This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz From Ambivalence to Valence to a New Story of Value: Articulating the Moral Urgency of Cosmos Ambi-valence: We Are Pulled In Two Different Directions I just want to share with you this ambivalence. Ambi-valence. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that a great word? Ambi-valence. In other words, valence is value or valid—V-A-L—or valor, or valiant. Valere in Latin. Valence. Valence is the currency of Eros, the currency of allurement. It’s the currency of attraction. It’s the currency of love. It’s the currency of Eros that drives Reality. Electrons have valence, and valence is a constitutional property of electrons that has to do with structure and constitution—which then directly affects the configuration of intimacy that is an electron, which then directly affects its valence, its current, its movement, the way it moves, the way it plays in the world. Even before we begin, Reality is an intimate Universe. That’s its structure. It’s not its accidental structure. It’s not a random structure. It’s its actual structure. When we’re ambivalent it means we have a question about direction. We’re pulled, we’re allured, in two different directions. Ambivalence is not just a mechanical cognitive question. It’s an ambi-valence. There’s an enormous intimacy to One Mountain Many Paths. We’re going to move towards renaming—this is part of this ambivalence—and taking One Mountain the next step. Something like: Sensemaking in a time between worlds: Articulating the new Story of Value. Because that’s what we’re doing. That’s what we’re doing here. * It has an intellectual dimension. * It has an existential dimension. * It has a policy implication dimension. * It has a spiritual dimension. * It has a religious dimension. Anyone who thinks that we can ignore religion is not ligared, is not connected to the fabric of Reality. We live in a physical reality in which 60 to 70% of the world is connected to a religion, of those, an enormous amount are connected to a fundamentalist version of a religion. We live in a world in which a virus in Wuhan, China—whether it’s originating from the wet market or, more likely, from the laboratory that was doing gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, in alignment with the gain-of-function research being done in the United States—we live in a world where a virus slips out of the laboratory, a lab leak, and then kills several million people in the world. So, it’s one world. We can’t ignore what’s happening in the world. Not even on just that level. We don’t want to go back to the old religion. We need to re-ligare religion itself. All of those implications are in what we’re doing here at One Mountain. Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Support the work by becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to 7-day self-study course on CosmoErotic Humanism with Marc Gafni.. Mystery School Responds to Existential Risk with a New Story of Value There’s a particular configuration of intimacy which is One Mountain. We’ve tried to keep it small. We’re in our 504th week. There are a few hundred people who participate in person and online every week, but we haven’t tried to build it out. We’ve tried to keep this intimate community because our intention is to be like the Florentine Platonic Academy—convened by Ficino, an expression of the Medici family, of Pico della Mirandola, of da Vinci—to respond to that time between worlds which was the Renaissance, in which the old systems were breaking down, in which the Black Death was sweeping Europe. We’re now in a time of exponentially more risk—an entirely different level of risk. Existential risk didn’t exist in the Renaissance. Now we’re threatened with two forms of existential risk: the potential death of humanity and the potential death of our humanity. And so, we’re coming together in this newly constituted Florentine Platonic Academy as it were, this mystery school. We’ve called this mystery school Who We Must Become. Who We Must Become applies to each of us individually, but to all of us as a community, as an intimate communion of pioneering souls around the world. We understand that the only response to the meta-crisis that will allow us to walk through this unimaginable threat to our very existence, the only possible response is a new Story of Value. We are coming together every week, and we are constructing, we are articulating, we are trying to weave together the strands of a new Story of Value. And in doing so, we’re not engaged in New Age declaration, we’re not engaged in fundamentalist religious regression. We Need to Break through The Evolutionary Bottleneck We’re doing the most serious work that I’m aware of that can be done—which is we’re trying to break through the evolutionary bottlenecks. The failure to resolve, to articulate, to evolve the way we think about ourselves: * who am I? —the way we think about the world * where am I, who are we, where are we? * what ought I do, what ought we do?—the way we think about ethics Those three great questions. The way we think of them has stalled. Value theory has stalled. Relationship theory has stalled. Economic theory has stalled. Our understanding of consciousness has stalled. Our understanding of self has stalled. Our universe story has stalled. Those are fundamental breakdowns. We’re polarized between stalled, broken stories. Each of those broken stories is functioning not in intimate communion, but as a lawyer, as if different groups in the world were hired as lawyers for different defendants, and the defendants are different positions in culture, and then the lawyer adduces all the evidence for that position and then denies all the other evidence. We could then get a positive verdict—but that doesn’t work. We don’t need a positive verdict—We need a shared Story of Value. We need to consider everything and then weave together the true but partial insights and understandings and gnosis of all the partial positions—break through in new imaginations, in new original imaginations. That’s what Einstein did when he did relativity theory: he broke through, he reimagined Reality. We have to reimagine Reality and then articulate an entirely new set of equations—we call those First Principles and First Values equations—that can evolve humanity, evolve Reality, that I can actually participate, can be cause for the evolution of love, the evolution of humanity, the evolution of what it means to be a human being. That is what we mean by telling a new Story of Value. And only that level of telling a new Story of Value has ever—in the past—and will ever allow us to walk through the crisis. Click here to sign up to join the free weekly live teachings with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday at 10 am Pacific Time. This Is a Crisis We Cannot Afford to Get Wrong The crisis is always a birth. Crisis is always an evolutionary driver. But now this is a crisis that we can’t afford to get wrong. If we get this crisis wrong, it’s endgame. Now, it’s not the endgame of Reality. It’s the endgame of humanity. After humanity’s endgame, let’s say, humanity dies—well, then something else will be born. Something new will be born. Life will go on. The infinite, intimate force of value and consciousness and spirit won’t disappear. But humanity will end—and will end tragically, will end in unimaginable suffering. The baton that has been passed to us by so many prior generations will have been dropped in a rupture of unimaginable pain. We will lose the birth of trillions of future lives, trillions of future love stories. It’sa rending apart of unimaginable despair and pain. The alternative to that dystopia is this unimaginably beautiful possibility that actually waits, that waits for us to participate. We’ve come together in this mystery school—not to make New Age declarations, not to be lawyers for particular cultural positions, not to make fundamentalist regressions or blithe neoliberal postmodern claims or techno-feudalist claims which say something like: oh, the age of life and carbon is over, let’s just move on to silicon,some kind of transhumanist dystopia. No. We’re at the very core of the heart, the beating heart of humanity, and we are standing for a human future. We are the Office for the Future, as my friend Barbara Marx Hubbard would like to call it. We’re the office for the human future. The human future means a future that includes humanity, that includes the entire non-human and more-than-human and less-than-human world. But humanity stands, as it has, responsible for facilitating that. This is why the whales don’t need to protect the humans, but the humans need to protect the whales, and the humans need to protect the oceans, and need to protect the biosphere. And we need to reach out galactically and create a shared Story of Value between us and the rest of the galaxy, as were before this imminent moment of disclosure, this realization of larger fields of life. We are at this very central place. We need to tell a new Story of Value. It is the overwhelming moral, spiritual, existential imperative of our time. It expresses not just the personal moral urgency that lives in all of us here, not only the ecstatic urgency, the privileged urgency, but it is the moral urgency of Cosmos awake and alive in us. There Is a Moral Urgency to Cosmos There’s a moral urgency to Cosmos. Cosmos is awake and alive in us. There is no split between us and Cosmos. It’s not: I live in Cosmos, let me try and figure out Cosmos. No. I live in Cosmos; Cosmos is inside of me. Science works because it’s a human Cosmos, and therefore, the scientist can go deeply inside of him or herself and
