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 — Introduction1:45 — You Can’t Reduce Evil to Trauma7:17 — Can We Talk About Evil Without Metaphysics?27:07 — About First Principles and First Values28:03 — Metamodernism and Cosmo-Erotic Humanism in Conversation41:25 — We Need to Cultivate an Ethic of Synergy and Kindness in the SpaceEnd — Mentioned SourcesEnd — Mentioned PeopleEpisode 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 TraumaMarc: 45:7 the text reads, Isaiah shamanic master, yotzer ohr u-boreh choshech oseh shalom u-voreh ra.yotzer ohr—who creates lightu-boreh choshech—and creates darknessoseh shalom—creates wholeness (not peace)u’voreh ra—and creates evilBrendan: 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 motherfucker.”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 other words, it’s true that all metaphysical principles should be immanent. They should be available in an immanent way, immanent-izing. That makes perfect sense.But why would we think that the immanent-izing is not sourced in a wider, deeper set of structures?Because, it’s like when you read Nick Bostrom. Let’s say you read Superintelligence.For Nick, if the lights go out, the lights go out.Therefore he’s so crazy about it, because this is the only place there’s light in any place, and if the lights go out, there’s no more light!But why would you think that?There’s lots of information that tells you when the lights go out they probably open someplace else.So I noticed (and again, I could be completely wrong—I’m pulling the exchanges up in my mind now at that symposium) that in a certain sense it seems like you’re trying to find a way to dance at both weddings.I’m translating from the Yiddish phrase.On the one hand you want to access the richness of the ontological traditions, and on the other hand you want to remain within a purview of a larger conversation that includes the structures that disallow metaphysics—because that’s where there’s a big mainstream dialogue there.But maybe we need to challenge—and all met tenderly with so much honor—but maybe we need to challenge the inappropriate reductions in a very direct way.Brendan: Mm-hmm.Marc: And in that sense, I’m religious. I’m overtly religious in that sense. And I think we need to be.I think we need to reclaim religion in a very direct way, which is why we changed the name of the Center, to the Center for World Philosophy and Religion.Does that make any sense, that exchange?Brendan: It certainly makes sense. And then we’d want to deepen into that.Marc: That’s right.Layman: There’s a lot of different approaches we could use that maybe cut both ways for the new religiosity. Maybe we do need to proffer that challenge.But maybe we also have to consider that dancing at both weddings is a good idea and something we can get better at.Marc: Right, so, both of you guys, if I understand correctly, are dancing at both weddings in different ways.Brendan: Maybe could you spell out the significance of that metaphor?I’m not sure if I’m dancing at both weddings. I like being invited to multiple weddings.[Laughter]Marc: It’s exactly all of that, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s exactly all of that.Of course, at different weddings there’s different menus and different kinds of wine, so we’re happy with all of that.But I think the core is actually what you just said, and you said it in a funny way but of course there’s a deeper intuition, which is we want to be invited to all the weddings.I think that’s actually true. We need to be invited to all the weddings.In other words, it’s a moment where we can’t afford to close ourselves into any community. We need a broader reach.And if I understand, and again, I’m mediated through Zak here, the way Zak has shared with me what you’re doing, so I’m going through it, but basically you’re leaning towards the wedding….I mean, Howard’s that way, Howard Bloom. Howard’s fantastic. He’s a wild, crazy, insane man in all the good ways. Reading Howard’s like, as Ken said to me once in a phone call, “reading postcards from the edge.”Howard’s crazy in a great way and he’s done so much original work. He’s like 81 and he did his own wild move in the world, very uneven.Layman: He came up a few times this week. Gregg Henriques just spoke with him on something.Marc: So Howard and I have talked every other week for seven, eight years at the think tank. Whenever I do something in science, I bring it to Howard and ask him to challenge it because he does science well. That’s his thing.I talk to Howard mostly science, just straight science. But there was a particular point I was pushing on a particular—doesn’t matter what it was—and he said, “Marc, I just can’t do that.”So I said, “Howard, we’ve been talking for seven years. I gave you the seven steps. It’s clear that I’m f*****g right. So just say I’m f*****g right and let’s get over it.”He says, “I can’t.” I said, “Why?”He says, “I’m a Jewish boy from upstate New York and Buffalo and I overthrew religion and I’ve identified my whole life in a particular box. I just can’t do it.” I said “Okay.” That was really beautiful and we have a recording of it.Barbara Marx Hubbard was on the call. It was a very beautiful moment.It was a very honest, “I just can’t do that.” He said,” I’m a stone-cold atheist.”I said, “Okay…and you’re a materialist mystic? Okay…”I just wrote a 5,000 word introduction to his new book which we’re publishing called The Sexual Cosmos, and he had read a draft of a book I did called The Intimate Cosmos.He said, “I like that name,” but it’s Howard. He won’t break his… He just can’t.So he’s dancing at that wedding.Brendan: So, if I understand the idea of dancing at both weddings, there’s this notion and it relates to the drawing from the social capital of traditionalism, to then undermine that with modernity and you want to have it both ways.So I’m following that, but I guess that’s not the way that I see this kind of move and what it can offer.Because let’s say, the example that comes to mind is from King Lear. “What is the cause of thunder?”“Where does lightning come from?” That’s what Lear asked the fool.“Where does lightning come from?”You can, in a certain context, say: well, it’s got to be a god up there of incredible power, who’s hurling some kind of lightning bolt in this sort of a thing, and that is a mapping to what is the experience of a thunderstorm, of a lightning storm.You’re like, okay, that’s an accounting for that, that makes sense and I can see that when I experience that. There’s a correspondence.Then another way to account for that is, there’s this electromagnetic field and then there’s a gradient and there’s a discharge, and this, and that.Now what’s interesting, I think, is that that’s still accounting for the same phenomenon. It’s giving a different account, but of a different kind and I think of an ultimately superior quality, in that it’s causally closed in an Occam’s razor sense, it’s sort of like, there’s nothing left over.It’s like ah, that is a very sufficient account of this phenomenon.So, for me when I look at value, I’m like, can we make a similar move?And so instead of saying is there a god in the sky throwing lightning bolts in here, it would be, is there some foundational metaphysical principle outside of space and time or something?I would say, well, is there a different way of conceiving that in the same way that we reconceived lightning and thunder to be an immanentized naturalistic phenomenon that we can account for, with a kind of closure to it?But it’s not dancing at both weddings because you still experience value.When I see it this way it’s an account that maps and it’s not like, I’m having my cake and eating it too. This is all real and in fact, it’s a confirmation and a deepening into the realness of value, but it’s a reframing of it, but it’s done in a different way.Marc: First, this is beautifully said. Thank you. And that’s pretty much how Zak has related it, so I guess you got it right.So here’s the one sentence response and it’s a fantastic conversation, which I deeply appreciate.I think you’re just wrong.But that’s where it gets exciting and interesting, which is for the following reason.The experience of value is not the experience of ascribing a thunderstorm to a kind of external to the universe God, etc.The experience of value, and that’s what I mean by anthro-ontology, when I experience the rape of a baby, I’m not experiencing an immanentized survival drive driven by evolution moving towards flourishing.I’m experiencing evil.Raping babies is evil. It’s a violation of the cosmic order, which is always beyond space and time.Even parapsychology tells us space and time doesn’t exist, so why are we reverting to the space-time continuum?It’s obviously a much larger world than the space-time continuum.So why would we even make that move?And what drives me is, to be very overt about it, my parents, and my mother in particular—my father’s Siberia camp, my mother’s your straight horrible story Holocaust survivor person.She sees when she’s four years old, the story of my youth was about a baby being literally ripped apart by a wishbone.I heard that story probably thousands of times. That was my mother’s milk.Brendan: S**t.Marc: Everybody was killed, but in pretty bad ways. That’s a violation of the cosmic order.It’s not oh, there’s an immanentized thing called… No. No, it’s Sauron.You’re violating something here, which is clearly not limited by the space-time continuum because we know that the space-time continuum—I could cite six papers, but you know the same six papers. We know what’s happening in science today. If you’re reading the leading edge of mathematics, I’m sure you are, you’re reading all over that stuff. We know the space-time continuum, citing one paper right now, is collapsing.We know that’s true. And I could send you a bunch of footnotes, but I’m sure you’re reading similar things.So, why would we limit it? I just don’t get it.Why would we, and again, the sharpness of my voice is not personal, it’s delightful, right?It’s like:1) Why would we limit ourselves to the space-time continuum?2) The anthro-ontological experience is that of a violation of a Platonic principle.And why are we okay—and I can cite six people on this, I’m sure you can as well—but let’s say, there’s X amount of reductive materialists who talk about mathematics as being Platonic and they contradict themselves.Brendan: Mm-hmm.Marc: Ah, Platonic!? Right? Like, work that out buddy.So you have to read, which most people don’t, if you read across a wide enough vector you just get, why would you want to immanentize evil?I’ll be very direct about this. What’s the name of that guy? That Howard wanted to introduce me to and I never met him. He wrote a book called romancing something…and reality…Brendan: The Romance of Reality.Layman: Bobby Azarian.Marc: Right, I’m just going to be this very direct and I apologize for this.I’ll give an example. Zak and Alexander and a bunch of those people forwarded me a thing, about a whole bunch of weeks ago where Bobby attacks me on the thread.Brendan: The IDW listener thing?Marc: The Alexander thing.Brendan: Yeah, the Bard thing.Marc: Yeah. Like, viciously.Brendan: I didn’t see it but I heard about it.Marc: The guy’s never met me. They don’t know me. Clearly read me, he’s got some intellectual jealousy. I’ve experienced this many times. Never talked to me and makes a bunch of crazy, insane assumptions.And Zak was like, there’s like a little evil, this is bad. It’s like that. And they push back on him. They said, what the f**k?I had never read him, so I got the book. I open it. I read a bunch of pages.I said, oh, okay. That makes sense. Meaning, he was making a similar move to what you’re describing, when I read him, which was like complexity theory, but actually when it came right down to it, he went into materialism.And when you go into materialism, you know—the churches were evil. We know that adopting a metaphysical view doesn’t avoid evil. Voltaire, “remember the cruelties.”I get that, of course, but our hope for the future, in the end the only thing that drives me is a battle against evil.I grew up in that. I think we grew up in a different place.Layman: Sure.Marc: I grew up in a battle against evil.Brendan: Mm-hmm.Marc: I’m still fighting Hitler. That’s what I’m doing. I’m hard to understand even to myself without understanding that.Brendan: Sure.Marc: I see that baby being ripped apart and think I’m responsible…Layman: When we look at CosmoErotic Humanism and the metamodern, I think we come from a nicer place. We’re thinking, yeah, battle for good. We’re not necessarily thinking battle against evil, but we’re open to those possibilities.But what I hear is an uncertainty relative to the scale.Like, when we say beyond space and time, is that just unthinkable infinities or is it some other space-like, time-like something else?And when we say immanent, how immanent is immanence? Is there another, bigger range of things that we could still call immanent that are outside of what normally gets that?Marc: And that’s great.Brendan: Yeah, my notion of transcendence is an immanent transcendence…Marc: No, no, I get the dancing at both weddings, right? In a good way. That wasn’t a critique, that’s beautiful.Brendan: Yeah, in a good way.Because the negative side of dancing at both weddings is saying, you know, wanting to have your cake and eat it too. It’s an impossibility as a contradiction, it’s in some ways a kind of deep hypocrisy.Marc: Did I say all of that?[Laughter]Brendan: Oh, no, no. I’m just not familiar with the idiom.I think that’s sort of an incomplete contradiction. But then there’s that dialectical synthesis.Marc: Totally.Brendan: And that’s what I’m always looking for.Here’s this radical polarity, is there a way in which if we set it up that way, we’re missing how these are actually deep parts…Marc: Totally. And you and I, because you’ve done it with Zak, we should at some point do a dialogue.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: We’d have this conversation and it’s why I’m an atheist.You know what I mean? Although I’m not. That’s the thing.Atheism has—if we ever have time, at a different time, maybe next year, there’s a Torah by Nachman of Breslov called Torah 64.You have the Sufi thing, in which you have this password when you’re in the market in Damascus and you say this password, they realize you’re a Sufi…So in certain circles of Hebrew mysticism, there’s what they call Torah 64, which is Nachman 64.That’s his thing, where he basically starts by saying, God withdrew and left a void.And we’ve always said that that void is epistemological. Meaning, I cover the Sun, don’t see the Sun.But he’s saying and we’ve dismissed for the last 200 years of text the idea that void could ever be ontological.Because how could you not have God?So Nachman says, if you know how to read him, he says, no, no, let’s take it seriously. Let’s take the void seriously.Brendan: yeah, yeahWhich is of course the atheistic move.So here’s Nachman, this major motherfucker Hasidic master saying, oh, void.And the other dude who did this was Mordechai Leiner of Izbica, that’s why I wrote about him in Radical Kabbalah.He is the guy who basically is making a move on the other side, which is, the void is real and of course, it’s not.We need to make that move.The first book I ever wrote, I wrote it in English, it got translated in Hebrew, published in Hebrew, I was like 26, 27 and we haven’t yet published it in English. It was about this issue.I tried to review all the theodicies in the world. I did all the theodicies and then said f**k these. That’s b******t.They just don’t work. And try to then work from there.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: There is no theodicy that stands in the face of burning babies.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: It just doesn’t. That ripped apart baby? Do not f*****g explain it to me or I will f*****g shoot you. So that’s where your play is really important.Does that make sense?Brendan: Yeah, sure.And one of the things that’s always helped me about a kind of evolutionary take on folding God into the divine aspect of evolution, development and unfolding, in a sense, and I think you’d take a very different take on this, is this notion that in some way there are things that actually aren’t intended, aren’t planned, aren’t under God’s control.There’s a limitation of the divine because when babies are getting ripped apart, that’s not because there is this God who’s created anti-value and is somehow ultimately in control and had a big master plan, it’s because God is part of the unfolding evolutionary saga as well, and until people can get their act together then God’s going to be part of that story as well.So we are in the process of evolving God and if you go back, this is where the developmental stories come in.If you look at how God has evolved through human history, you’re like, oh, yeah, God used to be more of a pantheistic Mars or Zeus or this kind of figure and amoral.And then God does actually undergo a kind of moral evolution and…Layman: And I’m curious about your take on this kind of thing, because do you read the Old Testament as an improvement of God through the intercession of the prophets?Marc: Right. Each one of these is huge. But let’s step back for a second. I just want to go back to something that you said in passing.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.Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination.Metamodernism and Cosmo-Erotic Humanism in ConversationMarc: It probably is worthwhile to more overtly juxtapose and bring into conversation what you’re calling Metamodernism and CosmoErotic Humanism.If I can again apologize, insincerely, of course, but for being overt, there’s a very big temptation for intellectual world-building and you know, philosopher-emerging, which human beings have. Right?I’m a little older than both of you guys and what happens is that I’ve also probably suffered in a different way.I’m sure you have your verticals. We all have verticals of suffering, so we’re not in a suffering sweepstakes, but what happens is in a certain sense, you become disinterested in a certain way and kind of intellectual world-building.It’s one of the reasons that we created David J. Temple. We wanted to create a different move.So in a certain sense, if we’re looking at the metacrisis together, we’re looking at the potential suffering together, we need to be more deeply aligned against unvalue, whatever that unvalue is, whether it’s immanent, or like…Brendan: We can all agree that ripping babies apart is a serious no-no.Marc: Right. And we need both contrast in intellectual debate, but also where are we standing together?Brendan: Yeah, for sure.Marc: Because we’re staying together in really important things, and we need desperately to have a shared space in which we can begin to really affect culture in more important ways.So when I first met Ken—and I know we haven’t circled back yet to the two points you made—but when I first met Ken, we talked about on the porch there, I remember the conversation, about Integral and how Integral has been adopted into Metamodernism not with a lot of citation, we talked about that, that hasn’t changed—so, bracket that.But when I met Ken, he was deeply in Buddhism, obviously, so he had a sense of this transcendent Buddhist notion, and so that was my challenge to Ken. And what came out of that challenge was the second person of God.We did the three faces of God after Ken and I talked for a couple years.We said, okay, let’s get God back in this story and let’s get rid of your kind of reductions of God to the Thunder story, which is what Ken was doing in Up from Eden and A Sociable God.That was his move.If you read the texts of our interiors and the sacred texts, in a given sentence in a sacred Sufi text, for example, you will find God as God and God as this immanent kind of play.So they were dancing at two weddings. And I think they’re both true.I don’t think God is only immanent in Cosmos, to be clear. I think that’s a mistake. An intellectual, spiritual, existential, moral mistake on every ground.And God’s also not dissociated from Cosmos.So there’s that dance of both weddings thing, and I think the dance of both weddings is just the truth.That’s where the truth lies, right?In other words, the truth is the Garden of Eden is not paradise. The Garden of Eden is paradox. That’s its notion.Layman: So I want to leap off that and who knows whether we’ll circle back to anything or not, but to me there’s a sense that the dancing at two weddings-ness is God’s nature.And that doesn’t preclude any fundamental moral and experiential limitations, but it’s a way of framing metaphysics as a kind of parallax, or adjacency, or doubleness in a way that would satisfy a lot of the postmodern critiques, but take those same structures in a positive sense and move forward.I think what we’re doing in terms of the sociological level, the metamodern is working out its theory collaboratively and what it’s focusing on collectively is community spirit building, [inaudible], we’re doing all that stuff outside of the theory but in tandem with our theory.But we do recognize a lot of moral sympathies with what you guys are doing here and a broader sense that a lot of different flavors and hubs in these related networks have to come together in order to cause some kind of cultural effect, which is why we’re here.Brendan: Yeah, if I had the First Principles and First Values book I could probably find the page, but there’s a great unfolding or articulation by David J. Temple about the project of being a post-postmodern project to reconstruct value, something to that effect.Marc: Great.Brendan: In that sense there’s profound alignment and I think also the diagnosis of the problem is also, vast amounts of overlap.And then it’s a matter of, okay, we’ve identified a set of issues that are these deep core problems at the root level of the meta-crisis and we’re zooming in on those.We’ve identified that value is a core aspect of that core and how we can effectively frame a reconstitution of this in a way that’s going to make sense to people, that’s going to play, that’s going to be in conjunction with reality, but most importantly, to make sense of this issue, to help resolve this.All that’s there.And then I think, to Layman’s point, that leads to, I think, a sort of variation and selective retention, sort of like a flower.You get a blooming, you get different approaches to this sort of problem space, and so I think we’re all chasing the solution to that issue and I think that is unfolding in different ways.And it’s good to have that plurality because there’s going to be pros and cons, benefits and demerits of any approach.Yeah, I see a hyper-fixated sort of like “this is the space that we’re operating in.”So there’s a lot of shared overlap in all of that. But then when you zoom in, how do we account for these? What are the answers that we’re giving?Then I think that’s where some of the diversity shows up and then I feel like there can be really fructifying, generative conversations across those differences. Debates, discussions, symposia, all of that.So then it’s just a matter of identifying those different hubs and working together to make sense.Marc: Yes, yes, and yes. And so, maybe friends, the thing to do is, practically, we should do in the fall—we don’t have to in person—an online symposium with Zak, the four of us, where we have a kind of CosmoErotic Humanism meets Metamodernism conversation.I think it’d be helpful for people.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: I think it’s good for the space.Layman: I think that could be really…Jeffrey: Do you mind if I shared a couple feelings about it?Layman: Yes! No. [Laughter]Go on.Jeffrey: First of all, I’m very new to all the philosophical context, you guys know I’m taking my first newborn steps, but in terms of the metacrisis, I’m someone who in the past maybe three years has done as much research as I practically could in terms of our context, and all of the trajectories and all of the insane kind of time limits on where we are going.I personally look up to all of you here who have been working and thinking about this for quite some time and for someone who, my skills are in 3D arts and film, and I feel I have a strong potential to pull levers that can do larger things.For someone like me, who is so emotionally invested in the well-being of all life and how we can move forward and make everything that I value about being a human possible in 100-200 years from now, and to even, in that process, remedy all of the pathologies of our current society as best as we can.I think similar paths, right?I definitely lean on a unification of those who really understand it and I think, you three, especially, and many others, if unified can produce such powerful energy that to me is the only way forward that works.Marc: Beautifully said.I want to just honor you Layman, and you Brendan because we’ve stepped into a space over the last couple years, which is seeing that—which is why we’re in conversation. We’re in conversation because it actually matters.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: Even starting in the fall with the symposium. It’s a message, because there’s so much—I got a little sad when they forwarded me that Bobby guy stuff because we have no time for this.Stop. We have to be visioning together. And it’s one of the things that Aubrey saw and had the kind of courage to step in. There’s no time for the nonsense.Brendan: Yeah. A couple thoughts.One of the challenges is when people can be putting some really valuable stuff into the space, but then they’re also juggling their own psychological health issues…And we can also appreciate the value of someone’s work while also recognizing there’s a problematic aspect for how this person’s showing up interpersonally, and that they’re bedeviled by some other aspects, to not necessarily overread what goes on in those kinds of contexts is anything significant in that sense.But the more important point I wanted to say is that unity, I think you probably would know this the best. The Jewish tradition is so beautiful in encouraging this kind of intellectual spiritual debate, right?The Talmudic scholars will like, all get together and they’ll be like, but this means this and this means this, and it’s this school, and this school…They’ll tear their hair out and pound the table. But this is a spiritual practice.So I see that when we have these kinds of conversations, it’s like it’s in both that lineage and that tradition, but it’s also in that spirit. There’s a deeper unity in that.Because at the end of the day, yeah, we’re fighting against a really nasty system with however we want to language it, in terms of anti-value or psychopathy or….There are big problems and we’re all on that shared mission to reconstruct…Marc: Yes, yes, and yes, just the and...I think that’s what you’re pointing towards. We don’t make that apparent enough. We’ve understated that in a way.Jeffrey: I feel like there’s like 500 different organizations all doing something but there’s no… Like, there should be some messaging…Marc: We start small. We don’t need 500…Jeffrey: Sorry, I was hyperbolizing. Many different organizations now, doing their own thing. Important. But I think what’s lacking is a voice from this corner at this point.Marc: At this point, I’d say the two interesting emergences in the space—CosmoErotic Humanism and Metamodernism. If we just start there. I’m saying take a baby step. That’s what I’m saying. Tenderly.I totally get it.Layman: You’re right, but it has to start somewhere.Marc: It has to start somewhere. In a certain sense, we have immediate access to this, and that will ripple. Weirdly enough, we don’t have to make any big declarations.Just by doing it, which you suggested, it was really as you said at the symposium, just by doing it, goodness will ripple. We don’t need to make declarations and stands on personal issues. We just do it.Layman: That’s how organic systems function. They’re not doing out their manifestos of lines necessarily. They’re just interacting.Marc: There’s lots of things we don’t need to take stands on.Layman: I want to flag for us to remember for another discussion, I’d be really interested to exchange a little bit about Andrew Cohen’s passing, but we can do that next time.Otherwise, I think what’s coming up here is, the urgency of this has to be more front and center and act as, not a unifying thing, but a reason for bringing these contexts together.Marc: Yes, the unifying thing but not a fusing thing.Brendan: Sure. Yeah.Marc: Yeah, exactly. We don’t want to fuse with you guys because you’re wrong.[Laughter]Brendan: I guess there’s a synergy that we’re missing and I feel like that synergy could then extend into communication with larger institutions and those in power. I think we’re not quite reaching that group.Marc: Received. Received. And I want to circle back to what Layman said.We Need to Cultivate an Ethic of Synergy and Kindness in the SpaceMarc: You don’t get to be unkind. You don’t get to brutalize people. You don’t get to it.In the Center, Jeffrey, I think you can attest to that, one of the things I work very very hard at is that kindness runs the Center. It’s a very very kind place. It’s a good place.No one gets to be an a*****e behind the scenes. If someone’s an a*****e, just get the f**k out.Layman: When you mentioned synergy what I thought was, it’s an ethic around synergy, right?Marc: Yeah. Nicely said.Layman: It’s an attitude of kindness and cooperativeness and conviviality between different centers, hubs, individuals and approaches to the same problem, so that they can coordinate as like a larger team against real problems.Marc: Well said.Brendan: The kindness thing I totally agree with.I think that there are ways to be kind, to be respectful and to have a sense of kinship with folks while also acknowledging disagreements and…Marc: And fierce.Brendan: Yeah. I think that that’s just the key.And we should call out, like, whatever Bobby was saying in that particular instance, for example, like that’s in no way a defense, it’s just saying, that’s really uncool.But there’s this other thing I did want to mention too and I’m curious how you parse this.I don’t know if you like Wagner’s music at all.Marc: I do.Brendan: You know, gosh, if you listen to Tristan und Isolde, and you listen to Prelude, you’re just like, this is literally the most f*****g piece of beautiful music that’s been ever created by a human being. How is this even possible?At the same time, as you know, Wagner was a terrible human being and an anti-semite, that was awful.So you’re stuck with and this is often unfortunately the case with folks who’ve gone on to produce these things that we marvel at and then we learn about them and we’re like, oh my God.There’s not just sometimes, often a disconnect between what people are able to instantiate in a particular kind of canonical oeuvre and how people show up in the world, in all their, you know, worse than foibles.And so, somehow having to be able to hold that is also an important skill to recognize that the interpersonal is somehow deeply related to but also separable from what has been the intellectual contribution of a particular person.Those should be both separable but also not independent, right?Like, it matters if someone’s writing a bunch of spiritual texts and then is a terrible person. That’s actually a significant datum.It’s not like, oh, but their work is great. We should take that seriously.But at the same time, especially when it’s not spiritual work, like, maybe you’re a great physicist, but you’re a lousy human being. The fact that you discovered something about electrons doesn’t necessarily bear on your EQ.That’s just something to consider as we find our sparring partners in this space and weigh what’s significant here.Marc: Yes, but with a distinction. An important distinction.We shouldn’t use that as a way not to do investigation, check issues, because otherwise what we’ll do is we’ll just lump everything into that.And the reason, of course, I’m sensitive to that is because there’s been a number of people over the years who have called me and said, yeah, yeah, we heard all that but you’re brilliant, so let’s talk.I said, I’m not talking to you.Do the investigation. Read the information. There’s a laziness…Brendan: Yeah, yeah.Marc: We don’t want to lump it all into that.Brendan: Sure.Marc: Because there’s that question that you’re dealing with and then there’s the question of, we actually are doing the “credibly accused” thing when there’s nothing. And it’s actually funny.We have a website up, that Barbara Marx Hubbard put up, called “Who Is Marc Gafni?”And it’s gotten, I don’t know, 30,000, 40,000 hits. But we’ve actually found that none of the attacking people ever look at it. Like, never. They just don’t look at it.There’s this laziness in the space and there’s all sorts of agendas and there’s all sorts of— we’ve lost touch with a word in the old text called tzedek which doesn’t translate well.It’s justice, it’s also kind of righteousness, but it’s kind of like ethos.It’s like there’s a fierceness to ethos. It matters.And if people feel that in us, they’ll be much more allured to what we’re doing. Correctly.Brendan: Yeah, and then there’s another aspect to this too, where it’s like…Before this most recent retreat someone posted a meme, basically the joke was the things that happen at Sky Meadow are a suicide death cult, people are drinking the Kool-aid and here’s the Kool-aid Man. Everyone’s laid out on the floor and ha ha ha.So there are ways that people just, like, lob things at you.Marc: Yeah, totally.Oh, wait, so it’s not a suicide death cult then?Brendan: Apparently.Jeffrey: I’m still alive!Brendan: I was looking to find out at this one, but it didn’t go that way.[Laughter]So, yeah, there’s a way in which, how do you hold that and how does one respond to it?There’s a certain way where the more that can fall away—and I also recognize there’s a big difference between the stuff that’s lobbed at you and me, and all that—with that being said, I’ve really valued talking to Layman whenever things come up in the space because I think you’ve got a good sense.It’s like, look, we should expect more and more of these kinds of things as this stuff hopefully continues to grow, and so there should be kind of an antifragility that we get comfortable with.There’s wisdom in recognizing, all right, I’m not going to go after them, trying to clear up the record that Sky Meadow isn’t a death cult when this kind of thing comes up.This is in some sense par for the course and on another register kind of insignificant.Because if there’s a real signal there people are going to tune into it, and so the kinds of people that are going to be along for this ride are going to be able to see that, and also see that it’s noise.Marc: Some will.Brendan: Yeah. And again, I’m confident enough that there’s enough signal there that it would be a waste of my time and energy to try to attend to those things rather than the project at hand.Marc: That makes sense.Brendan: And we wouldn’t want to over-amplify our detractors by responding to them and then making a thing out of something that doesn’t have to be.That’s why I think there’s a lot more unity than we probably appreciate.The less we can get bogged down in terms of who did, this person, what they say, and all of that…Marc: Agreed. I think antifragility is a good description of it.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: Good word.Layman: Yeah. It’s a good word.Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that the public outreach arm of Integral was really weak on.They really tried to promote this image of themselves as like this clean, new version of super inclusive, super consciousness or something like that, right?And when it’s shiny and white, any little bit of dirt on it makes it look completely soiled.Someone says well, it failed now! Look at all those controversies!You know, yeah, it should have been something like the way Taleb presents it.If you’re set up to be antifragile, when something comes at you, in some ways it ought to be able to make you stronger. It ought to be able to reinforce what you’re doing.And if it doesn’t, then you probably haven’t come at it in quite the right way.But our whole system is set up to design us toward fragile systems.Brendan: Yeah, it’s almost like Trump’s playbook.Layman: Yeah, Trump’s been an incredible personal demonstrator of it.But this goes against Taleb, right?Like, he exports fragility onto others to get antifragility for himself. But he does demonstrate that antifragility is a viable factor.Marc: Yes. Yes, and here’s the thing.You can be antifragile because you’re a sociopath or you can be antifragile because you’re so filled with love and Eros.Brendan: That’s beautiful.Marc: And that’s the distinction. Trump is antifragile because he’s such a f*****g sociopath, even though he’s right about a bunch of technical things here and there, because he’s got a bunch of good advisors.Basically, and the way you know it is, if any of us here had a daughter, who would want Trump to know your daughter?So there’s a way to be antifragile then which comes from, how can you be an empath?Brendan: Yeah, yeah.Marc: Yeah, the distinction is very big.How do we even be mad lovers and then be antifragile?That’s all because the reason we’re fragile is because we feel so much.Brendan: Yeah. For sure.So we’re so fragile. How can we be like mad lovers and antifragile, but Trump’s the other. He’s sitra achra. He’s the tragic on the other side.Layman: This is a whole good conversation of its own because I bet we all have some strategies worked out to solve exactly that.Marc: Yeah, this is great.Layman: You wanted to say something?Jeffrey: I was going to touch on the love piece, because to me…Marc: No time for that.[Laughter]Jeffrey: It’s kind of similar in your framing. Trump is so sociopathic that he can hold any criticism because he doesn’t give any care at all.Marc: Because he’s not holding it.Jeffrey: It just passes by. Right.But love, when deep enough, can hold it all without letting it hit you in a sense.Marc: Yes. That’s the A of love that the new age points out correctly. And B, love discerns.Jeffrey: Absolutely.Marc: Love wields Manjushri’s sword.So Brendan and I were saying, we’re not going to just lump any controversy into, yeah, f**k that. It’s good work.Although we need to figure out when to do that, and we’re going to have to actually discern.And discern doesn’t mean—here’s the thing, no one has time to go into every issue.God, I don’t want to read Who Is Marc Gafni… It was so long ago…But we can discern. There’s ways to discern. And you could read one article.I won’t do a podcast with anyone today unless they’re willing to read two, three articles. That’s a standard policy.I won’t do a 10-minute conversation with any new podcast without saying, hey, you’re going to get hit. These three people are going to write you… They’re going to say… Go read an article.If you can’t do that, right?We found our own way, but people have to be willing.We have to learn to cultivate discernment and Layman, as you say, especially as the information ecology is breaking down so dramatically that we have to stand for that and distinguish.We have to be radiance in some way.Layman: Not only can we not learn and study everything individually, but not everybody has to be in every conversation.But some people from each network have to be able to be in those conversations, right?Alexander Bard brings this up really well in his understanding of the traditional role of the shaman going way back.If you have two tribes and they’re running into each other and they’re extremely alien, they might as well be demonic to each other as far as they’re concerned.The individuals with high trait openness or high inter-tribal skills or something like the shamans have to do the inter-splicing between those things.Not everybody in those tribes can be expected to be in those conversations.Marc: That’s true.Layman: We’re all going to be in spaces where you talk to somebody, like, they’re not capable of it. And maybe they don’t have to be.But the ones who are then need to move over.Marc: Absolutely.Brendan: And there’s a number of folks that are actually right in the middle of the Metamodern and CosmoErotic Humanism spaces.I just did a podcast with Brad Kerschner, he came to one of the labs and he’s familiar with a lot of stuff going on. Or Daniel Thorson, a lot of overlap.So there are a lot of folks metabolizing the CosmoErotic Humanism stuff that are also playing the Metamodern spirituality scene.And to that point, these are mushy membranes that are overlapping and you’re going to find those edges at a certain point of, like, oh, I read it this way or I go this way with this idea, but there’s a lot of fructifying, cross-pollination going on there.Marc: Totally. No, no, it’s good.Layman: I think we’re really willing to work with you even though you’re wrong.