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 — Introduction0:58 — Context Setting1:49 — The Six Steps on the Evolution of Scripts of Desire4:48 — Clarifying Another Step: The Plotline of Reality Is the Evolution of Desire9:44 — The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Context from Chapter One12:22 — The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Chapter Two16:56 — Majestic Man and Redemptive Man22:41 — It’s Not Good for the Human Being to Be Alone29:27 — Invitation to the Who We Must Become CommunityEnd — Mentioned SourcesEnd — Mentioned PeopleThe 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 SettingZak: 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 DesireMarc: 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 DesireZak: 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 and discontinuities. Right?Zak: Yes. And domesticated cats are a strange creature because they’re predators that get their food given to them, so something sadistic emerges in cats. I mean, there’s a whole conversation about domesticated cats.Marc: Right. Domesticated cats is a whole kind of conversation. But, so what happens is—what happens when you interfere with scripts of desire?Zak: Exactly. That’s the question of domestication and civilization in many ways.Marc: And education, right? Education is supposed to be precisely not domestication. Education is to align.Zak: Yeah, not the overriding of scripts. You don’t want to override it. You want to help articulate it.Marc: You want to cultivate the capacity to discern, to know, to clarify my script of desire.Zak: Right.Marc: Beautiful.In one sense, there’s nothing new that we’ve said here at all. And we’ve been talking about this for the last 12, 13 years in various teachings. On the other hand, it’s crystallizing. This particular door in is crystallizing.Therefore, we’re not surprised that the epic story of Western civilization is a culinary desire story, if you will, right?[laughs]Marc: You know, mixed with nakedness and then sexuality… So, it’s the story that mixes in it visual desire with intellectual desire, with embodied desire of the culinary kind, with sexual desire… Right?In other words, it’s a complete desire story. All the way up and all the way down.So, I’m thinking, Z, should we talk about this, about the text, or should we actually enter the text and spend two, three conversations actually reading it through together?Zak: I think we should read it through because it’s so rarely done.People don’t spend time doing this kind of hermeneutic and I think it’d be very useful.Marc: I was hoping you would say that. I wanted to check in with your script of desire on this. Okay. okay. Yeah. Away we go.Zak: It’s the study hall. We’ll get the study hall.The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Context From Chapter OneMarc: Okay. So let’s go to chapter two. Friends, Romans and countrymen, I just wanted to give a shout out, this is the first time someone told me that this group had constellated and they were studying David J. Temple dialogue, so to those groups who are doing that, hi everyone.Just so you know, the text, in chapter two, essentially begins in verse seven. Seven is about where it goes. But eight is where it starts.The rest of chapter two is related to this story. Part of it is the Garden of Eden, and then it goes to the creation of the human being. But it starts with Eden, then human creation, then sexuality and all that, loneliness. We’ll get to that.Then all of chapter three is the classical garden story, of the snake, the snake, garden, tree, apple. That story.And then, when you get to chapter four, we have essentially the aftermath. What happens right after they leave the garden.But it’s basically from 2:9 till the end of two, all of three and basically 4:1. That’s really the whole thing.That’s it, so everyone can have those texts. And of course we’ll spend much less time on the 2 stuff. We’ll spend most of it on 3. But let’s look at 2.Okay. So, there’s these two creation stories. This is just the context.The first creation story is in chapter one of Genesis.It’s the story in which the description is, ur’du u-ve’of ha-shamayim bi-dgat ha-yam, “fill the earth and conquer it, rule over the fish of the sea,” et cetera.The name of God that’s used is Elohim, which is this kind of cosmological God. And there’s the first description there of Homo Amago Dei.God says, let us make the human being in our image. And God created the human being in the image of God.So there’s this notion of Homo Amago Dei.There’s no communication, no dialogue.The second name of God, is Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, the four-letter name of God, Adonai, is not used. The cosmological name of God is used.And there’s this sense of what Joseph Soloveitchik calls in his book, Lonely Man of Faith, that you and I looked at 13 years ago, majestic man, who conquers.This majestic man, let’s call him Adam 1. Adam 1, who conquers, who’s majestic, is one with the force of Cosmos.The Garden of Eden: Genesis, Chapter TwoMarc: Then we get to chapter two, and then it happens again, right? The human being is recreated.That’s basically where our story starts. Verse