420—Intimacy Is Conversation: The Thirteen Broken Conversations We Need to Heal
It’s a conversational Cosmos all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.
Summary: We live in a conversational Cosmos. Conversation is a movement of parts — through conflict — to a larger wholeness, all the way up and down the evolutionary chain. The global intimacy disorder, which is the root of the meta-crisis and existential risk, is, at its core, a breakdown of conversations along multiple dimensions of existence, from the conversation with ourselves to the conversations with the Field of inherent Value. We need to heal these conversations in order to survive. But no conversation is possible without trust. And trust is only possible when the conversation takes place as part of a shared story of value. Yuval Harari’s claim that such a story of value is necessary for our survival, whereas value itself is a delusion, is a recipe for totalitarianism. Because then a (fictional) story of value has to be made up and imposed on the population through totalitarian control, either in its overt Orwellian version or in the milder, invisible Skinnerian version.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 27th, 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).
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There is no Eros without trust.
There is no trust without conversation.
There is no conversation without each contributing a verse.
There is no verse without a shared text of inherent value.The Intimate Universe is a Conversational Cosmos
The Intimate Universe is a set of conversations.
The Intimate Universe is a conversational Cosmos.
Conversational Cosmos is a term that Howard Bloom has used, and I have used, that David Whyte has used, and a number of other people. Howard originally used it in a scientific context, and I think he probably coined the term. It’s a great term.
As Howard and I talked, the meaning of the term has, I think, changed for Howard. That’s what real conversation does. In a real conversation, we inhabit new meaning, we inhabit new possibility, we inhabit new value. Howard Bloom and I have been having conversations for the last seven or eight years. And that’s our topic, conversation.
We were introduced by Barbara Marx Hubbard, who co-founded the Evolutionary Church with me — One Mountain, Many Paths, as we call it together — as a seed of the revolution. The revolution against an empire hidden in the structures of systemic society that optimizes for collapse, for the failure of intimacy, for the breakdown of trust at the core of society, for a global intimacy disorder — which, as we’re going to see this morning, is the root cause of the meta-crisis and of the existential risk.
That’s what One Mountain is about. One Mountain is about —
evolving the source code of consciousness and culture,
generating the possibility for the emergence of a New Human and a New Humanity,
telling a New Story of Value.
Because it’s only a New Story of Value that can reboot reality and evolve the source code itself. Nothing else can do that.
All the infrastructure moves we make, as important as they are, won’t get us home.
All the social structure moves we make, all the regulations won’t get us home.
We need to change the conversation we live.
Conversations always live someplace. Conversations always take place within structures of consciousness. Conversations always take place within a Field. There is always a context for conversation, and the context for conversation is everything.
I want to tell you a little story about conversation, and about the conversational Cosmos. Let’s have a conversation about it, and let’s evolve conversation itself. We’re going to engage together in the evolution of conversation, and we are going to be responding directly to my friend and colleague, Yuval Harari, whose chilling of culture takes place, in large measure, through his upgrading of algorithms and downgrading of conversation. There is a fundamental downgrading of what conversation means, at its very core.
But first, let me just tell you a story about conversation.
One day, Barbara calls me and says, “I have this incredibly good idea.”
Barbara had this stunning capacity to get excited every day. It’s not because she was naturally ebullient or vivacious. It’s because she was willing to move through the darkness. She often encountered intense loneliness. She passed at 89. We had our first deep meeting when she was 83, and most of her close friends had passed.
I remember talking to Werner Erhard, at a moment when Werner and I were engaged in a multi-hour, very long, beautiful conversation. I mentioned Barbara, and he said, wow, Barbara is still with us, from the old days. Barbara said to me that most of her friends — most of her conversational partners — had passed. And she was lonely; there was no one to have a conversation with.
She called and said, “Oh, I’ve got this incredibly exciting idea.” As I said, she maintained her ebullience by walking through the loneliness, and through her commitment to walk through the loneliness every day. Every day, she encountered the sense of emptiness, the sense of “Wow, have I lived too long? Am I the remnant after my people have passed? What am I here? Should I be hanging up my cleats, or is there something left for me to do? Is there another conversation that I still need to be having?”
And so, she called me and said, “You know, it just occurred to me that you and Howard Bloom need to be in conversation.” And she called Howard, and she called me. We both were reluctant, but Barbara, of course, in her ineluctable fashion, persuaded us. We joined the conversation, and the conversation has gone on every other week for seven or eight years now.
Barbara, of course, participated in the early conversations until she passed.
Howard is a scholar at the think tank, and he also runs independently the Howard Bloom Institute. He is one of the really great thinkers — wild, creative expressions of new cosmic possibility.
My dear friend Ken Wilber said to me about Howard (which I shared with Howard), “Reading Howard is like getting postcards from the edge.”
And Howard and I have had many, many conversations. In those conversations, we have each deepened. We have each become more. There has been new possibility. There has been new opening.
One of the conversations we have had is about the conversational Cosmos, and what we mean by that. Both of us have shifted our understanding, and we have come to a larger shared understanding of this term. It will be the core of some shared writing that we do about the Conversational Cosmos.
It’s a conversational Cosmos all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.
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No part is apart
In the lineage of Solomon, conversation always means two things.
First, conversation means Eros. Sensuality, sexuality, but first, Eros. Remember, there has been twelve billion years of Eros before any sex. Eros means the movement of Reality, and that movement of Reality is a conversational movement.
Solomon is having a lot of conversations. Solomon marries a thousand wives. That’s a lot of conversations. The thousand wives that Solomon marries are about a thousand conversations. It’s Solomon’s Shekhinah project. Shekhinah means the face of the Divine, which is Eros, the Eros that suffuses Reality.
Solomon wants to have a thousand conversations, and he marries a thousand women from different traditions, from different lineages, from different nations. He refuses to treat them only as other and as enemies. He says, we’ve got to find each other. We’ve got to have a conversation. And he often builds temples in Jerusalem for his wives, out of the precincts of his own temple, Solomon’s temple. Solomon’s thousand wives are Solomon’s thousand conversations.
What does a conversation mean?
The erotic Cosmos, or the CosmoErotic Universe, or the Amorous Cosmos, the Cosmos of Amor, or what we might call the Universe: A Love Story, or the Intimate Universe — those are all different ways that we in CosmoErotic Humanism use to describe Reality; all of them, at their very core, are descriptions of the Conversational Cosmos.
Conversational Cosmos means that different parts engage in conflict, in the sense of conscious contradiction — conscious conflict, conscious debate, each one taking their perspective, rooted in their potency, and in their poignancy, and in their unique quality of power. And out of that conversation between the parts emerges a new wholeness.
Wholeness is the quality of Eros.
According to the interior science equation of CosmoErotic Humanism,
Eros = the experience of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and her greater wholeness.
Contact is conversation, contact between the parts. The aliveness that comes from great conversation.There’s nothing like great conversation:
I am on the Inside of the Inside. Seven hours have gone by. It feels like five minutes. I am in the living universe. I am in the living Cosmos, because I am on the inside of conversation, and from the contradiction has emerged a new wholeness.
Now, the Hebrew word for wholeness is shalom ‘wholeness’, which means peace. I make peace out of conflict.
Peace doesn’t bypass conflict.
Peace moves through conflict.
It requires the capacity to engage in conflict in a way that generates new potency and new potentiality (rather than polarizes). It allows us to respond to personal suffering and to collective suffering, to catastrophic risk, to existential risk, to the fundamental destruction of our life world — politically, economically, socially, and in terms of the very tectonic plates of Reality.
What does conversation mean? Conversation means no part is apart. No part is apart.
In the original Hebrew, the word for conflict is machloket.
Machloket comes from the root word chelek ‘part.’ It is parts that partition, that separate, and that don’t yet know that they mutually participate — notice the play of language — in a larger whole.
When parts mutually participate in each other’s experience,
when they see their relationship to the larger whole,
when they hold the irreducible uniqueness of their perspective, of their part, of their position,
then they generate something new in Cosmos. They generate new wholeness, they generate new intimacy.
This is why the word conversation means sensuality, and sexing, and the original Eros, which is sexing before there is any sex for twelve billion years, and sexing in all the non-sexual worlds after the sex appeared — all the dimensions of Reality in which parts come together, and instead of destroying each other, create something new. They create new possibility. They create new wholeness.
That’s the movement of Eros itself, all through Cosmos.