[Laughter]Marc: I just want to say something, I notice…it just occurred to me that the conversation this year is appropriately the next step deeper than it was last year…we can all feel that…it’s nice to just collect that.Brendan: Yes.Layman: There’s something in the moment that’s occurring now which is allowing risks of various kinds to come forward, and one of the things that allows us to do is put down some of the superficial social and emotional baggage that’s been inhibiting the kind of higher level synergies we need in order to move forward.Brendan: Yeah, I don’t know, my impulse is something in the other direction, where I’ll take the things that I care about most and if someone comes up to me and they’re like, hey man, and as long as it’s done in good faith, like, let’s say, I read your metamodernism book, but I think you’re wrong on x, y and z, and I think this whole thing is deeply problematic and here, let me tell you why. I won’t say nope, flag in the ground, sorry.I’ll be like, okay, well, let’s talk about it.Marc: Totally.Brendan: We should also feel this deep openness to take the things that are most dear to our hearts and again, and this is the discernment aspect as well—is this person is coming from a genuine good faith orientation…Marc: On that we agree a thousand percent.Brendan: So, like, a fierceness against the b******t, but when it comes to genuine good faith engagement, it’s like…Marc: Meaning, there’s no dogma in this space.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: We’re anti-dogma.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: We’re happy, I hope that, for example, reading First Principles and First Values appropriately influenced you. And I look forward to, as I read you or Zak does, right?In other words, we should actually be delighted to impact each other.Brendan: Yeah. I have a footnote in my last book, like, this is how I’m reading this and this is my response to it, that sort of thing.Marc: Fantastic. Yeah, citing and reading…Layman: This also ripples up in the individual styles as well, right?You’re talking, you have an age and you have a background, right? So your person’s going to ripple out a certain way. You have a view of a certain thing, right?My thing is always going to be a little bit more nebulous. Everybody was talking about that the other day, right?[Laughter]Marc: Layman’s “nice Nazis problem…”Layman: Well, we’re going to have to qualitatively…Marc: There’s different kinds of nazis…Layman: #novelnazis[Laughter]Layman: Yeah, I just mean that it takes time to work it out.Because we don’t initially know that about each other and we have to figure out where that fierceness is relative to each person’s style, background and function in the overall system.Brendan: Exactly.That’s the plurality bit, like, the diversity is good, it might seem like it’s disconnection or even fragmentationLayman: And it might sometimes be.Brendan: Yeah, but even when working well, that friction can be like oh, this is actually like different cells in the body or different organelles doing different functions.Marc: Yeah.Layman: Let’s get close enough to make our disagreements useful, for sure.Brendan: Yeah.Marc: That’s a great sentence. That’s exactly right.It’s interesting, there’s a big category in Hebrew, which also exists in English, but not as dramatically. Contronyms.Contronyms are great. Close is one of them.Close (to close, closed) and close (near).It’s very beautiful. It’s a very beautiful contronym.I just wanted to use the word contronym because it’s so much fun.[Laughter]Layman: Very fructifying word.Marc: Very fructifying. Perspicaciously.[Laughter]Marc: That’s totally good.Mentioned Sources:* The Bible* Gafni, Marc, The Mystery of Love, Atria Books, 2003* Bostrom, Nick, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014* Bloom, Howard, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025* Gafni, Marc, The Intimate Cosmos, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2024* Shakespeare, William, King Lear, c. 1606* Azarian, Bobby, The Romance of Reality, BenBella Books, 2022* Nachman of Breslov, Likutey Moharan, Torah 64, Breslov Research Institute, 1808/1995* Gafni, Marc, Radical Kabbalah (2 vols.), Integral Publishers, 2012* Wilber, Ken, A Sociable God, New Science Library/Shambhala, 1983* Wilber, Ken, Up from Eden, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981* Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Antifragile, Random House, 2012Mentioned People:* Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)* Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)* Ephraim Ben Chaim (1895-1981)* Haim Gouri (1923–2018)* Nick Bostrom (1973– )* Zak Stein* Howard Bloom (1943– )* Ken Wilber (1949– )* Gregg Henriques (1968– )* Barbara Marx Hubbard (1929-2019)* William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347)* Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BCE)* Alexander Bard* Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)* Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810)* Mordechai Leiner of Izbica (1801–1854)* Richard Wagner (1813-1883)* Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960-)* Donald Trump (1946-)* Brad Kerschner* Daniel Thorson Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe