First Notes on the Conversational Cosmos

The Amorous Cosmos Is the Relational Cosmos Is the Conversational Cosmos

This is part 1 of 4 of an excerpt from our forthcoming book The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture. We are going to post part 2 next week.

For citing, this is the appropriate citation:

Dr. Marc Gafni (with Dr. Zachary Stein and Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin), The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture, forthcoming: World Philosophy and Religion Press: Spring 2025, “First Notes on the Conversational Cosmos: The Amorous Cosmos Is the Relational Cosmos Is the Conversational Cosmos.”[1]

1. Relationships Are Our Primal Need

We want to live from a deeper place of aliveness, joy, and vitality. A relationship can fill us with all of these—or drain us of all of these. We want to experience our lives as suffused with purpose, creativity, and fulfillment. We want not only to achieve great things but to share our achievements. If we have no one to share our achievements, they often seem meaningless. Being witnessed in relationship is part and parcel of the motivational architecture that drives us to achievement.

In a word, we want to be in relationship. We want to be outrageously^[2] in love with our partners, our friends, ourselves, and with life itself. Only the personal love or relationship has the capacity to heal the traumatized stories of our past, and only the personal love or relationship liberates the contraction of our coiled separate self. Only the personal love heals the wounds of the traumatized ego.

It is in relationship that we transcend ourselves—only to find ourselves.

It is not by accident that our shared path of meaning in the world today is the path of relationships. Relationships are not an adjunct of our lives. We hold them to be essential to a life well-lived. Whatever our nationality, our stance on religion, our political or spiritual orientation or lack thereof, there is one path that we all walk together: the path of relationships. It can be fairly stated that the one shared spiritual path in the world today is the path of relationships. This path is being walked by atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Aboriginals, and everyone else.

Reality is relationship. Relationships are our primal need.

Imagine this scene: You have won the lottery, or you have realized a precious life goal, or you have seen something of dazzling beauty or depth. You rush to your mobile phone to text, email, or share on social media. But you are stopped short by a crushing realization: There is no one who wants to receive your communication. There is no one with whom to share. You are crushed by loneliness.

Based on extensive scientific research, we now know that loneliness, even without physical isolation, far outweighs diet and lifestyle as a predictor of disease and death.^[3] We lose our will to live if there is no other being with deep interiors with whom we can exchange feelings, energy, and information. Put simply, if there is no one to talk to—to really talk to—life virtually ceases to be worth living.

If we do not have at least one being with whom to communicate, who has an interior quality resonant with our own, our life is a horror of loneliness. We can have everything we need to survive. We can have every material pleasure available to us—delicious food, a beautiful setting, and the most sublime music, coupled with every available form of entertainment. We can have every intellectual pleasure available to us. But if we cannot communicate with another person, interior to interior, then life becomes almost not worth living. Without relationship, life withers and dies. For most people, not being able to talk to another being with an interior sense of self generates borderline or full-on suicidal depression.

We are compelled to foster relationships again and again, even when facing past pain and failure. The imperative to relationship, however, is not merely a biological imperative. It is the categorical imperative of all of Reality, from atoms to planets to cells to humans.

Remember the wonderful twenty-first-century movie Cast Away. The protagonist Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks, is marooned on an island in the South Pacific. He uses his own blood to imprint a face on a Wilson Sporting Goods volleyball. He gives the ball a name—Wilson. He needs someone to talk to, and Wilson is that someone.

He had everything he needed to survive, and even thrive materially, on the island. But despite that, he risked his life to get off the island by setting off in a makeshift raft. He would rather die in search of another human being than remain alone on the island. Chuck is expressing something much deeper than a strange fluke of human beings who can’t stand to be alone. He is expressing a core imperative of Reality, the drive to relationship. He knows that the lack of (fulfilling) relationship is literally a form of death. In the language of the erotic mystics of the Talmud in the third century, havruta o mituta—either relationships or death.^[4]

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Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

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2. Conversation Happens between Edges of Desire

From the perspective of CosmoErotic Humanism, we live in a Conversational Cosmos; our lives are a series of conversations. Chuck, cast away on an island, is desperate for conversation. Although in objective terms he has little chance of surviving the open sea on his makeshift raft, the call of subjectivity entirely overwhelms the objective. Without the experience of conversation—meeting another interiority—life isn’t worth living. This is not an abstract postulate but our own direct experience of reality. In the concentration camps, the prisoners whose interiors had collapsed, who had resigned themselves to the horror, often lost their capacity for conversation. They went silent—a silence of absence, in which the cries of suffering were silenced by the deafening intensity of pain that muted all conversation.

What is a conversation? It is the place of encounter. Encounter happens between edges. The edge of my face meets the edge of your face. We are face to face, which is the position of authentic conversation.

In an authentic conversation, I need to be in my own voice. I need to find the singularity, the aloneness of my voice. I need to feel the contours of my desires held in the qualities of the voice that is uniquely mine. My voice is the quality of unique desire that is my identity.

At the edge of my identity, which is the edge of my desire, I yearn for contact with you. This is the nature of Eros—the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.^[5] Contact happens through conversation. But my desire is not just for contact with you in any generalized sense but with the edge of your desire. If you are lost inside of your desire, we cannot make contact. If you are alienated from your desire, we cannot make contact. It is only when you are both inside your desire and at its edge that you open to my desire. In the space in between, contact happens.

The image of reality preferred by the lineage of Solomon is two sensually entwined cherubs atop the ark of the covenant in the inner sanctum, called the Holy of Holies, of the temple in ancient Jerusalem. In the language of the sacred text, it is the place of meeting—the empty space in between, from which the word of the Divine emerges. Conversation takes place in the empty space between the cherubs.

Contact is conversation. The movement of Eros is to contact through conversation, which generates deeper contact and greater wholeness. All of Eros is conversation.

The sexual models the Erotic, which is why the interior sciences often understand sexing as conversations: Upper lips meet upper lips, and then lower lips begin to speak, evoked by tongue. Indeed, the very word tongue (in both Hebrew and English), can refer to language—the structure of consciousness that arouses and capacitates conversation. All conversations are erotic conversations.

The primary Hebrew term for sexing is Yada. Yada means “to know,” in the sense of carnal knowledge. Carnal knowledge is where the edge of my desire meets the edge of your desire, in the space in between the cherubs, from where a new gnosis—the word of God—emerges. Sexing that ignores the desire of the other is not conversation. Communication is communion; intimate communion is the conversation of desires that meet at the edge and create a new gnosis. In the language of the text, Adam and Eve transcend their loneliness in the gnosis of sexing, which is intimate communion.

Sex is contact at the edge of identity. My identity is the unique quality of desire that fills me. I am desire.^[6] The only way to embody the fullness of my own unique desire is to realize that the name of God is Desire^[7]—and that there is no local desire, even as there is no generic desire. To be a Unique Self^[8] is to realize that I am not separate from the larger field of Desire, even as I am a unique incarnation of that very field. Therefore, my identity is my unique configuration of desire.

Desire expresses allurement to a value or set of values. Therefore, the clarification of desire generates the clarification of value. In other words, desire is a conversation around value. All desire is the desire for a deeper conversation around value, and Conversation itself it a value of Cosmos. That is what we refer to when we talk about the Conversational Cosmos.

Participate in the conversation:

3. Conversational Cosmos: The First Whispers of Conversation

Once pointed out, the conversational nature of reality becomes self-evidently true in the human realm. But according to both the interior sciences and exterior sciences,^[9] this is the nature of reality all the way up and all the way down, in every dimension of reality. From a scientific perspective, we live in a Conversational Cosmos.

There are conversations taking place between subatomic particles that become atoms, between the atoms that become molecules, between molecules that become macromolecules, between macromolecules that become cells, between simple cells (prokaryotes) that become more complex cells (eukaryotes) and then multicellular organisms, and between organisms and organs within an organism—all the way up the evolutionary chain. These conversations are based on shared values, shared meaning, shared telos, and shared story. These four overlapping elements are often referred to in the exterior sciences as information.

In the next two sections, we’ll explore the conversations happening on the most fundamental levels of Reality, between subatomic particles. Later throughout the book, we’ll turn to conversations between atoms, molecules, and cells.

3.1. Quarks: Beloveds Who Are Never Separate from Each Other

Let’s go back to the beginning of the Universe.

In the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang, gazillions of quarks explode as Reality. Quarks are called elementary, or fundamental, particles because they are the essential building blocks of the Universe. They are not divisible into other particles—the intimate communion that constitutes them is not, in the current understanding of science, subject to separation into separate parts.^[10]

When trying to understand the subatomic world, it is crucially important to disengage from the image of particles as tiny balls or specks of matter, which is almost inevitably invoked in our minds by the very word particle. A particle is a part that is not apart; it participates—through it is irreducible uniqueness—in the larger field of reality. Quarks, protons, neutrons, and all other particles are best thought of as sets of relationships, or allurements. Quarks, for example, which make up 99.9 percent of ordinary matter, could be seen as fast-moving, dancing points of allured energy. Professor Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate of 2004 and one of the world’s most eminent theoretical physicists,^[11] discovered that the mass of a proton comes entirely from the arrangement of the quarks and not from the quarks themselves.^[12] In an essay in The New York Times, MIT physics graduate Dennis Oberbye writes about Wilczek^[13] (we added the italics for emphasis):

Nowadays physicists—those coldblooded reductionists—are telling a . . . poetic but no less mathematically rigorous tale. It is a story not of a clockwork world but an entangled interactive world whose constituents derive their identities and properties from one another in endless negotiation—a city, in one physicist’s words, of querulous social inhabitants. In other words, they are telling a tale about relationships. . . . Particle physics, Dr. Wilczek and his colleagues like to point out, is not really about particles anymore, but about their mathematical relationships—in particular symmetries—aspects of nature that remain invariant under different circumstances and viewpoints.

In the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, particles are fundamental configurations of Eros and intimacy in a larger Field of Allurement.

Quarks are so relational that they are never found in isolation. They first appeared in the Universe as the so-called quark-gluon plasma (gluons are quanta of energy that bind quarks together). Once the Universe cooled down a bit, they entered into even more intimate relationships with each other, in groups of three, within (what we now know as) neutrons and protons. We use the word intimate here not poetically but precisely—according to the terms of our intimacy equation:^[14]

1. They have a shared identity (as a neutron or a proton) while retaining relative otherness as distinct quarks.

2. They recognize each other; we know this because they enter into relationships only with particular types of other quarks: A proton is made up of two up quarks and one down quark, and a neutron is composed of two down quarks and one up quark (up and down are two of six distinct “flavors” of quarks).

3. They converse and feel each other through gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force that binds them together.^[15] In the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, we might say that gluons are intimate love notes between quarks.

4. Their shared field of value is constituted by the laws of physics and mathematics they all obey, as well as their mutual drive to become parts of larger wholes.

5. And finally, they have a shared purpose as neutrons and protons, which go on to co-create all known chemical elements of the universe and, ultimately, biological life.

In the interior sciences, the configuration of intimacy at the level of elementary particles is characterized as two beloveds making love, who do not ever separate from each other (in the Aramaic of the Zohar, Teri Rein DeLo Mitparshin). This is called, in the interior sciences of Hebrew wisdom, the Zivug of Abba and Imma—the Sefirot of Wisdom (Chochma) and Insight (Bina) in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. These are the higher Sefirot in the Tree of Life.^[16]

3.2. Intimate Conversations within Atoms: No Electron Is an Island

It is now 380,000 years after the Big Bang. A proton, neutron, and electron, in particular configurations, are coming together to create a new whole called an atom. Howard Bloom writes about the emergence of the first atoms in the Universe:

Electrons do indeed discover that their inanimate lusts match the loneliness of protons perfectly. And electrons and protons do glump together. They do pair up in proton-electron twosomes. What’s worse, when electrons discover how naturally they fit around protons, the result is a radically new set of properties. . . . It’s the handful of properties we call an atom: hardness, durability, and the ability to play with others in the sandbox of space, to team up in ways this cosmos has never seen before.^[17]

While electrons and protons are stable on their own, a neutron has about a fifteen-minute life span outside of the nucleus of an atom, that is, outside of its relationship to a proton. If it does not establish a relationship, it loses its wholeness as a neutron and decays into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. But once it creates a relationship with a proton to form the nucleus of an atom, it can last as a neutron for billions of years.

All the particles within an atom are in unique relationships with each other and in constant intimate conversations. The messages between the atomic nuclei and the electrons dancing around them take on the form of photons—the carriers of the electromagnetic force.^[18] The nucleus of an atom consists of protons and neutrons.^[19] The electromagnetic force would have repelled protons from each other, because they are positively charged. However, at the very close distances inside the nucleus of an atom, the so-called residual strong force allures protons and neutrons together. When three quarks are bound together in a proton or a neutron, almost all of the strong nuclear force carried by the gluons goes toward binding the quarks together. However, a tiny fraction of the force acts outside protons and neutrons and allows them to have a conversation that generates a new whole, the nucleus of an atom. The messages in this conversation take on the form of mesons (quark-antiquark pairs).

Said differently, there is a constant interplay between forces of allurement and autonomy between particles and an exchange of energy between the protons and neutrons within the nucleus of the atom. We might also say that neutrons and protons are aroused to be in conversation with each other.

All matter is made up of atoms and their relationships. And all atoms are made up of relationships: the strong nuclear relationships between the quarks (and their intimate relationships and conversations), the residual strong nuclear relationships between the protons and neutrons (and their intimate conversations), and the electromagnetic relationships and conversations between the atomic nuclei and electrons.

An atom is a new emergent whole: It is more than the sum of its particles. The particles themselves are changed and transformed in that relationship, in a way that is essentially not so different from how we are changed and transformed in an intimate relationship.^[20] As the quantum gravity theorist Lee Smolin formulated it: “It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or nonexistence of everything else,” and “No electron is an island.”^[21]

3.3. Wholeness Implies Conversation

Both protons emerging out of conversations between quarks and atoms emerging out of conversation between protons, neutrons, and electrons are what Arthur Koestler called new holons.^[22] A holon is a set of parts that come together to participate in a larger whole. The emergence of holons is a structural quality of Cosmos. In a holon, each part is both individuated and has the wider identity of the larger whole. This is the core of our definition of intimacy (see Essay One, Section 2.3). In effect, a holon is a conversation—an act of communication generating communion, or wholeness.

Proton, neutron, and electron are allured to each other. They are desperate to talk. In conversation, they form a shared identity—they are now an atom. They obviously recognize each other. They feel each other, so they have shared pathos. But they also have a shared value. It is the shared value of wholeness itself, and what each of them brings to the table to generate the new configuration of intimacy. This, in turn, creates new vectors of possibility—a shared purpose. The reality of shared value is the premise for shared purpose.

If they were not communicating through some sort of conversation around value, they would have no reasons to integrate; they could not come together in the pattern of intimacy we call atom. Only shared value can evoke the underlying codes of communication. There needs to be a conversation—an exchange of meaning. Conversation is absolutely intrinsic to Cosmos. Wholeness always implies conversation, which always implies meaning and value.

The notion of conversation blurs the line between two forms of meaning or value, instrumental and intrinsic. A conversation may have a purpose, but it can also be self-validating—valuable for its own sake. In other words, conversation is a mode of activity that is both intrinsically valuable, in and of itself, and extrinsically, instrumentally valuable for other purposes. It is this blurred distinction that makes conversation a core structure of reality, all the way down to quarks. It is critical to understand that this is the core of science. Reality is holons—conversations—all the way down and all the way up. This is not a regressive animism but the realization of an Intimate Universe, a CosmoErotic Universe.

This conception of conversation as both intrinsic and instrumental is, in part, what animates the notion of Leela, or Divine Play, of the great traditions. Play is both infinitely serious and pure play at the same time. Similarly, conversation is both serious and playful. It is valuable for its own sake and is somehow accomplishing something. What is the most basic structure of reality? Multiple forms of serious yet playful conversation in pursuit of some open-ended expression of value. In this realization of the nature of conversation, we begin to get a fragrance of the paradoxical relationship between contingency, randomness, and design—one of the big unanswered questions in evolutionary thought. To hold this paradox, we simply need to look at the nature of conversation.^[23]

I have often been in deep conversation with a close partner. We have never prepared a script for the conversation. There is never an outline or talking points. There is a sense of utmost seriousness in the conversation, and yet there has always been a sense of play, the sense of Leela, a sense of delight for its own sake. And yet, if you were to read the transcript of the conversation, you would think that we had spent weeks orchestrating it. In retrospect, it looks as though the conversation followed a script, planned and carefully designed. And yet it is also fully filled with spontaneity—contingency and surprise. The conversation is not random but rather free and open.

What we are saying is that conversation is the structure of evolution itself. This is the nature of conversations all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. That is the interior of what is now exteriorized as information theory. One of the core weaknesses of some key strains in information theory is the attempt to take the music out of the conversation and reduce it to its mechanics. It is the attempt to transform conversation—the exchange of meaning—into a purely causal, mechanistic process. But value and meaning that are the substrate of every conversation are beyond the category of causality.

3.4. All Conversations Are About Value

At the earlier levels of reality (as in the conversations between quarks or atoms we just described), the conversation seems to be more scripted than at the later levels. In other words, the first-person experience of freedom and choice with regard to desire and its clarification is more veiled. Yet it is still present, in the form of proto-desire, or what Whitehead called prehension.^[24] However, Reality evolves. Indeed, we might see Reality as the evolution of Eros itself. The evolution of Eros is the evolution of desire. The evolution of Eros is the evolution of conversation, for desire is, at its core, the lonely self desiring intimate communion. Communion emerges from conversation, and all conversation is a conversation around value.

Why do we have conversations, which are the root of all occurrences? Why does something occur in the world? Is it because of causality or is it because there is agency?

This is what Whitehead was exploring. In the end, we understand that everything is rooted in prehension—a proto-consciousness, a Tao, a Field of Value, in which all things arise. At the most foundational level of atomic particles, prehension may look a lot like causality, and yet even these fundamental conversations are exchanges of information—value and meaning. Value expresses itself in the material and the biological through conversations. Without this realization, all our conversations lose their meaning, and we are left in a crisis of meaning, which at its core is a crisis of Eros—a crisis of conversation.

All through Reality, conversations have had meaning, from the beginning of time, and all of those conversations—between particles, between atoms, between atoms, between molecules and macromolecules, between single cells and multicellular structures—continue in us. All of those conversations live in me. I am physically constituted by meaningful conversations. I am constituted by conversations around value.

That is why we are all desperate for conversation. That is why everyone understood Chuck in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away we invoked above. Nobody said, “Huh? That’s really weird. Why is he doing that?” Everyone got it. There was a universal anthro-ontological recognition of the rightness of it.

We now begin to understand the root of mental crises. We are told that there is no inherent value, and therefore there is no shared value. But the essence of conversation is shared value. If there is no shared value, then there is no conversation—and there are also no heroes, and no love stories. What the Conversational Cosmos says is that there is a conversation to be had, and declarations to be made. Both our words and actions matter, and our words are actions. You can be a hero in every conversation.

Conversations are always, at least implicitly, about value. The Eye of Value, which illuminates every conversation, discloses value through our own deepest heart’s desire. In opposition to the Eye of Value, you have the eye of anti-value, which actively seeks out the sacred to destroy value. The natural strategy of the eye of anti-value is to destroy conversation. The eye of anti-value desires—a pseudo-Erotic desire—to destroy all of the deepest conversations you could have.

The Eye of Value is art. They eye of anti-value is advertising.

The Eye of Value is Eros. They eye of anti-value is pseudo-Eros.

The Eye of Value is depth. The eye of anti-value is clickbait.

So much of what we are attempting to do in this book, and all of our writing, is articulation of a new language for value. The old ways of making arguments don’t even work anymore. We are in a new stratum of language and justification that, at its core, is a new language of value. We need to move beyond the nowhere, where you can live from an assumption that there is no Field of Value, to a place where we can fiercely contest values, but from within the Field of Value.

In medieval times, God was everywhere. In modernity, God is nowhere. Messiah means that God will be everywhere, again. That is the messianic transformation of the assumption behind all the conversations: We reclaim, at a new level of consciousness that integrates all sciences, that conversations about value are real, and that they only take place within the context of the Field of Value.

3.5. Messiah Is Conversation

When I meet the depth of experience, I cannot but respond. I erupt in song. It might be a song of praise, a love song, an ecstatic song or melody of grief and pain—but the bursting of a song wells up from the conversational demand of the intimate moment; it is quite different from silent introspection. The messianic moment is demarcated by song, for nothing can hold the fullness of eruption other than the conversation between finitude and the Infinite, for which prose is insufficient. Only poetry and song can begin to even allude to that ultimate conversation.

But for the lineage of Solomon and many other interior sciences, song is not merely a human trope. It not just about adding the bird song or the whale song either. All of Reality is song, and each unique discretion of infinity has its own finite song. Nachman of Breslav writes that every distinct blade of grass has its own song. This realization is the premise of Perek Shira, an ancient work called chapter of song. The work, comprised of six short chapters, is attributed by some to Solomon, by others to his father David or perhaps their descendant Judah the Prince of the second century. At is core, it is understood by all to be the lyrics for the song of all of Reality—the song of the rock, the song of the field, the song of the trees, the song of the earth, the song of the sky, and all the way through the elements of the biosphere. By song, the text means something like: Reality is sentient, Reality is coded with unique qualities of meaning, and every dimension of the Real has a unique song. Song is taken to point to value, to unique qualities of intimacy, that both evoke and incarnate a uniquely intimate conversation with Reality.

The interior sciences deploy the term Messiah as a code word for conversation. The Hebrew root word for the word Messiah, according to interior scientist Nahum of Chernobyl, is siach, the same as in “conversation”:

Every person who is a God wrestler must prepare a palace for the part of Messiah that is of his soul. Then the complete form of Humanity/Reality will be whole. . . . Messiah is related to the word maShiach, meaning conversation . . . and when thought unites with speech wholeness is realized and the Messiah arrives.^[25]

What the interior sciences describe as Messiah is in effect what CosmoErotic Humanism calls the New Human and the New Humanity. For the interior sciences of the great traditions, Messiah is not a single person but the emergence of a new consciousness in humanity. It is the natural progression of evolution itself. Relationship, which is the structure of Reality itself, is defined or expressed in terms of the deepening capacity for conversation, itself the basic unit, or monad,^[26] of Reality.

In conversation, desire meets desire. Desire is our edge; it is the realization that we are not self-contained in our autonomous vessel. We are longing for communion—we are filled with the urgent desire for conversation. We yearn for intimate unions, recognition, mutuality, and embrace. Desire is our edge. The edge of our desire is not a desire in its superficial form but our deepest heart’s desire to speak, and be heard, and to witness our beloved.

Conversation is desire. Messiah is the harmony of all desire and conversations. When all conversations at the edge synergize into Unique Self Symphonies,^[27] we being to smell the fragrance of Messiah. In effect, Reality is the evolution of love, which is the evolution of conversation, which is the evolution of intimacy.

But Messiah is not an omega point. It is not the final conversation but the culmination of what is possible in the sublunar theater—and then we begin again, at the next level, in the next place, on the next journey.

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Footnotes

[1] At the turn of the twenty-first century, I partnered with a close friend at the time, Erica Fox, in the realizing of her dream of opening an institute for spirituality and negotiation under the auspices of Harvard Law School. The first event opened with a public dialogue between me and Bill Ury (the author of Getting to Yes, with Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton, 1991) in a packed hall at the law school. Then, I had a key conversation with Erica and Doug Stone (one of the authors of Difficult Conversations, 1999). In that conversation (2003 approximately), I unpacked an early version of the new Story of Value to Doug and Erica, and as part of the new Story I formulated an early notion of the Conversational Cosmos, which has later been refined over the years, in multiple teachings. To the best of my knowledge there are three of us who have expressed some notion of the Conversational Cosmos: myself, Howard Bloom, and David Whyte. Howard and I have discussed the term and its implications extensively over the years and will publish together on this term as part of our larger shared work on what we might call honest readings of science that disclose the Amorous Cosmos. Our thoughts on the Conversional Cosmos are somewhat related to David’s but in more important ways also radically different. The formal term was first coined and published by Howard.

^[2] Outrageous Love is a term we use to describe a Love that is of a different order and quality than what we call ordinary love. Ordinary love is contrived human sentiment. Outrageous Love is the structure of Cosmos itself. We turn to this distinction later in this book; see especially Sections IV.1–2.

^[3] On the connection between quality of relationships and chronic health, see “Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development,” by John F. Mitchell (2004), pp. 178–179, and Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy, by Dean Ornish (1998).

^[4] Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Ta’anit 23a.

^[5] See Essay One, Section 2.4, The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture, for a more detailed definition of Eros.

^[6] This identity between the human being and desire is the core of an earlier work, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid (2014), and the forthcoming twelve-volume Phenomenology of Eros.

^[7] See Essay Three, Section 4, The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture, for a conversation on the name of God in the lineage of Solomon.

^[8] See Essay One, Section 3.3, The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture, for an analysis of the name of God.

^[9] For the exterior-science perspective of the Conversational Cosmos, in formal terms, see “Conversational (Dialogue) Model of Quantum Transitions” by Pavel V. Kurakin, George G. Malinetskii, and Howard Bloom (https://www.academia.edu/33106632/Conversational_dialogue_model_of_quantum_transitions). On the Conversational Cosmos in a more conversational tone, see The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, by Howard Bloom (2016), pp. 409–452.

^[10] This description is rooted in the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. It was developed in stages throughout the second half of the twentieth century, by many scientists worldwide. Although the Standard Model has demonstrated some success in providing theoretical predictions that were later confirmed experimentally, it falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions, as it leaves some physical phenomena unexplained.

^[11] Frank Wilczek is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics. See, for example, his Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics, with Betsy Devine (1989), and Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (2021).

^[12] Quoted from “In the New Physics, No Quark Is an Island,” by Dennis Oberbye (2001): “‘The arrangement of the quarks’ means their movements and the relationships between them. Their movement creates kinetic energy, which is, according to Einstein’s relativity theory (E=mc²), equivalent to mass.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/20/science/essay-in-the-new-physics-no-quark-is-an-island.html)

^[13] Oberbye, “In the New Physics.”

^[14] Intimacy = Shared Identity × [Relative] Otherness × Mutuality (Recognition + Feeling + Value + Purpose). See also Essay One, Section 2.3, The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture.

^[15] The strong force, which binds the quarks together, is weak when the quarks are close (it even drops to zero when the three different color charges of the quarks get close to one another) but increases steadily when you try to separate them, making it impossible to isolate a single quark. This property of the strong force, which is known as asymptotic freedom, is a surprising, counterintuitive property, which is not found in any of the other fundamental forces. That is why the theory describing the strong force, called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), has to be simulated on huge computers. See, for example, https://phys.org/news/2005-05-mysteries-quarks.html.

^[16] The Kabbalistic Tree of Life consists of ten Sefirots (the word usually mistranslated as “spheres” but uniting three related meanings: mispar, “number,” sipur, “story,” and sappir, “light”).

^[17] Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2016), chapter 2 (Kindle edition).

^[18] If we could magnify the simplest hydrogen atom so that its nucleus (in this case only one proton) were the size of a basketball, then its lone electron would be found about two miles away).

^[19] The most common form of hydrogen has no neutrons, but this should not obscure our discussion.

^[20] See, for example, Gravity, Special Relativity, and the Strong Force, by Constantinos G. Vayenas and Stamatios N.-A. Souentie (2012), Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions, by Chris Quigg (2013), and Particles and Nuclei: An Introduction to the Physical Concepts, by Bogdan Povh et al. (2008). See also “The Four Forces,” by T. Thacker (1995, https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/modern/forces.html#005), “The Color Force” by Lena Hansen (1997, https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/modern/hansen.html). For a simple summary, see, for example, “What Is the Strong Force?” by Jim Lucas, LiveScience (2022, https://www.livescience.com/48575-strong-force.html).

^[21] Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (1997).

^[22] Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964).

^[23] We return to this theme in more depth in Sections IV.7 and V.1.

^[24] See Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, by Alfred North Whitehead (1978).

^[25] Nahum of Chernobyl, The Light of the Eyes: Homilies on the Torah (2021), pp. 633–34.

^[26] The term monad comes from ancient Greek, μονάς (monas) unity, and μόνος (monos) alone. Originally, it was conceived by the Pythagoreans. For them, the Monad is the Supreme Being, Divinity, or the totality of all things. For Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (and other philosophers of the early modern period), however, there are infinite monads, which are the basic and immaterial elementary particles, or simplest units, that make up the Universe (Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology, 2005). We are using monad in something approximating the first sense in the sense of the implicate order of wholeness of being that defines and allures Reality to its own evolutionary becoming.

^[27] See Essay One, Section 3.5, The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture.