Conversations with David J. Temple

David J. Temple

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Society & Culture

Listen to intimate conversations with David J. Temple and friends exploring the unfolding vision of CosmoErotic Humanism. worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com

3d ago

Value and Desire Broken Open: The Ontological Structure of Cosmos (with Ken Wilber)

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is the third in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. Philosophers and truth-seekers for thousands of years have wrestled with a timeless question: is life innately meaningful, or are we just merely the byproduct of a random cosmos? In this dialogue, three great philosophers—Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein—take a radical stance. They argue that meaning and value are woven into the very fabric of reality itself—more fundamental to the cosmos than even space and time. Throughout this discussion they explore how desire, prehension, value, and meaning are fundamentally interwoven, and how chemistry itself can be seen as the music of desire, with each element expressing unique scripts of desire. They conclude that understanding desire and value as ontological primitives reveals a universe of intimate coherence, re-enchanting science and the internal daily experience with deeper meaning. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, July 2026, Episode: “Value and Desire Broken Open: The Ontological Structure of Cosmos” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:01 — Context Setting 1:49 — Desire, Prehension, Value, and Meaning Are All Words for the Same Thing 8:47 — Chemistry Is Literally the Music of Desire 12:36 — This Characterization of Chemistry Is a Way of Revivifying Logos Mysticism 15:33 — Chemistry Is a Desire Between Parts that Generates a Unique Whole, and the Cosmos Is Intimate Coherence All the Way Up and All the Way Down 20:45 — Value Is More Primordial Than Space and Time 26:11 — Three Stages of Scripts of Desire: A Degraded Condition, a Deed, a Condition That Can Be Clarified 29:18 — The Desire We Hold Is Continuous with the Animal Realm of Desire, but It Is Also More 33:20 — About First Principles and First Values 34:08 — Value Is Both the Field and the Emergent Properties of the Field 41:01 — Value Is Both the Cause and the Product 47:53 — In Order for My Desire to Be Dignified, Desire Has to Be a Value 52:55 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Marc: Thinking even a little more deeply, we’ll start maybe with holons and deepen a little bit into what we actually mean by value. Ken, we had started last time, at the very beginning our conversation, throwing out a few understandings of value, so we thought we’d stay in that conversation, but before we did that, to circle back to holons, because holons always like being circled back to. To find our way. So I’m just going to dive in. I don’t know why, by the way, you started like three years ago on the hair thing, it’s getting better and better. This new iteration, it’s nice. Ken: [Laughs] Desire, Prehension, Value, and Meaning Are All Words for the Same Thing Marc: Ok, so when we talk about value, we talk about Value as being the logical primitive of cosmos. Value is a given. It’s not that value is equally primordial to space and time. It’s prior. And it’s not that Value is equally primordial to space and time. Value is that in which space and time arise. I’ve been thinking about this the last few days. So one way to say it, which is wrong, is, oh, value is equally primordial to space and time. No, value actually operates both in the frame of being and becoming. So value is that in which all being arises. Or Value is being, and Value is also the space which is the ground of becoming. It’s prior to space and time in that sense. Ken: Since we’re circling back to holons, let me present it in a similar way. All holons have prehension, or a small amount of awareness, or consciousness, or feeling, or however you would like to think of it. And generally speaking, meaning has value because what meaning is, linguistically, let’s say, is a signifier. Like the meaning of the word tree. The signifier is T-R-E-E. And the meaning is whatever the tree it’s pointing to. That’s the value of that signifier. So all holons have a signifier, which is prehension. Because prehension touches everything that it’s aware of. That’s Whitehead’s point. And so value is an intrinsic part of the self-prehensive meaning system of the individual holon. It has prehension, prehension reaches out and touches, sees, feels, knows something. And that’s its meaning. The meaning of the word tree is the real tree, which is the referent to the signifier T-R-E-E. You can see value as a sea that things arise in. So you’re saying space and time arises out of Value, and that’s, in a certain sense, correct. I just wanted to mention those couple of facts. Marc: That’s great. In a certain sense, we’re in the elephant conversation. There is a lot of ways to describe the elephant. Let’s see if we can go into a couple of doors here, see how they work and just see what happens. Let’s go to holons for a second, because that’s where we started. So we have holons, which are whole parts. And we say that all of reality’s foundational structure is holons and that everything that exists in the world, in the universe, in any form, is either made up of holons or made by holons. Holons are fundamental building blocks of the universe. Now, of course, I’m just going to say the obvious, so I apologize for boring you both. I know you both know this well. Let me just say it so we can have it on the table in the conversation. A holon is anything that’s at the same time, both a whole and a part. * An atom is both a whole and a part of a molecule. * A molecule is both a whole and part of a macromolecule. * Macromolecules are wholes and parts of cells. * Cells are wholes and parts of organs, etc… These are all holons. Now here, what’s crucial for us is that holons are a structure of Value. And there’s a currency of desire that runs through all holons. In other words, parts come together in desire to form larger wholes. The larger whole is formed in fulfillment of the desire of the parts. Ken: And the prehension that’s in the holon is always reaching out and touching. So Value is an inherent part of every holon. Marc: Exactly. And touching is: I’m desiring deeper contact. Ken: That’s right. Marc: And then you get particular value because the whole itself, which comes from the part reaching out prehensively, is a direct result of a particular pattern or configuration of desire. In other words, the unique configuration of desire in the parts forms the intimate coherence of the whole. And we’ve been driving each other crazy in a good way. I’ve been just marinating, almost like in this insane ashram meditation on Value the last couple of weeks. Zak and I have been going back and forth. It’s getting very clear. * The whole itself is the direct result of a particular pattern or configuration of desire. * This unique configuration of desire in the parts forms the intimate coherence of the whole. Or said differently, you could say: * The intimate coherence of the whole is woven from the threads of the unique desire configuration that inheres in the parts. We can say one more thing: * The parts can be said to share a common telos that’s implied by each of their respective—and I want to make up a word here—scripts of desire. In other words, every part has a script of desire. But in order for these unique parts, these scripts of desire to come together and to create something new, a new value, there’s already a shared ground of Value between them, a shared telos. The implicit ontological structure of the science in this regard, the disclosure is that diverse parts, each with their own quality of desire, both share a desired ender telos. In other words, the ontological structure of reality is such that, again, diverse parts, each with their own quality of desire, both share a desired ender telos that’s enacted in the whole that emerges from the distinct parts. So all of a sudden we have this realization that, literally, holons and desire generating new value are exactly the same. I mean, it’s very beautiful. It’s so f*****g elegant, you could cry. A
May 18

Understanding the Field of Value: Holons, Eros, and ErosValue (with Ken Wilber)

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is the second in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein do a deep dive into metaphysics and the clarification of terms they're using to articulate what they call a new grammar of value. They discuss the distinctions between Eros in the Greek and Christian sense and their definition of ErosValue, the difference between value and the Field of Value, and how holons and their core drivers play into all of that. Join in as a fly on the wall as these three great philosophers discuss the nature of the Field of Value itself and explore the relationship between these terms in the context of Integral Theory as well as CosmoErotic Humanism. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, May 2026, Episode: “Understanding the Field of Value: Holons, Eros, and ErosValue” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:48 — Context Setting 1:41 — First Definition of Value: Value Is the Quality of Irreducible Rightness that Exists in the Universe 8:59 — "Rightness” Works Across The Good, The True and The Beautiful 13:05 — Is the Field of Value a Real Place or a Real Thing? 15:52 — Understanding the Field of Value in terms of Self: Separate Self, True Self, Unique Self 21:36 — We Need to Distinguish Between the Field of ErosValue and the Narrow Sense of the Greek and Christian Notion of Eros 26:14 — About First Principles and First Values 27:01 — The Four Core Drives Of All Holons Are Included in Our Definitions of Eros and Intimacy 39:31 — We’re Using The Word “Value” in the Same Way Ken Uses Holons — Value Is Not Hard to Find, It’s Impossible to Avoid 51:18 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Marc: David J. Temple’s next book is really anthro-ontology, which is how we know what we know. Anthro: human. Ontology: real. * How do we know what we know? * How do we know anything? * And how do we know that value is real? But it’s really two related questions: * How do we know what the value is real? * What is value? Which are obviously co-joined and related. What we did is, David J. Temple came over the other night, and he looked a little bit like you, Ken. He looked a little bit like Zak. He had some Jewish genes there someplace, but he came over and he wrote down about 50 formulations of what is value. And we actually had our friend Daniel over for three, four days, where we also did a deep dive into this topic: what is value? Only if value is real all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain do we have an omnicoherent Cosmos. Otherwise, we don’t have a coherent Cosmos. So when David talks about the Intimate Universe, he means intimacy all the way down and all the way up, right? Intimacy and coherence are almost the same word. It’s intimate coherence or coherent intimacy. With that in mind, I thought we would just jump in. I’ll throw out possible definitions of value. And it doesn’t get more delightful than this. We’re throwing out actual definitions of value, some of them will be, of course, overlapping. We haven’t done stage two here to get it down to five definitions. We’re still at the list of 50, where Zak rolls his eyes and says, “When’s that going to get down to 5 or 10?” But let’s play for now. Let’s play, okay? Here we go. First Definition of Value: Value Is the Quality of Irreducible Rightness that Exists in the Universe Marc: 1) Value is the quality of irreducible rightness that exists in the universe. Or I’ll say it a little differently. * Value is the quality of irreducible rightness for its own sake that exists in the universe. Before we comment on it, I’ll say it again. We’re going under the assumption that we’ll have to unpack, David has to unpack this, that all value, when we say value is real, we mean value is real and that it is eternal and evolving. Ken?: And each value has to be a part of some other value. Marc: And each value needs to be part of the Field of Value. Ken: And we already have a name for what that is. It’s called a holon. Marc: It’s called a holon. Okay. Ken: So value is a whole entity that is a part of a larger value. Essentially. That’s why value is part of a field. And if it’s a field of entities, then they each have to be interconnected. All holons are interconnected because they’re a whole that’s part of a larger whole, that itself is part of a larger whole. Atoms are parts of molecules, which are parts of cells, which are part of multicellular animals , which are part of an entire tree of life, and it just goes up. And each one of those has a value. Marc: Each one of those has a value and no value is independent of all the values. Ken: That’s right. Marc: And that’s what’s key. To have an omnicoherent Cosmos, we have to recognize that no value is ever dissociated from the larger Field of Value. If it would dissociate, it would become the source of evil. Meaning, it would become anti-value. And that’s beautiful, right? Ken: Right. Marc: The dissociation itself causes it to become anti-value. Ken: And that’s a great definition of anti-value. Marc: Right? It’s a value dissociated from the larger field of value. I decontextualize a value from the larger Field of Value, I transform it into an absolute, non-holon, and it becomes anti-value. Ken: And that’s to say, a value that isn’t part of another value ceases to be a holon. Because when any holon breaks off being a part of a larger whole, it ceases being a holon. Because it’s by definition not part of a larger whole. Marc: And in some sense, what it’s done is, it’s become cancerous. Ken: Right. Marc: It’s become a cancer. Then that value metastasizes by itself, it sub-optimizes the larger system, and then winds up both suiciding the larger system, and then itself. That’s the process. A good example would be a value like power. In some sense, power is a value. If we lose our relationship to power, we become powerless, which is often tragic. But power is a particular value which is most prone to dissociate from the larger field. Right? It’s funny, in Tolkien, when he writes Lord of the Rings, “My precious!” Precious means value. But it’s the value of power which is dissociated from the larger field, so that power becomes this ultimate eros dissociated from all other values. So it becomes the ultimate anti-value. Ken: The ultimate evil. Marc: The ultimate evil. Yay. Zachary, thoughts from the third floor? Zak: Yeah, insofar as we speak of a grammar of value and holonic theory applies to the idea of grammar, then you get this idea of: one way of thinking about what we’re saying is, value is not some illegible, weird ephemeral feeling, there’s a grammar to it. It has that logic of them being nested, they’re related. You get these things that appear as polarities that are actually these deep inter-inclusions in some way. So a lot of the holonic theory applied to thinking about the Field of Value is one way of getting into some of what we’re discussing. I think it’s an interesting cross-fertilization there. Back to your definition of whatever it was, Mark, at the beginning there, that the intrinsicness of the universe being appropriate… Marc: I’ll give it to you, just so you have it. Value is the quality of irreducible rightness for its own sake that exists in the universe. Zak: So rightness, goodness, appropriateness that there’s something at the base of the universe that is good, would be one way of thinking about the root of the whole value conversation. Without that as a premise, you can’t arguably, for example, boot from a universe that’s bad and create value, right? That’s an interesting place to start. “Rightness” Works Across The Good, The True and The Beautiful Ken: Let me ask what exactly you mean by—how does it compare to the good, the true, or the beautiful? Why not goodness? Marc: We could go for goodness, right? Ken: Because there are very real, there are very specifi
May 13

Selection, Desire and the Becoming of the Universe

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the profound interplay between selection, desire, value, and the evolutionary process of the universe. They discuss: why does the universe select certain structures instead of others, across all levels of matter, life, and mind? They engage with the deep cosmic question: what does the universe value? — and argue that in order to respond to our escalating challenge of humans overriding natural selection with their own choices, we have to be able to clearly see and distinguish between value and its counterfeit forms. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, May 2026, Episode: “Selection, Desire and the Becoming of the Universe” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day deep dive into CosmoErotic Humanism course, valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:41 — Context Setting 1:02 — Framing the Conversation: There Is a Selection Process across the Levels of Matter, Life, and Mind 3:20 — There Must Have Been a Point in Which Humanity Started to Override the Organic Selection Processes of the Biosphere 6:44 — Distinguishing Between Value and its Counterfeit Forms Is Not So Simple 13:13 — We Have to Be Able to Say that Selection Is Off Course 15:38 — About First Principles and First Values 16:25 — To Liberate Yourself from Pseudo-Eros and Counterfeit Values, You Need a Better Script of Desire That’s Part of the Field of Value 26:36 — You Don’t Want to Make the Fantasy into Reality, but to Bring the Fantasy in Touch with What Is Real 33:27 — It’s Through Imagination that We Can Be Covenanted with All of the Present, All of the Past, and All of the Future 39:08 — Invitation to Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: So, joking aside, David was in touch. He hangs out in a bunch of places. He was over at CRI with me and Schmachtenberger and others, thinking about this topic of what sometimes is called generator functions. We’ve talked about this with regards to X-Risk with David quite a bit. Marc: Right. That sweetheart, Chris, who was at the house here for a couple of weeks, was he there? Zak: Precisely. Yeah, he’s a sweetheart. Framing the Conversation: There Is a Selection Process across the Levels of Matter, Life, and Mind Zak: One of the things that emerged was this notion of selection. It’s a very deep topic. Meaning, we know selection from natural selection. That’s where there’s a genetic mutation, and then it either lives or it doesn’t live. And that’s interesting, because that’s kind of the whole biosphere deciding if this thing stays or goes. But what’s interesting is before you get biological selection, there are structures in the universe that simply don’t exist, and other structures that are super, super common. There’s a selection process at the level of the physiosphere, meaning, physics. So, there’s this deep question about multi-level selection across basically matter, life, and mind. It’s a deep issue. And another way to frame it, to bring it into our bailiwick in terms of value theory, is: One of the deeper questions is: why is there something rather than nothing? Which is, why was there first, the universe, selected for at all? Meaning, the universe was chosen. And then, if you set the universe adrift temporally, it means at any moment you can ask the question, why is the universe in this state and not in some other state? This is the big question of cosmic selection, which is, what does the universe value? Why does the universe have some things hanging around? Other things are basically impossible, and other sets of things come for a time and then disappear and be selected out. Deep questions. It begins with thermodynamics and then self-organization at the level of physics. So, that’s the biggest frame. And then, there are these layers of the selection process. And again, we know natural selection because it’s popular and it totally exists. 1) Natural selection is very common. But there’s also all of these other ones, which you know a lot about. 2) Group selection, what’s called co-selection. The lion becomes more powerful, but then the gazelle becomes faster. And so, you get symmetry of co-selection, balancing ecosystems. You also get niche creation, which results in phenotypic accommodation. This was the Baldwin effect, where the organism creates for itself an environment that protects it until there’s a genetic mutation that allows it to adapt better. That’s a quasi-Lamarckian mechanism. There Must Have Been a Point in Which Humanity Started to Override the Organic Selection Processes of the Biosphere Zak: 3) Then this abrupt thing occurs, and this is where the whole conversation started, which was: How is it that the things that are selected for in the biosphere lead to more life, and then at a certain point, the things that start to get selected for in the biosphere start to destroy life? Marc: The meta-crisis. Zak: The meta-crisis. And at a micro level, something like suicide. How is it that an organism emerges, which has the capacity to destroy itself when that just didn’t exist in nature? There’s not suicide in nature. Humans are unique in the category of suicide. And so, this question of species suicide—which is what the meta-crisis is—and ecocide, we take the whole biosphere with us. What that means is there must have been some switch in selection where humanity at some point started to override the organic selection processes of the biosphere. So: * Technological group augmentation becomes the predominant mode of selection. * That turns into self-domestication, which means we start to self-alter our own genetic codes, the genetic codes of animals, crops and other things—and start to radically alter through our own choice, not the holistic selection of nature, but our own choice augmented by technology. * Then, eventually we’re at this moment of cyborgic self-augmentation, which even more fundamentally augments what’s possible to select into or out of existence. So, there’s this stack. And what’s interesting about that is that at all of those layers, First Principles and First Values suffuse the mechanisms by which selection work. And so, this is the classic thing we’ve said for long, just slightly reframed. In the first minutes after the Big Bang, there are these processes of intimacy and Eros which draw together certain structures. Those structures survive to this day and constitute us. Every moment of the universe, they’re continually selected for, and they instantiate these principles. Now, the things that get selected out, like a civilization that self-terminates, for example, must somehow have deviated from those things which are selected for which confer survival. And of course, we don’t mean that in the simple Darwinian sense. We mean in this really richly ontologically stratified way. So, that biggest question of selection is this question of what the universe values, and the human steps in at this juncture and starts to override, through its own freedom and creativity, that universal structure. That’s the thing. And it’s so related to First Principles and First Values, but that specific launchpad to reflect this was useful… Marc: Yeah. In some sense, it’s the same conversation, but with a unique formulation, which is always good. There’s always a particular formulation that reopens it again in a very fructifying and rich way. I love the presentation, thank you. I haven’t thought this through, so this is not like a prefabricated home. We’ll build it together. Let me just put a few pieces together. First, just a meta comment. Distinguishing Between Value and its Counterfeit Forms Is Not So Simple Marc: What we found over the years is that there’s these series of issues that we frame in terms of existential risk as particular problems. Like, existential risk is a particular problem, of a particular nature, which, of course, never existed before. And as a result of a unique set of variables, both in the interiors and the exteriors that conflate at a particular moment in time in a way that they never have before. At the same time, we became a
Apr 29

Value and Wholeness: A New Story of Value Is a New Story of Wholeness (with Ken Wilber)

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is the first in a series of dialogues between Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Zak Stein, reconvening after the release of First Principles and First Values. In this conversation, they discuss anthro-ontology, exploring the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism and the relationship between value and wholeness. Are they the same thing? How are they different? The dialogue also goes on to clarify the only actual cure to the meaning crisis: the clarification of value. This is a foundational conversation for anyone seeking to deeply understand and recognize value in their own lives. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, April 2026, Episode: “Value and Wholeness: A New Story of Value Is a New Story of Wholeness” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:45 — Context: Value and Wholeness Are Inter-Included 9:41 — There’s a Danger of False Certainty in Fixating on the “Why” Question: The Why Is Self-Evidently Responded To 22:45 — Existing Theories of Value in Philosophy Are Pallid 27:38 — The Relationship between Economic Value and Intrinsic Value Is the “Pointing To” 31:01 — We Need to Align Use Value with Exchange Value 32:35 — Before We Are a Specific Value, We Are Value Itself 39:19 — Your Personal Value Is Your Unique Personhood and It’s Part of the Field of Value 45:13 — The Core Assumption of Technofeudalism Is that There Is Nothing Sacred, There Is No Field of Value 52:37 — We Are Talking About Value, Love, Eros in a Four Quadrants Perspective 55:08 — About First Principles and First Values 55:55 — It Should Be as Clear as Day that the Fundamental Problem Is a Problem of Value 57:25 — The Crisis of Meaning Is Used Today to Avoid the Value Conversation 58:54 — The Only Cure to the Meaning Crisis Is the Clarification of Value 1:02:13 — It’s a Conversational Cosmos — And Conversation Is the Exchange of Meaning, Which Is Embedded in Value 1:15:37 — Creativity Itself Isn’t Necessarily Good, Creation that Moves Us Towards Value Is Good 1:25:04 — We Need to Be Messiahs — We Need To Raise the Conversation to the Assumption that There Is a Field of Value 1:31:17 — By Hijacking Conversation, AI Can Create a Sense of Nothingness and Take Away Our Ability to Create Meaning 1:34:16 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context: Value and Wholeness Are Inter-Included Zak: We want to speak about wholeness and value. Ken: Sure. Zak: I think Marc wanted to kick it off. Marc: Yeah. We will kick it off, but first, just to say, we’re here to celebrate the release of First Principles and First Values, which is really exciting. And to our friend John Mackey, who’s listening, John stepped in and created this possibility for Ken and I to work on this, Zak, many years ago. Ken: Right. Marc: This is a fulfillment of a commitment to John to put out a book together. And John is obviously excited that Zak has stepped in, and so David J. Temple has come through big time. Thank you John. That’s a good place to start. It’s so delightful to be at the beginning of another set of conversations. Ken: Right. Marc: People are not aware of this, Ken and I did a series of conversations six, seven years ago on Eros and sexuality on the seven levels of sexuality. That’s now a 12 volume set, which is being completed. So these things get somewhere, right? It’s very exciting. Ken: Right. What are you doing with it? Marc: It’s going to be published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, first as “2 m**********r volumes”—those big, you know—and then 12 individual volumes. It’s The Phenomenology of Eros. Zak subjected it to a very critical reading, on multiple levels, it’s gone through many years of revision and care. And it’s done, it’s monumental and you are clearly present, evoked, and of course cited. Ken: Ah! Great. Marc: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So, David really wants us to talk about: how do you know what you know? Anthro-ontology. By anthro-ontology, that Ken, Zak and I have talked about before, we mean anthro: human being, ontology: for real. That which is for real. True existence, the true essence, nature of things, that I know by accessing my own interiors. Or anthro-ontology in some sense: there is a mystery and the mystery is within us. Something like that. Now, what we want to particularly look at is this mystery through the prism of two lenses. One that David J. Temple spent a lot of time in this book First Principles and First Values, and one that Ken spent a lot of time completely independently in this new book about to be released, about Wholeness. And I would just note that Ken, you’ve been in this wholeness conversation for a long time. Back in 2004 you recommended, when I was talking about the four faces of Eros, that the fourth face, which was then the interconnectivity of the all with the all, you said, no, that should be wholeness. Which I changed in A Return to Eros, and that was yours. So this is an ongoing conversation for many, many years. And it’s really exciting to get to this place. Let’s begin. First off, what we’re saying is that that mystery within us could be called Wholeness, it could be called Value. And those are somehow two faces of the one. 1) One of the things we want to explore today is the relationship between them. Are they related? Are they the same word? Are they different words? That’s one. 2) Let me enter for a second from the perspective of value. David’s established a formula which is: clarified desire equals value. It’s based on a bunch of premises and CosmoErotic Humanism. And Ken, you’ve written way before CosmoErotic Humanism. I was writing on Eros on my side. You invoked Eros in multiple texts all through the years. And we’ve talked about Eros from the beginning. Ken: Right. And Eros, for me, is a primary force in the whole Cosmos. Marc: Right. And when we speak of Eros, we formulated an interior science equation of Eros. By Eros we mean: the experience that moves through all of reality, all the way up and all the way down, of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That’s an interior science equation of Eros that appears of course, in First Principles and First Values that we’ve tested over the last 10 years. You can talk about: * Eros in an organization, * Eros between people, * Eros on the biochemical level, * Eros in the pure world of interiors. And we’re talking about the same thing, Eros. So: 1) Reality is Eros.2) One of the faces of Eros, the qualities of Eros is desire.3) Desire moves towards deeper contact and greater wholeness.4) Clarified desire yields value. Now, we could rewrite the Eros equation in one of two ways. We could say: Eros equals radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. Or we could say the exact same thing: Eros equals radical aliveness desiring, moving towards ever deeper contact and ever greater value. The equation actually works both ways. It’s one of the places you begin to see the kind of inter-inclusion of value and wholeness. We actually have this understanding that value is not just—like Ken, you immediately said Eros is cosmic Eros, we’re understanding it the same way we always have. So by value we don’t mean values. By value, we don’t mean Christian values or the values conversation. By value we mean the Field of Value in which all values are included. And that is in the interior science tradition of Solomon, the lineage of Solomon, which strangely was pointed out to me when I was talking about it, is mirrored by Whitehead and I looked it up, it’s true, in Process and Reality. One of the 10 sephirot, the 10 luminations is tiferet. Tiferet means beauty. Beauty is the intensification of experience in which nothing is left out and all opposites are included. So the other name for tiferet, beauty, is shalom, wholeness. Because the word shalom literally means wholeness, of course. It’s very beautiful. So we have this sense of a Field of Value or a Field of Wholeness in which we participate, which discloses—not an answer, but
Apr 1

CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism: Fragrances of Their Important Distinctions

About this episode: This dialogue is a special episode, a spontaneous conversation of Dr. Marc Gafni with Layman Pascal and Brandan Graham Dempsey, held at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. It is a first step towards deeper conversation between CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple (Marc Gafni) in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, April 2026, Episode: “CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism: Fragrances of Their Important Distinctions” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. P.S. If you want to meet Dr. Marc Gafni in person, there is only one event of the year, and seats are going fast. Click here to join. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:45 — You Can’t Reduce Evil to Trauma 7:17 — Can We Talk About Evil Without Metaphysics? 27:07 — About First Principles and First Values 28:03 — Metamodernism and Cosmo-Erotic Humanism in Conversation 41:25 — We Need to Cultivate an Ethic of Synergy and Kindness in the Space End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Marc: So Isaiah Chapter 45 verse 7. We look at Isaiah as a prophet. He’s more of a shamanic master. Prophets are more shamans. We use the word prophet, it’s this kind of Christian word… But if you look at the literature, prophets are described almost always in the third century Midrashic literature, through texts of the Song of Songs. Meaning they’re erotic texts. By erotic I don’t mean sexual, I mean they’re shamanic erotic texts, and essentially the Song of Songs is a shamanic erotic document. The prophet for us is this guy at the gate saying, “Repent ye, repent ye,” but actually it doesn’t capture who they were. Which is why the prophets and the pagans were interlocked in debate. Not because the prophets were like, “Oh, pagans are bad,” but they were very close—they’re the flip side of the pagans. And what’s his name, that guy? Oh, Gafni. He has a chapter in The Mystery of Love, in the old thing, a chapter on prophets and pagans, which you would like—something we’ve never talked about. It’s directly related to that conversation. Layman: But we haven’t discussed it. Marc: Right. So back at the ranch. You Can’t Reduce Evil to Trauma Marc: 45:7 the text reads, Isaiah shamanic master, yotzer ohr u-boreh choshech oseh shalom u-voreh ra. yotzer ohr—who creates light u-boreh choshech—and creates darkness oseh shalom—creates wholeness (not peace) u’voreh ra—and creates evil Brendan: Mm-hmm. Marc: That’s the play. In the end, there’s a nondual monism in play, but there’s a dialectical ontology of evil within it. Brendan: Yeah. Big theodicy questions. Marc: Yeah. It’s everything. You may remember Brendan, we were once together in the space at that Symposium and we talked a little bit about that on Sunday, we talked there about the term “anthro-ontology.” Anthro-ontology tells me that I can’t reduce evil to trauma. There’s this move that we make in modernity, we basically reduce evil to a therapeutic problem. I’ve pushed back on you in a couple of conversations we’ve had just on this or that where you know, Layman’s very understanding of everyone and I’m saying, “No, there’s actually a line--that’s not okay.” But it’s not a moralistic prophetic sense. It’s a shamanic sense. We’re like, “What’s the line?” The Borgias were the line—they were murdering people all over. So it’s not just trauma. Trauma doesn’t anthro-ontologically explain it. Brendan: I know we both have benefited a lot from Nietzsche and integrated some thoughts around his framings into a religiosity that Nietzsche could maybe get behind or be comfortable with. And as an interesting exercise to attend to the critiques that he’s leveling, and then say “Oh, well, there’s something there.” He talks about the great health and about the possibility of conceiving a lot of these metaphysical principles more in terms of what leads to flourishing, vibrancy, vitality, increase of well-being—these sorts of things. Will to power, you could put that in that matrix. But yeah, for me that was very helpful to be able to re-situate, re-understand notions of sin and also evil as a failure to bring out the fullness of the vital, the healthfulness of things and so people… Layman: Somewhere between what the two of you are saying, the way I normally talk about nihilism and fascism is being related. The culture is full of nihilistic elements operating in various dimensions at various scales, where there’s self-undermining of all kinds of things going on, but it’s not really in my mind fascism until it mobilizes to start to destroy these things. Right? There’s all these tendencies that undermine or take away from or not fully increase in thriving, but there’s a slightly different move and a different felt quality when it actively starts to go back the other way. It’s not just not establishing thriving. It’s actively intending anti-thriving. Marc: Sauron. Yeah. Received. Nietzsche, I love Nietzsche. His passages on music and his understanding of reality not as mechanics, but music and his mocking of the mechanical understandings of reality are just like, “F**k! Thank you!” And Nietzsche is, in a way, Rilke is a similar way, where… When I first encountered Nietzsche I was majoring in philosophy, so I did all the courses at the college for one semester. Like, 25 courses in philosophy when you’re 18 and you do that crazy move. So I’m reading Nietzsche, and I’m like, “F****r, you m**********r.” What he basically does is he takes a loan of social capital. Nietzsche is the last great philosopher in a certain way. He’s both the end and the beginning of something new. He both destroys, but he’s still in the lineage. Nietzsche is taking a loan of philosophical capital or metaphysics from the great tradition still, in which he assumes that… On the one hand he’d have a passage where a postmodernist could say “It’s a social construct,” then he’ll have a whole series of other passages where he’s assumed that that aliveness and that flourishing is a value of reality and an inherent and intrinsic value of reality. Not a made-up value. When you read Rilke, Rilke is like, “Yeah, it’s all over when we die and dah, dah, dah,” and he’s filled with Value. So there are these hinge figures. I’ll give you another example. There’s a guy named Ephraim Ben Chaim, who was one of Israel’s great poets. We were very close friends. Another guy is Haim Gouri—these are two of the great poets of Israel and they died, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago. They were at the ‘48 war, they were in love with Hebraic texts. Complete heretics, but they assumed the text would always be there. They never meant to get rid of the text. They meant like, “We’re going to borrow all that capital, then destroy it and then assume it’ll go on forever.” So that’s what Rilke assumed and Nietzsche thought: “Of course the values.” It never occurred to them that “Oh, it’s all made up.” Can We Talk About Evil Without Metaphysics? Brendan: Yeah, I understand that and could see how you could put Nietzsche in that lens. I guess for me, it’s less about Nietzsche as a philosopher, as a thinker, but he names a particular thing that I think is a merit of an idea that can be entertained outside of Nietzsche and the rest of his project. That’s the big thing for me. It’s an “immanent-izing” of value—in a way that we can appreciate how things have an intrinsic relational dynamic that can give rise to, “This is valuable, this is good,” for all the things. You’re talking about the Borgias, right? Murder, torture, all these things are entropic, dissolving things. They take away complexity. But if there’s an aspect of, “When do I feel full? When do I feel rich and filled with a kind of enthusiastic capacity?” These are things that enhance, improve and complexify—that all seem to be totally cognizable without having to refer to metaphysical principles in the classic sense. Marc: So here’s the question. This is great. I totally get it. You just hit the crux of the conversation, and again, you and I have talked through Z and we were in that space together, we’ve never been in a different space. But it’s the crux, which is like this. Let’s take a different example. Look at parapsychology. It’s a good example. It’s very clear that parapsychology violates the laws of physics. Clearly—time, etc. etc. So why would one think the laws of physics apply, when it’s very clear—based on a radical empiricism—that they don’t. The laws of physics are both real, yet it’s very very clear there’s an entire other world at play. In
Mar 23

Journey of Becoming – Exploring the Garden of Eden – Part 2 of 3

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: This is Part 2 of a series of dialogues on the Garden of Eden. If you still haven’t listened to Part 1, we recommend you listen to it first by clicking here. In this second dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein deepen their exploration of the Garden of Eden, engaging with its complexities as a profound narrative about the evolution of desire, loneliness, and the process of becoming human. They examine the transition from the innocent unity of Adam and Eve to the birth of human complexity marked by desire, disobedience, and existential tension. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J.,Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, March 2026, Episode: “Journey of Becoming – Exploring the Garden of Eden – Part 2 of 3” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:31 — Context Setting 1:09 — Recapitulation: Garden of Eden, Chapter 2 2:31 — A Parenthesis on Genesis 2:24 - Leaving Father and Mother: The Condition of Desire 5:39 — The Garden of Eden, Chapter 3 16:42 — About First Principles and First Values 17:29 — The Garden of Eden Is a Text About Becoming Human 26:05 — Invitation to The Crossing End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: So again, David, he’s not here. But he asked us to record, continue speaking about the Garden. We were just getting into it. You might want to recapitulate maybe a little bit where we were. Marc: Yeah. On this one, if anyone is joining us for now, just listen to the immediate previous one, which is about 25 minutes on the Garden, where we opened up the Garden of Eden in Chapter 2 of Genesis. We’re going to go directly into Chapter 3. And what we decided to do is before we talk about the Garden in a meta frame, we’re just going to do this practice of actually just reading the text and raising issues as we raise it. Recapitulation: Garden of Eden, Chapter 2 Marc: So we saw in Chapter 2 that they’re in the Garden, they’re naked, there’s no shame. That’s how we ended. That’s where we ended. So there is sexuality. There’s this loneliness. The three steps are: 1) There’s the Garden. 2) Then apropos of nothing, we go to this lonely being. In response to loneliness, there’s the bringing to the human being of all of the beasts of the field. The lineage reads that as sexual relations with all the beasts, but not in a bestiality sense, sorry to disappoint everyone, but just in an archetypal sense. It doesn’t work. That’s after the two verses of calling names, meaning, dominating, controlling. He doesn’t find a helpmate against him that liberates him from loneliness. 3) And then there’s the sacrificial act. He falls asleep as it were. He’s split asunder. The woman emerges. And they’re then brought together. And when they’re brought together, there’s this great declaration, “The flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone. Therefore, he shall leave his father and mother. He shall cleave sexually, erotic union. They shall cleave together and they shall be one flesh. They’re naked and there’s no shame.” That’s the text. A Parenthesis on Genesis 2:24 - Leaving Father and Mother: The Condition of Desire Marc: And by the way, just a little parentheses, before David asked us to talk about the Garden, we were talking a little bit just in Zak and Marc’s space about that book that you referred me to, Sadly, Porn, by Edward Teach. He has this analysis that we were talking about briefly of the Fifty Shades of Grey story where he basically says, they’re exporting their desire to contract. They’re both controlled by contract, which he calls parental authority. So that’s parental authority. And of course, his point is that if they’re both brother and sister under parents, it’s actually not romance, it’s incest. That’s his dramatic point. But his point actually is this text in Genesis that we just finished reading, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife,” that is to say, step out of parental authority. * You have to each leave your parents. * You have to each not be under parental authority. * You have to actually have thrown mommy and daddy out of bed. You have to actually have a dimension of your own autonomy and your own script of desire in order to come together not as children of the great parent, but as autonomous free beings in which you can, with your own script of desire, create a new script of desire. What he’s describing is this kind of sexuality that takes place under the guise of parental authority. And the parental authority is not the inherent value structures of Cosmos, it’s the social construction of socially sanctioned visions of desire. He got a deep intuitive sense there of how sexing happens when you’re under parental authority. The penultimate text for that is Genesis 2:24, which is the text that we read last time, right before we’re about to start now, which is, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother.” And then w’davaq b’ish’to, “create erotic union with his partner, and they shall become one flesh.” It’s an incredible verse. You actually can’t create a Field of Desire without first leaving your father and mother. It’s a very tight structure verse, which is making a big demand. So that’s just a general thought. Before we go on, any thoughts on that one? Zak: It struck me as we read it last time, that particular bit, because of course Adam didn’t have a father and mother. So it’s just interesting. Like at that point, they’re like, “Leave your father and mother,” when in fact, “Who were those two?” Because right now we have one creator. And then of course there’s that sense of the giving away at the wedding. The kind of gestures of maturity that are thresholds, like leaving a Garden, like actually exiting. Leaving the nest. That stuff emerged. But the first thing was just that, “Well, I didn’t have a father and mother since...” Marc: Right. These texts, the silliness of superficial scholarship is to of course read them superficially. They’re not historical texts. They’re intentionally mythical archetypal texts, which are telling a story. And then the narrator says, and it’s like that. Zak: Yeah. The Garden of Eden, Chapter 3 Marc: All right, Garden of Eden. 3.1. Let’s see if we can at least read through this chapter today. If we can get through the text today, then in part three, we’ll raise the issues, then we can really look at the Garden. Or maybe we’ll be able to do it as we read. So the snake. This is actually where the phrase comes from in the West, but there was a snake in the Garden. This is the snake in the Garden. They’re in the Garden. There’s a snake. The snake is in the Garden and the snake was more arum. The word arum means naked and wise, in Hebrew, both words. So it’s both meanings, arum. So the snake was more wise, or more cunning or more naked. Arum literally means naked. The snake was more naked than all the beasts of the field. And the snake says to the woman, lo tokh’lu mikol etz hagan, “God told you not to eat from any of the trees of the field.” And the woman says, Verse 2, “No, no, no, God didn’t say that.” That’s what the snake does. “And God said, no, eat from all the trees. Just from one tree, don’t eat. From the tree which is in the center of the Garden, don’t eat. And don’t touch it, lest you may die.” Of course, the good reader of the text notices that God didn’t say don’t touch it. So you just notice how people play just in terms of dialogue, the dialogue here in these first three verses. What both of them are doing is recalling a conversation and distorting the text intentionally in order to actually evoke a result. The snake says, “And God said don’t eat from any of the trees in the Garden, but of course God didn’t say that.” So he’s distorting the text. Then she goes, “No, no, no, no, no, God didn’t say that. God said he ate everything.” But then she goes on and then she misquotes. They’re both misquoting God. The misquoting of God is this process in the Garden of Eden. This is very structurally in the text. It’s the ambiguation of the God voice, the in
Mar 9

Desire and Loneliness: The Garden of Eden and the Evolution of Scripts of Desire - Introduction: Part 1 of 3

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the evolution of desire through the lens of the Garden of Eden, situating it within the context of CosmoErotic Humanism. They do a recapitulation on scripts of desire, proposing seven key steps to recognize your own scripts of desire and how they participate in the larger field of desire of reality. The dialogue then moves on to a reading and hermeneutic of the Garden of Eden, Genesis chapter 2, examining how early human experiences with loneliness and desire are expressed through the narrative, emphasizing two dimensions of the human being: majestic man and redemptive man. This discussion sets the stage for future dialogues exploring the deeper ethical and existential implications of desire. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast are drawn from the following volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Gafni, Marc. Codes of Desire: On the Nature of Reality: The Answer to Who, Where, and What. 2025. * Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni. Forthcoming. The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, March 2026, Episode: “Desire and Loneliness: The Garden of Eden and the Evolution of Scripts of Desire - Introduction: Part 1 of 3” Get the book: 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. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:58 — Context Setting 1:49 — The Six Steps on the Evolution of Scripts of Desire 4:48 — Clarifying Another Step: The Plotline of Reality Is the Evolution of Desire 9:44 — The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Context from Chapter One 12:22 — The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Chapter Two 16:56 — Majestic Man and Redemptive Man 22:41 — It’s Not Good for the Human Being to Be Alone 29:27 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: Okay, so, last week David prompted us to begin this conversation about scripts of desire, moving towards this discussion of the Garden of Eden, which he said that he had seated with you. So I’m curious if you have been in touch with David since last week. I know he’s traveling… Marc: Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know why he does this, but he goes both to the, in America, to the Republican and to the Democratic National Convention, each time disguised as a different delegate. He was probably at the DNC this week, you know, after doing the Republican thing. So he’s had a little bit of a busy week. He had lots of cultural insights, but I guess that’s a different conversation. Zak: Gotcha. Yeah. Marc: Let’s think about this, holy man. I woke up in the middle of the night to a little ping on my phone where David did like a little recapitulation and with a little note said, start this next time. So here’s the quick recapitulation. And then we got the garden text. We’re ready for the garden. The Six Steps on the Evolution of Scripts of Desire Marc: Six steps. * We have three questions, the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism. They are: * Where. Where am I? Where are we? * Who. Who am I? Who are we? * What. What ought I do? What ought we do? * We answer those questions. All those questions are completely bound up with desire, scripts of desire. * Where am I? In a Field of Desire, CosmoErotic universe. Where are we? Same. * Who am I? Who are we? We are personal scripts of desire and we are cultural scripts of desire. * What. What ought I do? Meaning, what desire should I fulfill? What desires deserve to be responded to, fulfilled and engaged, and what ones do not? * We’ve got the three questions. We’ve now understood them in terms of desire. Then when we go on we say, okay, what do we know? We know: * Reality is a script of desire. Reality is scripts of desire. * I participate in Reality and Reality participates in me. So I live in Reality scripts of desire and Reality scripts of desire live in me. I know you and David spoke about that a lot, and I know that you’re tracking that in a whole other way, but you referred to it last week. That if you look at Lacanian or Freudian or even Gestalt, or Jung… They don’t use the actual word script of desire, but the basic idea, as you pointed towards and elaborated on, Z, was that: * You’re making your unconscious scripts of desire conscious. So that. Then David points out, we pointed out in the last episode that from the CosmoErotic Humanism perspective, of course, that’s woefully insufficient. In other words, what I need to do, step four is: * I then need to actually clarify my scripts of desire. And when I clarify my scripts of desire, I do that because there’s something that is clear and something that’s unclear. Because desire is backed by the universe. It’s a value of the universe. So when I clarify my script of desire (d), then e: * My script of desire becomes aligned with the script of desire of reality. So there’s an ontic identity of wills. And will is desire. And then finally, I got my last step. * I need to add the second part of clarification: my unique desire. Okay, good. We can live in that. It’s very beautiful. Right? There’s a home there. Zak: Yeah, that’s good. Marc: Okay. So now we go. So, not surprisingly, now we’re going back to the garden. Any thoughts on that before we go? I was just doing a little recap. Clarifying Another Step: The Plotline of Reality Is the Evolution of Desire Zak: It’s a good recapitulation. I would say the other thing to add, and you alluded to it, the cosmological vision here is one that gets that kind of logos mysticism, where you have these scripts of desire instantiated billions of years ago moving up, becoming more complex. So it’s part of that CosmoErotic Humanist vision where there’s continuity between the human psyche, culture, aspiration and the universe’s aspirations and scripts of desire. Marc: So what we would do then is I won’t repeat all six, but we would change the numeration. I actually thought about going there and I just literally in my mind skipped it over. It’s actually brilliant. Thank you for putting it on the table. You’re right. What we would say is in the second numeration after: 1) Reality is scripts of desire. Before we got to the human being, we would say: 2) And the plot line of reality is the evolution of desire. And then: 3) The human being participates and the human being participates in desire’s evolution. Zak: Yeah. And it’s fascinating to think of, like, the interpretation of animal, molecular, chemical behaviors as scripts of desire. It’s very clear, of course, in the animal world, especially mating, that they’re acting this thing. It’s a very complex dance. And it’s a script of desire. When you see chemical catalysts and other things, it’s a very evocative way to re-characterize structure and process in nature. Marc: Totally. That’s great. And you added to that. I like just going slow in these structural parts. So we’ll get to the garden, the garden awaits us, but you added, I think completely appropriately, this. We always say, both of us, that we can’t talk about world religion without saying: world religion as a context for our diversity. Otherwise it’s so completely confusing what we mean. So, in the same way, we can’t talk about desire being backed by the universe as a structure of Cosmos and the evolution of desire, without adding what we formulated a couple of years back, this principle of continuity and discontinuity. It’s just so important, right? That there’s this continuity of desire all the way up and all the way down. And yet there are these discontinuities. There are these emergences. And it’s funny, I was talking to our mutual friends, the Marcus’s, Aubrey and Vylana. They have a cat. Vylana was commenting on how this cat is a very feline, quite expensive, rare cat, who just delights in eating lizards in a torturous way, but the cat doesn’t actually eat them. Just kind of tortures them in this kind of erotic frenzy of aliveness. You know, and it’s quite clear that if your next door neighbor was doing that, that would be complex. Right? In other words, it’s clear, there’s both continuities
Feb 14

Value Cracked Open

About this episode: What if the story of the Garden of Eden is not just an ancient myth, but a powerful “script of desire” that is still running our lives today? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore this radical idea, revealing how reality itself is a script of desire, and how your personal interpretation of the Eden story can expose your own unconscious programming. To help you understand your own script, they first take us on a journey through the four major ways humanity has viewed desire—as negative, neutral, positive, or sacred—before introducing a new script, which recognizes Reality itself as “ErosDesire.” This conversation is a call to action to crack open our own programming, discover which historical script we are unconsciously running, and clarify our unique desire in the love story of the universe. Note on Source Material and Citation: Parts of the material covered in this podcast are drawn from the following volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Gafni, Marc. Codes of Desire: On the Nature of Reality: The Answer to Who, Where, and What. 2025. * Gafni, Marc. Value Is a Feeling and Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel: Responding to the Existential Risk of A.I. with a New Story of Value: Not the Death of Humanity but the Death of Our Humanity. 2025. * Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni. Forthcoming. The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, February 2026, Episode: “Value Cracked Open” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber 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, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:00 — Context Setting 1:52 — The Garden of Eden Is a Scripts of Desire Story 3:55 — Desire Negative, Desire Neutral, Desire Positive, Desire Sacred 7:04 — Reality Is Scripts of Desire 12:16 — Integrating Human Desire into Cosmological Value Realism 14:21 — About First Principles and First Values 15:16 — We’re Prone to Having Our Scripts of Desire Hijacked 19:15 — What Artificial Intelligence Does Not Possess: A Script of Desire 21:17 — Aligning with the Desire of Reality as It Expresses Itself Uniquely in Me 26:41 — Your Unique Desire Is Aligned With and Distinctly Additive to the Script of Desire of Reality 29:46 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become Community End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: Well, David said he was reading the Bible or something. He sent you some note about some part. Marc: He was reading the Bible. Yeah, he said he was reading the Garden of Eden stuff. Garden of Eden is wild. I left—you know how it is, right? I wrote a note back, and just left it under the door on the porch, but it wasn’t there in the morning. So I guess he picked it up. But I was thinking, we got about a half hour now, maybe let’s talk a little bit generally about scripts of desire to open it up, and then on Saturday, where I think David might—maybe I’ll even come by once—but maybe we’ll actually open the Genesis text on the Garden of Eden. Zak: Good. Marc: If we can maybe set the frame for this set of conversations, what he basically said in the note was that—and he used this term that he’s been using for the last year—Scripts of Desire. An interesting term. Zak: Yeah, he’s mentioned it a few times. I picked it up, but he never, you know, really— The Garden of Eden Is a Scripts of Desire Story Marc: Yeah, he never—so I thought that maybe we would talk about that term a little bit. His basic point was that the Garden of Eden is a Scripts of Desire story. It’s a story about desire. Meaning, it’s a story about desire in the garden where all of the fruits that can be eaten are ta’avah la’einayim, they’re a desire for the eyes, is the text. They’re a beautiful text. And the word ta’avah is literally a desire. They’re a lust for the eyes; they’re a desire for the eyes. So we have all these trees in the garden, and the garden story, by the way, starts at the second part of chapter two. It’s all of chapter three and part of chapter four in Genesis. The garden is filled with these trees that are a lust or a desire for the eyes. And then there are two trees in the middle of the garden. One is the Tree of knowing good and evil, and the other is the Tree of Life. So you can’t eat from that tree, from the tree of knowing good and evil, because if you do, then you’ll be like God and live forever in one of the readings of the text. That doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing. Zak: It’s not like they’re disincentive. That’s a pretty bad disincentive. Should read more Skinner, right? Marc: Right. Not such a great disincentive there in terms of negative reinforcement. So what is the story about? Really, what he pointed out in the note was that the way you read the story will tell you what your script of desire is. In other words, how you read and the history of this story, and how the story shaped civilization is actually… * It’s a script of desire story. * The story is a story of desire. * It’s a story also of what’s the boundary of desire. And then: * How you read the script of desire story will depend on your script of desire. Zak: Right. So it’s a Rorschach, you’re saying. Marc: That’s right, exactly. So let’s maybe we’ll literally open that on Saturday and look at it in a deep way. Zak: Yeah. But before that, so we can dig into that—what’s the script of desire? What does that even mean? Desire Negative, Desire Neutral, Desire Positive, Desire Sacred Marc: Yeah, totally. What do we mean by scripts of desire? And just one more thing. At David’s request when he was still anonymous, you and I spent a couple of years—I did some draft writing, and you did some intense critique and up-leveling of a project we were doing with one of our key faculty, Dr. Kincaid. And Ken Wilber was very involved. I did an intense dialogue with Ken on each one of what we called the seven levels of Eros and the four narratives of Eros. So we outlined in this thing that we’re calling The Phenomenology of Eros, we outlined four stories of desire. And out of those four stories of desire—which are really four scripts of desire—you could call them: 1) “Desire negative,” and it gets you in really dangerous, it gets in a lot of trouble. Classical, medieval script of desire. 2) “Desire neutral.” Classical scientific script of desire. “Desire is neutral, let’s call it attraction.” So science says, let’s call it attraction, and when science uses words like “attraction,” it’s like a mechanical structure of Cosmos. That’s actually desire neutral. Zak: Right. Marc: It’s actually—it’s interesting, right? And it was just, that’s one of the things he wrote in the note. He said, “Take a look back at the old scripts of desire, the old four narratives of desire,” which back in the day, we called them “sexual narratives.” And then we said, “No, no, they’re narratives of desire.” Zak: They’re broader. Marc: Broader. Narratives of desire. So “desire neutral” is the scientific narrative. It’s like, attraction is a mechanic of Cosmos. And then there’s more of the beginning of modernity. You have this other modern script of desire, or story of desire, which we call: 3) “Desire positive.” And in modernity, it talks in terms of, like, not “the gravitas of desire negative. It’s dangerous to the Divine.” It’s positive, it’s affiliative. It’s affiliative and positive and constructive and all those things that are positive. But of course, as we pointed out back then, desire’s a lot of things. The positive is a little bland. Zak: Yeah. Marc: It’s a little bland for its blandishments. Zak: Yeah. They’re maybe more efficient at work if you— Marc: And then, of course, there’s: 4) “Desire sacred,” which is, “Oh, desire creates children so it’s sacred.” At least in its sexual expression. And desire to serve God so it’s sacred in its more religious sense. But again, “Huh?” First off, in its embodied sense, when was the last time someone engaged sexual desire to have children? Well, some people are doing that, but it’s definitely not the preeminent form of embodied desire in the world these days. Zak: No. Marc: That’s A. And B, our point back then was, desire is not sacred because it creates life. It’s sacred because it is life. So then we came up with this notion of—we called it “desire Eros,” or “ErosDesire,” or “desire erotic.” In the sexual, you would call it “sex erotic,” but it’s more like “desire erotic.” It’s ErosDesire, which is: Reality is Desire. But saying that itself—here it gets really subtle—is a new script of desire. Reality Is Scripts of Desire Marc: In other words, the new script of desire is the realization that Reality is a script of desire. And it’s very precise. It’s not that desire is this local form, this thing that’s coming into you… “That’s really negative. It’s dangerous.”“Oh, it’s very positive. Oh, y

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Listen to intimate conversations with David J. Temple and friends exploring the unfolding vision of CosmoErotic Humanism. worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com

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David J. Temple
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2025 - 2026
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