The Covenant Between Generations Requires First Values and First Principles

In Response to Yuval Harari: Only a New Story Changes History—Reclaiming the Anthro-Ontology of the Better Story

A Covenant Between Generations

What is our relationship to this moment in which humanity stands poised before utopia and dystopia? Human beings have been alive for some ten thousand generations. All the generations are related to each other. The facts of science—the exterior and interior sciences—tell us that in some profound embodied sense, all prior, present, and future reality lives in us. This truth points toward an implicit evolutionary covenant between the generations. To get a sense of what this might mean let’s turn for a moment to the individual and then back to the community or what we have called the generation.

Every person is responsible for their own evolutionary transformation—a continuation of the process of continuous transformation, which science has revealed as the essence of evolution itself. Just like every person, every generation is responsible for its own evolution of consciousness. Each generation, building on what came before or learning from previous mistakes, commits to contribute its own unique insights and technologies to the ongoing transformation and evolution of culture and consciousness. That is the expression of the covenant of partnership between the generations.

But we are not an ordinary generation. We stand, as no other generation has, poised between utopia and dystopia. Our exponential tech, and its democratized proliferation among state and non-state actors, creates exponential risk of both catastrophic and existential nature. The social fabric of polarized discord, without a shared global ethos for a global civilization, increases dramatically the cast of possible disaffected actors who have access to technology with the capacity to generate exponential and even existential risk.

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Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

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[Up to sixty percent of the world lives under a fundamentalist religion or some version of a totalitarian state that claims that only its truth is valid and all other truth claims are enemies of the true religion, nation, or state. The rest of the world, more liberal-democratic in orientation, lives in a context of post-truth, a phrase chosen by the Oxford Dictionary as the defining word for 2016. And by post-truth, they meant the sense in culture that there are no values that are part of a global story of Reality that we all share. All truth is commonly understood to be contrived, or a power move by interested parties seeking to perpetuate their power.]

The ostensible post-truth lack of a shared narrative of value—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—combined with broken narratives of identity and community—makes it all the more dangerous. Toby Ord, in his recent book on existential risk [which appeared after Barbara Marx Hubbard passed], gives the odds of human extinction, at this next chunk of history, at 1 out of 6 within the relatively immediate timeframe of the next hundred years, and at a shocking fifty-fifty in the next several hundred years, which is, from a historical perspective, an only slightly longer timeframe.^[1] Ord’s careful work in the mathematics of prediction is significant and needs to be taken in with quivering gravitas. Failure to do this is a failure of imagination.

The human being, both man and woman, is originally called, in the old Genesis text, adam. Adam means both of the Earth and, quite literally, imagination. The human being, born from the Earth, the humus, is also Homo imaginus, the most wondrous figment of reality’s Divine Imagination.

In the forthcoming The Universe: A Love Story series and, in more depth, in the forthcoming book The Intimate Universe, we discuss what we refer to as the second shock of existence.

The first shock of existence, occurring for prehistoric humans and to every human being since, is the realization of individual death. By this, we refer to not the biological fact of death but rather the existential experience of death for the prehistoric dawn human.

The second shock of existence is not the realization of the inevitable death of the individual human but, rather, of the potential death of humanity. And because the possibility of there being no future is radically shocking, we turn away from it. But at this moment in history, we have an overriding moral imperative to know the truth that the impossible has now become possible. And we can only know this truth if we dare to imagine it.

We are undergoing a phase shift the likes of which the world has never seen before. We have generated exponential technology which creates exponential destruction. And we have no story equal to our power. But evolving forms of nanotech, biotech, and infotech are not only exponential in their potential blessings in fields like medicine, or even for their raw destructive power. They are also exponential in that they will very rapidly change our essential experience of self potentially forever.^[2] To cite but one self-evident example: Who is the human being at a time when virtually all jobs are performed by artificial intelligence?

In a sense, the shifts that will be catalyzed by the new exponential technologies could well be as great as the move from single-celled to multicellular life. This has brought us to a pivotal point at an unprecedented historical crossroads. But at this precise moment, we face a yawning chasm between the exterior technology that is now available or in development and the interior technology that could allow humans to make sense of our lives in this new exponential technological world. It is in this awful chasm between exterior technologies and interior technologies—that is to say direct access to gnosis and value—that catastrophic and existential risk thrive. To traverse the chasm without collapsing into one of the many forms of catastrophic or existential disaster, we need to articulate what we have called the First Values and First Principles of Cosmos. And, as we will unpack below, these First Principles and First Values are not only eternal, but they are also evolving. But we are ahead of ourselves. We will return to this crucial distinction below.

