Eye of Value: Saving the Damsel in Distress
By Marc Gafni
Note: The Parallax Course: Value is Real Why Saying This Clearly May Save Civilization [and our Souls] — (with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein) takes place on Saturdays, September 7/14/21/28–2024. For more information:
My name is Marc Gafni. I’m representing myself and my dear friend, interlocutor, and initiate in CosmoErotic Humanism, Dr. Zachary Stein. Zak is the co-president with me of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion.
We’ve been together with a couple of dozen other people in the inner core of the Center on a great adventure. This adventure involves trying to save a damsel in distress.
- The damsel is She.
- The damsel is Reality herself.
- The damsel is, and I apologize for the directness of it, humanity.
About thirteen years ago, Zak and I were studying together in a context that I call Holy of Holies, a deep kind of interior study, in the text of the lineage of Solomon and in other broader philosophical world texts. A dawning realisation occurred to me at that time, and to Zak from a different perspective, of what we then called the second shock of existence.
The first shock of existence is the experience of the dawn of the individual human being: that I’m going to die. My death, the skull grins at the banquet.
The second shock of existence is not the death of the individual human being, the second shock of existence is the potential death of humanity. That’s called existential risk. That’s sometimes called the meta crisis. We call it the second shock of existence.
It has two components. The first is the potential death of humanity, but the second is the potential death of our humanity.
Indeed, many of the moves being made today to try and avoid the death of humanity will be cause for the death of our humanity.
Now, as myself and Zak entered deeply into the space of Holy of Holies study, a number of realizations became very clear. The primary one I want to share with you is that to respond to this meta-crisis — which is the urgent, erotic moral imperative of this moment in time, more than any other — we had to engage not just in infrastructure — infrastructure solutions to bioweapons in the wastewater for example — not just in social structure, but in superstructure. The superstructure is, in this particular take on the superstructure, the very core Story of Value. This is a term we coined, it’s not a story, it’s a Story of Value, rooted in a Universal Grammar of Value, an expression of a larger Field of Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values. All that needed to come together this new Story of Value, constituted by this grammar of value itself, rooted in First Principles and First Values.
It is only this New Story, this evolution of the source code itself, this evolution of Eros, this evolution of Value, this evolution of a new Story of Value, that can change the vector of civilization, save potentially billions of people from unimaginable suffering, and speak to the trillions of unborn.
I mean, that’s how serious it is, right?
We’re in this generation between generations.
We’re in this time between stories, in this time between worlds.
We are the link to the future and the past.
All of the present depends on us.
Trillions and trillions of unborn human beings and unborn and untold love stories from the future depend on us.
So, the entire integrity of the memory of the future depends on us. The potential for the past to pass its baton to us, for us to fulfill all of her unfulfilled destinies and dreams, for us to write the injustices, and for us to create wholeness out of the shattered vessels — all of that depends on us.
What is the essence of this new Story of Value?
So what Zak and I want to share and talk about together in this 4-week course is: What is the essence of this new story of Value?
We want to introduce four primary new dimensions that we didn’t talk about in the last iteration of this course, Eye of Value part one. (If you weren’t at Eye of Value part one, it’s okay. You can join us in Value is Real. It’s part two that you can step into, even if you haven’t been in part one.
We’re going to talk about:
1. Scripts of Desire
Scripts of Desire. Reality — life — has scripts of desire. We say this as a very formal idea, not as a psychological idea, not as a mythopoetic idea. We have to move from mythopoetic to ontology. We need to begin to understand the erotic basis for being, which is Scripts of Desire. So, what we mean by Scripts of Desire is going to be an entire week in this course.
2. Imagination
Number two, we want to look at imagination. What does it mean to imagine? You know, Fauerbach, famously said that God is a figment of our imagination. My friend, Yuval Harari, kind of as a mouthpiece for post-modernity, a decent historian, a terrible philosopher, Yuval constantly talks about how value is an imagined reality. And of course, he’s echoing Fauerback and that entire trajectory of modernity and post-modernity. And of course, it’s true, I want to be very clear, my friends, God is a figment of our imagination. That’s true. But, our imagination is a figment of God.
What does that mean? What is the political role of imagination, the economic role of imagination, the mystical role of imagination, the social role of imagination, the psychologic role of imagination?
What does it mean to know that we are Adam? But by Adam, in the original archetype, we don’t mean Adam, just human or humus, meaning Adam, Adama, Earth. But the word Adam is not just the Hebrew Adama, Earth, humus, human, but Adam means deemyon. Deemyon means imagination. Adam means, we’re not just Homo sapiens, we’re Homo Imaginus. So what does that mean? How does that relate to in speak into Scripts of Desire?
3. Value is real and good
Three, we have to address the following issue very directly. Or perhaps we could call it the following assertion, because we’re not asking it as a question. We’re not doing the politically correct, “let’s ask this as a question.” We want to actually assert something, which is: Value is real and good. Value is real. Value is not a mythopoetic structure, value is an ontology of Cosmos. Value is not hard to find, value is impossible to avoid. What does it mean, value is real? We want to formulate that and actually crack open Values Theory, which has gotten stuck in the legitimate modern and post-modern critiques of old Value Theory. Let’s crack open Value Theory, but in a way that we can literally can feel the pulsing Eros of Value calling and addressing us directly.
4. Need, desire, value, rights and responsibilities
And four, we want to talk about the crucial thread that we’ve established and we’re now writing on between need, desire, value, rights and responsibilities. That crucial five. Let’s not call them the four horsemen. Let’s call them the five horsemen: need, desire, value, rights and responsibilities. We need to spend at least a week on that.
So these are four huge topics. We want to crack these open together with you, in a way that actually evolves something in the source code, that actually cracks something open, that actually moves something.
Radical audacity from a place of absolute humility
There’s a phrase in the lineage of Solomon, which is called to Tekufot. Tekufot means to be radically audacious from a place of absolute humility. The place where absolute humility meets radical audacity, is where our truth lives, where our Eros lives. Tikufot.
So, we want to approach this with absolute humility and radical audacity. Let’s do this together. But let’s do this together, not as an act of intellectual titillation or public intellectual posturing. Let’s do it because we care passionately about Reality. We are lovers of Reality. We care passionately about suffering. We are stepping in. We are somehow taking responsibility. To be human is to take responsibility, and to take responsibility is to respond. Right?
Life is a response to the Field of Value, and the Field of Value is real.
How we respond to it is the story of our lives.
So we’re going to come together and celebrate. We’re going to be alive with this. We’re going to try to laugh, dance, cry, think, and feel it deeply.
So from Zak and I just a huge invitation. Let’s do this together.
Thank you so much to Andrew Sweeny and to Parallax for the beautiful space.
I look forward to be together with you all. We both do. Thank you.
— Dr. Marc Gafni
This a lightly edited transcript from this beautiful personal invitation from Dr. Marc Gafni below:
