422—USA Elections: What Does It Mean to Partner with God in This Moment?
In a time between stories and a time between worlds, the bridge is art.
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
In a time between stories and a time between worlds,
the bridge is art. The philosopher must become the artist,
the activist must become the artist.
The great library, the vision of First Principles and First
Values, the new Story of Value, the great entry into the Field of
Value are all, first and foremost, artistic projects.
In a time between worlds, and a time between stories the age
old false split between art and morals must disappear. Eros
and ethos, art and morals are one. To the artist the moral and
the mystery are not in opposition, they’re part of the same
great dance.
Let’s make art. Let’s tell the great story of value(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [November 10th, 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 vision for the future is everything
It’s a big day. It’s an important day. It’s a wondrous day. It’s a day pregnant with peril, and pregnant with potency. It captures this experience of being in a time between worlds and a time between stories.
And this is such an insanely important day in One Mountain, Many Paths.
We always have to evoke the Field. The Field is never just there. We have to step out of our to-do lists, and find the space in between, and evoke the Field. And even when we are in our to-do lists, doing our thing, we have to do our to-do lists from within the Field. Our to-do lists live in the Field, so we are in the Field.
The last week One Mountain was our protest. Kathy Brownback, our Board Chair, who was the Dean of Exeter Academy for many years, just wrote me a text saying how deeply she felt the vision of First Principles and First Values alive as we integrated it last week in great depth with the immigration conversation.
We talked about these seven or eight variables that you need to take into account, but none of them make sense unless we step into the Field of Value. We talked about the implications of stepping into the Field of Value, and how that changes the conversation around immigration. In some sense, it was a very clear protest last week, and the protest stands a week later. It was a protest against Stephen Miller’s comment at Madison Square Garden, America’s for Americans. We said, yes, depending what you mean, brother Stephen, yes, America’s for Americans — if we are protecting a unique identity called America, if we are protecting a unique Field of Value called American values.
But those values have to participate in a larger Field of Value. They are not xenophobic values, they are not ethnocentric values. There could be an ethnocentric national character to America, because there is a First Principle and First Value of uniqueness. Because there is a First Principle and First Value of uniqueness, it’s legitimate to protect, let’s say, France’s national character, America’s national character, China’s national character, Russia’s national character. True. But then, we want to step into a larger Field of Value.
What are the values that America stands for, and how do those hold in the larger Field of Value?
We never establish one value (for example, uniqueness against the entire Field), because then we would be transposing that value into an absolute, and then saying that all other values have to serve at the altar of that one value. That never works.
Each value lives in a wider Field of Value. And in the wider Field of Value, we as human beings, we as human beings incarnate Homo amor. We incarnate the New Human and the New Humanity, which means we incarnate value.
We participate in the Field of Value, and all the First Principles and First Values live in us.
We are first Homo amor. We are first together in the Field of Value. Therefore, we are not strangers to each other. There are no strangers. That which unites us — as we participate in the Field of Value — is much greater than anything which divides us.
On the one hand, there are no immigrants because we are all in the Field of Value already. That’s our home before any home. On the other hand, there are immigrants because we each come from a unique identity, a unique character, a unique instrument, a unique intimacy, a unique quality.
We don’t want to say to the Irish, “Hey, Irish, why are you doing Ireland? Do Brooklyn.” That wouldn’t go over well in certain hamlets in Ireland. Walk into an Irish pub and say,
“Forget this Ireland thing, just do Brooklyn,”
and they would say, “No, no, no.”
And you would say,
“Well, what’s the difference? We’re all in the Field of Value.”
No, there is a unique beauty. There is unique pleasure to Ireland, to Dublin. There is unique art. There is a unique aesthetic. There is a unique contribution. Dublin is not reducible to Brooklyn, just like Shanghai is not reducible to Moscow. Let’s not even talk about Idaho and Montana. And then Marseille.
We protect uniqueness. That’s one value. But then, uniqueness lives in relationship to the larger Field of Value, which we all live inside of together. From the perspective of uniqueness as a value, there are immigrants, but from the perspective of the Field of Value, which we all incarnate as part of our essential humanity, we are all in the Field of Value. The Field of Value is our home before any other local home. It is the ultimate locality that we live in and locate ourselves — what’s called adam kadmon in the lineage, the Field of holy apples — the Field of Value. We live there before we live anyplace else. Therefore, there are no immigrants. There is no place to go. There are no strangers.
Now, it’s a week later. First off, everything we said last week stands. Stephen Miller, the fact that your side won the election doesn’t let you off the hook. The protest stands, brother, okay? The protest stands. President-Elect Trump, the protest stands. And Stephen, you actually get this yourself. We are asking you to clarify. Be a leader, clarify. When you say “America for Americans,” don’t say it in a way that can be interpreted as regressive and violating our shared humanity. I know your teacher in the Hebrew school, Metuka Benjamin, your teacher at Hebrew school. She said you were pretty good in Hebrew school, so go back to those prophetic roots and clarify what you mean.
What you mean is, there are no strangers in the Field of Value.
What you mean is that we all participate in this Field of Value.
What you mean is that that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us.
We honor the unique instrument, and quality of intimacy, but we are all ultimately unique expressions of the same musical score — and our particular note, our particular instrument deepens and adds to that score.
That’s a world we can live in.
That’s a vision for the future. A vision for the future is everything. It’s everything. A prophetic vision is everything. We have to articulate this vision together. The world depends on us articulating this vision together.
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It is a moment of reckoning
Today, we are going to engage in an enormously important — new, old, ancient, post-post-modern — enactment called prayer. But I want to set a context for the prayer; that’s going to be the first part of One Mountain. And then I want to enter with you into the prayer.
The context for the prayer is where we are at this moment in the world.
What’s just happened?
Because something has just happened, and the whole world is reverberating with what happened.
I want to first speak with the voice of the elemental, the primal, the Field Herself, because we are in this time in-between. We are in a moment of phase transition, a time between worlds and a time between stories. Phase transition is this place when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand, and then matter changes from one state to another. For example, solids become liquids, liquids become gas. The system opens up into new peril and new possibility.
From the moment of chaos, the creative force comes into play, which always moves against entropy and collapse, and towards new possibilities. There would be no world without these transitions, when everything seems to be falling apart, and you think, “Oh my God, did entropy have the last word?” And then we realize, no, it didn’t. We realize that there is a new arising. There is a new possibility. There’s a new movement towards wholification.
Not just in exteriors, but also in interiors, as old systems of value prove insufficient to meet the new moment, new expressions of value emerge from intrinsic inherent value in Cosmos. The eternal Tao becomes the evolving Tao. Eternal value becomes emergent new value, and a new life force emerges — the irrepressible creativity of Eros seeking ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness gives birth to new possibilities.
That’s where we are. We are at this moment when the elemental forces are at play. We are in a moment of what James Baldwin described as a reckoning. It’s a moment of reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity.
In this reckoning, this time between worlds and this time between stories is filled with competing visions of what just happened. I am not going to spend this One Mountain recapitulating the thousands of articles that have been written around the world in the last four days to explain the events of the American elections. Each article contradicts the next article. They all are mutually exclusive with each other. They all adopt a particular stance. There is truth in all of them, but it’s partial.
Let’s go deeper.
Let’s go to the elemental.
Take it all up in your painfully expanded soul
In the space between two world wars, Hermann Hesse wrote a novel, Steppenwolf.
He writes that every age, every culture, every custom, every tradition has its own character — its own weaknesses, its own strength, its beauties and ugliness, accepts certain sufferings, puts up (and I would add, wrongly) with certain human evils.
Today, for example, for some strange reason, we put up with animal suffering, with cruelty towards animals (which we should not). Why is that? We put up with an immense cruelty to animals. People are having lamb chops all the time. That’s somehow acceptable. There is this strange notion of the evolution of value, which doesn’t recognize value in an earlier age, and puts up with “acceptable” evils.
