between. The space between is a second person. It’s how two parts relate to each other. It’s the nexus point. The nexus point is where the play happens.
In the classical lineage tradition of Solomon’s temple, the voice of God appears above the Ark of the Covenant (which became famous through Harrison Ford movies). Above the Ark of the Covenant, there are two cherubs, romantically entwined, facing each other, making love— and from that space in between, the voice emerges. What emerges from the in-between, that’s second person. The first person is what each of the cherubs feels moving through them as they’re making love.
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We need all three voices — first person, second person, third person
An example of the first person is the channel, which we talked about last week: Moses takes dictation; he is channeling the Divine. As we said last week, it’s not that Moses is out of the way, it’s that Moses is so fully present that he is channeling the Divine.
There is also a second kind of channel, where I do get somewhat out of the way. And a voice of entities (guides) moves through me, but those entities are never separate from me. It’s not that there is this other entity that’s completely separate. There are voices that access and move through me, but those voices in some sense are also not just using me as a vessel. I am actually, in some way or another, part of the transmission.
But in an ultimate transmission, there is a complete merger between my essence and the voice of the guides, or the voice of the first person channeling, as when Moses channels the Torah. The voice of channeling is an important voice. The voice of channeling is the first person experience.
In this new story of CosmoErotic Humanism — this New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis — we are going to have to have first, second, and third person. The telling of the story is third person, but what often happens is this: the third person people — the science people, the religion people — disqualify, or dissociate from, the second person and the first person. “We are doing third person, we don’t really do second person.”
I’ll give you another example of the second person, the space in between. In classical culture, the second person becomes romance. It’s just you and me. It’s you and me, baby. It’s beautiful, but it also can hijack culture: it is all about an individual, two separate selves; there is no Dharma. There is just what’s happening between us right now. There is no tradition. There is no science. There is no interior sciences. Just second person.
The church might be second person. The church community, or the synagogue community, or the mosque community, or the Buddhist community: it’s the community that matters. It’s the second person. The shadow of the community is: it obliterates first person and third person. The church is not looking at science in any real way, and it dismisses the first person as being ridiculous. (Unless it’s a fundamentalist church which talks in tongues, and even then the first person of talking in tongues is hijacked by the second person).
Fundamentalist communities, the pre-personal cults, and the cult of romance — they all prioritize second person, but don’t really do first person; the first person gets lost, and the third person gets lost: both science and the experience of trusting my own first person, independently of the community.
First person would be: I am sitting in the meditative hall, and I am having a first-person meditative experience. That’s my first person. It’s all about Thou Art That. It’s the experience that I am having moving through me. That’s one example of the primacy of first person.
Another example of the primacy of the first person is: trust your feelings. That’s basically one of the classical liberal notions; there is no Dharma, there is no third person. No Dharma, no church. Trust your feelings. That’s where therapy is often focused: let’s go into your feelings, let’s go into your first person, let’s go into your experience.
Is that good or bad?
Well, there is a lot of good to it. Listening to your feelings is a big deal. Getting access to your feelings is a big deal, for sure. Doing therapeutic work is certainly worthwhile and important. But just like second person and third person, there is a shadow. Your feelings might not be trustable. And maybe you are confused. Maybe the trauma is confusing your feelings. Maybe you need to let go, and bracket your feelings, and see the broader field. Maybe your feelings are blocking, obfuscating, dis-intermediating between you and a direct experience of Reality.
The first person could also be my own creativity, the experience of my own creativity. And it could be channeling: I am channeling, I have a channel coming through me. I am trusting that channel. I am listening to that channel.
Which one of these is right?
Are the first person people right?
Are the second person people right?
Or are the third person people right?
None of them, and all of them. In other words, whenever you pick first person, and say, “That’s the one,” or second person (“That’s the one!”), or third person (“That’s the one!”), you get lost. Each one of those is true, but deeply partial. A larger wholeness comes from the space between all of them, as all three of them arise in a Holy Trinity.
There is this Holy Trinity of arising, and we listen to all the voices, and all the voices play with each other, and all the voices dance together, and we bring these voices together.
That’s what we mean by overcoming the global intimacy disorder.
We need to access gnosis — knowledge, wisdom, direct realization — from a deep study of third person. I want to study nature with profound depth. I want to understand the chlorophyll molecule, and be blown away by the process of photosynthesis. I want to not just look at the beauty of a baby — I want to look at and understand mitosis and meiosis, which are just so stunningly beautiful that you faint in ecstasy. Whenever I study mitosis and meiosis — they are inordinately complex, and I come back to them, and they are dazzlingly beautiful — I cannot but faint in ecstasy. I can’t be but aroused into ecstasy and just faint in rapture.
At the same time, I don’t want to just study mitosis and meiosis, I want to hold the baby in my arms — second person (the baby emerges from mitosis and meiosis). And I want to be able to experience the inner child that lives in me — first person.
In other words, I can study about babies (third person), I can hold a baby (second person), or I can actually access my own inner child (first person). You always need all three. If you pick one and you alienate from the other two, that is an expression of the global intimacy disorder. In order to overcome the global intimacy disorder, you need to access all three voices — in order to be a full human being and in order to respond to the meta-crisis.
Of course we need channels!
Conversation with guides
The world of channeling has gotten, in some sense, self-absorbed. Often, it’s transmitting classical True Self teachings. It often takes itself out of this larger concern for the meta-crisis and evolutionary Dharma.
The people who are channeling are basically channeling disincarnate entities. A channel is generally not channeling God. Generally, a channel is channeling guides that are somewhere between what we would call the angelic realm and the human realm.
Whatever the angelic realm is — I am not going to go into now, but there clearly are beings that live in the world that are not only human. The reality of this world is one dimension of Reality. There is an enormous amount of empirical scientific information that tells us that we live in a multi-dimensional world. Let me be very clear about that: it is empirical scientific information. Whatever we call angels — they are beings of another dimension. Sometimes a guide can be an angel, but usually they are not. Usually, guides are beings of other worlds, or of other dimensions, that engage this dimension. That’s usually what a channel is.
Now, the fact that a being comes from another dimension doesn’t make it right. Paul Selig, who is a wonderful example of what a channel can be, in a refined and beautiful way, made a very correct remark that it would be silly to trust a disincarnate entity just because it’s a disincarnate entity. Why would you trust a voice? That’s really important to get.
A dear friend of mine, who invited me into this channel conversation, said to me, very, very sweetly and beautifully, “Wow, you’re going to come down, and you’re going to get to talk to the angels. You’re going to get to talk to the guides.”
And I said, only half facetiously, “Well, no, no, no, the angels are going to get to talk to me. The guides are going to get to talk to me.”
I didn’t mean that in an arrogant way. I was obviously being a little bit flip and funny, but you get the point. The point is that when we clarify our own first person as human beings, we become first person channels.
As we met and engaged, I shared some Dharma for about an hour, and then Paul accessed the guides, who loved the Dharma, and commented on it, and objected to certain parts of it. Then, I went inside, and accessed the channel, and I began channeling, and I responded to Paul, in a channeling mode of communication. The dimension of gnosis that I was channeling talked to the dimension of gnosis that Paul was channeling (the guides), and we impacted each other.
I was deeply moved, and delighted, and honored, and learned — in very real and deep ways — from the guides. And the guides, they were gorgeous. They had enormous authenticity and humility — and they reshaped, they reformulated, they were impacted, they clarified. In particular, we were talking about the nature of story, and we distinguished between levels of story — and they were also, in a beautiful way, impacted and they transformed, and I am sure they will give their guidance in a different way going forward. That’s how you know they are authentic, and real, and sacred: we impacted each other; we had a real conversation.
Let’s go deeper.
When I did that channeling in response to Paul’s beautiful guides, I was accessing two things.
One is, I was accessing what I called, for that moment, the Solomon guides. I dropped into a channeling mode — not by any design or intention. I had never done it in that particular way before, but it was what was most right in the moment. It was a moment to channel the lineage guides, and we did that. That was beautiful.
When you channel guides, and you are channeling high-level voices, that’s one dimension and mode of channeling. When it’s a channel that has integrity and depth, like Paul, it’s a wonderful gift. It is a gift that needs to be brought to the table, and it’s a gift that needs to be part of the conversation in response to the meta-crisis. I responded by channeling Solomon guides; that was beautiful and called for. Paul and I had this very beautiful conversation, in which we were all moved, and we were all transformed, we were all different afterwards.
But there’s actually an even deeper mode of channeling. And the deeper mode of channeling is precisely what I would call Unique Self. The deeper mode of channeling is Unique Self, and channeling Unique Self is channeling God directly.
When you are channeling your Unique Self, you are not channeling a guide, you are channeling God directly. It’s a direct channel of the Divine, because that is precisely what Unique Self means.
Unique Self is a direct channel of the Divine
Unique Self doesn’t mean your talent, it doesn’t mean your personality self, it doesn’t mean your separate self, it doesn’t mean your small self or your ego self.
And Unique Self is not True Self. It’s not my identity with the Field of the One, which is beyond all story, which is the infinity of the Divine that is in this moment — and I am part of the larger field, I am part of the seamless coat of the universe. That’s True Self. That’s some version of True Self.
Unique Self means:
I have done the work at separate self — the psychological work, the trauma work. I’ve done deep work at these levels of development. Franklin Jones would call it individuation and integration (terms Franklin borrowed from psychology). I’ve done good separate self work. I can’t skip that.
Then, I’ve had a realization of my indivisibility from the larger field. I’ve overcome what Albert Einstein called the optical delusion of consciousness.
In Rogue One: A Star War story, there was one figure who would say, I am one with the Force and the Force is one with me. That’s a little bit like the realization of True Self. Now, this guy was killed. You can get killed being your True Self, to be clear. True Self doesn’t save you from death in this world. It doesn’t make this dimension eternal, but you do have this dimension of eternity that moves through you, which makes you fearless.
True Self is: I am one with the Field; I’m part of the seamless code of the universe. True Self is the singular that has no plural. The total number of True Selves in the world is one. That’s the God field. That’s the Field of ErosValue. That’s the Field of Consciousness. That’s the field of inherent goodness, truth, and beauty. That’s the Field of Infinity.
That field is not the quantum foam, and it’s not the zero point field exactly. That’s often misstated. Obviously, the It-world doesn’t fully express the biological world or the cultural world, but it has the potentiality to birth those worlds. But the It-world also emerges from an involutionary process. It is a contraction into a point, into an It of Infinity. Infinity is disclosing itself in a grain of sand.
Infinity is disclosing itself in the laws of physics, and the laws of physics have the infinite potential to birth the world of life and the world of mind.
In True Self, I am one with the Divine field, and then I individuate as — God having a Medea experience; God having a Dorothea experience; God having a Zohar experience; God having a Talya experience; God having a Krista experience; God having a Joni experience; God having a Timothy Paul experience; God having a Terry experience.
In other words, Unique Self is God having your experience.
That’s channeling. That’s what channeling means.
Channeling means the irreducibly unique voice of Terry-ness, when it is clarified — not because Terry disappears, but because Terry becomes the most Terry ever (like Moses becomes the channel because there’s more Moses). Not because there is a separate-self Moses that includes the Divine, not because there is an ego self that’s torrentially ignoring Spirit and hijacking the space. No, no, it is the clarified Terry-ness, which is ErosValue all the way up and all the way down. Terry is animated by an entire cellular structure that is driven by clarified allurement and desire for life, in which every cell knows every other cell, which emerges out of the entire Field of Infinite Intelligence, uniquely garbing itself in the finitude called Terry-ness.
Infinite Reality intended Terry-ness.
And Infinite Reality desires Terry-ness.
And Infinite Reality needs Terry-ness.
And Infinite Reality recognizes the unique voice of Terry-ness. And Infinite Reality adores Terry-ness.
And Infinite Reality chooses Terry-ness — because Infinite Reality is choosing, and intending, and desiring, and needing, and recognizing, and adoring itself as Terry, because Terry as an irreducibly Unique Self is an expression of the irreducibly unique LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty that is the initiating and animating Eros and energy of all that is being Terry —
with Terry’s clarified unique perspective,
and Terry’s uniquely clarified quality of intimacy,
which fosters Terry’s unique gift that Terry can give — if he’s audacious, if he takes his unique risk.
You’ve got to be willing to take your unique risk. Step up. Be willing. Don’t get conflict averse.
Conflict is machloket in Hebrew; machloket means part. It means I’m taking a partial position, so I’ve got to take my partial position and reach, together, for the larger whole. How we do conflict is the beauty of who we are. The image of making love is: you are both conflicting, and you are becoming whole at the same time. You are struggling, and you are embracing.
This is this sense of becoming whole by stepping into conflict — by expressing the prophetic voice that is in my Unique Self while I hear your prophetic voice, but I want to demand that you clarify your voice.
Now, don’t come from ego. Don’t come from trauma.
Let’s clarify our trauma. Let’s clarify our ego.
Let’s have two prophets prophesying uniquely. And then, their Unique Self instruments and the great Unique Self Symphony creates what we may call collective intelligence, collective wisdom.
That’s not the hive mind at all. The hive mind, that’s totalitarian. The hive mind is separate selves, unrefined and un-clarified. We are talking about a Unique Self Symphony, in which I am an irreducibly unique voice of the Divine, and everyone is playing divine music.
I know you’ve got to deal with the trauma, but get out of that recursive loop. Don’t use trauma as your identity. Don’t use separate self breakdown. Don’t use my pain as my identity. Stop the striving.
Be in True Self, and realize there is no place to go.
Once I realize there is no place to go, I can individuate as Unique Self, and I can go everywhere, which is my unique destiny. I realize every detour is part of my destination, and I’ve got a unique voice, and I’m a prophet because I am the Divine Voice.
My Unique Self is a prophetic voice.
My Unique Self is a channel.
My Unique Self is channeling not an entity, but God.
We can’t restore our dignity unless we restore our divinity
I haven’t checked this with him, but I would say my friend Paul is not just channeling. He would not say this, he has full right of denial, but I think he’s not only channeling guides. I think there is this merger between Paul’s irreducibly uniquely refined Self and the guides. I think they are coming together. I think there is a place in which the doubleness, the split between the channeler and the guide disappears. And then a third person emerges, what I call trialectics.
I was just talking to my friend Sean a couple of days ago. I was unaware that he also uses the word, we both independently point to this word, trialectics, meaning it’s not me and it’s not the guide, it’s something new. It’s my Unique Self and the guide that emerges into something new, which is a trialectical emergence — this new voice that emerges. It’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It’s She comes in threes.
Unique Self is a channel.
We need Unique Self channels.
We need the democratization of enlightenment, but the democratization of enlightenment is not that everyone has an experience of enlightenment, in which they move beyond their story and they just live in the moment.
No, enlightenment means we all live in the infinity of the moment.
In the infinity of the moment, we let go of the low-level urgency, the desperation of covering over the emptiness with some kind of contrived narrative structure, some kind of fictional story that gives me some sort of identity. I’ve got to always go back to True Self and give up that striving. I’ve got to give up that kind of low-level urgency. I’ve got to give up that low-level desperation. I’ve got to just be in the moment, where there is no story. That’s True Self.
Then I individuate as Unique Self, and then the urgency comes back, but it’s ecstatic urgency. It’s the urgency of the holy and broken hallelujah. It’s the re-embrace of the story, but not at the separate-self level, not as the victim’s story — but as my Unique Self story. It’s the re-embrace of desperation. There is the desperation of the Unique Self. The Unique Self is desperate again. It’s a holy desperation. I am filled with need again.
We demonize need: need belongs to the separate self; separate self has needs; let’s get over the need thing; let’s not be codependent. No, no, no, codependency needs are a pathological version of the separate self. Then I move to the True Self — I am just here right now. There is no place to go and nothing to do. I don’t need anything. I’m just in the infinity of Now. Gorgeous.
And then I individuate beyond True Self into Unique Self, and I am filled with needs again. But these are holy needs. These are the needs of essence moving through me. This is the realization —
that my need is God’s need,
that my deepest heart’s desire and need is God’s deepest heart’s desire and need,
that I am in need of the Divine, the Divine is in need of me,
and I am in need of you and you are in need of me, and we need each other.
The holy realization that there is no I love you without I need you. We need each other.
We are afraid to need each other. But of course we need each other, but it’s not a desperate pathetic need. It’s a holy desperate need filled with pathos, the Divine need that lives uniquely through me.
Evolution is Eros in action in response to need. The very nature of evolution itself, evolution is love in action in response to need.
We need to be Unique Selves. Reality needs us to be Unique Selves. God needs our service (Ibn Gabbai, 16th century): Your deed, your unique deed is God’s need. God needs my service. God needs your service.
If you don’t realize that God needs your service, you have no dignity. You have no dignity if you have no divinity.
God needs your service, and your service is to be a Unique Self, and to be a Unique Self is to be a unique channel, a unique incarnation of the Divine, a unique quality of intimacy — because God is the Infinite Intimate.
God’s not only the infinity of power, God’s the infinity of intimacy, so I am a unique channel of the Infinite Intimate. I am a unique incarnation of the Infinite Intimate. I am a unique quality of intimacy.
When I clarify my unique quality of intimacy that births my unique perspective and gives my unique gift, I am a unique force of God in the world. And, in some sense, before I existed Divine was not yet born into being. I am — in my Unique Self — more God to come.
My dignity is in my divinity, which is why flatland therapy can never work. Of course, it can’t work. You’re talking to a therapist who believes that the world is flatland. Very nice person. Sweet, lovely, all good. But the overwhelming majority of the therapy community believes that value is not real, that there is no Field of Divinity that addresses me personally (or views that as fundamentalist dogma). They are operating in a personal psychology based on whatever the nine to eleven schools of psychology are, and they are supposed to make you whole. That’s not going to work.
We cannot be whole unless we restore our dignity.
We can’t restore our dignity unless we restore our divinity.
We can’t restore our divinity unless we realize that we are Unique Self channels, incarnations of the Infinite Intimate, which is the unique quality of intimacy —
that lives in us, as us, and through us;
that never was, is, or will be again;
that is needed by the Divine;
that is the Divine in person.
It is this sudden and shocking self-recognition of the Divine in us, as us, and through us — that’s where our dignity is. Our dignity is always in our divinity. My dignity is in knowing that there is more God to come, and that more God to come is me, and that I am needed by all that is.
That’s what it means to be a channel.
The paradox of being human
To be a human being, that’s first person.
That’s not second person.
That’s not a third person’s story.
It’s my first person identity. My first person identity is: I am a unique channel of the Divine.
When someone from the New Age world comes to me and says, “Oh, I am God”, I say, “Shut the fuck up! No, no, of course you’re not God. You’re you. Okay? Let’s not get deranged here. We don’t want to prescribe too much pharmacology.”
Obviously, I am not God, I am me.
But I am also a Unique Self. When I clarify my identity, when I realize my clarified identity, in my clearest moments, I disclose that my will is identical with God’s will, and I am a unique incarnation of the infinite Divine.
Hold on one second. How do those two go together?
That’s a paradox. It’s not a contradiction, it’s a paradox.
I am a human being. You shouldn’t walk around saying that you’re God, that’s stupid. Of course, you are not God. You’ve got a separate self, and you’ve got all sorts of contractions, and egoic issues, and unresolved shadow, and psychological work, and some trauma that should be worked out. And then, there is that day that you did that. You remember that day? That wasn’t so cool. You’ve got to get over that. You’ve got to work on that. You’ve got to transform that. That is all part of my humanity.
The psalmist said, in chapter 9 of the Book of Songs, ma enosh ki tizkereno ‘What is so significant about the human being that you’re mindful of them?’ And then in the next verse, the psalmist says, va'techasrenu me'at me'elohim ‘We are but a little less than God.’
That’s the dialectic of being human. That’s the dialectical tension within the human charism:
I am a Unique Self, I am a channel of the Divine, I’ve got to take responsibility for the God Voice that moves through me.
And I am broken.
I am a holy and a broken hallelujah. Right? Of course.
The entire goal of CosmoErotic Humanism — of this New Story of Value — is to recognize that every human being is a channel. Every human being has the potential to be a clarified channel. That’s what we mean by the democratization of channeling, which is the democratization of enlightenment, which is the democratization of greatness, which is, in some sense — hold on tight! — the democratization of Divinity.
Consciousness is everywhere. It’s everywhere, everything, everywhere. Consciousness is the unique qualia of value. It’s all value.
Value is not like space and time.
Value is primordial.
Value is the field in which space, and time, and all of the manifest arises.
We are going to conclude with the code:
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
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 enchanted universe includes 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 for the meta-crisis.This episode is Part 2 of a series, read Part 1 here.
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