Desire: The Heart of Reality
Part 1 of a 5-Part Series of an Early Draft of the Essay "The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future"
We will start with just a couple of sentences recapitulating what we have discussed in depth elsewhere.[1]
We live in a CosmoErotic Universe. Reality itself is animated and driven by Eros.[2] That is one of the tenets of what we have called CosmoErotic Humanism.[3] The core understanding, drawn from an extensive integration of a broad range of exterior and interior sciences, is that the human participates directly and uniquely in the larger Field of Value, which is Cosmic Eros.
The human being is the CosmoErotic Universe in person. And by CosmoErotic Universe we do not imply merely the physical structure of matter, but rather the entire Universe in all of its interiors and exteriors. The realization that the CosmoErotic Universe distinctly incarnates in every human being is the core of CosmoErotic Humanism.
An essential quality of Eros is desire. Throughout traditional, modern, and postmodern societies, the surface chatter of human culture has tended to identify desire with sex. The two words are virtually synonyms. But deeper levels of realization in all three time periods inform us that desire is not in any sense reducible to the sexual; indeed, sexual desire participates in the larger Desire of Reality—a Desire that powers Reality.
When I am on the inside, when I am fully intimate with myself, I am able to access desire, the most wanton and poignant quality of the erotic experience. Desire is an essential expression of Love and Eros. But when I am on the outside, a stranger to myself, I am alienated from my deepest desires. I cannot access my yearning, though longing and desire are vital strands in the textured fabric of Eros.
It was Rilke, rebelling against the old religious dogmas, who wrote of the shivering blaze that is Reality’s Desire as it awakens in human consciousness:
You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything
The darkness that comes with every infinite fall
And the shivering blaze of every step up
So many live on and want nothing
…
But what you love to see are faces
That do work and feel thirst.[4]
Desire is a quality of Cosmos itself. To place desire only in the realm of the sexual is to exile the erotic to the sexual[5]—but we must remember that twelve billion years of Cosmic Eros existed before sex disclosed itself.
Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
Desire Implies Future Tense
Intense desire means that I yearn for something I do not have. I yearn not for what is present but for that which longs to present itself. Desires implies future tense. We do not desire the past or the present. We desire the future.
Desire Implies Need
As we have written elsewhere, not all desires are equal. Our deepest heart’s desire is a quality of Eros. Eros is the force of Cosmos itself desiring to emerge. We have articulated Eros clearly in the writings of CosmoErotic Humanism via the Eros equation:
Eros = Radical Aliveness x Desiring (Growing + Seeking) x Deeper Contact x Greater Wholeness x Self-Actualization/ Self-Transcendence [Creation/Destruction]
We have formulated a set of precise interior science equations evolving around what we have called First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value. We cannot engage in a reconstruction project of culture with regressive fundamentalism, or progressive human potential movement, or new age declarations, with all due respect to the partially legitimate offerings of each of those forms. As such, we have articulated these precise equations, which we unpack in other writings on CosmoErotic Humanism.[6]
For our purposes in this short essay, a general statement of the Eros principle, without entering the details of the equation, is sufficient, as the purpose of this essay is to introduce a key part of the theory of identity in CosmoErotic Humanism. By identity we mean the most accurate and compelling response to the first of the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism: Who am I? The core of our response to this great question of CosmoErotic Humanism—integrating the leading validated insights of premodern, modern, and postmodern insights across wisdom streams into a New Story of Value and Identity—is the five selves, which are at the core of Unique Self Theory.[7] In this writing, however, we are adding a new key dimension in our response to the question of Who am I—the narrative of identity. This new dimension was first articulated in our study and practice intensives in Holland and Belgium over the last decade.
So, here is our general Eros statement:
Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, desiring, seeking, moving towards, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
In other words, desire is one of the constituents of Eros. Eros lives in us as evolutionary desire itself, uniquely incarnate in our irreducibly unique personhood. When we are disassociated from the unique Eros that animates us and drives us, we are alienated from the larger Field of Eros. It is precisely through our irreducibly unique quality of Eros that we participate in the larger Field of Eros.
When we are not in the Field of Eros, feelings of emptiness and ennui overwhelm us. We can barely bear it. So, we cover over the emptiness with pretty costumes of pseudo-eros and its desires. These desires are not our deepest heart’s desire, but a more surface, pseudo-erotic form of desire. What psychologists call acting out, in its myriad forms of addiction, is but one expression of pseudo-eros.
We need to know our own desire. And we desire to know what we authentically need. That is what it means to know thyself. To know yourself is to clarify your desire. The process of clarification is known by the interior sciences as Berur.[8] Once you do Berur—the clarification of desire—you develop the capacity to incarnate the desire of evolution itself—manifest as you.
Desire implies need.[9]
Clarified desire meets authentic needs. This is the need of evolution, or Reality, itself for its unique expression in you, as you, and through you. Or said in the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, clarified desire, your deepest heart’s desire, is evolution awakening as you. Your need becomes Reality’s Need.
Distorted desire meets distorted needs. Ambiguous desire meets ambiguous needs. Both are often forms of pseudo-eros.
Desire implies a need that is not met in the present or in the past. Desire implies a need that lives in the future. This is true, even if the desire is about reconnecting to the past. The point is that, in the future, I want to collect my past.
The realization of that desire, or LoveDesire, is a core structure of Cosmos. It is a core structure that informs us about the dignity of desire, which in turn informs us of the dignity of need. Cosmos is animated by desire and need. Their evolution appears as two interwoven plotlines of Cosmos, and the response to need is a fundamental driver of Cosmos.
At the human level, we awaken to ourselves as evolution. From our perspective, we might even say, evolution awakens to itself as us. But from evolution’s interior perspective, it was self-evidently already awake when it manifested the vast codes and design of the Intimate Universe. Just think mitosis and meiosis, and the intelligent, conscious Cosmos becomes self-evident.
At the human level, therefore, Reality generates a new capacity—to clarify desire and need. Awakening to our identity as evolution, the capacity to distinguish between authentic needs and pseudo-needs, authentic desires and pseudo-desires, emerges. We will articulate the clarification of need on the human level later but, for now, let’s stay focused on desire and its implied need, with the understanding that we are referring to authentic need in all of its disguises.
In many systems of spirit, desire was thought to be the enemy of the sacred. Classical forms of both Eastern and Western mysticism reject desire and, with it, its implicit future tense. Theravada Buddhism, for example—along with most other great mystical spiritual traditions—either rejects desire, viewing it with great suspicion, or seeks to straitjacket it in every possible way.
A natural corollary of the rejection of desire is the rejection of the future tense. Mysticism puts radical emphasis on the Eternity that resides in the present. Indeed, the reality of the now is omnipresent in much of the interior sciences and is often expressed as the Power of Now or the invocation to Be Here Now.
In a not-unrelated move, virtually all the great traditions, at least in their public teachings, falsely conflated desire with its sexual expression, effectively exiling desire, a core face of Eros, to the sexual. This reduction of desire to the sexual distorts both the nature of the sexual and the nature of desire itself. The result is the collapse of the sexual and the failure of desire. The sexual collapses because we look to it to meet all our needs for the full aliveness of desire. Desire collapses because when we exile it to the sexual, we effectively denude all other dimensions of life from the pulse of its aliveness and wisdom. We become, in the language of T.S. Elliot, the hollow men and the stuffed men.
We become, as the poet continues,
Shape without form, shade without colour,
paralysed force, gesture without motion;[10]
The contemporary field of study that most potently restored desire to the heart of the Universe is emergence science,[11] science’s fairy dust. At its core, emergence is the realization that the present—in all its complexity—is not the future. The future will emerge something new, which is not only not reducible to, but also greater than, the sum of its parts. Emergence has two steps: First is the desire to merge, the yearning for deeper unions. Second is the desire to emerge resulting from these newly merged unions that generate new synergies—new wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.
In the language of second simplicity:
Evolution pulses with desire: the desire to merge and the desire to emerge.
Key moments of desire are recorded all through evolutionary history. The notion of Reality’s Desire for more—why Reality did not stop at hydrogen and helium—is core to evolutionary thought and, similarly, the intense desire that binds all of Reality in dances of allurement is the heart of all matter. The iconic scientist and author Howard Bloom writes lyrically about the intense desire of protons for electrons, which advanced evolution 380,000 years after the Big Bang.[12]
Reality is driven by desire. The desire at the heart of Cosmos is specific, not simply general. Unseen reasons of the heart guide the precise, potent path of desire that animates the self-organizing Universe. Evolution emerges through new configurations of intimacy, all brought into being by the constant allured desire of the Cosmos.
Interior scientist Rabia was feeling Reality’s desire when she wrote:
God must get hungry for us; why is He not also
a Lover who wants His lovers
near.[13]
But, at its core, desire is not about the sexual. It is the quality of the evolutionary impulse itself that has been throbbing at the core of Reality since the inception of time. In the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, it is the radical desire for the Good, the True and the Beautiful, in all of their forms, that is the generator function, the animating Eros of Cosmos.[14]
Evolution is Reality’s inherent Desire for the future. Reality is not satisfied with the past or even with the present; Reality yearns for, desires, needs the creative fulfillment of the future.
This is the first part of an early draft of the essay “The Three Selves: A Memory of the Future” by Dr. Marc Gafni. It is part of The Phenomenology of Eros: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire by Dr. Marc Gafni with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Dr. Kristina Kincaid. The essay was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this essay, next week, or go to our website to read the whole essay or download a PDF of it here (no registration or login necessary):
New Book Release: First Values & First Principles
Our new book can be ordered from the US and Canada.
From other countries, you can already pre-order the book from your country's amazon.
The audiobook version can also be ordered on amazon, now!
First Values & First Principles
Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
by David J. Temple
AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.
Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.
“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary
David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.
Footnotes
[1] See, for example, the four-volume Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire by Dr. Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Dr. Kristina Kincaid.
[2] We are using the word Eros in a very specific sense, as what we have called the experience of radical aliveness, desiring, seeking, moving towards, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
[3] CosmoErotic Humanism is a world philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. Much like Romanticism or Existentialism, CosmoErotic Humanism is not merely a theory but a movement that changes the very mood of Reality. It is an invitation to participate in evolving the source code of consciousness and culture towards a cosmocentric ethos for a planetary civilization.
CosmoErotic Humanism addresses three core questions: Who? Where? What?
· Who am I? Who are we? [Narrative of identity]
· Where are we? [Universe Story]
· What is there to do? What do we want? What is our deepest heart’s desire—both personally and collectively? [Eros and ethos]
This movement is a strong, fluid, and emergent response to the meta-crisis, fundamentally understanding that existential and catastrophic risks are not just rooted in flawed infrastructure (technological and other systems), social structure (law, education, politics), but primarily in failed superstructure—specifically the collapse of an implicit, shared worldview, what we call a shared Story of Value rooted in evolving First Principles and First Values as a context for our diversity.
The core of CosmoErotic Humanism is therefore a new Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values that integrates the validated insights of the interior and exterior sciences—across premodern, modern, and postmodern thought—ultimately recasting cosmic evolution as a Story of Value, in which our stories are understood to be chapter and verse in the larger narrative arc of Reality—the CosmoErotic Evolutionary Love Story of the Intimate Universe.
These evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value are grounded in a comprehensive set of meta-theories, encompassing psychology (and a theory of self), epistemology, scientific metaphysics, education, ethics, theology, mysticism, sexuality, Eros, and ethos.
CosmoErotic Humanism offers some of the first words on the possible emergence of world philosophies and world religions adequate to our time of civilizational crisis and transformation—rooted in a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity, weaving humanity into a shared story of inherent yet evolving Cosmic Value.
[4] From: Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke, Anita Barrows (Translator), Joanna Macy (Translator), Riverhead Books, 1997. The original German book Das Stunden-Buch was first published in 1905.
[5] On the exile of the erotic in the sexual as a primary malaise of the culture and as source for the collapse of sexuality itself, see The Mystery of Love, by M. Gafni, 2004, Simon and Schuster, Chapters 1-3. See also Chapter Seven “The Cosmo-Erotic Reality Unveiled” in A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, by M. Gafni and K. Kincaid, 2017, BenBella Books, Inc.
[6] See David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism—Post-Tragic Memories of the Future and see also the fuller conversation in David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism—Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method—both books published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, in Conjunction with Waterside Press and Integral Publishers. David J. Temple is a pseudonym representing Marc Gafni and Zachary Stein in all of these writings. In individual books, David J. Temple also represents key partners in the project. In the books referred to above, a third figure, who is also represented by David J. Temple, is our dear friend Ken Wilber. Ken is the co-founder with Marc and Zak of the Center for World Spirituality, which later renamed Center for Integral Wisdom and finally evolved to its present name, Center for World Philosophy and Religion. Each of these name changes was with great intention and represented an evolution of the Center’s mission and work.
[7] On Unique Self Theory and the five selves, see Gafni, Marc. Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with Introduction and Afterword by Ken Wilber, Integral Publishers, 2012. The notions of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony emerged at the interface of religious scholarship, psychological meta-theory, and evolutionary meta-theory—expressed collaboratively in different forms by Gafni, Stein, and Hubbard. This work naturally integrates with Hubbard’s seminal work expressing and exploring Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, by B. M. Hubbard, 2015, New World Library (revised edition). For a detailed look at the genesis of Unique Self Theory itself, see the special scholarly issue of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 6(1), which is dedicated to Unique Self Theory. The volume was edited and largely penned by M. Gafni, with the lead article, “The Evolutionary Emergent of Unique Self: A New Chapter in Integral Theory,” by M. Gafni, 2011, JITP, (6)1, 1-36. See also major works by Gafni (2012; 2014) Your Unique Self (see above) and Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism: Two Models and Why They Matter on the core articulation of Unique Self Theory. And see the forthcoming work by Z. Stein and M. Gafni, Toward a Politics of Evolutionary Love. For the first book-length treatment of First Principles of CosmoErotic Humanism, see A Return to Eros by M. Gafni and K. Kincaid, 2017. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is supporting a series of book projects currently underway involving scholars from over a dozen fields, including business, psychotherapy, attachment theory, evolutionary theory, medicine, and technology. For more details about this emerging school of thought, see the think tank at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org.
[8] Borrowing a term from the sixteenth-century Lurianic interior sciences.
[9] Desire and need, however, are not isomorphic. Need is generally understood to be more survival-oriented, fundamental, and non-negotiable versus desire, which evokes the sense of a more discretionary nature. Need is also understood in the sense of immediately needed, right now, versus desire, which is more future-oriented with less of a sense of pressing immediacy. But to really engage desire and need, one must first distinguish between Eros and pseudo-eros. Eros is the experience of radical aliveness moving towards wholeness, while pseudo-eros is the attempt to cover up the lack of Eros through various frivolous or destructive strategies. In the way of this initial distinction, we further elucidate the distinction between authentic desire (or deepest heart’s desire) and pseudo-desire. Pseudo-desire might also be called unclarified desire or surface desire. The same goes for need. We distinguish between authentic need and pseudo-need. Once you take this distinction into account, and we affirm that we are talking about authentic need and clarified desire, the sharp distinction between need and desire becomes sharply attenuated and even blurred. Indeed, the more evolved one’s developmental level and the more evolved one’s level of self (for example, Unique Self vs. separate self), the more needs and desires blur into each other.
[10] Eliot, T. S. (1925), “The Hollow Men,” Faber & Faber. See also https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/t-s-eliot/poetry/text/single-page#the-hollow-men. Retrieved February 2024.
[11] On what is being called emergence science or theory, see, The Reemergence of Emergence Theory, Phillip Clayton, Paul Davies, Oxford University Press.
[12] In The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, Prometheus Books, 2012, Howard Bloom writes on p. 46: “At roughly the 380,000-year mark after the big bang, the particles in the plasma slow down. We call that deceleration “cooling.” The skittering protons, neutrons, and electrons separate, and give each other more space. But more space does not mean solitude. It does not mean time off from social gatherings. And it does not mean randomness. In fact, it means the very opposite. The puny particles called electrons discover for the first time in their 380,000-year existence that they are not satisfied on their own. Whizzing in their vicinity are particles 1,837 times more massive than they are. Hulking giants. At least relatively speaking. These galumphulous Gargantuas are protons. And the tiny flits called electrons find that they have an electromagnetic hunger, an electromagnetic craving for a sort of coziness this universe has never known before. What’s more, the hulking giants of the new cosmos, protons, discover that they, too, feel they are missing something. They discover that they, too, have an electromagnetic longing at their core.”
[13] Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West—Renderings by Daniel Landinsky (p. 26). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[14] See, for example, Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, New York, Free Press, 1967 (originally 1933). See especially pp.11-13 on the attraction to goodness, truth, and beauty as an expression of the Eros of Reality: “All three types of character [intellectual beauty, sensible beauty, and moral beauty] partake in the highest ideal of satisfaction possible for actual realization, and in this sense can be termed that beauty which provides the final contentment for the Eros of the Universe.”—p. 13. It is also expressed elsewhere as what Whitehead calls Divine Appetite or, to put it more simply, the hunger of the Divine Desire (or the hunger of the Divine) that animates all of Reality. E.g.: “God’s immanence in the world in respect to his primordial nature is an urge towards the future based upon an appetite in the present.” Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28)—p.32. Free Press. Kindle-Version. We talk about this Divine Appetite that is the Eros of Cosmos in The Intimate Universe, deploying the more intuitive language of desire. See also Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World, Free Press, 1997. See also David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism, State University Press of New York, Albany 2000, p. 294, who succinctly alludes to Whitehead with the sentence, “We are attracted to beauty, truth, and goodness because these values are entertained appetitively by the Eros of the universe, whose appetites we feel.”
We are also delighted to have released this new Video Course with Dr. Marc Gafni as a special gift for you:
CosmoErotic Humanism: The New Story of Value – Birthing the New Human and the New Humanity (recorded in 2022)
Chapter 1: Responding to the Meta-Crisis with a New Story: CosmoErotic Humanism
Chapter 2: Reading Texts of Culture: Don’t Look Up Explores Value, Beyond the Intention of Its Writers
Chapter 3: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Chapter 4: The Radical Path to the Transformation of Shame: From the Shame of Finitude to the Celebration of Finitude
Chapter 5: The Leading Edge of Human Identity
Chapter 6: Towards a New Universal Grammar of Evolving Value as a Context for our Diversity
Chapter 7: Blessings of the Father and Blessings of the Mother: Am I Welcome in Cosmos?
Each level consists of the main teaching by Dr. Marc Gafni that was recorded on one of seven days during Eros Mystery School in Holland in 2022. It contains Dharma talks, practices, prayers, chants, movie clips, songs, poems, and dance sessions – seamlessly woven into one whole. It is kind of like being at a Mozart concerto played on that day – in those hours – unrehearsed and raw – never to be played in that way ever again but recorded for you in this course journey, which is Reality’s gift for you.
We offer this incredible course of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion as a gift for you, because we believe in the urgent, desperate need to make the new Story of CosmoErotic Humanism available to whomever needs it. We are not in a win/lose metrics selling courses, but much rather, we are seeking to activate a Planetary Awakening in Love through Unique Self Symphonies.