These First Values and First Principles of Cosmos need to serve as a basis for a new universal grammar of value, a new Universe Story, and a new human story that serves as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization. Without such an articulation, there are very compelling reasons—that only a willfully ignorant, emotionally numbed, shut-down, or fundamentally dishonest human being could ignore—to believe that there will be—quite literally—no future.^[3] Trillions of lives, loves, as well as goodness, truth, and beauty, will die before even being born. And, from a human perspective, it appears like only our action on behalf of the future can change that almost inexorable trajectory.

Stated succinctly, with elaboration to follow throughout this writing: It is only a shared global story based on (evolving) First Principles and First Values that can generate a global ethos for a global civilization, which in turn can foster the kind of global intimacy and coherence needed that can then generate effective global action—the only kind that can be effective at this moment in history. The articulation of a shared human Story of Value is the self-evidently overriding moral imperative—and therefore the most effective altruism[4] possible—in this generation.

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The Covenant Between Generations Requires First Values and First Principles

This wider sense of intimacy implicit in the covenant between the generations is an evolved expression, at the level of the human self-reflective mind, of a cluster of First Principles and First Values. Those First Principles and First Values include all of the ten key examples of First Values and First Principles, which we adduced in our book by David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values.

For example, they must include

the First Principles and First Values of Intimacy,

the evolution of intimacy,

the notion of story, the plotlines of Cosmos and therefore history,

the irreducible Value of Uniqueness,

the ontologies of community and communion,

our deeper identity with evolution,

and the transformative power of Conscious Evolution, as we awaken to evolution, conscious in us, awake through us,

as well as the experience of our larger identity beyond separate self, which includes access to our participation in the eternal Field of Consciousness beyond the spacetime continuum.

And more.

Without this cluster of First Values and First Principles as part of the new Story, there is no covenant between the generations, and no power to activate our creative commitment, not only to the present and the past but to the future.

Only a New Story Changes History: The Ontology of Our Evolving New Story, Beyond Fiction and Social Construction

We have asserted time and again that the new Story must emerge from a new Universe Story, sourced in interior and exterior science, which is woven together into a new whole greater than the sum of all its scientific parts. As historian Yuval Harari correctly points out—it is a new story that changes history. But for Yuval and numerous other leading postmodern neoliberal writers, all stories are mere fictions. The one shared explicit or implicit premise of at least the public thought of all of these writers is that there are no First Values and First Principles upon which to articulate a new story—a new global ethos for a global civilization.

Of course, the leading edge of awake liberal and conservative theorists of all ilks across the globe, all want to save our world. But even among those few that are grasping the enormity of what is at stake, virtually none of them are talking in terms of a universal grammar of value that articulates a new Story that might unite humanity. Most of the conservative world is rooted in a religious tradition and draws its values from the unique revelations of that tradition. Most of the liberal world, whatever the diversity of their internal beliefs, clearly refuse to articulate any universal grammar of values.

The examples of Haque,[5] Harari,[6] Zuboff,[7] and Naam[8] are not exceptions but organic and ordinary expressions of the rule. It is, of course, more than paradoxical, because all of their writing is based on making moral claims of a prophetic nature about the dangers to civilization. While the collapse of ethos that lies at the core of those dangers is implicit and explicit all through their writing, they either utterly ignore (Naam), bypass (Zuboff), or explicitly reject any articulation of a universal grammar of value. Indeed, as we will see for Harari, who has been hugely influential, (and for Haque,) intrinsic value itself is a social construction of reality, a fiction, that which is merely imagined.

When we dogmatically reject intrinsic value as a feature of our own interiors, and the knowing that we are embedded in and participatory in the interior face of Cosmos itself, our own deepest and best knowing become inarticulate and confused. We become “the hollow men, the stuffed men.” ^[9]

“The centre cannot hold.” ^[10]

Echoing the poet, the best seem to 

“lack all conviction, while the worst

Are filled with passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;” ^[11]

And that revelation points toward the evolutionary restoration of First Values and First Principles themselves.

In the postmodern context, which is taken for a given in most of the academic world—even though as a formal movement it has all but crumbled—the notion of First Values and First Principles are dismissed out of hand. But without them we are unable—as we shall see in a moment—to even recognize that universal human rights express an emergent ontological value beyond mere fiction.

In Response to Yuval Harari: Reclaiming the Anthro-Ontology of the Better Story

Let’s very briefly look at popular historian Yuval Harari, who is often a mouthpiece for postmodernity. Although it is often unclear whether his postmodern echoing is conscious or reflexive.

Harari points out at the beginning of his well-told history of humanity, Sapiens, that the early development of language, some 70,000 years ago, demarcates the emergence of what we refer to today as humanity. Some explain the impact of language as providing a significant survival advantage in the hunt. Hunters can communicate better from a technical perspective. More hunts are more successful because of a survival advantage bestowed by language. Harari avoids this reductionism and correctly understands language to be more profound in its transformative capacity. For it is language that allows us to easily tell a shared story. And it is human beings living within the context of a shared story that creates coherence. A myth, in most historians’ lexicon, is but a synonym for a shared story. It is in this sense that Harari writes correctly—“myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in larger numbers.” ^[12]

“Ants and Bees can also work together in large numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.” ^[13]

For the sake of this writing, we will ignore Harari’s view of ants and chimpanzees. The continuity between human beings and animals is much more profound than the materialist reductionist worldview, to which Harari subscribes, ever imagined. And changing our interior relationship both to chimps and ants is a moral imperative. But we will leave that aside for the purpose of this writing.

What is most important for this writing is the organizing power of stories. It is stories that create social coherence. They are a prerequisite for shared action, what Harari refers to as cooperation. Early human beings could only cooperate to the limit of what is referred to as the Dunbar number, groups of about 150, where there is direct physical intimacy and recognition. But, of course, you cannot run a platoon, a large business, or anything else that requires thousands of people, if it is based on a mutuality of recognition, pathos, and purpose that requires physical intimacy. Once language birthed the possibility of a shared story, the story itself generated intimacy in the sense of our core intimacy equation:

Intimacy = shared identity in the context of otherness + mutualities of recognition, pathos, and purpose

It is Story that creates the intimacy that generated the coherence that enabled human beings to cooperate in huge numbers.

“Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths [stories].” ^[14]

But here is where it all goes wrong. For Harari and the entire cohort of neoliberal thought leaders shaping policy, stories are all fiction. For these civilization-shaping leaders, stories are not merely mythic but literally myths. And here, Harari, trapped inside of the postmodern mind that he cannot imagine beyond, reveals his true position. And it matters, because it dogmatically assumes that it is not possible—by definition—to tell a true story based on shared First Values and First Principles that are rooted in our true nature, which participates in the nature of Reality itself.

For Harari, as for all dogmatic postmodernists, there is no such thing as what Alfred North Whitehead refers to as ontological value. There is no genuine value. Everything is just made up. Lest you think I am exaggerating, let’s turn to Harari in his own words:

“The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.” ^[15]

Or a bit later in his text:

“This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.” ^[16]

Let’s not even pause to notice at this point that Harari is articulating a dogmatic materialist point of view. He validates not William James’s Radical Empiricism, but a much more paltry and narrow empiricism, what has been called the Eye of the Flesh as narrowly defined by empirical reality known through the five senses. But, of course, the Eye of the Mind provides information as well. Mathematics is a form of information that we neither see, touch, nor smell.

But there is not only the Eye of the Mind that sees, it is also the Eye of Consciousness in all of its four expressions as the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of Contemplation, and the Eye of Value. The Eye of Value discloses enormously important dimensions of Value about that which it does not see, smell, or touch. It is in that sense, for example, that I have written extensively in other texts about love as perception.[17]

Now, as we already pointed out above, it is self-evident that the premodern and modern wisdom traditions, often based on their drive for power, made dogmatic claims to knowledge about Reality that were in fact mere fictions. Our dear friend and colleague Howard Bloom talks about this premodern and modern cloaking of fiction in religious and political garb extensively in his epic The Lucifer Principle (1995), which Harari cites approvingly. But for Harari, that is the nature of all stories. Not for Bloom. ^[18] Because for Harari, there are no First Values and First Principles. And no less importantly, for Harari, there is no evolution of consciousness. We do not have the capacity—from his postmodern perspective—to be more discerning than the premoderns and to tell more accurate and true stories.

To get the implications of this claim—the claim that there are no accurate narrative arcs that tell us something important and true about Reality—let’s cite Harari again. Harari is talking in this context again about stories, or what he calls imagined reality.

“Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.”

This imagined reality is what Harari calls a story. Stories are for Harari, in his own arrogant and subtly mocking postmodern tone of dismissal—informed by an unconscious merging of his postmodernism and Buddhist mis-understandings—an expression of human superficiality.

“[O]nly Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.” ^[19]

Harari, of course, critiques primitive versions of caricatured depictions of superstitious versions of premodern religion and claims that this is the nature of all value stories. But accurate stories rooted in First Values and First Principles are not about convincing “a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death.” Rather, through a new cosmocentric Story rooted in First Values and First Principles, and by articulating the First Value of Love in Cosmos, we might be able to persuade a human being to help feed another human being, or even to participate in the caring for all sentient beings. And by articulating the First Principle of the Evolution of Love, we might also be able to help an individual human being, or an entire society, to evolve from what we might term egocentric intimacy to ethnocentric intimacy to worldcentric intimacy to cosmocentric intimacy. For as we have written elsewhere, Reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies—and the evolution of intimacy is the evolution of love.[20]

But for Harari, there is no evolution of culture and consciousness. He ignores—literally—over a hundred developmental thinkers, from Baldwin to Peirce to Gebser to Habermas to Kohlberg to Graves to Kegan to Gilligan to Loevinger to Wade and many more, who all map, in different forms, the evolution of culture and consciousness. For Harari, cultures are all equal expressions of contrived value propositions, all of which are ultimately arbitrary fictions.

But let’s put all that aside for this moment, in order to really access the full implications of Harari’s claim as articulated by him in the following paragraph (and many others). In this writing, Harari is describing belief in an imagined reality. His point is that it impacts even though from his perspective—Harari’s—it is pure fiction.

“The sculptor from the Stadel cave may have sincerely believed in the existence of the lion-man guardian spirit. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods or demons. Most millionaires believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. [Hence the demand of the UN for the respect of human rights in Libya.] No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all [fictions] figments of our fertile imagination.” ^[21]

What that means is that, from Harari’s postmodern perspective, there is no essential distinction in ultimate value between universal human rights, the reality of a corporation, or the cultural axioms that generated Khadafi’s Libya. They are all fictions that do not participate in any Ultimate Sense of Value. Harari manages to deny his own anthro-ontological truth, which asserts, in the daily practice of his life, the absolutely better nature of universal human rights over the brutality of Libya’s crushing of universal human rights.

For Harari, there are no First Principles and First Values that rise above the level of convincing a monkey “to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.” Goodness, truth, and beauty are for Harari but imagined realities. Love and compassion are but fictions. Compassion is a social construct and all ethos is but an imagined reality. None of these and nothing else rise to the level of First Values or First Principles, “[t]he kinds of things [including all personal and cultural values] that people create through networks of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions,’ ‘social constructs,’ or ‘imagined realities.’” ^[22]

For Harari, there are no grand narratives of value. Except for one—which is Harari’s absolute and dogmatic faith story—that there are no First Values and First Principles which rise above being mere social construction of reality, fictitious and merely imagined realities. At the same time, Harari insists correctly—throughout his writing—on the historical truism that it is only by changing the stories that we can change history. He first introduces this truism in Sapiens.

“The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large scale numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths—by telling different stories. [And] under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.” ^[23]

This is a key piece of insight, not limited to Harari, but rather a self-evident historical fact. Society changes its patterns of organization, based on the emergence of new stories. New stories are virtually always rooted in a new Universe Story and what we call its corollary narratives of identity and self, community, power, desire, and more.

As we stand between dystopia and utopia, with a yawning abyss of catastrophic and existential risk opening before our eyes, this is crucial information. What is self-evidently necessary is a new story. But here is the key point. For Harari, a new story is arbitrary—as is cultural evolution itself. For him, as well as for most of the leading neoliberal postmodern writers, universal human rights, in the move from premodernity to modernity, are not an expression of cultural evolution. Universal human rights do not represent any sort of First Values of Cosmos being realized at a more evolved level of consciousness. In fact, there is, for Harari, no difference in the level or depth of value between premodernity and modernity.

For example:

“In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people.” ^[24]

But for Harari, this does not represent a cultural evolution of Value. Rather, democracy and despotic kingship are for Harari and his influential cohort—from an ontological perspective—not different in their value at all.

For Harari,

“ever since the Cognitive Revolution [the emergence of language some 70 thousand years ago] Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. Speeding down this fast lane, Homo sapiens soon far outstripped all other human and animal species in its ability to cooperate.” ^[25]

But by cultural evolution, Harari does not mean an increase in levels of depth and value, which is precisely what constitutes evolution from its inception. Evolution consistently generates ever-deeper and wider Fields of Value. At each level of evolution, there is an increase in the depth of existence itself.

We move from quarks

to subatomic particles

to atoms

to molecules

to macromolecules

to cells

to multicellular life

to all of the life of the oceans

to early plants,

amphibians,

early animals,

later animals,

mammals,

and ultimately hominids,

who develop into humans,

going through several stages of human beings

until we get to Homo sapiens,

and then through distinct levels of conscious and complexity as Homo sapiens,

finally today reaching for the fulfillment of Homo sapiens in Homo amor.

And every level adds a new level of depth.

At every level, there is more connectivity, intimacy, and coherence.

At each level of evolution, there is an increase in our capacities of consciousness, which result in a direct expansion of our capacity for both creativity and care.

In each level of evolution, there is a genuine evolution of our experience of uniqueness.

At every level, there is more capacity, function, and insight—more aliveness.

Within this overall trajectory of the evolution of value, some several hundred years ago, we went from slavery to universal human rights and the outlawing of slavery. But for Harari, the movement from slavery to universal human rights, suffrage, and the emergence of the feminine do not constitute a genuine deepening of value. Because, for Harari, sans First Principles and First Values, Cosmos is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. In that tragic Cosmos, one which violates a preponderance of human experience, First Values and First Principles become absurd and all value is fiction. ^[26]

That claim itself, as we have unpacked in depth in other writing, is a root cause for the meta-crisis. Like so much of postmodernism, Harari’s dogmatic emptying of Reality from inherent Value is cause for the meta-crisis, which he describes and warns of with so much appropriate passion and precision.

CosmoErotic Humanism: A New Story of Value

It is for that reasons that, together with my dear colleagues Ken Wilber and Zachary Stein and the entire team at the think tank, we are committing our hearts, souls, and bodies to the articulation of a new Story of Value—eternal and evolving Value—that we call CosmoErotic Humanism.

CosmoErotic Humanism scaffolds on multiple sources. One of those sources is the wisdom of Solomon lineage of nondual humanism,[27] a second is our partner Ken Wilber’s articulation of what he has called Integral Theory,[28] a third is the developmental lineage itself,[29] and a fourth is the great tradition of interior sciences across all lineages—premodern, modern, and postmodern—all of it woven together in a new Story of Value. This is the ground for a potential world religion as a context for our diversity, a shared musical score as the context for what we call a Unique Self Symphony[30] of Eros and Value in response to the meta-crisis and to our own and the Universe’s deepest nature.

At the center of this project is the post-postmodern articulation of a new Story of Value. Not just a new story but a set of evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value.[31]

It is of course true that Reality is stories, but stories are not just stories, if we but step back for a second and realize who is the storyteller.

Scroll down for footnotes…

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This essay was originally written in 2020 but never published. A more in-depth critique of the postmodern position expressed by Harari is forthcoming by David J. Temple.

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Articulating a New Worldview in Response to Existential Risk: From Homo sapiens to Homo amor—The Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism

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Footnotes

^[1] See The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, by T. Ord, 2020, Hachette Books.

^[2] And as we will see in other works, our core experience of being a human being may change beyond recognition, so much so that the term human as we understand it today might no longer apply to us.

^[3] See for example, The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, led by Founding Director Professor Nick Bostrom, for the essential work being done in this area. Bostrom, apparently influenced by Derek Parfit, also of Oxford, and others, has raised the flag for existential risk. Toby Ord’s book, (2020) emerges from this same Oxfordian circle.

[4] The idea of effective altruism is sourced in Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Peter Singer, and a group of other thinkers in Oxford closely affiliated with Nick Bostrom. The entire group, including Bostrom, seems to be importantly impacted by Derek Parfit, a significant moral philosopher, who was one of the figures that focused attention on existential risk and posed the dilemma of the three scenarios which we cited above.

[5] Umair Haque, a prolific and intelligent former economist, writes a daily column on Medium.com. See, https://medium.com/@umairh.

[6] See Harari, Yuval N., Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. See also Harari, Yuval, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2017, Vintage. See also his newest book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Random House (2024).

[7] See Shoshana Zuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books Ltd.

[8] See Naam, Ramez (2013), The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (1st ed.), Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.

^[9] Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men” 1925.

^[10] “The Second Coming,” poem by W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920.

^[11] Ibid, Yeats.

^[12] Harari, Yuval N. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. HarperCollins Publishers, 2015, page 27.

^[13] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, pp. 27-28.

^[14] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, p. 27.

^[15] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, p. 24.

^[16] Ibid.

[17] See Gafni, Marc, and Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, Inc, 2017, pp. 309-338.

^[18] Personal discussion, Oct. 2020. We are presently in discussion with Howard on the articulation of First Values and First Principles.

^[19] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, p.27.

[20] See David J. Temple, First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come (2024). See also, Dr. Marc Gafni, The Intimate Cosmos: Evolution = the Evolution of Intimacy: From Homo sapiens to Homo amor. Integral Wisdom Publishing—A division of Integral Publishers, 2024.

[21] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, pp. 35-36.

^[22] Harari, Yuval N, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015, p. 35, Chapter 2: “The Tree of Knowledge.” See also Harari, Yuval, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2017, Vintage, especially Part II: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World. For a larger critique of Harari, see also our Homo Amor (in preparation), which is a direct response to Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus. Of course, Harari is also caught throughout his work in what has been called the performative contradiction of postmodernity. He affirms value throughout the book, explicitly views his work as the attempt to help make better value choices [see, e.g., Homo Deus, p. 461: “All the scenarios outlined in this book should be understood as possibilities rather than prophesies. If you don’t like some of these possibilities you are welcome to think and behave in new ways that will prevent these particular possibilities from materializing…So considering everything that is happening in our chaotic world, what should we focus on?”], and he denies the ontology—the intrinsic Reality of both choice and value. This is what we (Gafni and Stein) have called, in other writings, the crypto-normative position—quoting Habermas, who coined the term cryptonormative judgment in his book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, transl. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)—the assertion of normative value as implicitly real in one breath and its denial in the next breath.

^[23] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, p.36.

[24] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, p.36.

^[25] Ibid, Harari, Sapiens, p.36.

^[26] We add importantly that the experience of meaningless is also a real experience in Cosmos and in our interiors. The same is true of the great spiritual existentialists. But one example is the searing writing of religious existentialist Nachman of Bratslav [see Arthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, Appendix Two, The University of Alabama Press, 1979], who wrestles and dares to enter the apparent ontology of what he calls the void. Evil is but one expression of the void. Depression is another. But as Nachman understands, and we have discussed elsewhere, these are not absolute experiences. Rather, every experience of the void lives in profound dialectical resonance with the fullness of joy, the intrinsic goodness of life, vast patterns of elegant symmetry, design, depth, and inherent value—all of which suffuse our daily lives and decisions. Postmodern deconstruction of value is motivated by many factors, some more base and others more noble. But at their highest, they seem to draw from the root of the void, which they mistakenly embrace naively instead of dialectically, as is the true nature of our experience. The tragic result is that, for postmodernity, the void then becomes a dogma to be defended instead of a path, which is part a wider and deeper royal road.

[27] See Gafni, Marc. Radical Kabbalah, 2012, Tucson Az: Integral Publishers. See also Gafni, Marc. Your Unique Self, The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with Introduction and Afterword by Ken Wilber, Integral Publishers, 2012. See also Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 6(1), a special issue on “Integral Spirituality: Unique Self.” In particular, see from that issue Gafni, Marc. “The Evolutionary Emergent of Unique Self: A New Chapter in Integral Theory.” See also Gafni, Marc, and Kincaid, Kristina, A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, BenBella Books, Inc, 2017.

[28] See Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala Publications, Inc, 2000. See also Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Shambhala Publications Inc; 2nd edition, 2001.

[29] See Stein, Zachary. Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Bright Alliance; Illustrated edition, 2019.

[30] On the Unique Self of a religion, see Gafni, Marc, Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism: Two Models and Why They Matter, Integral Publishers, 2014. On Unique Self Symphony, see Module ten of the Awakening Your Unique Self online course: https://cosmoerotichumanism.shop/avada_portfolio/awakening-your-unique-self/.

[31] See David J. Temple, First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come (2024).