When conversation breaks down, evolution stops.
That’s what evolution is: evolution is a series of conversations. In other words, Reality is a series of conversations.
You could talk about evolving Reality in one of two ways.
You could say Reality is a series of conversations, or you could say Reality is a series of transformations. You could say evolution is a series of conversations, or evolution is a series of transformations. But actually, it’s the same thing, because the nature of authentic conversation is that it leads to transformation.
The second meaning of the word conversation is Messiah, ma shiach. Messiah, the English word for the Hebrew phrase ma shiach, literally means conversation. Ma shiach, what’s your conversation?
Ma — I come to the conversation with a question, with the quest I am on, and I am willing to engage with you in conversation. I am open to being transformed — without giving up my core integrity, without giving up my core depth, without giving up my core direction.
And then —
my direction meets your direction.
My depth meets your depth.
My integrity meets your integrity.
If we are both together in the Field of Value, and we understand that we are individuations of the Field of Value — we are not separate selves, we are not materialistic chance expressions of a random Cosmos (which is just bad science), we are, at the leading edges of science, irreducibly unique expressions of the Field of ErosValue — we each have a verse to contribute.
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We are each unique verses in the cosmic scroll
This understanding is precisely the opposite of Yuval Harari’s contention that any meaning that anyone ascribes to their life is mere delusion. Delusion is, to quote in the dictionary, “a false belief or judgment held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, as a symptom of serious mental illness.”
Harari says, any sense that you have a part to play, that you have a verse to contribute is delusional (Sapiens, the chapter on happiness, somewhere around p. 391). That’s the phrase that he uses all through his writing. No, no, no. That’s actually a mistake. That’s a dogmatic, scientistic materialism, which misunderstands the nature of Reality and makes dogmatic claims about it against mounds of empirical evidence.
Part of that empirical evidence is the realization that Reality is a conversational Cosmos, and there are conversations about value, and there are conversations between values, and there are conversations about meaning — all the way down the evolutionary chain.
In other words, the codes of Reality — from the mathematical codes (the mathematical values) to the musical values to the molecular values — are all coded with specific qualities of allurement towards specific values and specific fields of meaning. And then, meanings come together, and a larger meaning is created; values come together, and from the fructification — from the dialectic between values — new value is created.
For example, I am pro-life. I am glad you’re pro-life. That’s great.
No, I am pro-choice. I’m glad you’re pro-choice. That’s great.
But one second, I am pro-life. There cannot be any choice. It’s about life. Life’s the value.
No, I am pro-choice. Choice is the value. It’s not about life, it’s about choice.
Those are both obviously wrong. Both life and choice are innate, intrinsic, inherent values in the Field of Value. But before life is life, and before choice is choice, life is value and choice is value. From the synergistic erotic dance, the sensual undulation of life and choice as they meet and engage, they create a new whole. Let’s go back 50 years, in a tango, or in a wild rave somewhere in the Nevada desert. What happens is: from their autonomy and from their unique vectors of value, in which they each validate each other because they are each expressions of the Field of Value, they synergize and create a new whole.
A new whole means new value.
A new whole means new possibility.
A new whole is the shalom, the peace that surpasses all understanding, that emerges from conflict — but from conflict that is in the Field of Value, which is the Field of Consciousness.
This means that the vectors of value never seek total victory, they always and only seek partial victory. And partial victory means that I’ve been transformed by you.
That’s conversation.
That’s the crazy joy of conversation — the realization that these two parts can actually generate a larger whole, that’s erotic conversation. You can’t pay for erotic conversation. No amount of money, no credit card will buy you a real erotic conversation. In a real erotic conversation, I am radically rooted in the depth of my I-ness. The original Hebrew for I, ani, is rooted in those same three letters, spelled slightly differently, as ayin, and ayin means the Field of No-thingness, which is the Field of inherent Value.
Since we are both in the Field of inherent Value, as we meet, as our verses meet, they create a new sacred text, they create a new quality of intimacy.
God is not only the Infinity of Power, but the Infinity of Intimacy. The new name of God in CosmoErotic Humanism is the Infinite Intimate. God is Infinity garbed in the Intimate. And I am God’s unique intimacy. That’s me. I am God’s unique intimacy, which means I am God’s unique verse. Isn’t that beautiful?
One master said (the Zusha of Hanipol, in the 19th century), we are each unique letters in the cosmic scroll. We are each unique verses in Reality, which is not merely a fact, but an unfolding story describing the progressive deepening of intimacies. And intimacy means that we come together from the place of our otherness, and we realize we are living in a shared Field of Value, which incarnates a unique configuration of desire and value — those values meet and a larger whole is created.
That’s peace. That’s where peace comes from. That’s wild.
The global intimacy disorder as the breakdown of conversation
Take a minute and think about a conversation. What are the conversations we’ve refused to have with ourselves or with others?
Who have we placed outside of the conversation? We’ve said, they have no daemon — they have no unique incarnation of meaning. They are only demon. We demonize when there is no daemon. I’ll read a couple.
Some of those conversations maybe aren’t ready. Every conversation has its temple. But we always need to ask, why do I refuse to have the conversation? Is it because that person is impossible, or that topic is impossible, and they are fundamentally wrong, but if they were different, then the conversation was possible? Or is there a part of me that I don’t know how to bring to the conversation? I don’t know how to evoke from them something that they would need to show up with in order for that conversation to be possible.
The global intimacy disorder, which is the root cause of the meta-crisis, is, at its very core, a conversational disorder, an inability to have a conversation.
The global intimacy disorder is the structure of Reality that is governed by rivalrous conflict, which is always win/lose metrics. When I am in rivalrous conflict with you, we are each optimizing for the efficiency of our success story, and we are sub-optimizing for contact.
We are sub-optimizing for intimacy.
We are sub-optimizing for wholeness.
We are sub-optimizing for integrity.
Then we have an intimacy disorder: we are not actually having a conversation. We might be exchanging, we might be looking at each other, we might be looking in each other’s eyes, but we are not actually having a conversation. It is not happening, it doesn’t happen. We have a society that’s optimized for non-conversation, because it’s always a success conversation, which means you are always an instrument for my furtherance (even though we seem to be having a conversation, it’s a pseudo-conversation).
In fragile systems, there is no conversation between parts
The absence of conversation generates complicated systems, rather than coherent, complex systems (David Snowden’s term), not what Nassim Taleb calls antifragile systems — not systems that are resilient, that can survive shocks, that can have a kind of long-term sense of continuity. A complicated system means a fragile system. And the demarcating characteristic of fragile systems is that there is no conversation between the parts.
For example, a financial instrument created in the Far East ripples through the European financial markets and crashes into America, causing a mortgage meltdown in 2008 (this is a rough approximation of one dimension of what happened in that financial meltdown). The point is, there is no conversation between different dimensions of society. Different forces are all acting in their very narrow local vector, and there is no sense of the whole. There is an alienation or a dissociation from the whole. There is no whole conversation. We are not whole mates with each other.
Everyone is involved, by definition, in a local conversation and creating sets of effects that ripple through the system, but there is no intimacy between the different parts of the system because they’re not in conversation. They are not hearing each other. They are tone-deaf to each other. They barely even know that each other exists, or don’t know it at all. And you can’t have a conversation with a dimension of Reality that you don’t know exists.
There is alienation between different forms of knowing
Is it the knowing of the sciences — the Eye of the Senses or the Eye of the Mind?
Is it the knowing of the heart — the Eye of the Heart?
Is it the knowing of value — the Eye of Value?
Is it the knowing of contemplation — the Eye of Contemplation?
Is it the knowing of ritual — the Eye of the Spirit?
There are different ways of knowing. Just think about science and humanities (it’s just a narrow expression of these different ways of knowing). They don’t talk to each other. There is no real conversation between science and humanities. There is no conversation between the Eye of the Heart and the Eye of the empirical measured Senses. The senses that measure and the senses that sense the heart don’t talk to each other.
One is called merely subjective, and the other engages in what it calls the real, the objective. Or the subjective says, “Only I count. It’s only the feeling tone that counts and the objective be damned.”
There is no conversation between ways of knowing.
There is no conversation across time
The past is the past, the present, the present, the future, the future — but there needs to be a conversation between past, present, and future. There needs to be a conversation between the generations. That’s a conversational Cosmos. Otherwise, we have alienation, which is the opposite of conversation.
We are alienated from sense-making
We don’t know how to do sense-making. The world has become, from our perspective, too complicated. There are too many variables. Most people have no idea how to even explain fractional reserve banking. What’s fractional reserve banking? What’s driving the growth curve in the world?
We have no idea how our own financial systems work, which are the currents of energy personified by money. We are completely alienated from sense-making — from making sense about the most immediate dimensions of Reality in which we are embedded, because the world has gotten so complicated that the effort of sense-making just seems too hard for lots of people. All of it seems of obfuscated and unclear.
We are alienated from conversation with our different selves
There is a separate self, the skin encapsulated ego. And the separate self is real in the mind of God. It is my personality.
There is the True Self, my participation in the Field:
I am inseparable from the Field of Consciousness and Desire and Eros and Value.
I am one with the Field.
There is my Unique Self: I am an irreducible unique expression of the Field,
And my Evolutionary Unique Self: the evolutionary impulse that pulses in me uniquely.
That’s four selves right there. Let’s just add one more: my pre-personal self that doesn’t even want to be a Unique Self; it just wants to merge with the all, whatever the all happens to be. It might be hashish, it might be a cult, it might be a relationship in which I fuse and don’t engage in union, but I just want to go pre-personal. We’ll call that my pre-personal self, or anti-self.
All five of those selves are not talking to each other. I am not talking to all of them, and they’re not talking to each other. In some deep sense, we might call it alienation within the self — this intimacy disorder within the self, this breakdown of conversation within the self.
My friend Richard Schwartz started something called Internal Family Systems. Hal and Sidra Stone called it Voice Dialogue. There are a lot of different ways to tell the story. It emerged in California actually in the early ‘90s, but it’s got roots that are much deeper. It is about the different selves:
I’ve got a controller.
I’ve got a protector.
I’ve got a wounded child.
I’ve got a seeking mind.
There are all these different selves, but I am not in conversation with all of the selves. Myself, my larger whole, my wholeness is not in conversation with all of the selves. Then, the selves are not in conversation with each other. The protector is not talking to the controller, the wounded child is not talking to the seeking mind. There is a failure of conversation within, within the self, within all the multiple selves, number seven.
There is no conversation between us
There is no conversation between us, because we don’t experience ourselves as participating in a shared story.
We don’t have a shared story. We don’t feel ourselves as being part of shared plotlines. We can go to a movie, and we can get excited to go to a movie together, because we are actually participating in an empathetic catharsis with someone else’s plotlines. But between us, we don’t feel the shared plotlines of our story. We’re not in a shared story, so there’s no conversation between us because we can only have a conversation if we are in a shared story. This creates polarization, and polarization is the experience that we are not in a shared Field of Value.
Therefore, we hijack one value. We decontextualize that value from a conversation with a larger whole, and we make that one value self-centered and selfish, incapable of feeling other values. It seeks to dominate the Field of Value and becomes radically aggressive.
It becomes the Eye of Sauron.
The Eye of Sauron disqualifies all the other eyes and makes this aggressive dominating move, a selfish move. It becomes a cancerous cell that’s dissociated from the larger Field of life and seeks to multiply itself, to listen to its own self-conversation (which is just a monologue, not a conversation). It’s a self-absorbed monologue, which destroys the entire communion and then commits suicide. That’s what cancer means. Cancer means the same thing as polarization. It’s an absence of conversation. It’s this set of cells that metastasize against all the other cells.
We are alienated from the Field of Value itself
We don’t realize that we are in a Field of Value, and that all of matter and all of energy arises within a Field of Value. We are alienated from a conversation with the Field of Value, which is a conversation with the recesses and depths of self, because we participate in the larger whole, and the larger whole is the Field of Value. But we are alienated from the Field of Value. We are dissociated. There is no conversation with the Field.
There is no conversation between values
As we talked about earlier, LIFE doesn’t have a conversation with CHOICE.
SECURITY doesn’t have a conversation with PEACE.
COMMUNION doesn’t have a conversation with AUTONOMY.
CERTAINTY doesn’t have a conversation with UNCERTAINTY.
AUDACITY doesn’t have a conversation with HUMILITY.
There is no conversation between the values, so there is no larger wholeness that emerges.
We act in the world, and we dis-intimate with the externalities of our action. We run a factory, but there is a whole set of externalities that affect the rest of the system. We don’t have a conversation with those externalities.
We arbitrarily say, okay, this is a pharmacological drug. Oh, there is an externality: it causes thirteen side effects. Nope. “Those are just side effects, write them on the side; that’s not really what we’re doing. What we’re really doing is our purposeful action.” We don’t have a conversation with externalities. Legally, we are obligated to write them in the side of the box, but in most industries, we don’t even need to write them in the side of the box.
We’re just not in conversation with them.
We’ve taken them out of the conversation.
There is no conversation between classes
There is no conversation between classes — between the elite and the masses, between the 1 % and the 99%.
No conversation where the rich can feel what it means not to be able to figure out whether I will have enough food this week?
Will I have enough food this month?
How will I balance my checkbook this month?
I know quite a lot of people who are having a hard time, even though they don’t talk to me about it, but I’m aware of it. When people are having a hard time balancing the checkbook, that’s a very big deal. But we can’t feel another person’s poverty. We can’t feel another person’s impoverishment, or their own experience of alienation, whether it’s financial or otherwise, so there is a fundamental alienation between the elite and the masses.
There is a fundamental inability to have a conversation with myself
My inward space of meaning has been violated by an entire immersive environment that I live inside, which is optimized for the hijacking of attention. Attention is the prerequisite for the potency of conversations. Paying attention, that’s what love is.
Love is the placing of attention.
Eros is the placing of attention.
Sex is the placing of attention.
Sexual potency is based on one thing, the radical placing of attention, because that’s why sex is a conversation at its core. It’s one expression of the conversational Cosmos.
The root of conversation is trust
That’s the global intimacy disorder. It’s a conversational disorder, but the root of every conversation is trust — and that’s the first alienation we have to overcome. When we overcome that alienation, we’re in the conversation.
And all alienations flow from the alienation from the Field of Value.
As long as I am outside of the Field of Value, conversation is too much of an effort. Conversation is somehow in the way of my short-term goals, with which I seek to deaden the emptiness and the ennui of being fundamentally emptied of ErosValue.
I can’t bear the emptiness.
I can’t bear the ennui.
I seek to cover it up.
I cover it up with pseudo-Eros.
And pseudo-Eros, by its nature, inhibits conversation. Addiction, acting out, violence, abuse, manipulation — those are all inhibitors of the core movement of Cosmos. The core movement of Cosmos is the currency of conversation.
The first conversation to have is with myself, with the part of myself that participates in the Field of Value.
I begin to have a conversation with myself.
I begin to trust my inner knowing.
Some interior knowing comes from common sense. That’s one form of interior knowing.
But there is another form of knowing, which comes from contemplation. I’ve got to go deeper. I’ve got to enter the mystery.
And finally, there is what we call transfiguration: I engage so deeply in the potency of practice that I actually transfigure. I become more than I ever possibly thought I could be, and I begin to converse with parts of myself that were long split off, and I realize that I am actually dazzling, beautiful, inseparable from the currency of Cosmos, that I am actually God’s verb, that I am actually God’s conversation, I am God’s verse, that I have a verse to contribute.
Wow! I’m in the conversation. I’m at the table. I’m in the conversation.
To liberate myself from the shackles of tyranny —
whether it’s the totalitarianism of self, self-tyranny, when I can’t shatter the tyranny of the ego’s dream,
or it’s the totalitarianism of the palace,
or it’s about being afraid to have the conversation because I am afraid that the surveillance will disclose something that will make me vulnerable to the success story of my superficial self,
I need to be willing to have all the conversations. Not every place, not every time — every truth has its temple. Every truth is the emergence of a conversation. It’s a conversational Cosmos.
Democracy is the ability to have a genuine conversation across the polis.
It’s a move beyond polarization.
It is the willingness to have the impossible conversation, even if we can’t resolve it.
To have the potency of hearing your pathos, even if it causes me pain. I honor your pain, and you honor my pain. And together, we create new potency. We’ve got to be willing to not go tone-deaf, to stay in the conversation, not to say that every perspective is equal.
Sometimes, there is a hierarchy of perspectives.
Sometimes, I might be very sure that I’m right, and I might be right and you might be dead wrong, and that might require a certain kind of conversation, but even that still requires a conversation.
There is always a conversation to be had. And the conversation always deepens us.
We need to be in conversation
Yuval Harari makes the devastating claim that democracy requires conversation, and conversation requires infotech for us to be proximate to each other, to be able to — technically, functionally — talk to each other. That’s not correct.
To have a conversation, we need to trust each other.
To trust each other, we need to be in the Field of Value together. That’s what conversation means:
We trust there is a shared verse.
We trust there is a shared text.
We trust there is a shared musical score between us.
Even if we are each playing our Unique Self instrument, which is
our unique verse that we contribute,
our unique incarnation of intimacy,
our unique configuration of desire,
our deepest unique heart’s desire, which is God’s desire awakened alive in us —
we can actually hear each other, because we are in a shared conversation, because we are in a Field of Value together.
It is absurd to suggest
that we can have a conversation, that we need to have a conversation, that democracy collapses and existential risk triumphs when we can’t have a conversation,
and then to say, as Harari basically does, that value is not real, meaning is not real, any meaning that a human being gives their life is mere delusion (Homo Deus, page 170).
That is a recipe for the totalitarianism:
I say value is not real.
I say we need a conversation in order to survive.
I say we need to have a shared story in order to survive. I say we need a shared story of value in order to survive, which people actually agree on, and can coordinate based on.
But if value is not real, if it’s completely fictive, what I am saying is that somebody has got to make up a story of value and impose it on the population through propaganda, subliminal and direct. That’s what I’m saying.
If you say the Field of Value is not real, and you say a story of value is utterly necessary in order to cohere in the face of existential risk, then we have some version of either Orwellian or Skinnerian totalitarianism. It’s either the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or it’s Skinner’s Walden Two, which are both forms of totalitarianism, one ostensibly benign (Walden Two), the other more brutal (Orwellian). But they are both totalitarian because they are both saying, we create value, we create the story of value.
Skinnerian totalitarianism acts subliminally, through levers of invisible control: we upend the conversation without anyone knowing that it happened.
We’re going to control a person’s internal conversation; they’re not even going to know what hit them.
We can undermine, subvert, or bypass free will.
We can cause conversation through sequenced provocations.
We can create completely statistically legitimate predictive capacity, which we sell, Google says, as our major product. That’s our business model, not a search engine. Facebook says, our business model is selling predictive capacity, not connecting people. We are connecting people in order to create addiction — constant engagement — in order to gather data from the digital exhaust, in order to create personality profiles and peer groups that allow for predictive analysis. This means we’ve upended the conversation. There is no more real conversation.
That’s what digital dictatorship does. It shuts down the conversation.
What do we need to do?
We need to re-engage the conversation.
We need to re-engage the wholeness, the synergy that comes from a conversation.
We, human beings, are at this time the apex of the conversational Cosmos.
We need to be talking to the animal community.
We need to be talking to all the species that we’re making extinct.
We need to be talking to the split off parts of ourselves.
It’s all about conversation. It’s a conversational Cosmos.
But most critically, we need to realize and experience ourselves in the Tao, in the Field of Value. And from that place, we move from polarization to new possibility. We need to move from polarization to the possibility that the promise of humanity can be kept.
The alternative is totalitarian. It either means the death of our humanity, or possibly becomes an artificial general intelligence totalitarianism that imposes a values lockdown, as it has been correctly described in the literature of existential risk, and hijacks the systems. And we all operate within that immersive environment, and we can’t in any way step out of it.
The conversation has to take place, so I need to talk to Yuval, and Yuval needs to talk to me. We need to talk to each other. We need to create a shared Field of Value and a shared Field of possibility. That’s why I’ve engaged these past weeks in a sharply critical, fiercely critical analysis of Yuval’s positions, while madly defending to the death his right to have them in order to have a real conversation. And I invite Yuval to that conversation — anytime, anyplace.
Let’s have it, in public or in private.
Let’s actually move this forward.
Let’s actually find a synergy.
Let’s find the best underlying intuitions that you have and that I have expressed, and let’s create something new.
That’s what we need to do. We need a shared story. We need a shared story of value. We need to be in conversation.
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Let the Conversations begin! An intimate Cosmos is such a better framework of coherence that the other models of materialism, or of a "Living Universe". Wow!