The Empiricism of Love: The Three Eyes of Knowing/Eros/Gnosis — The Three Eyes That Are One
Part 1 of a 5-Part Series of the Early Draft Essay "The Eye of Value"
We are interrupting our series on the “Three Selves” for the next couple of weeks, as we respond to the need of the participants of the Parallax course “Opening the Eye of Value During the Meta-Crisis” with Dr. Zachary Stein (and Dr. Marc Gafni as guest in week 1) and post this essay on “The Eye of Value” first. We will continue the “Three Selves” series, once this series on “The Eye of Value” is finished.
If you cannot wait, you can find the whole ”Three Selves” Essay here:
How do we know that Love is Real?
Not because of faith or dogma.
Rather, we know Love is real because the depth of our direct felt experience of Love tells us it is so. Our experience of Eros generates gnosis. That Love is real, and not a social construction, a fiction, or a figment of our imagination, is, like all good science, an empirical truth. This is, in fact, how all true knowledge in every field of inquiry is obtained.
Knowing through experience, however, is precisely the opposite of dogma. Knowing through experience is what we call empiricism. And knowing that Love is real—in fact more real than anything else, as the intrinsic value of Cosmos it is—is what William James correctly called Radical Empiricism.
Indeed, all of science, as opposed to organized religion, is based on the authority of direct validated experience. This is true both in the exterior science and what we have called the interior sciences. Indeed, in exterior and interior sciences, there are three ways to unfurnish our eyes—or what have been called the Three Eyes of Knowing. In fact, these Three Eyes are three distinct forms of the Anthro-Ontological Method.
In CosmoErotic Humanism, we refer to them as the Eye of the Senses, the Eye of the Mind, and the Eye of Consciousness.
The Eye of Consciousness is also known by at least four other names: the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, or the Eye of Contemplation.
It is this last set of eyes, by all of their names, which discloses Love’s Ultimate Reality, which is Love’s Knowledge, which is Love’s Value.
But we will see, as consciousness evolves, these very distinct eyes begin to come together, and we realize that, at the higher levels of consciousness, they inseparably inter-animate each other.
Each of these eyes illuminates a different dimension of Reality.
Each one is the province of particular dimensions of knowledge.
At higher levels of consciousness—what is sometimes called, in the interior sciences, nondual realization—the different dimensions, perceived by the different eyes inter-animate, pointing towards a larger Seamless Field of Eros.
Each of the Three Eyes goes by different names.
Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
The Three Eyes Are:
The Eye of the Senses or the Eye of the Flesh.
The Eye of the Mind or the Eye of Reason.
The Eye of Consciousness, alternatively known as the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, or the Eye of Contemplation. [These names, however, are not quite synonyms. Rather, each implicitly implies a different quality of the Eye of Value. As such, we will occasionally use all of the names together with the lead name(s) being written first and the other names in brackets next to it.]
The Eye of the Senses [Eye of the Flesh] is generally referred to as empiricism. This eye is what is classically called empirical knowledge. But, as we shall see, it is referring to a very narrow strain of empiricism.
The Eye of the Mind [Eye of Reason] is generally known as rationalism, while the Eye of Consciousness [alternatively the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Heart, or the Eye of Value] is generally known as mysticism.
But it would be more accurate to say that all of the eyes are forms of science, what we refer to, in CosmoErotic Humanism, as exterior and interior sciences. All Three Eyes are forms of empiricism.
The Eye of the Senses deploys sensory empiricism.
The Eye of the Mind deploys mental empiricism.
And the Eye of Consciousness, or the Eye of the Spirit, or the Eye of the Heart, or the Eye of Value, deploys what we might call value empiricism or amorous empiricism or spiritual empiricism.
The third Eye, by its various names, is no less empirical:
The Eye of the Spirit might be called spiritual empiricism, the Eye of Contemplation might be called contemplative empiricism, the Eye of Value implies a form of values empiricism, while the Eye of the Heart evokes feeling empiricism or, the same things said differently, an empiricism of pathos.