eight is the planting of the garden, verse seven is right before. God creates the human being.It’s this much more humble, complex, human humus kind of thing.And then there’s this intimate act. Vayyipach be’appav nishmat chayyim—God breathes into the human being the breath of life. We have a living being.God plants… The language here is Adonai, not Elohim. It’s not cosmological God, it’s intimate God. Adonai.And then verse eight, the Garden of Eden, Adonai and Elohim come together, the two names. Vayyitta Adonai Elohim—the cosmological God, who is the intimate God, gan be’Eden miqqedem—plants a garden in the East, vayyasem sam et ha’adam—and places there Adam, aser yasar—who He created.That’s verse 8.Verse 9: Vayyasmah Adonai Elohim—notice cosmological and intimate God are again adjoined.Min ha’adama—God causes vegetation or trees to emerge.But what emerges, kal es, every tree, nehmad lemar’e, which one desires to look at.In the Ten Commandments, word is lo tachmod, you shall not desire. This is the same word. Nehmad lemar’e. It’s not pleasant to look at as it’s translated. The word chamad is the same root word as the Ten Commandments. It’s that which you desire to look at. So it’s visual desire. And again, the English translations read out the desire dimension. But it’s nehmad, it’s a direct desire word.Vtob lama’akal—and it’s good to eat. There’s all these trees which are aroused desire. And then, v es hahayyim, the tree of life is in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowing good and evil.Okay, that’s our garden.And then ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, there’s a river that flows from Eden, l’hasqot et hagan, to water, to l’hasqot.L’hasqot, again, is a funny word. L’hasqot is to water, but the root word is shaqah, desire, meaning you’re thirsty. So the experience of desire is the experience of being thirsty, meaning I want to be watered.So when the baby nurses at the mother’s breast, he wants to be watered.In other words, the word l’hasqot is the same root word as shaqah. You can hear it in the word, right? Chesheq, which is a desire word again. So ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, a river goes forth from Eden.And just a little parentheses for the scholarly listeners. A colleague of mine, Melila Eshet Helner, who’s a student of Liebes’, wrote her doctorate and she published it on the Zohar.The name of the doctorate is ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, the river goes forth from Eden, which she does a very excellent philological analysis of this text in light of her teacher, Libes, and what Yudah basically is saying, and I correspond with him on this on one occasion, he’s saying basically ve-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, the river that goes forth from Eden, that’s the river of Eros.He actually writes a very important article, a philological article called Zohar and Eros.So I’m merely pointing out that we’re being very rigorous here in our reading.A river goes forth from Eden, l’hasqot, to meet the shaqah, to meet the desire.This is a desire story, which is very easy to miss.And then, there’s four dimensions to the river. There’s lots of mysticism on why there are four. That’s not our topic.Zak: Yeah.Marc: We will skip a couple of words, there’s a description of the four rivers, which are obviously four qualities of desire, but that’s already the realm of mysticism. We’re just reading the text. Then verse 15, right?And Adonai Elohim, vayyiqqah Adonai Elohim, again, this conjunction of right cosmological and intimate God, vayyiqqah ha’adam, so God takes man, vayyanniḥeu began ‘eden, places him in the garden, l’abda ulsamra, to be in devotion and in guardianship.Which is very different. This is Adam 2.Majestic Man and Redemptive ManZak: I’m still hung up on the whole Adam 1 thing. Like why?Marc: So Adam 1 is fill the earth and conquer it, 1:28, right?Now Genesis 2 is this intimate relationship in which I breathe into you and then you’re in the garden. Your relationship to the garden is devotion and holding.There’s these two typologies, right?Zak: And that there were two would imply God was unhappy with the first one? Desired a different kind of creature, or...Marc: So why are there two creation stories? Right.Zak: Yeah, why are there two? Well, specifically the first Adam, second Adam, yeah.Marc: This is where I believe biblical scholarship does a very bad job. Right? Well, it just happened to go together because there were two different texts... No, anyone who knows anything about this document, who’s a good reader knows this is a coherent text.It’s not like some sloppy text where, isn’t it a shame, we didn’t get a copyeditor...Zak: We left that one in there. We left that sentence in there all those years. [laughs]Marc: We couldn’t afford copy editing, so we left it in there. That’s just so absurd. Right.So there’s this coherent notion, and what Soloveitchik is doing in his Lonely Man of Faith, is of course, he’s echoing a theme in first, second, third century Midrash, he’s solving your question.He’s answering that.Zak: Yeah, I’m now remembering The Lonely Man of Faith, the two Adams of The Lonely Man of Faith.Marc: What he’s saying is that Adam 1 and Adam 2 are two dimensions of the human being.And we would call one majestic man, and then would be redemptive man.Adam 1 surges forth majestically and Adam 2 is sustained, he’s got this experience, I’m sustained by the divine breath. I’m le’ovdah uleshomrah, worshipping, serving, in devotion, I’m guarding, which is a very different relationship.Marc: It’s not the sense of this kind of infinite Elohim, infinite power, and El, the word El, David Kimhi, in the 13th century, El he does the etymologies of stuff.El is power.El is El HaKochot. and you look up the etymology word El, Kimhi is tracing all the texts, El HaKochot the god of power. There’s this unabated power in Adam 1, and there’s this check on power in Adam 2.You, David and I have talked about power. It’s one of our essays. This relationship to power is at play here. Okay. As we talked about before, we’re just reading the text. We’re just staying very close to the text, right?Zak: Hmm-hm.Marc: So just worth mentioning that again, le’ovdah, to serve, to be devoted to, again, is a quality of desire.Devotion and desire. People don’t realize that devotion and desire are inherently inter-included.It’s very beautiful. Right? And if I could say something, I’m not graphic, but explicit, if I can make that distinction, is that in sexuality, when a person is on their knees in devotion, that’s deeply bound up with desire.In other words, the devotional and the desires are not split.We think that desire is this kind of rapacious violation. Actually, desire opens up to the desire to serve.Zak: Right. And as if devotion is like a kind of flaccid, insipid, moralistic thing.Marc: Beautiful. That’s the other side of it. In other words, desire is not inherently rapacious and devotion is not inherently flaccid. Those are shadow forms of each one of them.It’s really beautiful in the philological and anthro-ontological structure of devotion and desire.Zak: Mm-hmm.Marc: We’ll get through at least Genesis two today.We’re in 2:16. And so then God commands man—vaysav Adonai Elohim vaysav ha’adam. Now you have a command for the first time.And He, God says, mikol es hagan ‘akol to’kel, eat from all the trees of the garden.There’s again, this relish. It’s ‘akol to’kel, it’s double language. Eat. But from the tree of knowing good and evil, you shall not eat for on the day that you eat from it, mot tamut, you shall surely die.So, eat from everything in the garden. Don’t eat from the tree of knowing good and evil.And if you do that, death is introduced. So that’s obviously a strange text because wouldn’t you want to know good and evil? And why would you die from knowing good and evil?Zak: Right. And why put the tree there? He put the tree there.Marc: Right? And why is there a tree that you’re not supposed to eat?What’s obvious again is that the superficial readings of the text as kind of an absurd fundamentalist text are clearly not the case. In other words, the text is aware of what it’s doing. It’s very clearly self -aware. It’s like, huh, okay.So, you can’t understand canonical text, at least in the Torah, the canon got extended in certain places over a couple thousand years, but in the major canonical texts, you have to read as a koan.It’s not like, one hand clapping? Did you make a mistake? Was it two? You forgot, the text was wrong. [laughs]It’s f*****g one hand clapping. So you got to read this as a koan. Now, here it gets wild.We’re at the end of verse 17 and then, apparently apropos of nothing and what would seem to be a complete non sequitur, the text completely shifts its mode and it goes to a new text, but it’s the same flow.A text that we’ve actually studied together over the years, looked at and it actually appears in our The Phenomenology of Eros. And what’s the text?It’s Not Good for the Human Being to Be AloneMarc: The text is, and God said, it’s a divine declaration, it’s not good for the human being to be alone. And the word levado, as we’ve talked about many times, levado, which is alone, connotes not physical aloneness, but a kind of loneliness. Right?It’s both alone, single, not good to be the single one. At the same time, loneliness. It’s aloneness and loneliness together.And then the divine response to that declaration, it’s not good for the human being to be alone, lonely, which in essence, it’s all of chapter one, which is Adam 1 and the cosmological God, Elohim and fill the earth and conquer it.Majestic man is not lonely.So the experience of loneliness, of aloneness, that awareness is redemptive man. That’s a different experience.It’s lo tov, it’s a value statement on the nature of relationship.In other words, all of chapter one goes, and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good. Then all of that it was good, then crescendos in chapter two, you can’t actually read this without realizing it’s not good as a response to chapter one.That’s all of cosmological God, all of majestic man, all of a sudden it’s not good.And of course, Z, we know this anthro-ontological experience, right?We’re having a hard time with our beloved or a beloved. And you can’t work. The whole day is wrecked. Right?There it is. Like, what just happened? What’s the problem?It’s not a functional problem. It’s an existential problem. It’s an existential text.It’s not good to not be in relationship, to be lonely.But there’s only one human being. Therefore, e’eseh lo ezer k’negdo, I will make for him a helpmate against him.And I’m gonna resist now, Z, getting into the interpretation of this text because that would take us in a different direction. That’s its own conversation.But very simply, after that we’ve got this lonely human being, God then creates all of the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, I’m translating the text, brings them to man, lir’ot mah yikra lo, to see what name he will call them, and everything that Adam gave a name to became its name, and man called, vayikra ha’adam, man gave names to all of the beasts and all of the birds and all of the animals of the field.Then, middle of the text, but man did not find a helpmate against him.So it’s a strange text. Of course, the lineage masters understand that this was kind of, first attempts at dates. In other words, not bestiality, rather physicality, sexuality. The aperture’s there, the release is there.But no, but he didn’t find an ezer k’negdo to a helpmate against him. And helpmate against him is the category set out by the text that ameliorates loneliness.So lots of beautiful one-night stands with the beasts of the field, but he’s still lonely.Zak: Yes. I won’t repeat the whole, the apertures there.Marc: Right. Then verse 21, God causes a sleep to fall on man and he sleeps.So again, it’s not victoriously surging forward, he’s now sleeping, it’s almost like going into the operating theater. It’s the sense of vulnerability.Then God takes one side of him, tsela, which is translated either as rib or side, right?It’s often the side of the tabernacle. So it’s not a rib actually. But it takes one side of them and splits, takes out, then sews them up, literally, vayisgor basar tachtenah, God, this intimacy God then closes his flesh, and then God builds out of that side that he took from man, woman, and brings woman to man.And then Adam says this time, meaning the beasts didn’t work before this time, etsem me’atsamai, flesh of my flesh, right? Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, this shall be called woman for she has been taken from me. I mean, she’s of me.And then the text reads, therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his woman, v’hayu, and they shall be one flesh. So sexuality, first sexuality.They were both naked. Adam and his wife, v’lo yitboshashu, and there was no shame.So they’re in the garden. This is how we got there.They’re in the garden. The garden is described as a Field of Desire, nechmad, filled with trees that arouse desire. There’s an attempt to sate the desire with physical encounter with beasts, meaning the vitality of physicality. That doesn’t respond to loneliness.There’s a need for this kind of vulnerability. He’s almost sedated. He sleeps, he’s laid out. Half of him is taken out. God takes half of him, builds from half of him. There’s this sacrificial act of sleeping.Half of you is taken out, built into woman. They then come back together. God brings Adam to isha, to woman, and they are one flesh.Now notice that in this description, there’s not a description of desire.It’s not, and he desired her. It’s God brought him. Vyvi’eha el ha’adam, God brought woman to man, places them together and they engage sexually, they become one flesh. They’re naked, v’lo yitboshashu, there’s no shame.So there’s something which is almost like, I think we’ll hold here and we’ll start with three next. It’s a proto-human.You can already feel, if you’re reading this carefully, there’s this proto-humanity here.There’s this Field of Desire, this loneliness that can’t be addressed by the rawness of physical fulfillment. It’s existential in some way.It’s then addressed by this bringing together, which addresses loneliness.In other words, this is sexing. So let’s assume that there’s desire here.So it’s kind of desire sexing that liberates us from loneliness.Zak: Right.Marc: This is sexing that addresses loneliness. It’s: desire somehow ameliorates loneliness.They become one. They’re not two anymore. There’s the sense of union.They’re in the garden and the snake is about to enter.Zak: Right. Beautiful.Marc: So, I guess we meet the snake next?Zak: Yeah, I’ll be here.Marc: I guess, brother, we’ll read it through and then we’ll talk about it.Zak: Yeah, that’s the only way to do it.Marc: Delight to be in the garden with you.Zak: Yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure. Until next time.Mentioned Sources:* Soloveitchik, Joseph B., The Lonely Man of Faith, Doubleday, 1992* Hellner-Eshed, Melila, Ṿe-nahar yotse me-ʻEden, 2005* Liebes, Yehuda, Zohar and Eros* Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni, The Complete Phenomenology of Eros (Forthcoming)Mentioned People:* Aubrey Marcus* Vylana Marcus* David Kimhi (1160–1235)Go Deeper:If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey.Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis.With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation.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. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe