Eight Stages of Marc Gafni’s Teachings and Publications – An Intellectual Biography

 Click here for Dr. Marc Gafni’s Official Biography

Marc Gafni’s path of study and teaching has unfolded in several stages. Each stage transcended and included the previous stage in a direction of every expanding circles of inclusion, moving from ethnocentric to world-centric to cosmo-centric.

Downloadable PDF of Marc Gafni’s Eight Stages of Teaching and Publications

Stage One: Halachic Orthodoxy and Personal Myth [1983-2006]

In his twenties, Marc (Winiarz) Gafni served as a congregational rabbi and scholar in residence, teaching the original lineage texts of Talmud, Kabbalah, Biblical thought and mysticism within the Orthodox world in the US and Israel. Marc led a large Jewish outreach movement in New York and Long Island public schools dedicated to reconnecting unaffiliated Jews with Orthodox Judaism. Marc served as rabbi at the Boca Raton Synagogue, guiding a key moment of stabilization and growth at the Center for Jewish Living in Palm Beach.

Marc lectured at Yeshiva University and authored key articles in the official Yeshiva University Haggadah, Tradition Magazine (Modern Orthodoxy’s peer reviewed intellectual journal), Israel’s Nekuda and Netiv intellectual magazines, as well as other halachic forums. He penned the Orthodox response in Tradition magazine to Harold Kushner’s immensely popular best seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, entitled Is Religion for the Happy Minded?  Subsequently he published an annotated scholarly bibliography of all of the writings of Joseph Soloveitchik in Da’at, Bar Ilan’s academic journal.

Already at this early stage, Marc asserted a Judaism which held the koan of being simultaneously ethno-centric and world centric, holding both the unique lineage of Jewish practice as well as its most universal orientation. Marc’s teaching and practice were, in certain key dimensions, already post Orthodox by this time, even as he remained enmeshed, in love with and radically committed to halachic Orthodoxy.

Following the path of many Orthodox Jews, Marc moved to Israel where he Hebraicized his name from Winiarz to Gafni. Marc served as the founding rabbi of a West Bank settlement adjacent to Kfar Saba and Kalkilya. In this stage of his teachings, Marc taught classical Hebrew wisdom through the prism of the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Biblical psychology in hundreds of popular public lectures in Jerusalem, at the Brookdale program of Bar Ilan University and at locations all around Israel. During this period, Marc’s views continued to evolve to a more embracing stance both within Judaism and in an ever-deepening world-centric and cosmos-centric orientation.

In his late 30s, Marc’s major focus in teaching turned to what he called “stages of faith,” following James Fowler’s description of the psychology of individual spiritual development. His teaching revolved particularly around what he called the dance of certainty and uncertainty which takes place within the interior landscape of the spiritual initiate. His two major Hebrew books on this topic are slated to be published in English by Integral Publishers. The first, A Certain Spirit, redefines the idea of faith, moving from the old notion of “the dogma is true” to the more radical and profound idea, “I am true.” In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit: Reclaiming Uncertainty as a Spiritual Value, Marc challenged the age-old idea that Spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering. In response, Marc taught the spiritual path of dancing between certainty and uncertainty, without allowing either to nullify the other, as the only way of realizing an authentic spirituality.

In his early 40s, Marc formulated the core tenets of what he called The School of Personal Myth beginning with a series of lectures at the Gesher Foundation.^[1]  In this series, Marc began to depart from the age-old Jewish form of teaching which is to comment on the sacred text, Jewish law, or the holiday cycle of the Jewish calendar. Instead, his primary topics became the lived spiritual, emotional, and psychological experience of the human being, for example, as in the experiences of laughter, silence, and tears. In 2005, Marc penned Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion and Rosh Hashanah, a beautiful and insightful book that re-visions the Jewish New Year holiday of Rosh Hashanah which is central to Biblical and Talmudic thought.

As part of the personal myth project, Gafni deepened and formalized an earlier articulation from a decade before, namely the foundational concept of what he called Soul Prints. Soul Prints illuminates the centrality of the irreducibly unique nature of human personhood as the prism through which one embraces self, world, and Divinity. This teaching found its way into the larger public arena in the form of a 2001 best-selling book and PBS special called Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfilment.[2]

Also as part of the personal myth project, Marc developed the core Eros teachings and Lines and Circles teachings that emerged formally in the form of an early lineage book called Mystery of Love.^[3] These teachings were further developed and emerged formally in the form of an evolutionary reading in A Return to Eros in 2015 in the context of early CosmoErotic Humanism.

[1] As we hope is self-evident, we are using myth here not in the sense of being fiction but as referring to a fundamental ontological truth. Myth is understood as a direct presentation of events in the divine world through ontological story.

[2] Soul Prints is currently (2025) in the process of being reissued with some forty pages of primary source footnotes.

^[3]  In the words of Professor Elliot Wolfson of New York University, the Mystery of Love is a “beautiful book that will undoubtedly inspire many people and perhaps even bring some healing to a desperately ill world”.

Stage Two: Nondual/Acosmic Humanism: Early Iterations of Cosmo-Erotic Humanism [2007-2011]

In Stage Two of his teachings, Marc formulated an early lineage articulation of what would later become CosmoErotic Humanism in a three-volume, 1,000-page opus called Radical Kabbalah. This scholarly work—which is sourced from a radical re-reading of classical scholarship and based on thousands of original texts drawn from the esoteric Wisdom of Solomon lineage—points to a nondual or acosmic realization that, unlike the prevailing conceptualization of nonduality, does not efface the human being but rather is highly humanistic in its nature.^[1] A portion of this work was submitted as Gafni’s doctoral dissertation at Oxford University under the co-supervision of Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel.

Marc introduces the enlightenment teaching of what he terms non-dual humanism. He then traces the esoteric intellectual history of non-dual humanism in five major matrices of the Kabbalah. In the vision of non-dual humanism, the potential democratization of enlightenment opens up as a genuine option in which every human being is called to live as Source. Sean Esbjorn-Hargens cited this work as a classic example of what leading scholar Jeffery Kripal calls “mystical hermeneutics,” in which the scholar-practitioner brings his full Eros and love into unlocking and evolving vital lineage sources and sharing them with the world. Compared by Prof. Richard Mann with the work of Elaine Pagels on the Gnostic gospels,^[2]  Marc’s two-volume academic treatise on Radical Kabbalah lays the groundwork for key dimensions of the Unique Self teaching.

[1] Nondual or acosmic humanism is an expression of the ultimate form of human realization and emergence. Nondual humanism, at its core, is God realized in the first-person of the human being. Nondual humanism—as transmitted in the lineage of Hassidic master Mordechai Lainer—is highly humanistic in nature:

1. Affirming and honoring the unique individuality of every person.
2. Engendering human freedom and empowerment.
3. Affirming the necessity, ontological impact and dignity of human activism.
4. Affirming the ontic identity between the human and Divine name as the empowering realization of enlightenment.
5. Affirming the ontological dignity of human desire and viewing it as an important normative guide.
6. Affirming the ontological dignity and authority of the human capacity to employ trans-rational faculties, lema’alah mida’ato—above and beyond his common knowing, in apprehending the unmediated will of God.
7. Affirming the centrality of will and the ultimate ontic identity between the will of God and the will of the awakened person, who has achieved post-berur
8. Viewing not only the tzadik, but every person who walks in a berur–awakened state, as a source of ultimate moral and legal authority. We have termed this the “democratization of enlightenment”.

[2] “This work by Dr. Marc Gafni makes a landmark contribution to a number of fields. I am reminded in reading of the legitimate excitement that was generated by Elaine Pagels and others as they opened up the parallel tradition of the Gnostic gospels that had been expunged from the Church’s teaching. I expect Gafni to gradually emerge as one of the significant intellectual figures of our time, making a substantive contribution to the evolution of consciousness.” – Professor Richard Mann

Stage One (1983-2006): Halachic Orthodoxy and Personal Myth – Selected Publications

Stage Two (2007-2011): Nondual/Acosmic Humanism: Early Iterations of CosmoErotic Humanism – Selected Publications

Stage Three: Theory of Identity, Universe Story, Enlightenment Theory In the Context of Existential Risk, World Spirituality and World Religion [2010-2014]

Stage Three of Marc’s teachings marked a shift from topic-based dharma to formulating solutions at a more systemic, global level. The impetus for this shift was Marc’s prescient recognition of the reality of a looming meta-crisis and the resulting existential risks. Whereas today, the reality of catastrophic and existential risk is virtually self-evident, at the time, this view was ridiculed even at the cutting edge of thought.  At the time, Marc, together with Dr. Zak Stein, published a seminal article on this topic called Reimagining Humanity’s Identity: Unique Self and the Second Shock of Existence.

In Stage Three of his teachings, Marc focused on three main areas: a new Theory of Identity, a new Universe Story, and a new Theory of Enlightenment.

The new Theory of Identity is Unique Self. Early expressions of Unique Self had initially been formulated in 2001 in a lineage book called Soul Prints. Marc subsequently evolved these teachings into what became Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, which was published in 2012.

Three other key works were published as part of this first expression of Unique Self Theory.

A special scholarly issue on Unique Self was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Integral Theory and Practice (JITP) 6:1 which encapsulated a thorough analysis of Unique Self Theory. Gafni, Marc [Guest Ed.], Ed. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens.  Lead article, “The Evolutionary Emergent of Unique Self: A New Chapter in Integral Theory,” by M. Gafni, 2011, JITP, (6)1, 1-36.  Guest Editor Introduction

Marc, together with Zak Stein and colleagues at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, convened a major conference with John P. Mackey of Whole Foods and dozens of other business leaders. The conference leveled a critique of the Success 2.0 model (which is rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metric model). More importantly, they launched a powerful new model for success called Success 3.0. Video and Full Transcripts

A re-edited and condensed version of Your Unique Self was published in 2012 and titled Your Unique Self: An Integral Path to Success 3.0. This book empowers spiritually conscious entrepreneurs and changemakers in establishing their connection with the larger world. Your Unique Self: An Integral Path to Success 3.0

The Unique Self teachings are being widely adopted in ways which promise to shift the landscape of culture.  Academics are including the Unique Self teaching in multiple disciplines including psychology, business, education, integral theory, and religious science, and is also being integrated into the educational system at the high school level.  Adherents of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and other traditions are applying Unique Self principles in the articulation of fresh formulations of indispensable pre-modern wisdom. Unique Self is even being used as a new model of addiction recovery in a leading treatment center in the U.S.

During this stage, Marc wrote a manuscript on mystical, psychological and spiritual “Shadow Teachings,” which he sees as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. In this work, he seeks to evolve the understanding of shadow beyond Jung’s conception and to connect shadow work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the Unique Self teaching. Marc’s work on shadow identifies three distinct primary forms of shadow, which include not only one’s hidden dark side but also one’s distorted Unique Self and one’s unrealized divinity. A book of teachings on what Gafni today calls Unique Shadow is currently in progress.

Also in Stage Three of his teachings, Marc articulated a new Theory of Enlightenment in the form of what he calls the Enlightenment of Fullness. Marc introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom may be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Not only is it an enlightenment tradition, it may also be properly characterized as an evolutionary enlightenment tradition where the nature of the manifest Divine is seen to be constantly emerging and evolving. Marc showed that perhaps the most important Kabbalistic idea (an idea that lies at the heart of Lurianic Kabbalah) is the teaching that the nature of enlightenment itself evolves—and that the evolution of All-That-Is somehow depends on us.

In Marc’s understanding, the goal of the Hebrew tradition is to achieve a democratization of enlightenment—an enlightened society, rather than simply an enlightened elite. This teaching was articulated clearly by Marc in two dialogues with Prof. Moshe Idel and Ken Wilber. Idel supported Gafni’s reading of the Hebrew tradition as an enlightenment tradition whose goal is the greatest possible depth of enlightenment to the greatest possible span.

Marc’s teachings on the Enlightenment of Fullness as well as Unique Self as the core of a new, world religion vision of personal myth have been shared in a series of published dialogues with world thought leaders such as Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, Brother David Stendahl-Rast, Michael Murphy, Moshe Idel, Huston Smith, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, John P. Mackey, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating, Byron Katie and Jean Houston.

Stage Three (2012-2014): Theory of Identity, Universe Story, Enlightenment Theory in the Context of Existential Risk, and World Spirituality & World Religion – Selected Publications

Stage Four: Outrageous Love [2014 -2025]

Evolutionary Love and Outrageous Love

Stage Four of Marc’s teachings focused on the concept of Outrageous Love, which is a unique term deployed by Marc to refer to Eros. The notion of Eros as being a core structure of reality was originally articulated in Marc’s book entitled Mystery of Love in 2001.

In 2011, Marc began to articulate, in a series of teachings, the distinction between ordinary love and Outrageous Love. Outrageous Love and  Evolutionary Love refer to the same phenomenology. Both imply that love or Eros is not merely human sentiment, but the heart of existence itself. Marc, together with his evolutionary partner, Dr. Kristina Kincaid, transmitted this teaching in a book entitled On the Path and Practice of Outrageous Love, which details the 12 Laws of Outrageous Love and its lived experience.

Around 2012 or 2013, the dharma of Outrageous Love was joined by the yoga, or practice, of writing Outrageous Love Letters. In what Marc calls the third turning of the wheel (prayer being the first turn of the wheel, followed by meditation, then the writing of Outrageous Love Letters) Marc and Kristina transmitted the evolutionary teaching of engaging a spiritual, religious practice of writing from within the field of Outrageous Love itself.

The relationship between the sexual and the erotic was a theme that was originally explored in Mystery of Love in 2001 and continued in 2004 in The Erotic and the Holy. In 2016, Marc and Kristina wrote a deepened and expanded version of The Mystery of Love called A Return to Eros.

Evolutionary Love: Kosmic and Impersonal, Intimate and Personal

Another related structure that was initially introduced in The Mystery of Love was the notion of intimacy. In this period, Marc developed the teaching that intimacy is a core structure of reality beyond its expression in the human experience. Intimacy inheres all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary scale. We live in an Intimate Universe.

Furthermore, Marc introduced the realization of a participatory universe, that my intimacy participates in cosmic intimacy; my Eros participates in cosmic Eros. This teaching was first formally articulated in a 2011 essay called “Evolutionary Love: Kosmic and Impersonal, Intimate and Personal,” which was published as Appendix 1 of Your Unique Self.

This deeper understanding of the structure of intimacy led to an up-leveling of the Unique Self formulation, which had been first articulated in Soul Prints in 2001. The understanding of Unique Self had previously been: Unique Self = True Self + Unique Perspective

Adding the understanding of intimacy, Unique Self formulation was then more deeply understood to be: Unique Self = True Self + Unique Perspective + Unique Quality of Intimacy

Marc has further developed the foundational construct of intimacy in each of the subsequent stages of his teachings, as detailed below.

Stage Four: Outrageous Love (2014 -2025) – Selected Publications

Stage Five: CosmoErotic Humanism—The Evolution of Humanity from Homo Sapiens to Homo Amor (Next Stage in Universe Story and Theory of Identity: A Continuation of Stage 3) [2017-2023]

Following on his articulations of the dharma and yoga of Outrageous Love in 2014 and 2015, in Stage Five of his teachings, Marc began to articulate the notion of a CosmoErotic Universe and of CosmoErotic Humanism.

CosmoErotic Humanism builds upon all the teachings in the prior stages of his work:

• Eros and intimacy (Stage 1)
• Acosmic and nondual humanism (Stage 2)
• Soul Prints/Unique Self (Stage 1 and Stage 3)
• The Intimate Universe (Stage 3)
• Evolutionary/Outrageous Love (Stage 4)

CosmoErotic Humanism is not one meta-theory but more a world view, or said even more precisely, a world story, much like the way Existentialism or Romanticism or Rationalism integrates multiple validated information and wisdom across domains.

CosmoErotic Humanism integrates the validated information and wisdom of the leading-edge world stories in premodern, modern, and postmodern thought. It aggregates key data, validated insights and meta-theories from each of these periods into a larger story of value, rooted in evolving first principles and first values.

CosmoErotic Humanism understands evolution to be the love story of the universe. Moreover, it is only in the context of such a love story that one can protest against evil, act to heal suffering, and partner with and as the evolutionary impulse in the healing and transformation of reality.

In Marc’s words, the primary tenets of CosmoErotic Humanism, the “Evolutionary Love Creed,” can be summarized as follows.

We seek to live according to a new story of self and cosmos. We believe that the human being and the universe are both expressions of an evolving LoveIntelligence. Therefore the nature of the human is to embody and express the evolution of love itself.

The universe is not simply a fact or event; it is a story. And it is not an arbitrary or meaningless story; it is a love story. It has direction and is driven by an underlying force. The universe is a story about the evolution of love, a story in which love emerges into ever-new and higher forms.

Reality at all levels is driven by a force that can be called Evolutionary Love or Eros. This force moves all of reality towards ever-greater contact and wholeness, toward ever-higher and more complex forms of interconnectivity. The interior experience of this interconnectivity is intimacy. The true nature of reality is thus a profound and growing intimacy among all beings.

The evolutionary love story that is reality, like all love stories, includes mystery, agony, and ecstasy. Everything unfolds within the arc of ever-deeper configurations of intimacy. Humanity is a key player in the CosmoErotic drama that is the evolution of love.

Thus the human must always inquire:  Who am I? Who are You? Who are We?

Every human is an irreducibly unique expression of the LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire that is the initiating and animating Eros and energy of the universe. Evolutionary Love is that which lives in you, as you, and through you.

As such, you have an irreducibly unique perspective, an irreducibly unique taste, and an irreducibly unique expression like none other in the universe. You incarnate an irreducibly unique quality and place within a cosmic web of configurations of intimacy. Your unique quality of intimacy and your unique perspective come together to form your Unique Self.

You are (as is every human being) a Unique Self, participating in the evolution of love.

We, the species Homo sapiens, are evolving into Homo amor. We are becoming the self-conscious stewards of evolutionary love on a planetary scale.

The fullest expression of humanity as Homo amor occurs when each and every Unique Self is able to give its unique gift of evolutionary love. Every human, and all other beings, emanate a quality of unique being and doing, whose enactment is the intention and purpose of their life.

Every Unique Self lives in the context of evolving configurations of intimacy. We are all part of a larger Evolutionary We-Space. The Evolution of Love in and through humanity reaches beyond individual Unique Selves to form Unique Self Synergies.

Unique Selves are able to unite beyond ego in cooperation to create symphonic harmonies of collective LoveIntelligence. These Unique Self symphonies are unions that emerge as a natural outcome of human diversity.

Thus does the love story of the universe manifest through humanity in the form of a Unique Self Symphony—a jazz symphony in which every Unique Self improvises their own irreducibly unique part in complex and intimate harmonies and melodies with all others. ^[1]

It is through these melodic and harmonic movements of interconnectivity and love that humanity gives birth to Homo amor, a new species that is conscious of its role in the love story of the universe. Homo amor will remake the Earth and explore the galaxy in the pursuit of advancing the evolution of love.

[1] The notions of Unique Self and Unique Self Symphony emerged at the interface of religious scholarship, psychological meta-theory, and evolutionary meta-theory—expressed collaboratively in different forms by Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein, and the late Barbara Marx Hubbard. This work naturally integrates with Hubbard’s seminal work on Conscious Evolution entitle Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library, 2015.

Stage Five: CosmoErotic Humanism (2017-2023)—The Evolution of Humanity from Homo Sapiens to Homo Amor (Next Stage in Universe Story and Theory of Identity – Continuation from Stage 3) – Selected Publications

Stage Six: The Phenomenology of Eros [2017-2025]

Stage Six of Marc’s teaching focused on the phenomenology of Eros. Between 2017 and 2020, Marc, together with his evolutionary partner, Dr. Kristina Kincaid, wrote the first draft of a 16-volume series on this topic.

The Phenomenology of Eros comprises a new universe story and a series of corollary narratives, including narratives of identity, community, power, and crucially, a new narrative of sex and desire. The intent of The Phenomenology of Eros is to understand Eros and its phenomenology, that is to say, the way in which Eros appears in our personal and collective lives. The Phenomenology of Eros charts the relationship between sex, relationship, and Eros on a personal and collective level. We cite below a few paragraphs from the book.

The sexual expresses the fundamental eroticism of all of reality from the subatomic to the celestial to the human. But sex does not exhaust the eroticism of nature. The sexual is an expression of Eros; it is not the whole of Eros. Eros is the inner texture of reality that lives awake, alive, and aware in every moment. To wake up to Eros is to wake up to the shocking yet stunning realization that the universe is passionately making love all the way up and all the way down the spectrum of creation.

Sex in the human realm is an expression of that same core yearning for contact, Eros, which drives all of reality from the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. There are twelve billion years of Eros before sex appears, and then quite a while before human sexing appears.   Cosmology tells us that we are made from stardust in constant equilibrium, attracted and held together by gravitational pull, allured yet not absorbed; held distinct, kept apart by the autonomous trajectory or natural repulsion. We are apart and part of, participatory in the larger field, partnered and yet separate—all part of the great cosmic Eros of reality.

When this cosmic Eros plays urgently in our bodies we call it sex.  Sex is cosmic Eros performed in the flesh.

Eros is the fundamental movement in the universe toward contact.

Sex is an expression of the core Eros of the cosmos.

Sex is the drive for contact, the drive to bond, to connect, to be intimate.

Sex is an expression of the drive to greater intimacy which is the creative essence of reality itself.

The New Sexual Narrative and the Sevel Levels of Sexing

The new sexual narrative is called Sex Erotic. The term simply connotes the realization that the universe is erotic—motivated and animated by allurement and attraction. We chose to reclaim the term Eros as it most closely evokes CosmoErotic Humanism, our largest context. At the core of our intention is the urgent need for a new sexual narrative that is reconstituted in a larger universe story—the story of reality as Eros. Without this new sexual narrative, our experience is one of devastation, both in the microcosm of our private lives as well as in the local, national, and global public spheres.

The new sexual narrative is structured by seven levels of sexing. These levels are, first and foremost, modeling levels of Eros. They exist beyond their particularly sexual dimension as levels of relationship, both in the sense of personal human relationship as well as the wider sense of relationship that includes the larger context of reality. From this perspective, sexing expresses a different mode of relationship at each level. The Seven Levels of Sexing are:

1. Vital Sexing: the experience of pulsing desire coupled with fierce or tender demand.
2. Personality Sexing: how sex meets, expresses or covers up emptiness and pain as well as the joy and pleasure of life.
3. Healing or Mother Sexing: the experience of being held and nourished in the arms of the archetypal “mother” during sexing.
4. Pleasure Sexing: the experience of pleasure itself as a self-evidently good, true, and beautiful experience—an experience which becomes a portal to what the poets and mystics called “eternity.”
5. Mystical Sexing: the experience of our enlightened nature disclosed in the tender and fierce fires of sexing.
6. Unique Self Sexing: the radical liberation from loneliness—the experience of being fully received and seen—through the fullness of mutual recognition through sexing.
7. Bodhisattva or Evolutionary Sexing: sexing for the sake of the healing and liberation of all persons and all of reality.

The sexual drive is but an expression of the core evolutionary Eros that moves all reality. It is only this “spiritually incorrect” but scientifically accurate understanding of reality that can birth a sexual narrative that honors the radical dignity of our desire.

Stage Six: The Phenomenology of Eros (2017-2025) – Selected Publications

Stage Seven: Re-Reading Science: The Intimate Universe and Tenets of Intimacy [2017 – current]

In Stage Seven of his teachings, Marc began to engage in an intensive process of re-reading the sciences together with his close friend, student and colleague, Dr. Zak Stein. They had drafted a book in 2015 together which they called “The Intimate Universe” and which they wanted to ground in hard sciences, lest it be dismissed as New Age trope or fundamentalist dogma.

As such, Marc and Zak are in an ongoing process of deeply reading a wide range of scientific literature in order to understand the foundational principles and processes to which all the academic findings point. In the philosophical tradition from Peirce to Whitehead, this has been called building a scientific meta-physics: seeking higher order coherence within and among the various fields of science.

Their process is not intended to invalidate any specific knowledge nor are they claiming to know more about particular fields of study than specialists. They are instead serving as expert generalists and philosophers who weave the insights of all the interior and exterior sciences together. Furthermore, their goal is to contribute to healing the split that currently exists between these bodies of gnosis.

The exterior sciences include the broad conceptions of evolutionary science and systems theory (and its later iterations: complexity theory and chaos theory), as well as the specific disciplinary domains and their overlaps: physics (both big and small), chemistry, the life sciences, and everything that builds on these foundations. It also includes the subset of the psychological and social sciences where the foci of study are purely objective phenomena.

The interior sciences include the shared phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological truths gathered by the great wisdom traditions, truths which have themselves been evolved and clarified through the great insights of modernity and postmodernity.

The premodern view was that there was a great chain of being, with spirit at the top and matter at the bottom, or said slightly differently—with exterior objects at the bottom and interior subjects at the top. Yet at the leading edge of knowledge, the old war between science and spirit is over. It is only primitive visions of science and spirit that are still lost in an outdated battle. They give us different truths about different dimensions of reality seen from different perspectives. Spirit talks about subjective interiors; post-dogmatic wisdom masters of spirit help us map and make sense of what happens in the inside of our hearts and consciousness. Scientists map objective exteriors, or what happens in what Plato called in The Republic the “visible and intelligible realms.”

The shocking and yet not at all surprising news from the frontier of science and spirit is that interiors and exteriors are not separate magisterium that occasionally overlap. Rather, insides and outsides are not separate but utterly connected, and they are even reflections of each other.

All of reality is one, with two faces. The faces of every dimension of reality are interiors and exteriors. Reality is interiors and exteriors all the way up and all the way down. So, while interiors and exteriors cannot be reduced to each other, they do point to each other. Exteriors and interiors are inter-included with each other and always alluding to each other.

Science has downloaded an enormous amount of crucial new information into the source code of culture. The language of science is facts. These facts, however, are not dry or abstract or merely theoretical. Facts are not only prose but poetry. Facts directly inform the fabric of our understanding of reality, our universe story, and therefore of our place in reality, in that universe story.

Stage Seven (2017-2025): Re-Reading Science: The Intimate Universe and Tenets of Intimacy – Selected Publications

Stage Eight: Eternal and Evolving Inherent Value, First Principles and First Values, Story of value, ErosValue, Evolving Perennialism, and Anthro-Ontology [2018 – current]

Stage Eight of Marc’s teachings focused on the reclamation and evolution of our understanding of value. The material below is excerpted from Marc’s published material on the topic of value.

Eternal and Evolving Inherent Value

Value is not only what traditional religions refer to as an eternal and unchanging reality. Value is also not only a “social contrivance,” what postmodernists refer to as a “fiction,” “social construct,” or “figment of our imagination.” Rather, value is real.

And value is both eternal and evolving. There is no contradiction between value being both eternal and evolving. Value is eternal, but not in the sense of being preordained, everlasting, or unchanging. Eternity is not just another way of saying a lot of time. Rather, eternity is of an entirely different nature than time. As Wittgenstein—one of the greatest modern, positivist critics of superficial notions of eternal value—pointed out, eternity does not mean everlasting time but that which is beneath time:

In other words:

The eternal Value is the evolving Value.

The eternal Logos is the evolving Logos.

The eternal Torah is the evolving Torah.

The eternal Tao is the evolving Tao.

Eternity is the Field of Value, the Ground of Value

Eternity is the field of value itself. The field of value is not eternal in the sense of everlasting time. We speak of the eternal not as the time that lasts forever but rather in the sense of being beneath space and time. In this sense, eternal and evolving value is not co-primordial with space and time, but rather eternity is the ground of value in which all the manifest arises and evolves.

In other words, eternity is but another word for the ground of value itself. The ground of value implies inherent value that is real, a precious quality of rightness that implies an ought, an infinite depth and desired direction, an expression of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and a desire for ever-more value.

Another way to articulate the realization of eternal value is to speak of an eternal ground of being, out of which all becoming, all evolution, emerges. Reality lives in the dialectical play of eternity and evolution, being and becoming.

First Principles and First Values: Individuated Expressions of the Field of Value

The field of value has multiple individuated expressions. We identify the eternal quality that lives in ever-evolving distinct forms of expression all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain through a series of interior science equations. The equations, much like the equations of exterior science, describe the essential qualities that are at play as core principles and values of cosmos.

Each of these values are individuated expressions of the field of eternal value. Each of these eternal values evolves as it expresses itself in the manifest world. This being the case, we are being entirely precise when we state that value itself is both eternal and evolving.

First principles and first values are the plotlines of reality, the trajectories of evolution’s unfolding. They are the intrinsic values and ontic principles that must be the foundation of human worldviews if we seek to live in keeping with the meaning of life and realities of nature. First principles and first values place (again) at the center of culture a sense of what is real and what should be valued.

Our flagship book, the first of about 50 books which will emerge in the coming decade from the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, is called First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come. This book was written by  David. J. Temple, a pseudonym which was created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The primary authors behind David J. Temple are Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein. Ken Wilber collaborated in the writing of First Principles and First Values.

Telling a New Story of ErosValue, Rooted in First Principles and First Values

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is the realization that story is an ontology of reality. Story is not just a social construct. Story is real. Story is a first principle and first value of reality. Eros is a first principle and first value of reality. Reality is Eros. We live in a CosmoErotic Universe. And Eros itself is not merely the mechanics of cosmos; Eros is the value of cosmos. Eros is value. And value itself is filled with Eros. Indeed, we recognize that the two terms are inseparable; hence, we have coined the new term ErosValue. The failure to recognize ourselves as living within a story of ErosValue has led to the meaning crisis that is the hallmark of our contemporary human experience.

In modernity and postmodernity, the vacuum of ErosValue has been filled by the telling of a pseudo-erotic story, the success story. The success story is defined by rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. The success story in which we live today is one of the primary generator functions for the meta-crisis. As such, the failure to recognize that we live within a story of value is direct cause for the meta-crisis. And it is only the articulation of a story of value that has the potency to respond to the existential and catastrophic risk that we face today. It is in this precise sense that we describe this moment as being a time between stories and a time between worlds.

The greatest ethical imperative of our time is therefore firstly, to demonstrate the ontology of story and secondly, to tell the most accurate story of value that we can about reality.

Evolving Perennialism: In Response to Critiques of Value Theory, Perennial Philosophy and Natural Law

The new story of value considers thoughtfully and responds effectively to the modern and postmodern critiques of value theory, perennial philosophy and natural law.

Perennial philosophy and natural law spoke of unchanging eternities and thus failed to recognize the paradoxical nature of reality to embracing being and becoming; eternity and evolution. In response, we are articulating an evolving perennialism as an ontologically validated vision of value that is innate and eternal, as well as forever evolving.

As a framework of evolving value, evolving perennialism elegantly resolves the valid and debilitating challenges to both natural law and perennial philosophy. It is possible to have a universal set of first principles and first values, understood as both always already existent, as well as ever evolving into greater, more complex and more beautiful forms.

Anthro-Ontology: Phenomenological Truths Borne From Interior Gnosis

The interior sciences are drawn from multiple sources, but all of them include the truths of what we have termed anthro-ontology. By anthro-ontology, we mean something very elemental: the mysteries are within us. The interior experience of gnosis, direct knowledge of the true nature of reality, is not merely socially constructed, as is the claim commonly asserted by members of the more superficial and increasingly prominent sects of the postmodern movement.

We receive the constructive insights of postmodernism. We acknowledge the important contribution it has made in exposing the hidden power agendas that inform the construction of knowledge. However, we firmly reject the absurdity of its overreach, and instead, we affirm that there are core truths which live within all human beings across culture and time.

A few examples of these core truths are:

Love is real.

Values matter.

Choice is real and important.

Healing suffering is a non-relative and universal good.

Goodness is better than corruption.

Friendship matters.

Integrity and loyalty are not merely social constructions.

Awe opens us to the elegant and mysterious order of the intimate universe.

All of these are examples of phenomenological truths. By focusing on phenomenology, we avoid abstract theological arguments. Instead, we focus on the depth experience of lived values which orient and organize the lives of people around the world. We move from the realm of abstract philosophical arguments to the assertion of a living value or truth for which we are often willing to risk our lives.

Anthro-ontology points towards a level of phenomenological depth that directly reveals to us the nature of being itself. This is what the great traditions meant when they articulated various versions of the realization that the human being is a microcosm of the Cosmos. This realization anticipated evolutionary science which implies that the evolutionary process is inherently embodied, enfleshed, in the human being.

Stage Eight: Eternal and Evolving Inherent Value, First Principles and First Values, Story of Value, ErosValue, Evolving Perennialism, and Anthro-Ontology [2018 – current]