The Three Eyes: A Deeper Cut
The Eye of the Senses or the Eye of the Flesh
The first eye is the Eye of the Flesh, or the Eye of the Senses, which engages the physical domains of Reality. This form of sensory empiricism deploys the five senses of the human body, as well as amplified forms of those senses ranging from the Hubble telescope to an FMRI scanner developing brain pattern images to the most advanced forms of underwater or outer space photographic systems.
The name Eye of the Senses points towards the sensemaking capacity of this eye, but particularly—at least at the surface level of this eye—in terms of what are called the five physical senses as well as their amplifications through all forms of technology.
The name Eye of the Flesh emphasizes the sense of physicality, the flesh of this eye.
The Eye of the Mind or the Eye of Reason
The second eye, the Eye of the Mind, or the Eye of Reason, engages not the physical but the logical, the mathematical, and the reasonable. It is not sensory but rational or mental empiricism.
The mind is a broader term involving multiple capacities of the mind.
Reasoning points to the faculty, for which the mind is most well known in western civilization, the inductive and, particularly, the deductive process of reasoning.
In many accounts of western enlightenment thinkers, the Eye of the Mind includes not only scientific reasoning. Moral reasoning, politics, and governance would also be the realm of the Eye of Reason or the Eye of the Mind.
The Hubble telescope, which deploys mathematics and logic, is more accurately described as deploying both, the realm of the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of the Senses.
The Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind perceive that which is measurable.
The evolution of modernity itself is the evolution of the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of the Senses, which translated into the evolution of ever-more sophisticated methods of measurement.
Whether it was Kepler’s measurement of motion or Newton’s measurement of force, modernity was defined by the move from Aristotle’s premodern scientific classification to modern scientific measurement. The great goods and dignities of modernity, such as they are, are deeply connected to measurement.
Modernity’s Unintentional Degradation of the Two Sacred Eyes
Both, the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind, at least in their surface expressions, may be understood to be data driven. The Eye of the Senses generates sensory data, while the Eye of the Mind generates mental data. Both, the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind involve the measurable world, and indeed, the act of measurement in ever-more sophisticated forms, as one of their primary endeavors.
This is the religious worldview, expressed by what Alfred North Whitehead famously called scientific materialism,[1] the view of a dead universe.
There are two versions of this view: the atomistic view and the systems view.
In the first, the universe is seen as mechanized, atomized parts, in which each part is fundamentally independent and must be understood and studied as such.
In the second view, already popular in western enlightenment circles, and crystallized in many standard readings of systems theory and its offshoots, the universe is still conceived of as a dead universe, but this time, the parts are seen, more accurately, not merely in their atomized monadic dimensions but as a system of system of interconnectivities.[2]
But often, these very same thinkers describe Reality as a system of interconnected its. That, however, is the result of viewing the Eyes of the Senses and the Mind as utterly dissociated from the Eye of Consciousness, [alternatively the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of the Heart, and the Eye of Contemplation.]
Let’s briefly unpack this, only as is necessary for our immediate point here, which will be the desired and necessary inter-inclusion of all the Eyes in order to yield any sort of accurate picture or experience of Reality—and particularly to know love is real and the foundational Reality of Cosmos.
The Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind take their full seat at the table of culture only in modernity.[3]
This moment itself is a great evolutionary leap. When they take their seat at the table, these two Eyes are necessarily—as is the nature of the dialectic of history that Hegel was later to point towards—in adolescent rebellion against the power-distorted forms of the Spirit that had in premodernity blinded the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—telling, for example, Galileo’s eyes what they were permitted to see through his telescope. These degraded forms of the Eye of Consciousness [or the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Heart, or the Eye of Value] were distorted by the ethnocentric prism, through which they forced to always look—the prism became inseparable from the Eye, and the eye was enslaved in slavish devotion to the various ecclesial and political powers of the day.
One of the key moves of modernity, which Max Weber followed by Habermas and others already point towards, is the differentiation of value spheres.[4]
This was the great evolutionary leap of modernity that allowed evolution to burst forth by liberating the deployment of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind from the distorted forms of the Eye of Consciousness—namely the dogmatic belief structures of institutional religion which were aligned with the political power structures of governance—the church in all of its degraded forms. But the values spheres with their respective eyes, as Habermas points out, were not only differentiated but disassociated.[5]
In their understandable eagerness to liberate their vision from the distorting prism of religion and politics, the two Eyes—the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—blinded themselves to the Real. They adopted a narrow empiricism, instead of what William James was later to call a radical empiricism. Their narrow empiricism focused their view only on atomized mechanical laws or on the system of interconnected its—dead mechanized or holistic parts and the laws that governed them. In other words, even as the western enlightenment began to eschew the notion of mechanized atomistic parts in the favor of interconnected holistic systems, it still spoke in covert or overt reductionist materialistic terms of systems without Eros or telos.
What we call the Telerotic Universe was ignored or even denied.
Telos was thrown out of science[6] because of the understandable traumatized collective memory of the churches in their various guises claiming telos as truth but then hijacking telos to mean their particular triumph and domination as the teleological end of history. This telos was then deployed to justify all the degraded egoic power games of the collective local, ethnocentric ego, which was almost always laced with cruelty and barbarism, all in the name of fulfilling the Divine Telos of history—which meant their own triumph.
In other words, just as the ego-self hijacks the intuition of Eternity for the immortality of a particular body self, so too, the intuition of telos in history was hijacked for fundamentalist religious ends, which themselves often covered up—as the philosopher Foucault reminded us—the most base of corrupted power drives.
As a result, telos was disqualified. And the system was viewed—as noted above—as a flatland system of inter-connected its. Interiors were ignored. As Lewis Mumford famously wrote: The universe was disqualified.
On the one hand, this generated an explosion of technologies, both in terms of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind [science, math, moral reasoning, third-person perspective].
The Eye of Consciousness [and its expression as the Eye of Value, the Spirit, Contemplation, and the Heart] was exiled. Even as these Eyes were also implicit or what the enlightenment theorist called self-evident, for example, the self-evident nature of human rights, assumed in the founding documents of American democracy:
“We find these truths to be self-evident.”
The implicit deployment of the Eye of Consciousness [Eye of Value, Eye of the Spirit, Eye of the Heart, Eye of Contemplation] was expressed as, what we have called in other writings, the common-sense sacred axioms of modernity. These axioms all assumed value implicitly as the foundational superstructure of daily life, but without explicitly claiming it—without articulating a compelling theory of value—and even when such a claim went against the dominant deconstruction of value that already took place in modernity, with postmodernity just being a slightly more explicit and virulent form of the same.
But in the heady intoxicating days when modern technology-based science exploded into reality, there was little time to clarify what seemed [wrongly] to be side issues. The social capital of premodernity’s assumption of value still had so much currency that it was impossible to truly imagine a world in which intrinsic value had truly collapsed as the foundational ideation of society.
The power of the Eye of the Mind, as applied to exterior power and profit-generating technologies, evolved so rapidly with such self-evident intensity, that the Eye of Consciousness [alternatively known as the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of Contemplation, and the Eye of the Heart] in its potentially clarified forms ceased its evolution, at least in the public commons.
Again, it is not that there was no value at all. Rather, value was assumed, caricatured, and dismissed—with all three of these relationships to value living side by side—being enacted in the very heart of public culture and people’s personal lives. Indeed, as we just noted above and have discussed elsewhere in the writings of CosmoErotic Humanism, modernity solved the problem by implicating the common-sense sacred axioms of value. These included axioms like some measure of free will, Love is real, goodness, truth, and beauty are real, all part of the axiom that value itself was real.
The common-sense sacred axioms of value were foundational assumptions, even as the rebellion against premodern conceptions of value was in full swing. Value was assumed, even when it was contradicted by the value theories of the dominant strain of modernity itself, from David Hume onwards. One can draw a line of thinkers running from Hobbes to David Hume, all the way through the 19th-century materialists, Neo-Darwinists, logical positivists, existentialists, right into postmodernism, which caricatures and then savages value—ultimately disdainfully dismiss it as being not real. In this postmodern reading that has now suffused mainstream thought forms, Love is a not real in any classical ontological or metaphysical sense: Indeed, Love, and value itself, is dismissed either, as the educator Peter Greer assumed,[7] as a psychological fiction, or as Harari wrote, a social construction of reality.
Worldwide Book Release: First Values & First Principles
Our book can be ordered from the US and Canada via Amplify.
From other countries, you can order the book now from your country's amazon. It is available as Paperback, eBook, and audiobook.
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.
The Eye of Consciousness [The Eye of Value, Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of Contemplation].
The third Eye, which in our writing on CosmoErotic Humanism we have called the Eye of Consciousness. The Eye of Consciousness is trans-mental, trans-data and trans-natural.
But as we have already noted, this third Eye is no less empirical than the first two Eyes. The Eye of the Senses disclose sensory empiricism, while the Eye of the Mind discloses a form of mental or intellectual empiricism.
The Eye of Consciousness, Value, Spirit, Heart, and Contemplation deploys empirical methods and discloses empirical information about our very own true nature and some fragrance of the nature of Reality. We will return to this important point below.
The Eye of Value—as one expression of the Eye of Consciousness—does exactly what its name implies. It discerns value. The Eye of Value discerns goodness, truth, and beauty as values. The Eye of Value is not about measurement. Quite the opposite. The Eye of Value attributes value to that which measurement does not value. The Eye of Value discerns the immeasurable or and values the invaluable. The invaluable discloses as the priceless dimensions of Reality, that which transcends commodification and refuses to be the object of measurement of the kind imposed by the limited perception of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of Reason.
The Eye of the Senses might establish facts, but the establishment of a fact as a value, the value of truth, is an expression of the Eye of Value. The Eye of the Senses might see beauty or elegance, but the declaration of elegance or beauty as values requires the Eye of Value. Love, loyalty, integrity, wisdom, joy, creativity, transformation, honesty, commitment, curiosity, nobility, forgiveness, virtue, kindness, heroism, and excellence are all discernments of the Eye of Value. In this sense, the Eye of Value opens a domain, which by themselves, the Eye of Reason and the Eye of the Senses cannot open. The Eye of Value speaks not only to what is but to what ought to be. It is the Eye of Value that shapes our longing.
This is not the realm of classical scientific paradigms, at least not in the realm of any of the exterior sciences. Quantum physics, systems theory, complexity theory, or chaos theory by themselves—even the most complex mathematics do not in and of themselves—open us up to the experience of the Eye of Value. All of these, at least in their surface structures, may be, and have been, by what Whitehead called the dominant view of scientific materialism, in the domain of its.
But even virtually all the new paradigms, offered in various forms of holistic thinking, leave out this third Eye. This Eye is also known, as we have noted, as the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of the Heart, or the Eye of Contemplation. We use the name Eye of Consciousness to summarize all four expressions of this Eye, which are overlapping and related but not the same. This is because this Eye in all four of its expressions is known through an entire range of spiritual practices, which give access to different dimensions of this Eye. Those practices include ecstatic dances, chant and music, embodied practices, sacred text study practices [Lectio Divina in Christianity or Talmud and Torah in Hebrew wisdom are but two examples].
To cite but one example from the above, one text reads of the prophet who says to his lad: “Take for me a player of music, and when he plays the music, the hand of God descended on him.”[8] The Hebrew text for when the player of music [the minstrel] plays music is Ke-Nagen Ha-Menagen. Menagen is the minstrel or player of music, and Ke-Nagen means when he plays. But in the formal reading of the Hebrew, it might also be read as when the player of music becomes the music, then, the hand of the Divine descends on him. The Eros of the music generates the gnosis of the Divine Word, the hand of the divine, the prophecy of Elisha in this text.[9]
This is an experience that lives in every human being; indeed, for the interior sciences, every human being participates in prophecy.[10] But prophecy in the sense of the interior sciences of the Hebrew wisdom texts, is not necessarily a teller of the future, rather, it is one who has access to the inner gnosis of Cosmos, the melody and even the word—however it is spoken or heard of the Divine—namely through the Eye of the Spirit.
It is in that precise sense that music and song are one example among so very many of a practice that opens the Eye of the Spirit.
The Eye of the Spirit is inter-included with the Eye of Value, for the disclosures of the Eye of the Spirit are anthro-ontologically experienced—through a direct experience of our own clarified interiors—as having irreducible intrinsic value.
But let’s now turn to the third name for this third Eye—the Eye of Contemplation. The first thing that we need to again remind ourselves of is that all of the versions of this Eye, including its expression as the Eye of Contemplation, are—like the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—empirical at their very core. By empirical, we mean that they are not dogmatic, or faith-based, in the sense of belief, or not supported by evidence, but rather they are expressions of science—both of the interior and exterior sciences.
Sensory empiricism is the world of the embodied physical world; mental empiricism includes logic, mathematics, moral reasoning, governance, social theory, and hermeneutics; and value empiricism, disclosed by the Eye of Value, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of the Heart—all expressions of the same Eye of Consciousness—emerges from the direct experience of Reality and especially as Reality as value.
This is all part of what we might refer to as radical empiricism.[11] Indeed, radical empiricism, the basing of truth claims on the depth of human experience, is closely related to what we have termed earlier Anthro-Ontology. Radical empiricism is, of course, very different than the truncated version of what passes for empiricism in general culture, which indeed exiles the empirical to what we have called sensory empiricism.
This is a tragic mistake and is based not on authentic empiricism—radical empiricism—but rather, on a kind of politics of the real. By this, we mean the dogmatic attempt animated by an almost religious fervor that is animating mainstream reductive materialism, which refuses to even entertain the empirical possibility that there is intrinsic value in Cosmos that is not a product of human fiction or arbitrary social construction.
Authentic empiricism, or what we alluded to above as radical empiricism, refers to gnosis, or empirical knowledge, that is grounded in experience—human experience—Anthro-Ontology. But it would be absurd to limit our definition of experience, from which gnosis is born, to the surface form of sensory empiricism. It would mean that we had to derive truth, goodness, and beauty from an impoverished empiricism, which drew only from the most superficial forms of flat sensory empiricism.
Rather, radical empiricism—Anthro-Ontology—derives truth from experience-generated evidence.
Let’s look particularly at the Eye of Contemplation, which is a key component of the empiricism that drives the interior sciences. In its anthro-ontological, empirical sense, it is not that different from the Eye of the Mind. Mathematics is invisible to the eye, at least to the Eye of the Flesh, but it is made visible by the inner Eye of the Mind. Indeed, the values in a mathematics equation—disclosed by the Eye of the Mind—discloses dazzling beauty, which appears as intrinsic value patterns—First Principles and First Values of Cosmos itself. These patterns appear in the first person of the mathematician, or the scientist who uses mathematics as a language, who participates in the field of mathematics that is, like all languages including music and dance, intrinsic to and an expression of Cosmos.
In this sense, we pointed out already that it would be mistaken, as is generally done, to identify the Eye of the Mind only with third-person perception. Mathematics is rather both, a third-person disclosure of the abstract field of pure mathematics, or the concrete field of applied mathematics, and a first-person experience of the mathematician. And in the most subtle, sensitive, speculative of mathematicians, mathematics shows up in the second person as well. Think, for example, of the remark Prof. Littlewood is reported to have made to the famous Prof. Hardy about Ramanujan, the young Indian mathematics prodigy that Hardy had invited to Cambridge. “Every positive integer,” said Littlewood, “is one of Ramanujan’s personal friends.”[12]
In Anthro-Ontology, expressed as radical empiricism, inner human experience discloses the value patterns of the Cosmos. Stated simply, human science works only because we are cosmic humans. In other words, the patterns of Cosmos, the First Principles and First Values of Cosmos, live within us. And this is true for the classical sciences, the value equations of mathematics that are seen through the inner eye, and for the value equations of the interior sciences that are similarly seen through the Eye of Consciousness [the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of Contemplation, and the Eye of the Spirit].
Habermas and many other theorists, such as Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and the classical empiricists—all expressions of contemporary epistemological theory—were reaching for a clear understanding of what it means to know.[13]
The core of the theory is that true knowledge, or what we have referred to as gnosis, requires three fundamental strands.
First, gnosis must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it is dogma in disguise.
Second, gnosis must be empirical, that is to say, rooted in the illumination of direct experience.
Third, as Thomas Kuhn points out, gnosis is not just there; it must be elicited from Reality through what Kuhn calls injunction. An injunction is an experiment or a tool or practice which elicits gnosis.
This applies to all forms of knowledge.
We either read the literature, learn physics, do the chemistry experiment, run the numbers in the mathematics equation, look through the telescope, or do spiritual exercises or practices. All of these are forms of injunctions that directly lead to gnosis.
G. Spencer Brown echoes this element of injunction as a vital strand in all gnosis in his, now classic, Laws of Form:
“The primary form of mathematical communication is not description, but injunction. In this respect it is comparable to a practical art forms like cookery, in which the taste of a cake, although literally indescribable, can be conveyed to the reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe. … Even natural science [the Eye of the Senses] appears to be dependent on injunctions…such as ‘look down that microscope.’”[14]
This is an injunction that leads to an illumination. [And then] the “men of science” according to Brown “describe it to each other…discuss among themselves” [thus creating Popper’s possibility of falsifiability].
In other words, an injunction is performed that generates the knowledge, illumination, or gnosis of the Eye of the Mind, which is checked for falsifiability, meaning we talk to others, and they perform the same or similar experiment to see if they elicit the same result. That is, of course, the formal and informal peer review process that takes place both in interior and exterior sciences, that checks the validity of the text results.
And as Jürgen Habermas has already pointed, in each domain, there is a different Eye that engages in the experiment—and there are different validity tests to check the results of the different forms of experiments. For example, the inner eye of mathematics performs one form of injunction [experiment] in the mathematical process with its appropriate validity tests and the inner Eye of Contemplation performs a different kind of injunction [experiment] and has its own distinct validity test.
The gnosis of the Eye of Consciousness [the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, or the Eye of Value]: Love is Real.
Mathematics, for example, is not performing an injunction to see if Love is real—that is to say, a real and intrinsic value of the universe that lives inside of all human beings, who themselves are the universe in person in a unique form.
The exterior sciences are not doing an injunction to find out if Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe is a real plotline of Reality or if it is just what postmodernity calls a fiction, a figment of our imagination, or a social construction of reality.[15]
Rather, exterior science is generally doing an experiment to understand something of the cause-and-effect operations of Cosmos, as understood on the subatomic, atomic, molecular, or cellular level, understanding how the four forces operate and interact with each other, and the like. The nature of the exterior sciences is to look for antecedent material causes and their effects and interrelationships. All of this is done by the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind, and it discloses important and real, if limited information about the exterior cosmos.
Imagine watching a couple act and talk, in order to determine their future trajectory and the present laws that govern their reality, without being able to feel the nature and quality of the love between them or to understand the meaning of their words. That is precisely the nature of the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of the Senses. Both of them witness a small fraction—a sensory patch—of a much wider and deeper Reality. But they refuse to open up their wider and deeper sensemaking capacity, because they dogmatically declare that there is nothing else that can be seen or felt. And with that dogmatic declaration of reductive—not scientific but scientistic—anti-empirical materialism, the Eye of Consciousness [in its four expressions as the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, and the Eye of Value] is savagely blinded.
With that in mind, we now turn to the Eye of Consciousness [Contemplation, Heart, Spirit, and Value] to at least see Reality for a moment through these Eyes that are core to our own deepest nature and identity. Before we turn directly to them, one final note is in order, to which we will return briefly below.
This is part 1 of an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
Next week, we are going to deepen our understanding of the Eye of Consciousness in its four expressions.
Footnotes
[1] See Whitehead’s Critique of Scientific Materialism, e.g., in his Science and the Modern World, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925, New York: The Free Press, 1967.
[2] On the two core views, pre systems theory and systems theory, see Ervin Laszlo’s first chapter in his classic Introduction to Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (Gordon and Breach, 1972). Laszlo’s work is heavily presenced in Wilber’s Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, chapter two, which is based explicitly—at least in large part—on Laszlo’s later work, particularly, Laszlo, E. (1987), Evolution: The Grand Synthesis, New Science Library/Shambhala Publications. Wilber then goes on to critique what we call, in CosmoErotic Humanism, the systems view theory of western enlightenment, which Wilber accurately and poetically portrays as describing Reality as a flatland system of interconnected its. Wilber criticizes Laszlo’s Work in this regard as well. However, Laszlo has evolved his thinking in this regard in later works and in recent private conversations and correspondences fully aligned with our view of Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe. We intend a short publication with Ervin integrating his systems view into our Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe. We began part of that integration in the Laszlo Science Boxes that appear throughout the text. CosmoErotic Humanism aligns with Integral Theory’s reading of many of the western enlightenment theorists. However, in CosmoErotic Humanism, we also point towards a second set of enlightenment theorists—Comenius, for example—who understand Reality as both interconnected and alive—a living universe. On these two basic views of modernity, see David J. Temple, First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, The Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come (2024), and the fuller conversation in David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism: Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method (2024). We are co-authoring this second book with Ken Wilber, who is fully aligned with us in terms of these two basic characterizations of Reality—the living universe and the dead universe of interconnected its—that appear in the western enlightenment theorists of modernity. On Comenius, see Zachary Stein’s essay “Education Must Make History Again: Remembering Comenius in a Time Between Worlds” Jan. 2022, https://systems-souls-society.com/education-must-make-history-again/.
[3] Although in both, the east and west, there were times when they were flourishing with relative independence earlier in history—think of historical moments in Athens and Alexandria in the west and the early histories of China and India in the east—but the independent sciences, driven by the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind were always, ultimately, brought to heel by the Eye of the Spirit, which was hijacked by the various forms of dogmatic belief structures of institutional religion, which were aligned with the political power structures of governance. On the nonlinearity of historical sequences in general, see Graeber, David and Wengrow, David, 2021, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[4] On Max Weber and the Differentiation of Value Spheres, see Weber, Max (2004), “Zwischenbetrachtung: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung” (1916)—translated into English as “Intermediate Reflection on the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” Whimster, S (ed.), The Essential Weber: A Reader, London: Routledge, 215–244. In this essay, Weber introduced the idea that, throughout history, social life has become separated into various spheres of life: economic, political, aesthetic, erotic, intellectual. He also introduces two terms: value spheres (Wertsphären) and life orders (Lebensordnungen). Habermas picks up on this theme of the differentiation of value spheres in his Theory of Communicative Action, Translated by Thomas A. McCarthy, Volume One (1984) and Volume Two (1987), Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 1981), and in The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987, (Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen, 1985), which are two core texts for Habermas. His vision is to keep them differentiated in important ways, but, instead of allowing them to become dissociated, to reanimate and reunite them. That is precisely the nature of our work on value, which, in this sense, aligns deeply with Habermas. Habermas understood that this is the next step beyond modernity [in which he included what we would call postmodernity]. It is important, however, to understand that his version of what we are referring to as the Eye of Value would refer to things like ethics and morality, absent a translogical, transpersonal spirituality. In this sense, Habermas misses the dimensions of the Third Eye, the Eye of Value, which are evoked when it is referred to as the Eye of the Spirit or the Eye of Contemplation. It is only in his later work that he beings to accept that the Eye of Value includes a certain kind of genuine transpersonal spiritual dimension. This shows up in two books. The first is Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, MIT Press, 2002. The second is Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (2008)—Zwischen Naturalismus u. Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt 2005).
[5] Ibid.
[6] See philosopher of science Howard Bloom’s discussion of the exile of telos from Reality by the dogmas of modern science, particularly around Ludwig Büchner’s publication of Force and Matter: Empirico-Philosophical Studies, Intelligibly Rendered, an English translation (Trubner, 1864) of Kraft und Stoff: Empirisch-naturphilosophische Studien in allgemein-verständlicher Darstellung (Meidinger,1855), Edited and translated by J. Frederick Collingwood, some one hundred and twenty-eight years after Newton and his subsequent firing from the university. It is worth mentioning that Bloom writes of telos from a purely scientific perspective—as an inherent structure of Cosmos itself unconnected with any sort of exteriorized religious impulse or God who is purely external to Cosmos. Hence the title of the book, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016). Bloom, who is a dear friend and a senior fellow at our Center for World Philosophy and Religion, identifies as a stone-cold atheist, but what he actually means by that is a rebellion against the premodern vision of Spirit, which still dominates much of the globe. If everyone was a stone-cold atheist of the Bloomian type, then, religions could comfortably retire.
[7] The educator we cited above from Kathy Brownback.
[8] Kings Two, Chapter Three, Verse Fifteen.
[9] This reading of the text is offered by the great 19th-century interior scientist Schneur Zalman of Liadi in a text of his that I read many years ago. His major works are not in my library at this time, so, I am unable to locate the precise reference.
[10] This reading is core to Maimonides and to many other classic interior scientists of the Hebrew wisdom tradition. See Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed. For some of the core sources in Maimonides on prophecy, see for example, R. Eli Hadad in his short essay “Prophecy,” which focuses on Maimonides: . This reading of prophecy in Maimonides as being both a possibility and legitimate aspirational commandant for every human being is unpacked in numerous texts of Maimonides greatest interpreter Joseph Soloveitchik. For an annotated bibliography of Soloveitchik, see DAAT—A Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah, Department of Jewish Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University. The notion of prophecy being accessible in various forms to every man [and woman] also runs as a theme through Abraham Kook’s writings. This theme is readily apparent to any careful reader of Kook, and I (Marc) have pointed this out in myriad passages to my students over the years. Kook himself emerges directly from Maimonides in this regard. See, in regard to Kook and prophecy, two key sources in scholarship: One is Eliezer Schwied, Neviiim le-Amam u-le-Enoshut: Nevuah u-Nevim be-Hagut Ha-Yehudit shel Ha-Meach Ha-Esrim, Prophets for their Nation and Humanity: Prophecy and Prophets in 20th century Hebrew Philosophy, Jerusalem, Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 1999, pp. 190-214. The other is the doctoral dissertation of Avinoam Rosenak, The Philosophy of Halacha in the Thought of Rabbi Abraham HaCohen Kook (Hebrew) Hebrew University, 1997, and in brief, Avinoam Rosenak, (2004), “The Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud in Rabbi Kook's Conception of ‘the Prophetic Torah of Eretz Israel’” (Hebrew), A. Ravitzky (ed.), The Land of Israel in 20th century Jewish Thought, Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, Jerusalem, pp. 26-70.)
[11] On radical empiricism, see William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), a collection of essays edited and published posthumously by his colleague and biographer Ralph Barton Perry in 1912, Dover Publications 2003. See also, The Works of William James: Essays in Radical Empiricism, Harvard University Press, 1976, ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers—this critical edition includes commentary, notes, emendations, and appendices with and English translation of “La Notion de Conscience.”
[12] In G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work (1940) Ch. 1 “The Indian Mathematician Ramanujan,” p. 12, Hardy writes: “He could the idiosyncrasies of in an almost uncanny way. It was who said that every positive integer was one of Ramanujan's personal friends. I remember once going to see him when he was ill at . I had ridden in taxi cab number and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.’” After this famous anecdote, the number 1729 (= 13 + 123 = 93 + 103) is now known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number.
[13] See, for example, G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, 1969, London: Allen & Unwin, Hardcover. Integral Theory has recapitulated this material and sharpened it significantly. See, for example, Ken Wilber, Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, 1998.
[14] Quoted from Ken Wilber, Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, 1998.
[15] Mathematics itself, as we have alluded to in the main body of the text, serves in some sense both as a supporter of the classic exterior sciences, performed in mathematical value equations that are able to describe exterior processes in Cosmos from the movement of elementary particles and waves to the flow of money in economics, and itself an interior science, that is, an expression of the perceptions of the inward eye. In this sense, as we will note below, the Eye of the Mind, when animated appropriately—with differentiation and not disassociation from the Eye of Consciousness [Spirit, Contemplation, Value, Heart]—turns out not to be reductive materialist but rather an expression of the Intimate Universe.