But there is a moment when civilizations shift; they move.
For example, a man of the classical age, writes Hesse, who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably, just as a prehistoric man would suffer in the middle of civilization. But then there are times — and this is the point of Hesse’s that I want to share with you — in which a generation is caught between two ages, between two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.
That’s the nature of this moment.
We are in this moment when artificial intelligence is at play.
We are threatened both with the potential death of humanity and the potential death of our humanity.
We are not sure what truth means. We know that it means something, but it’s bandied about way too lightly.
Value has been deconstructed, and the assumption across the board is that value is not real. There is lip service given to fundamentalism, but there is an assumption that you don’t really need to tell the truth, because that’s a subservient value.
It is, of course, a wrong claim, but there is this feeling across the board — both in the postmodern liberal world and in the conservative world, which is hijacked increasingly by individual powerful figures.
There is a sense that truth is not an ultimate value we need to bow before.
There is a sense that power is what’s really at play, and it’s all ultimately about power.
There is this sense of collapse.
This is precisely — as Toni Morrison wrote a hundred years after Hesse — this is precisely where artists have to go to work. This is precisely where art happens. We are living through this world, which is confused and conflicted — this time between stories, this time between values — and there is something new that needs to happen.
That’s what Hesse begins to speak about. He says that, in this moment, there is something new that has to happen.
We need to turn to the artist, Hesse says — the artist whose job is to nourish the goodness of the human spirit with such strength and indescribable beauty that the human spirit is, “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering that the light of it spreading, its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.” It’s a moment for art. It’s a moment to begin to see ourselves as artists, and realize that our great project of enacting a great library in this time between worlds is art.
We are storytellers of the new Story of Value, and also scientists of the new Story of Value, reading chemistry, and molecular biology, and neurochemistry, and neuroscience, and sociology, and anthropology — but at the core, we are artists weaving together different strands, painting a new canvas.
Often the artists perform their art at great personal cost. Hesse considers what it means to be an artist and he writes, it’s not easy. You can’t just turn to your own personal fulfillment. Sometimes you need to see what’s happening in the larger Field, step out of your to-do list and ask yourself, am I actually Homo amor?
Can I actually embrace the whole?
Can we see the whole and paint a new tapestry?
Hesse writes, “You will instead embark on the longer and wearier and sometimes harder road of life.” It’s not simple to do. In this harder road, instead of narrowing your world, you’ll complicate your complexities still further, because you’re going to want to take more in, instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, which we want to do in order to balance the nervous system.
I get that. You’ve got to do what you need to do that, of course — sleep enough, nourish yourself in all the ways you do. But ultimately, instead of narrowing your world, what the artist does at this time between worlds? Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you’ll have to absorb more and more of the world. And at last, Hesse writes, take it all up in your painfully expanded soul if you are ever to find peace.
You think, let me turn back to my family.
Yes, of course we take care of our families. Of course, of course, of course. I’m living in Saint Johnsbury because I have a son who needs me to live in Saint Johnsbury. I believe in taking care of one’s family. I just dropped everything to go to New York to spend four hours with my older son. Of course, of course we stand for family.
But family is not where we exhaust our loving. If I am actually a pillar in the temple, I’ve got to see the whole thing. I’ve got to be an artist of the whole thing. You have to be willing to absorb more and more of the world. And at last, take all of it up in your painfully — and I would add, ecstatically — expanded soul, if you — if all of us — are ever to find peace.
When society disintegrates, we need art
I want to move on to the English novelist E.M. Forster and his essay Two Cheers for Democracy.
He talks about art in the time between worlds, although he doesn’t use the word time. He writes that art is the only material object in the universe that may possess internal harmony.
Just feel that for a second.
Art stands against entropy. Art takes entropy — the dissolution — into account, but there is an interior quality of coherence in art.
All the other dimensions of the world, writes Forster, have been pressed into shape from outside — by forces of power, if you will. When their mold is removed, when the power structure is removed, all other things collapse. The work of art stands up by itself as nothing else does. It achieves something that has often been promised by society, but always delusively.
Ancient Athens, he says, made a mess, but Antigone stands up. The Renaissance Rome made a mess, but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess, but there was Macbeth. Art is the one, as he calls it, orderly product. I wouldn’t call it orderly product. It’s the one intimate coherence which our muddling race has produced. It’s the cry of a thousand sentinels. The echo from a thousand labyrinths. It is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.
Auden writes, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. And Iris Murdoch writes, tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify in order to obfuscate, while art tends to clarify.
Back to Forster: If our present society should disintegrate, and who dare prophesy that it won’t, what we’re going to need is a new figure, and that figure is the figure of the artist, the artist. Society can only represent the final quote, a fragment of the human spirit, but the wider web, the wider vision is held only through art.
Outrageous trust
Who are we here?
We are artists, and what does it mean to be an artist?
The word art in the original Hebrew is oman. It’s a beautiful word.
It derives from the word emunah, and emunah means trust. It is wrongly translated as “faith,” but it actually means “trust.”
Lehagid baboker chasdecha, ve-emunatcha ‘to speak of your love in the morning, to trust you through the night.’
David gives that teaching to Solomon, and we read it in two ways.
First, we speak to the Field of Eternity that’s evolving through us, and we say, to speak of your love in the morning, and we trust you through the night. The artist trusts. The artist trusts that there is a coherence that’s possible. The artist trusts that out of the fragmentation something fabulous and fantastic can emerge; that there is a new fantasy that can emerge from the fault lines. Then, in the time between worlds and the space between the cherubs, there is a voice of the Divine that emerges.
The artist is the oman, art that has emunah, which is trust. The artist knows how I speak of your love in the morning and I trust you through the night.
I trust Reality.
I trust goodness, truth and beauty.
I trust that I can participate, as the evolutionary impulse, in telling a New Story of Value.
But there is a deeper reading.
If you read carefully the hidden nuances of the sacred texts, it’s a conversation. It’s the Song of Solomon.
The Song of Solomon is not a poetry of love. It’s a set of Outrageous Love notes between a lover and a beloved. That’s literally what the Song of Solomon is, and it is considered the ultimate canonical document of civilization. When all the books are holy, the Song of Solomon is Holy of Holies. One text says, if all of wisdom didn’t exist, all of the world could be governed by the Holy of Holies.
We think love only lives with us, it doesn’t live on the other side. The other side are haters, we’re lovers. No, no, no. Love gets distorted, but love animates the whole thing.
Let us feel this deeply — to speak of your love in the morning, to trust you through the night. That’s our Outrageous Love note into the evolutionary field — but then She, the Goddess, She, the Field of ErosValue, She speaks back to us, and She says, to speak of your (= humanity, human being) in the morning, and I trust you through the night.
In the same lineage, another word for the artist is Rabba, outrageous. It’s a technical word that exists in Hebrew text which is translated as “great”, but it doesn’t mean great.
If you read and follow the word carefully, there is something called Ahava Rabba — not great love, Outrageous Love. Rabba is outrageous.
Rabba Emuna-Techa ‘outrageous is my trust in you.’
We hear back the echo, where She says to us, outrageous is my trust in you. Rabba Emuna-Techa ‘Outrageous is my trust in you, God.’ But the very same words mean, outrageous is your trust in me — but not me generally, each one of us personally.
That’s trust. She trusts you through the night.
She trusts us not to “get it done,” not to check something off on a to-do list.
She trusts us to hold Her hand and be Her.
She trusts us through the night.
That’s the artist. That’s the artist.
The first word is oman. Oman is an artist. Art. The same word means trust, this deep trust. I’m faithful, but I’m faithful to the memory.
I am not faithful to the dogma.
I am faithful to the realization.
I was once on the Inside of the Inside. I said to my beloved, Kristina, my holy partner, about ten-twelve years ago, “She’s going to go away. This explosive voice of She that we can feel, She’s going to disappear. You have to know that She’s going to leave.” And KK said, “She’s not, She won’t.” I said, “She will. She will. She’ll leave. And then, if you have faith, if you’re faithful to the memory, She’ll come back. That’s what faith means. Faith is not blind faith.”
We are on the Inside of the Inside. We are in a moment together. We are reading science together. We are all the way inside. We feel it. We are faithful to that moment. She knows. She trusts us.
But what we have to do is to remain faithful to the memory.
We have to find the moment when each of us was so radically inside. We were together on the Inside of the Inside, and we knew it was true, and we’ve got to remain faithful to that memory of the past. We have to let that memory of the past live in the present, and let that present open up into the future. The greatest commitment to the future is to do with full passion what the present demands. The greatest commitment to the future is not to bypass the present, but to clarify it. It requires clarification.
The project of the great library is a political project
In Lehagid baboker “to tell the story in the morning,” what does the word boker mean?
It has three meanings.
First, it means ‘morning’ (boker tov ‘good morning’). But boker also means bakara ‘discernment, clarification.’
I have to discern the light in the morning. What is the invitation of the morning?
It’s so easy to compromise. It’s so easy to get off path. It’s so easy to get comfortable. Comfort is good, but you also need an optimum place of discomfort — not to be comfortably numb.
‘Comfortably numb’ has lots of very high versions. You’ve got to be willing to be uncomfortable. When I am uncomfortable, what I can discern (bakara), what’s mine to do?
What’s my gift?
What’s my full passion?
The way I do that is a bikur — that’s the third meaning of boker ‘visit.’
I have to step out of my bracketed ego self, and I have to visit the Field of Value, and let the Field of Value live and dance in me. That’s the experience of waking up. I’ve got to visit the Field of Value, step out of my narrow separate self, and feel the Goddess speaking and whispering through me.
And then, from that visit to the Field of Value, I go back to my discernment. And then I say, good morning.
The project of the great library is a political project.
I want to be clear about that. And the greatest political project has to be an artistic project.
Political projects that are rooted in movements of power don’t last. Power ultimately— at least exterior power history — always falls before what I would call trust history, art history, faith history. There is a greater history that’s at play.
There is a greater story at play.
There were ten families living in Florence in the Renaissance, and nine of them, we know nothing about. One family, for two or three generations, stepped in and said, we’re going to look at the wider field. And the Medicis, and Marcello Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo da Vinci, infused with the vision of Luria — they painted. The Renaissance was art and a New Story together. It couldn’t have been different. Da Vinci was both thinking great thoughts and painting a new world at the same time.
It was this new vision of embodiment.
It was this new vision of the feminine.
It was this new vision of Eros and sexuality.
It was this new art, and it was this new science.
It was this new Story of Value.
You can’t split them.
We are weaving together as one artist — each being a different dimension in the vision — the great political vision of the interior sciences.
We are all part of that same organism — but not as a hive. We are all individuated expressions of this wider symphony of art and spirit. And we each paint a different dimension of this great mural — this great mural of potency, this great mural of possibility.
And we are politicians. We are engaged in the polis. We are engaged in reformulating the vision of what it means to be a human being individually, what it means to be in communion. And if the polis is violated, we protest. If the polis is violated, we rebel. We launch a revolution. That was the French Revolution. That was the American Revolution — the realization that the polis is not an eternal idol that lives forever. Sometimes the Bastille becomes a prison that violates the integrity of society, and the Bastille has to fall.
But right now, we are in a moment which is a time between worlds and a time between stories. Something has happened. Democracy has operated. It has granted a mandate. That’s simply what happened. That’s just a description of what happened, as The New York Times described. And The New York Times is obviously a strongly liberal paper that endorsed Kamala Harris. The New York Times said, democracy spoke, overwhelmingly. How it happened is not our topic today. Democracy spoke.
We are at a time between worlds and a time between stories. How, in this moment in between worlds, do we respond?
There are some people who are going to respond through vectors of formal politics, and that’s good, and that should be done.
There are some people who will respond through vectors of international coalitions, and that should be done.
There are some people who respond through vectors of court-mediated processes, and that’s good, and that should be done.
But we have to stay focused on what we desperately know needs to be done, and what we have the capacity to do, unlike any others.
That’s an audacious statement. We’ve been in this for fifteen years. It’s just bubbling to the surface in this unimaginably beautiful way.
What’s ours to do?
We have to be artists in this time between worlds. We have to understand that the written page, and the audio, and the media — these are canvases of new formulations of words. There is no chance of moving through this time between worlds, this time between stories, without a shared Story of Value, without evolving First Principles and First Values.
That’s what we talked about last week. You cannot discuss immigration without it, and you cannot discuss anything else without it. No conversation is possible.
It doesn’t matter what country we live in.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re on the conservative side or the liberal side.
The abyss that’s happened is we are not first in the Field of Value.
And when we are not first in the Field of Value, then we hijack identities from the world of surfaces — not Value, but values to buttress our identity. And we lie about everything else in various forms, because we’re desperately afraid of being consigned to oblivion.
No, no, no.
We are in the Field of Value.
We are all value before we are anything else.
Our valor, our heroism comes from living and being in the Field of Value. That’s where we pray from.
Beauty means wholeness
Let’s be wild artists. Let’s be ecstatic artists, but art as a political act.
We will watch carefully, and we will pay attention, because Eros is the placing of attention.
Sex models Eros, and sex is the placing of attention. Sexuality is not about technique. It’s not about how many explosions happened. Sexuality is about whether I was able to radically place my attention on the beloved and to feel the radical attention of my lover beloved. In sexuality, we bloom our beloved with the placing of attention. You can be involved in the most wondrous sexuality in the world, which seems to be technically proficient and working perfectly, and you feel empty and vacuous. Or you can be stumbling your way, but you’re placing attention on each other with such beauty, with such poignancy, with such fragility, with such vulnerability that what emerges moves the heavens.
We are erotic artists.
We are erotic artists, and our vision is transfiguration. Transfiguration means that we take opposites, polarities, and we weave them together as new potencies. That’s what the artist did.
Whitehead talks about beauty; art seeks beauty.
Whitehead says the exact same thing as the Solomon lineage does when it describes beauty in the Tree of Life. In the Tree of Life, beauty is tiferet. And it has another synonym, which is shalom, wholeness: the more opposites, the more polarities I can weave together into a new tiferet ‘beauty’ — into a new shalom ‘a new whole’ — the more beauty I have.
The value of all values, Whitehead writes in Process and Reality, is tiferet — the central channel whose center point is ultimate beauty. And beauty means transfiguring the opposites into a wider Field of Value. No one is outside the Field of Value.
We have to be artists. The pleasure of the artist is in their irreducibly unique creativity — weaving, painting the stroke of the brush that can only be painted by them.
The artist is mad. That’s why we talk about mad love. That’s why we don’t talk about ordinary love. Ordinary love can’t survive the exigent pressures, the cauldron of entropy. Only mad love can do that.
The artist is filled with mad love.
Not mere human sentiment, not a strategy of power, but mad love. The insanity that’s the only sanity. It’s that mad passion. It’s that mad love.
It’s that ecstasy, that ekstasis in Greek, where I step out of my small self and I feel the currency of Eros moving through me, painting, holding my hand, holding the quill in my pen, holding the computer, weaving.
It doesn’t matter whether I am writing a text, or I am writing a marketing piece, or I am engaged in some technical detail. It’s all the same. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same ecstasy. It’s the same passion.
We are a Unique Self Symphony. We are politicians. We are committed to the polis. And the polis needs the potency of a new Story of Value without which the center will not hold.
Anything great is cumulative over decades
Let’s re-understand ourselves.
We are philosophers, which means we are lovers of knowing. And knowing is carnal knowledge, and the artist is the one who trusts that there’s that which can be painted. There is beauty to be evoked, and even when there is ugliness in painting, that itself is redemptive. The very act of the artist is an expression of faith.
The first word for art, as we said, is oman (and by the way, it’s the English word is amen). This is all amen.
As we said, the first meaning of oman is “art.” I’m an artist.
The second meaning is “trust.”
The third meaning is “skill” (emun).
This morning I was reading in the Zohar this intense passage in Aramaic about the intense painful skill of loving. There is an expansion of self to develop and master the skill of loving. Love is a great skill. The artist needs the skill. There is an emun; there is practice.
Moshe Idel, the greatest scholar of Kabbalah in terms of manuscripts today in the world (he has read more manuscripts than everyone), the only thing that ever accomplishes anything that’s great is cumulative over decades; not ten years — twenty, and thirty, and forty. Anyone who has kids knows that.
To change the source code of culture is a cumulative artistic effort — day after day of practice. It’s not a piece on a to-do list. It is a constant ritualized action. It’s the textualization of Eros, the creation of a great library in all of Her ways.
I’ve got to be able to have vision.
I’ve got to see beyond the immediate, hold the immediate, be fully in what the present demands — and yet, be called into the future. That’s the third meaning of amen —
artist,
trust,
and then this cumulative, daily, radical effort produces greatness.
The Story of Value is a great artistic unfolding, the canvas of Reality.
The fourth meaning is so beautiful.
Omen, the nursing mother who holds the child of Reality at her breast.
Moses, the leader, Moses, the artist, Moses, who represents the entire generation (all 600,000 live in Moses; Moses is not the charismatic leader; Moses is Unique Self Symphony himself) — Moses is described in the text as the nursing mother who holds the child at her breast, and the child knows that no matter what, her mother won’t drop her. That’s what faith means. Faith means, I know my mother is not going to drop me. That’s the omen. Omen is the nursing mother that engenders in the child this knowing: my mother won’t drop me, my father won’t drop me.
We have to be radical here.
We have to say, we have to be the mothers and the fathers, even as we are the sons and the daughters, but it’s not enough to be just the sons and the daughters. It’s not enough just to be lovers.
We have to take the responsibility of being the mothers and the fathers, even as we have our own mother traumas. Even as we have our own father traumas, even as we feel like we didn’t get the blessing of the father, or we got somehow constricted by the mother. We have to loosen the fixities of our early traumas in order to become the mother, to become the father and to become the omen, the artist who practices radically every day, who trusts that there is an internal coherence; there is a possibility of possibility that’s yearning to emerge and that holds the generation at his breast, at her breast. And the generation has to know that we’re not going to turn away, that we’re committed.
Does that sound grandiose?
Well, it is not grandiose. It’s actually just grand. Grand in the sense of a grand piano trying to make great music. It’s an unbearable responsibility. It’s also an unbearable joy.
Prayer
Modeh ani Le’Fanecha.
I embrace my I, I am before you (Leviticus 23).
Before means face. Before means being on the inside. I’m not just before you, I am on the inside of your face. It means I am turning towards you. I am turning towards this great artistic work. I embrace my I. I am the inside of your face. I am turning towards you in this next sacred conversation in the Field of Value.
Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Melech Chai Ve-Kayam, Modeh ani Le’Fanecha, Melech Chai Ve-Kayam. Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Modeh ani Le’Fanecha.
It doesn’t matter if you are an atheist, or you are a Catholic, or you are a Buddhist, or you are a Taoist, or you are a Native American. We are picking these words as an example, representing in the great world religion, the world, the great art tapestry as a context for our diversity.
Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Modeh ani Le’Fanecha. Rabba Emuna-Techa. Rabba Emuna-Techa. Rabba Emuna-Techa.
Great is my trust in Thee, She; great is my trust in Thee, She; great is my trust in Thee, She. Great is my trust in Thee, She. Great is your trust in me, She. Great is your trust in me, She. Great is your trust in me.
Rabba Emuna-Techa, Rabba Emuna-Techa.
Great is your trust in me, She. Great is your trust in we, She. Great is my trust in Thee, She. Great is my trust in Thee, She.
Rabba Emuna-Techa. Rabba Emuna-Techa. Rabba Emuna-Techa. Rabba Emuna-Techa.
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